if heartsick, “Oh, those children.”
Her beautiful eyes were wide, and the tree outside her window was just a shape in the darkness. She was trying to remember what I was telling her, sentence by sentence. She was hearing every word.
“Is it terrible?” she asked. “Are you afraid?”
[TWO]
The Haunted Land
MEETING THE SLAVE TRADERS
I met John Easton and Dudley Saltonstall in the spring of 2004 when a friend sent me an article that had been published in the Hartford Times in 1928. He enclosed a brief note that said, “Thought of you.” The article, printed out from microfilm, described the logbooks of three slaving voyages, bound together in a single volume.
The logbooks described two voyages from New London to West Africa, and one voyage from West Africa to an island in the Caribbean, all made between January 1757 and August 1758. The tone of the newspaper article, one of cheerful bonhomie and brave Connecticut mariners, was set by the first sentence:
No Odyssey of the Old Connecticut shipmasters surpasses for romance and danger the bread-and-butter adventures of the Yankee slaver out of New London and the river towns. Bartering rum for Shylock’s “pound of flesh,” filling the wood-bin from the jungle and beating off “hi-jackers” to the trade with grape-shot, they raced back under canvas to American auction-blocks in the attempt to beat the spectre of death.
Despite the article’s exaggerated air of derring-do, which was typical for the time, and the mistaken idea that most Africans were brought directly to the American colonies and “American auction-blocks,” I was intrigued. The idea of Connecticut men commanding slave ships was new to me, despite my state’s proximity to Rhode Island, which was colonial America’s largest transporter of slaves to the Caribbean and the colonies. But no book or scholar during my earlier research had suggested such a possibility to me, so I had not looked for evidence of that commerce. Not seen because not looked for.
My friend had sent me the article because, at the time, I was working as a newspaper reporter at the Hartford Courant but on special assignment to write, with two colleagues, a book about New England’s relationship with human enslavement before the Civil War and after. (The book was published in 2005 by a division of Random House.) I had been studying slavery in Connecticut and New England for almost two years, and knew that Rhode Island men were at the helm of 90 percent of the ships that brought captives to the American South, an estimated 900 ships. The ships always seemed to have pretty names: Charming Susannah; the Swallow; the Greyhound; the names of beautiful wives and beloved daughters, swift birds and virtues. Much later, I found Robert Hayden’s poem about the Middle Passage, the sea voyage from Africa into the place of enslavement, and those dark ships, “their bright ironical names / like jests of kindness on a murderer’s mouth.”
In the course of researching, I learned that colonial Connecticut had been a major provisioner of the British West Indies plantations where slaves were growing and processing sugar in a monoculture that yielded huge profits to England. Connecticut-grown onions, potatoes, pigs, and cows were considered the best of the best on the Caribbean’s English plantations, and the sturdy white oak we grew also was highly sought after. The horses raised on farms in eastern Connecticut were shipped to the Caribbean in the tens of thousands, and the colony’s newspapers were filled with ads for “fat shipping horses.” These advertisements usually displayed a chubby, prancing horse.
In the same way that sugar agriculture killed enslaved men and women—roughly one-third died in the first thirty-six months after arrival—it also killed the horses sent to plow the fields and turn the wheels of the sugar mills, many living just a single harvest. English settlers made an Eden-like Caribbean into a hell on earth for its enslaved black workers, and Connecticut livestock and produce supported what scholar Gary Nash called “the heartless sugar system.”
When I studied the customs records of colonial Connecticut ships sailing to and returning from the Caribbean, and saw the newspaper advertisements for tropical products such as nutmeg and Madeira and “raizins,” I understood that this was the broad record of human enslavement and suffering. The fortified wines and exotic spices were coming from a place where slaves were worked to death and then replaced because it cost less to import a life from Africa than to raise a child to slavery in the Caribbean. But I had not felt the information I was seeing.
In order to begin to understand, and to be guided by empathy and be changed, I had to cross the street.
I can explain.
The Hartford Courant’s offices are almost within sight of the Connecticut State Library, a massive gray block of a building where the ships’ logs had been since their acquisition from the widow of a North Carolina collector in 1920. I showed the article to my editor at the newspaper, and she said, “Check it out.” Jenifer Frank, who was editing our book as well as writing a chapter on New England’s cotton connections, was deep into her own research and writing. A slender, intense woman with wildly wavy hair and a smile that transforms the severity of her bookish face, Jeni waved her hand at me and said, “Go, go.”
The 250-year-old logs are fragile, and are stored in a temperature-controlled manuscript vault, so the librarian asked me to read them first on microfilm. Microfilm is hard to read, and as I tucked the end of the filmstrip onto the spool, I wondered if I’d find anything to bring back to Jeni, or if I would even be able to decipher the microfilmed pages of eighteenth-century handwriting. I worried that I didn’t have enough background on the slave trade to understand what I would see.
Logbooks, Courtesy of the Connecticut State Library
The basement study room at the Connecticut State Library in Hartford was cool on that steamy May morning, and the tables were packed with genealogists and researchers working to reconstruct their personal histories. I looked at them, bent over their piles of books, and thought, what am I looking for?
The first shock of the logbooks was that the handwriting is easy to read. The log keeper’s hand is relatively large and perfectly legible, and he made a distinctive “d” with the upright stroke of the letter curving to the left over the round part of the letter.
I started calling the narrator Sam, because the name Sam Gould is written in what looks like the same handwriting on the inside cover, and because the newspaper article in 1928 had referred to him that way. His spelling was highly phonetic—“sett” for set, “currant” for current, “breses” for breezes—but spelling was not then standardized in colonial America. Noah Webster’s famous “Blue Back Speller,” the first national attempt to standardize spelling and word usage, was still twenty-five years in the future.
The log keeper was clearly literate, and someone with authority. “In the Africa, John Easton Commander from New London Towards Africa” was written across the top of two facing pages of the first log. I knew that this could not have been John Easton’s own log of the voyage, though he may indeed have kept one. But the handwriting, which seemed to be the same for each of three voyages, noted three different commanders. On a quick read through the logbooks, the organization of the pages, the language used, and the style of the notations all looked the same. A shipwright at Mystic Seaport and my neighbor who had researched maritime life
