handwriting seemed to match the weather, and was sketchier when seas were rough. Many of these entries would have been written by the light of a guttering candle.
There were many entries I didn’t understand. I didn’t know why, as the ship neared Africa, crewmen were cleaning out the steerage, building an awning, and repairing the “carrages.” What was “ricing” and “the factory” and a “panyar”? Later, I learned that all those terms are particular to a ship engaged in what was called then “the Guinea trade.”
When the ruins on Bence Island were rediscovered in 1947, part of the fortress still had a roof. Now, tall trees grow within the walls. Courtesy of Tom Brown/Hartford Courant
But on page 38 of what appeared to be the second voyage in the logbooks, the log keeper noted, on Wednesday, April 13, “On Board the Good Hope Lying at Bence Island Taking in Rice Slaves Wood & Water.” Similar entries appear for the next three days. Though I was confused about many of the terms, and had no idea where Bence Island might be because it is so small that it does not appear on modern maps, I understood that “taking in slaves” meant trading for human beings and putting them on a ship. And I understood that this set of records could tell me information about the past in its very soul, at the moment this history was lived.
I was about to make a journey of my own, into these logbooks, and I would learn that of the dozens of slave castles that once dotted the West African coast, tiny Bence may have sent as many or more Africans into Southern colonial slavery than any other slaving outpost. And then it vanished from the world’s memory, the jungle claimed the tall walls of the fortress, and trees grew up in the roofless yards where captives were once held in the hundreds for sale. Even my tentative identification of the log keeper, as Samuel Gould, vanished and was replaced by more compelling evidence that surfaced and pointed to an aristocratic colonial named Dudley Saltonstall as the narrator of the tale.
On the other side of the Atlantic and a world away, New England’s slavers and their ships did not become part of the history of American slavery, though they wrote some of its early chapters. These men would be described in their obituaries as West Indies merchants and sea commanders.
Their lost chapters, of which Dudley Saltonstall’s logs are just one, are remarkable for what they contain, but remarkable also for what they illuminate about memory and its power. Working in an era when the slave trade was legal and often lucrative, Saltonstall and Easton would transform the suffering and enslavement of black people into beautiful things for themselves and their families. Neither would have felt he had anything to hide.
Nor did they need to worry. History and the workings of human memory would hide it for them. And in their story of commerce in Africa, I found a larger story and a way to think about American slavery. For almost eighty years, the logbooks sat on a shelf at the state library, waiting to tell their tale, waiting to serve as a symbol of New England’s long forgetting. Their challenge to me has been to use them correctly and ethically in portraying a traumatic past.
Reformer Jane Addams once said that the first function of memory is to sift and reconcile. This, then, would be my work.
ANOTHER CENTURY, NOT MY OWN
In the month when I first read the logbooks, I also found myself single after twenty-five years in two long relationships, one of which had led directly into the other.
Four years earlier, my father had died, and I was helping to care for my mother, whose diagnosis of dementia had made it impossible for her to live independently. It seemed like my whole life was about the past, and about memory. I missed my father so acutely that I still did not really believe he was dead, and every night drove home by the building where he had worked during his career, as if I might see him standing at his bus stop. My mother’s steady decline cracked my heart every day, and my job was all about a story New England seemed to want to forget. I wondered how I had become, at fifty-three, so deeply enmeshed in looking backward and in regret.
I fed a handful of quarters into the microfilm reader and printed out a few pages of the logbooks documenting the purchases of slaves, and took them back to the office of the Sunday magazine to show Jeni. I still had everything to learn about the slave trade, and was sure only that these pages showed people being bought by a man who had started his journey in Connecticut.
Jeni looked at them, then up at me, and said, “Show Rob.”
Robert Forbes, then on the staff of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University, had mentored me through a newspaper investigation of Connecticut and slavery and was helping me with our book. Rob is calm and patrician, and wears beautiful tweed jackets; his late father was a scholar on porcelain. An authority on the Missouri Compromise, Rob likes to drive and listens to garage bands in his car.
When I showed him the pages from the logbook, he leaped from his chair. “Where did you get these?” he demanded, repeating, “Bence Island! I can’t believe this! Bence Island!” I had thought Rob might already be familiar with the logs, but he had neither seen nor heard about them. And in the oddly novelistic way the story of these logbooks was unfolding, it turned out that the world authority on Bence Island—a man who had spent almost thirty years studying the island and the eighteenth-century slave trade in the Sierra Leone River—was working in the next room but had just stepped out for lunch.
Joseph Opala takes his mealtimes seriously, and he was having a leisurely lunch that day. I had eventually left Rob, and was piling books and notes into my car, when I heard Rob calling my name as he ran across the courtyard of the Gilder Lehrman Center building. His tie had blown over his shoulder, and he called “Come back! Joe’s back!”
Joseph Opala, a faculty member from James Madison University in Virginia, had spent the spring semester at Yale on a fellowship drafting a plan for the stabilization of Bence Island and its eighteenth-century structures, which in their unprotected state are open to the elements and prey to theft. A strongly built Oklahoman with the ruddy complexion of a farmer and the nature of a contrarian, Joe had visited Bence at the end of a two-year stint in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone during the mid-1970s. Trained as an anthropologist and interested in a past that is better measured in millennia than in centuries, Joe went to see the island simply as a courtesy to the American ambassador. He found a beach covered with the undisturbed remnants of the eighteenth-century slave trade and ruins cloaked in thick vegetation. He also found a story that he could not leave, and in the ruins on Bence Island he found his Troy. He has researched the island’s history for decades, and though forced to flee under a threat of death during the country’s civil war, he returns several times each year.
Joe turned pale when he saw the logbook pages. “Do you have the rest of this?” he asked. “I thought I had seen everything on Bence Island, but I haven’t seen this.” My heart pounding, I said that I didn’t have a copy of the rest of the logbooks, but that I would get one. Joe kept reading the few pages I’d brought, as if he could see more in them than was written there. He was breathing hard, and he walked in circles there in the office, while Rob beamed at him, at both of us.
I drove back to Hartford in an altered state. Something big had happened to me, was happening to me. I knew then that a door had opened, but I didn’t yet understand that sorrow was written over its portal.
THE PAST IN DREAMS
Six months after first seeing the logbooks on microfilm, I was on a plane to Belgium to catch a Swissair flight to West Africa. I had persuaded the management of my newspaper that a missing piece of Connecticut’s history was lying on the ground on an abandoned island off the coast of Sierra
