boat we didn’t have to worry. I admired the lush African coastline and the hills that come down almost to the water, and their gentle slopes. The coastline is punctuated with mangrove trees, which I had read about in the guidebooks of eighteenth-century visitors.
I felt as if I were inside the logbooks’ first journey, seeing what the men on board the slave ships would have seen almost 250 years earlier: the sandy inlets, fallen trees lying in the water, white blossoms winding through vegetation so thick it looked like a wall, and here and there a child, watching us from a small beach.
At 10:00 a.m. it was already nearly 100 degrees and steamy. Sierra Leone has a Muslim majority, and I had arrived during Ramadan, which is carefully observed in the isolated communities we were to visit. Out of respect to local practice and the Africans we met, I wore long sleeves and long pants, and covered my head with a scarf.
On the edges of the river as it grew wider, there were several clusters of old rusted structures that looked as if they might once have been parts of water towers and industrial cranes. I wondered how long they had been there rotting away; they emphasized the sense of emptiness and dereliction that seemed to hang in the sunny air. Much later, I learned that these structures are the ruins of a once-successful operation to move iron ore from a local mine through the deep-water port of Pepel Island. Corruption claimed the project in the 1970s, but the abandoned railways, conveyor belts, and company buildings are still on Pepel, lying in rust and ruin. In my dreams about Sierra Leone, they are always there at the side of the river.
A kind of fear stirred in me as we shifted course and our motorboat approached Bence, which spread before us horizontally. The tall ruins of the fortress are at the northern end of the island, and because they were only partially visible, I felt as if the ruins were watching me.
No one lives on Bence Island now. There was once a deep well, but there has never been electricity or running water. The island’s caretaker, a slender Muslim named Braima Bangura, maintains a wedding-style scrapbook that he asks visitors to sign, but he lives with his family on neighboring Pepel. For safekeeping, he stores the scrapbook in a worn and scratched Ziploc bag.
The local people, many of whom are Temne, one of Sierra Leone’s largest ethnic groups, believe the island is haunted, and will not stay here overnight. When daylight begins to fade, they drift back to their canoes, one by one. They believe that a devil sits on a rock just upriver of the island, and that he can stride across the water to come ashore. The belief is of very long standing, because I read of this devil in an account by an eighteenth-century Englishwoman who first came to the island in 1791. She called him the “old Gentleman.”
The sandy jetty where slave ships sent their longboats ashore and from which captive people were rowed out to ships from Europe and the American colonies is still perfectly visible. The ruins of the fortress are on a small rise to the left of the jetty, and hidden by trees. Courtesy of Tom Brown/Hartford Courant
I slipped down off the side of our boat and waded ashore, the water warm as a bath. The island has that particular silence of abandoned places, but as we walked onto the narrow beach, green monkeys began to scream from the treetops, and insects buzzed loudly. Something moved violently in a canopy palm. Mr. Bangura took my elbow gently, and made a wide gesture of welcome with his other arm, as if inviting me to Bence Island. I looked up at the small rise, a green pathway that leads up to the ruins.
The shore of Bence Island just below the ruins of the slaving fortress is still littered with the detritus of the slave trade, including glass beads, cowrie shells, bits of clay pipes and stone ballast, and fragments of soft-paste porcelain such as this one. This might have been a piece of a plate or platter on which food was served to traders dining at the fortress. Courtesy of Tom Brown/Hartford Courant
I suddenly felt terribly shy in front of my small team, and hoped they would not look at me. I could not say anything and did not want to make eye contact with anyone. I read later that this is how visitors to the death camps feel, but the only thing I felt at that moment was a sense of shame in having come to the island. The buoyancy I had felt at the airport was replaced by the feeling that the island’s suffering history defied my pens and notebooks, and that I was in over my head. (At a college in New Jersey seven years later, a young African American woman said to me, “Did you feel you had the right to just walk into our history?” and I understood that she was asking whether I had felt shame on that first day.) In my pocket, on a scrap of paper, I had written Saltonstall’s words from the logbooks, “Lying at Bence Taking in Slaves Wood & Water,” and I held that tightly as I followed Joseph Opala up to the entrance to the fortress.
I had seen film and photographs of the island in a documentary Joe had helped produce, but I wasn’t prepared for how intact the fortress is. I had imagined piles of rubble and cairns that Joe would interpret, but in the same odd and unexpected way that the logbooks were perfectly legible, Bence Island was not hard to decipher. Its purpose, its layout, and its story did not have to be imagined. It was perfectly clear how the island had worked.
The jetty of stone and gravel that leads onto the beach is the same one that was used during the centuries of the slave trade. This is where the captives, with their arms roped behind them, would have been walked down to the longboats and pushed in. Though the trading of goods for each slave took place in a clearing just outside the fortress, the beach and the jetty are still littered with objects from the slave trade, two centuries after its end. I saw the stems and bowls of clay pipes no longer white but gray with age, and broken pieces of the porcelain transferware that the company agents and traders would have used when dining at the fortress. Brilliant ruby and azure beads of Venetian glass and cowrie shells, once used in payment for human lives, were thick on the ground, as were shards of old bottles. An eighteenth-century cannon, its surface pitted with age, lay on the jetty facing the river. A large old fragment of blue porcelain with the figure of a prancing horse shone in the grass near the water’s edge.
On this jetty, a piece of slavery’s story was lived and suffered. We accept the idea that time changes the layout of streets and waterfronts, and that, for instance, John Easton’s wharf in Middletown no longer exists, and his stretch of riverfront is now a piece of a highway and a grassy verge. But this jetty was that jetty, the same one he and Saltonstall crossed; that sameness seemed to obliterate time itself. Seamen smoked their long clay pipes while men and women were shoved toward the longboats beached on the gravel shore. For most of those men and women and children, this small piece of land would have been their last moment on African soil, and though the place is now deserted and has the emptied-out atmosphere of a ruin, it is easy to imagine when it rang with commerce and the business it was about. The island was once a hive of activity, and its air, now so still, would have been pierced by shouts and cries.
We walked up to the clearing outside the main entrance. Joe explained that captives would be brought out from where they were held inside the fortress, and then examined for sale. For ten days before my arrival, men from nearby islands had been clearing the walls of dense vines and other vegetation so that we could make film and photographs of the ruins, and so that I could understand the layout. Joe had said that the fortress walls would tell me the story of what had happened here. Dark and rough with age, scabbed with tropical moss and lichen, the brick walls still have the power to frighten. These ruins are from the last slaving castle built on Bence Island, the last of perhaps as many as six fortresses, and was finished in 1796. The castle where Saltonstall and Easton traded in the 1750s was destroyed by the French in 1779. The fortress that followed that one also was destroyed by the French, but this last was, like all the others, built on the original site and the oldest footprint.
The exterior of the fort would have been covered with a white stucco that made the structure gleam, even from
