This book is excellent, remarkable for the breadth of the research it embodies and the clarity of its exposition. It is an exercise in microhistory, tracing the voyage of a single slave ship from Newport, Rhode Island, in 1754-1755. It is not the first of its kind. As the author is quick to acknowledge, Robert Harms published a similar study in 2001 on the Diligent, a French slaver that sailed from Vannes in the 1730s. The Voyage of the Slave Ship Hare, however, takes microhistory of this sort to a new level, bringing a fine-toothed archival investigation to some of the most significant questions in Atlantic History.
Kelly analyses the trading community of Newport in a brisk yet insightful opening chapter. Although Newport was British North America’s principal slaving port, its slave merchants operated at a disadvantage when compared to their counterparts in major European ports. Merchants in Liverpool, say, had a rich hinterland at their disposal from which they could source locally made manufactures or in-demand items from further afield like Indian cotton. New England slavers drew upon a much more limited range of trade goods. Indeed, they were heavily reliant upon locally distilled rum, which was not the best commodity to bring to areas of West Africa where Islamic influence was strong. It meant that New England slave captains had to spend a good deal of time on the African coast trading with other captains, exchanging their liquor for other wares to acquire a more attractive basket of trade goods. The captain of the Sally, another Rhode Island slaver which sailed a decade after the Hare, did the same, as the Sally’s accounts at Brown University (now digitised at http://cds.library.brown.edu/projects/sally/) reveal.
Captain Caleb Godfrey of the Hare acquired his captives in Sierra Leone. He did so slowly, buying victims from European and Eurafrican traders along a two-hundred-mile stretch of coast from Rio Nunez (in present-day Guinea) in the north to Sherbro Island in the south. This process was not bulk buying. Godfrey bought 76 slaves from 24 traders; most transactions involved the acquisition of just 1, 2, or 3 slaves.
One of the great strengths of this book is the sustained effort that goes into tracking the routes that brought the Hare’s captives from the interior. (Only a minority appear to have originated in the coastal zone.) The jihad that had raged through the Futa Jallon highlands between the 1720s and 1740s provides the context. The state that emerged from that struggle was strongly expansionist and furnished a stream of captives who ended in the hands of coastal traders. Kelley argues that most of these enslaved in the interior spoke languages that were part of the broader Mande language family. Despite some lexical variety, there was a high level of mutual intelligibility within this group. Kelley follows, in other words, scholars like John Thornton who have disputed the notion that the transatlantic slave trade was an atomising process that shattered African identities. He is careful, however, to stress that African identity was dynamic rather than fixed.
The Middle Passage, the central horror in most accounts of the slave trade, plays a relatively muted role in the story of the Hare. This ship is in many ways generously documented but the transatlantic voyage that took the Hare first to Barbados, then to Charleston, South Carolina, is uncharted, literally so because the ship’s logbook has not survived. Its absence is regrettable, but it does not severely weaken The Voyage of the Slave Ship Hare. Kelley makes artful use of accounts from other voyages to bridge the archival gap. Besides, the Middle Passage has been the subject of excellent studies in recent years by Marcus Rediker and Stephanie E. Smallwood, amongst others.
Much more is known about the destiny of Captain Godfrey’s prisoners once they reached the New World. A complete record of their sale is at the New-York Historical Society amongst the papers of Samuel and Daniel Vernon, the brothers who fitted out the Hare. It is not a unique record, but it is rare; fewer than two dozen sale accounts survive from pre-revolutionary Charleston. The sale did not go well. There was demand enough in the Low Country at mid-century, with rice cultivation spreading at speed along the coast north and south of Charleston, but the Hare’s parcel of slaves did not feature enough young and healthy males to attract eager buyers. Sales were, from the vantage point of the Vernon brothers, at dismayingly low prices.
Captain Godfrey had purchased his slaves in small batches in Sierra Leone, and they were sold on in equally small groups in Charleston. The 56 slaves who survived to market, were divided between 29 buyers, half of whom bought just a single human being. Three-quarters of those who had endured the passage aboard the Hare went to coastal plantations. These might appear isolated locations, but the newcomers were very likely to find themselves in the company of other exiles from Upper Guinea, for Senegambia and Sierra Leone provided most of the enslaved Africans who landed in South Carolina in the 1750s. These were people often designated as “Mandingo” by their captors. This category was not a pure African ethnicity, as Kelley is at pains to point out. It was a historical process. This process was on-going: “the ethnonym ‘Mandingo’ probably represented a New World elaboration on a transformative process that had begun with the expansion of the Mali Empire in the Middle Ages, continued through the Mane invasions of the sixteenth century, and strengthened through the extension of Mande trade networks and political leadership in the eighteenth century” [171]. It was an identity readily open to those who had spoken the Mandinka tongue in Africa; it was also a newly minted American identity that might be taken up by anyone who spoke one of the Mande languages of Senegambia, or who could understand one.
This book is multi-faceted and thoughtful one in which the author demonstrates his mastery of more than one complex historiography. Along with Collen E. Kriger’s recent Making Money: Life, Death, and Early Modern Trade on Africa’s Guinea Coast (2017), it offers new insight into Anglo-African interaction on the Upper Guinea coast. The Voyage of the Slave Ship Hare also provides an unusually detailed exploration of emerging identities among the enslaved in British North America’s wealthiest plantation society.
