LITMIR.BIZ

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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 both suggested that this was a private document, being maintained for someone else. The 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

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