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      Englishman John Matthews was planning to establish a slave trading business in Sierra Leone when he first saw the entrance to the Sierra Leone River. This engraving was published in his book A Voyage to the River Sierra-Leone on the Coast of Africa, late in the eighteenth century. Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations

      The next morning, we motored upriver in a small boat borrowed from the American Embassy. The eighteen-mile trip felt like an outing, the wind cool on my face because Gabriel, our pilot, kept the boat zipping along. This stretch of the river is filled with shoals and shifting sandbars, so ships in the era of the logbooks would have picked up a black pilot at a point of land in Freetown called Cape Sierra Leone, but in our light little 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

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