The Voyage of the Slave Ship Hare: A Journey into Captivity from Sierra Leone to South Carolina by Sean M. Kelley

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Voyage of the Slave Ship Hare: A Journey into Captivity from Sierra Leone to South Carolina by Sean M. Kelley Ousmane K. Power-Greene The Voyage of the Slave Ship Hare: A Journey into Captivity from Sierra Leone to South Carolina. By Sean M. Kelley. ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Pp. xiv, 290. $30.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-2768-7.) In 1754 the Hare, an American slave-trading vessel, left Newport, Rhode Island, for West Africa in order to purchase and transport Africans to sell in South Carolina's slave markets. Through an examination of this one ship's journey, Sean M. Kelley reconstructs the inner workings of the Atlantic slave trade with scattered sources, such as correspondence between investors Samuel and William Vernon and the ship's captain, Caleb Godfrey, as well as port logs, account books, and a list of instructions. By sifting through these sorts of sources and supplementing them with secondary studies of eighteenth-century Atlantic world history and African history, as well as logbooks of slave traders, Kelley offers a vivid, well-researched portrait of the Atlantic slave trade. Kelley's book joins other works that examine the Atlantic slave trade through the perspective of African people who were central to this history. Without any remaining narratives or testimonies of the actual experience of being captured, sold, and transported to British North America, Kelley recounts the harrowing voyage of the seventy-two enslaved men, women, and children who became the Hare's human cargo by, for example, describing their efforts to resist enslavement from their initial purchase on the Upper Guinea coast to their passage aboard the ship. Kelley's approach is influenced by social history's imperative to tell the story from below, as enslaved Africans challenged the terms their captors sought to dictate. Although this book does not offer new insights into the cultural practices of those enslaved, this "blind spot," as Kelley calls it, is of little consequence for how we understand the generation of Africans brought to British North America during the eighteenth century (p. 7). Instead, Kelley shows the geographic distribution of the captives, and he sketches out the culturally complex and linguistically diverse world the Hare's captives came from. The captain and crew endured a series of crises and challenges, illuminating how risky slave trading was for Europeans. Success often depended on appreciation and respect for the power of African traders who, as Kelley explains, manipulated Europeans for their own benefit. These African traders compelled them to adhere to African customs, such as palaver and pawnship, the practice by which European traders held Africans as security while the trade was being [End Page 661] deliberated. European slave traders' adherence to African customs, as well as their ability to manage their crew, often determined the outcome of the voyage. In the case of the Hare, Kelley shows the volatility of the slave trade by describing episodes like when some of the Hare's crewmembers jumped ship for a longboat off the African coast, or when Captain Godfrey executed an African who had led an attack on a different slave-trading vessel. Kelley weaves together these examples of peril and violence with less dramatic, yet frustrating, everyday occurrences on the voyage, like when the ship's stove caught fire during the journey back to North America. Scholars who research slavery in North America will appreciate Kelley's microhistory because it examines the gritty details of slave trading within the context of the larger forces at play within the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. The strength of Kelley's approach is that it concretizes the experience of both slave traders and those enslaved, and moves from detail to broader context effortlessly. In one passage, Kelley reconstructs life in "working Newport" with its "seamen, longshoremen, coopers, caulkers, glaziers, braziers, sailmakers, riggers, and porters," and in another he sketches out the contours of British mercantilism (p. 18). Ultimately, Kelley's well-researched exploration into the lives of Africans enslaved in British North America during the late eighteenth century is an indispensable study of the Atlantic slave trade. Ousmane K. Power-Greene Clark University Copyright © 2017 The Southern...