The Slave Trade, One Voyage at A Time Gregory E. O’Malley (bio) Jonathan M. Bryant. Dark Places of the Earth: The Voyage of the Slave Ship Antelope. New York: Liveright, 2016. xii + 376 pp. Figures, map, notes, and index. $28.95. Sean M. Kelley. The Voyage of the Slave Ship Hare: A Journey into Captivity from Sierra Leone to South Carolina. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. xii + 290 pp. Figures, maps, appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $30.00. Whereas quantitative studies dominated slave-trade historiography in the second half of the twentieth century, recent years have seen numerous attempts to put a more human face on the traffic. Some scholars focus on the experiences of captives departing particular African regions to bring culture and language to the fore with precision. Examples of these would be Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery (2007), and Alexander X. Byrd, Captives and Voyagers (2001). Others, such as Emma Christopher’s Slave Ship Sailors and Their Captive Cargoes (2006), examine the crews working aboard slaving vessels and their face-to-face encounters with the enslaved. Meanwhile, in The Slave Ship: A Human History (2007), Marcus Rediker studies slaving vessels as technologies of oppression, with a strong focus on individual experiences. Another approach to humanizing the study of the slave trade has been more micro-historical, focusing on individual slave-trading ventures in great detail. Numerous studies have examined infamous and exceptional voyages such as the Zong (from which 133 captives where thrown overboard and drowned in an attempt to collect an insurance settlement, touching off an important legal battle in Britain) or the Amistad (which was overtaken by captives off the coast of Cuba and eventually landed in New York in 1839, leading to a highly publicized Supreme Court case over the status of the rebels). By contrast, Robert Harms’ The Diligent (2002)—and to some degree Nigel Tattersfield’s The Forgotten Trade (1991)—highlight more routine slaving ventures to expose how the traffic functioned, the profits derived from it, and the devastating effects on captives (and sailors). Sean M. Kelly and Jonathan M. Bryant offer welcome additions to this burgeoning genre of single-voyage slave-trade [End Page 26] studies, with Kelley examining a fairly routine voyage and Bryant narrating a more exceptional, controversial case. In The Voyage of the Slave Ship Hare, Kelley uses a Rhode Island–based voyage in 1754–55 to expose the involvement of New England merchants in the slave economy, to examine slave trading in the Sierra Leone region, and to explore the possibilities for cultural continuity for slave-trade survivors in South Carolina. It is a deeply researched and elegantly written book that takes full advantage of one of micro-history’s greatest strengths—capturing a sense of historical events unfolding in a real world for real people. Reading about the Hare’s voyage, one gets a glimpse of daily life in the Atlantic world, including such experiences as finding employment as a mariner on the docks of Newport, needing to use dead reckoning at sea, buying and selling captives as a trader of mixed descent in coastal Sierra Leone, and surviving as a captive from enslavement through settlement on a Lowcountry rice plantation. Tracing the journey of a single ship all around the Atlantic also exposes meaningful connections between these sites ringing the ocean. Kelley’s story starts in Newport with profiles of the ship’s investors, the crew, and the town itself, offering a nice snapshot of a colonial New England port town. Kelley also puts the Atlantic in Atlantic History with a depiction of the Hare’s voyage to Africa, introducing readers to eighteenth-century navigation, work routines at sea, and the importance of Atlantic provisioning way-stations such as the Cape Verdes, where salt-raking was big business. The Hare acquired captives through numerous small transactions in the Sierra Leone region, which Kelley describes in rich detail to illuminate as much as possible the background of the Hare’s captives (mostly non-Muslim Mande speakers), the mistrust and violence that characterized trade between Europeans and Africans on the Upper Guinea Coast, and the cross-cultural brokers who often served as middlemen between...