The Voyage of the Slave Ship Hare
A Journey into Captivity from Sierra Leone to South Carolina
-
- $19.99
-
- $19.99
Publisher Description
From 1754 to 1755, the slave ship Hare completed a journey from Newport, Rhode Island, to Sierra Leone and back to the United States—a journey that transformed more than seventy Africans into commodities, condemning some to death and the rest to a life of bondage in North America. In this engaging narrative, Sean Kelley painstakingly reconstructs this tumultuous voyage, detailing everything from the identities of the captain and crew to their wild encounters with inclement weather, slave traders, and near-mutiny. But most importantly, Kelley tracks the cohort of slaves aboard the Hare from their purchase in Africa to their sale in South Carolina. In tracing their complete journey, Kelley provides rare insight into the communal lives of slaves and sheds new light on the African diaspora and its influence on the formation of African American culture.
In this immersive exploration, Kelley connects the story of enslaved people in the United States to their origins in Africa as never before. Told uniquely from the perspective of one particular voyage, this book brings a slave ship's journey to life, giving us one of the clearest views of the eighteenth-century slave trade.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kelley, senior lecturer in history at the University of Essex, England, uses a single trip of the sloop Hare to illuminate the day-to-day experience of life on board the thousands of slave ships that made the "Middle Passage" across the Atlantic. This particular voyage of the Hare, which transported 72 captives from Sierra Leone to South Carolina in 1754 1755, was "the most thoroughly documented slaving voyage to 18th-century North America," producing unusually detailed records in relation to the nature of the captured African men and women and their fates on arrival in the plantation South. From these documents, Kelley illuminates the financial and logistical workings of the trade in human beings, as well as the persistence of the Mande captives and the ways in which they retained or altered elements of their culture in a new and intensely challenging environment. He deftly traces these people's fates their capture inland, their transportation to the Sierra Leone coast, and their torturous voyage across the Atlantic to Charleston in combination with those of the captain and crew of the Hare. Kelley offers readers a devastating picture of the practices that ravaged West African societies while forming the foundation of colonial America's economy.
