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

The Voyage of the Slave Ship Hare is possibly the best book on a single slave voyage. Sean M. Kelley presents and examines the profuse sources about the ship, which departed from Newport, Rhode Island, in 1754 in order to embark captives in Sierra Leone and transport them to Charleston, South Carolina. The author consistently foregrounds the recent scholarship on the transatlantic slave trade to North America and the Caribbean, as well as the larger history of the traffic, to gauge to what degree the Hare was either typical or unusual compared to other forced Atlantic itineraries. Kelley uses detailed biographies of slave merchants, captains, and sailors involved in this voyage as a lens to scrutinize the larger moral economy that allowed the transatlantic slave trade to persist for nearly four centuries. While rigorously academic, this is an excellent companion to books intended for the general public, such as Marcus Rediker’s The Slave Ship, as it paints on a human scale the larger picture of forced Atlantic passages.¹

Books on a single slave ship are typically limited to the British, and to a lesser extent the French, Atlantic.² This is largely due to the types of sources available for the former, such as business papers and abolitionist literature, which are lacking in the longer history of Luso-Brazilian traffic and typically hidden in the mostly illegal nineteenth-century slave trade to Cuba. Kelley acknowledges that the Hare is a rarity in the larger history of this traffic: the most common slave voyages were Luso-Brazilian, and most slave ships arriving in the British mainland colonies before 1776 were based in Britain rather than the colonies. But the documentation on the Hare provides an exceptional window onto slave-trading networks controlled by the English and Africans in Sierra Leone and, particularly, onto the fate of the captives after disembarkation. Kelley shows that patterns of slave sales in South Carolina led to the continuance of shipmate networks among the survivors of the Hare, making it possible for them to find people of similar cultural and geographic backgrounds.

The book closely follows the Hare from its departure in Newport to its arrival at various trading posts in Sierra Leone, its stopover at Barbados, and finally its disembarkation at Charleston. Thereafter, the narrative focuses on the life prospects that these Africans found in South Carolina. This structure allows readers to examine how Africans transitioned from one place to another by looking into the depths of their forced itinerary. Kelley interweaves temporal, geographic, political, and economic contexts on both sides of the Atlantic to demonstrate how they shaped the ordeal endured by these captives. In doing so, he shows how Mande worldviews, belonging to a region larger than Sierra Leone, persisted even as they changed in colonial South Carolina. By following this slave voyage, readers see that local contexts and particular slave-trading routes shaped distinct black identities in the New World.

The first two chapters zoom in on the outfitters and owners of the Hare, William and Samuel Vernon, and on its captain, Caleb Godfrey. Kelley shows that slave trading was more important to New England’s—not just Rhode Island’s—economy than previously thought. New England developed commercial ties with slave-based economies in Britain’s mainland and Caribbean colonies and, after American independence, with slave societies such as Cuba and Brazil. While slave trading was not Newport’s main activity, it was deeply embedded in local society. Newport was the main North American port organizing slave voyages because it was a crossroads for maritime craftsmen, as well as a center of production (rum) and redistribution of merchandise sold in this traffic. The merchant community of Newport entered this trade early in the eighteenth century and increased their engagement as they accumulated knowledge of African slaving...