I had seen film and photographs of the island in a documentary Joe had helped produce, but I wasn’t prepared for how intact the fortress is. I had imagined piles of rubble and cairns that Joe would interpret, but in the same odd and unexpected way that the logbooks were perfectly legible, Bence Island was not hard to decipher. Its purpose, its layout, and its story did not have to be imagined. It was perfectly clear how the island had worked.
The jetty of stone and gravel that leads onto the beach is the same one that was used during the centuries of the slave trade. This is where the captives, with their arms roped behind them, would have been walked down to the longboats and pushed in. Though the trading of goods for each slave took place in a clearing just outside the fortress, the beach and the jetty are still littered with objects from the slave trade, two centuries after its end. I saw the stems and bowls of clay pipes no longer white but gray with age, and broken pieces of the porcelain transferware that the company agents and traders would have used when dining at the fortress. Brilliant ruby and azure beads of Venetian glass and cowrie shells, once used in payment for human lives, were thick on the ground, as were shards of old bottles. An eighteenth-century cannon, its surface pitted with age, lay on the jetty facing the river. A large old fragment of blue porcelain with the figure of a prancing horse shone in the grass near the water’s edge.
On this jetty, a piece of slavery’s story was lived and suffered. We accept the idea that time changes the layout of streets and waterfronts, and that, for instance, John Easton’s wharf in Middletown no longer exists, and his stretch of riverfront is now a piece of a highway and a grassy verge. But this jetty was that jetty, the same one he and Saltonstall crossed; that sameness seemed to obliterate time itself. Seamen smoked their long clay pipes while men and women were shoved toward the longboats beached on the gravel shore. For most of those men and women and children, this small piece of land would have been their last moment on African soil, and though the place is now deserted and has the emptied-out atmosphere of a ruin, it is easy to imagine when it rang with commerce and the business it was about. The island was once a hive of activity, and its air, now so still, would have been pierced by shouts and cries.
We walked up to the clearing outside the main entrance. Joe explained that captives would be brought out from where they were held inside the fortress, and then examined for sale. For ten days before my arrival, men from nearby islands had been clearing the walls of dense vines and other vegetation so that we could make film and photographs of the ruins, and so that I could understand the layout. Joe had said that the fortress walls would tell me the story of what had happened here. Dark and rough with age, scabbed with tropical moss and lichen, the brick walls still have the power to frighten. These ruins are from the last slaving castle built on Bence Island, the last of perhaps as many as six fortresses, and was finished in 1796. The castle where Saltonstall and Easton traded in the 1750s was destroyed by the French in 1779. The fortress that followed that one also was destroyed by the French, but this last was, like all the others, built on the original site and the oldest footprint.
The exterior of the fort would have been covered with a white stucco that made the structure gleam, even from a distance. Made from ground white oyster shells, the bright stucco was not used on the inner walls of the slave yards, which were not for show.
Bence Island was a slave trading depot managed by Great Britain, the slave trade’s international leader for centuries, so even though the island is a tiny place, it appears often in eighteenth-century reports, letters, and journals. As we walked on the island, I remembered fragments of the vivid accounts I had read.
Barry Unsworth, who relied heavily on the journal of mid-eighteenth-century English slave ship captain John Newton in writing his novel Sacred Hunger—Newton traded at Bence in the 1750s and lived on nearby Plantain Island for nearly a year—describes a slaving fortress that could only have been Bence Island: “On a rocky eminence above the river bank, rose the white fort, shimmering in the sunshine, dramatic and imposing, with its block towers and high, crenellated walls. [The narrator] made out the Union Jack flying from the battlements, and another flag, blue and white—the colours of the Company.”
Two centuries ago, the outer brick walls of the fortress on Bence Island were coated with a white stucco made locally of oyster shells. The white exterior was designed to impress, and the slave ships arriving for trade would have seen the fortress gleaming in the distance. Courtesy of Tom Brown/Hartford Courant
Englishwoman Anna Maria Falconbridge was the first white woman to write an account of life in Sierra Leone during the late eighteenth century, the pivotal period when England began to move away from the slave trade. She visited the fortress that stood here in 1791 and 1792, and said it had a “formidable” appearance. “I suppose it is about one hundred feet in length, and thirty in breadth,” she wrote in her memoir, “and contains nine rooms, on one floor, under which are commodious cellars and store rooms; to the right is the kitchen, forge, &c., and to the left other necessary buildings, all of country stone, and surrounded with a prodigious thick lofty wall.”
As late as 1805, just before Great Britain withdrew from its position at the helm of the world slave trade and became one of the trade’s most ardent opponents, English traveler Joseph Corry visited the island and wrote of its “elegant range of buildings and store-houses, which, with great propriety, may be considered as one of the most desirable positions upon the windward coast of Africa.”
This circa 1727 map of Bence Island shows the footprint of the fortress at the time when it was under the management of the Royal African Company of England. When John Easton and Dudley Saltonstall visited the island in 1757, a consortium of British and Scottish businessmen had been running the slave trading operations since 1748 and had made of them a great success. Drawing of Bence Island, Sierra Leone, image Reference “Mariners 18,” as shown on www.slaveryimages.org, compiled by Jerome Handler and Michael Tuite, and sponsored by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the University of Virginia Library
Richard Oswald, a Scot, and Henry Laurens, an American from South Carolina, made fortunes from the slave trade conducted here but never set foot on the island. Oswald, head of a London-based consortium of merchants who leased Bence from the local African kings, and Laurens, who bought hundreds of Sierra Leoneans to work on rice farms in the American South, were traders on a global scale. They participated in the slave trade with great success, but never felt this rocky shore under their buckled shoes or saw the towering mangrove trees. They never smelled the marshy stink of this earth.
In the logbooks and in the culture of the slave trade, this place was called, simply, “the factory.” Saltonstall wrote on April 15, “This Day I Dind & Suped at the factory with Capt. John Stephens.” (This is probably the same John Stephens, a slave ship captain, who worked directly for Oswald and his associates.) Substantial slaving outposts were often called factories, and their lead agents were called factors. These words remind me, always, that the slave trade was a business.
Company agents and military men came to Bence to manage the complex business of bringing captive people here from inland and hundreds of miles north and south of the island. The imprisonment, maintenance, and sale of those thousands of captive people also created work. There would have been accountants from England, and men who could build barrels and repair structures of wood and brick. There would have been white