The Voyage of the Slave Ship ‘Hare’: A Journey into Captivity from Sierra Leone to South Carolina

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. [em](May) [/em]