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

Online ISBN:
9781469627700
Print ISBN:
9781469627687
Publisher:
University of North Carolina Press
Book

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

Published:
2 May 2016
Online ISBN:
9781469627700
Print ISBN:
9781469627687
Publisher:
University of North Carolina Press

Abstract

From late 1754 to early 1755, the slave ship Hare completed a journey from Newport, Rhode Island, to Sierra Leone, and back to the United States—a journey which transformed over seventy Africans into commodities, condemning several of them to death and the rest to a life of bondage in North America. In this detailed narrative, the book reconstructs this tumultuous voyage, covering everything from the significance of slave trading to the New England economy and the identities of the captain and crew, to their encounters with inclement weather, slave dealers, and near mutiny. But most important, the book tracks the cohort of slaves aboard the Hare from their purchase in Africa to the rice and indigo plantations of colonial South Carolina. In tracing their complete journey, the book provides rare and detailed 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. The Hare captives’ story underscores the extent to which the African Diaspora was a highly structured, rather than culturally “randomizing” process, resulting in communities of Africans of common linguistic and cultural background living in close proximity to one another in the New World. Rather than living in isolation, the Hare captives were part of a large community of people of Mande background that left an indelible cultural stamp on the eighteenth-century Carolina Low Country.

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