2 - Their Own Middle Passage

Summary

Chapter 2 places the movement of 99,752 recaptives within a broader history of forced migration in the Atlantic world, conceptualizing the voyages of Liberated Africans as a “structuring link” between homeland and diaspora. The chapter shifts the level analysis away from aggregate origins to the individual experiences of Africans, whom the 1807 Abolition Act and the deployment of the Anti-Slavery Squadron were intended to help. To do so I draw on a corpus of narratives composed in Sierra Leone that comprise some of the few first-hand accounts we have of enslavement in Africa. I also introduce the argument, further elaborated on in subsequent chapters, that this experience was a crucible during which “shipmates” forged deep, lasting connections. Nineteenth-century Sierra Leone was populated first and foremost by the arrival of some five hundred cohorts of shipmates. The Middle Passage experienced by recaptives was both an ending – to family, to friends, to familiar sights and sounds – but also a beginning, to new communities, families, and affinities that helped define colonial society in Sierra Leone.