This is a welcome addition to a short list of books focused on single slave ship voyages. Through painstaking research, Sean M. Kelley reveals much about the actors who financed, supplied, and crewed the Hare in 1754 and 1755. Most importantly, he moves beyond numbers that appear in shipping records to tell us about the places from which 72 individuals were likely stolen, the nature of the suffering they endured, and the ways they shaped, to the extent they could, their lives under enslavement. This is a rich social history that centers on an (rather than the) Atlantic slave trade.

From chapter to chapter, Kelley follows the voyage of the Hare across the ocean and back again. The first chapters center on Newport, Rhode Island, where the Hare was outfitted in 1754. Kelley provides an account of how the voyage was financed; biographies of the captain, crew and local investors; and an analysis of the mindset that rendered slaving acceptable as an industry. The next chapters explore how the slave trade operated in the places the Hare visited in what is today Sierra Leone and Liberia. Kelley names many of the coastal merchants and political leaders who engaged with the captain of the Hare. He explains his best guesses about from where those who were enslaved and forced onto the ship originated, and what life was like for them in those places. He also details the political, economic, and social structures in the interior and on the coast that facilitated slave raiding and trading. Finally, Kelley provides thoughtful comparisons to other parts of the continent. What was unique about this section of Africa was that slaves were sold in small numbers by a range of coastal merchants, which had implications for the nature of negotiations and the economics of the trade.

The final chapters explore the journey back across the Atlantic and the fate of those held captive on the Hare. Unfortunately, source material does not reveal much about this particular Middle Passage. So from a range of accounts of other passages Kelley spins a rich description of the suffering that Africans on the Hare likely endured.

Most of those slaves found themselves briefly in Barbados before they were moved on to Charleston. In both places, the Hare’s captain received correspondence from his employer in Newport, which is revealing of merchant communication networks in the period. Kelley says much about the people from South Carolina and Georgia – rural and urban, small holders and large – who purchased slaves brought by the Hare. And he considers whether slaves from the Hare ultimately ended up among others with similar cultural backgrounds. Here he engages with debates about whether enslaved Africans found themselves among coherent groups, or in crowds constituted by people of diverse linguistic and ethnic backgrounds. Scholars have focused on these questions because they have implications for whether and how Africans recreated in the Americas cultural elements from their homelands. Kelley's thoughtful analysis reveals that many of the survivors of the voyage of the Hare spoke related Mane languages and were Mandinga or from groups with close ties to Mandinga. This facilitated their embrace of a common ‘Mandingo’ identity, rooted in practices from across the ocean, in South Carolina. Moreover, Mandinga elements became central to Gullah cultural traditions that have been important through to today.

Kelley's book is the best biography of a slave ship that sailed from British North America. If I found anything disappointing, it is that Kelley was often forced to fill gaps in the historical record with informed guesses. And thus the word ‘probably’ pops up frequently in chapters centered on the plight of the Hare’s 72 unnamed slaves. Such is the nature of historical research on populations about which we have few archival sources.

As a scholar who has focused more on the South than the North Atlantic, I found myself contrasting the sources that Kelley and I rely upon. It is clear that where the Catholic Church was firmly established, historians have rich records from baptisms, marriages, and burials, which often detail African origins, family relationships, and social networks in ways that sources of the Protestant world do not. To be sure, in drawing his informed conclusions, Kelley makes good use of data from other parts of the Atlantic. In so doing, he demonstrates as well as any study of British North America that Africans who were held in bondage understood their experiences and acted in part based upon world views that survived the Middle Passage. That is, Kelley makes clear that it matters from where Africans hailed.