Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [380]
Always, Grandma and the other old ladies had said that a ship brought the African to “somewhere called ’Naplis.” I knew they had to have been referring to Annapolis, Maryland. So I felt now that I had to try to see if I could find what ship had sailed to Annapolis from the Gambia River, with her human cargo including “the African,” who would later insist that “Kin-tay” was his name, after his massa John Waller had given him the name “Toby.”
I needed to determine a time around which to focus search for this ship. Months earlier, in the village of Juffure, the griot had timed Kunta Kinte’s capture with “about the time the King’s soldiers came.”
Returning to London, midway during a second week of searching in records of movement assignments for British military units during the 1760s, I finally found that “King’s soldiers” had to refer to a unit called “Colonel O’Hare’s forces.” The unit was sent from London in 1767 to guard the then British-operated Fort James Slave Fort in the Gambia River. The griot had been so correct that I felt embarrassed that, in effect, I had been checking behind him.
I went to Lloyds of London. In the office of an executive named Mr. R. C. E. Landers, it just poured out of me what I was trying to do. He got up from behind his desk and he said, “Young man, Lloyds of London will give you all of the help that we can.” It was a blessing, for through Lloyds, doors began to be opened for me to search among myriad old English maritime records.
I can’t remember any more exhausting experience than my first six weeks of seemingly endless, futile, day-after-day searching in an effort to isolate and then pin down a specific slave ship on a specific voyage, from within cartons upon cartons, files upon files of old records of thousands of slave-ship triangular voyages among England, Africa, and America. Along with my frustration, the more a rage grew within me the more I perceived to what degree the slave trade, in its time, was regarded by most of its participants simply as another major industry, rather like the buying, selling, and shipment of livestock today. Many records seemed never to have been opened after their original storage; apparently no one had felt occasion to go through them.
I hadn’t found a single ship bound from The Gambia to Annapolis, when in the seventh week, one afternoon about two-thirty, I was studying the 1,023rd sheet of slave-ship records. A wide rectangular sheet, it recorded the Gambia River entrances and exits of some thirty ships during the years 1766 and 1767. Moving down the list, my eyes reached ship No. 18, and automatically scanned across its various data heading entries.
On July 5, 1767—the year “the King’s soldiers came”—a ship named Lord Ligonier, her captain, a Thomas E. Davies, had sailed from the Gambia River, her destination Annapolis . . . .
I don’t know why, but oddly my internal emotional reaction was delayed. I recall passively writing down the information, I turned in the records, and walked outside. Around the corner was a little tea shop. I went in and ordered a tea and cruller. Sitting, sipping my tea, it suddenly hit me that quite possibly that ship brought Kunta Kinte!
I still owe the lady for the tea and cruller. By telephone, Pan American confirmed their last seat available that day to New York. There simply wasn’t time to go by the hotel where I was staying; I told a tax driver, “Heathrow Airport!” Sleepless through that night’s crossing of the Atlantic, I was seeing in my mind’s eye the book in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., that I had to get my hands on again. It had a light brown cover, with darker brown letters—Shipping in the Port of Annapolis, by Vaughan W. Brown.
From New York, the Eastern Airlines shuttle took me to Washington; I taxied to the Library of Congress, ordered the book, almost yanked it from the young man who brought it, and went riffling