On the African Coast

When the Sally sailed, Hopkins opened an account book, in which he carefully recorded every shipboard transaction, including wages advanced to crewmen, trading for supplies, and the purchase of 196 Africans. [1] He acquired his first slaves on November 15, a few days after the Sally's arrival on the coast, trading 156 gallons of rum and a barrel of flour to the captain of another slave ship for two Africans, "1 boy" and "1 garle." [2] Initially, he accounted purchases in pounds and shillings, but he soon adopted the custom of the coast, recording transactions in "barrs." [3] A barr was literally a bar of iron, but it was also a monetary equivalent – thus a yard of cloth was valued at one bar, a barrel of rum at ten bars, English and French guns at five and six bars, respectively, and so forth. Slaves could be worth anything from seventy to one hundred and thirty bars, depending on their age, sex, and health.

While slave ships typically worked their way along the African coast, the Sally appears to have most of its time in one place, near the mouth of the Grande River, in what is today Guinea-Bissau. Judging from the account book, the Sally operated as a kind of rum dispensary, supplying passing slave ships with the rum they needed to conduct business on the coast and receiving in exchange manufactured goods like cloth, iron, and guns, all of which were important trade goods. Slaves tricked in one or two at a time, acquired from other slave ship captains, from British and Afro-Portuguese traders operating in the area, and from the local African king. [4] Occasionally, Hopkins dispatched a boat to Geba, an inland trading center with an active slave market. On June 8, 1765, a boat returned from Geba with ten slaves, bringing the total number of purchases to 118 Africans. [5] That same day, Hopkins recorded the death of a woman slave who "hanged her Self between Decks." [6] She was the second African to die on the ship. By August 20, the Sally's last day on the coast, the death toll had risen to nineteen. A twentieth captive, a "woman all Most dead" was left behind when the ship sailed. [7]