ABSTRACT
On a sunny afternoon in 1758 a sixteen-year-old boy named Boyrereau Brinch and a group of his friends ascended the banks of the Niger River after several hours of swimming and water sports. On shore they were surprised by a large party of slave catchers who grabbed eleven of the boys, bound and gagged them, and threw them on top of one another at the bottom of a small boat that stank from filth and dead fish. After a four-day river journey, they reached the Atlantic Ocean and were transferred to a large slave ship. The slave traders spent several more weeks gathering their human cargo, then set sail for the small British colony of Barbados. Fifty years later Boyrereau Brinch, who had survived West Indian slave-breaking, fought in the Seven Years War, endured slavery in Connecticut, fought in the American Revolution, won his manumission, settled as a free man in Vermont, changed his name to Jeffrey Brace, and told his life story to a young white antislavery lawyer named Benjamin Franklin Prentiss. Published in 1810 under the title The Blind African Slave; Or, Memoirs of Boyrereau Brinch, Nicknamed Jeffrey Brace, the memoir powerfully illuminates transatlantic slavery from the rare perspective of an African victim, witness, and survivor. In my introduction to the memoir’s 2005 edition I provide wide-ranging contextual information about Brace’s life. In this essay I expand and deepen my investigation into the particularities of Brace’s sojourn in Barbados.
