Content area
Full Text
It was a scene replayed countless times in the annals of the Atlantic slave trade. Only about six years old in 1735, when slave raiders ambushed his tribe and killed his father, a West African prince known as Broteer was captured and marched hundreds of miles to Anamaboe on the Gold Coast. There, told to "appear to the best possible advantage for sale," the boy and some two hundred and sixty fellow Africans became cargo on a slaver bound for Rhode Island. Before hauling anchor, the ship's steward Robertson Mumford traded "four gallons of rum and a piece of calico" for young Broteer, changing his name to Venture on account of "having purchased me with his own private venture."1
Venture touched Narragansett soil in 1737, having survived an "ordinary voyage" that included shipboard smallpox and a stopover in Barbados, where what was left of the ship's human freight had been sold. Over the next three decades Venture Smith-he added the surname of the master who let him purchase his freedom in 1765 -met northern slavery head on, commanding respect with physical strength he deemed "equal if not superior to [that of] any man whom I have ever seen." As it had in Africa, slavery rent Smith from relatives in southern New England, where he spent his first years of freedom cleaving wood tirelessly to reunite his cloven family. Against the odds, Smith forged an independent livelihood in late colonial and early republican America. Remarkable achievements earned Smith immortality in a thirty-two-page memoir, "Related by Him.relf' and published late in 1798 by the printer Charles Holt of New London, Connecticut.2
In three chronological chapters, sandwiched between an editorial preface by Smith's white amanuensis and an authenticating certificate signed by prominent local white men, A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa: But resident above sixty years in the United States of America, paints Smith's life in broad strokes. Chapter 1, eight pages long, outlines his early memories of Africa; the book's remaining sections recount selected events from Smith's life in slavery and, ultimately, in freedom. An advertisement for the Narrative ran for six weeks in Holt's newspaper, the New London Bee, beginning on December 26, 1798. It described Smith as "a...