Paths of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Interactions, Identities, and ...

Chapter 1

New England Merchants
and the Circum-Caribbean Slave Trade

Jennifer L. Anderson

In 1770 Oliver Warner, a leading Rhode Island merchant, instructed Captain James Card to retrieve a slave named Newport from the Mosquito Shore on Card’s upcoming voyage. Originally “of the Gold Coast country,” Newport had been enslaved in New England before being leased as a woodcutter in two British mahogany-producing enclaves on the Spanish coast of Central America—the Bay of Honduras and, later, the Mosquito Shore.¹ When Card arrived and began making inquiries, Newport apparently decamped into the rain forest. Card dutifully reported that he had searched for the “Negro man Newport … finding by Sum Negroes where his Wife Lived, but [I] Can’t Come at him … I believe it will not Be in my power to Git him.” Warner instructed Card to sell the missing man and conclude his business by investing any proceeds