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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
**Longlisted for the Mountbatten Maritime Media Awards 2022** A groundbreaking history of the Black Joke, the most famous member of the British Royal Navy's anti-slavery squadron, and the long fight to end the transatlantic slave trade. Initially a slaving vessel itself, the Black Joke was captured in 1827 and repurposed by the Royal Navy to catch its former compatriots. Over the next five years, the vessel liberated more enslaved people than any other in Britain's West Africa Squadron. As Britain attempted to snuff out the transatlantic slave trade by way of treaty and negotiation, enforcing these policies fell to ships such as the Black Joke as they battled slavers, weather disasters, and interpersonal drama among captains and crew that reverberated across oceans. The Black Joke is a crucial and deeply compelling work of history, both as a reckoning with slavery and abolition and as a lesson about the power of political will - or the lack thereof.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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For my father, who always wanted this, and my mother, who made it possible vi
CONTENTS
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The most difficult voice to hear in the history of the transatlantic slave trade is that of the enslaved themselves. Often, people are barely individuated—for all historical intents, just one more body caught up in the morass of profit motives and policy decisions whose personal history we’ll never know.
When Black Joke captured a slaver, the ship was sent to Freetown for trial; if condemned, the enslaved on board were formally freed, which is to say transferred to the jurisdiction of the British Crown as colonial subjects. The Liberated African registers from Sierra Leone give us the names of these people, their ages, and a bit of physical description—height, usually, but also sometimes scarring and ritualistic markings. Historians have been able to use these details to trace the tribal origins of some of them, to better illuminate the journey that brought them to Freetown, but when compared to the information that’s available about the life of, say, the commodore of the Squadron, it’s not much at all.
But it is something, and though many of their voices may not have survived in the historical record, in this way, their identities did. Though reproducing every relevant page of the register was not an option, after every chapter in which a slave ship was captured, the first pages of the Liberated African register for that ship are included here. It feels like somehow both the most and really the least I could do, but it’s what we have.
Since even these records would not have been accessible to me during a pandemic without the work of archivists, historians, and librarians, I would like to especially thank Henry Lovejoy and the Liberated Africans project (https://liberatedafricans.org/), the National xArchives, Kew (Digital Microfilm Project), and the Sierra Leone Public Archives for the efforts toward education, digitization, and preservation that made the inclusion of these images possible.
And while we’re on the subject of institutions that made what you’ll see possible, the rest of the pictures herein are available courtesy of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London, with special thanks to Beatrice Okoro, for patiently walking me through the process.
AN INTRODUCTION
Beware, beware, the Bight of Benin, there’s one comes out where fifty went in.
—Sea shanty
The fire made for a beautiful sunset. The screams of sailors and slavers were a memory. The terrible cacophony of the cargo over which they’d struggled had also gone silent. It was as if the flames consumed not just ship timbers but sound; stillness had settled where the breeze of the sea refused to let the smoke rest, despite the crowds of people the blaze had drawn to the harbor. If evidence remained of the lives lived on board the now-empty vessel, it went up with the pungent smell of the burning decks, and the acrid scent of charred wood and whitewash accompanied the crack and snap of sparked beams. Naturally, the ship had been looted first, everything of value removed. The western coast of Africa was not a place where stores and sails would go to waste; what could not be used would be sold or traded by the same people who’d destroyed one of the finest Baltimore clippers ever to sweep across the open sea.
It wasn’t the first time this notorious ship, the Black Joke, had been laid bare. Only five years previously, it had been a legendary slaver making quick work of a terrible job, with a reputation for being too fast to ever be caught—but one fortuitous night it had been. Repurposed from horrific duty to a higher calling and outgunned for much of its career, Black Joke nonetheless set about capturing slavers in the same waters it had so recently cruised for human chattel—and persevered. In a world where news traveled in months, rather than minutes, the slaver-turned-hunter was famous in both incarnations, 2renowned in battles, outmaneuvering ships of every nation until its precipitous end. Those bearing witness to that demise knew that this time there would be no next chapter, no last-minute reprieve. This was irrevocable. It was not the sort of conflagration from which one arose.
Toasted by its peers and enemies alike upon its destruction in 1832, it’s possible people wept upon hearing the news of Black Joke’s ignoble end. Certainly the free Black population of Freetown, looking on from afar, would have saved the ship if they could have. The Black Joke had seized thirteen slave ships in its short life as an enforcer of abolition, but by many accounts, the tally in human lives spared bondage, at least in the immediate sense, was much greater. Setting aside the wider impact of the chilling effect created by Black Joke’s mere presence on the water—which wasn’t insignificant—while the ship was active, approximately a quarter of all the enslaved who arrived at Freetown to be officially liberated arrived care of this single ship and its crew. The crew on board included everyone from eager teen sailors (as young as thirteen) to grizzled veterans, in a diversity of ethnicities that demonstrated the incredible reach of the still-growing British Empire. A symbol to the whole of the West Africa Squadron (WAS) to which it had briefly belonged, the Black Joke had found and, at least temporarily, freed at least three thousand people. A figure to compare with how many the ex-slaver had itself brought to bondage, to be sure, but overall, barely a drop in the ocean of lives lost to the trade.
But how had it come to this? For four years, the Black Joke, itself a captured vessel, manned by a rotating crew, plagued by illness, dogged by bureaucracy and pirates, nonetheless sailed as the scourge of traffickers, releasing thousands of the enslaved from the cramped decks of ships flying flags from dubious diplomatic partners. Its captains and commanders had cracked slaver codes, discovered secret trade routes, and brought home the kind of prize ships that could change a man’s life, and perhaps even his station. It had navigated shoals corporeal and political—whether off the coast of 3western Africa or ensconced in the Admiralty House in London, both were surpassingly treacherous. As those made rich from the sale of human flesh lifted a glass to a common enemy’s downfall, speculation must’ve raged regarding who or what had destroyed the most celebrated thorn in the Atlantic slave trade’s side.
To answer this question requires a deeper exploration of the transatlantic slave trade than many of us, especially in the United States, ever encountered in school. If your education was anything like mine, what we learned about the slave trade as children and teens—if we learned much of anything at all—can be distilled into two broad statements: it was extremely unpleasant, and it ended before the Civil War. Beyond these limited understandings, many seem to believe that after bans were enacted … sometime in the 1800s, slave trading came to a mostly natural end.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Despite its short tenure in the service, the journey of what would eventually become His Majesty’s Brig Black Joke and its crew touched on nearly every aspect of this frequently overlooked chapter in the popular history of the abolition of slavery. If one begins with the ship’s history as a slaver and its unlikely capture, to follow in the Black Joke’s outsize wake is to discover a ready microcosm of a difficult transition period for Britain. From biggest slavery profiteer before the turn of the nineteenth century to the most vociferous proponent of abolition soon thereafter—all while attempting to drag the rest of the world with it for reasons both high-minded and pragmatic—decades of British interventions in the slave trade, for good and ill, are reflected in Black Joke’s genesis, incredible campaign, and ultimate end.
In the oft-ignored era post-dating Napoléon and predating Victoria, the Black Joke’s crew, fortunes, and failures can be linked to not only the global evolution of the slave trade, but the demise of the Age of Sail, the increasing steam behind the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of Pax Britannica. However, this is not just a story of big ideas and global changes. The daily tensions and privations faced by the crew and their captured prizes—particularly in a time when 4the West Africa Squadron (also known as the Preventive Squadron) was arguably the most dangerous post in the British Royal Navy—reveal courage and suffering, greed and folly, all against the backdrop of one of the greatest blights on humanity’s collective history. The actions undertaken by these sailors may have occurred on salt-crusted rigging or below enemy decks sluiced with blood, but they had the potential for far-reaching and explosive repercussions on the international diplomatic stage and for the cause of abolition as a whole.
The Black Joke’s voyage in the contemporary imagination went much further than its patrol. As we struggle to dismantle racist and colonialist legacies today, the Black Joke’s journey demonstrates that battles for freedom have never been short, uncomplicated, or without sacrifice—though they are, conversely, easily forgotten. Far from dying a slow, if mostly natural, death, the slave trade had to be actively dismantled over many years of tense maneuvers in storms both political and nautical, and if British sailors had a hand in it, so, too, did Africans, enslaved and free, as well as ardent abolitionists, politicians both reluctant and enthusiastic, and collaborators the world over.
This is not, however, yet another narrative in which Britain mostly saves the day. The history of the Black Joke (and certainly that of the Royal Navy) resists such simplistic assessment. Far from a story of unmitigated White Saviorism, this is a complex history with few uncomplicated heroes, even when writ as small as a single ship in a much-larger landscape. The slave trade, the fits and gasps of its final decades, the aftermath—the choices made then have filtered into every facet of our modern world; the Black Joke’s cruise is still in the food we eat and clothes we wear, it is still in the land we live on or occupy, it is in our wars and our peace and our borders and our economy and how cultures the world over grapple with legacies of colonialism and racialized violence. The repercussions of the transatlantic slave trade surround us, still. Regardless of which side of the Atlantic we live on, the reverberations of centuries of human trafficking and the turbulent decades encompassing the fight to finally 5end it are still felt now; it is in reading and writing about escaping the slave trade that one realizes that the legacy of the slave trade and its abolition is yet inescapable.
In our current political climate, one of tense negotiations and tenuous alliances in the face of an increasingly shrill White supremacist movement, perhaps these lessons from an untidy history, gleaned from a battle for justice that was waterlogged and dirty, nuanced and treacherous, can help in navigating society’s way to better shores. Though one ship alone could never hope to stop the proliferation of slavery, to read the history of the Black Joke is to wonder if its example could have, to wonder why its success couldn’t be replicated, to wonder further at the avarice, inefficiency, and moral relativism that frequently scuttled even the best efforts to halt the flow of the enslaved across the Atlantic. So much more could have been done decades sooner to effectively police the transatlantic slave trade. Hundreds of thousands of lives might have been spared the lash or saved outright had intrigue and ineptitude not created a scenario in which the greatest navy on earth somehow fielded a woefully understaffed fleet to contend against the flood of slavers pouring from so many ports.
Even a ship without peer, when situated in a military bound by distant bureaucracy, on a coast known for deadly maladies, in waters rife with hostility, was poorly equipped to cope with the sheer magnitude of the task set before it. This tiny ship of fifty or so men was Britain’s reflection on troubled water—an image of morality and principle, regularly disrupted by waves of indifference to and profit from the trade in human chattel. As the embers of the Black Joke crumbled near Sierra Leone, one thing was clear: the Royal Navy would never contain its like again. 6
CHAPTER ONE
Henriqueta
September 1827, 569 enslaved people
It was a ship with a reputation, and rumors of its speed might have been the only thing, in 1827, that sailed across the ocean faster than it did. American built, small timbered, lean, and by all accounts beautiful, the ship was masterfully crafted, and its sleek hull snuck through the deep night—quick, yet cautious. As it headed inexorably toward the equator and open ocean, its low profile was sunk lower still into the lapping waves by the weight of the bodies tightly packed belowdecks. Though it was a prime prize for many who might seek to claim the ship by right, might, or both, its captain nonetheless sped confidently through the warming September waters off the coast of Lagos, where he’d packed over five hundred then-shackled people into an impossibly small space. They would, soon enough, be in northeastern Brazil, a region under the yoke of centuries of sugar cultivation. They were bound for Bahia.
João Cardozo dos Santos might almost have felt sorry for his mostly still cargo. Were it not for British interference, their journey would at least be markedly shorter. The detours required by British treaties added weeks to the trip—his last had been forty-nine days—but did little to stop the trade; if the British supposedly cared so much for the enslaved, why make the inevitable worse? As for him, surely he minded the additional weeks on board, certainly he minded the farce of British diplomacy that had held his nation 8hostage to what he must have thought a fool’s bargain, yet despite the money at stake, the penalties, the dangers, Cardozo dos Santos probably sat on deck unbothered. After all, he’d dealt with pirates and other slavers—what was the British navy to him, a man steering a ship he didn’t own, carrying cargo that (perhaps with a few exceptions) did not belong to him, flying the recently crafted flag of his nascently independent country?
Despite the fact that Brazil had formally separated from Portugal a mere five years prior, in 1822, its dominance as a market for the slave trade remained unsurpassed. By the time the nation formally abolished slavery—over sixty years after Captain Cardozo dos Santos’s soon-to-be much less quiet night—approximately 44 percent of enslaved people shipped to the Americas from Africa would have arrived, toiled, and, if dubiously fortunate, survived for more than a few short years working on the vast sugarcane, rice, tobacco, and cotton plantations or in gold and diamond mines across Brazil’s territory. In contrast to the United States, which had nominally ended the practice of importing newly enslaved people after a congressional ban on slave trading went into effect in 1808 and thus relied heavily on “natural increase” (enslaved reproduction) to replenish the unpaid force on whose back the wealth of the nation rested, Brazilian slaveholders often found it more expedient to instead simply work their human property to death and buy more. Part of the reason for this difference may have been the nature of the work, as both sugar production and mining were notoriously difficult, onerous labor and thus thought to be inappropriate, if not impossible, for most women to perform. Brazilian slave markets thus demanded a substantially higher proportion of male enslaved Africans, and the ratios of the enslaved population, near 80 percent men to 20 percent women in some areas, made import, as far as slave holders were concerned, the only viable mechanism of sustaining Brazil’s booming agricultural economy. The fact that the work was deadly, well, that simply meant import was very good business.
Slavery itself, not just land and resources, made men (and occasionally 9 women) rich, and though Captain Cardozo dos Santos didn’t have an ownership stake in this voyage, it’s probable he was aiming to in the future. This was his seventh time captaining his current berth, the Henriqueta, a ship so fine it may well have been built for an emperor, for the only like craft sold in the era, originally named the Griffin, was purchased either by or for Pedro I of Brazil in 1825. The Henriqueta’s previous six trips to this part of Africa, the Bight of Benin, had each been a resounding economic success, and the pretty little ship hiding unimaginable horrors, the same one cruising ever closer to safe passage under the cover of night, had already delivered over three thousand newly enslaved Africans to its home port, Salvador de Bahia, the region’s capital, profiting its owner, Jose de Cerqueira Lima, approximately £80,000, over £8.5 million (nearly $11 million) in 2020. Extraordinarily rich and socially prominent with it, de Cerqueira Lima was, perhaps even more than his employee, likely supremely unconcerned with the fate of the Henriqueta. The wealthiest and most famous slave trader of his era in all of Brazil, which is saying something in a time when well over forty thousand (and rapidly rising) Africans were trafficked each year to that country, de Cerqueira Lima was a busy man with business, with parties, with politics—he was serving as a city councilman that year—and this ship was just one of a fleet of at least a dozen slavers reaping him handsome, if blood-soaked, profits.
And besides, he had insurance. No matter that missions such as the Henriqueta’s had been rendered illegal via laws enacted under pressure from Britain, first under Portuguese rule and then as independent Brazil, de Cerqueira Lima and his ilk were so powerful that they were able to protect their interests in vessels purpose-built for illegal trade, even specifically insuring them against capture by the Royal Navy right in the policy. Though Henriqueta called Salvador home, the ship was insured by an outfit in Rio; few in power anywhere in Brazil were eager to obey treaties forced on them by a foreign empire bloated with economic might, and this, Cardozo dos Santos knew, suited his employer just fine. Him, too, truth be 10told—he’d only risked capture once in this, arguably the fleetest of ships, and that had been bad luck more than anything else. The second time he and this ship had made this voyage, the Henriqueta had been spotted loading shackled Africans at Lagos, and was either reported by the nearby American schooner Lafayette, or the slaving brig was being abetted by the schooner, yet was nonetheless found by the Royal Navy’s HMS Maidstone. If the former, since Americans had also built Cardozo dos Santos’s ship and most like it, the captain wasn’t sure why they feigned disdain when coming across them at their business on the water, but it hadn’t mattered. He had outsmarted them the usual way.
A simple, if tedious, solution worked nearly every time: Cardozo dos Santos ordered his crew to off-load any of the enslaved already on board, with haste, then waited to sit through the “inspection” by the British. After whatever cumbersome tub they had on patrol had finally lumbered to harbor, the captain presented them a ship devoid of human cargo, and even if the chains sat in plain view on what was very obviously a slave deck, regardless of whether coffles of the enslaved stood packed in barracoons within sight of the harbor, or even at the docks themselves, there was nothing the English could do. No enslaved on board, no crime. Then he and his crew would idle a while longer to ensure the English were well away—a few days perhaps, though it could be weeks, even months—a respectable period of time, time spent drinking and eating and, in his case, making pleasant conversation with the locals who mattered. Then upon reloading the enslaved under cover of night, they aimed the Henriqueta straight for the open ocean, hurrying toward the equator (and away from British jurisdiction) at full sail. The Royal Navy ships were old, often repurposed warships, lots of guns, but achingly slow for the task to which they’d been set. Though the Maidstone had waited for them, again, it hadn’t mattered; if it had been a real chase, Cardozo dos Santos had barely noticed, and he’d arrived in Salvador, only slightly delayed and cargo very much intact, without even a good story to show for the patrol’s efforts.
Yes, business was good, excellent even, despite the fevers, the 11heat, the rain, the ruthless competition, and the incessant meddling of England, embodied in its slow and infrequently spotted West Africa Squadron. If one could not hear the cries or smell the stink, the former, at least, lessening as the hour eased past midnight and exhaustion claimed his captives, it was peaceful on board one of the most prolific slavers on the coast—until a voice rang out over the slick deck in the still night, and the captain started, refocusing on the horizon. There, suddenly, another ship had leaped into view and was rapidly closing.
Leaped might have been pushing it, but the much-bulkier silhouette of the HMS Sybille was certainly putting on its fair share of speed despite being everything the Henriqueta quite deliberately was not. Designed by the famous French naval engineer Jacques-Noël Sané, the Sybille had been in service since 1792 and seen plenty of action, including its own initial capture by the British HMS Romney just three years after being launched from Toulon. Having been in service to the Royal Navy for the next thirty-three years, Sybille was now a little more antiquated, more liable to show its age and wear. Though the Hébé-class frigate was four times larger than its quarry with nearly eight times the complement of sailors and dozens more guns, the firepower and French proportions that had once served it well in the Napoleonic Wars here, when compared to those of its nimble American-built target, simply made it heavy and more ill-suited to its duty: no less than the eradication of the Atlantic slave trade.
Sybille was not without its advantages, even in these seemingly mismatched circumstances. Both the ship’s crew and its commander, the recently arrived Commodore Collier, had plenty of experience with pirates, many of whom sailed smaller, more maneuverable ships, more akin to the Henriqueta than those he commanded as an officer of the Royal Navy.
Just a scant decade earlier, in 1818, Francis Augustus Collier had been recalled into active service to combat a “piratical scourge” in the 12Persian Gulf, which is to say quell local resistance to British economic colonialism. This “resistance” at the time took the form of tolls that the family controlling the area, the al-Qawasim, charged all ships doing business in the Gulf, money the British had no interest in paying, which eventually prompted some raids of British vessels. However, rumors of supposed piracy (and attendant Arabic barbarism) had almost certainly been vastly overblown by the British East India Company in an effort to provoke just this sort of military response. The validity of the assignment was of little interest to anyone back in London at the time; of greater import, Collier’s first command of a squadron—and the resulting effort to quell opposition to British regional intervention—had been a resounding success. A career navy man who’d thus far earned his promotions while on service in the West Indies, Collier’s creativity, diligence, ability to command, and willingness to order the complete eradication of entire harbors until little was left but smoldering ruin were credited by some with functionally eliminating the practice of piracy from an entire geographic area.
This seems like less of a feat when the history of regional “piracy” was as short as it was exaggerated, but given that the British informal empire in the Gulf can be dated to the treaty forced out of this ruinous campaign (and lasted deep into the twentieth century), the significance of the action can’t be overstated. International parties and the British commander of the land operation, Major General William Kier Grant, heaped praise on Collier’s “zealous, cheerful, and active” leadership, without which the campaign might have failed. Awards for distinguished service followed soon after—the Order of the Lion and Sun from the Persian sovereign (though the Foreign Office disallowed Collier’s wearing of it), and the Cross of the Legion of Honor, the highest class of France’s top military honor, from then Louis Philippe (III), Duke (of) Orléans, cousin to the king (and later king himself). Back at home, however, the Admiralty’s reaction to Collier’s resounding success had been substantially more tepid. Through a sleight of bureaucratic hand based on his not yet being of flag rank, aka an admiral, Collier, already a Companion of the 13Order of Bath for previous service, was denied the knighthood those involved thought he unquestionably deserved. Though other British naval officers present for the campaign would be knighted for their valor, Collier would never receive any official recognition from his own government for his success in the Persian Gulf. A man who was as courageous as he was frequently uncompromising, Collier seems to have not always been uniformly beloved by his superiors. For him to be promoted to commodore of an overseas squadron, however, some in the Admiralty must have suspected that if any man could turn an impossible naval task into a foregone inevitability, or at least make a good showing, it was the one at the helm of the Sybille. Moral imperatives aside, this was a job, and Collier was determined to finally make an example of the loathsome Henriqueta.
Collier’s habit of doing things right, regardless of whether they made him popular, probably divided opinion—for instance, he regularly petitioned his superiors on behalf of his men, but was known to be a strict disciplinarian, and this in the days of severe, even deadly, corporal punishment. Collier was unambiguously good at his job and came from a solid naval lineage, in both family and patronage. He had been hand-selected by none other than Admiral Horatio Nelson, among the greatest naval heroes Britain had ever produced, who had remained Collier’s patron until Nelson’s untimely death in the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. Nelson had, it cannot be overstated, been a massive fan of Collier’s, ever since he’d encountered a ten-year-old Francis on the streets of Bath in 1798, smartly dressed in naval uniform, and with a child’s eagerness to adventure.
Though many in the Royal Navy joined the service young, Collier’s initially rapid ascension was a reflection of his connections, his precociousness, and the times in which he lived. He’d been born in 1788 to a recently established naval family, as his father, Vice Admiral Sir George Collier, had risen from middle-class origins to great success harassing the American colonists in their war for independence. Sir George, much like his son, had been known as a man of great initiative, with a talent both for command and for annoying his 14superiors with his forthright opinions; he’d been vocal in his opinion that the American war was unwinnable as it was being managed, which made him enemies among those then in power in the navy. Sir George was an unconventional man: he used his spare time in the Americas adapting theatrical works; spent his life challenging superiors, possibly to the detriment of his career; spent his political capital on oppositional positions in Parliament; and last, though certainly not least, spent his actual capital securing a divorce—Francis, one of his father’s seven children, was the product of Sir George’s second marriage. Divorce, though not completely unheard of in the eighteenth century, was an uncommon and often embarrassing experience, as the willful dissolution of a marriage required a literal act of Parliament to accomplish and could only be granted for adultery. Though not solely the province of the aristocracy, divorce was an expensive process, and only about 325 occurred during the 150-plus years these acts were required. Sir George’s ability to secure one in 1772, even before his most successful tours of duty in the colonies and resulting honors, speaks volumes to just how far the senior Collier had already risen, even before the peak of his career (and about the problems that existed in his first marriage).
Sir George’s second marriage, to Francis’s mother—Elizabeth Fryer, a wealthy merchant’s daughter from Exeter—was presumably a happier affair, but it, too, was eventually cut short. By the time Sir George’s naval career had begun to recover from his foray into politics, enough to merit two promotions in just two years after over a decade of waiting, the newly minted vice admiral’s health failed so suddenly that he was forced to resign the active command he’d spent his life seeking. The senior Collier left his ship in January of 1795 and was dead by April, only a year after his seven-year-old son entered his first ship’s books (or list of personnel). Signing up for naval service at an exceptionally young age was a common practice to gain an advantage in time served for the naval experience required of officers, though boys so young rarely served on board any Royal Navy vessels bound for distant harbors. So when Nelson encountered a previously unknown lad that fateful morning in Bath—who, if he’d resembled his father at a young age, would have shown the promise of a “middle stature”; “well made and active”; with an “open and manly” countenance and “complexion fair”; his hair light and his eyes blue and beaming with intelligence—whatever he’d found remarkable about the boy Francis Collier’s demeanor was not a function of long experience or family name. The recently promoted admiral had an eye for the man he thought young Francis might become, not merely the circumstances into which he’d been born. 15
Engraving of Sir George Collier (© NMM).
Watercolor of Sir Francis Collier (© NMM). 16
Sunny disposition, keen intelligence, or just awfully snappy in a uniform, whatever ineffable quality it was Collier had, Nelson, always on the lookout for talent to add to his ships’ complement, found himself entirely taken with the lad, and upon learning that Francis’s father had also been an admiral of some skill, the soon-to-be hero of Britain sought permission to call on Francis’s mother at the family’s residence in Bath.
Perhaps if it had been after Nelson’s greatest fame, rather than before, Lady Elizabeth Collier wouldn’t have hesitated. Sir George had been dead for three years now, and after all, both Francis and her oldest son, also named George, were already enlisted in the navy. It wasn’t even particularly unusual for a family to allow their son to go to sea with what was essentially a stranger; earlier in the century two vicar’s sons, Alexander and Samuel Hood, would eventually go on to become feted admirals and peers of the realm after a carriage accident brought then Captain Thomas Smith to the boys’ home for the night while awaiting repairs—the younger boy, Alexander, leaving for sea almost as soon as the captain did. Perhaps lively and cheerful Francis, such a joy to be around that the very sight of him arrested high-ranking strangers and passersby, was simply his mother’s favorite. Perhaps she was scared for the child’s life, as Nelson, who happened to be home in England because he was recuperating from having lost his right arm in a defeat to the Spanish at the Battle of Santa Cruz de 17Tenerife, would have been a stark reminder of how deadly life at sea could be. No matter the cause, Lady Elizabeth took more than a little convincing, including several additional letters, visits, and assurances from Nelson, to give her son up to the admiral’s custody, and with it active service, that same year. (Given that Nelson’s correspondence for the next few years would include written updates regarding young Francis’s progress and prowess to the boy’s mother, one imagines Lady Elizabeth’s eventual assent came with some strings attached.)
If she was concerned for Francis’s well-being, Lady Elizabeth must’ve felt downright prescient when the first action her ten-year-old son saw was the famous Battle of the Nile in 1798. The long, pitched, and ultimately decisive night engagement; creative tactics; and impressive head injury to his new mentor, Nelson, surely must have made an impression as Collier, who in later letters preferred “Frank,” adjusted to life at sea. In 1803, when the Peace of Amiens collapsed after only one year, ending the brief respite from open hostilities between French and British—and, at some point or another, seemingly every other major and minor European—powers, Collier found himself on the front lines of British colonial interests in the West Indies. Then a lieutenant so freshly minted that he’d had to carry blank promotion papers from England to be signed upon his arrival—despite Nelson’s insistence to Earl St. Vincent, First Lord of the Admiralty, Collier simply wouldn’t have served enough time to rise in the ranks until his transport to the Caribbean had concluded—Collier had been all of fifteen years old when he’d arrived at the Leeward Islands Station in April of 1803; war resumed in May. The teen who’d arrived to his berth on the HMS Osprey was not an inexperienced youth, but a war veteran who’d already served with Nelson and Sir Charles Ogle and, once on board, quickly earned distinction as a reliable and courageous leader of men. Perhaps, like his father, he was more vocally opinionated than his superiors would prefer, but if this was a defect, it was one many saw as outweighed by Collier’s growing reputation as the kind of man who, twenty-five years later, could jump-start a lackluster campaign—exactly what 18he’d been tasked to do as the captain of the Sybille and the commodore of the West Africa Squadron.
The West Africa Squadron could use whatever help it could get. By the time Collier arrived in 1827, the Squadron had existed in some fashion for nearly two decades, but it hadn’t been robustly supported during either of them. Some would much rather see the recently minted commodore fail, likely more due to animus to the mission rather than the man. Despite England’s having abolished the slave trade in 1807, the battle to do so had been highly divisive both in Parliament and throughout the nation, in no small part because a great deal of the British economy directly depended on either the ongoing enslavement of Africans or on the products the practice produced. From the moment John Hawkins took the less than laudatory distinction of being England’s first slave trader in the mid-1500s until abolition of the trade, it’s estimated that English slavers had shipped approximately 3.1 million enslaved Africans to ports scattered throughout the Americas, and at least four hundred thousand of those individuals never survived the journey. Gradual moves toward abolition in 1799 restricted the British trade to three ports in England proper—Liverpool, Bristol, and London—and Glasgow in Scotland participated heavily as well, but by this point the now British Empire had dominated the slave trade for at least the previous century and had already been immeasurably enriched by human bondage. Beyond the coin made in the sale and trade of the enslaved, the British Empire created via colonization relied on the labor Africans provided to not merely function, but to economically survive.
While the United States had violently exited the British domain decades before Sybille sailed the ocean, England remained intricately invested in the cotton trade as a leading manufacturer of cloth, and in distant holdings such as Jamaica and Barbados, colonial governments ruled over a fractious plantation class that demanded enslaved labor to keep up with the world’s insatiable craving for sugar. The imperial reliance on sugar cultivation had been a crucial aspect of England’s participation in what is also known as the triangular trade 19and was a likely root of much of the skepticism many had regarding Sybille’s (and the rest of the Squadron’s) larger mission. If some higher-ups within the British government and Captain Cardozo dos Santos agreed on one thing, it was that both thought it unlikely that England could continue its present economic dominance without the ongoing existence of slavery. Enslaved people produced the raw materials that English industrialism consumed to create products often used to trade for more enslaved people—by the end of the eighteenth century, at least half of the ships transporting the approximately eighty thousand newly enslaved each year were of British extraction. Those who welcomed responsibility for the presence of the Sybille were either less fatalistic or more ethically driven, but there was no altering the plain historical fact that European slave trading had existed on the western coast of Africa for centuries and, at the outset of the nineteenth century, constituted upward of 75 percent of total regional exports. For England’s economy to survive a collective bout of moral reckoning, it was imperative that the rest of the world’s powers also give up the sale of human beings—without a global shift in attitude, or at least law, Britain would have lost its primacy in the market without creating perceptible change regarding slavery.
One could not simply ban a major industry and expect that to be the end of it, especially since incentives to disregard the new law were both plentiful and lucrative; such a massive shift in policy would have to be enforced. Given the inherent maritime element of a transatlantic trade, it makes sense that Parliament would turn to the Admiralty (in conjunction with the Colonial Office) to see its will carried out, but there were more reasons than water to merit the Admiralty’s involvement. When the abolitionist push at the highest levels of government began in earnest in the 1780s with a comprehensive fact-finding mission, it was slavery’s impact on the Royal Navy, not Africans, that ultimately cracked open the door to serious consideration of the movement’s ultimate goals. It had long been taken for granted that seamen unassigned to one of His Majesty’s ships might seek their paycheck from the private sector—England had the largest merchant 20marine in the world undergirding its powerhouse economy, alongside everything else—and the slave trade was widely regarded as just one of several licit ways to make a living at sea. If it was more dangerous to engage human cargo rather than bales or barrels of freight, well, a job was a job, even risking pay in weaker West Indian currency, and sailors readily switched between seafaring industries. At slaving’s peak in Britain, as many as 130,000 British sailors may have worked in the trade. What piqued the Privy Council’s interest, however, was abolitionist Thomas Clarkson’s discovery, after the examination of over twenty thousand muster rolls (lists of ships’ personnel), that the slave trade was not just some mildly riskier business—a fifth of the crew of a slaving vessel could be expected to die on a round-trip voyage, usually from illness, though overzealous punishment from slaver captains and enslaved uprisings claimed their share of lives, too. On top of that another fifth, though not dead, would likely be rendered unfit for service as far as the Royal Navy was concerned, be it through incapacitating illness or disability, or parting ways with the slaver on foreign shores partway through the trip.
A yearly 40 percent hit to a large sector of the available manpower with sailing experience had the Admiralty’s attention because, as was the way of things at the time, war with France was both recently concluded and on the horizon. It was the Treasurer of the Navy who proposed gradual abolitionism in 1792, and though an end to the British slave trade wasn’t promulgated for another fifteen years, it was the navy that would ultimately be tasked with making the new law reality. That is not to say that it was a priority. By 1807, war with France was very much back on, and the Admiralty wasn’t willing to give much in the way of resources or thought to preventing the slave trade. Though some back in England used the next few years to transition to licit trade, others—particularly in the cities most profiting from slavery—tried to circumvent the new law in a variety of ways, from shifting to foreign investments in the slave trade to attempting to fly foreign flags on their slavers to avoid detection. British participation tapered, but by no means ceased, in the wake of An Act for 21the Abolition of the Slave Trade’s going into effect in 1808; especially in the early years, slave trading was likely hampered more by European conflict than by any nascent preventive efforts. As for the navy, it made a number of early captures in the West Indies, which was already a theater in the war against Napoléon, but the first ships sent to patrol the western coast of Africa the first year the law could be enforced weren’t even a squadron—they were instead listed as “on particular service,” a designation for Royal Navy vessels that were unassigned to an official squadron or station. It would take several years for a formalized West Africa Squadron to come into being, and it rarely contained more than six assigned ships in any given year, a fact Collier’s arrival on the Sybille would not fundamentally change. All the while, the slave trade continued almost apace as other nations rapidly filled the gap in the market Britain had (mostly) left.
Thus, aged, comparatively cumbersome, and not really suited to the task at hand, HMS Sybille typified the force of the British will to end slavery, and clearly it was a populace divided. Though a more comfortable berth than smaller ships, the Sybille and its peers in the West Africa Squadron were frequently outclassed by slavers in speed and maneuverability, and the talents of the Squadron’s crews and command were repeatedly called on to make up for shortcomings that seemingly only increases in budget (or perhaps more precisely, political favor) could remedy. But the merchants and politicians of England weren’t on this ship—Francis Collier was, and he was determined make headway where his predecessors had not, no matter how much opposition he had at home or across the water. The commodore had a job to do, and he had the men to do it, but he needed more ships, faster ships. Ships like the Henriqueta.
At deadly cross-purposes, it’s possible, even probable, that at another time, in a different place, the Henriqueta might have evaded the Squadron’s hunt; it obviously had before. Cruising off the shores of the Bight of Benin at midnight, Sybille had been lucky to spot the low-slung brig in the darkness, recently laden and just leaving harbor. Just as lucky was the fresh breeze that rose in the tropical night as 22the crew crowded on sail in pursuit. Most fortunate of all, however, might have been that Captain João Cardozo dos Santos was assured of the unparalleled speed of his slaver. Certain of his ship’s escape, unafraid of risking capture, the captain attempted to get windward of the Sybille, ordering Henriqueta to cut across the bow of the larger frigate. The spray disappeared into the night as the crew of the slaver executed its daring move toward an irony-rich freedom, putting on as much sail as could safely be filled by the brisk wind.
Had Cardozo dos Santos simply tried to flee as he had before against the Maidstone, relying on the passage of time as much as Henriqueta’s speed, he might have managed to clear the equator and, with it, any obligation a Brazilian brig might have to English authority. When he instead attempted to get upwind, bringing the slaver dangerously near its foe, the Henriqueta’s risky path and the Sybille’s able sailing—due in no small part to the abilities of the latter’s first lieutenant, William Turner, who had already served a commission on that ship—put the brig directly in sight of Sybille’s gunners. With the easy practice born of veterans of the Napoleonic Wars, they fired their bow chasers, skipping heavy balls of cast-iron shot off the water and into the slave ship’s rigging, destroying sails and masts while (they hoped) sparing the lives trapped belowdecks. In the darkness, Henriqueta had come far too close; though the Sybille’s size was a detriment in some respects, it also allowed the frigate to carry far more in the way of armament than that mounted by its small, seemingly indefatigable quarry. More men, more firepower—the frigate’s guns flashed above the depths and into the darkness until the smaller brig had no hope of flight and was forced to surrender to boarding from armed British sailors. One of the most notorious ships in the slave trade was on her way to a new identity, while young First Lieutenant Turner had just helped capture the ship that would alter his course forever.
Even after capture, a slave ship still held perils for all who’d encountered it. A captured ship accused of slave trading could not be 23left to it own devices. A crew from the Sybille would have to steer the Henriqueta to judgment by the Mixed Commission, established for the purpose, again by treaty, in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Commodore Collier was by no means unfamiliar with at least some of the risks he’d be asking of every sailor assigned to man the slaver’s final journey. He’d seen action against French privateers in the Napoleonic Wars and, while assigned to the Osprey, had served on prize crews in the Caribbean. There, within two months of his arrival, the teenage Collier had led landing parties of seamen and marines in support of British territorial control in the Caribbean, and within six months he found himself at the head of a prize crew of perhaps a dozen men tasked with escorting the French privateer Ressource into custody. Prize crews, while they left ships shorthanded, could serve several Royal Navy purposes at once. The most obvious is that they were necessary to preserve custody of captured bounty before legal disposition, which often took place in specific locations that might be far out of the way of the capturing vessel’s normal patrol, such as Freetown, the home of one of three Courts of Mixed Commission tasked with the adjudication of slaving ships. As an internal naval matter, being placed at the head of both ship and crew provided valuable experience to promising young officers—conversely since, depending on the circumstances, prize ships could reach their destinations several months and several hundred miles distant from the navy ship whence the crew came, those crew members who were less than promising could effectively be reassigned to another, closer HMS vessel, making the prize crew an efficient mechanism to make problem sailors someone else’s problem.
It’s not known whether Collier’s prize crew was of the fractious sort, but it seems rather unlikely given what happened once he took the helm of the Ressource. Though he had not led the party that boarded and captured the vessel he now guided, when the crew spotted yet another privateer, the Tremuse, young Francis, who had clearly never lacked initiative, didn’t hesitate. The French ship had a 24complement of forty-five sailors, but undeterred, Collier and his tiny crew took that vessel as well, spreading themselves even more thinly among all the tasks that had to be accomplished to keep two captured ships’ crews subdued, as well as both boats afloat and aimed in the correct direction. Many prize ships were often less fortunate, or less well manned. Though some simply took an inordinate amount of time to complete otherwise short journeys due to navigational or structural issues, others succumbed to disease, insurrections from captured crews, or even rebellion from the enslaved population on board, for whom one captor was much the same as another. However, when Osprey’s prize crew eventually arrived at the Vice Admiralty court for adjudication, the talented young lieutenant’s gamble paid off impressively; if issues with recognition later dogged the future commodore’s career, this time his actions on the Ressource and Tremuse likely provided the next logical step toward his advancement up the ranks, as Collier returned to the Osprey soon to become its first lieutenant.
So, better than most, Commodore Collier, who now faced a subdued Henriqueta, knew that his choice of prize crew was important, particularly if he wanted to ensure this vessel would be available to redeploy as soon as possible. Though Lieutenant Turner may have seemed like a logical choice, Collier likely needed him aboard Sybille—losing a prize was one thing, but capable personnel were, due to the conditions of service in the West Africa Squadron, considerably more valuable and, in some ways, even more easily lost. So instead the dubious honor of guiding the slaver to Freetown fell to an Admiralty mate named Frederick Mather. In the WAS, the groups of sailors known as prize crews frequently consisted of as few as nine or ten men assigned to take possession of a slave ship, as well as its surviving crew and all the enslaved, and navigate the journey to their day in court in Sierra Leone. Due to the need to stay close to the coast for safety reasons and given that the trip to Freetown went against the ideal currents and winds, what could have been a quick (for the time) three-week trip had the potential to become a voyage 25of several months. The crews were necessarily small because WAS ships needed the personnel, but the job of caring for the malnourished and dehydrated human cargo, ensuring that a noncooperative enemy crew stayed imprisoned, and sailing the ship shorthanded was an exhausting one.
There was good reason it was difficult for the enslaved Africans to tell the difference between slaver and nominal liberator—in their quest to maintain order, prize crews frequently rechained captives, continued to ration water and food, and used whips and floggers as incentive and punishment. Though it’s true that more than one of these smaller crews had succumbed to rebellion from their slaver prisoners or from the recently enslaved themselves, the real danger constantly stalking the decks of all ships was a variety of deadly maladies that respected neither skin color nor nationality. The conditions on slave ships exacerbated what was already a serious risk of illness; unlike navy vessels, which were cleaned more regularly and weren’t overcrowded, the slave trade’s demand for maximum profits created conditions that murdered the very people it commodified. Collier’s predecessor atop the West Africa Squadron, Commodore Bullen, had been so appalled at the conditions he’d found on a slave ship captured in May of that year, a few months before Collier’s arrival, that he felt compelled to detail the horrors in a letter to the Secretary of the Admiralty:
The putrid atmosphere emitting from the slave deck was horrible in the extreme, and so inhuman are these fellow creature dealers, that several of those confined at the farther end of the slave-room were obliged to be dragged on deck in an almost lifeless state, and wasted away to mere shadows, never having breathed the fresh air since their embarkation. Many females had infants at their breasts, and all were crowded together in a solid mass of filth and corruption, several suffering from dysentery, and although but a fortnight on board, sixty-seven of them had died from that complaint.26
Having released as many people from the slave deck as the upper deck would allow, the Henriqueta was said to be so crowded with naked bodies on the prize crew’s voyage to Freetown that a captive African fell overboard in the night and no one noticed until morning. The overcrowding was also illegal, as in just 1824 Brazil had, at least on paper, changed the permissible ratios of people to ship tonnage to make the slave trade more “humane.” While three years earlier, under Portuguese rule, Captain Cardozo dos Santos would have been permitted as many as 600 enslaved people crammed into a space significantly smaller than Henriqueta’s roughly ninety-by-twenty-six-foot frame, in 1827 that number should have dropped to a licensed capacity of 490 … yet 569 enslaved people had been embarked in Lagos into a seemingly impossible space. Though Brazilian authorities seemed distinctly uninterested in consistently enforcing these changes—at least if the rest of Jose de Cerqueira Lima’s extensive fleet of slavers was anything to go by—this gave the Henriqueta the rather common distinction of being illegal both at home and abroad. Lest any laws remain unbroken on the voyage in between, Cardozo dos Santos had been carrying double passports at the time of the ship’s capture, the better to obscure where he’d purchased the Africans on board and thus circumvent Brazilian treaty obligations while maximizing profits.
Upon arrival in Freetown—the moans and wails of the sick and dying inescapable, crawling with all manner of insects and pests, and literally stinking of every conceivable guilt as it sat in the harbor, as the “excessively disagreeable and oppressive” reek of the “dense mass of human beings was suffocating” to those who boarded even after the slaver anchored—the Henriqueta was soon ready to be tried in court. Back in 1808, when the nations of Europe were in global conflict, a Vice Admiralty court had been established in Sierra Leone to adjudicate the fates of captured enemy slave ships; these courts presided over maritime crimes, prize cases, and the occasional commercial conflict. However, at least when it came to prizes, the advent of peace had necessitated an increasingly complicated spate of treaties 27 to accomplish what the expedient of war no longer provided—an international right of search and, with it, the ability to police the seas. By the time of Henriqueta’s trial, the judicial body in Freetown had evolved into one of three Courts of Mixed Commission—the other two were in Rio and Havana—specifically impaneled with a multinational slate of judges to represent the interests of all concerned nations while adjudicating such matters. (At least in theory they were multinational; in actuality, the commissioners in Sierra Leone were usually uniformly British due to the difficulty of getting a non-British national to accept a posting in Freetown, which, as a somewhat recently established colony, was considered a backwater.) The Brazilian brig’s purpose and location when apprehended were difficult to dispute; Henriqueta was rapidly condemned as a slaver by the court and, as was the custom, put up for auction. Commodore Collier, fresh off success and with permissions in hand, wasted no time, using £900 of his own money to acquire what would eventually become the pride of the Squadron on January 5, 1828.
Jose de Cerqueira Lima almost certainly took the loss with equanimity. He’d lost ships to the British before and would go on to lose several more—it was just the risk one ran in this business. He continued to be a prominent and influential citizen, eventually becoming a justice of the peace with a home so extravagant that it would later officially house provincial presidents and Bahia’s governors. And besides, de Cerqueira Lima, although the biggest at the time, was just one of a number of high-profile Brazilian slave traders, and one of hundreds, even thousands, of those who owned or invested in a boat engaged in the involuntary shipping of enslaved people worldwide. As little satisfaction as there is in knowing that de Cerqueira Lima had a long and prosperous life as a pillar of the community despite any economic setbacks inflicted by the Royal Navy, it mirrored the state of things in Brazil in the late 1820s. The global abolition of the slave trade was a stutter-step process officially commenced by Britain in 1807, but it had only been a dream nominally acceded to by Brazil in 1826. The latter nation insisted on a gradualist approach to abolition 28 that was meant to be strengthened by existing and progressively more stringent laws until Brazil abandoned the market altogether in 1830, but acquiescing to the British had had an unintended side effect on the market that had made reality far less satisfying.
Given these conditions—questionable political will, lax enforcement, reluctant partnerships, and massive profits to be potentially had by anyone willing to break the law—it’s unsurprising that at the time of Henriqueta’s capture, the slave trade remained rampant. In Brazil, at least, the panic created by the prospect of the abolition of the slave trade spurred massive investment in procuring new enslaved laborers that might not be available for much longer, increasing the demand for trafficked persons. But if de Cerqueira Lima and his captain Cardozo dos Santos—who, though technically liable for his part in the transaction, would, like so many other slaver captains, walk free, if missing a ship and several hundred people who should not have belonged to him or anyone in the first place—embodied the desires of some to cling to slavery and their continuing ability to be successful at exploiting it (current setback notwithstanding), then the ship they lost came to represent quite the opposite. The transition from American shipbuilding worthy of royalty to Brazilian slaver to Royal Navy vessel was not always a smooth one. The small brig would come to symbolize new methods and ideas for fighting slavery, heralding the possibility that a moral and ethical disgrace global in scope and centuries in the making could actually be fought and quickly dismantled, piece by piece.
The battles over change that marked this span of years weren’t limited to a single brig. A spreading fervor for a radically different future could be found in government, nationhood, and ideology, and with it, a growing will to abandon at least some aspects of the past to progress. So it was fitting that the new year and the new owner had yielded the Henriqueta one more major change—a new name. In early 1828, rechristened and repurposed, the now Black Joke, for let it not be said that Collier lacked a sense of humor, embarked on a campaign of harassment of slave traders that arguably no single 29ship had ever, or would ever, match. The Henriqueta had personally delivered 3,040 enslaved people to Bahia’s markets. Though the lives shattered and lost on the way to Salvador and on Brazil’s plantations could never be recovered, it would be up to the Black Joke and its crew to make whatever amends for the past, and changes to the future, the little brig with the legendary speed could accomplish. This transition from slaver to liberator would pace Britain’s larger struggle to abolish the trade in the face of a cavalcade of obstacles and obstruction from within and without the empire, but not without cost. Though the Black Joke had been created suddenly, birthed out of redemptive opportunity and sheer force of will, the circumstances that would lead to its destruction were already in motion.
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CHAPTER TWO
Gertrudis (aka Gertrudes;
