The Black Joke

The True Story of One British Ship's Battle Against the Slave Trade

A. E. Rooks

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781785788444
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire prémoderne

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.

7

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 rem...