This was not the book I’d set out to write what feels like a lifetime ago, but was really only a couple of years back. In 2019, I thought I’d be spending the majority of my time mining muster rolls and difficult-to-read letters for personal tidbits about the sailors aboard Black Joke and exploring the city and archives of Freetown, and I was ridiculously excited to see all the things and do all the history. Not knowing any better—baby’s first rodeo, as it were—I decided to break my research trips into two, London that fall, to be followed by Sierra Leone and England again in the spring of 2020. Since I was coming back, I spent most of my time during this first trip at the Caird Library and Archive at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, the home of, among many other fascinating things, Downes’s logbook, and there the staff was patient, helpful, and kind, and made the whole experience rather lovely, which I appreciate.
I came back to the States ready to work and eager to get back into the archives in a few months, but as we all experienced, a world-changing pandemic intervened. Travel was impossible (and irresponsible), archives were closed, and I needed a new plan. It seemed I would not get a chance to read Hayes’s and Collier’s correspondence with the Admiralty firsthand, or to try to discover where Ramsay and Black Joke disappeared for two months, and there was still a book to write. Taking a step back and turning toward the ship’s context, rather than its contents, would not have been possible without the scores of scholars who’ve made it their life’s work to study subjects I may have referenced repeatedly or only touched on for a line or few; every contribution to the historical discourse was immensely helpful to me, and while obviously all works cited are listed in the sources, I want to take this time to actually thank the people who created them. (All mistakes are assuredly my own.) Of particular note—and setting aside primary sources—I think it would have been next to impossible for me to complete this project without the work of Peter Grindal, Basil Lubbock, Sîan Rees, Mary Wills, Christopher Lloyd, W. E. F. Ward, David Eltis, Leslie M. Bethell, Paul Michael Kielstra, N. A. M. Rodger, Michael Lewis, William Law Mathieson, Marcus Rediker, Sowande Mustakeem, Daniel Domingues da Silva, Christopher Fyfe, and W. E. B. Du Bois.
This is definitely not to say no other archives and repositories were directly engaged in this project. The folks of the New York Public Library Archives, especially Tal Nadan, could not have been more accommodating when it came to figuring out how to get me access to Dryad’s logbook under these circumstances, a feat that would not have been possible without the additional help of Sara Rodberg, who went above and beyond the call of friendship. HathiTrust’s pandemic guidelines were crucial for access to books I could not physically access. Though mentioned in the author’s note at the outset of the book, I’d be remiss if I did not again laud the work of Henry Lovejoy and the Liberated Africans project (https://liberatedafricans.org), the National Archives, Kew (Digital Microfilm Project), and the Sierra Leone Public Archives for preserving these records and getting them into the public eye.
Of course, on a meta level, what you’re holding would not have been possible without my wonderful agent, Jess Regel of Helm Literary; my editors, Sally Howe, who is surely one of the most understanding souls on the planet, and Daniel Loedel, for believing in the book in the first place; as well as the whole production team at Scribner, who not only entertained ideas like “what if we included all the pages from the Liberated African registers” but actually found ways to make them reality—they all have been everything an author could ask for. And last, though certainly not least, if there was one person who was there for the highs and lows and the late nights, every step of the way, reading (and correcting) every draft of every iteration from the proposal to the final product, it was my mother, Elizabeth Rooks. Her critiques were valuable, her support was invaluable, and though obviously I’m biased, I’ll go out on a limb here and say there is no better mom in the history of moms. Thank you.