CHAPTER TWO
Gertrudis (aka Gertrudes; Eng.: Gertrude)
January 1828,
155 enslaved people
Collier’s choice of name was perhaps even more tongue-in-cheek than modern sensibilities might suggest and may not have been referring to current understandings of Blackness at all. Black Joke, now a seemingly obvious reference to the Henriqueta’s rather abrupt change in mission, was then most commonly known as either the titular object of a bawdy jig, or the type of lewd humor of which it was generally representative. Dating back to at least 1730, the extant verses—and there are many—celebrate, at great length and in increasing detail, the nether regions of an unnamed comely British woman, she “with a black joke, and belly so white.” The song and its variations were still so popular that this new Black Joke wasn’t even the first ship with that name to serve—between hired crafts and nicknames, at least two Black Jokes had been on the water in recent memory. The brig didn’t even have the distinction of being the only Black Joke sailing in 1828, as a notoriously unmerciful pirate, Benito de Soto, had just that past year participated in a mutiny on board the slave ship Defensor de Pedro and, upon succeeding in taking the slaver and killing both the old and the newly elected captains, renamed his ill-gotten ship Burla Negra, or “Black Joke.” This transition was as meaningless as the Henriqueta’s had been dramatic—in 1824, Britain enacted a law stating that slavers had committed “felony, piracy and robbery, and should suffer death without benefit of clergy and loss of lands, goods and chattels as pirates, felons and robbers upon the seas ought to suffer,” but no British slaver was ever prosecuted under it, so men like de Soto were merely the most obvious and vicious examples of a veritable ocean full of pirates and “pirates” engaged in similar business. For the purposes of the West Africa Squadron, well, they all looked alike. Call him a slaver or a pirate—the job title would have made little difference to de Soto as he was, quite avidly, both—either way, he’d immediately set about pillaging any ships unfortunate enough to meet him, preferring to brutally execute the crews he encountered rather than take on prisoners or additional sailors, capturing any enslaved on board for further maltreatment and eventual sale.
Whether or not all the possible meanings were intentional, sharing a name with a dirty tune or a prolific and ruthless pirate ship and slaver, albeit in a different language, was the least of the Black Joke’s potential controversies as it began its new career. The very existence of ex-slaver tenders in the West Africa Squadron was a point of contention for many of those at the top of the Royal Navy’s hierarchy. The tender system, in which a nonmilitary craft is introduced to the force and, in cases such as this, is understood to be simply part of an existing Royal Navy vessel, was not new at the time of Henriqueta’s capture and remains ongoing today. Traditionally, tenders are smaller than their military counterparts and are often used as supply ships, running vital goods—such as munitions and food—from shore. All the previous naval crafts officially named Black Joke were tenders in this traditional sense.
What Collier wanted to do with this new Black Joke was rather different, but it certainly wasn’t precedent shattering. The previous commodore of the West Africa Squadron, Charles Bullen, initiated the practice of deploying tenders on active cruise, rather than as mere support vessels, and vigorously advocated that the Squadron make as much use of former slaver tenders as the Admiralty and Navy Board would permit. Getting this particular ship for his first tender must have felt to Collier like a fitting final salute to Bullen’s time in the WAS. After all, HMS Maidstone, which had almost captured Cardozo dos Santos and his sleek brig on the Henriqueta’s second voyage, was Bullen’s own flagship, and Commodore Bullen—by this point more than three months departed from the coast of Africa for a much-needed rest back in England—if not remotely successful in dealing anything resembling a death blow, had left quite a wake. Having sailed off toward an eventual appointment to the Navy Board as Commissioner of the Navy for Pembroke Dockyard, several promotions, and eventual knighthood, Charles Bullen, who also had the distinction of having been a captain at Trafalgar under Nelson, had been the third commodore in the West Africa Squadron’s official existence, and during his three-year tenure, British sailors had liberated approximately ten thousand enslaved people. Collier, another of Nelson’s protégés, would have not just appreciated, but heeded, Bullen’s advice and experience.
Bullen had recognized that tenders in the WAS could do quite a bit more for their mission than merely carry supplies. Freed from the requirements that the Napoleonic Wars, various revolutions, and budgetary wrangling had placed on Royal Navy craft of the era—meaning many of the WAS vessels were older, repurposed warships by design and necessity—“tender” status potentially allowed for the slave ships the British were already capturing to be acquired cheaply, removed from circulation in the slave economy, and ultimately used against their former compatriots in human trafficking. However, what should have been an obvious win-win-win was undoubtedly complicated by the uncharted and, frankly, murky waters into which Britain’s foray into bully pulpit diplomacy had cast the WAS. Was the capture of a slaver by a tender even legitimate? No less than the foreign secretary himself, George Canning, had recently had to craft a letter clarifying the official English stance on this point of maritime law. The situation precipitating Canning’s involvement had been initiated by Commodore Bullen, who, realizing that it might be better to ask forgiveness than permission, used the wide latitude sheer distance from the Admiralty back in England granted him to put the tender question to the test.
Back in November of 1826, the Hope, a former slaver now tender to Bullen’s Maidstone, captured the slave ship Nicanor as it departed Little Popoe (modern-day Aného, Togo). Though the capture had been an unmitigated success and was in every other manner done in deference to Britain’s treaty obligations, the propriety of the Hope’s actions turned on an outwardly minor technical point. Tenders, not officially independent ships in their own right, did not then as a matter of course carry the requisite paperwork (copies of those selfsame treaties) that would empower them to capture slavers—those papers were reserved for Royal Navy vessels. Yet the unique nature of service in the WAS necessitated creative solutions, and Bullen was reasonably certain this one might be effective. Before the somewhat innovative strategy of exploiting the legal status of tenders to put more ships to sea capturing slavers could be put into wider use, however, it would have to be legitimated. This wasn’t a question of using foreign vessels—England was already much in the habit of repurposing any ships the nation captured to whatever end might best suit. The problem was that, given that extant treaty obligations granting Britain the right to search the ships of other nations had been hard enough to come by, and with foreign “partners” constantly trying to wriggle out of the already agreed-upon terms, clearly few outside of Britain were looking to willingly cede even more potential power to police to an already swaggering nation, demonstrably keen to throw its weight around internationally.
For the foreign secretary, widely regarded as one of the most brilliant politicians and orators of his age and at this job for the second time, the reluctance of his international peers to accede to any terms that might have a meaningful impact on the trade probably made the answer easy, or at least easier, to settle on. George Canning would eventually go down in history as one of the first European politicians to understand the import of recent revolutionary affairs in South America and can be directly credited for helping bring about the independence and recognition of several new Latin American countries, including Brazil, as well as forcing fellow colonizing empires Spain and Portugal to recognize their former holdings as nations in their own right. This work had allowed England to weaken its European rivals while reaping the benefits of newly accessible markets across the ocean, but though the treaties were signed and the ink mostly dry, the geopolitical landscape remained precarious. Canning, a vocal proponent of abolition, readily realized that the Squadron had a hard enough go of it without being hamstrung by unstipulated details like what sorts of British ships were allowed to capture slavers, and with the weight of hastily compiled precedent, he came down firmly on the side of Bullen’s interpretation of maritime law, writing:
I have received your [dispatch] […] in which you call my attention to the Case of the “Nicanor,” captured and condemned for illegal Slave-trade. The peculiarity of this Case was, that the Slave-trader was captured by a Vessel acting [… ] as a Tender to His Majesty’s Ship “Maidstone.” On this point I have to acquaint you, that, by a Communication from the Admiralty, it appears that it would be contrary to all the Regulations of His Majesty’s Naval Service, to consider the Tenders as in any way distinct from the Ships to which they belong; and I have further to state to you, that it is the opinion of His Majesty’s Law Officer that you have acted properly in the Case referred to, and that you should continue to act on the same principle in future Cases. I have also to acquaint you, that, for the more fully carrying of this principle into effect, the Lords of the Admiralty have given orders, that the respective Officers commanding the Tenders in question should each be furnished with the signed Instructions required by the Treaties for the repression of the Slave-trade.
In short, Canning asserted that since tenders were a part of the Royal Navy ship directing their actions, the authority a Squadron vessel had to detain slavers should theoretically transfer to the tenders beneath them. Sure, any ship making captures for slave trading was supposed to be in possession of its own signed copies of the treaty papers, not unlike the letters of marque carried by privateers, and would going forward. But if said tender was officially indistinct from the ship to which it was assigned—and as such wouldn’t have been carrying its own papers regardless—then when it caught a slaver, by the transitive property of Britain’s say-so and as a matter of legal fiction, Canning decreed that it was essentially the same as if the Royal Navy ship that supervised it had done the deed.
The appeal of such a shift in policy had to be obvious to those who, like Canning, were supportive of the WAS efforts in the Atlantic. Building new ships was expensive and time-consuming, especially during the dawning of the era of Pax Britannica. The Napoleonic Wars had only just ended in 1815, and the Royal Navy’s prize for decades of (mostly) successful war-making on multiple fronts across the globe would be several more decades of aggressively militaristic “peacemaking” on multiple fronts across the globe. The relatively recent conclusion of the wars in Europe had left a sufficient glut of sailing personnel that the practice of press gangs, or roving bands of men involuntarily conscripting their fellows into the Royal Navy, had ceased by 1815 (which is to say, not in time to prevent the War of 1812, which had been sparked in part by increasingly strenuous objections to the pesky British tendency to impress American nationals). New ships, however, were not in like supply. While some of the fleet had been rendered unfit or outright destroyed by the incessant confrontations marking the turn of the nineteenth century, those that could be repaired and salvaged would soon again be scattered across the globe, this time as self-appointed referee rather than open combatant.
The end of this age of warfare precipitated an altogether different kind of decimation within the Royal Navy. Up until quite recently the British government’s largest (and most expensive) employer, the massive fleet of 1812, with 543 ships and over 130,000 men, employed only 20,000 just five years later. Alongside the navy’s diminished capacity came a diminished role in the affairs of the empire it had helped secure, and the once-powerful political forces supervising the Admiralty and the Navy Board were steadily declining in influence and might. The unsteadiness of the new normal created by these rapid changes was amplified by fear. Though Britain’s economic position was strong and would gain as the century progressed, the cessation of the slave trade had many concerned that even more sailors, those employed in the merchant marine, would also be put out of work. Among the more prosperous set, recent uprisings in the colonial holdings, not to mention the end of costly and protracted wars with Napoléon et al., had many in government and in trade deeply concerned as to whether the English economy could weather such a commitment to moral indignation. And now a much reduced and likewise divided navy had been tasked with enforcing it all.
In the era of the Black Joke, when much of Europe and the Americas was approaching the twilight of what would come to be known as the Industrial Revolution, a zenith of an altogether different, and in some ways antithetical, historical moment was also taking place. The Age of Sail, dating from the mid-sixteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, had seen the domination of maritime pursuits as vital components of robust statehood, and though enormous navies and colossal warships may have been on their way to passé, the particular demands of slavery in the 1820s and ’30s meant the wind was still full for shipbuilders who knew how to put on the speed. Shipbuilding had been just as susceptible to the energy of the era as any other trade, and Henriqueta and its slaver kith had readily proved in most every encounter that ships built to contain human cargo were much speedier than warships. The Royal Navy had just had reasonable success in several wars and clearly wasn’t hurting for decent ships—the class of French frigates to which the Sybille belonged, in particular, was so popular a design that the Royal Navy had fifty-four near copies finished or under construction by 1831. While smaller than the towering ships of the line that dominated in Nelson’s day, these new frigates being turned out over a decade after the wars had concluded were still fairly large, and though capable of reaching speeds up to thirteen knots, they were primarily built to send and withstand volleys from similarly structured opponents. Successful innovations in the types of smaller wooden vessels that would make up the bulk of the Squadron were not yet forthcoming, either.
The War of 1812, as it’s known in the United States—apparently in Britain this conflict doesn’t merit an appellation as it was only one of several fronts—had prompted a rather different response from American shipbuilders. In deference to the realities of costs, crew size, and available armament, the use of privateers had become a necessary expedient in the conflicts with Britain, and American shipwrights turned their attention to crafting progressively faster ships capable of evading British enemies at sea, sturdy enough to take a fight, or flight, on open and betimes storm-battered waters. As the war progressed, increasing numbers of American privateers took to harassing the British frigates, and the world couldn’t help but notice that, quiet as it had been kept, the former colonies were steadily putting out arguably the best ships on the water. Beautiful, seaworthy, well-formed, and, above all, wickedly quick, the fastest of these privateers were capable of reaching twenty-one knots, almost double the speed of the frigates. Just as fast as the famous clipper ships popular almost a half century later and hardy, it’s no surprise that, after the war, the American privateers became a model for slavers—they shared many of the same needs, and the same builders. Over the years, the “race-horse beauty” of American slave ship design evolved through the shipyards of the northeastern United States to an epicenter in the Chesapeake (Baltimore) region, which, though not exactly places normally associated with the wholesale embrace of slavery today, both made use of and were integral to the transatlantic slave trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Many Americans, despite the foreign slave trade being banned in 1808, remained perfectly happy to do business with anyone willing to buy ships, and slave brokers were eager indeed. The period after the war saw continued innovations in shipbuilding, and prohibitions notwithstanding, the 1820s debuted the kind of purpose-built slave ships Bullen and now Collier would face off the coast of Africa; unfortunately for the WAS, the British suppression efforts of the previous decade were already strongly influencing their design. Indeed, every facet of the slave trade was considered in the creation of a ship. Slavers couldn’t be too large, as a massive profile against the horizon would make them obvious targets for the Royal Navy, and besides, new restrictions on the trade meant that it was difficult to purchase sufficient quantities of human beings in any one market, and even with an undermanned patrol, attempting two ports simply wasn’t worth the risk. And there was a minimum size, too. To turn a profit, traders, wholly untouched by the moralizing sentiments of the day, performed a nasty calculus. There were several ways to be murdered on a slave ship—presuming one wasn’t raped, beaten to death, or thrown overboard for “disobedience” (or to set an example) by a crew member, claustrophobic conditions limited the air supply, fostered unmitigated filth, and propagated disease. Prosperous slave traders had an eye for the bottom line, not human suffering, and each of thousands of voyages was a horrific negotiation between the number of Africans who could be unreasonably crammed into a space and how quickly those same Africans would die from the conditions of that space and the voyage. The most profitable slave ships ranged from sixty to a hundred feet, and with room at a premium—and decent care viewed as an unnecessary expense—a certain percentage of loss of life was not only acceptable but expected to maximize profits.
The obscene money to be made meant that those commissioning new ships in the 1820s were capable of funding the creation of craft perfectly suited to the trade in size and seaworthiness, all with particular attention to the specific climates, routes, and even the individual harbors where a vessel would likely make port. None of this care for craftsmanship was extended toward the comfort of those captured and detained.
Allowing for the limited space available for enslaved, crew, and supplies required for oceanic travel, the slave deck was near uniformly less than five feet in height, often three feet or lower in practical headroom, and situated at or near the waterline, making it difficult to keep dry. Grated hatches let in some air because it could be presumed that the enslaved would spend at least sixteen hours a day held below, but provided no relief from the heat, particularly on days when the temperature on even the upper deck surpassed ninety degrees. Suffocation and heat-related deaths were common killers, and though many deadly illnesses also attended the decks of slave ships, there was no dedicated treatment area beyond moving the ill from the slave deck to a section of the main deck, where they often shared what little space there was with the sleeping hammocks of the crew. Thought was usually given to the construction of a barrier to separate the enslaved by perceived gender, though this may have been less for propriety’s sake—rape was prevalent, and any number of enslaved women would disembark on the other side of the Atlantic pregnant—and more to allow the crew a place to retreat in the event of an uprising.
Despite this multitude of humanitarian flaws, the attention given to their speed and armament ensured that purpose-built slavers were, as a rule, simply better suited to the theater of conflict in which they and the West Africa Squadron found themselves. The slavers, compared to British ships built in England, or those that had been acquired from other nations in previous wars, had additional features that commended their use to the Royal Navy, at least once they had been captured, tried, and condemned. Had the Admiralty been more considered about and less resistant to the notion, had they purchased former slavers rather than only grudgingly accepting them when pressed, they would have found that these ex–slave ships were much cheaper to put into use than the products of England’s best shipyards. At auction, the slavers were as little as a tenth, even a twentieth, of the cost of building a ship in England, and that doesn’t include getting it to the coast of Africa. Even with the cost of refitting slave ships to serve in the Royal Navy, the WAS could have been creating and sustaining a force that might have been capable of effectively patrolling the coasts of Africa and would have been able to replenish itself without committing substantial additional resources. After a vessel had been worn out through service, it still had uses. The materials on board could be repurposed, and through the process of “removing the lines,” particularly well-designed craft would be dismantled, and the elements of their construction documented, enabling them to be copied and replicated and thus availing the navy of any of the latest innovations in shipbuilding abroad.
Commodore Bullen had been moderately successful using tenders and had made no bones about how vital he felt they could be for the Squadron’s mission: they were cheaper, they were better designed for the service in question, they were best equipped to capture ships like themselves, and the Royal Navy had an established history of both using tenders and adding ships to the fleet via capture. And yet the Admiralty continued to refuse to enthusiastically back their use. Given all the positives, this vacillation seems rather senseless, but there were some valid drawbacks. Though Canning’s letter had made it clear that it was acceptable to use tenders to capture slavers—ideally while possessed of the proper paperwork—no policy mandated, or even much governed, their use in this way. This is most obvious when one recalls that it was not the Royal Navy who was buying these tenders—officers were. And it was not up to the Admiralty to adjudicate what was a legitimate capture—that’s what the Mixed Commission was for. Once suspected slave ships were brought to Freetown (or Rio or Havana), both they and members of their crews were examined before a court meant to be composed of a panel of judges representing all treaty-partnering nations. Since Freetown was considered a pestilential, undeveloped hinterland by citified Europeans and South Americans—if an extraordinarily scenic one—no judges particularly wanted to go there, meaning the Mixed Commission in Sierra Leone had thus far exclusively contained British judges. As a result the court also had the highest rate of condemnations, and if so judged, the slave ship was auctioned off to the highest bidder, some of whom were naval officers like Collier or Bullen, while others were proxies for slave traders looking to secure quality, gently used shipping at an extremely low price. The Admiralty did not provide a budget for the acquisition of additional vessels to officers already assigned a berth on one of His Majesty’s ships; any ships so purchased did not just become recognized members of the Squadron simply due to being owned by a captain. Given the nature of WAS service, it was entirely possible, even likely, that when an officer returned to England after a tour was completed, he would simply auction off any tenders he owned to the highest bidder… who was usually a slave trader. Rather than become vigilant about the disposal of former slave ships, the Admiralty had instead recently issued commands that officers be discouraged from making such purchases at all—any benefits weren’t worth the risk of scandal.
No matter the outward political situation, for the moment the men of the Navy Board and the Admiralty retained near-complete control of internal policy. Before leaving England, Collier had felt the political winds and seen that the attitude toward tenders from the higher-ups was lukewarm at best and rapidly cooling—and whether or not he gave a damn about optics, the new commodore was by now adept at the political gamesmanship success the Royal Navy demanded. To that end, Collier secured permission to buy such a ship before he left England, and as such, before the Admiralty began to actively discourage their acquisition. So when a marvelous specimen had all but presented itself scant months after he arrived in Sierra Leone, he could move to follow Bullen’s advice as quickly as the adjudication process would allow. Given that Collier had caught the Henriqueta almost as soon as he arrived and purchased it immediately thereafter, the acquisition occurred well before his superiors would have had a chance to change their minds and communicate any increased restrictions on the tender policy to the Squadron on the coast—his expedient, plus £900, had worked. Further, since the Admiralty had already agreed months earlier to furnish a tender of Collier’s with its own set of official treaty papers should he nab a suitable one, the Black Joke would have the distinction of becoming the first tender in the West Africa Squadron that could unquestioningly legally cruise for slavers entirely independent of its parent ship, presumably with the understanding that Collier would be kind enough not to embarrass the navy by allowing the ship to fall back into a slaver’s hands.
Those who topped the Royal Navy’s command structure were responsible for every aspect of the administration of an organization that was still, even recently diminished, a major force in British political and cultural life and identity. For these men—and they were all men—safeguarding the reputation of the navy was of paramount concern. Indeed, reputation and moral standing were much on everyone’s mind, as this was an era when the power of perception had diplomatic stakes as well. At the time, Britain was leaning heavily on its mercantile power to force other nations to acquiesce to England’s newfound morality in regard to slavery, or at least the slave trade, which it had itself outlawed in 1807. This move wasn’t universally popular by any stretch of the imagination—at one point Liverpool was one of the richest slave-trading ports in the world—and if selling the notion on the home front in England was difficult, convincing historical rivals like France, Spain, and Portugal to give up one of the most lucrative trades in the world frequently seemed next to impossible, while forcing many of their own colonists in places like Jamaica to do so was a pipe dream. Both slavery itself and indentured servitude were very much still legal in the British Empire—only the buying, selling, and shipping of the enslaved was forbidden. Maintaining the tide of rectitude that had given rise to the WAS and supported its mission on the home front necessitated positive public opinion. The more strident abolitionists would not brook the thought of Britain doing anything that might facilitate the trade, even as an afterthought or by-product. Diplomatic matters abroad likewise required Britain’s dealings to appear beyond reproach—powers in other nations already looked askance on English intentions toward slavery, and lest years of interminable meetings ultimately come to naught, any hint of backroom dealings and external profit motives had to be righteously snuffed out.
This need to keep up appearances was balanced by the colossal amount of economic power Britain could access. Many treaty negotiators had found the power of the purse to be the most compelling of the available diplomatic strategies. Agreements between England and Portugal, and England and Spain, both involved direct monetary payouts in exchange for concessions that would allow the Royal Navy the right to search suspected slavers and seize the guilty, as well as grant the newly established Courts of Mixed Commission the power to judge those so captured. Complicating matters, these treaties frequently had to be renegotiated, whether in light of newly discovered implementation problems, or due to an acute case of national reorganization, as both the Spanish and Portuguese empires were at that time in an ongoing process of spectacular collapse. The revolutions that caught the winds as the Black Joke cruised were not just metaphors for sea change in industry and economics; there were also quite literal revolutions happening with what must have seemed like startling frequency all over the globe. When the colonizers and the colonized rose up against their shared imperial overlords, together or independently, it meant that Britain had to provide inducements to remain at the bargaining table to not just the French, American, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch state representatives, but also to the new governments of any recently liberated holdings. Loath to lose any progress in regulating the slave trade, British negotiators were required to craft these additional agreements with a mind to both the desires of the new nation and the previously stipulated obligations of its former rulers.
The Henriqueta’s capture, for instance, was governed by the terms Britain had ratified with two recognized foreign powers. Brazil, formerly of Portugal, had agreed to abolish the slave trade three years after the date of the mutual ratification of its treaty with Britain in 1827. However, because the nascent Brazil had desperately needed English recognition of its independence to strengthen its position and ensure its economic survival, it had also been obliged by this new treaty to honor Portugal’s previous agreements with Britain in regard to the abolition of the slave trade. Although these terms had been settled even before Brazil’s formal existence, in 1810, 1815, and 1817—and in the face of plenty of resistance from wealthy Brazilians—the British had made it clear that the simple expedient of revolution could not be used to allow colonies-turned-nations to evade the restrictions on the slave trade that had previously governed them. (Given the resistance to regulation the English faced in their own Caribbean territories, it’s fair to assume they were particularly uninterested in the kind of precedent that might set.) Since Portugal was restricted to trading the enslaved below the equator, by subsequent agreement so was Brazil, for three years from the ratification, and after that date, in 1830, the international trade became wholly illegal and equivalent to piracy. This meant the Henriqueta, which was flying Brazilian colors in 1827—after the treaty was signed but before full abolition of the trade went into effect—but boarding enslaved people in Lagos (above the equator), was, in contravention of the previous Portuguese commitments inherited by Brazil, acting illegally, and thus subject to legitimate capture by the British.
If this sounds confusing, it was, extraordinarily so, and was perhaps nowhere more evident than on the decks of the ships tasked with enforcement. Since different vessels were potentially party to a potpourri of treaties, WAS ships had to judge each encounter with fresh eyes and potentially radically different rules. While power moves on the world stage dictated which countries’ ships the Squadron could rightfully detain where, a different kind of ruthless practicality ruled the waves. Tricks, feints, and treachery surrounding the nationality of a ship, its port of origin, its destination, its rig, its cargo, and even the national identity of the crew were so commonplace as to be the norm. Many sailing captains (not just the slaving ones, and not just the merchant ones) were willing to lie, and lie boldly, about who they actually were if they felt the situation required it. Frequently they would take every available precaution to tailor their deceptions to both context and foe; given that lives, not just livelihoods, often depended on it, they tended to be proficient. Due to the existence of privateers—state-sanctioned pirates—even vessels involved in legitimate trade had reasons to deceive, the means and props to do so, and plenty of practice.
If Collier wanted a ship that would make proverbial waves, the kind that might increase support for the campaign at home and change attitudes toward tenders in Whitehall (Admiralty) and Somerset House (Navy Board), just one mile apart in London, he knew he would need a smart, bold, and resourceful lieutenant as its captain. That WAS service was not exactly in a popular location might have been a hindrance when opportunities for advancement were plentiful—say, during a war—as many serving in the Squadron from England could barely tolerate the heat and climate (and certainly not without complaint):
Freetown and its vicinity […] has a most pleasing appearance, and notwithstanding that its climate is so pernicious to European constitutions, the most prejudiced must grant that the scenery here is magnificently picturesque. The wide confluence of the Sierra Leone river with the sea, resembles a smooth and extensive lagoon, bounded on one side by the low, woody […] shore, on the other by the verdant and gentle acclivity on which the town is situated, the [background] of which, gradually ascending, terminates in a semi-circular range of moderate side hills, forming a sort of amphitheatre, decorated with lofty trees and richly foliated shrubs; while every spot of the ascent, here and there studded with neat country seats, presents to the delighted eye a picture of the most agreeable character.
Despite the weather, the recent downsizing and long-established system of patronage (or what was then known as interest) meant loads of hungry and capable young officers and their patrons were clamoring for any service that might increase the latter’s influence by moving the former up the ranks. This is not to say that capability and character didn’t matter; they very much did, particularly in a workplace in which one’s coworkers were not only constant companions, but potentially vital to the survival of the entire crew. It’s just that whom a lieutenant knew could be as crucial for promotion as what he knew, which had been standardized, or who he was as a man and an officer. The quality, speed, and, perhaps above all, independence of the Black Joke would make its captaincy an excellent opportunity for young officers suddenly confronted with a dearth of wars to fight to demonstrate why they deserved promotion. As a tender, Black Joke would be led by a lieutenant, the rank below commander and post-captain. And post-captain was arguably the most difficult rank to achieve in the Royal Navy.
In modern nomenclature a post-captain would, most recognizably, be the captain of a ship. In the Royal Navy of the early mid-nineteenth century, there were lots of potential ways for a lieutenant, and even the occasional petty officer, to end up at the helm of a vessel—death or incapacitation of the appointed captain not least among them—and some ships weren’t viewed as large enough to merit such a senior officer; thus, the rank was distinct from the duty. Many post-captains didn’t have continuously active commands throughout their career; especially in those days, there were always more officers than berths to contain them. It was also one of a few positions that could not be achieved through what was, in most other cases, an issue of seniority and paperwork. Time could advance the rank of long-serving post-captains and admirals. It was a matter of an exam to make a lieutenant of, ostensibly, any man with the requisite experience and competence. Good patronage could advance the common sailor and young gentleman alike through the noncommissioned ranks and the junior officer corps. However, it took all three—time, patronage, the lieutenant’s exam, plus assignments to captain appropriately size ships and a bit of the winds of fate besides—to advance a man to lieutenant, through the rank of commander, and, ultimately, to post-captain.
Though clearly merit mattered, the ongoing impact of patronage on advancement in the Royal Navy cannot be overstated, and this kind of internal political reckoning would have been at the forefront of Collier’s mind when selecting who would command the Black Joke’s first outings. Despite that many of the realities of naval life were in flux with both the times and several somewhat rapid-fire political changes that would continue to impact Admiralty policy well into the next decade, the role of patronage was deeply entrenched, and had been only somewhat liberalized by the comparative relaxing of class distinctions within the navy’s officer corps in the eighteenth century. Though it may seem that such a system was guaranteed to encourage the advancement of the well-connected over the best suited, in practice, the system’s pervasiveness and the participants’ mutual dependencies kept it rather perversely honest. Senior officers, as patrons, and junior ones, as followers, relied on one another for influence and advancement. Too, it was often thought that the characteristics of a senior officer would inexorably, via the slow osmosis of a long time at sea, rub off on those beneath him. If an admiral promoted or recommended someone who subsequently did poorly in his duties, the admiral’s ability to secure promotions for his other protégés would suffer, and future lieutenants would not choose to align with an officer who could not help their career, no matter how famous or how senior. These professional ties were so closely bound that the sudden death or fall from grace of the senior half of this symbiosis could and often did completely destroy the career of nearly every junior man known to follow him—even if the latter had been stationed half the world away and had had nothing to do with any of it. Collier, as a protégé of Nelson’s, would have known this risk intimately—if Nelson hadn’t been a hero of the realm for the ages, his notorious personal life and untimely death could’ve decimated Collier’s budding naval career, and there was no guarantee that the open secrets swirling around Nelson hadn’t already had a detrimental impact.
In the postwar years, demand for promotions within the navy far outstripped the supply of available commissions, and given that every senior officer was expected to have his own loyal coterie of younger men, it would have been understood that Collier’s own protégés were likely at the front of the queue for any of his major staffing needs. After securing positions for those who were already in his own circle, Collier could then dispense such positions as he had left among those recommended to him in streams of letters by and between other powerful senior officers (who had their own followings to consider). As commodore for the West Africa Squadron, Collier was particularly well equipped to engage in this quid pro quo by post. The commanders of overseas squadrons weren’t obliged to wait for the Admiralty’s dispensation before naming someone to a new position—the mail simply took too long to meet the immediate needs and rapid turnover of a fleet on active duty. Since it was expected that the powers that be in the Admiralty would ratify their decisions after the fact, the commodores—whether they were post-captains with temporary authority or had already “obtained their flag” as rear admirals—had the simple ability to promote men, meaning that if patronage and advancement defined the market of power, commodores were nearly as flush with the backroom coin of the Royal Navy as those at the top of the hierarchy. Even being appointed to such an independent station speaks to how trusted Collier, then still a post-captain, was among his superiors as a man of sterling character and commitment, as he now possessed not just the power to make and break the careers of his subordinates, but the followings of his peers.
The opportunities for prize ships made a promotion to commodore as lucrative as it was powerful and would have required some substantial “interest” to achieve in and of itself, so it’s possible that Collier owed someone, maybe several someones, consideration for his current post and, with it, due attention to any of their personnel requests. Nonetheless, respect for the sotto voce mechanisms of naval patronage was so well established that in reality Commodore Collier could have his pick among his or anyone else’s best men without raising too many Admiralty eyebrows, provided they happened to be in proximity. Not the type to leave anything to chance if he could help it, however, Collier had once again come prepared. Much like his preemptively requested official copies of the treaties that would enable an as-yet-unpurchased tender to independently sail for an as-yet-unimagined international renown, the commodore had simply brought his as-yet-unpromoted choice for the captaincy of what was once little more than a plan—now manifested in a smart, swift brig—with him from England. Twenty-five-year-old Lieutenant William Turner would actually have known Collier’s recently commissioned vessel even better than his boss did, as this was Turner’s second berth on Sybille, the first having been as a mere midshipman five years earlier. Now the extraordinarily popular wine merchant’s son from Portsmouth would be serving as the new brig’s captain.
Given that Collier’s reputation would be bound to the success of the Squadron, it’s probable that Turner was one of Collier’s own followers, someone the commodore was certain he could trust to represent both his superior and the Squadron well, even unsupervised. Though Turner wasn’t notably young for a man of his rank, he hadn’t joined the Royal Navy until he was thirteen or fourteen, years older than many of the young men of the gentlemen’s class with whom he had to compete. Born wealthy (for a commoner, anyway) on his father’s increasingly profitable gentleman’s-farm-cum-manor, the Elms, in Bedhampton, a village near Portsmouth, young Turner had probably felt some pressure to join the family business before choosing the navy. He’d signed up in 1816, despite the fact that the end of the Napoleonic Wars the year before had likewise spelled an end to the complications involved in procuring French wines, profiting legitimate purveyors like his father, and in a city with a centuries-long reputation for heavy drinking. Having grown up surrounded by comfort, scampering across over twenty acres of bucolic meadows, tall elms, and mature fruit trees to the sounds of the elder William Turner’s constant improvements to the family’s country estate—the father would add a “brew house, a wash house with a mangle room, a granary, a barn, a four stall stable, open cow ranges and a piggery, as well as coal, wood and pigeon houses,” all before his son’s eighteenth birthday—the future lieutenant would have been able to contrast his home life with the sight of many of the impoverished residents of Bedhampton crowding the poorhouse as they struggled in the grip of an economic downturn. Likewise, Turner could not have missed the industry around which much of Portsmouth’s cultural, economic, and political life turned—shipping, and, more specifically, the bustling navy dockyard, then the largest known industrial complex in the entire world, directly and indirectly fueled the businesses of many of Portsmouth’s wealthiest residents, including his father’s.
Portsmouth’s inextricable connection to the navy might have been a reason for his father to support, rather than bemoan, William’s decision not to follow him into the wine business. Turner the elder was well-known and well-off, but class barriers in nineteenth-century England were notoriously impermeable—perhaps he saw his son’s service as a new avenue for upward mobility and encouraged it accordingly. The Royal Navy’s officer corps was one of the few venues in which a man could forever alter the class of his birth, which made it an attractive option for those young men blessed, it seemed, with everything in life but sanctioned nobility to continue to progress their families socially. Given that Turner quickly passed his lieutenant’s exam (with its math and navigational requirements) and rapidly became beloved by those he knew in the service, it would probably have been evident from his youth that he was a bright and friendly lad, demonstrably capable of eventually handling his father’s business even at a relatively young age. No matter, as Turner’s choice had instead brought him, as a first-class volunteer and soon midshipman, on board the HMSs Scamander, Vengeur, Queen Charlotte, Sybille, and Romney—not the same Romney that had originally captured the Sybille from the French, as that would just be too poetic for historians to hope for—before this, his second and suddenly rather brief return to the Sybille’s quarterdeck as first lieutenant. As a member of the crew that had taken the Henriqueta, but not one of the men escorting the brig on the three-week jaunt back to Freetown, the disposition of the Black Joke must’ve constantly circled Turner’s mind. To get what would be his first command in experience if not in job title within four scant months of his arrival—and at the helm of such a ridiculously fast ship, some unknown Baltimore shipwright’s best work, the sort almost guaranteed to see the kind of action that could merit promotion—that was just the kind of luck to which William Turner had likely been accustomed his whole life.
Despite accusations to the contrary, Freetown’s harbor, where both Turner and the Henriqueta awaited their destined union, wasn’t the worst place to idle. It was, as mentioned, a beautiful landscape and natural harbor tucked into impressive hills, and the settlement itself, after multiple decades of uneven administration, finally seemed to be on steady (if admittedly colonialist) footing. It was still a site of conflict, particularly in the battle between those in favor of and opposed to abolition, but by the end of 1827, this was primarily a war of words. Despite a lack of cohesive planning that had consistently plagued colonial Sierra Leone since its inception, it now had a population of over fifteen thousand, over half of which were Africans who’d been removed from slave ships, and the colony engaged in trade both local and distant. There were schools and churches aplenty, as well as newspapers, distinct neighborhoods, and adjacent villages; the city could boast fairs and holidays featuring rowing and wrestling competitions and “sky rocket” displays, social clubs, amateur theatricals, horse racing, public dinners, and all-night dancing. Despite hand-wringing to the contrary, the death rate didn’t seem much higher for Europeans than in other, similarly situated, tropical locales—and regardless, as one White resident was quick to point out, Sierra Leone hadn’t been founded for Europeans, but for repatriating Africans, many of whom seemed better suited to the climate than their paler counterparts. Far from the disorganized and ill-fated arrival of the first settler colonizers back in the eighteenth century, and despite the complaints of those who felt it still lacked the amenities available in longer-established ports, the harbor where the young lieutenant idled had things to recommend it over months at sea.
After the trial’s conclusion, transferring from the Sybille to the Black Joke with a small crew and a small boat—one of Sybille’s, its purpose to further gild the legal fiction that the brig was a mere extension of the frigate, no matter how far apart the two sailed—Turner and company would have seen, as they approached, a sleek, low-sided, two-masted brig with “very raking ends” that cut a distinct profile. (Rake simply refers to the angle of something, in this instance a not-uncommon adjustment in clippers to perfect a ship’s buoyancy, balance, and/or motion through the water.) At its longest, the new tender was ninety feet, ten inches, measured across the gun deck, at its widest, twenty-six feet, seven inches, and by all accounts it was “a most symmetrical specimen of naval architecture.” Put in perspective, if these dimensions were squared off, the Black Joke would have been less than twenty-five hundred square feet for approximately fifty people, and the little brig was far from square; back when it was Henriqueta, those raked ends, plus the additional storage spaces at either end of the ship, meant an even smaller slave deck, into which over ten times that number of bodies were unwillingly wedged with barely room to breathe, much less move.
But if it was the same ship in body, it was now much altered in name, purpose, and populace. On board were grizzled ratings like Richard Holt and William Fielder, each over fifty, all the way to adolescent boys like George Martin. Turner was also joined by fellow promotion hopefuls Edward Lyne Harvey and Edward Harris Butterfield, both mates aspiring to make the coveted leap to lieutenant (and with it, an officer’s commission and guaranteed half pay when not assigned a berth). After what was probably an especially thorough cleaning, it must have felt auspicious that their first outing was both unremarkable and yet astonishing in its speed. Collier had spent two days in Sierra Leone in early January, officially purchasing the Henriqueta at auction on January 5, 1828, and the ink was scarcely dry on the bill of sale when, seven days later, the crew of the Black Joke captured a Spanish schooner bound for Cuba, Gertrudis, only forty-eight hours laden with human cargo from Gallinas, both a river and a region spanning modern-day Liberia and Sierra Leone. It’s not that finding a slave trader near the Gallinas was unusual; the river and islands of its estuary were liberally sprinkled with stations for the sale of the enslaved, and the area had traded in people, and only people, for as long as many a British naval officer could remember. It was odd because ships of the Squadron usually spent months cruising for any prey, much less treaty-suitable prey, and the Black Joke had barely even existed for a week before capturing its first slaver. Making it odder still was that Gallinas in the 1820s had as its most prominent slave trader a British citizen and ex–army officer named John Ouseley Kearney, whose contacts in Freetown, insofar as possible, kept him abreast of the Squadron’s every movement. Perhaps more than any other illicit harbor in the vicinity, Gallinas should have been prepared for “unexpected” visits from the Royal Navy. To find and successfully capture such a prize, with human cargo loaded yet none dead, so close to the Gallinas and so quickly—it just wasn’t normal.
It would be easy to suppose that any surprise factor, and thus the Black Joke’s success at the expense of the Gertrudis, may have turned on the ship’s recent transition and unmistakable profile. Given the turnaround between sale and sail, it’s unlikely that Turner’s crew had had time to do much of anything but clean, make their best attempt to arrange their new berth to Royal Navy specifications, and hit the open water. The Black Joke was unmistakably a purpose-built slaving vessel; it was the size of a slaver, rigged like a slaver, gunned like a slaver, and moved like a slaver. More akin to a racing yacht than an English frigate, nothing about the craft would have seemed out of place in the waters of the Gallinas. Certainly, Black Joke was probably better looking and of higher quality than most of the ships that might have found their way to that unfortunate port, however, but for any British colors it may have been flying, it would have blended. On the other hand, Turner had recently been sailing alongside the Sybille and HMS Esk, a vessel whose service on the coast was ending just as Black Joke’s began. In this part of the world, nothing about a brig traveling with a frigate and a ship-sloop was low profile.
Detail. H.M. Brig ‘Black Joke,’ tender to HMS ‘Sybille’ and prizes […] ‘Providentia,’ […] ‘Vengador’ […] ‘Presidente’ […] ‘El Hassey’ [sic] ‘El Almirante’ and […] ‘Marianna’ (© NMM).
No, perhaps unsurprisingly, it was the speed. After his ship was spotted, Francisco Sans, captain and owner of the slaver, tried everything he could think of to shake off the British patrol, even tossing his own guns overboard to drop Gertrudis’s weight and enable its flight, and though he’d managed to pull away from Sybille and Esk easily enough, Black Joke had instead steadily gained, and gained, and gained, chasing the Gertrudis for twenty-four hours straight until Sans was forced to surrender. The tender was just a much-faster offering than any slave trader had come to expect from the WAS, and Sans, who had nothing with which to adjust to the new reality confronting him, soon found his ship taken with little fuss. Worldly in the manner of most illicit vessels, Gertrudis had first been an American schooner before eventually hoisting the flags of Spain and Brazil, and was originally named Julia before being purchased by Sans, a Spaniard, for $5,000. While the order for the captives on board and ownership of them fell to his partner in the venture, Isidro Romagoza of Havana, their presence on his boat at this location meant Sans and his ship were quite obviously guilty of violating Spain’s treaties with England. The ship would be condemned by the Mixed Commission just three weeks later, and all 155 enslaved people on board—80 of whom were children—were processed into Freetown. Though they couldn’t have known it then, once the slaver was sold at auction (and likely after having changed owners a few more times), Gertrudis would harbor in Freetown again just a year and a half later, captured this time as the Brazilian schooner Ceres. Such a disheartening end—really, continuation—for the Black Joke’s debut capture highlights the quixotic expectations regarding the WAS mission. In the moment, however, the whole affair had been a wild success for Turner and the rest of the tender’s crew from outset to nominal conclusion and likely could not have done more to cement Collier’s confidence in his choice. But, as every sailor knows, luck can change.
