CHAPTER THREE
Providencia (aka Providentia; Eng.: Providence)
April 1828,
0 enslaved people
For the crew of the Black Joke to be consistently successful, they would have to regularly find appropriate quarry—no small task. Between 1827 and 1832, well over a thousand slave voyages would vie for profits and historical ignominy crossing the Atlantic. The pool from which the Squadron could actually fish, however, was much smaller.
Other than the brief respite provided by the aforementioned Treaty of Amiens, between the French Revolutionary Wars (aka the Wars of the First and Second Coalitions) and the Napoleonic Wars (the Third to Seventh Coalitions), Britain had battled with various European powers from 1793 to 1815, and the Royal Navy had featured prominently in many of the island nation’s victories. Indeed, a prolonged series of wars among numerous countries in which allies and enemies had been interchanged as readily as sails—except for, generally, that historical enemy France—had created a rather unique set of global conditions, and British politicians were determined to take advantage. Given how comparatively well positioned Britain was in the postwar years, it’s not difficult to compass the logic behind the machinations. Arguably no combatant came out of the years following the turn of the nineteenth century in better shape than England. Not sharing a land border with any of its wartime rivals helped, but decades of both internal and external conflict had also sapped, to varying degrees, the economic strength of traditional continental powers such as the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and, naturally, French empires, even as postwar territorial concessions and colonial realignments—as well as robust revolutionary sentiment—eroded many imperial aspirations these governments may have still harbored. By stark contrast, though attitudes in Britain were slowly turning away from the sort of “formal” control of territorial possessions requisite for the mercantilist mindset, the shift toward free trade allowed for imperialist economic coercion in the Persian Gulf, China, Latin America, and elsewhere, such that the number and strategic value of England’s overseas interests actually increased as the nineteenth century progressed.
A proliferation of British bases of military and economic operation was only one facet of the deeply enmeshed relationship between the Royal Navy and national economic interests, but it was an important one. Negotiations following the long-awaited peace of 1815 granted the English what must have seemed like, to the average citizen, a seriously random list of territorial concessions and recognized claims, not at all commensurate with the scale of their perception of British triumph. Though a list of these acquisitions—including Heligoland, Malta, the Ionian Islands, Ascension, Mauritius, the Seychelles, Ceylon, Malacca, St. Lucia, Tobago, Guiana, plus assent to British holdings in Africa as far north as the Gambia and as far south as Cape Town—seems at first to be a rather scattershot smattering of islands and inlets, their value to the Royal Navy, and thus the English economy, would soon demonstrate the canny rationale undergirding these choices; at least one member of the Admiralty would later assert that quality bases were second only to men and ships in underpinning British naval superiority. From these diverse ports, the Royal Navy would have a base capable of comparatively rapid response just about anywhere on the globe (but for the Pacific Ocean). Ready, worldwide military deployment might seem like a strange goal for peace talks, but then, Pax Britannica wasn’t destined to be a particularly peaceful era. Unsurprisingly, other governments seeking to reimagine the world after Napoléon were deeply suspicious of British motives, concerns that, through the excellent looking glass of hindsight, managed to somehow be both well-founded and misplaced. True, England was about to unequivocally eclipse all its rivals, entering a period of global dominance the likes of which the world has never again seen, and undoubtedly the Royal Navy was a primary mechanism through which this aim would be realized. However, the unfolding geopolitical drama that would resolve into the long “peace” of nineteenth-century Britain was not to be decided by pitched battles between massive fleets. It was trade and treaties—and perhaps the occasional, proverbial “whiff of grapeshot”—not large-scale military maneuvers, that would steer the course of the future.
Well, and pirates. Though what historians now consider the golden age of piracy ended well before an officially constituted West Africa Squadron was a gleam in anyone’s eye, the waters were nonetheless rife with predation in the early 1800s. While the end of the wars had precipitated a particular rise in nefarious activity in the Caribbean and Mediterranean, the economic impact of the disruption of maritime trade by illicit vessels could be felt the world over. During the previous conflicts, many of these aquatic aggressors had been privateers, distinct from pirates, their actions against merchant ships sanctioned by an often-distant government. The letters of marque these privateers carried distinguished them from pirates and protected them from interference so long as they kept their (piratical in everything but name) activity to enemies of the state they represented. Revolutions in Latin America meant privateers would continue to be in play, but given that the large European powers were ostensibly now at peace—at least with one another—it would be in much smaller numbers than seen the previous years. Those ships that wished to continue the lucrative business of robbery at sea could, in the main, no longer seek the shield of the nation-state (and that’s if they even desired it)—privateers may have been the tools of some, but pirates were the bane of nearly all. The obvious losses measured in goods, ships, and lives stolen at sea were only part of a colossally destructive economic picture; it’s impossible to reckon how much was also lost due to the cost of protective measures, such as extra crew, more weaponry, insurance, and so on. What’s indisputable was that with the conclusion of war came fewer opportunities for privateers and an increase in piratical activity, with extraordinary economic impact. In 1815, a working resolution seemed difficult to find.
It was obvious to those gathered in Austria that the resurgent pirate situation was going to require vigorous policing of the open seas. But where, oh where, could a maritime force of sufficient size, strength, budget, and political incentive be found? The majority of those attending the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15 were uninterested in looking to England, least of all many of the English themselves. British representatives had come to the negotiations bound by heightened public pressure to, among other things, secure concrete measures to eradicate the global slave trade from Africa, not piracy; in fact, the Barbary Coast piracy that most agitated the continental powers had frequently served British trade interests rather well. The abolitionist sentiment that continued to mount even after England’s legislative abandonment of the slave trade in 1807 had surged before the meetings in Vienna, when campaigners presented the government with petitions containing well over a million signatures demanding support at the Congress of Vienna for universal cessation of slave trading. A stated belief in the manifest injustice of the trade (and by extension, slavery itself) may have pervaded many of the intellectual and diplomatic circles of the various representatives to the Congress—and scientific justifications for inequality referencing the innate inferiority of the Black race entire had not yet reached their future popularity—but British diplomats were surely sailing against the wind. Even those continental representatives who’d witnessed the clamor against the trade in London firsthand when they visited the city in the lead-up to the Congress suspected that, whatever the motives of the populace, the English government’s drive to restrict the trade was born of national self-interest, not altruism.
Britain’s rivals were generally more interested in taking advantage of the window of profit left open by its abandonment of the slave trade, not in joining in the country’s potentially economically disastrous moralism. Denmark had been the first European power to abolish the slave trade in 1792, though the law wasn’t in effect until 1803, while the United States enacted legislation and began enforcing bans against the slave trade at around the same time that Britain itself did, in 1807 and 1808. Britain already had some leverage in their relationship with the Dutch, so inducing an end to the trade from the Netherlands had been a relatively simple matter in 1814 before the Congress began. Bringing other slave-trade profiteers to the table would take substantial inducement, more than a little time, and substantive proof of Britain’s willingness to deploy its navy for humanitarian intentions that wouldn’t profit it… which is to say that if England was so keen to police the sea, as far as other European powers were concerned, England could start by doing something about those damn Barbary pirates. After all, if Britain couldn’t be compelled by the prospect of “white slavery” much closer to home, how was anyone to trust this newfound antislavery political attitude that extended much farther abroad, and to Africans to boot? Never mind that the practices of the Barbary Coast were not akin to the chattel slavery to which the African populace was subjected across the Atlantic, nor that the number of European captives had dwindled to perhaps a few hundred a year by this time in the nineteenth century, or that these captives were regularly ransomed, rather than sold, back to Europe—either Britain was opposed to the slave trade or it wasn’t. Opting to be demonstrative, England would send a detachment of ships to eradicate the Barbary pirate problem in 1816 and, with that action, would by fits and starts embark on an international policing mission that, if somewhat thrust upon it, would nonetheless come to typify the role of the Royal Navy in the coming age.
Gestures, even grand ones, were not going to be enough to force the Portuguese, Spanish, and French to capitulate, nor to meaningfully change the international suspicion of English motives. Though the British walked out of the Congress of Vienna with a signed declaration decrying the slave trade as “repugnant to the principles of humanity and of universal morality,” asserting that “the public voice in all civilized countries calls aloud for its prompt suppression,” and “declaring the wish of [the signatories’] Sovereigns to put an end to a scourge which desolates Africa, degrades Europe, and afflicts humanity,” it was worth about as much as the vellum it was inked on. The declaration had little to say on either timetable or methodology for bringing about its pronouncements. Nations were mostly left to themselves to determine “the period at which each particular power may definitively abolish the trade,” with the addition that “the period for universal cessation must be the subject of negotiation between the powers concerned”—those still directly profiting from and sanctioning the slave trade, and England—and that “no proper means for accelerating that period are to be neglected.” However, neither were any means for accelerating that period enumerated. Unlike with the Netherlands and Denmark, whose share of the slave trade had already slowed to a trickle when they moved to abolish, or the United States, where hereditary enslavement and the practice of regularly trafficking both women and men meant its unpaid labor needs could now readily be met by “natural increase” and a robust domestic slave trade, sudden British abolition left a market vacuum that Portugal, Spain, and their soon-to-be-independent colonial holdings in the Americas were positively aching to fill. Persuading the two cash-strapped empires to give up so much potential profit—a move sure to be deeply unpopular when some of their richest citizens were slave-trafficking profiteers—was going to take seriously lucrative incentives.
Aware that collective discussions for universal abolition of the trade could well come to naught, Britain’s representatives at the Congress had met with their opposite numbers from Portugal and Spain, continuing negotiations for bilateral treaties that had been ongoing since 1807 and 1808, respectively, and that would extend long past the Congress of Vienna’s conclusion. The diplomatic approach taken with both nations during the war had been similar, and with similarly lackluster results—Portugal had paid lip-service-by-treaty to British enforcement of trade abolition in 1810 and 1813 with no tangible progress toward enforcement, and Spain had done even less. This time, the Congress, one of the most consequential gatherings the continent had ever seen, the meeting that reapportioned Europe and swaths of the world besides, had, when it came to the slave trade, yielded little more than more high-minded and ultimately worthless commitments. Now that it was over, and the threat of Napoléon no longer imminent, neither Portugal nor Spain saw any reason to simply acquiesce to British demands.
It wasn’t until a year or a few later, when Britain added money to the deal, that the gears finally began to meaningfully turn, as both Portugal and Spain were in increasingly desperate and expensive bids to retain their Latin American colonies. After signing yet another series of empty promises in 1815 in Vienna, Portugal, it was finally agreed in 1817, was to be paid £300,000 (almost £26 million today), have the remainder of a £600,000 war debt to England cleared (about £480,000 in money still owed, or about £41.5 million today), all with additional payments to come. In exchange, Portugal agreed, among other things, that trade north of the equator would be abolished; that a Portuguese law would be enacted to punish those who continued to trade in slaves in violation of the treaty; that the Portuguese flag could not be used as cover; that vessels above this line could be boarded, searched, and, if applicable, detained by the British; and that a Court of Mixed Commission to adjudicate the fates of these ships would be established in Sierra Leone. (Brazil, when seeking recognition of its independence almost a decade later, would agree to be governed by this treaty.) Likewise Spain—£400,000 up front and more in the future, and in return, the slave trade would be abolished north of the equator forthwith (decreed by the king of Spain in 1817), south of the equator and from all “Spanish dominions” at the end of May in 1820, and Britain would have the right to seize and detain ships that would be tried in a Court of Mixed Commission to be established in Cuba. These concessions might have been more meaningful if Portugal (and by extension, Brazil) couldn’t access slave trading south of the equator and if Cuban slavers had not worked with a complicit Spanish colonial government to subvert the intention of the agreements—really, if either government had had any intention of stringently, or even halfheartedly, enforcing anything they’d just agreed to.
The situation with France was even worse. Even at the Congress of Vienna, abolitionist demands were tepidly received by the French delegation, in no small part because anti-English sentiment was running particularly high after the French defeat. Just as popular opinion at home forced British representatives to seek an end to the trade, French delegates felt pressured to not concede to British machinations, high-minded or no. French suspicion regarding British motives was rampant from the most enlightened salon to the cheapest newspaper; there was perhaps nothing in which France was less interested than granting the Royal Navy the right to search French ships for literally any reason. France did, nevertheless, agree to the declaration at the Congress and was willing to state publicly that the traffic in the enslaved should end. By 1817, the king of France had decreed that any ship attempting to land enslaved people in a French colony was subject to confiscation (presumably by the Crown), but France was not yet ready to abolish the trade, nor “withdraw the protection of its flag” from slave traders, nor make any other move to prevent human trafficking from Africa.
The next decade of international relations would see a frustrated Foreign Office stymied by readily exploited legal loopholes and repeatedly pushed to demand assistance, or at least the end of active subversion, from England’s supposed treaty partners and “enlightened” foreign frenemies in its efforts to end the slave trade. As made hopelessly clear by the example of France, crucial to all of this wrangling was the “right of search,” or, under what specific circumstances the Royal Navy could board, search, detain, and potentially confiscate ships suspected of illegally transporting human cargo for condemnation by the Mixed Commission. (Unsurprisingly, when it came to countries England didn’t consider its equal—diplomatically, racially, or otherwise—“right of search” was rapidly becoming a nonnegotiable feature of British foreign relations.) It wasn’t as if some in the British delegation hadn’t tried to forestall this problem by formally suggesting an international naval force at the Congress of Vienna, and again at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818, and again the next year, but the notion had never gained much traction in European circles and was a nonstarter in the United States, given that it had recently fought a war in part over this very issue. So even with nominal partners, by 1828 perhaps the only thing that was clear was that, for all the effort spent garnering paper support and fragile concessions, Britain was basically alone on the waters if it wanted to stop the slave trade.
And there was so much water. The Royal Navy had, in essence, been charged with enforcing England’s abolition of the trade since the 1807 ban had been conceived. The text of the act makes it clear that the drafters were far less concerned with how Africans from all parts of the continent arrived at coastal ports already bound for enslavement across the Atlantic than their oceanic disposition thereafter:
All Ships and Vessels, Slaves or Natives of Africa, carried, conveyed, or dealt with as Slaves, and all other Goods and Effects that shall or may become forefeited for any Offence committed against this Act, shall and may be seized by any Officer of His Majesty’s Customs or Excise, or by the Commanders or Officers of any of His Majesty’s Ships or Vessels of War.
Any such action on the part of the Royal Navy would, in the years immediately following abolition of the slave trade, remain generally subsumed to the war effort—despite the massive size of the wartime force, there weren’t ships available to create a dedicated patrol. As early as January of 1808, HMS Derwent, a brig-sloop, successfully detained two American slavers off Cape Verde, but no one in Freetown was sure what was supposed to happen next. Clarifications and increased stringency would be forthcoming… eventually, but in the interim, those tasked with enforcement—such as the Derwent, its frigate companion HMS Solebay, and the entire colonial government of Sierra Leone, such as it was—simply made do against what must have felt like an indefatigable adversary. In 1811, as Parliament realized that the slave trade would not just taper off under the weight of semi-collective British disapprobation, a new act elevated slave trading from a misdemeanor (punishable by a fine that a successful voyage could readily cover) to a felony (replete with potential transport to Australia). This change did have some effect, particularly among British nationals, but quite a few slave traders were, on account of not being British, not subject to British law and, regardless, were not the sort to scruple the legality of their actions any more than they had the morality of them. Naively, it seemed, many of England’s abolitionists, and at least some politicians, had expected the eradication of the trade to be a relatively simple endeavor that would pave the way to abolition of slavery itself, imagining it would take a scant few years, perhaps. Slavers, in large part, simply contrived new methods to evade condemnation, even if captured; though the increase in penalty was a deterrent in some cases, the lure of astronomical returns on investment still brought enslavers, daily, to the coasts of Africa. Just throwing the Royal Navy at the problem sounded like an easy fix, but substantively addressing the complexity and entrenchment of the slave trade across the Atlantic would actually take decades of bilateral negotiations hand in glove with unilateral action.
England may not have come out of the Congress of Vienna with much in the way of abolitionist partnerships, but the power to police international waters, even in a limited capacity, would ultimately change the face of the world and make the era in which Black Joke sailed possible. By the time other nations sanctioned England’s efforts to police the slave trade in 1815—or at least didn’t directly oppose them—and the Admiralty chose Captain Sir James Lucas Yeo to lead the newly recognized force, Royal Navy vessels had been patrolling the waters of the coast in search of illegal slave traders for several years under the rules of war. These Royal Navy ships had been “on particular service” since 1808, and in that guise there had already been three commodores—Edward Columbine (1809–11), Frederick Irby (1811–13), and Thomas Browne (1814–15). Yeo would be the last of these early commodores. This first group had had success capturing several illicit traders, though it wasn’t difficult when slaver captains could easily boast of seeing “no less than eighty” like-missioned vessels headed in the same direction the day they sailed from Havana. Yeo’s assignment, refashioned in the wake of diplomatic negotiations, was deceptively straightforward:
You are hereby required and directed to put to sea, in the ship you command, as soon as she shall in all respects be ready to sail, and proceed without delay to the coast of Africa, for the purpose of visiting the several British forts and settlements on that coast and rendering them such assistance and protection as you may find them to require.
You are to repair in the first instance to Sierra Leone…. In proceeding down the coast you are diligently to look into the several bays and creeks on the same between Cape de Verd [sic] and Benguela, particularly on the Gold Coast, Whydah, the Bight of Benin, and Angola, in order to your seizing such ships or vessels as may be liable thereto, under the authority of the several Acts of Parliament prohibiting the slave trade (abstracts or copies of which we herewith inclose for your information and guidance); and you are to use every other means in your power to prevent a continuance of the traffic in slaves and to give full effect to the Acts of Parliament in question.
With regard to the conduct to be observed towards the Portuguese ships and settlements, we send you herewith copies of two treaties between this country and Portugal, signed at Vienna on the 21st and 22nd of January 1815, and we hereby strictly require and direct you to govern yourself according to the instructions and stipulations contained therein.
Simple enough, it would seem, but for a few, rather important, considerations. First, the Squadron was tiny; for several months in 1815 the Royal Navy had had no ships stationed to the coast at all. Now, beyond his own ship, HMS Inconstant, Yeo would be joined by Princess Charlotte, the single serviceable colonial schooner still left in Sierra Leone—which was, in fairness, still actively harassing slavers with enthusiasm—HMS Bann, which actually departed the coast ere Yeo arrived, and eventually HMS Cherub, manned by the transferred crew of the Bann. That’s it. And little help would be forthcoming. Internationally, the Dutch and Spanish fleets had been decimated by war, the United States made sympathetic noises while providing little tangible support, and the Portuguese and French, occupied by internal political strife and external profit, were as yet uninterested. Domestically the situation was little better. While Yeo’s understanding was that a small squadron would follow him to the coast, the powers that be in England made an eleventh-hour choice to send those ships to St. Helena to guard Napoléon instead. Even that minimal assistance would not be forthcoming from home.
Adding insult to rapidly accruing injury, Yeo’s minuscule force was tasked with reining in the trade from Cape Verde—the actual cape, not the islands off the coasts of Senegal and Gambia—to the Benguela River in Angola, over three thousand miles of coastline. The “several bays and creeks” he was meant to patrol while making this cruise were nigh on innumerable, and while navigable for the smaller-framed slaving vessels, they were extraordinarily treacherous (if not outright impossible) for the Royal Navy’s sometimes much-larger ships, which had to detach small boats to perform this work; natural harbors, areas that were both protected from the worst weather and waves the ocean had to offer and deep enough for ships to anchor, were almost entirely confined to the major slaving rivers. The unreasonable nature of the Admiralty’s expectations did dovetail with a larger purpose, as 1815 had also seen the beginning of a monumental and ultimately successful effort to survey and accurately map the seas and then, in contravention of historical practice, practically give the information away to anyone who wanted it. However, accurate maps are the work of years, so all this meant for Yeo in the present, and the Black Joke in the not-too-distant future, was that the hazard-ridden and absurdly long stretch of coast the Squadron was meant to police was both perilous and less than thoroughly charted.
Logic dictated that at least some of the Admiralty’s instructions would have to be more honored in the breach, and over these early years, it seems the Squadron rarely bothered with the farthest reaches of its assigned watch, largely confining its patrol to the middle two thousand miles, from off the coast of what is now Conakry, Guinea, to present-day São Tomé and Principe/the Gabon Estuary. Even after British efforts to geographically restrict the trade via treaty began to have some impact over the coming years, thus allowing the Squadron to better focus on slaving distribution hubs, sailing was further impeded by the capricious winds that could suddenly appear in the tropical environs, as well as an ever-contrary current that ran from west to east and had long confounded sailors in the region. These additional factors could readily lengthen a two-week cruise along the coast to over five, just to go back the way they’d come. Yeo, who’d had bouts with debilitating fevers and “overwork” in the past, would die from illness on his return trip to England (by way of Kingston) in 1818, at just thirty-five, well before the increasingly formalized Squadron could become more effective. Honestly, it’s debatable whether there really was a Squadron as such until after Commodore Sir George Collier (no relation to the Sybille’s Francis Augustus) replaced Yeo on the coast. By 1819, the Admiralty had seen fit to provide Sir George Collier with six Royal Navy ships, still bound to cruise from Cape Verde to Benguela, but here the size of the Squadron would again stall. While the quantity of enslaved people being exported from Africa would precipitously rise from at least forty-eight thousand in 1815 to a postwar peak well over a hundred thousand in 1829, the number of ships the Royal Navy fielded to suppress the trade from West Africa would remain near stagnant all the way through 1832.
Almost ten years and three commodores later, when the Black Joke, freshly rechristened, embarked on its new mission under Francis Collier in 1828, the vision for the Squadron was less than clear. Opponents to the original abolition act in England had declared the goal of eradicating the slave trade practically impossible, the policy forthcoming from the polity hadn’t helped, and the outlook seemed bleak. Even including the new tender, the ships of the West Africa Squadron were outnumbered by slave traders by almost thirty to one the previous year. Though the Royal Navy was, in the aggregate, notably low-cost, plenty of folks back in England were less than enthused about the West Africa Squadron’s mission, method, or both and were not eager to continue to subsidize its efforts to the tune of anywhere from £60 million to £100 million per year.
So, though the expansive scope of the Squadron’s assigned territory would remain constant, additional help, in the form of military vessels of any available national extraction or substantially improved charts, would not be immediately forthcoming; domestic enthusiasm in Britain was complicated, and foreign enthusiasm practically nonexistent. The ships being sent from England were not ideally suited to the job at hand. And that was only the surface—these were just the issues to be reckoned with before anyone in the Squadron even stepped foot on a slaver.
Though the view was not altogether rosy, the West Africa Squadron continued to adapt, and it’s not difficult to see why both Bullen and Francis Collier were keen to develop the use of tenders on the coast. As the Squadron evolved, each successive commander learned more about what measures it would take to patrol these waters with any appreciable success. This preservation of institutional knowledge, along with the kind of training only experience can provide, was a key component of the Royal Navy’s overall success. England’s geographic reality in relation to that of other European powers meant that the nation had historically had a greater investment in sea power, rather than land power, and the recent military actions across the globe had only strengthened that model. This investment meant that, compared to other navies or pirate ships, the Royal Navy usually held the advantage in tactics, gunnery, seamanship, and discipline. As a result, those back in Whitehall expected His Majesty’s ships to win, even when outmanned and outgunned—a normal state of affairs on the African coast when combating ruthless slavers and pirates who were willing to kill for money.
Then why bother to cruise at all? As incentive to ensure the most commitment with the least oversight, the Admiralty held out the possibility of promotion and the potential to earn prize money. Simply waiting around ports, as opposed to cruising for opponents, would have diminished everyone’s chances at both—in a peacetime navy that was much reduced in size, if not public stature, where the promotion ladder was congested and opportunities few, berths were both deeply valuable and difficult to come by, at least for officers. Showing initiative (and being successful) could set men apart from equally long-suffering peers waiting for promotion in parts of the world with a lot less potential for action. And given that only 3 percent of the Royal Navy’s personnel were serving off the coast of West Africa in the late 1820s, not to mention that, at higher rankings, as few as one in ten officers were fully employed at all, a berth in the WAS could be both career making and purse filling for men able and willing to make the most of the opportunity. Besides, the closer a slaver was to port, the easier it was for its captain to run back to shore and disembark their human chattel, waiting until Royal Navy ships were out of sight again before setting sail.
So, after the capture of Gertrudis at the beginning of 1828, the Black Joke, like all ships of the WAS, cruised. And cruised. And cruised. The territory the Squadron was meant to monitor had been divided at first into four sections, then into three: Senegal to Sierra Leone; Sierra Leone to Cape Coast, Ghana; Ghana to the Bights, and with them, the equatorial line dividing legal and illegal slave trading. Each area was assigned to particular vessels, much like servers at a restaurant; not only did this practice make the whole endeavor more manageable, it also helped prevent squabbles over the pursuit of prizes. Though a ship might have orders to report to Freetown, be due for a “wood and water” resupply in Fernando Pó, need to rest and refresh in Ascension, or have some other such task that required a specific destination, there was also a lot of just… sailing around, up and down the coast. Of the three patrols, the Bights, farthest south and most subject to calm winds and strange currents, was the least suited to a native-born Englishman’s constitution, but did have the benefit of plenty of potential prizes, particularly near the Bonny and Calabar Rivers, and naturally, it was here that the little brig found itself for several months as the winter passed into spring. To increase their chances of finding a ship that could not just be caught, but successfully condemned, officers and sailors alike trolled for information about where such ships might be loading and when they planned to depart—both conversations ashore and with other ships they encountered could prove fruitful. Opportunities for gossip notwithstanding, this constant patrol was, more often than not, rather boring.
However, it was not idle. In the spring of 1828, the Black Joke had forty-three men on board: mostly seamen, but also including Royal Marines, midshipmen, Kroomen, an assistant surgeon, and Lieutenant Turner himself. They would have been divided into two, possibly three, watches, and given that the running of a ship is a twenty-four-hour operation, one watch was on duty at all times, the sound of bells echoing, like clockwork, in their ears. Each assigned watch lasted four hours, but for two watches of two hours, called dogwatches, from 4:00 to 8:00 p.m., with the time marked by a bell every half hour; one watch was eight bells, and then the count reset. A two-watch system would mean that, when a ship was at sea—which in the case of the Black Joke was nearly all the time—no one rested for more than four hours. Sleeping, when done, was accomplished in hammocks strung in spaces as small as fourteen inches wide per man, assigned and usually alternated by watch to provide more space and always stored away in the morning. Being roused for one’s watch was not a gentle affair, as the boatswain’s mates might just as readily resort to canes as loud shouts. If it was the beginning of the day, the deck would be scrubbed while the cook finished breakfast, usually served at 7:00 a.m. After eating, there would be ship maintenance or possibly drills. Accurate navigation required the sun be sighted at noon and its location noted, followed by an hour- to hour-and-a-half-long lunch (or “dinner”), the largest (and longest) meal of the day, when all watches could eat communally. More work for one watch, then dinner (or “supper”) at four, the two dogwatches, and finally “the watch was set” at eight. At this point, Lieutenant Turner would retire to the designated captain’s quarters, likely leaving his boatswain, Harvey, or Butterfield, in charge of the watch on duty. The night watch was less onerous in many respects—the ship had to be steered and the lookout kept, but other than for the occasional trimming or reducing of sails, men could, for the most part, relax during these late hours. Depending on how kind Harvey was, and how much he trusted them to be ready at a moment’s notice should the need arise, he may have even let portions of the watch sleep on deck.
The Black Jokes—the crew of a ship was referred to, in the collective, by the ship’s name, no matter how strange it might sound to the modern ear—might go weeks without any other company but the sharks that ominously swam alongside the brig. The ship rarely put into port because empty slavers couldn’t be condemned and doing so risked illness unnecessarily. Due to the patrols, slave traders were now in the habit of boarding the enslaved at night, so, if near a likely port or inlet, the Black Joke might find a spot, perhaps thirty, forty miles from shore, and wait in the darkness, hoping to be in position to pounce at first light should a ship appear. So it went, day after day, unless, suddenly, “Sail ho!” pealed out, goading the crew to quick and well-rehearsed action. The lucky sailor who’d raised his voice would receive an £8 bonus—a month’s pay and more for everyone but Turner and the assistant surgeon of the Sybille, Coates, who acted as chief medic for the tender, and nothing to sneeze at for them, either—but first, the ship had to prove to be a genuine slaver.
If most of the crew’s time at sea was an orgy of repetition, in this moment just about anything might happen. Turner, taking up his scope, would sight the vessel—since the mast was the first thing to appear above the horizon, it could take some time to see those particular characteristics of a vessel’s profile and movement (the rigging, size, shape, and speed) that might mark a slaver. During this time, the senior midshipman, or mid, called, “All hands!”—summoning anyone who might be belowdecks, and all the while the Black Joke itself was in motion, too, already having altered its course toward what was usually a short-lived mystery. Not every craft off the coast of Africa, particularly as Britain moved to replace its previous returns from the slave trade with agricultural exploitation rather than human trafficking, was a slave trader. While readily observable outward physical signs were key in attempting to identify potential enemies at sea, they weren’t foolproof. But presuming that far-off mast didn’t belong to a legitimate merchant ship or a fellow Royal Navy vessel, things could get exciting rather quickly.
And all of these things, from the labyrinthine treaty agreements to the duplicitous slave traders, factored into Turner’s dilemma on the spring night that the Black Joke first sighted the Providencia, roughly forty miles southwest of Principe. It was early April 1828, at about 2:00 a.m., when the shout came—“Sail ho!” An extraordinarily keen-eyed sailor on the Black Joke had noticed, in the far distance, an unidentified brig. Someone, possibly Harvey himself, roused Turner, calling him to his scope, and whatever the lieutenant saw must have kindled his suspicion. As the helmsman laid in the direction, seamen swarmed in a beautifully executed riot of movement, setting all available sail to catch every scrap of wind as the pursuit laid on. Still, the “hurry up and wait”—or perhaps more precisely “wait and hurry up”—current that steered the experience of service in the Squadron was inescapable. Once a course had been set, one still had to wait hours to catch up to and hail that distant ship; even if the winds were with one’s craft, as they were that early April morning, there was yet more waiting. Arriving swiftly and before daybreak, as the Black Joke soon did, could only save so much time. They’d need sunlight before the next move could commence.
It was a question of flags, and the simplicity of the task belied the difficulty of the circumstances. All of those treaties Turner had in the Black Joke’s possession were useless if the ship waiting across the water could make a credible claim to being from any nation where the particulars of this precise moment—including the unknown vessel’s current latitude, claimed point of departure, stated destination, supposed nationality, and the nature of its cargo—exempted it from the Royal Navy’s jurisdiction. Of the over two hundred slaving ships leaving the coast of Africa each year in the late 1820s, just over 10 percent are recorded as sailing under French or US flags. Since neither government had succumbed to British pressure to recognize a (nominally) mutual right of search, no treaty on board the Black Joke (nor anywhere else in the world) would let Turner legally search a ship under those colors, much less take one. Not every slave captain had access to the resources to acquire fake flags and the requisite papers to accompany them, but if Turner’s potential adversary raised the unembellished and solid-white flag of France’s Bourbon restoration, or the already distinctive flag of the United States (if with twenty-four stars, rather than fifty), his quarry could not be searched at all, and any lost sleep was for naught. The rest of the other nearly 90 percent of slave-trading ships that are known to have sailed that year claimed association with Portugal or Spain, the precise governments for which Turner had a boatload of applicable treaties… that clearly enough said that such ships could only be fruitfully searched and detained, location and itinerary permitting. Now, any slaver claiming Dutch extraction was a viable target regardless of where it was found, but Dutch vessels were scarce on the water during this period. Admittedly, one of those had been apprehended by Sybille less than a fortnight previous, but the odds of this unknown ship making it easy for Turner by flying a Dutch flag were quite slim.
All of this presumes that the flag being raised was accurate. It should not be surprising that those who valued profit above life and human dignity were also not above lying their entire faces off—and in every conceivable fashion and manner, with every means available—if it would prevent the WAS from capturing and condemning the illicit wealth imprisoned in their ship. One practice was to have one or two persons of the nationality the ship claimed always in the crew, or even as the captain, able to lend a native speaker’s veneer of truth to the lie of the vessel’s actual affiliation. Some would carry multiple commissions from various nations and simply destroy the set that could get them condemned during any chase that might ensue. Some would, like Henriqueta had, fake the papers that showed where they had come from and where they were going or have multiple sets, both accurate and inaccurate, to show the patrol depending on the slave trader’s position relative to the equator. In other instances, like a macabre comedy trope, slaver captains would simply pretend not to speak English at all, daring their opponents to take the gamble of capturing them. This was a very real gamble—if a captain in the WAS erroneously captured a ship that was not subsequently condemned by the Mixed Commission in Freetown, he was personally liable for the costs and damages of his mistake; neither Parliament nor the Admiralty would indemnify the individual enforcers of its national will against reasonable error for another several years, no matter how difficult to fathom the actual rules of engagement remained.
Even the liability question was disturbing—if the Black Joke erred in detaining a ship, who would be liable, Turner, the captain in all but rank, or Collier, his captain? Remember, the Black Joke was a tender, not an official Royal Navy ship, and Turner had arrived in Sierra Leone as first lieutenant of the Sybille, serving on the Black Joke essentially at the commodore’s pleasure. The Black Joke was administratively inseparable from the frigate it served, and Turner must’ve recognized that his mistakes would also be Collier’s mistakes, that if Turner failed, it would reflect poorly on the man who safeguarded his career and potentially hit him in the purse as well. The precedents to be found in those first years of preventative activity in the area could not have been heartening—part of all that money Britain had bribed Portugal and Spain with to get an enforceable agreement had specifically been named as redress for slave ships illegally captured and detained under misinterpreted versions of older treaty agreements. On the other hand, the precedents also weren’t necessarily relevant—as Bullen’s letter to Canning the year before clearly demonstrated, the legal and administrative questions brought to the surface by tenders could hardly be called settled law.
WAS officers were just as incentivized to not make mistakes as slavers were to slip out of their reach, and perhaps few more so than Turner, born to a commoner (if a rich one) in an age when “lowborn” officers had all but disappeared from active service. It had become so unlikely, in the much-contracted postwar Royal Navy, for someone such as a wine merchant’s son to even become a lieutenant, much less a first lieutenant in command of his own ship, that William Turner’s trajectory was already an exceptional occurrence, even if he never advanced any further. Of course, anyone who’d managed to come that far usually wasn’t interested in resting on whatever laurels and half pay he’d managed to accrue—advancement through the officers’ ranks was accompanied by sizable increases in income. It had also been one of the very few mechanisms of social mobility that existed during this period in England; if Turner ever wanted to become something his society recognized as more than his father’s son, he would have to succeed.
Success against the slave trade required a certain degree of pragmatism, and pragmatism required more flags than the one to which Turner’s service was pledged. Which is probably the rationale, though certainly not the how, behind why an officer in His Majesty’s Royal Navy, commanding a vessel of that navy, just so happened to have several flags of his own, only one of which would have been a Union Jack.
As the two ships faced off, a strange, if altogether expected, vexillological dance commenced. The light of day saw Turner raise the British flag, and in response, the mystery ship hoisted the Red Ensign—a civil, rather than military, flag used to indicate a British merchant or passenger ship—and moved to a spot within earshot on the Black Joke’s weather beam, or the side of the ship facing the wind. As the two ships approached each other, the still-unidentified ship brought down the Red Ensign and hauled up another, now identifying itself as Spanish. Since flag shenanigans were a regular occurrence, this behavior was, if suspicious, not inherently evidence of shady piratical dealings or enslaved people on board. Once within hearing distance of Turner and his speaking trumpet—vintage megaphone—the Spanish (for he was actually Spanish) captain seemed reasonable enough, perfectly happy to send an officer to the Black Joke to explain his ship’s presence off the coast. This offer accepted, almost immediately the captain changed his mind, saying he would still gladly send over men, if only Turner could send over a boat, as the Spaniard had “no boat that could swim.” Turner, ever obliging, sent Harvey and two other men in a small craft over to the other ship, but rather than being joined by one or more from the Spanish vessel, the three men were forced to board the Spanish ship in what was beginning to look an awful lot like the prelude to a hostage situation. Easing the tension slightly, once the smaller boat had been vacated, an officer from the other ship and five of his fellows promptly hopped in and rowed back to the Black Joke. Once on board the English brig, Turner politely greeted the new arrivals, but the Spanish officer was having none of it. He identified his ship as the Providencia, a privateer commissioned against any ship of the South American states and, in what must have seemed like an odd turnabout, immediately demanded to see the Black Joke’s identification papers.
This isn’t quite as strange as it might first appear. In most respects the Black Joke very much looked like a slaver, due to the undeniable fact that it had been one, and there were those on the seas who could yet recognize it, visually, from its days as the Henriqueta; news still traveled slowly enough that not everyone may have been aware that the distinctively built brig had made the transition to legitimate waters. If it had still been a slaver, illegally flying British colors over twenty years after the nation abolished the trade, the same treaties Turner had in his possession might likewise have empowered the Providencia, if it was truly officially sanctioned, to detain the Black Joke, rather than vice versa—it was a mutual right of search, after all, even if only the Royal Navy much bothered. That the Black Joke was staffed by British sailors also wouldn’t have evidenced much to the Spanish officer. It cannot be presumed that the crew of the Black Joke looked stereotypically “English”—in the eighteenth century, at least, the sailors of the Royal Navy were a far more diverse bunch than is imagined in the present day; the expansion of Britain’s global aspirations could, in many ways, be seen in the diversity of faces that graced its navy. Not only was the crew almost certainly not racially or ethnically homogenous—even setting aside the ubiquitous Kroomen—in 1828 only commissioned officers in the Royal Navy had any sort of stipulated regular uniform; seamen provided their own clothes. English sailors certainly had a rather specific (and sometimes flamboyant) cut to their proverbial jib—a phrase just moving from the maritime lexicon to the popular one in the 1820s, as a jib was a triangular sail and its positioning was often used, aptly enough, to identify the nationality of a ship—but it wasn’t as if the Royal Navy had a universal, or even universally recognizable, uniform. The Providencia officer’s claim to suspect the Black Joke of being a Colombian privateer wasn’t per se unreasonable, given the difficulty distinguishing Royal Navy seamen from those of other nations, or from the average pirate.
It wasn’t even a stretch. Britain’s Foreign Office was very much involved in what was going on, revolutionarily speaking, in South America, and despite a professed neutrality, it didn’t exactly seem to be backing the Spaniards or Portuguese as the two empires fought to retain their colonial holdings. A number of British sailors who’d found themselves out of work when the Royal Navy downsized after 1815 had joined the naval effort for South American liberation, perhaps most famously the semi-disgraced yet unquestionably brilliant Lord Thomas Cochrane, the Sea Wolf, who had just left South America at the end of 1827 to assist Greek liberation from the Ottoman Empire, but only after helping organize and lead both the Chilean and Brazilian navies in successful rebellion against their Spanish and Portuguese overlords, respectively. So the fact that Turner was claiming to represent the Royal Navy was nice and all, but one can’t exactly blame the Providencia’s designated representative for seeing an Englishman in an officer’s blue coat leading a small and somewhat diverse crew aboard what very much appeared to be a particularly fine slaver and nonetheless having his suspicions.
Turner complied with this demand, unwilling to hazard the lives of his men on the other ship, and showed the officer the Black Joke’s commission. As the parley progressed, it was soon discovered that there should be a quick way to settle all of this. The Providencia said it had already been boarded by a WAS ship just forty-eight hours prior—and not just any ship, Sybille itself. Apparently a thirty-eight-gun frigate flying the commodore’s broad pennant had been a lot less questionable—or less easy to argue with—than a slick little brig with a single gun, so when boarded, the Providencia showed Commodore Collier a seemingly authentic commission from the king of Spain, and Collier had signed the back in acknowledgment. Collier’s signature was also, naturally, all over the Black Joke’s own paperwork, both its commission and orders to cruise. It should have been a relatively simple matter to compare documents, ensure the signatures were authentic, retrieve Harvey and his companions, and go on their merry ways, no worse for the wear. However, the Spanish officer wanted to accomplish this comparison on his ship, rather than Black Joke—after all, that’s where the Providencia’s papers were, and why make the extra trip?
Turner, who was no fool, didn’t like where that was headed at all, and though he was also under orders to be as courteous as possible in the execution of his duty, he was not going to just ship his commission off with potentially disreputable strangers and hope it came back. So the young lieutenant refused and opted instead to keep his own hostages—the Spanish officer, and two of his shipmates, would be staying on the Black Joke until the matter was sorted. Unsatisfied but less abrasive than his underling, the captain of the Providencia called out again and gently insisted that, as an alternative, Turner could send over fifteen more men, that he would likewise send fifteen of the Providencia’s complement back, then both ships could reconvene at Prince’s Island (modern-day Principe) to sort all of this out once and for all. Otherwise, the captain would be forced to take action. This was the last straw for Turner, as it was now abundantly clear that being polite was getting him nowhere. The Black Joke had only forty-three men aboard, and three of them were already on the other vessel, while the larger, fourteen-gun Providencia looked to have roughly double the number of sailors. A straight exchange of so many men may have looked fair on its face, but it would crucially disadvantage the former while negligibly impacting the latter. Put another way, had the lieutenant agreed, he would have had only twenty-five men on his ship to contend with eighteen Spanish “hostages,” several of whom would be busy sailing the ship to Principe, while his men on board the Providencia would remain greatly outnumbered by their Spanish counterparts. Besides, Turner knew that his orders were authentic; if there was to be any dispute, the fault would lie with the Spanish documentation, which, though Harvey may have had a chance to glimpse during this discussion, his captain, still on the Black Joke, had not.
So Turner, without hesitation, refused. And the Providencia, until now the picture of cooperation, immediately fired a broadside directly into the Black Joke. Clearly regard for the lives of the hostage Spaniards on board the English ship had come second to a different motive, because the two ships, so recently close enough to parley, now moved into clear and deadly opposition. Thinking quickly, Turner ordered his crew to take up a position on the bow of the Providencia, thus making Black Joke harder to hit while preserving his own field of fire, and an extended combat ensued. Despite facing fourteen twelve- and twenty-four-pounder Spanish carriage guns to their one long eighteen-pounder on a pivot and—possibly because they had not forgotten that three of their fellows were on the enemy ship—primarily armed with grapeshot, the Black Jokes refused to yield to their larger foe. Grapeshot consisted of canvas bags tightly packed with small balls of iron; when paired with excellent gunnery, its subsequent spray, akin to that of a giant shotgun, could be used to devastating effect on an adversary’s rigging while minimizing loss of life on and belowdecks. Taking out the rigging, rather than firing into the body of the ship, was always an important consideration when attempting to rescue the enslaved without killing them, especially if the ship was to be subsequently condemned for additional prize money. (Not every sailor in the WAS personally agreed with the mission, but all certainly agreed with the money.) The same technique now came in handy when attempting to both survive the sudden attack and not kill their hostaged compatriots.
For two hours, the Black Joke staved off the Providencia, firing grapeshot charge after charge from their lonely eighteen-pounder, slowly but systematically dismantling the rigging of the larger brig. Though Turner’s maneuvering and the crew’s labors had been genuinely exceptional, the unvarnished reality was that the average Royal Navy vessel had better equipment and was perceptibly better at aiming than their average opponent, regardless of nationality. Many historians attribute the difference to a longer tradition of professionalism in the Royal Navy—and a lot more practice—but whatever the rationale, the Black Jokes showed the truth of it that day. By the time the Spaniards waved the flag of truce, the Providencia had been nearly unrigged, its previously complex structure of ropes and sails almost entirely dismantled or destroyed. Though Black Joke had sustained notable damage to its own rigging, cuts to the sails and the like that would want repairing, it was largely unharmed, as were the long-suffering Harvey and his fellows. The three men had, it turned out, been in more danger from their surroundings than their shipmates on the Black Joke; on several occasions members of the crew of the Providencia had attempted to kill all of them—only the interventions of the Spanish captain, ever calm, had kept them alive long enough to see a return to the Black Joke.
This wasn’t the reason, however, that Turner ultimately let the Providencia go on its way, even after the unprovoked attack. Quite simply, he had to. Even if the Spanish ship had proved much more pirate than privateer, thin as the line was between them, it certainly did not have enslaved people on board; the Black Jokes who’d been there could confirm that. The ship’s commission had looked legitimate enough that Collier really had signed it—British papers later recounting the incident would state as fact that the Providencia had been boarded by the Sybille only two days earlier—but no matter how bogus its commission may have been, a ship had to have the enslaved on board to be validly captured under Anglo-Spanish treaties. It could have been much, much worse. The Black Joke had sustained some damage, but not a single casualty, not even a man wounded. Though after the encounter the Providencia’s captain had refused to say how many of his eighty-seven men “of all nations” had been lost, Harvey reported that, at the least, several men had been wounded and some likely killed. The proof of this came soon enough—after capitulating, the Providencia lowered its flag to half-mast and commenced to bury its dead. Turner’s leadership had saved the day, as far as the home front was concerned—the Hampshire Telegraph wrote, “Too much encomium [praise] cannot be given to Lieut. Turner, for his intrepidity and judgment on the occasion.”
When the full accountings reached England’s shores, the Admiralty agreed. While the Admiralty expected a degree of naval superiority from all its officers, Lieutenant Turner’s gallantry against the pirate—for that’s how the Providencia would ultimately be remembered in contemporaneous British accounts—had demonstrated excellent judgment in a fraught situation and exceptional courage in the face of a much more powerful foe. Though he didn’t know it yet, Turner had earned his much-coveted promotion to commander, and more besides. Commodore Collier was so impressed by Turner’s action that the commodore had a sword worth £220, over a year and a half of a lieutenant’s sea-pay, presented to Turner upon his receipt of his promotion back in England, and engraved:
A token of respect and regard from Commodore Collier, the Captain, officers, and ship’s company of H.M.S. Sybille, to Capt. Wm. Turner, for his zeal and gallantry while Lieutenant-commanding the Black Joke tender.
And Turner wasn’t alone. Edward Lyne Harvey, who’d maintained his equanimity throughout the entire affair, was also promoted, from mate to lieutenant, moving him from the ranks of the senior-most petty officers to the commissioned class. But as yet, neither Harvey nor any of the other men on the Black Joke were aware of the new circumstances their victory had wrought, changes that would eventually find soon-to-be-commander Turner replaced at the helm. For now, flush with victory, if a little worse for the wear, the Black Joke sailed on, in search of a prize it could keep.