CHAPTER FOUR
Vengador (aka Vingador, Vincedor; Eng.: Avenger)
May 1828,
645 enslaved people
Presidente (aka President; Eng.: President); Hosse (aka Nosse, Josse)
August 1828,
0 enslaved people
Zepherina (aka Zeferina)
September 1828,
218 enslaved people
Six weeks after encountering the Providencia, on May 16, 1828—hardly any length of time at all when cruising the coast—the Black Joke would find its next chance. If the Providencia’s antics had been emblematic of the many issues that made effective service on the coast such a complicated affair for the West Africa Squadron, the experience capturing the brig Vengador was the complete opposite… yet still somehow just as emblematic of the complications for captains and everyone else. The Vengador, despite mounting eight guns, didn’t even put up a fight; if a single shot was fired, there appears to be no record of it. The Black Joke approached, and Miguel Netto, captain of the suspected slaver, opted to heave to rather than attempt to fight an unexpected—and unexpectedly nimble—foe. Wary, Turner probably waited for Vengador to back, or lower, all of its sails, lest he send a boat to board the slaver only to have it rapidly reset all sails and hie off into the horizon at the precise moment Black Joke was least equipped to give chase, but no such tricks were forthcoming. Vengador, its hold tightly crammed with the bodies of 645 people, simply capitulated.
Given that many ships in the Bights and beyond, slavers or not, were obviously willing to fight a lot harder for a much smaller potential profit, this may seem like a curious end to what would otherwise be a rather brief anecdote. After all, the Providencia hadn’t even embarked any enslaved, yet had engaged in a deadly two-hour gun battle; Gertrudis had, just five months before, led Turner and his men on a not-so-merry chase for an entire day just to forestall the surrender of 155 people, less than a quarter of those carried by the Vengador. While infrequent, relatively uneventful captures were more the norm than the Black Joke’s once and future service history would seem to evidence, it’s possible some contributing factors were at work in Netto’s lack of resistance. One problem might have been that not just Netto’s cargo, but also a significant minority of his crew, were in bondage. Of the Vengador’s complement of forty-five sailors, fourteen of them were also enslaved and were listed as such in the slaver’s rôle d’équipage (muster roll, or the list of the crew on a ship). Though this wasn’t unusual, perhaps Netto didn’t like his odds if nearly a third of his own sailors might be inclined to seize the opportunity—and with it, potentially their own freedom—and side with the British forces.
Briefly traversing ever further into the morass that is supposition and hindsight, Netto may also have sailed with the understanding that he was to offer no resistance to the Squadron if escape didn’t seem feasible. In this instance, escape was unlikely because a vessel—even one made for speed, like a purpose-built slaver—weighed down, whether by licit goods or stolen lives, didn’t have much chance of getting away from a counterpart lacking a like burden, much less one faster than most any other ship of the era. Escape was potentially unimportant because the Vengador was likely insured, easily replaced, and probably one of many in a fleet, as it was almost certainly owned by a man already deeply intertwined in the Black Joke’s own history—the Henriqueta’s previous owner, the still-rich and still-powerful Jose de Cerqueira Lima. Though de Cerqueira Lima had lost what was arguably his fastest ship, he’d nonetheless continued to seek the lucre of a filthy business with his fleet of slavers—it’s quite possible he already recognized Henriqueta’s forced defection as more anomaly than trend. (Since it was the only other known ship of his in this period to be captured with the enslaved on board, this would have been an unfortunately accurate assessment.) Perhaps in deference to his burgeoning political career, and with a tacit nod to Britain’s ongoing diplomatic involvement in Brazil specifically and South America generally, the prominent slave trader sought to avoid the appearance of flagrantly violating Brazil’s treaty agreements, no matter how resentfully borne, by capitulating quietly and avoiding any further inquiry into the ship’s actual ownership. Almost certainly, though, de Cerqueira Lima had assurance, even beyond simple indemnification, that his losses would be minimal should Vengador be captured.
He was likely covered in the obvious way, in that slavers continued to insure themselves against the efforts of the WAS, despite the rising costs. This may have helped ease de Cerqueira Lima’s mind, if not his bottom line alike, but one has to imagine the Vengador’s own history (and what it said about its likely fate) could have been at least as warm a comfort. The slaver was going to be condemned by the Mixed Commission in Freetown, of this there was little doubt. Not only was Netto clearly above the equator with enslaved people on board, those individuals must’ve been loaded at Lagos, given where Turner found the slave ship, while the Vengador’s passport clearly stated its destination as Cabinda, a slaving port south of the line. Sure enough, when the Vengador arrived in Sierra Leone in June—escorted by the Black Joke, unusual for prize ships—the Mixed Commission found the slaver to be in violation of its otherwise authentic Brazilian passport, and further, that the entire voyage had been planned to that end, with premeditated intent to contravene the treaties regarding where the enslaved could be purchased. The judges made their determination with corroboration from Netto and his mate on the Vengador, testimony they seem to have provided without reservation or concern for the stated penalties for slave traders to be found in the Anglo-Brazilian treaties—namely, banishment to Mozambique for five years if one was an officer—likely because these punishments were, for all intents and purposes, never applied.
But the saga of the Vengador did not end there, just as it had not begun when the Black Joke came upon the slaver two days out from Lagos. Netto’s ship had also been rechristened; it was once known as the Principe de Guine and had been captured with “considerable bloodshed” by Bullen’s pathbreaking tender, the Hope, in August of 1826, only a year previous to the Black Joke’s own capture as Henriqueta. Once captured, the then Principe de Guine was auctioned off and sold to Commodore Bullen for use as a tender, and upon leaving the coast, he sold that ship, along with Hope, at auction once again, as was the custom. The vessel was purchased by a foreign buyer, likely a proxy, who subsequently transferred ownership to someone in Bahia, presumably Jose de Cerqueira Lima’s slave-trading outfit. In short, the once Principe de Guine had been captured, sailed back to Freetown, tried, condemned, auctioned to Bullen, repaired, possibly used as a tender by the navy for a few months, sold again, sailed to Brazil, and, embarking from Rio, was back to the coast with a new captain as the Vengador in time to be recaptured by the Black Joke in the Bight of Benin roughly twenty months later, in May of 1828.
If this, then, had truly been the end of it, it would still be more than enough to call into question the system by which the Royal Navy disposed of its slaver tenders. Alas, it most definitely was not. Collier, realizing how untenable this all was, addressed a letter to Croker, Secretary of the Admiralty, later that year, in early December, recounting what is, for this narrative, the final disposition of the Vengador. It may sound as frustratingly familiar now as it must have been to Collier. After the slaver was condemned the second time around, it was again auctioned, this time to a recent arrival named Mr. Brockington, who’d come from Santos, a Brazilian port north of Rio, with the specific intention of buying slave ships. Brockington, a British national and thus prohibited from the trade, was either the business partner to or agent of the American consul in Rio, and he successfully purchased three ships, including the Black Joke’s first two prizes, Gertrudis and Vengador. Brockington then did everything he could to get out of Freetown as quickly as possible, before, one imagines, anyone started asking any incriminating questions. The most expeditious way to clear the coast of Africa was under the British flag, given the presence of the Royal Navy, and to this end Brockington hoisted same on the Vengador, but by law, for a ship to fly a British flag it had to have a certain number of British sailors crewing the boat. Undeterred, Brockington hied off on his new purchase himself, even calling in favors from prominent British nationals in Sierra Leone to get the requisite number of Englishmen on board to legitimize his actions, and sailed for Brazil, along with his other purchases. To whom the now ex-Vengador was eventually sold is unclear, but what it unequivocal is that, by the time of Collier’s frustrated missive less than six months later, it was back on the coast of West Africa again, for the third time (and with a third name) in as many years. Now in the guise of the Perseverance—who knows if the irony was intended—this recycled slaver had become, as Collier disgustedly pointed out, “a most notorious Vessel” under its new name.
Lest this read like an unfortunate anomaly, it’s instructive to look at the rest of Collier’s letter, because here the quagmire created by the Admiralty’s policy on the disposition of the slave ships becomes maddeningly obvious. Getting directly to the point, Collier opens with:
Sir,
I have to state to you, for the information of His Royal Highness the Lord High Admiral, that most of the Slave-vessels that are captured and sent here [Freetown] for condemnation, are again purchased by Agents here and sent to the Brazils.
Given that Brazil had filled much of the void left by Britain in the brisk business of human trafficking, the implications were clear, and Collier knew it. Seeking to press home the extent of the problem, he didn’t restrain his exasperation to the Vengador incident, detailing the disposition of another slave trader, the Esperanza. The commodore’s frustration leaps off the page, even almost two hundred years later. Truly, one sympathizes, because get this: the Esperanza was formerly known as… the Hope.
While it’s true that esperanza does literally mean “hope” in Spanish, the problem was much more complicated than a case of duplicate names. Just a month before the Black Joke came upon the Vengador, on April 13, 1828, the Sybille detained an empty slaver, the Portuguese schooner Esperanza, captained by Jose Rios. Rios had already been condemned as a slaver captain the year before, in March 1827, by none other than Bullen’s flagship, the Maidstone, the same ship that had captured the Hope (under the name Hoop—it was originally of Dutch extraction). After that judgment, Rios had been free to go despite his crime, and evidently it hadn’t been difficult to find another berth. He wouldn’t fare any better this time. Though the Esperanza had been empty when it was captured, it, like the Vengador, was awfully far north to be loading the enslaved in Cabinda, to the tune of nine hundred miles in the wrong direction. Rios claimed to have accidentally become very, very lost—obviously no one believed him—and the ship was condemned and slated for sale at auction. So far, so reasonable. Esperanza was sold in June to a landed British resident of Sierra Leone, William Henry Savage, Esq., who shamelessly rehired the twice-condemned Rios—and the remaining slaver crew of the Esperanza, plus a bonus Englishman to serve as a figurehead captain—and promptly attempted to sail the ship out of Sierra Leone and back to Brazil. Black Joke was also in Freetown’s harbor, having just accompanied the Vengador to its date with the Mixed Commission, and recognizing what was about to happen, Lieutenant Turner (for his promotion would not be official for another two weeks) refused to let the schooner leave.
Even if it had been nominally purchased by a British national, everyone familiar with the trade was well aware that condemned ships sent back to Brazil fared much the same as their captains—they continued to go about their business. (Namely, enslavement.) It was also clear that this had been the Hope. Savage, protesting mightily to anyone who might listen, even had the unmitigated gall to make the connection explicit, likely referring to the now Esperanza as the Hope in letters in an effort to distance the vessel from its extraordinarily recent slaving past. (It may not have helped his argument to remind everyone that his new purchase had been a tender of the Royal Navy that had, with alacrity, found itself back on the wrong side of the law and history.) He wasn’t hiring an (almost) exclusively Brazilian crew to staff a slaver, of course not, he just wanted to help “to take away the whole of the Brazilians from this Place, under an expressed and written direction from the Brazilian Ambassador to myself, to do all in my power on behalf of their Subjects, until the arrival of a more authenticated Personage.” In these letters, Savage, the picture of innocence and cooperation, swore he would be happy to “make any concession” to satisfy Turner’s suspicions (which Savage implied were manifestly unreasonable) and thereby expedite the Hope/Esperanza/Hope’s departure… except for giving up its armament, which Savage contended would simply be too difficult and potentially deleterious to the vessel to remove. Not content to merely blow smoke, Savage ended his June addressing complaints to both the lieutenant governor of Sierra Leone (via his private secretary, Lieutenant Maclean) and Collier’s own prize agent in Sierra Leone, the Honorable Kenneth Macaulay, asking the latter to intervene “as a particular favor” since “as Agent to Commodore Collier, [his] opinion must have great weight with Lieutenant Turner.”
An agent in this case meant prize agent, and men like Macaulay acted on behalf of naval personnel to make arrangements for the sale and disposition of prize ships, as well as their gear and any licit cargo that may have been on board, and became ridiculously rich on a percentage of the profit. Given that the Black Joke’s prizes were, in effect, the Sybille’s prizes, Kenneth Macaulay—who was not just an agent at the firm Macaulay and Babington (not the named partner, that was his cousin, famous abolitionist and previous colonial administrator Zachary Macaulay), but also one of Freetown’s most prominent businessmen and public citizens—was the prize agent for both Collier and Turner in Sierra Leone. Accordingly, he stepped in to help Turner get the matter settled, brokering a meeting between Turner and Savage the morning of June 30 at Macaulay’s residence, just one day after he’d received Savage’s note. It would turn out to be a good thing for Turner that Macaulay had taken such active involvement. Sometime between June 30 and July 1, most likely at that very meeting, it seems that a portion of the Hope/Esperanza/Hope’s documentation as a former slaver was provided to Turner; Turner, in turn, was to redeposit this paperwork with Henry Rishton, the acting colonial secretary of Sierra Leone, on July 1, which he did. The next day, Rishton fired off a letter to Macaulay, in which he accused Turner of only returning a portion of what he’d been given, adding that what had been returned was so “mutilated” that Rishton couldn’t possibly tender the documents to the lieutenant governor in their “present state”; perhaps, at least, Macaulay had the missing papers? Collier’s agent wasted no time nipping this accusation of impropriety at the root:
Neither myself, nor any connected with the “Sybille,” or “Black Joke,” have any of the “Hope’s” Papers in our possession. To the very extraordinary charge you bring against Lieutenant Turner, I beg leave to give the most unqualified denial; the 2 Licences alluded to were delivered to Lieutenant Turner, in my presence, in the very same state and condition they were forwarded to you. He did not “mutilate” them, neither did he take the Bill of Sale, and the other Documents away.
The crux of the issue was money. Even if Turner knew he wasn’t wrong about Savage’s plans for the Hope/Esperanza/Hope, he couldn’t afford the risk of standing his ground on a charge of “illegal navigation” without Collier present to back him, both administratively and financially, in the event Savage sued for recompense and won. So the lieutenant, under intense pressure as Savage called in favors around town, felt obliged to compromise. In order to leave Freetown’s harbor, Turner had Savage sign two documents, oaths assuring the reader and posterity that he was the owner of the Hope, as opposed to a middleman laundering a dirty ship; that he was willingly surrendering the ship’s previous papers from its return to slave trading, “so professing to give to the said Schooner ‘Hope’ a British character,” which is to say change the national identity of the ship to English, with the attendant regulations vis-à-vis the slave trade that would accompany such an affiliation; and that he would also dismantle and store any guns on board and give up the Hope’s gun carriages (how the guns were mounted to the ship) entirely. Perhaps most important to Turner, Savage further agreed to indemnify Turner and any of his men from actions they had already taken to prevent his departure, as well as release any claim he might have against Turner or Collier, their heirs and assigns, etc., for the detention of the schooner in the harbor and any expenses related to both that and the compromises agreed upon to secure the Hope’s release. Answering the question of fiscal responsibility for mistakes prompted by Black Joke’s previous encounter with Providencia, it’s clear from this incident that the commodore would be jointly liable if his tender’s captain erred in judgment, and the cost of restitution could be steep enough to bankrupt those Royal Navy officers whose eagerness outstripped their personal pocketbooks. So Turner, reluctant to the last but out of options, was forced to let the Hope sail. One can only imagine his misgivings—and annoyance—as he watched the ship disappear, once again, from Freetown’s harbor to Brazil’s distant shores. The reality of service on the coast was discouraging, as circumstances constantly conspired against success, and efficiently doing one’s duty for king, country, and, depending on one’s sentiments, the literal soul of humanity—for such was the rhetoric back in abolitionist circles in England—was unreasonably difficult.
Which ultimately brings the tale back to Collier’s letter to his superiors in December of 1828. The commodore shared his protégé’s frustration, and more, because now Collier could say with certainty that Turner had been smart, appropriately reactive, and, above all, absolutely correct back in early July when he’d claimed the Esperanza/Hope was headed back to the slave trade, and further, that this problem, writ large, would continue to make the Squadron’s mission on the coast nigh impossible. That fall, the Esperanza—for Collier refused to even dignify Savage’s previous dissemblance by using the name Hope—had, sure enough, been spotted once again in the Bight of Benin, just come from Ajuda and loaded with “upwards of 300” enslaved people, a scant three months after the practical realities of Admiralty policy had effectively forced Turner to either let the ship go or risk penury. Including a signed affidavit from a witness who would swear to seeing the Esperanza filled with the enslaved in October, Collier begged the Admiralty to, at the least, seek cases against Savage, Brockington, and men like them as British nationals participating in the slave trade, and one gets the distinct impression that Collier would have had no problem with the notion of shipping all such facilitators to Australia on the first available boat. Though the commodore’s letter and the evidence he included were duly passed up the chain from the Admiralty to the Foreign Office, there’s no evidence that any specific punishments came of Collier’s efforts.
Again one wonders why the Royal Navy itself refused to commit to purchasing tenders. A fleet of repurposed slavers would have been a cheap and effective way to increase the size of the Squadron, and the navy’s representatives in the field—or in this case, at sea—like Bullen and Collier, could clearly see that such supplementation was necessary if the Admiralty intended to keep the West Africa Squadron to six to eight official navy vessels. However, counterintuitive though it may seem, the custom at the time was to allow officers to purchase ships for use in the Royal Navy’s service, retain a portion of the profits derived from those vessels if they captured prizes, and wash their hands of whatever happened next, including the disposition of those ships once an officer left his service on the coast. The Royal Navy was so reluctant to spend its own funds that captains even had to pay for the expenditures (such as supplies) generated by the transport of a prize back to Freetown when they initially captured it! Only if officers had the economic wherewithal and a requisite need might they buy that prize themselves. This itch was not, or at least not always, merely a question of creating a stronger fighting force. Some in the WAS—like Captain William Fitzwilliam Owen, administrator of the outpost at Fernando Pó—were discovering, first, that the acquisition of prizes could be a lucrative sideline and, second, that the most expedient way to catch some slavers was to buy one.
This language of “prizes” was not a purposeful distancing mechanism—ships captured under similar circumstances, whether in war or peace, had been called prizes long before suppression followed oppression to Africa. What is obscured by this shorthand, though, is that in the Squadron, the most lucrative and desirable of prizes could be more accurately described as dozens to hundreds of terrified people in straits beyond dire and the suffocating, disease-ridden hell in which they suffered and often died—and not just at the hands of slavers. The Royal Navy’s own disciplinary system was, in this era, no stranger to the whip; it’s entirely unsurprising, if still horrifying, that there are accounts of prize crews resorting to such means on the very people they were sailing to “liberate.” Prize crews might also, in the name of order on deck, attempt to shove all of the enslaved back into the claustrophobic pit they’d just escaped, resorting to violence if the crews felt it warranted. Sexual assault of enslaved women (as no one was officially liberated until the ship was actually condemned by a Mixed Commission) was sufficiently common that one officer suggested the level of “impropriety” as a rationale for a policy cutting or denying prize crews their daily allotment of alcohol as prescribed by the Victualling Board. To be captured by the Royal Navy was almost certainly better than the alternative—how much better is an entire discussion unto itself—but that truth can’t absolve its sailors of any crimes against humanity they committed against those they ostensibly sought to free.
Though sometimes the enslaved might have had a difficult time differentiating between the behaviors of the slavers and the Squadron, the far more universal problem was neglect. Prize duty created a lot of work for Royal Navy seamen on board both the victor and the captured vessel—both would be operated shorthanded for the duration of the prize ship’s trip to adjudication in Freetown, and on the prize ship, the crew also had to feed and provide rudimentary medical care to the enslaved and the slaver’s crew, combat the illnesses that were more prevalent on slaving ships, and ensure that the crew of the slave trader didn’t connive a way to retake the ship, a not infrequent occurrence. It wasn’t remotely unheard of that prize crews and the ships they sailed simply disappeared, and whether these disappearances were due to insurrection from the captured crew, an uprising of the enslaved on board, or severe weather such as tornadoes at sea might never be discovered. If the slaver actually arrived in Sierra Leone, it still had to face judgment, by no means certain, that the ship had been legally detained—only then could a prize earn back the direct and indirect costs of capturing it and bringing it to court. What made the expense, labor, and potential pitfalls worth it—especially if a sailor was not particularly devoted to the cause of abolition—was the opportunity to substantially supplement his income from the Royal Navy. It was rare, but a particularly valuable prize could be economically life-changing for those who’d helped capture it. The sources of that money were one-quarter of the proceeds from the recovery and sale of the ship and its contents (or “salvage”), and a £10 per person flat rate the WAS ship collectively received as a bounty for each enslaved person recovered and liberated (or “head money”). Though this rate per head was actually much lower than the scale the suppression effort had begun with—£60 per man, £30 per woman, £10 per child had proved unsustainable by 1824—and would drop again to £5 per enslaved person in 1830, between money and the comparative ease of condemnation, it’s clear why ships with human cargo on board were an ideal prize, no matter the risk.
That’s, of course, presuming that the men could get the money to which their work entitled them. Agents like Macaulay were necessary precisely because, having gone through the harrowing process of getting a prize to the Mixed Commission, sailors in the Royal Navy still had to plead, cajole, berate, and provide ample paperwork before the Treasury would actually dispense prize money. Adding insult to serious annoyance, if an officer who owned a tender (and only officers could afford such an expense) left service on the coast for the shores of England, the expense of transporting any purchased ships back to England remained with the man who bought it, no matter how much valuable service the vessel had provided. Since this was not often believed an endeavor worth the cost to even those who could afford to buy such a ship, these repurposed slavers were most frequently put back up for auction. And though restrictions were supposedly in place as to who could purchase them, slave traders in the Americas found it farcically easy to entice an entirely different breed of agents, friendly to slavers, to act as fronts and get ships back to Brazil, where they could be repaired, renamed, issued a new passport, and sailed right back out to enslave once more. Men such as Brockington and Savage earned their money as temporary owners at best—their real job was to funnel vessels lost to the slave trade right back into it, thereby erasing much of what suppression was meant to accomplish. Stories like the Vengador’s surely made many leery of using and maintaining tenders that could well become slavers once again—it was a scandal waiting to happen, and Collier’s letter could not be entirely ignored… but it could be put aside. The commodore had bitterly complained in 1828, yet meaningful orders requiring that any ships purchased for the service had to be sold to the Royal Navy or scuttled would not arrive until the mid-1830s, and it would be even longer before the Admiralty disavowed the practice of allowing officers to buy tenders at all, ensuring all ship purchases and dispositions went through official channels. In the interim, for Collier’s entire command of the WAS, not only was this loophole wide open, but the enterprising slaver could, via proxy, even purchase slave-trading vessels via Lloyd’s of London (a particularly popular option from a prize-money perspective), a body that still exists today as an insurance underwriter (and which has apparently only just begun to grapple with its intimate ties to the slave-trading industry). Clearly, a variety of economic considerations, from international trade agreements to the disposition of secondhand ships, contributed to the perception that ending the slave trade might be a Sisyphean task.
Unfortunately for the commodore, back when the Black Joke made its quick capture of the Vengador in 1828, this recycling of slaving vessels wasn’t even close to Collier’s most pressing problem. At present, WAS ships resupplied in Freetown, though plans constantly seemed to be percolating to move that depot to Fernando Pó, where opponents to the mission and/or very existence of Sierra Leone had been advocating it be put for years now. On May 13, back when Sybille first brought the Esperanza into Freetown, the commodore found the WAS ships Primrose, Clinker, and Plumper docked and aimlessly waiting in the harbor. This was not entirely unusual for Plumper, which had a defective copper bottom and an arguably even more wanting captain—one who’d supposedly been put to pasture over a decade previous, replete with a note from the Admiralty to never give him a ship again (so either powerful friends or one hell of an administrative error there)—but Primrose, a ship-sloop under Captain Griffenhoofe, was the most successful nontender in the entire Squadron. What’s more, they’d all seemed to have been there for a while. The captains, far from neglecting their duties, informed Collier that the supply chain had fallen apart… somewhere, and the WAS stores onshore were empty—no one could safely leave until they resupplied, meaning every WAS ship that sailed into the harbor was stuck in Freetown until the problem was resolved. Collier couldn’t have been happy to then see the North Star sail into the harbor two weeks later—this meant that every single Squadron vessel but for Black Joke was effectively trapped in Sierra Leone.
One might think that such an event might incline Collier to favor a move to Fernando Pó, which maintained a brisk trade with the metropole in its own right due to extensive lumber exports and had the support of a vocal contingent back in England, but pretty much no one in Freetown wanted the change, the commodore very much included. That island had its own potential deficits, not the least of which being that Captain Owen, who ran the settlement there, was the closest thing Collier had to a nemesis on the coast and had been the same to Bullen before Collier. As such, the commodore was extremely disinclined to go that route unless forced to by command. (And the feeling between the two men was entirely mutual, though Owen would have welcomed the traffic.) So the Black Joke was, for close to a month, the only Squadron ship on the entire coast doing any patrolling whatsoever. (Captain Owen had his own tenders that also remained active, but since he was acting way beyond his orders from the Admiralty in doing so, they were not actually part of the West Africa Squadron.) Once the supply chain issue was resolved, the Sybille, eager to get back out to sea, had departed by the time Turner arrived with the Vengador to a port now empty of Squadron ships, just in time to try to stop Esperanza/Hope from heading back to Brazil. But Collier, frustrating though he would find it six months later, had just left, and since there was nothing Turner could do once it was decided to let Savage proceed, the Black Joke took advantage of the (finally) refilled stores and also headed back out to cruise. The crew could not have known that their string of relatively easy and mostly bloodless victories was about to come to an end.
It was close to two months later, on an afternoon in late August, when the Black Joke, on orders to deliver messages to the Primrose and take a gander at what folks might be getting up to near Ouidah, sighted a suspicious brig and two schooners near “Whydah Roads.” By this time, rumors of the Black Joke’s legendary speed and exploits had spread among slave traders, and Turner, attempting to stay as incognito as possible, was flying a Brazilian flag. Still, he must’ve wondered if his disguise might be working slightly too well when the three ships, far from avoiding an encounter, weighed anchor and sailed straight for him—the larger schooner heavily armed and clearly signaling the others as they came. Figuring out whether these were slavers, pirates, or something else entirely—and with it, what their intent and next move might be—became more and more pressing as the leading ship closed. Of course, for the purposes of the law, there was no difference. Pirates were not as plentiful as they had been throughout the previous two centuries, but were part of the upsurge in dangerous maritime activity that occurred when the slave trade became an illegal market. Piratical activity, on the other hand, had exploded due to a legal shift, as earlier in the 1820s, both Britain and the United States had opted to erase the legal distinction between slave trading and piracy. (As the disposition of Vengador, Esperanza, and other slaving crews demonstrated, a de facto difference—particularly in punishment and sentencing if caught—nonetheless remained.) Obviously both (now) operated illegally on water, but one reason for the change was more particular—since most pirates didn’t discriminate between profiting from the seizure of inanimate goods and living people in bondage, all it took for a pirate to become a slaver was the capture of a vessel with people, rather than goods, to seize and ultimately sell. As slave ships were some of the most valuable craft to be found at sea, the line between the pirate and the slaver was often already nonexistent.
The larger schooner was precisely one such, a notorious pirate and sometime privateer that had been wreaking havoc to such an extent that slavers likely sought to avoid both it and Black Joke in equal measure. Over the summer of 1828, the Presidente had terrorized practically everyone it had come across, flying virtually every available flag in pursuit of bounty. The two ships accompanying the large schooner, the brig Hosse and the smaller schooner Marianna, were previous victims of the pirates. The captain of the Hosse, Juan Maria Evangelista, would later testify that the Presidente had, in contriving to board his vessel, identified itself as American, but when he went aboard the Presidente to show its captain, Prouting, papers identifying both himself and his vessel as Portuguese (and thus not subject to American authority), Prouting replied, “Never mind flags; you shall keep aboard all night, and tomorrow we will see what we can do.” Based on its cargo, Evangelista was sailing a supply ship, not a slave trader, though nonetheless one owned by notorious Ouidah slaver Francisco Félix de Souza, also known as “Cha Cha,” possessed of an empire of flesh and agony so sprawling he had an entire fleet of like ships to supply the barracoons he kept stocked with the enslaved up and down the coast of western Africa. It didn’t matter. By the time Evangelista left Captain Prouting’s cabin, the entire crew of the Hosse was in shackles. Evangelista soon found himself likewise confined—though in the gun room with some freedom of movement about the ship, rather than in irons, as befitting his station as a captain. That had been August 26. On the twenty-seventh, around 2:00 p.m., hearing someone shout, “A vessel in sight!,” Evangelista made his way above deck on the Presidente; though he was quickly hurried back down to the gun room, he did later see the Presidente hoist a French flag, though he’d seen it flying the flag of Buenos Aires that very morning (not to mention the Stars and Stripes the day before).
Commander Turner, now that his promotion was approaching six weeks official, caught little of this initial action because, though it had been seen, the Black Joke hadn’t sighted the Presidente in return until 4:00 p.m., and when, an hour later, the unidentified ship closed to a distance of half a gunshot, it flew no identifying colors at all. Making sail and tacking back inshore, the Presidente hoisted a French flag—this was the moment Evangelista caught. Turner mirrored the probably-not-French ship’s movements until, after an hour and a half, Prouting tired of the charade—he’d decided the Black Joke was definitely Brazilian, and, what’s more, quite possibly a supply ship loaded with gold bullion, bound for Gibraltar and rumored to be in the vicinity. From its position on the little brig’s lee quarter, the Presidente let off a shot and switched its flag to that of Spain. Turner, assuming the Black Joke had already been recognized, struck the Brazilian flag and raised British colors, setting his sails to make moves. The Presidente fired again, this time joined by the two ships still trailing it, but the Black Joke, unfazed, pressed closer, then closer still, now a pistol shot away, then half that. Close enough to talk, or at least trumpet, Turner called, “Schooner, ahoy!” and attempted to hail the lead ship once, twice, thrice. He wouldn’t get a fourth chance.
The only answer the Black Joke’s hails got was a massive broadside from all seven of the Presidente’s guns. Whether Prouting genuinely initially believed the Black Joke’s British flag to be yet another ruse was a legal question to be answered another day, but he, and several other crew members of the Presidente, were irrefutably British nationals and so fully subject to the jurisdiction of the empire (as represented by the Black Joke) whether they were pirates or slavers or hapless souls who had, all unwittingly, just fired on one of His Majesty’s ships. Evangelista tried to point this out; he’d been allowed to briefly observe the initial chase, and though night had closed in fast, the moon was bright, and the Portuguese captain was quite familiar with the ships that sailed this coast. Evangelista knew that was the Black Joke, which he mentioned to the sailor who’d been guarding him in the gun room, and as the message worked its way to the captain, dread and deadly commitment followed. Attacking a Royal Navy ship as a British national was treason; the penalty, death by hanging. And the damage had already been done. Far from changing Prouting’s mind, the unwelcome news Evangelista bore meant there was no turning back. “I don’t care a curse!” the doomed pirate captain cried. “As soon as they come near me, I’ll fight them like hell!” Shouts of assent rose up from the deck, another sailor rallying his fellows with “Never mind flags[!] Everybody I find on the coast I shall rob! We’ll try to take that brig because she has a great deal of money!” Prouting agreed, “She is a damned fine brig, has but one gun, will do very well for us, and I must have her.”
The Presidente was wrong in one crucial respect—though still outmanned and outpowered, the Black Joke now had two guns and returned the broadside. Collier had, just days before, given the Black Joke a twelve-pounder carronade from Sybille’s own launch, now mounted on a traversing carriage and ready to make things a bit more lively. Still, three opponents to one weren’t good odds, even for a ship and crew of the Black Joke’s caliber, especially given that the Presidente was heavily armed with seven guns, had two additional vessels and their armament as support, and boasted a crew that was noticeably experienced at taking ships. It was also clear that, of the piratical cohort, the Presidente was the fastest—and this gave Turner an idea. Even as the other ships closed to assist, the Black Jokes applied every bit of skill they had to maneuver the tender the hell away from the immediate danger of being that close to a ship full of pirates. Slipping free, Black Joke stood off, keeping its distance, and Prouting gave chase. Through the evening, Turner and his crew ran, fighting to stay just out of range and returning fire high, hoping to hit the Presidente’s sails or masts, while pushing the two support ships off the pace.
Soon the fighting slowed, then stopped altogether. Hours passed, and as the sound of cannons ceased and the moon rose ever higher, Turner steadily drew Prouting farther and farther from his other ships. And then finally, close to midnight, it happened. Presidente had appeared on the Black Joke’s weather quarter, and it was all alone—not another sail in sight. This was the moment the Black Jokes had sailed hours to reach. As the call of beating drums brought nearly the brig’s entire complement on deck, Turner tacked the ship, bringing the Black Joke into close quarters, but the Presidente was as practiced as he’d feared, and for over an hour, the two ships circled, neither able to get quite close enough to board the other, and both seemingly running out of time. Prouting broke first, setting all of the schooner’s sails to run, likely with the hopes of reconvening with his other ships quickly enough to turn about once more and bring their full power to bear on the little brig. Now it was the Black Joke’s turn to give chase, and as the brig poured on every ounce of speed it had, it became clear which vessel the slavers should truly fear to come across. The Presidente’s crew was admittedly ruthless, willing to murder every enemy on board if it was expedient. But before anyone could get killed, they’d have to get caught, and here Black Joke excelled.
It was past four in the morning, a full twelve hours since the Black Joke had sighted the Presidente, when the navy ship finally caught up to the pirate, and though he could see the sails of his support in the distance, Prouting knew he had to make a stand. Rounding on the Black Joke, Prouting sent off another broadside, which was returned and then some. One suspects it was now Turner and the Black Jokes who were impatient with this fight—surely tired, and there was still a boarding to accomplish—and their cannons bore that out, as they stuffed each gun almost to the brim with every variety of ammunition they had to hand, lined up with muskets, successfully ran alongside the Presidente, and fired everything they could at it all at once. Making a daring move, Turner pressed his advantage and immediately ordered nearly everyone to board the Presidente, leaving only three sailors on the Black Joke, two of them boys and one with his hands full minding the suddenly empty ship. Despite the fact that both vessels were sailing at over seven knots—roughly eight miles per hour—over shark-infested ocean, the Black Jokes made the leap over the Presidente’s low rail with cutlasses at the ready, throwing themselves at men with nothing to lose armed to greet them with pikes, battle-axes, and the sailor’s swords known as hangers. One last shot of the guns had accompanied the crew of the Black Joke in their fearsome rush to the opposite deck, and it was a beauty. The Presidente’s boom shattered from the impact, its rigging cut and sails crashing to the deck, killing the sailor at its wheel. In the confusion, Prouting, desperate, called an order to fire the long guns into the oncoming horde, but his last order made little difference; in the short, pitched fight that ensued, he died, along with at least five of his men, for a total of over thirty wounded or killed.
The Presidente’s crew surrendered once Prouting died, but the Black Joke had suffered its first battle casualty: the gunner’s mate had been killed in the rush of boarding. Though the Presidente had no enslaved on board and was clearly not in the area to purchase its own enslaved, having much preferred to take someone else’s ill-gotten trade, the loss was not entirely in vain. Upon searching Prouting’s cabin, Turner discovered a logbook of secret codes employed by pirates throughout the area, and when the Hosse finally did catch up the next morning, having missed the battle entirely—the other ship, Marianna, was nowhere to be found—Turner used these codes to signal them from the pirate ship’s deck, as if the Presidente, if worse for the wear, had won the day. Trusting the signals, the pirate crew holding the Hosse closed to the battered Presidente, and the Black Joke made easy work of reuniting Evangelista with his ship.
And then, as was the way of service on the coast, things got complicated. The Presidente was a pirate ship flying the flag of Buenos Aires (and everywhere else) with a mostly British and American crew, while the Hosse was a slaver supply ship with a Portuguese captain and Portuguese papers, owned by a resident slave trader known to supply Bahia, and the third (still-missing) ship might not have been a slave trader per se, either, and was reputedly Spanish to boot. The Presidente, barely seaworthy, was wrecked on its voyage to Freetown, though the entire prize crew of Black Jokes survived; the British crew members of Presidente, at least, would be on their way to England to be tried as pirates in criminal court at the Surrey County Sessions House on Horsemonger Lane. The Hosse was also taken back to Freetown for adjudication, and though it didn’t precisely qualify as a slaver, it was deemed a Portuguese ship taken by pirates, so the Black Joke was credited with rescuing it and awarded salvage. The crew of the Hosse was equally free to go back to supplying slavers, but for Captain Evangelista—he would instead be taking the trip back to England as a court witness to testify against the surviving members of the Presidente’s crew. He and the alleged pirates would be traveling on Collier’s least favorite ship, Plumper, undeniably too worn-out to continue in the Squadron and finally being sent back home for an overhaul. And they would have one more, unexpected, traveling companion—Commander Turner, also acting as a witness at the trial back in England, would join the motley assemblage headed back to get their day in court. But before leaving, while Presidente was breaking up and as its prize crew and captives made their way to Freetown, where the disposition of Hosse would be determined, William Turner, ever the overachiever, would take one more ship at the helm of the Black Joke. Because complications were the way of things in the WAS, he wouldn’t get any recognition for it.
It was the Primrose, not Sybille, as represented by the Black Joke, that would be credited with what was arguably Turner’s last capture, but determining who was ultimately responsible for bringing in the Zepherina, and as a result how the prize money should be apportioned, resulted in a case that went all the way to the High Court of the Admiralty. The morning of September 14, thirty miles south of Lagos, lookouts on Primrose sighted what appeared to be a laden slave ship bound for Brazil. Accordingly, Captain Griffenhoofe ordered pursuit. While Primrose was probably the fastest and most nimble of the nontenders—certainly, during Collier’s tenure, the most successful—it had not been designed primarily for speed, and it showed; though ably handled, and despite the best efforts of the crew over the course of the next six hours, the Squadron ship just couldn’t manage the necessary knots to catch the slaver as it sped ever closer to the equator. Enter the Black Joke, quite literally. At three in the afternoon, Turner and his crew appeared on the horizon heading in the opposite direction, and quick on the uptake as usual, the little brig immediately joined the chase. At this point, the Zepherina had to decide which ship it had the best chance against, and the captain changed course, heading toward the Primrose. By 6:00 p.m., the Black Joke had effectively herded the slaver to within a half mile of Primrose, and Griffenhoofe seized the moment and fired. As a consequence, one imagines, of having just been shot at, Zepherina struck its colors and surrendered to the Primrose. Both Royal Navy vessels then approached, both boarded the slaver, and both contributed members to the prize crew that brought the ship and its enslaved cargo to Freetown.
So why not share the credit, and with it the bounty, equally? Given the way the chase had been going, there was no dispute that, had the Black Joke not arrived and had Turner not reacted as quickly as he did, the Primrose might never have caught Zepherina. There was even an established rule for just such a scenario:
…[The] Order in Council of the 30th of June 1827, for the distribution of such captures […] directs, “that all rewards for arrests and seizures made by tenders employed by the order of the Lord High Admiral, or of the commissioners for executing that office for the time being, or by boats or officers belonging to and detached from H.M. ships and vessels, are to be shared by the officers and men of the ship or vessel to which such boats or officers belong, in the same manner as if the seizure was made by the said ship or vessel.”
The problems, as the court saw them, were twofold. First, the Black Joke wasn’t the “actual captor” of the Zepherina. Primrose saw the slaver first, Primrose spent more time (as in, all day) chasing it, Primrose fired the only shots, and the slaver surrendered to the Primrose. At best, the Black Joke had been a “joint captor,” never mind the fact, which the court admitted, that had the tender not appeared, the Zepherina might well have sailed free and cleared the equator to waters in which the Squadron had no jurisdiction. Second, the Black Joke wasn’t actually the Sybille, no matter how well recognized and deeply entrenched the legal fiction. The practical support the ships could have offered the Primrose, had the situation become sticky, was very different—what the Black Joke lacked in armament was compensated for by its speed and handling, while the bigger, slower Sybille had more guns than the Black Joke could ever hope to fit on its comparatively tiny deck. Prize money in joint captures was apportioned by the amount of “force” each ship contributed to the seizure. While being fast enough to compel the Zepherina to change course had been vital, it wasn’t exactly what the framers of the order had had in mind. By this reasoning, the Black Joke should receive only a tiny portion of the bounty relative to the force it contributed to the capture. The court sympathized; since the Black Joke was a tender, even that comparatively paltry sum had to be distributed among the entire crew of the Sybille as well, and the opinion expressed the hope that there might be “some reciprocity between parties so detached” that could mitigate the disproportionate balance in the awarding of prize money. But the decision stood. The Primrose would remain the captor of record.
This anticlimactic capture would be both William Turner’s and Edward Lyne Harvey’s last on the Black Joke. Collier had acquired more tenders, and the now Lieutenant Harvey got a command of his own aboard the Paul Pry. Two months after the capture of the Zepherina, in November 1828, Commander William Turner transferred his life-changing brig to its new captain, Lieutenant Henry Downes. That accomplished, Turner boarded the Plumper for England and the trial of the pirates of the Presidente, and there he would be presented with the sword that Collier, on behalf of the entire crew of the Sybille, had gotten him in recognition of his exceptional work throughout 1828. The frigate had a lot to thank him for. On Turner’s watch, the Black Joke had been responsible for more seizures, officially or unofficially, than any other vessel in the Squadron. The commander returned home responsible for the liberation of between approximately nine hundred and over sixteen hundred people, and due to the vagaries of Royal Navy assignments, there was no guarantee that he’d be back. It may not have helped that Turner had made enemies, too, among the slavers and their agents in Freetown. While he was gone, they got to work.
