CHAPTER SIX
Carolina
March 1829,
420 enslaved people
Once again, promotions rained down on the crew of the Black Joke. Lieutenant Downes achieved the rank of commander after having been a lieutenant for almost two decades. Butterfield and Slade, mates both, had already been slated for a promotion, and Thomas Le Hardy, who’d been wounded in the fight, would now join them as a lieutenant. There was more good news. After the long drought that had preceded the dramatic capture, the crew of the Black Joke stayed busy throughout the spring of 1829. While promotions were lovely and the conflict with El Almirante the stuff of legends and eventual paintings, those aboard the tender were surely relieved when the Black Joke managed one of its few uneventful captures, that of the Brazilian brigantine Carolina in the first week of March. The Black Joke encountered the Carolina less than a hundred miles from Lagos with a hold full of the enslaved, and the captain, João dos Santos, indicated that he had embarked those enslaved in Lagos, which violated extant treaty obligations. Taking the captain at his word, the Black Joke claimed the slaving ship as a prize, and for the Carolina it was off to Sierra Leone and a date with the Mixed Commission. But things were rarely easy and never simple on the coast of Africa for any ship in the WAS, and certainly not for the Black Joke. Captain dos Santos still had a few tricks in reserve, and though they wouldn’t cost lives on Black Joke, his machinations would certainly cause the kind of headaches back in Freetown that tended to be contagious to London.
Upon his arrival, dos Santos, along with the Carolina’s cook, went through the usual proceedings, admitting that the vessel was owned by João Alvez da Silva Porta, a Brazilian slave merchant, and the enslaved were his purchases. The plot twist occurred when both suddenly swore that they had picked up their human cargo in Molembo, and for a buyer in Rio. Beyond the fact that lying about where they’d been and where they were going was endemic to slave traders, there didn’t seem to be much reason for this at first—the Carolina had been found near Lagos, and the captain, when pressed after he’d been boarded, said the enslaved had come from Lagos, not Molembo, and he was going to Bahia, not Rio. Compounding the evidence, the passport dos Santos had for the Carolina was a regular commercial, rather than slaving, Brazilian passport, and it listed his destination as Onim… which was another name for Lagos. When questioned again by the Mixed Commission, the captain and the cook finally capitulated, admitting that, yes, as dos Santos had first revealed, he’d purchased and boarded the enslaved from Lagos. The Mixed Commission expressed some tsk-tsking at, it seemed, the particularly egregious and wholly unnecessary lies from dos Santos, and noting that they were not born the previous day, the commissioners summarily condemned the Carolina.
No one cared about the deception, least of all the commissioners, who, when detailing the peculiarities of the case, dismissed it out of hand, writing of dos Santos that the “perjury thus exhibited is now, we are sorry to say, become too notorious a practice to require any more particular notice from us.” What did require special attention was Carolina’s authentic commercial passport—it was going to be a problem, and a big one. Seeking to impress upon the Admiralty back in London the depth of its concern, the Mixed Commission added to its normal summation of adjudication an alarmed letter, which read in part:
…[In] this Case, proof of a new system of fraud not hitherto generally followed, but which, we have little doubt, will now be universally adopted. We allude to the abandonment by Slavers of the regular Slave Passport, and the providing themselves with simple Commercial ones. A number of Letters found on board this Vessel, all speak of the Writer sending so many Slaves to this and that person, in return for such and such goods; thus fully establishing the fact, that the “Carolina” was from the very first, destined for the Slave-trade, yet the Authorities at Rio de Janeiro scrupled not to grant her a Commercial Passport, which, had the Slaves not actually been found on board, would have screened her from Capture, and she would, on her arrival in the Brazils, have reported herself as from Molembo.
The Carolina, captured though it had been, was frightening because it represented an evolution in the evasive tactics being used by slave traders, one being enacted with the blatant assistance of the highest levels of government in Brazil. The officials responsible for granting the passports all merchants departing from Rio carried knew well what strictures the Anglo-Brazilian treaty contained; Brazilian officials had been seeking ways around them for years and had tried everything from issuing double passports to slave ships, to perhaps pointedly suggesting Brazil adopt an “apprenticeship” system akin to Britain’s setup between Sierra Leone and the West Indies, to insisting all judgments against Brazilian slavers in which a Brazilian commissioner had not heard the case be vacated. (A particularly ludicrous demand given that Brazil had not managed to actually send a judge to the Mixed Commission until this very year, 1828, and wouldn’t have minded if its refusal to participate provided legal standing to invalidate the entire operation.) Given that this last dodge had been attempted by both the Brazilian Foreign Ministry and Judge Joseph de Paiva, the very commissioner (finally) appointed to serve in Sierra Leone, tacit, if not explicit, coordination between slave traders and members of the Brazilian government was entirely expected. British officials seemed to react to this with a hapless shrug—spurious complaints resting on improbable legal theories and questionable treaty interpretations were just a thing Brazil did vis-à-vis the slave trade, and it wasn’t as if Britain was inclined to heed the objections of other nations, legitimate or no, if it didn’t have to.
However, the fact that the Carolina’s commercial passport had been authentic meant that Brazilian slave traders were attempting an entirely new technique to evade their treaty obligations, and the Mixed Commission was concerned that the powers that be in Brazil had finally hit upon a genuine loophole, one large enough to sail tens of thousands of Africans a year through. Since a slaving passport unmistakably identified the business of the ship, it had, up until now, been a relatively simple matter for the captains of the WAS and the judges of the Mixed Commission to ascertain whether a slave trader was where it was meant to be—if caught above the equator as a slaver from Spain, Portugal, or Brazil, that almost certainly meant a trip to court and, with it, the potential condemnation of one’s vessel. With an official commercial passport, the type given to merchants who weren’t slavers (which had been issued by some European governments since at least the seventeenth century), it would be impossible to tell whether a ship was or wasn’t meant to be doing business above the equator unless it had enslaved on board, meaning the only way to prove illicit intent was to, as with the Carolina, catch someone red-handed and full-berthed. And the existence of such passports, procured through official channels, meant that, at best, officials in Salvador, Brazil, were ignorant of slave traders’ lies or, at worst (and far more likely), complicit in them.
The “illegal passport” rationale had itself been a work-around of a sort, perpetrated by British officials; while a ship still couldn’t be detained for having the requisite equipment for slaving without recently purchased enslaved people physically present, it could be detained for being in the wrong place with the wrong passport, even if the hold was just as empty. This had been one of the most effective ways of getting around the lack of equipment clauses in antislavery treaties, and neither the judges nor the Squadron was interested in losing what few advantages they had. With that aim in mind, the Mixed Commission floated a possible response to the incipient crisis in the text of its judgment of Carolina—and to the modern eye, it’s absurdly obvious:
After this, and some of the late instances before them, [the judges of the commission] cannot but feel that their decisions must be formed, on the circumstantial Evidence of the Case, rather than on the Testimony of the Parties interested, to which no credit can be given beyond what it may otherwise receive from such Evidence.
That it took until 1829 for someone to say, in all seriousness, that perhaps the slave traders themselves were not a reliable source of evidence and that only those statements that could be corroborated could be relied upon is, frankly, shocking. Clearly, incredible profits, professional reputations, and livelihoods were on the line for every slave trader attempting the coast—slavers had every conceivable incentive to lie as much as possible, in every manner possible, if it would get them back to Brazil or Cuba with a passel of Africans in chains. Any testimony they provided should obviously have been taken with a pillar of salt, and given that the suppression effort was already laboring under a number of external constraints, it boggles the mind that up until this point the Mixed Commission had wasted any time giving the slavers the benefit of the doubt.
Setting aside what one might consider the obvious lack of moral compass displayed by their choice of this profession—trafficking human beings into lifelong bondage—the perfidy of slave traders had already been amply demonstrated. Capturing a slave ship was no guarantee it would stay off the water—not even for a reasonable length of time, though a substantial portion of that inefficiency could be laid at the Admiralty’s door in Whitehall—because, as the histories of the Vengador and Esperanza illustrated, slave traders and their agents would go to great lengths, and tell huge lies, to keep their business operations running smoothly. And sure enough, while Black Joke was dealing with dos Santos’s dubious testimony in Freetown, the Sybille was busy picking up the Hosse… again. The Hosse had begun life as the Trajano and had first been captured and condemned as a slaver in 1827 when it was captained by, of all people, Jose Rios, most recently of the Esperanza (because when it came to slave traders on the coast in the 1820s, anything old could be new again). As was the custom, the Brazilian government had complained mightily about the Trajano’s capture, citing it as a particularly egregious case of British overreach, and had its protestations ignored. As was also the custom, the Trajano was sold at public auction after condemnation by the Mixed Commission, changing hands twice before it reached the private fleet of Francisco Félix de Souza (Cha Cha), who renamed the ship the Hosse and procured for it legitimate Portuguese papers. Cha Cha was deploying it as a supply vessel when it was taken by the pirate/privateer Presidente, which was almost immediately thereafter captured by the Black Joke, which was awarded salvage for the Hosse upon depositing the ship in Freetown. Andrez Fernandez, Cha Cha’s agent in Sierra Leone and one of the two buyers who’d laundered the Hosse’s ownership the first time around, dutifully got his boss’s ship back a second time. By February, now captained by Benito Torrent, the Hosse was replicating almost the exact path that had landed it in the clutches of Presidente and subsequently the Black Joke, carrying supplies such as tobacco and rum to Ouidah, and since no pirates were around to stop it, the Hosse there embarked enslaved people to transport to Bahia. This time, though, it was Torrent, not Evangelista, who had the displeasure of meeting not the tender, but its owner. Collier and the Sybille made short work of the capture and sent Hosse back to Freetown to be thrice condemned in under three years by three different WAS ships. Even El Almirante would be back on the water, slaving again, by the next year. This constant capture and recapture of slave ships, as unwelcome as the prospect clearly was to Collier and his captains, was the source of far greater problems than an annoyingly familiar case of severe déjà vu—each seizure carried real danger, a risk of dying orders of magnitude beyond that found in conflict. And the entire West Africa Squadron was about to see how much worse it could get.
It should be said, slave ships stank. In multiple accounts of interacting with slave-trading vessels, observers seemed unable to help but note the smell, near uniformly described as an unrelenting stench somewhere on the spectrum between inescapably noxious and unbearably nauseating. WAS search parties often used smell as evidence—Lieutenant Butterfield had once been barred from searching a ship by a recalcitrant Spanish captain and still reported that the prize should be boarded and taken because he could smell the presence of the enslaved on board—and the Mixed Commission had, too. It was a very particular, awful smell. Slave ships stank, everyone knew, because they were incredibly dirty. Slavers were cleaned far, far less frequently than the majority of their Preventive Squadron (or even licit merchant) counterparts, and while this was just one facet of the terrible conditions on board, it was a big one. For instance, on WAS ships, where the deck might be scrubbed every morning, seamen cleaned so much that it was legitimately feared that the self-imposed, or rather captain-imposed, damp conditions were increasing rates of rheumatism and tuberculosis in sailors. In 1824, the Royal College of Medicine—represented by sundry exasperated naval surgeons—recommended naval policy switched from wet scrubbing to dry scrubbing, and the incidence of both diseases dropped precipitously. In essence, seamen had been making themselves sick from overcleaning. A marine serving on board a naval vessel once got three hundred lashes after “pissing from his hammock upon the deck.” Cleaning was just a fundamental element of daily shipboard life in the Royal Navy, no matter where one was stationed.
Slavers were less rigorous when it came to cleaning (though not punishment, there they excelled). The upper deck where the crew congregated was generally not scrubbed daily, and the slave deck was cleaned whenever the captain happened to decide, maybe every two to three weeks, maybe not at all for the duration of the multiweek journey, other than, if the enslaved were perversely fortunate, the bare minimum of removing the especially sick and the dead from the hold. There was usually a surgeon, but reports still detailed incidents like a corpse left to rot beneath the living and bodies dead of suffocation in the hold, or lying in pools of waste from dysentery on deck, flesh rubbed off from the motion of the ship upon the waves. Where they persisted, there was no drive to improve these conditions. This was because a certain degree of loss—dead Africans—was not just expected, but specifically calculated and built into the slave trader’s estimation of the number of enslaved people that could be packed incredibly close together for weeks and still make it to the auction block in Brazil or Cuba or, hell, Jamaica (where slavery was still very much legal, despite its being a British holding). Also, certain ports were more dangerous than others; the Bight of Biafra, in particular, had the worst slave ship mortality rates of any port of embarkation in its region, though it seems doubtful anyone realized this at the time. Though there were informal networks circulating information in the form of books, pamphlets, and medical observations and findings, due to the illegal nature of the trade, medical personnel on slave ships did not have access to the same supplies and stores of knowledge as the naval surgeons stationed aboard WAS ships. And it was beyond unlikely that, absent the impetus of military regulation, something such as overcleaning would ever become a problem.
These issues, writ large, made every single slaver a potentially serious vector for disease, a ripe breeding ground for the illnesses to be found in the tropical climate (and everywhere else). Unlike the experience of indigenous peoples in the Americas and the world over, in which populations were decimated by contact with Europeans and their novel diseases, on the coast of Africa in the nineteenth century, it was the Europeans who were felled with regularity. According to one account, at Fernando Pó, which was initially meant to eventually supplant Freetown as a base of operations for both the Squadron and the Mixed Commission, “on an average […] two or three of the forty or fifty whites in the settlement die weekly, and the whole of the remainder, with few exceptions, either are, or have been ill.” In describing the island, another officer said:
…it is about forty miles in length by twelve in breadth, with a high peak rising in the centre 10,700 feet above the level of the sea, covered with vegetation nearly to the summit. This peak is visible on a clear day, in coming from the westward, for nearly 100 miles! The island is beautifully picturesque, and about sunset presents one of the grandest objects it is possible to conceive, as the chasms in the neighbourhood of the peak afford so many splendid and varying colours when the sun is far below our visible horizon; but yet, falling with his dying lustre upon these high pinnacles, every projecting fragment reflects different bright tints, which keep constantly changing as he approaches his ocean bed. It is strange that the most picturesque spots along this coast are in general the most deadly. Sierra Leone is a beautiful grave: this spot again is almost [unrivaled] for scenery, but the air is contaminated;
“—dread pestilence, with her poison’d tongue,
Lurks in each breeze.”
The gale, which you fondly court to cool your burning brow, is the breath of destruction. It has passed over the valley of death, and comes heavy with the cold damp of the charnelhouse, to woo you to his court! This island, to appearance, possesses every thing desirable for a settlement. Nature has been prolific in the extreme; fertility, plenty of water, a commodious harbour, good anchorage, abounding with fish, and a good soil capable of producing any description of vegetation, offer every inducement to the settler, and promise all that he can wish for. But the curse of Africa soon finds out the unthinking victim; and ere he can reap the seed which he has sown, Death, with his unsparing scythe, cuts the slight thread of his existence.
So the environs weren’t exactly healthy for many British sailors. However, even on the cleanest Royal Navy ships sailing in the most conducive-to-the-European-constitution waters, officers and seamen were already used to the perils of typhus, scurvy, tuberculosis, cholera, all manner of sexually transmitted infections, and smallpox, though vaccination for this last was becoming more common (for Europeans; it had already been common among populations of Africans). None of those possibilities went away with duty on the western coast of Africa, where the much-warmer and positively mosquito-ridden climate was anything but welcoming to those who’d not spent their lives, or even better, generations, building up resistance. Sailing near the equator carried the additional risk of contracting malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever, and blackwater fever, as well as, to a lesser extent, yaws (a tropical skin infection), leprosy, elephantiasis, and guinea worm. (Hepatitis was also believed to be present and impacted by season and climate, as well as water quality.) And since slavers cleaned a lot less, if one were a sailor on a slave ship or on a prize crew, one could add the risk of contracting dysentery, ulcers and additional skin diseases, and ophthalmia, an eye disease that can cause temporary or permanent blindness and had been known to leave entire ships, both enslaved and crew, blind on the water, left to stumble into harbors or simply disappear, never to be heard from again. Depression, unsurprisingly, was rampant, and suicide on slave ships was not uncommon.
So the shanty “Beware, beware, the Bight of Benin, / there’s one comes out where fifty went in”—if it does, as many scholars believe, refer to the risk of death from disease that stalked service on the coast—was an exaggeration, but less than one might imagine. That being said, up until this point, only twice in the history of the WAS had this propensity toward all manner of maladies exploded into a full-blown epidemic that ravaged the enslaved, the service, and the population of Freetown alike. Once was in 1823, just before the beginning of Bullen’s tenure as commodore. And in a piece of extremely bad luck for Sybille and Black Joke, in particular, the other was in 1829. In the average year, the West Africa Squadron might lose roughly 5 percent of its men to disease, which was plenty. In 1829, over 25 percent of the entire Squadron would succumb to a terrifying malady.
Black Joke had departed Freetown after the condemnation of Carolina on April 13, and things were fine. How the outbreak had spread in Freetown’s harbor wasn’t immediately evident, especially in the midst of a chaos of grisly death, but from the account of James Boyle, the colonial surgeon, the first case originated in Freetown on April 21, 1829, in the colonial secretary’s office. Eden arrived May 1, with diseased enslaved people on board. The next case in Freetown showed up in a man who’d just returned from a boat trip to the Scarcies River on May 4. Chief Justice John William Bannister, who’d barely been in the colony a year, was struck fourth (finally succumbing to a relapse a few months later), the eighteen-year-old apprentice of Turner’s old nemesis Savage was fifth, becoming ill May 18, the same day the Sybille prize crew arrived in the Panchita, with diseased enslaved people on board. By May 19, the sixth case in Freetown had made it to Judge Jackson’s house, and five days later, Sybille’s prize crew was dead.
Hindsight, mostly courtesy of Boyle, provides a cohesive order of events, but that Collier would have argued that the Eden was the initial source of the outbreak wasn’t just his animosity at work; there was a lot of evidence to point to Eden. The commodore’s disdain for Captain Owen, and particularly his disregard for regulations, was on record; Owen’s ship Eden was, much like its captain, unkempt by Royal Navy standards. The ship arrived between the first and second cases in Freetown. As Boyle noted after boarding, the Eden was poorly ventilated and at least an order of magnitude filthier than ships of the Squadron under Collier’s command. The Eden had also taken a slaver rife with disease, but the Eden had stopped in Fernando Pó, as was Captain Owen’s wont, before arriving in Sierra Leone in early May. (Owen did this in part so he could expand the workforce at the island settlement by, essentially, skimming people off the total number of enslaved to be liberated—or not—by the Mixed Commission in Freetown. He didn’t keep them in bondage on Fernando Pó, but they also weren’t exactly “freed” through approved channels nor given much choice in where they were now to live or how they would be employed. This was just another of the many reasons that many distrusted William Fitzwilliam Owen.) By the time the ship had dropped anchor in Freetown’s harbor, most on board were deathly ill, if not already dead. The catastrophic decimation of Eden’s crew had also laid the ship’s surgeon low, and Boyle, as the colonial surgeon, was asked to look at the conditions on the vessel and proffer treatment, an opinion on what was killing so many men, and, hopefully, what the commodore might do about it.
Collier had already been sick more than once during his service on the coast. His fit of letter writing in regard to the Vengador and Esperanza in December of 1828 had been during one such episode. The commodore, known to be a disciplinarian of the old school, undoubtedly kept a clean and well-run ship. What he couldn’t fight and did not know how to fight were the mosquitoes. Though the best minds in British medicine had not yet figured out the connection between certain illnesses and hordes of bloodsucking insects, they were aware that something about the climate of the tropics promoted disease, particularly in those not born to the West African coast. More pressing to Collier’s immediate situation, the years 1823 and 1829 had shared a near-identical weather pattern.
Since the fatal symptoms had also been much the same, Boyle, as colonial surgeon, would be the first to directly compare the weather in the two outbreak years. In 1830, as he tried to make medical sense of the carnage of the previous year, he discovered the related and anomalous weather present in 1823 and 1829. Attempting to explain and differentiate all the fevers on the coast was a major undertaking, but clearly the situation could be one of life or death, and Boyle’s resulting book-length analysis of the fevers of the West African coast revealed:
These two records present a striking coincidence, with respect to the occurrence of rains as early as the month of March. Both in 1823 and 1829, during that month, the weather was unseasonable, and it afterwards became still more so. Frequent heavy showers of rain, alternated with a hot sun, and attended by thunder, lightning, or other unusual phenomena, occurred; and it is further remarkable, that these elementary commotions happened, as nearly as can be learned, on the same dates of the different years, and sometimes even at the precise hours of the respective dates. Indeed, so extraordinary is the similarity in the weather, that it renders the fatal consequences attendant upon the two periods [reconcilable], if not to be anticipated.
Clearly, the epidemics were related, both symptomatically and seasonally, and the March rains definitely had had something to do with the major outbreaks of what Boyle referred to as “epidemic fever.” However, this was far from grasping the mode of transmission, as medical knowledge in the 1820s had yet to take many of the impressive leaps forward that would come later in the century. Boyle, for all his efforts, just couldn’t see past the climate and ultimately attributed the fevers to unseasonable rain in March, finis.
It’s hard to blame Boyle for getting it wrong in the end—almost no one had made the leap that, while tropical regions or unusual weather might readily coincide with bouts of epidemic, they did not directly transmit the disease. In this era, many doctors still propagated the idea of miasmas—bad air—as both the cause and method of transmission for any number of illnesses. This is key because Boyle’s work was probably the best available analysis the Royal Navy had on fevers on the coast during this period, and it was published after the epidemic of 1829 had passed, with as much access to all available data that a world without modern communication could provide, and the full recognition that the events of 1823 and 1829 were related. If this was among the most advanced knowledge available in 1831, with all the benefits of hindsight, when Boyle could successfully compare and contrast two seasons of virulent fever, it’s not surprising that, back in 1829, they hadn’t stood a chance.
Unwitting of the dangers presented by the weird weather in the spring of 1829, the ships of the Squadron had continued about business as usual, and though both the Eden and, indirectly, the Sybille would be floated as the possible source, in retrospect it seems obvious that the mystery fever was developing simultaneously in multiple places, seemingly independent of one another. One site was, of course, the Sybille—for Collier’s part, at the end of April, just over a month after retaking the Hosse and approximately six weeks after Boyle’s suspicious rains, Sybille would uneventfully capture the Panchita, out of Havana and captained by Felipe Romez. Despite the fact that the slaver had just embarked over two hundred enslaved people from the Calabar River, had easily been won and easily been condemned, it’s entirely possible that, if Collier could have taken back only a single decision in his entire time on the coast, it might have been the capture of this ship.
But that the commodore might have missed the warning signs was understandable. When the Sybille boarded its prize crew, sickly Africans were on board, but given the conditions on slavers, that was normal. It was also discovered that the Panchita’s captain, first mate, and doctor had already succumbed to disease. This was, perhaps, a little more unusual, but given the sheer quantity of afflictions that could be contracted off the coast, not in itself alarming. So the Sybille’s prize crew followed procedure. By May 18, the prize ship arrived in Freetown, where twenty of the diseased enslaved were immediately disembarked for care. The rest had to stay on board; the Liberated African Department was, it seems, already overcrowded with the sick and dying.
This was why Collier and some in Freetown ultimately blamed the Eden, which had arrived before Panchita, but was still in the harbor and topful of dead and dying sailors. Boyle boarded the Eden for the first time on May 17, a full day before the Panchita appeared in the harbor, meaning that whatever was decimating the crew of the former could not have come from the flagship’s prize. Here, two diseases seemed to be operating at once: one presented somewhat like malaria but killed in two to three days; the other manifested as horrific ulcers and seemed to primarily affect the Africans, but was less fatal. The latter mystery was the easier one to solve, as Boyle discovered in conversation with the few sailors on the Eden still capable of communicating. They were certain that the enslaved had not had any such ulcerous malady when the ship on which they were found had been captured and were equally convinced that the five weeks the enslaved had spent in Fernando Pó waiting for transfer to Freetown was the source of what ailed the Africans, as the mystery affliction had already been spreading rapidly throughout the island settlement before the Eden had made its brief stop.
The malaria-like illness was what genuinely concerned Boyle. Malaria transmission may not have been understood, but the usual progression of symptoms was known, and though treatment did still occasionally include some form of bloodletting, many had converted to quinine bark, which was actually effective. Only in the most serious of cases was malaria still fatal, and in even those extreme circumstances, death rarely resulted before eight to ten days of symptoms; Boyle had neither heard of nor seen a case of someone dying from malaria before the fifth or sixth day, and even that was exceedingly rare. On the Eden the men had shown almost no symptoms before they collapsed, and only a scant twenty-five members of its original crew were now even on board—the rest had either died, usually within three days, or been invalided off the ship and continued to struggle with the disease, indicating that the illness continued to spread. A quick-killing disease that appeared to be highly contagious was nightmare enough, but when Boyle learned that no one with the second illness had presented any symptoms before the vessel’s arrival in Freetown, whence the disease had come, at least in the most recent incarnation, seemed clear. Boyle could now be certain that whatever it was had rapidly been spreading through Freetown before either Panchita, Sybille, or Eden had sailed into port. Despite its grime, the Eden was less culprit and more victim—those on board had caught it from the town.
It’s not shocking that ultimately, between the ships and Freetown itself, the latter had the earliest documented cases. There were all manner of fevers one might contract; one, probably malaria, was such a common affliction in Freetown that it was known as the “Sierra Leone Fever” and contracting it was expected for newcomers and those possessed of “weak constitutions.” When the Panchita did arrive, with forty-three Africans already dead and members of the prize crew beginning to show signs of infection, the reason it had not been able to land the rest of the enslaved with the Liberated African Department was not just a matter of space—the judges and much of the staff of the Mixed Commission were already sick. Risk of illness had already made it difficult to recruit judges to serve on the Mixed Commission in Sierra Leone, as foreign judges were not generally eager to sacrifice their health on the altar of British policies that many of their countrymen barely tolerated. Appointed non-British commissioners regularly failed to show up in Freetown when expected, usually with a litany of excuses at the ready (conveyed by letter) for why. The events of 1829 didn’t help matters. The suspected culprit among those in the colony—at least before both Eden and Panchita had arrived like so many scapegoats ready for sacrifice—was some other, as yet unidentified, slave ship whose officers or witnesses must have, in their interrogations, carried the malady right to the Mixed Commission’s doorstep, weeks before the Panchita arrived. Though virulent and frequently deadly, the mystery ailment was not uniformly fatal—some, including one of the British commissioners and the new Brazilian commissioner, did survive it. Short-staffed and worse for the wear, the Mixed Commission was nonetheless able to once again confer by May 24, and it summarily condemned Panchita that very day. Given a disease that often killed in a couple of days, the time that passed between the prize’s arrival and its condemnation could be ill afforded; sure enough, by the day the prize was condemned, it was already too late for the crew. Every Sybille sailor who’d helped usher the Panchita to Sierra Leone was dead but for one, and he didn’t seem likely to make it. It hadn’t even been four weeks since Boyle had seen the disease appear in Freetown, barely three since the Eden arrived, a scant week since the Panchita had put into port—and a full-blown epidemic was raging.
So what was it? Boyle, writing in 1830, detailed the varied symptoms, noting where they seemed to resemble nothing so much as superpowered malaria (what he refers to herein as “endemic fever”). Clearly a horrible way to die, even just the accounting is frightening:
With respect to the symptoms, it may be remarked that, as in the endemic fever [malaria], there will generally be pyrexia [fever], but rarely so marked or developed, and it will sometimes advance with so insidious a march as not to attract the particular attention of either the patient or medical attendant. In most cases the action of the pulse will be quickened, and the temperature of the surface elevated; but it will frequently happen that the patient is first seen in a state of collapse, to which reaction [recovery] never succeeds. Some times pain in the head will be complained of as being very severe; but more frequently, however, it will be very slight, and not unfrequently [sic] altogether absent. Occasionally great giddiness will prevail. There will almost always be pains of the back, loins, or limbs, with pain in the chest, extending along the course of the oesophagus [sic], from its commencement [the throat] even to the stomach; and this pain will be said to be of a burning description. The state of the tongue varies greatly, it being at one time hard and dry, like a chip, and of a dark brown colour; the patient being unable to articulate for want of saliva. At other times the tongue will have a white centre, with edges of a bright red; and, still more commonly, in the worst cases, the tongue will be altogether without fur [papillae], and of a deep blood-red colour, and either very much enlarged and sponge-like, or elongated and contracted at the tip [glossitis]. There is generally thirst and a desire for cold liquids. The bowels are, for the most part, deranged; sometimes constipated, and sometimes, on the other hand, there is slight purging, attended with griping or tenesmus [cramping rectal pain]. The red appearance of the tongue, and the pains of chest, back, loins, or lower extremities, may be considered as the truest characteristics of the existence of the disorder.
This seemingly exhaustive list didn’t even cover the two other, extremely common symptoms of the epidemic that would provide the best hint to subsequent naval surgeons and modern readers alike as to precisely what affliction had struck and killed so many. In an early effort at contact tracing—there’s even a map—Boyle’s case studies of the 1829 epidemic tracked the progression of the disease across Freetown, and over and over, two phrases appear: “black vomit” and “yellowish cast of the skin.”
The Black Joke returned to Freetown six weeks after it had left in mid-April. It unknowingly sailed directly into an epidemic’s perfect storm and arrived just in time to be decimated by what turned out to be an especially awful incarnation of yellow fever. Though direct person-to-person transmission of yellow fever is impossible, mosquito-to-human-to-mosquito-to-human was more than feasible, and sailors often transferred between vessels. Downes might have gotten it in Freetown. He might also have gotten it when he met up with Captain Owen—currently aboard the Medina, but late of both the Eden and Fernando Pó—on May 27. Either way, the outcome was the same. Downes’s logbook ends five days later.
Progression of the 1829 epidemic through Freetown, from James Boyle’s A Practical Medico-Historical Account of the Western Coast of Africa (1831).
Commander Downes—who upon arriving in Sierra Leone this final time had only just learned of his promotion for the El Almirante action of May 2—did survive, barely. However, he was so sick that he had to be invalided home to England just three days later, on May 30, 1829. After twenty-four years in the Royal Navy, Commander Henry Downes would never again serve on ship. His crew fared little better. In the few months it took for the epidemic to spend itself, just over half of its company—twenty-five of forty-five people—had died. With the exception of the Primrose (which hadn’t touched in Freetown since February and wouldn’t return until August) and Clinker (likewise cruising, and mostly far from the coast), Collier’s flagship, Sybille, following in the wake of its prize Panchita to the now-deadly harbor, held out longer than just about any other Squadron vessel. Notoriously stringent about cleanliness and health, the commodore had made sure his lower decks were well ventilated and free of humidity, ensured his men stayed as dry as possible, sent only Kroomen (who were thought to be more immune) to accomplish Sybille’s “wooding and watering” onshore, fed every sailor who did go onshore “Peruvian bark” (quinine) and wine after breakfast regardless of ethnicity, and forbade any interaction with Freetown, Fernando Pó, or Eden, recently released from quarantine. It wasn’t enough. On June 22, Sybille took on nine apparently healthy marines, eight of whom had previously served on the Eden. Four days later, a sailor came down with fever, presaging sixty-nine cases over the next two months, twenty-two of whom died. Out of the 792 sailors serving in the West Africa Squadron in 1829, 204 were felled by disease, almost all during that single terrible summer. Of those that died, 57 had come from the Sybille and its famous tender.
