CHAPTER SEVEN
Cristina
October 1829,
348 enslaved people
Considering the sheer quantity of sailors lost, especially since the Sybille was in no position to readily supply more, it’s no surprise that the Black Joke was slow to recover, or that its next captain, Lieutenant Edward Iggulden Parrey, was a long time coming. The crew, what was left of them, weren’t missing much. Rumors of the 1829 epidemic had, naturally, spread among seafaring vessels with business on the coast. Though most WAS ships were shorthanded and temporarily out of commission, the two that still cruised in the summer of 1829, Primrose and Clinker, saw few potential slavers and little action. Since the epidemic was thought to be seasonal—and it was, just not in the way the medical profession supposed—slavers were mostly content to wait it out. Toward the end of summer, action picked up as the epidemic showed signs of tapering off, and Collier became progressively more worried about the resumption of slaving traffic in West Africa, particularly in his preferred hunting grounds, the Bights. Even before the epidemic, the commodore had seen an alarming increase in Spanish slave traders in the area. Even the Providencia—the supposed privateer with whom the Black Joke, under Turner, had had its famously dubious run-in—had, by the beginning of the summer, been resold and was sighted sailing as the Fama de Cadiz, waiting to board the enslaved with several other ships near Ouidah.
The onset of the fever had, temporarily, altered the commodore’s priorities. Collier felt compelled to sail south to St. Helena for the benefit of Sybille’s crew, regardless of his concerns regarding the quantities of slavers. As its familiar shores came into view—
the coast changed its hitherto monotonous and barren aspect, […] relieved by a chain of small islands and rocks extending inshore, and bearing the most fantastic shapes. One […] was a rock which appeared originally to have been of some height and extent, but the sea or some other cause had carried away the whole of its centre, excepting a surface of about twenty feet deep, which rested on the two extremities, leaving between them an immense archway or natural bridge, apparently capable of allowing a ship to sail under without lowering a mast. […] The surrounding country is one continued sand, without a shrub as far as the eye can see. […] A rock forms the north end of this bay, upon the top of which […] a column and cross, which, in the adventurous and flourishing days of the Portuguese, was erected […by Bartholomew Diaz, about the beginning of the fifteenth century].
—Collier must’ve felt, in his gut, that it had been the right move. And it was; Sybille hadn’t made a full recovery until it approached the healthful airs of St. Helena, but by August 28, the frigate reported no new cases of yellow fever. Though he’d left the understaffed Black Joke to keep a weather eye on Lagos and another ship to patrol near Ouidah, the precautions would prove unnecessary, at least for the month of July. By August, however, slave traders were willing to venture the risk, and slowly but inexorably, the traffic in Africans reemerged, soon picking up to the levels Collier had been so worried about a few months prior.
It wasn’t only the slavers who bothered the commodore; in late spring, then throughout the summer and into the fall, interference from the Admiralty (and its affiliated boards), as well as the colonial administration in Sierra Leone, was beginning to give him fits. The various maladies at the onset of the epidemic had underscored that it didn’t take a yellow fever epidemic to decimate the African population of a slaver, and what’s more, that the lack of hygiene and medical care could, through illness, impact the safety and performance of the Squadron. (Though it wasn’t as if no one had considered the question before, it might have been nice if there’d been more impetus to resolve this issue before 1829, if only for the sake of the enslaved.) The problem of filthy slavers and the myriad diseases they carried had persisted for decades before the West Africa Squadron had been impacted, and illnesses on slave traders had already killed far more people than the Squadron could ever fear to lose, even (or perhaps especially) in an epidemic. Nonetheless, the question of how to save lives was now at the forefront of everyone’s mind, which should have been a good thing to a man as reputed for his cleanliness as Collier. What he took issue with, though, was not the concern, motivated by self-interest or not—it was the proposed solutions.
Nothing could be done about the conditions on slavers, short of capturing them. Debate also remained ongoing as to whether a slave ship or a prize ship had been at the root of the epidemic that had prompted the surge in interest in the prevention of disease (and with it, disease transmission). So those behind implementing the suppression effort turned their attention to something they could control—the conditions aboard prize ships. Boyle, the colonial surgeon, proposed what he thought was an easy fix: having ships of the Squadron supply their prize crews with medications to treat the enslaved. Collier, exasperated, pointed out that such a solution was ludicrous. The population on board a slave trader could be huge—four, five, even six hundred Africans—without question far larger than the population on any ship in the Squadron but for the Sybille itself, which, fully manned, would have carried about 240 men at most. Compare that to the population of one of the smallest ships, Sybille’s tender Black Joke, which not infrequently had a complement of under fifty. And what if a Squadron ship had to supply more than one prize crew before making it back to Freetown to resupply itself? Unless the stores at Sierra Leone were prepared to supply every ship of the WAS with, Collier estimated, ten times the number of medicines ordinarily provided to each craft, and the Admiralty was willing to approve changes to the regulations stipulating the amount of medical supplies a Royal Navy vessel could carry and pay for the higher costs, the idea made less than no sense, obvious though it may have seemed. Not one to naysay without at least contributing a counterproposal, Collier passed on a suggestion from the Sybille’s own surgeon, Robert McKinnel, that was more feasible—warm clothing. The open sea at night could be frigid, so perhaps something as simple as being able to adequately warm the sick and feverish could make an immediate and appreciable difference in survival rates on prize ships. McKinnel’s plan also had the advantage of being readily implementable across the Squadron. The advent of mass production had dramatically dropped the cost of cloth, while using these types of supplies circumvented much of the Admiralty’s red tape. No one took Collier up on it.
The commodore was also in heated debate with the Victualling Board, the arm of the Royal Navy responsible for regulating and supplying food and drink. Captain Owen had gotten in its ear, and now the board was seriously considering moving the West Africa Squadron’s store from Ascension, where it was now located, to Fernando Pó. Collier, unsurprisingly, disliked this idea about as much as he disliked Owen, which is to say a whole lot. Of course, their mutual antipathy wasn’t part of Collier’s rationale—his eventual reasoning for opposing the move didn’t include something along the lines of “And also, I can’t stand that guy”—but since the two hadn’t seen eye to eye from the first moment they’d met, this context can’t be ignored, especially given that Owen was the one goading the change. The story was that Captain Owen, in the years previous to 1827, had been seeking more productive relations with the native population of Fernando Pó. Noticing the prevalence of facial hair among the original locals as well as the respect they afforded bearded “Arabian” traders, he had grown a huge, perhaps verging on magnificent, beard and readily encouraged his men to do likewise, in direct contravention of the Royal Navy’s rules governing the appearance of its officers. Collier, while a beloved captain who ran a well-contented ship, was widely known to be absolutely insistent about following regulations. The navy may have been in the process of extremely gradual modernization, but the commodore was a protégé of Nelson’s, for goodness’ sake; Collier wouldn’t readily abandon the guidelines of the service, the way of life he’d known since childhood. Luxurious beards, no matter how practical, convenient, or useful, were out.
So when Collier arrived in Freetown, flush with the success of capturing the Henriqueta, only to have a lieutenant from Owen’s Eden pay a call on the Sybille for the first time sporting not just any beard, but a full, lush, well-established beard, Collier was entirely uninterested in the rationale behind what he saw as a bushy spit in the navy’s eye. He wanted that beard gone, yesterday if possible, and the commodore pulled rank and kicked the lieutenant off his frigate, telling him “not to presume again to disgrace the uniform of the Service and his Country by appearing so unlike a British officer.” Rather than back Collier up, or at least accede to the reality that regulations were regulations, Owen wrote to Collier expressing surprise that a little facial hair “should have drawn from you such an extraordinary order.” Nothing about following basic guidelines seemed extraordinary to Collier, so when it happened again when the commodore first visited Fernando Pó, the mutual dislike was a seed already planted. While there, Collier spied yet another lieutenant “in a state of tropical undress,” and while surely a beard has never since been described in such a delightful manner, Collier was anything but amused. Since Owen was on the coast under ambit of the Colonial Office, Collier wasn’t the lieutenant’s direct superior, so he couldn’t just order the man to shave, and the commodore did the next best thing and refused to meet with the lieutenant until he reappeared beardless (which he did).
Owen resented what he saw as Collier’s interference in his squadron and overall inflexibility in the face of extenuating circumstances—i.e., a politic deference to local custom. Owen again wrote to Collier, this time pointing out that perhaps his lieutenant “may possibly in wearing his beard have been influenced by the example of his Captain who has worn his these six years.” While Owen had stopped ever so short of saying that he had been actively encouraging his men to flout regulation, he might as well have. This was precisely the wrong tack to take with the rigid, at least in this respect, commodore. The relationship broke down almost as soon as it had commenced and would only get worse; soon the two senior officers were exchanging a flurry of increasingly testy letters concerning, of all things, beards. And while the beard issue might, in retrospect, seem awfully petty, note, first, that modern militaries still regulate facial hair, and, second, that it actually was emblematic of Owen’s being, as a general rule, incredibly insubordinate. Regularly. About all manner of things, some of which were a lot more serious than shaving. Nuanced histories have chalked at least some of it up to the years Owen had spent in isolated, independent command, but the man unquestionably liked to cut corners and ignore orders, sometimes with genuinely deleterious impact. To wit, when Captain Owen decided to buy his own tenders and send them to cruise for slavers. Recall, this was the same man who’d complained of Collier’s interference in the administration of Fernando Pó over beards, and now Owen was interfering in the operations of the whole West Africa Squadron by directly contravening orders to him from the Admiralty, which had, in no uncertain terms, told the captain that he was not to chase slavers.
And he was doing it badly. Foreign powers who weren’t exactly enamored of their treaty obligations—ahem, Brazil (and Portugal and Spain)—would seize on any opportunity to help a slaver escape condemnation, and Owen’s knowledge of, or perhaps respect for, the treaty obligations and restrictions surrounding British search and seizure of foreign vessels was shaky at best. The captain’s willy-nilly pursuit of slavers—more than once, he detained and captured slave ships that weren’t even subject to British jurisdiction—created headaches not just for Collier, but for the Mixed Commission, which was obliged to clean up the inevitable mess. Catching slavers made money, and while Owen was a committed abolitionist, he wasn’t averse to using the cause to richly supplement his own income, which gave him a reputation to some for being a flagrant opportunist who had more commitment to his pocketbook than his duty. Then Owen, never one to miss a chance to make an enemy, wrote to the Admiralty and complained that he didn’t have enough officers and men to appropriately staff the Fernando Pó settlement because they were all out on cruise looking for slavers, and could the Admiralty be obliged to send him more? The temerity of the request had to raise more than one eyebrow back in London. Owen’s job was to try to launch Fernando Pó as a settlement, which he seemingly needed constant reminder of; the Royal Navy already had an entire squadron devoted to direct suppression in West Africa, namely, Collier’s squadron. However, since it wasn’t exactly clear who was Owen’s boss, the Admiralty or the Colonial Office—and his ship had been issued treaty instructions that allowed it to legally cruise for slavers—there was only so much the Admiralty could do to reign him in. When it came to Eden (tenders inclusive), Collier was under orders not to interfere.
So while the commodore did not care one bit for Captain Owen, in fairness a whole lot of people agreed with Collier, and with cause. This new situation with the Victualling Board wasn’t the first time a body operating out of Sierra Leone had strenuously resisted the idea of a move to Fernando Pó. Back in 1828, Owen had shown up in Freetown, with little warning, and declared that the island settlement had been made sufficiently ready for the Mixed Commission to move its operations there. Owen and the Eden would take them; he’d be glad to wait in the harbor until everyone was ready to go. If he’d asked before summarily showing up, Owen might have discovered that the British commissioners weren’t ready to move to Fernando Pó and were never going to be ready, primarily because they had zero interest in being fourteen hundred miles farther from England, much less farther south. And if the Mixed Commission could barely get foreign commissioners to come to Freetown, which had been founded in 1792 and had decades’ worth of infrastructure development, how on earth was it to convince anyone to move to Fernando Pó, a much more recently established settlement? In that instance, the Mixed Commission got out of the move by punting the matter upward, pointing out that while of course everyone knew that the general plan was to steadily move operations to Fernando Pó, “as no orders or arrangements of His Majesty’s Government have yet been received […] regarding their removal […] it is quite impossible for the measure to be carried out.”
Collier’s problem in 1829 was twofold. He couldn’t resort to the Mixed Commission’s tactic from the previous year because if the Victualling Board told him to move the WAS supplies—which it might, if it kept listening to Owen—Collier would have to move them. Most important, he didn’t want the Squadron’s stores moved to Fernando Pó regardless of who was in command of the settlement. The commodore agreed with the Mixed Commission’s assessment that the island was inconveniently located—true, it would have made many prize-crew journeys shorter if everything were at Fernando Pó, which would in turn save some lives among the enslaved, but it would make patrolling for slavers, particularly in the northern section of the WAS territory, that much harder. And clearly, everything—namely the Mixed Commission—was decidedly not at Fernando Pó. Additionally, Collier liked going to Ascension at least once a year, despite its distance, because he felt it was good for the men. In the commodore’s opinion, its air was healthier than that of Fernando Pó, still to his mind a possible source for the recent outbreak (or at least just as susceptible), and upon reading a description of Ascension, it’s easy to understand why:
The climate here is exceedingly grateful to our feelings, after the damp and [drizzly] atmosphere of the pestilent coast we have just left. From the very small quantity of rain that falls on the lower parts of this island, but little decomposition of its superficies has taken place in this situation; consequently there is here scarcely any vegetation, and the air is uncommonly pure and dry. The temperature at present is varying from seventy-two to eighty degrees during the day. The upper half of what is called the green mountain, which is about seven miles from the anchorage, is decomposing rapidly. The elevation of this spot is two thousand eight hundred and eighteen feet. It is almost constantly enveloped in mist, but is, notwithstanding, uncommonly healthy—the thermometer averaging ten or twelve degrees below its usual range at the garrison and anchorage. The soil at this spot is a loose black earth, very productive, and already extensively cultivated.—Fields of several acres of the common and sweet potato, turnips, and other esculent plants, adorn the sloping sides of the mountain; and the mountain house, besides its pleasure ground of English flowers and shrubs, has its kitchen garden, which produces almost every vegetable in great perfection and abundance.
Ascension additionally had plenty of water, cattle, and a climate the sailors could actually enjoy, and it was also more convenient to the Bights, where most of the WAS patrol occurred, than Sierra Leone. If not Ascension, Collier would have also willingly accepted St. Helena, whose medicinal and recreational benefits have previously been mentioned. Eventually, the Victualling Board dropped the idea.
The commodore’s concern for his men didn’t stop with those who’d taken up service back in England. Kroomen were essential to the effective functioning of the West Africa Squadron, and Collier was appalled that the Kroomen who served on Squadron vessels were not being paid comparably to the mostly White sailors of the Royal Navy. These free African sailors were hired in Africa, usually in Freetown (which had an entire Kru section that, even with the transiency required of maritime life, could range from several hundred to over a thousand residents at any given time), to supplement inadequate complements of Royal Navy sailors. (So tight was the bond between English ships and the Kroomen that Liverpool also had a well-established Kru neighborhood and community.) Though Kroomen were salaried at a rate similar to the seamen of the WAS, as yet no Admiralty policy apportioned to them a portion of the prize money earned by Squadron ships. Historically, the average Royal Navy sailor was paid less than many of his merchant counterparts, which was likely no small part of why the Royal Navy was a relatively inexpensive investment for the British government. British politicians of the day would probably take issue with that characterization, but it’s accurate—the thirty-odd years of war preceding 1815 had been expensive as all get-out, but the Royal Navy was a downright bargain, considering what the government was getting for the price. Setting aside the total cost, the real price of Britain’s total defense expenditures at the time was getting roughly £1 per capita per year. This averages out to 2 to 3 percent of the annual national income; that’s less than the United States spends on its military today (over 3 percent), and in the nineteenth century Britain was building what would become, by landmass, the largest empire ever recorded in the modern or ancient world.
So the Royal Navy saved the government’s money by keeping salaries on the lower end, then made up the difference with the potential for prize money (which was also a major performance incentive). Though it wasn’t quite as simple as throw a rock, hit a prize, during the wars this supplement had been spread across the whole of the service, and the sheer number of war zones plus the ability to attack enemy merchant shipping meant that prize ships were widely available nearly everywhere one served. Even if one had to harry the government to actually pay up on prize money—and one very much did, so much so that an entire profession grew up around the need (Collier’s agent in Freetown, Macaulay, for instance)—and what pay there was, was diminished by numerous charges and reductions, it was money duly earned, and eventually (somewhat) duly paid. By the 1820s, however, the West Africa Squadron was one of the few places within the service that had ready and consistent access to prizes and their attendant bounties. It was one of the things that appeared to make a berth in the WAS worth risking the deadliest station in the service, even if the reality didn’t exactly live up to the hype. Prize money from a single ship could double or triple a sailor’s salary and was part of what made up for the difficult climate and risk of death from the frightening maladies British sailors often associated with the Bights and their environs. When a Squadron ship captured a prize, it was awarded a percentage of the money from the proceeds of the sale of the ship and the goods thereon, plus head money where applicable. This percentage was then apportioned among the ship’s complement based on rank and rating, on a scale commensurate with the distribution of the sailors. While Commodore Collier was among the first (possibly the actual first) to try to do something about it, the source of the pay inequity was obvious. Kroomen were supplemental to the Royal Navy, not members of the Royal Navy; they were paid like seamen, not as seamen. They didn’t have a rating. When it came to prize money, they got nothing.
Kroomen in the Squadron were members of West African tribes (the Kru, Kroo being an archaic anglicized spelling) who resided primarily, or at least originally, in coastal regions of modern-day Liberia and collectivized by language. The Kru were multitalented—they were also artisans, carpenters, coopers, cooks, interpreters, etc., plenty of whom worked in Freetown—but of most interest to the Royal Navy was their experience with swimming, diving, and boating, which had its origins in a time long before Europeans arrived in Africa. (It’s entirely likely, even probable, that the Kroomen might be the only people on a Squadron ship who could swim—since the Admiralty believed the ability to swim facilitated desertion, the Royal Navy had a long-standing policy of actively discouraging efforts to teach its sailors how to do it, counterintuitive though that may seem.) Since the 1780s, when legitimate (as opposed to slaving) trade to the West African coast began to sharply increase, Kroomen had been seen as valuable and useful hires on all sorts of marine craft.
As a larger cultural question, Europeans tended to afford the Kru a particular reputation for reliability and loyalty, distinct from any other African tribal group in the area. For the WAS, the Kru had another advantage over other tribes, uniquely useful to the Squadron, namely, a hierarchy the Royal Navy could easily understand and fit into its existing structure. Though anywhere from five to fifteen Kroomen might serve on a Squadron vessel, nearly all formal interactions were with a single man, the headman. The captain told the headman, the headman told his fellow Kru, and everything got done with a minimum of fuss. Orders to all of the Kroomen were distributed through the headman, likewise their pay—they were a crew within the crew and functioned just as cohesively and efficiently as any other unit of sailors or marines. The headman occupied a traditional place in Kru society, and the practice was often maintained even among Kru who ended up in England. The Kroomen appeared to have little concern that this man might take advantage of the situation—on land the headman could even serve as what Europeans might think of as a trusted bank, holding and distributing wages on his tribesmen’s behalf and at their behest.
Collier understood better than most, it seemed, that the West Africa Squadron could not have accomplished even half as much as it did without the assistance of Kroomen. Not only was their indigenous knowledge of the geography of the area invaluable, neither Collier nor any of his predecessors had ever been convinced that the Admiralty had assigned the Squadron enough ships or the personnel to fill them. The problem of ships had been somewhat addressed with the changes in the use of tenders; the problem of personnel had been mitigated by Kroomen, a development the recent epidemic had only sped up further. Since the Kru appeared to be at least partially resistant to some of the native illnesses found onshore, Collier was neither the first nor the last captain to near exclusively send Kroomen to do land work that was significantly more likely to kill a non-indigenous sailor. Kroomen did many of the “dirty” jobs of a ship and were also excellent sailors: they could interpret in some situations, they could swim or dive should the need arise, they could warn of potential hazards in the shallower waters near the shore, they knew the best ways to prepare the local foods that supplemented items the Victualling Board could not feasibly send from England, they often had other skills that were invaluable to shipboard life—in short, the WAS could not have functioned as well as it did, if at all, without the Kroomen who served aboard each ship. Collier knew it, and to his enduring credit, he did his best to make sure the distant Admiralty knew it, too. Via letter, the commodore had first asked that the Kru be given full food rations, as they then received only two-thirds of what a Royal Navy sailor was issued for both food and alcohol. (He left the rum ration untouched due to the Kru propensity to sell their share to their boozier British crewmates.) After the Admiralty relented, Collier then campaigned relentlessly for genuinely equitable pay for his Kru sailors. And he made a little headway here, too. The Admiralty relented and agreed to ask the Treasurer of the Navy for suggestions on how it might address the problem.
The commodore had other personnel issues to contend with. In the fall of 1829, with the Squadron still reeling from the echoes of the epidemic, there was a shortage of midshipmen—a real one, not like Owen’s self-generated lieutenant problem—and Collier requested that the Admiralty be kind enough to send him more, as expeditiously as possible. The shortage was probably the result of the dynamic duo of death and promotion, but the practical result was that Collier was running low on prize masters, the sailors in charge of leading prize crews on their journey back to Freetown. Often the job was assigned to midshipmen, which worked out well for everyone—usually a ship could spare one, and since mids were on the commissioned-officer track, it provided them the opportunity to develop and demonstrate their command skills, and their captains an opportunity to evaluate them before recommending promotion. The use of tenders had already spread the officer corps on the coast thin, and the need for prize crews spread it still thinner, but on this issue the Admiralty was firm. Despite never having set foot or sail on the coast of Africa to see the problem for itself, the members of the Admiralty told Collier to make do—the West Africa Squadron’s complement was sufficient, and on that the Admiralty could not be moved.
Rarely moved, at any rate. The Admiralty had no problem with sending smugglers who’d been caught and prosecuted to the Squadron to repay their debt to society and serve out their time doing something useful. Back in the eighteenth century, Parliament had approved naval acts that stipulated that magistrates could, as a sentencing option, ship anyone convicted of a crime (including vagrancy) to the navy. Since the Admiralty was not in the habit of letting criminals on its ships, most of these men were rejected out of hand. Two groups usually weren’t: debtors owing less than £20, who could choose for themselves between debtor’s prison and the Royal Navy; and smugglers. In the first instance, small-time debt was a pretty benign crime—these men hadn’t exactly gone on a wild crime spree, they were just broke—so, especially during the war years when the need for sailors had been so great that the government resorted to legalized kidnapping off the street, petty debtors were in large part accepted into the navy as their skills and abilities warranted. Smugglers—who were criminals, sure, but their crime was not so much outright theft as buying a thing in one place and contriving to sell it in another without paying any applicable tax—weren’t viewed as equally harmless, but tended to have the skill set the Admiralty was looking for. In England, its being an island and all, smuggling was a felony, yes, but also primarily accomplished by way of the sea, meaning that most smugglers knew their way around a boat. Collier had had several ex-smugglers on board the Sybille, and he, in turn, put at least two of them on the Black Joke, fifty-year-old William Fielder of Portsea and eighteen-year-old Thomas Atkinson of Liverpool. One wonders if the commodore had in mind their illicit experience with vessels smaller than a frigate, but whatever the reason, the ex-smugglers had been model sailors, giving him no reason to doubt them, and in his own words had “conducted themselves with the greatest gallantry.” Due to their sentences, however, none of these men was allowed to return home without permission, and Collier, as their commanding officer, felt they merited reprieve. He went so far as to add that he would consider it a personal favor from the Admiralty if they’d be allowed to come home with the Sybille when it finished its tour—strong words in a system of patronage in which favors were currency. But Collier made the request at the beginning of the summer, before yellow fever claimed so many and drew the focus of all and sundry—neither Fielder nor Atkinson would ever see England again.
All in all, 1829 was a year of a multitude of frustrations for the commodore—even setting aside the horror of the epidemic and the resurgence of the slave trade in its aftermath—but only one of them seemed to send Collier into a genuine rage. That May, just as Sybille and Black Joke were arriving in Freetown’s harbor to a pestilential welcome, Collier became aware of a letter from Judge Jackson of the British Mixed Commission to the Admiralty. In it, Jackson accused ships of the Squadron of plundering prizes before they reached the Mixed Commission and could have their total value officially tabulated for appropriate redistribution. By way of example, Jackson pointed the finger directly at Commander William Turner. Apparently even the memory of Turner—who’d been back in England for some six months by now—had stuck in someone’s craw, and Judge Jackson had heard it from the Mixed Commission’s registrar (record keeper), who heard it from “elsewhere,” that Turner, while in command of Black Joke, had plundered an unnamed prize ship. Citing only this thirdhand rumor, Jackson passive-aggressively implicated the entire Squadron, claiming that he had “some reason to believe that the practice complained of [plundering prizes] is of too frequent occurrence.” To remedy the issue, the judge suggested the Admiralty require that Squadron ships perform a complete survey and inventory of all prize ships at the instant of capture. And then, Jackson had promptly gotten sick—the sixth epidemic case in Freetown—and gone back to England on June 8.
To say Collier about lost it is putting it mildly—he was probably closer to apoplectic, and for several good reasons. Any such accusation implicated not just the Squadron, but its leadership; to accuse the WAS of malfeasance was to accuse its commodore of being either incompetent, ineffectual, or complicit. That it was a judge of the Mixed Commission passing nothing so much as malicious gossip up the chain of command was even more infuriating, because there certainly were prize ships being plundered, and unlike Judge Jackson’s nebulous thirdhand rumor of Turner’s alleged wrongdoing, the commodore had seen it happen in real time. He could name names.
Though the yellow fever epidemic of 1829 had wreaked as much havoc on the operations of the Mixed Commission as it had on the West Africa Squadron—three members had to be replaced due to death or sick leave, and a single Brazilian judge was the only non-British commissioner in Freetown—every prize ship that was brought in for judgment was nonetheless processed the same way in a routine that had been established since the first days of the Mixed Commission of Sierra Leone, which, alongside its opposite numbers in Brazil, Cuba, and Surinam, came into being in 1819. Once a prize sailed into the harbor, the responsibility for both the ship and any enslaved on board shifted from the prize crew—and by extension, the Squadron ship whence they came—to the marshal of the court, who was essentially the bailiff of the Mixed Commission. If present, the officer who’d captured the ship (up to this time either Turner or Downes, in the Black Joke’s case) then provided an affidavit to the registrar of the court, the secretary/record keeper to the Mixed Commission; otherwise, the officer leading the prize crew did it. Said officer then passed on all papers found on the prize as well as a declaration made at the time of the capture as to where the prize had been found, when it had been searched, the condition of the ship at that time, and the number of enslaved on board, plus a declaration of how many had been lost on the journey to Freetown. If present, “interested parties”—usually the captain or perhaps agents of the owner—were then called to present evidence of why the prize should not be condemned, after which the registrar, using a preset list of questions, would examine all relevant witnesses (usually the available crew of the alleged slaver, at the least). Once all of this material had been compiled, it was given to the proctors (attorneys) who would represent the two opposing claims in argument before two judges of the Mixed Commission.
The Mixed Commission operated from an assumption of guilt on the part of the accused slaver, but neither the lawyers nor the judges were required to have previous legal experience. Alongside each judge, a commissioner of arbitration was also appointed to represent each nation, creating a senior/junior partnership for each country represented on the Mixed Commission bench. If the judges couldn’t agree on a ruling, they would flip a coin to determine which of their commissioners of arbitration should join the panel (thus creating a majority decision), meaning that the guilt or innocence of a prize could easily come down to a coin toss. (This outcome was most prevalent at commissions actually fielding a multinational slate of judges and arbitrators, as representatives from the same place tended to agree with each other.) Sentencing was meant to occur in twenty days, though only the Mixed Commission in Freetown (as opposed to those in Havana and Rio) regularly met this deadline, probably because judges in Sierra Leone tended to be uniformly British while those of the other two courts were genuinely “mixed,” and at all the Mixed Commissions the majority of disputes between commissioners over the sentencing fell along the lines of nationality. British judges, inclined to agree with one another, could render decisions faster. If a prize was acquitted, the vessel and anything on it—including the enslaved—were immediately returned to the owner or his agent, who could make a claim for damages resulting from the cost of the suit and any losses sustained while the ship had been detained, whether from the initial capture or the subsequent journey to Freetown. The registrar and a third party, usually a “respectable merchant” or perhaps two, would then go on board to establish the liability of the Squadron ship, as 95 percent of all captured vessels tried by the Mixed Commissions were presented by the Royal Navy. This sum was to be paid back in a year or less by the captain who was legally responsible for the capture—only in the event of default by the captor did the cost of amends revert to the government (which Britain, at least, refused to pay if the ship had clearly been a slave trader, regardless of the adjudged illegality of the seizure).
Conversely, if a ship was condemned, its contents were disposed of systematically, and it was put up for public auction, where it could usually be purchased for a song by just about anybody. The monies from the auction, ranging from £100 to £5,000, were then split by the two governments being represented in the adjudication as a cover for the costs of maintaining the procedures of the Mixed Commission, including everything from the cost of the furniture in the courthouse to the auctioneer who’d sold the condemned vessel, and beyond. (In Britain’s case, it was a percentage of these funds that made up the prize money for salvage.) Any enslaved person thereon would be “freed” to the Liberated African Department for registration, to be followed by a very limited set of options for future employment (some of which bore more than a passing resemblance to slavery).
From the moment a prize ship came into port to the instant it was either returned to its previous owner or presented to a new one, it remained in the custody of the marshal of the court. Collier, as the senior officer of the Sybille, had been called upon to give more than one affidavit, and as someone who had reason to be in Freetown often, he had seen this entire process play out many times. He knew, without a doubt, that plundering was being done, and that the fault lay entirely with the marshal of the court and his men, who, to escape detection, targeted only the condemned vessels, ships the Mixed Commission had ruled to be slave traders, and therefore not subject to an assessment of liability by the registrar. Collier had seen the marshal’s men in the very act, with his own two eyes, on board one of the Sybille’s condemned prizes. In the present situation, it begged the question, who’d proffered Turner—one of the commodore’s best officers, and conveniently not present to defend himself—as an alternative culprit?
For Collier’s money, it had been some embittered Brazilian slave-ship captain, and Collier told the Admiralty, in no uncertain terms, what the word of such a man should be worth against the reputation of an officer so well regarded and promising, and on such little evidence. (Other possibilities might include the master himself, looking to deflect attention, or perhaps even Turner’s old adversary Savage, who was the agent to a Brazilian slaver, and perhaps looking to return the favor of making trouble.) The commodore, though outraged on behalf of the honor of the entire Squadron, was protective of those who served under him and must have been concerned about how rank hearsay such as this—even unsubstantiated and, to Collier’s mind, clearly fictitious—might impact Turner’s future. Unlike, say, Lieutenant Butterfield, whose father was an admiral who would serve in the navy for sixty-one years, or Lieutenant Le Hardy, whose family had produced not one but three admirals and innumerable officers while enjoying centuries of prominence in Jersey, Commander Turner was the son of a merchant, and he had no familial naval connections to speak of, not even a brother in the service somewhere. Turner was extremely popular, maybe even popular enough that a court-martial against him would disgruntle many of those who’d served with him or knew him by reputation, but there was no guarantee that a good reputation alone, even one universally agreed upon, would be enough to protect him.
No charges were ever brought against Turner, so Collier’s letter must’ve been convincing—perhaps too convincing, at least when it came to evidence that plundering was a real problem. The Admiralty, though officially finding no fault worth pursuing in either the Freetown Mixed Commission or the West Africa Squadron, did decide to nonetheless implement the former’s suggestion requiring immediate inventory of prize ships, much to the commodore’s chagrin. Collier tried to tell them, repeatedly, that such a policy wasn’t feasible—the prize crew had a hard enough time creating an accurate count of the enslaved at the moment of capture, much less tallying every barrel of food and spare sail—but the Admiralty, as usual, wasn’t all that interested in practical realities of service on the coast. Such a rule would make it difficult for anyone, in either the commission or the Squadron, to plunder, and that was good enough for the men who made Royal Navy policy. The year before, Collier had attempted to get an increase in the Squadron’s allotment of weatherproofing hammock paint to account for the increased deterioration precipitated by the tropical climate, but the Navy Board hadn’t thought dry bedding was worth worrying about, either. Again and again, the higher-ups in London had demonstrated how out of touch they were with the men who executed their will, who lived and died under their policies, and this new impracticality would be no exception. As Collier predicted, the rule requiring inventory was as hated, among the men of the WAS, as Commander Turner had been liked. While no doubt some sailors were skimming—not to cast aspersions, but by way of example, Lieutenant Harvey, while in command of Collier’s other tenders, had at least two prizes that appeared to the Mixed Commission to have been looted in some fashion, and no one publicly accused him of anything—this change and other decisions like it made it evident that the distance the Admiralty had from the daily practicalities and privations of life in the WAS wasn’t measured solely in miles.
Now, if those in administrative positions had really wanted to make sure no one sought any extracurricular cash, they probably shouldn’t have again reduced the head money for liberated Africans from £10 per head to £5 the next year—not, perhaps, the most intuitive theft-prevention method. Yet the policy makers back in England continued their trend toward increasingly granular and unpopular rules that negatively impacted the lives and attitudes of men in the service. The expectations of bureaucracy existed, in many ways, in opposition to the realities of service in the WAS. But only so much could be done about it, particularly for the average sailor, so with much grumbling, life on the coast continued.
After spending all of summer and early fall of 1829 recovering from the devastating outbreak, the Black Joke was finally considered ready to recommence active cruising by October of 1829. Downes, who’d been near death, had been sent home with Collier’s gratitude and yet another impressive gift, this time a beautiful oak-and-silver wine cooler engraved with “a tribute of admiration and respect from Commodore Collier to Lieut. Henry Downes, for his gallant conduct when in command of H.M. tender BLACK JOKE.”
Since then, the tender had gotten a new captain, Lieutenant Edward Iggulden Parrey, the first of the Black Joke’s captains to come from a ship that wasn’t Sybille. Parrey had been on the Primrose before his transfer to the tender and had acquitted himself well, but his performance in the WAS was likely just part of the reason he was promoted to the Black Joke. Though he wouldn’t serve on the Black Joke for more than a few short months, just as the Squadron transitioned to a new decade, Parrey’s connection to Collier went far deeper than perhaps that of any other man the commodore selected for the job. Parrey, alone among the tender’s captains, had actually served under then-captain Collier back in 1819 on the Liverpool, the very ship on which Collier had spent so much time incapacitating pirates in the Persian Gulf. Then an acting lieutenant, Parrey had been severely wounded during that action and it was on that ship that he had his officer’s commission confirmed.
Wine cooler made from the timbers of the slaver El Almirante […] wooden base made from the timber of the Spanish warship Bahama captured at Trafalgar […] inscribed: “A TRIBUTE OF Admiration and respect FROM COMMODORE COLLIER C.B. To Lieutenant Henry Downes for his gallant conduct in command OF H.M. TENDER BLACK JOKE” (© NMM).
Parrey wouldn’t have to wait long to prove himself again to his old captain, though it wouldn’t be a tricky game of flags or a particularly impressive bout of gunnery that would distinguish him. It was a rescue mission. On October 10, the Black Joke happened upon the Spanish slaver Cristina stranded on the bank of the Scarcies River. The slave trader had hit the bank when navigating the tricky exit from the river and was clearly in distress. Though Parrey first attempted what seemed like the most expedient solution—getting the Cristina off the bank and back into the safety of deeper water—the slaver couldn’t be made seaworthy, and what might have been a boarding party rapidly escalated into a desperate attempt to save the Africans still trapped in the slaver’s hold before they drowned, a pressing matter made more urgent by Parrey’s discovery that the Cristina had begun filling with water almost as soon as it had struck land. Though not the type of glamorous action that had made the Black Joke’s fame, the rescue of the Cristina might have been one of the tender’s most impressive feats. Black Joke, coordinating with an English merchant, the Sappho, which was also in the river, pulled hundreds of people from the water and salvaged what supplies it could; miraculously, not a single life was lost. Realizing that the Cristina was a lost cause and couldn’t be recovered, and knowing that the Black Joke could not even begin to adequately feed and care for over three hundred enslaved people if Parrey took them on board—the ship didn’t have the space, besides—he had no choice but to land the enslaved and the crew of the Cristina onshore. Parrey sent an urgent message to Freetown, blessedly nearby, begging immediate assistance.
Though “immediate” was a relative concept in 1829, Collier’s agent in Freetown, Dougan—Kenneth Macaulay having died in the yellow fever epidemic that year, after twenty years living in Sierra Leone—did everything in his power to render aid, and three days later a rescue ship, the Frederick, made it to the Scarcies to embark the population of the Cristina along with a prize crew from Black Joke (led by Slade) and ferry them to Freetown. The two-day trip from the Scarcies to Freetown was far shorter than the average prize journey, but the losses from the Cristina, almost all of which occurred in just forty-eight hours, were astronomical. Even if every lifesaving policy that had been debated throughout the year had been implemented, it would have been difficult for warm clothing or medicine to quickly make up for what ailed too many; smallpox would accomplish much of what the sea had not. It’s unclear whether the Africans had been ill before the accident or had gotten sick during the three days they had been onshore, but it would have been difficult to not notice that the enslaved of the Cristina were on average particularly young. For every hour it took to get to Freetown, the prize crew watched on helplessly as adults and children—and there were so many children—died. So soon after the deaths of many of their crewmates from yellow fever, the Black Jokes must’ve been uncomfortably reminded of how helpless they, too, were in the face of unmerciful death. All told, 116 of the Africans embarked to the Cristina never saw the harbor that purported to hold their liberation. Sixteen more died after they arrived enslaved, and of the 216 still alive, 75 were children. When colonial surgeon Boyle went on board to examine the survivors the next day, he found most of them to be infected with smallpox, and those who weren’t were suffering with either “craw-craw” (a skin disease) or ophthalmia. Rather than take the infected into Freetown, the Frederick was sent immediately to the colonial hospital at Kissy.
And almost as quickly as he’d come, Parrey was gone. Within a few short months, the lieutenant received word from the commodore that the savvy Captain Griffenhoofe, who’d so ably steered the Primrose to its place just behind the Black Joke on the list of the Squadron’s most successful ships, had died at Ascension. Though the sudden loss of a captain as efficient and effective as Griffenhoofe was awful in its own right, the cold reality was that the Squadron’s efforts on the coast couldn’t afford to lose a ship as capable as Primrose to questionable leadership. So Collier turned to someone he knew, someone he trusted, someone he’d trained—Parrey, his once and current lieutenant. Parrey was already familiar with the Primrose, having just come from being second-in-command under Griffenhoofe to captain the Black Joke, making him the most logical choice. His short time on the Black Joke had been marked by misery, though not of Parrey’s making. His appointment to the Primrose was shrouded by grief, but Parrey could do nothing about that, either. He could only continue to serve where he was needed. Even after so much death, life in the Squadron went on.
