CHAPTER EIGHT

Manzanares

April 1830,

354 enslaved people

Parrey had proved to be an excellent captain, but by March of 1830, when he officially left the Black Joke to assume command of Primrose, the tender was in the midst of a serious dry spell. The little brig with the outsize reputation had had no actual captures since that of the Carolina the previous March. Parrey’s timely aid to the Cristina didn’t count because, despite its being an impressive feat, the Admiralty saw it was more of a rescue operation than a prize capture, even though the Spanish ship was eventually condemned as a slaver, for which Black Joke was awarded prize money. This lack of action since being hit by fever eleven months earlier wasn’t the only bad news for the Black Joke. Death, which had already claimed so many, continued to plague the Squadron, and Collier was now, well and truly, short on officers. Between the official ships of the WAS and his own tenders, the commodore currently had no one available to officially replace Parrey; in the name of expediency Collier temporarily promoted the Black Joke’s senior mate, William Coyde, to acting lieutenant and gave him command. It’s unclear how much Collier expected of the acting lieutenant, who’d previously served ably in the East in Britain’s First Burmese War—a particularly bloody and expensive two-year conflict that decimated the Burmese Empire and solidified Britain’s hold on India—but Coyde didn’t shrink from his new role.

On April Fools’ Day 1830—it’s a very long-standing holiday—the Black Joke came across the Spanish brigantine Manzanares off Gallinas. Things started out well enough. The two ships were evenly matched in both complement and armament, but the captain of the brigantine, Manuel Alcontara, wasn’t interested in a fight, opting instead to make a run for the quickest current to Havana. The Black Joke was beginning to show some of the wear of its two years of continual and vigorous service to the Royal Navy, but it was still more than a match for anything sailing; after a twelve-hour chase, Coyde had his prize. Or almost had it. Alcontara struck his colors and surrendered to boarding, and Coyde sent over a crew that included the Black Joke’s resident medical officer, Lane, assistant surgeon to the Sybille, presumably in case any enslaved on board needed immediate care. Subsequent accounts attest to how extraordinarily crowded the Manzanares was, and prize-crew boardings could be rather chaotic—subduing the crew, releasing the enslaved from the hold, searching the ship, documenting everything, counting anything that wasn’t nailed down; it was a lot. They could be particularly confusing for the enslaved, a sudden cacophony of English, and in this case Spanish, and perhaps snippets of whatever native African tongues any of the Black Jokes had picked up during their time in the service, all flying across the deck as the prize crew went about its standard procedures, sometimes with violence, depending on the disposition and sympathies of the sailors. But the Africans on the Manzanares, though unaware of who had boarded their disgusting prison—as it turned out, the Manzanares had been very busy, and besides being a slaver, was wanted by the US Navy for piratical activity committed on this very voyage, so it could have been just about anyone—were not in the least confused about their captivity or their chances of surviving the horrors of the Middle Passage and whatever hell waited on the other side. On the contrary, they had a plan. And at the moment of peak chaos, and with an unseen signal, they rose up and attempted to free themselves.

Shipboard slave revolts were not actually all that uncommon in the Atlantic slave trade; as the Henriqueta, the Black Joke itself had had one on its third voyage. They were infrequently successful and often bloody—in Henriqueta’s case, upward of a fourth of the enslaved may have died in the uprising—but that does not mean that the Africans who’d been forcibly removed from the continent passively accepted their fate. Slavers took precautions against revolts, but regularly enough, some or all of the enslaved on a vessel tried anyway. That being said, revolts against WAS prize crews were rare. Because he was the assistant surgeon, Lane might well have been the British officer nearest to the enslaved—and the burgeoning revolt—but whatever the reason, he went down first. At the sight of their shipmate being overtaken, the other Black Jokes on board the Manzanares jumped into what was fast becoming an all-out melee. The prize crew, unlike the Africans, were armed with well-honed swords and well drilled with them; they’d been prepared to face resistance from the crew of the Manzanares, not the human cargo. The record is silent on what, precisely, happened next, but when the Spanish brigantine sailed into Freetown four days later, the result was obvious. The revolt had surely been quelled, and violently. Boyle, acting as surgeon to the court, reported the results of his examination of the prize:

[That] amongst the slaves were a great many sabre wounds, and 3 amputated stumps, arising from the circumstance of their having mutinied; that there were about 40 cases of diarrhæa, and a few of purulent ophthalmia; and the “Manzanares,” from her crowded state, was of necessity in an unclean and unhealthy condition.

Additionally, five of the Africans had died on the passage to Freetown, though whether from disease or wounds sustained in seeking their freedom on their own terms is unclear, and another died in Freetown before the Manzanares was condemned. Lane was the only person from the Black Joke seriously wounded, but he survived. Boyle recommended the soon-to-be-“liberated” Africans be landed as soon as possible, which they were, but after the slaver was condemned, there was some consternation about what to do with them.

Normally, after having been registered at the Liberated African Department, the “free” Africans would be distributed at the discretion of the lieutenant governor of Sierra Leone. Perhaps fearing reprisals, the colonial administration in Freetown likely had no interest in maintaining a population of Africans that was able to organize and willing to be militant with it. By the thirteenth, with the help of Dougan, a plan had been reached to distribute the liberated Africans of the Manzanares in the “mountain villages” of Sierra Leone, the administration thereby washing its hands of the entire situation. That the vast majority of the Africans in question were, in all likelihood, not from this region was no impediment, as far as the colonial administration was concerned. It seems as if as long as the Africans were far enough away that the British could sleep soundly at night, that was good enough. So the Black Joke successfully secured its first prize of the new decade. Whether Collier, upon learning of the revolt, considered this a massive bungle or the natural result of having to make do in a bad situation is unknown. But Coyde would not retain the captaincy.

Collier might not have thought much of the situation at all; he was extremely preoccupied that April. At a reconnoiter with Black Joke back in January, a recent WAS addition, Tyne, passed by, and the commodore added an apparently healthy young sailor, a boy, from it to Sybille’s crew. If this sounds familiar, it should, because by the end of the month, virulent yellow fever had broken out on the Sybille for the second time in less than a year. By February it had spread rapidly, resulting in the “most dreadful havoc among all classes on board,” and the death of the beloved master, Tom Collins. Dealing with the fever again so soon after losing so many the previous summer was a huge blow to morale, which had always been high on the frigate, and many sailors became convinced that, no matter what anyone said, the malady had to be communicable from person to person. McKinnel, still the Sybille’s surgeon, became exasperated with all of the talk of contagion, probably because fears that touching the sick made one sick would upend the commodore’s commitment to cleanliness, which really would make everyone sick, and he asked his assistant, McKechnie, to collect a pint of the symptomatic black vomit from the next violently ill sailor. That in hand, and his curious assistant trailing behind, McKinnel took a stroll up to the half deck of the frigate, where the entire crew would have been at their dinner. As an incredulous McKechnie looked on:

[McKinnel] called [Lieutenant Green] over, and filling a glassful of the black vomit, asked him if he would like to have some of it; being answered in the negative, he then said, “Very well, here is your health, Green,” and drank it off. Dr. McKinnel immediately afterward went to the quarter-deck, and walked until two o’clock to prevent its being supposed that he had resorted to any means of counteracting its effects […] It is almost unnecessary to add that it did not impair his appetite for dinner, nor did he suffer any inconvenience from it afterwards.

To add to the visual, it was a wineglass.

After such a demonstration, it’s hard to imagine the good surgeon had any more problems getting the decks clean. Subsequently, the commodore was effusive in his praise for McKinnel’s medical care, stating, “The unremitting attention of Dr McKinnel to the sick surpassed anything I had ever experienced.” It was a compliment surely earned.

Collier’s men were still dying, though, and he tried what had worked the previous August and headed back to St. Helena; by the time he arrived in mid-March, eighty-seven men on the Sybille had come down with the fever and twenty-six were dead. But far from having a restorative effect, the disease seemed to gain traction, and another wave of yellow fever felled six more men from another twenty-two cases. Commodore Collier had had about enough—enough of dying, enough of sickness, enough of attempting to change the world while having to fight for scraps of support from his superiors. Just enough. Though at first the Admiralty had floated the idea of keeping the Sybille on the coast until 1831, the commodore had shot it down in no uncertain terms, as he feared the frigate would not hold out much longer. For once, the Admiralty reacted sympathetically and replied that Collier should use his best judgment as to when it was time to go. And it was time to go.

Even before leaving for St. Helena, Collier had more than an inkling that he might not be coming back to the coast. To that end, he sent letters to the captain of the Atholl, Gordon, directing him to meet the commodore in Ascension and, there, transfer command of the WAS. Collier dispatched a schooner from St. Helena’s small fleet, also named St. Helena, but if anyone knew things on the coast were rarely that simple, it was this commodore, who had spent three years trying to make sense of incomprehensible orders while making progress on an improbable mission. So he probably was resigned, but not entirely surprised, when news came back that, before the schooner had ever reached Gordon and the Atholl, it had been set upon by the aptly named pirate ship Desperado, whose crew, in typical pirate fashion, killed several, plundered the damaged ship for anything worth stealing, and made off with Collier’s letters. But he’d selected Captain Gordon as his successor on the coast for a reason, no matter how temporary the appointment. Gordon had also heard about the schooner’s unfortunate encounter with the Desperado, and suspecting what might be afoot, the captain took the initiative. He was already in the company of Primrose and Black Joke, the latter now laboring and desperately in need of a refit, so much so that Gordon was afraid to let the tender cruise alone. Making an executive decision, the captain sent both ships together to find the Desperado and took the Atholl to Ascension, hoping to find Collier there, since surely if the commodore was truly headed back to England, he would first need to resupply.

Shipping off Saint Helena (© NMM).

The two men did find each other at Ascension. There, Commodore Collier at last laid down the burden of command, and Gordon shouldered it. An officer of long experience, it wouldn’t be the first burden born of tragedy Alexander Gordon, the forty-nine-year-old son of a well-respected and extensive extended Scottish family, took on. Both of his brothers had already died well over a decade previous, one in action in Buenos Aires and the other of yellow fever while serving in Barbados. As for Francis Augustus Collier, the old commodore could claim responsibility for the liberation of several thousand enslaved Africans. Over his three years of leading the fight for suppression of the slave trade on the West African coast, he’d finished the reimagining of the West Africa Squadron initiated by Bullen. Collier was ready for a rest. And rest was the last thing on Gordon’s mind. His appointment as acting commodore was only temporary—Collier chose his interim successor, and the post would be filled permanently by the Admiralty—but that didn’t mean there wasn’t plenty to do. With the acting title, Captain Gordon and the Atholl inherited the Black Joke as a tender, as the Sybille, which would be returning to England with Collier, would no longer need it. Though Gordon wasted no time in ordering a refit for the ship and would soon show himself to be an able interim commander, a fierce advocate for the sailors of the Squadron generally—and for the crew of the Black Joke specifically—had left the coast in the person of Commodore Collier. Whether his Admiralty-appointed permanent replacement would be as committed to his men was anyone’s guess. No one could have known that Collier’s departure would mark the beginning of the end of the era of the Black Joke.

Register, Manzanares