CHAPTER NINE
Dos Amigos
November 1830,
563 enslaved people
The long-overdue refit of Black Joke began on June 14, 1830, when acting commodore Alexander Gordon arrived at Principe with the requisite materials from Fernando Pó. During Captain Owen’s tenure as administrator of the Fernando Pó settlement, he’d built up a small but effective lumber industry, from which residents produced palm-oil casks for the coast and ships’ masts for England and refit merchant ships besides. But the Fernando Pó settlement was also on its way out. Owen, for all his distractions and insubordinations, had been a capable steward of the settlement itself: he’d formed positive relationships with the Bubi, the resident tribe of Fernando Pó, from whom he purchased (rather than coerced or outright stole) the land for the site of the British base; cleared roads and built a town at Clarence Cove that included a hospital and a school for the children of the formerly enslaved; and, once a British style of infrastructure was established, promptly turned over the daily administration of the community to a council staffed by liberated Africans. Though his religious fervor did prompt him to compel everyone, Bubi included, to attend a church every Sunday at which Owen preached the sermons, it seems that Owen, while still incredibly paternalistic, was not quite as deeply wedded to the notion of African inferiority, inherent or otherwise, when compared to many others engaged in either the suppression effort or betimes the colonial government of Sierra Leone (and for the rest of his life he remained confirmed in his absolute commitment to abolition).
However, for all the respect Owen had seemingly shown to the African residents of Fernando Pó—which, though perhaps exceptional for his era, was nonetheless limited and at the service of British colonialism, no matter how comparatively benevolently conceived—he could not muster much of the same for the Englishmen who commanded him. Owen was happy to give orders, but his disinclination toward taking them had made him enemies from Sierra Leone all the way back to London. The Admiralty had been the only division (both of the government generally and the suppression effort specifically) openly inclined in favor of moving the base of preventive efforts to Fernando Pó, but Owen’s disregard for its orders and input—namely, that perhaps he should do his actual job and leave the patrolling for slavers to the West Africa Squadron—had drained away much of that support. It probably didn’t help that the British members of the Mixed Commission had escalated from simply not wanting to move to Fernando Pó to running a smear campaign against its superintendent, one underwritten by the wealthier residents of Freetown. (At least some opposition from the colonial Sierra Leoneans was almost certainly due to Owen’s habit at Fernando Pó of treating Africans as if they were capable of running not just their own lives, but maybe even a whole town.) Letters were sent back to England claiming that Owen was continuing to hold Africans in bondage and asserting that the island was, far from Owen’s glowing reports, a wasteland of disease where dead bodies were buried at night to hide the truth of the situation.
Both accusations were patently false—and a sure irony coming from anyone at Freetown, given not just the town’s own reputation for disease but the “apprenticeship” system utilized in the Liberated African Department, which was not half as liberatory as the name advertised. As one officer succinctly put it, the “Clarence Settlement [on Fernando Pó] is most unhealthy. The only question is, [w]hether it be more so than any other of our settlements on the western coast of Africa? It is, to say the least of it, equally as fatal as Sierra Leone, and that is saying a great deal.” However, the charges did plant the seed of doubt in ground made fertile by Owen’s own behavior. The Foreign Office was angry at him, too, given his penchant for attacking a slaver first and asking questions later, precipitating all sorts of diplomatic nightmares back in England; it also wasn’t sold on the concept of Fernando Pó, since Spain had a viable claim to the island. Still, loath to turn its back on someone who was clearly having success as an administrator, regardless of what disgruntled Freetown residents might claim, the Colonial Office tried to offer Owen a permanent post if he would resign from the Royal Navy, thereby taking him off the Admiralty’s hands and putting him out of the Foreign Office’s mind, while utilizing the full extent of the captain’s talents to keep the base viable in the face of ever-mounting opposition. Captain Owen was shocked. It may not have been his assignment, but his self-manufactured sideline uniquely satisfied both his opposition to slavery and his desire to enrich himself, and the captain hated to give up on his “honest and profitable command” in favor of a (far less remunerative) “petty superintendancy.” In what one imagines may have been a fit of pique, Owen replied by asking to be relieved as administrator of Fernando Pó immediately. If he was surprised that he was at once taken up on the offer, he shouldn’t have been. The captain was summarily replaced with Colonel Edward Nicholls, who’d been serving as the governor of Ascension.
And then the epidemic of 1829 happened. The primary argument in favor of gradually shifting the base of the suppression effort from Freetown to Fernando Pó had been the island’s geographical advantages. As previously noted, it was well situated to a number of active slaving ports, and taking prize ships to Fernando Pó, rather than Sierra Leone (north in the West Africa Squadron’s assigned territory), would have been easier for the enslaved and the prize crews alike. But up until 1829, it was also thought to be healthier. Sierra Leone had for years had a terrible reputation for illness. Captain Yeo had called it “the most unfit, and worst situation on the whole coast” for both its remove from the main action of slave traders and its prevalence of disease, and nothing much had changed in the intervening decade to alter that assessment in the minds of those charged with administering the suppression effort. In a time when the “climate” could be perceived as unhealthy, the second yellow fever epidemic and the astronomical losses on Fernando Pó that followed (the Bubi were nearly wiped out) were evidence that, at least in one extremely key aspect—and unlike, say, St. Helena, where Collier had run to escape the disease both times—Fernando Pó was no better than Freetown. (It wasn’t just this instance, either; recall that at the outset of the first outbreak, the Eden had had two different contagious diseases aboard, and the ulcerous one, the crew had insisted, had been caught while anchored at the settlement.) This time, Nicholls was struck with the fever, and though he would survive, months of resulting delirium left him incapable of performing his duties as administrator of Fernando Pó, which promptly collapsed into disorder and disrepair in the wake of so much death and the resulting near-complete lack of oversight.
Owen’s tribulations with the epidemic and the Eden had meant that he was away from the island for a large swath of 1829, and when he finally returned to the town he’d built from the ground up, the conditions appalled him so much that he got into an epic altercation with Nicholls over whose fault all of this was. That encounter—in which Colonel Nicholls literally fled from a chasing Captain Owen and barred himself inside his house and, when the captain attempted to break in, tried to shoot him—didn’t settle anything. Owen was absolutely not going to allow himself to get blamed for this turn of events when he’d already been attacked for things that hadn’t happened, so he held a show-trial-style court of inquiry that found Nicholls to be “the cause of the almost total ruin of the settlement,” then packed up any surviving laborers from Sierra Leone, all the stores he could fit, and the entirety of the settlement’s records, and hied off to service on the South America Station.
So when acting commodore Gordon had shown up in Clarence Cove to gather the supplies needed for Black Joke to become seaworthy again, it was not the thriving settlement with the complicated administrator of Gordon’s predecessor’s day. Collier’s old nemesis Owen was gone, the town was a shadow of itself, and everyone was pretty much just waiting for official notice from England of what they already knew to be true—Fernando Pó was toast. The island still had plenty of lumber, though, and Gordon gathered some up for what was, at least for a little while, the Atholl’s new tender, and thus his responsibility. At Principe, Gordon met up with acting commander Parrey, still captaining Primrose, who’d had the tired brig hauled onshore in anticipation of Gordon’s arrival, and after dropping off the materials, the acting commodore headed Atholl out to the Bights to patrol. Gordon was only doing what his old commodore had done, but as far as the governor of Sierra Leone was concerned, that was precisely the problem.
The colony at Sierra Leone had finally gotten a permanent lieutenant governor—the previous one, Lumley, had died shortly after the events of the Esperanza in 1828, and in a little over eighteen months, a series of four different acting lieutenant governors had rotated through the position. But Alexander Findlay was there now, and he had several opinions on how Collier had been doing his job, few of them favorable. Findlay, writing to the Colonial Office, felt that Collier’s concentration of his limited WAS resources in the Bights had been a mistake, that for Gordon to continue the policy was a bigger mistake, and that all the Squadron wanted to do was get that head money and increase “the expense of the British Nation by bringing many thousands of slaves to this colony.” Not only did that kind of math support Collier’s choice to patrol in the Bights, it ignored the possibility that changes in the traffic were due to the WAS presence being effective south of Freetown; the trade up the coast near Sierra Leone was growing even as it began to shrink to the south as slavers went to greater and greater lengths to avoid the Black Joke specifically.
It may seem odd that Findlay was complaining about the Squadron doing its job—which was to capture slavers and then to bring the enslaved to be liberated in Sierra Leone, which had been founded as a colony specifically to resettle free Black people—but it makes more sense if one knows the new lieutenant governor was an unrepentant racist. Findlay would have liked to see a lot fewer Africans in his little slice of Africa, the entire population of which he described as “naturally lazy and indolent” and incapable of accomplishing anything “without a European to direct them.” This attitude made the Sierra Leone colony a particularly bad posting for the new lieutenant governor, as the culture that had begun to take shape was formed, in large part, around groups of Black people: free and “liberated” Africans, the latter removed from the slave trade in Freetown, and the free Black communities that grew out of resettled Black residents from Nova Scotia and Jamaica.
Though a quick explanation does little justice to the topic, it will have to do. Back at the conclusion of the eighteenth century, the English abolitionist campaign did not focus solely on the abolition of the trade by the government, nor did it jump right into Parliament and demand an end to the trade. (Well, actually it did, it just wasn’t very effective.) One facet of the groundswell was a recolonization effort for the relief of London’s “Black poor” led by Granville Sharp. Many of these “Black poor” were formerly enslaved people left homeless by emancipation and destitute as the result of racism, and the idea was that the government might be willing to support killing several birds with a single stone by settling an entire community back in Africa, and laying claim to an excellent harbor besides. After the land was purchased (a few times, as the African chieftains with whom the English contracted regarded the relationship as more of a lease than a sale), a pamphlet was put out calling for volunteers to make the journey. Several hundred Black Londoners did sign up willingly, but the benefactors felt the ships weren’t full enough and conscripted over a hundred White prostitutes and dozens of criminals to also make the trip to the coast of Africa. Since this was not perhaps the best population balance for a successful agricultural settlement and the benefactors behind the project knew nothing about running what was meant to become a full-fledged colony, unsurprisingly this first attempt failed fairly quickly. But those behind this “Province of Freedom” continued their efforts.
Over the same time, roughly, Black loyalists in Nova Scotia had begun to raise complaints over their treatment by the English. In return for their freedom and assurances of land, these Black people had sided with the English in the American Revolutionary War, but after the war, the British government tossed them into communities in Nova Scotia without guaranteeing that land, and the local White settlers took advantage of the situation. When the loyalists’ advocate came to England to petition the Crown for redress, he met with Sharp and other Sierra Leonean advocates. The causes united, which eventually resulted in over a third of the Black loyalist population in Nova Scotia, approximately twelve hundred people, moving to Freetown. When land promises again weren’t met, some of these new settlers revolted, leading the Sierra Leone Company, as Sharp’s need for investors had prompted the previous organization to incorporate until the colony could become self-sustaining, to bring in over five hundred Jamaican Maroons to quell the unrest. And that was all by 1800. Though there was an increasing European presence, by the time of Findlay’s appointment, these communities of independent, English-speaking Black people had solidified and commingled, and to them hundreds of Africans from across the continent were regularly added. In 1822, Freetown’s demographics comprised:
Europeans including the members of the government and of the civil, judicial, and religious establishments of the colony; the missionaries, merchants, mechanics, and adventurers of every description, (exclusive of the garrison)……128
The Maroons, who were sent from Jamaica, and their descendants, of whom many are now persons of consequence and property……601
The Nova-Scotians, being the original settlers, brought from America in 1791, and their descendants, several of whom are also persons of property and respectability……722
Exiles from Barbadoes [sic], in consequence of the insurrection of 1816, together with a few North-American Blacks who have settled in the colony……85
Natives of Africa, who have voluntarily taken up their abode in the colony. Of these a small part are natives of the peninsula of Sierra Leone; the remainder are natives of the surrounding and interior countries, who have, of their own accord, either settled permanently in the colony, or made it their temporary residence. Of this class the largest part are adults, and are either Mohammedans or Pagans, who adhere to the rites and customs of their own respective religions, and are quite indifferent to Christianity…… 3,526
Liberated Africans, comparatively few of whom, it must be recollected, have been long in the colony; and of whom there is imported, every year, a large additional number in the lowest state of ignorance and degradation……7,969
Discharged soldiers, principally liberated Africans, the rest having originally been purchased as slaves in the West Indies, and who were disbanded in 1820 and 1821……1,103
Kroomen, a body of labourers who, though the total number is generally the same, are, individually, constantly changing. Strongly attached to their own country and its customs, though they will migrate freely for a time, no inducement can prevail with them to remain long absent from it, or to relinquish their native superstitions……947
As Macaulay makes clear, they didn’t all stay, but Freetown had been founded as a Black settlement and became an ethnically and culturally diverse Black town in which only roughly 0.85 percent of the stable population was White, and despite the fact that this minuscule percentage of White Europeans held the majority of administrative power, the town’s Blackness apparently irritated Findlay to no end. Nonetheless, his letter questioning the efficacy of the Squadron’s deployment was passed on to the Admiralty.
Rather than looking to the WAS, Findlay might have better spent his time sweeping around his own front door. His racism meant he refused to hire qualified Black people for administrative posts in Freetown and had fired all of the Black people who had previously held those jobs, redistributing them to White European officers who were less qualified, in both experience and education (many of them being young enough to have just left school). And Findlay’s race-baiting histrionics notwithstanding, the intelligence Captain Gordon had received regarding activity around the colony just a few weeks before Findlay sent his nasty note was less “predation by slavers running amok” and more “residents of Sierra Leone using a boat to run guns to French slavers on the Rio Pongas.” Gordon sent the Plumper, back on patrol of the coast, to investigate. Plumper had left boats in the Pongas a couple of weeks prior while searching nearby rivers for quarry, and upon the ship’s return, Plumper’s boat crews had more bad news—the slave dealers were rumored to have arranged for four hundred locals to attack the Squadron vessel and its boats and kill everyone. This wasn’t an idle threat; eight years earlier, a similar attack had been made against HMS Thistle in the same river, killing two and injuring several more. Anchoring under cover of night, Plumper soon waylaid a schooner attempting to sneak past it and discovered that, sure enough, the ship had sold guns to French slavers farther upriver and was owned by “Mr. Smith” of Freetown. After sending the schooner on for Lieutenant Governor Findlay to deal with, as that was a colonial matter, not a Squadron one, Plumper went even farther inland to investigate. They found a slaver to condemn, but though the assault had never been forthcoming, fever caught on the trip eventually killed twenty-seven members of the crew.
French slave traders had become a much bigger problem that year, and no one in the Squadron, at least, could do much about the reason. France had officially banned the slave trade back in 1818, but since then the government had done little to suppress the French traffic in the enslaved. In effect, all the 1818 measure had done was remove regulations on those traffickers who, much like the then French government, were willing to simply ignore the law, and the trade continued. Administratively—especially given that France had already technically agreed to abolish the trade—its stance on suppression had shifted by 1826, when French abolitionists discovered and revealed undeniable evidence of France’s ongoing participation in the slave trade, shaming the government into enacting further regulations and more stringently enforcing those already on the books. This had a marked chilling effect, cutting the number of trips by known French slavers in half (from seventy-two to thirty-six) in a single year. Then, in 1827, France passed an anti-slave-trade law with some force behind it—one that Charles X, king of France and noted conservative, was willing to sign—further dampening enthusiasm for the trade. Now, if caught, a French slave ship was subject to confiscation by the government, and all officers on French slavers would be charged a fine equivalent to the worth of both the ship and cargo and banished; noncommissioned crew would be jailed for three to five years, though whistleblowers who informed on their berth in a timely fashion upon arrival back in France would serve no time. Thus, by 1828, the number of French slave-trading voyages reached their nadir for the entire decade, with twenty-three voyages that year. Up until this point, French slavers still favored the Bights to embark enslaved Africans, and soon it became a not-uncommon sight for WAS ships arriving on their own cruise of the area to see the French Squadron, representative of their navy, detaining French slavers, since they were the only ones who legally could, as Britain and France still had no treaty entertaining a mutual right of search. Though surely a strange feeling after too many years of enmity, distrust, and warfare, that someone was finally doing something about French slavers had to have been heartening, particularly for those who believed more zealously in the abolitionist mission.
For years, slavers (whether actually French or not) had used the flag of France as a cover. (This was the white field of the Bourbon dynasty, not a variation on the revolutionary tricolor we know today, as the flag tended to change with the system of government, and to vastly oversimplify, France had gone through a lot of governments since the late 1780s.) Because no mutual right of search as yet existed between Britain and France, the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron could do absolutely nothing, legally, about any ship that was of French extraction—or convincing enough in its game of colors and papers to seem French—and slavers of all nationalities knew it. There had been the bright spot of 1828, when control of France’s navy was turned over to Hyde de Neuville, the first abolitionist to reach the heights of France’s royal cabinet. Conservative though de Neuville undoubtedly was, his antislavery bona fides were solid, and he cautioned that the administration “must be vigilant that the French flag is not usurped to cover odious speculation; it must seek to know about the participation […] of French subjects […]; finally it must prevent our colonies from again becoming the theatre of criminal operations.” That last one would prove the most difficult.
Both Lieutenant Governor Findlay’s complaints of increased slaver traffic near the colony and free Africans being kidnapped off the edges of Sierra Leone and acting commodore Gordon’s discovery of Sierra Leonean complicity with French slavers were facets of the same trend. British-colonized Sierra Leone was right down the coast from French-colonized Senegal, and by 1829, even de Neuville in Paris had heard the rumors that a robust traffic in the enslaved was departing from, among other places, Senegal to the Cape Verde islands. It was the same story across the French colonies—Guadeloupe, Martinique, Réunion (then called Bourbon) were taking on the slaver traffic too risk averse to depart from France directly, supplying the official papers that, though they could no longer be obtained in France, colonial governments seemed more than happy to issue. As reports of ongoing French slave trading continued to pour in from across the globe, de Neuville cajoled, remonstrated, even threatened to send special officers from France to accomplish what its territorial governments would not, to little avail. And things would get worse before they got better.
In 1829, the balance of power had once again shifted in the French government, this time to an ultraconservative bloc—at the orchestration and behest of Charles X—and with that change, de Neuville was out at the ministry. Nearly all of the official political will behind meaningful suppression disappeared with him. The brief tenure of de Neuville had seen a sincere effort that, absent additional support (particularly from the colonies), had only yielded mixed results. As the months progressed into 1830 and a new decade, many in France’s holdings continued to side with the slave traders. Slaving voyages from ports in France that dropped in 1827–28 had once again risen, while the brief surge in slaving ships leaving from French colonies returned to much the same levels as before the stricter measures were enacted—a trend that seemed bound to continue, especially after it became clear that the new national government’s position on the reinvigorated slave trade was a shrug and a sigh and the telling public assertion that, really, it could do nothing else. In the French Squadron, even those who wanted to do their jobs felt stymied; the commissaire général of the marine at Nantes, France’s largest slaving port, noted that more slave ships, once again, appeared to be departing, and “seem to regain here an activeness which I have no means at all to oppose, under existing legislation, which seems to me to leave still much to be desired.”
Not only was there much to be desired, the government in Paris could still most definitely do something—it just really didn’t want to. The reports from the WAS to British officials had also reflected an increasing frustration regarding the protections afforded slave traders by the French flag. Even before Collier returned home, he’d written the Admiralty to highlight the depth and extent of the problem, and rather succinctly, too: “The Slave-trade between the Gambia and Cape Palmas, is carried on solely almost under the French Flag.” His opposite number commanding suppression efforts in the Caribbean, agreed, adding, “The chief evil under which all the pirates now cloke [sic] themselves, is the open manner in which the slave-trade is carried on between the French possessions in the West Indies and the Coast of Africa, under their flag,” and with the full awareness, if not tacit approval, from colonial officials, who were at best apathetic and too often complicit. Even Black Joke, refit and raring to go under the new command of William Ramsay, Captain Gordon’s first lieutenant on Atholl, couldn’t help but sail into the enormity of the France problem.
Lieutenant William Ramsay was the son of privilege, and privilege somewhat unexpected, too—Ramsay had been born in Aberdeenshire to the Scottish nobility with the last name Burnett, the youngest surviving son of eight boys and three girls born to a father who inherited the Ramsay baronetcy from his uncle on his mother’s side when young William was ten and changed the family’s last name accordingly. There was no way Lieutenant Ramsay would inherit without an even more convoluted turn of events or substantial family tragedy, but he nonetheless grew up a son of the upper class with an idyllic childhood, at least if his older brother is to be believed. Dean Ramsay—aka the Reverend Dr. Edward Bannerman Ramsay, famous for his involvement with the Scottish Episcopal Church—wrote the book, proverbially and literally, on bucolic Scottish childhoods, Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character. But his youngest brother, William, was destined for the navy, not the cloth, and after joining up in 1809 just after turning thirteen (slightly old for his upper-class cohort), the younger Ramsay had managed, unlike nearly every other officer in the Royal Navy, to stay fully employed ever since, spending the next twenty years moving from berth to berth with scarcely a gap in service.
The crew of the little brig must have been happy to be back on the water (if not to relieve the tedium, then at least for the opportunity for prize money), but the tender and its new captain spent an incredibly frustrating October chasing down five different French ships they now knew for a fact were carrying over sixteen hundred enslaved people, and had left ten more waiting to load them from the barracoons onshore to the slave ship off the Old Calabar River, yet still had nothing to show for it. Ramsay and the Black Jokes were not alone in their irritation; WAS officers and sailors complained of French-flagged slavers who “literally laugh at us as we pass,” and one lieutenant, Peter Leonard, arriving to the coast on Dryad in 1830, could clearly see that the Black Joke’s fruitless month was emblematic of the problem that sapped effective suppression, bluntly writing:
But when will the diabolical traffic in human beings, even on this part of the African continent, be annihilated […]? […] Alas! the period seems as far distant as ever. France will do nothing towards it: under her flag there are ten vessels to one of any other nation engaged in the slave trade. During the month of October last, […] his Majesty’s brig Black Joke, boarded five French vessels, with [1,622] slaves on board, from the River Bonny alone; and in the month of November following, there were ten French vessels lying in the Old Calabar river, ready to take saves on board, the smallest of which would embark four hundred. She could not detain one of them: indeed had [Lieutenant Ramsay] strictly attended to the letter, or even the spirit of our feeble treaty with France, (than which nothing requires a more strict revision,) he must have known that he was not permitted even to board any vessel under French colours. So complete is the immunity of slave vessels sailing under this flag, owing to the disabilities under which our ships of war labour, and the perfect idleness and inactivity of the Gallic squadron, and so comparatively subversive are the laws enacted against the traffic to the northward of the equator by every other power under whose flag it has hitherto been carried on that, before long, there is not a doubt but the [French flag] […] will, ere long, be the only flag employed to carry on the slave trade, and under this it will flourish, unless France is forced to grant the right of search—at least on the coast of Africa—and the right to capture all vessels under her flag fitted for the reception of slaves, or having slaves actually on board.
Allowing British ships the right of search—which the French government had fought since 1815 and was still fighting—was the thing it could do. It was also, by 1830, obviously the only solution that would make a real difference in the business practices of slavers; as long as there was a single flag to hide behind, the unscrupulous would exploit it. It’s entirely possible that the ships the Black Joke had boarded weren’t French at all—flying the flag and/or carrying the papers of whichever country suited one’s purpose was incredibly common, and France’s was the documentation of choice—but Black Joke was nonetheless stymied in its captures by ongoing political maneuvering over a thousand miles away. Negotiations between the British and the French empires had not been particularly fruitful in the previous years, but inexorably, the tide of public opinion had been turning against France’s refusal to see what abolitionists would have called reason.
The international pressure had been building since 1815, but previously, French politicians had been able to hide their reluctance to accede to the right of search behind the will of the people. Back in 1815, the war had been fresh, the loss to Britain even fresher, and anti-English sentiment was fervent, even feverous. (And that’s setting aside the hundreds of years of historical enmity and oppositional religious doctrines that had once and would again include vigorous anti-Protestant sentiment in France and still featured virulent—if slightly relenting—anti-Catholic sentiment in England.) In 1815, it is reasonably safe to generalize that if Britain wanted it, France almost certainly did not. And in 1815, Britain wanted abolition of the slave trade. There were abolitionists in France—most heavily represented in intellectual and radical circles—and the nation had already banned slavery once before (in 1794—Haiti began to throw off the yoke three years prior in 1791, and there’d been plenty of politicking in France to accompany the island’s revolution). However, the rise of Napoléon had brought with it a return of French slavery, and with his fall, popular sentiment was against concessions to England, and military sentiment was against letting the Royal Navy search French naval vessels. Occasional talks would continue between the two European powers over the next several years, but against such a background, and with the conservative monarchy of Charles X, the political will to create real reform stagnated.
After fifteen years, things had changed. Abolitionist sentiment was more popular than it had ever been. Several newspapers in France now regularly ran articles lambasting the French government’s complicity in slave trading. Even officers in the French Squadron, veterans of the Napoleonic Wars—who, now that the French Marine had begun genuine suppression efforts, were more familiar with the difficulties of policing the trade—were ready to accept that the mutual right of search was vital to suppression. The complaints from those charged with French prevention of the slave trade would have sounded incredibly familiar to their WAS counterparts: that their ships weren’t fast enough to do the job, that ships could not be detained without the enslaved on board was intolerable, and that a flag—particularly the French flag—should not be the best protection a slaver could steal, bribe, borrow, or buy. The squadron of French ships assigned to the western coast of Africa was further hamstrung because French policy, as currently understood and practiced, meant that if the French Marine came upon a French slaver in British custody, it was obligated to liberate the slaver, not the enslaved. Sure, the French military on the coast could then take that slave trader into custody itself, but since it was also obliged to use force if need be to get the slaver from the British, every such encounter was an international incident (and potential pretext for war) waiting to happen. The French Squadron didn’t have to like it—and it didn’t, as shared duty on the coast tended to make these sailors sympathize with the West Africa Squadron’s uphill battle these many years—but that’s what the current state of affairs between the two nations dictated.
At the beginning of 1830, it must’ve seemed as if progress on slave trade reform in France had not just stalled but regressed. The “apparent laxity with which” the ultraconservative faction in power (that’s not historical hindsight, they called themselves Ultras) approached France’s “humane Intentions” provoked increasing consternation within Britain’s Foreign Office. In 1827 British diplomats had been willing to take a wait-and-see approach to France’s efforts to self-regulate the slave trade; by 1830, they’d seen enough. The French administration, for its part, wasn’t particularly interested in what would happen to the slave trade (and some continued to profit from it), but was downright obsessed by the right of search and, more specifically, not granting it. The French Foreign Ministry reinvigorated suspicions that all this talk of British humanitarianism was a mere front for England’s ongoing participation in the slave trade, that demands were made “to the profit of its maritime pretensions.” The French government would be happy to rail “with force against all violations of the French flag,” but Royal Navy actions such as, say, boarding French slavers when it had no hope to detain them, nor even a legal right to be there, had to stop. (See Lieutenant Ramsay, though he was by no means the only culprit.)
However, this wasn’t the only kind of reform the Ultra government was stifling in 1830, and when Charles X and his handpicked politicians attempted to restrict the (already limited) franchise in that year’s elections, the French had had enough. The people of France (notably the Parisians) had proven more than once that they were perfectly willing to overthrow an unsatisfactory government, yet even given this revolutionary tradition, the July Revolution of 1830 was shocking to many in both its appearance and speed. The Three Glorious Days went by exactly as quickly as it sounds, and whereas at the beginning (July 27), Charles X was king of France, by the end (July 29), his cousin Louis Philippe was king of the French, a not-at-all-small distinction that meant, among other things, sitting at the head of a constitutional, rather than absolutist, monarchy. Though France’s involvement in the slave trade was not per se at issue—it doesn’t even make an appearance in the incendiary rhetoric that precipitated the regime change—the July Revolution brought with it an onslaught of liberalism and a new, reform-minded monarch. Whatever antagonism the new king of the French had once felt toward British foreign policy had been tempered in no small part by several years spent in exile in England, and Louis Philippe’s regime brought with it a slew of anti-slave-trade and outright abolitionist ministers. By 1831, France passed a far more stringent antitrafficking law than that of 1827, and the French Foreign Ministry acquiesced to opening talks regarding the conditions under which a slaver could be detained and captured and regarding a mutual right of search. A declaration of intent on the latter issue was signed—though meaningless in and of itself, the beginning of real negotiations (concluded successfully in 1833) marked a huge step forward in France’s shift from defender of the slave trade to ally of suppression.
Back in late 1830, however, and despite the international upheaval that would revolutionize operations on the coast of Africa, the limitations of the treaties governing capture of slave vessels, and the extent to which the compromises in these agreements frustrated the twin causes of justice and liberty, were still on full display.
Not long after that frustrating October chasing down French-flagged slavers more bemused than concerned at the appearance of the Royal Navy, on November 13, the Black Joke was patiently waiting offshore near the Cameroons River. The tender had been sitting in the area for four days on the suspicion that a slaver would be emerging at any moment, having embarked enslaved people inland at King Bell’s Town, and after so much frustration with the French, Ramsay was determined to make an actual capture. To that end, he’d sent the Black Joke’s two boats, a gig and a cutter, under the commands, respectively, of R. K. Jenkins, mate, and William Coyde (back to being mate after his short and rather tumultuous tenure as acting captain of the Black Joke), into the mouth of the river to provide some warning of the ship’s appearance to the crew back on the brig and hopefully forestall escape. Sure enough, early that morning a black-hulled Spanish brigantine full of African captives appeared in the river’s mouth. However, at roughly 9:30 a.m.—having passed Jenkins, Coyde, and their boats, who’d signaled their fellows back on the tender—the slaver’s captain saw Black Joke weighing anchor in preparation of pursuit and immediately turned his ship around and began lumbering back upriver, hoping to disembark his human cargo quickly enough to evade capture as a prize. Jenkins and Coyde took off to intercept the slaver, with Jenkins in the lead.
It was not just the contrary breeze that day that made the return trip slow going. This area, the Bay of Cameroons—an English bastardization of the Portuguese name of the river that fed it, the Rio dos Camarões (or, accurately translated, “River of Prawns”)—was thick with treacherous reefs and lurking shoals, which made for hazardous sailing and compounded the difficulty by creating forceful currents that, even rowing at their utmost, the Black Jokes were only barely able to clear. It was nearly sundown before even the slaver made it the ten miles inland back to King Bell’s Town and again anchored, with Jenkins and his men on oars only a scant half hour behind. From his leading position, two miles back and gaining, Jenkins watched as canoes streamed from the shore and the crew of the slaver hurriedly and unceremoniously removed every enslaved person on board; by the time the mate was only a pistol shot (roughly twenty yards) away, he could only watch helplessly as the canoes were being landed again and members of the Spanish crew, along with some residents of the town, dispersed those so recently confined within the slave ship’s hold into the surrounding forest.
Not entirely helplessly—Jenkins did fire off two shots, but they had no effect on the frantic action in either the remaining few canoes or onshore. Coyde’s boat arrived shortly thereafter, ten minutes to a half hour later, to much the same scene that the first boat had, with canoes recently landed and Black bodies being disappeared into the bush. Jenkins and his men boarded the slaver first, only to come across the smug captain of Dos Amigos, Juan Ramon de Muxica (the younger), waiting in all innocence, yet with the smell of slavery still clinging to his vessel. Jenkins and Coyde each searched the ship individually and found a slave deck, recently emptied and already covered in excrement—which the unfortunate Jenkins found out the hard way, namely by stepping in it—and old sail canvas lining the sides as makeshift and woefully inadequate “pillows,” still wet with the sweat of the enslaved. On the same deck three tubs (one approximately seven gallons in capacity, the others ten to twelve) contained yet more excrement, which to the mates’ estimation was far more than the crew of the slaver should have been able to produce in the time Ramon de Muxica claimed Dos Amigos had been upriver. (Jenkins, who searched after Coyde, had only seen one poop tub, but given that he only had a candle for light and could apparently barely take a few steps without stepping in human feces, it’s likely he didn’t explore nearly as much of the hold as the other mate and could see much less besides.) Seeing as it was by now completely dark, but satisfied that there was still more than enough evidence of wrongdoing to support their eyewitness accounts, they quit the slaver for fresher environs to finish the search when daylight returned.
When the next morning came, Black Joke could been seen approaching the town, having had much farther to go against the wind, and Jenkins and Coyde returned to the slaver to find many fewer supplies than had appeared to be there before. They nonetheless performed yet another search, which was interrupted not by their captain, but by the son of King Bell, who was less king and more famous Cameroonian middleman trader, locally known as kings, but not to be confused with contemporaneous leaders of African geographical areas and tribal groups. King Bell’s son not-so-nonchalantly asked why Black Joke was there, and Jenkins, not mincing words, told him its purpose was likely to fire on the town if those enslaved people did not make a reappearance as sudden as their departure had been miraculous. (The “town” being little more than a slave-trading post surrounded by the requisite auxiliary buildings.) Jenkins knew his captain’s mind well; Ramsay was driven and not exactly the type to simply take the loss and leave. By the time he caught up, bringing the full power and reputation of the Black Joke with him, Ramsay was confronted with an empty slaver, its likely still-smiling captain, and a seriously annoyed Jenkins and Coyde.
The two mates caught their lieutenant up and passed on the message King Bell’s son had left with them, essentially, “Please ask your lieutenant not to do anything hasty.” The two men also relayed that, sometime before dawn, a considerable portion of the slaver’s stores of yams, rice, beans, and other foodstuffs seemed to have likewise disappeared, along with several other crucial items. These included the ship’s “slave boilers,” usually made of brass, copper, or iron and used for preparing the mass quantities of food such a voyage would require, as well as the quantities of food meant to go in them; though rations for those trapped in the hold would be minimal, given the hundreds of mouths to barely feed, the supplies did have to be plentiful in case the journey to the Americas took longer than expected. (In at least one documented case, a slaver’s journey had lasted six weeks longer than expected, and concerned that his remaining stores wouldn’t continue to stretch, the enterprising captain jettisoned a third of the enslaved on board into the ocean, alive, with the hope that insurance would cover the loss of life or, as he saw it, profit. It did not.) There was a stand for such a boiler, in this case thirty inches square and twenty inches deep, and fresh ashes underneath that stand, but the pot itself had vanished. Also missing were “a quantity of iron bars and rods, for running through leg-irons for slaves,” and also used to connect the shackles of the enslaved to more bars bolted into the sides of the slave deck. The tubs of refuse had disappeared, not just emptied but nowhere in evidence. De Muxica—who was not just the captain, but also the owner of Dos Amigos—had done everything possible in the little time he’d had before Black Joke arrived to remove any evidence not just that any enslaved Africans had been held therein, but that he’d planned to embark any at all in the first place.
So, when Lieutenant Ramsay finally surveyed the deck of Dos Amigos, he was, to borrow the colloquial expression, pissed. King Bell’s son had returned and inquired again as to the Black Joke’s reasons for being in the area, to which Ramsay reiterated very nearly the precise threat Jenkins had suspected he would, namely that his purpose was “to fire the town about your black wooly heads if you don’t hand over the slaves of the Dos Amigos” (and the attendant provisions as well).
King Bell’s son conveyed the threat to his father, who countered with an offer of twenty-five enslaved people, probably all that was left in the town’s barracoons after reputedly loading over five hundred people into Dos Amigos, and an attitude of “Now please take them and go away.” Ramsay declined King Bell’s offer, and nothing else was forthcoming from Juan Ramon de Muxica, who’d likely produced his best “I have no idea what you’re talking about” face throughout the entire affair. The slaver captain knew that Ramsay could do little about the situation—seeing as the Black Joke couldn’t possibly feed and supply the transit of several hundred enslaved people back to Freetown from its own stores and Ramon had had his own provisions thrown overboard, thus preventing the crew from liberating those he’d purchased. Ramsay was enraged, but not deterred. One of the seamen from Jenkins’s gig, Thomas Williams Osborne, had mentioned to his boat captain that he’d conversed with de Muxica during the night—probably in the town, more probably while drinking—and the slaver captain had mentioned not just embarking and then disembarking 563 slaves, but also that the copper boilers had been thrown overboard during the chase. Jenkins passed this information up the chain to Ramsay, who asked Osborne up to the brig’s quarterdeck to question the sailor himself.
Ramsay was probably still furious, but it’s possible that he was now the one smiling. The British treaty with Spain specifically allowed for condemnation of a ship if British witnesses could testify to the presence of the enslaved on board a vessel, even if, when the vessel was caught, none was present. An incredibly good-looking ship that appeared to be near the equal of the Black Joke, Dos Amigos had thirty-four crew armed with a cannon on a swivel, sixteen rifles, and fifteen pistols; it might have been a very different end to this story had the chase taken place on open water, rather than in slow motion on a day when the minimal breeze was headed in the wrong direction. So the lieutenant seized the “extremely fine” ship, for the prize money certainly, though it couldn’t hurt that without it de Muxica would have a much tougher time embarking the captive Africans he’d purchased, still hidden in the bush, while King Bell would have a much harder time finding a buyer if de Muxica decided to cut his losses—the trade in that area had slowed to a sliver of what it had once been, and even if King Bell kept de Muxica’s money, he’d need to either feed and house (at his own expense) the enslaved still being hidden in the foliage or release them.
Even then, the Spanish slaver wasn’t done being difficult. As expected, upon the prize crew’s arrival in Freetown, de Muxica, along with Dos Amigos’s cook, readily testified that they were shocked (shocked!) to find that anyone could believe their humble and entirely legitimate merchant vessel was engaged in something as nefarious and obviously illegal as the slave trade. He’d only fled because the Black Joke had hoisted Portuguese colors, and given its look, anyone could be forgiven for thinking it might be a pirate. As with the Brazilian slaver Carolina before him, the slaver captain had papers attesting to the validity of this identity, surely nothing on his ship spoke of participation in the slave trade, and he was certain no one else had actually seen enslaved people on board, just a lot of overstuffed canoes making for the shore. Fortunately for history, Coyde absolutely had seen what he believed to be many miserable Africans packed into the ship’s hold—it had just been the morning, not evening, of the chase, when the Spanish brigantine had first been sighted attempting to leave the river. Juan Ramon de Muxica nonetheless fought the case for another two months, in what had to be one of the more dramatic trials the Mixed Commission ever witnessed. Both Jenkins and Coyde, along with de Muxica and his cook, stood for questioning multiple times, answering questions about what flag Ramsay had run up, what was and wasn’t present on the deck, what was and wasn’t still in the hold, who could see what, and how close they’d all been to one another during those crucial moments of fading sunset. George Duncan, a seaman who’d been a rower on Jenkins’s gig and had witnessed the dumping of the excrement, had to attest to that unfortunate sight. Thomas Williams Osborne had to swear to what he’d told Jenkins and subsequently Ramsay, only to have his testimony stricken on the grounds of potential witness tampering from his own captain. Whatever Osborne said to the commission, it involved being threatened and prompted Ramsay to send a sworn affidavit to be read aloud in court that Osborne had said what he said, to both Jenkins and himself independently, had said he could swear to it, and further that the lieutenant “positively denied, ever having used any threatening or promising language whatever to […] Osborne, relative to the evidence he might be required to give in this case.” Jenkins corroborated Ramsay’s version of events, but Osborne’s statement was still removed from the record, just in case. These many issues having been argued, the Mixed Commission topped it off by undertaking its own inspection of the Spanish brigantine quiescent in the harbor.
The ship visit clinched it. The court, possibly annoyed at having had months of its time wasted and with the hope of forestalling any appeal, went off. The commissioners’ incredulity drips from their opinion, of which this is only a small excerpt:
The passport of the “Dos Amigos” certainly does state that she is bound for [Principe and São Tomé], for lawful commerce; but the passport of every Spanish vessel captured in carrying on the slave-trade, since Spain […] totally abolished that traffick, has been of precisely the same [tenor]; and it remains with [de Muxica] to prove that he has been engaged in lawful commerce, and not the traffick in slaves. The Court is of opinion [sic], that he has totally failed in so doing. In endeavouring to account for several suspicious circumstances, he asserts, that the platform on board his vessel, was laid to stow away his outward-bound dry goods upon; that his returning up the river, when he saw the “Black Joke,” was because he feared that vessel was a pirate; that he was going, first, he says, to [Principe],—secondly, to [São Tomé], to dispose of the remains of his outward-bound cargo; that the yams on board were for the use of his crew; but he says not one word about the immense quantity of the fresh water stowed in the hold.
To ascertain the points connected with these assertions, the Court directed a Commission of Inspection of the “Dos Amigos” to issue. That Commission has been returned. The Commissioners therein state that the platform on board the “Dos Amigos” is placed immediately on the top of the water-casks, and that that platform extends the whole breadth, and, for and aft, the whole length of the vessel; that there were 87 to 90 bales of dry goods on board […]; but those bales would take up but a small space of room, compared with the hold of the vessel; and the Court must, therefore, assume that the platform was for other purposes. His excuse for going out of the river in order to sell his remaining outward cargo, required the Court to learn what that remaining cargo consisted of; and there appears, by the Commissioners’ report, to be onboard [a list follows], and some other trifling articles. The Cook swears that he was to have 60 dollars per month; no legitimate commercial voyage could pay such extravagant wages. Now, would any rational man believe, that a vessel, manned with from 35 to 40 men, therefore being navigated at an enormous expense, would go on a voyage for the purpose of disposing of so small a quantity of goods, as the “Dos Amigos” had on board. The Court does not believe it; nor does it believe the excuse that she was going to either of those islands to obtain a freight to the Havana. The Court will not aver that that is impossible; but it will say, it is extremely improbable. It would, if it were true, be the first case the Court ever heard of.
His returning upriver, armed and manned as his vessel was, because, according to his own account, the “Black Joke” had a Portuguese flag flying, and he took her for a pirate, is, in the opinion of the Court, very incredible; and here it is to be remarked that a national vessel has a right, and we know it is constantly [practiced], to hoist the flag of any nation when chasing a vessel, but certainly not to board under it. The probability is, seeing the British boats with the British flags flying, he made the best of his way back to disembark his cargo; and, in so doing, he would, of course, [endeavor] to obliterate every mark of a number of human beings having been on board. […]
The Commissioners of Inspection have reported, that the “Dos Amigos” was, in every way, fitted for the slave trade […]. If, therefore, the “Dos Amigos” came to this coast for lawful commerce, where was the necessity of such fitting? True it is that the subjects of Spain may fit up their vessels as they please, nor is such fitting-up of Spanish vessels grounds for condemnation by the Court; […] such fitting-up is, and must, when other circumstances occur to support the Captor’s allegation, be viewed as extremely suspicious, as it is well known that that fitting-up is only required for human cargo; and if the “Dos Amigos” were positively lawfully engaged, why is her log discontinued on the day she anchored off [Principe]? that is another circumstance that bears upon its face the stamp of fraud. The Court is, therefore, of opinion, that the evidence of [de Muxica] is insincere and fictitious.
Black Joke was awarded the prize, and with it a particularly valuable salvage that some were already picturing as the West Africa Squadron’s next tender, but what happened to the enslaved? It’s most likely that, soon after Dos Amigos’s capture, de Muxica or one of his officers either found another ship for transport or simply resold the Africans purchased for this journey; and it’s doubtful that any enslaved people found freedom, or even “liberation,” from this encounter, especially if the slaver captain felt pressured to recoup what losses he could. The Mixed Commission found a way to further sour the long-argued victory, charging Captain Gordon (ultimately responsible for Black Joke’s prizes and failures as captain of Atholl, to which it was currently tender) £4.14s for inventory discrepancies regarding a slave ship known to have had most of its inventory tossed overboard in flight before lying in every capacity about what that inventory had been. Whatever happened next, with Lieutenant Governor Findlay, the French, or falsifying slavers, it was no longer Gordon’s immediate problem. During the months that Dos Amigos waited in the harbor for the commission’s disposition, the new year had arrived, and with it, John “Magnificent” Hayes, the new commodore of the West Africa Squadron, had sailed into Freetown on his flagship, HMS Dryad. Like his predecessor (and his predecessor before that), he was looking for a fast ship. But the Black Joke had disappeared.