CHAPTER TEN
Primero (aka Primeira)
February 1831,
311 enslaved people
A ship might disappear into thin air for one of three primary reasons, and each was deadly—shipwreck, pirates, and storms. All three options carried with them the distinct possibility of a ship’s never being heard from again: shipwrecks often sank, pirates frequently killed, and the crew of the Sybille twice saw a slaver they were pursuing batted around like a toy by a tornado at sea, and nothing was ever seen to fall out of the sky again. When Commodore John Hayes arrived in Freetown, in HMS Dryad and accompanied by his own tender, the Seaflower, no one knew which whirlwind, whether aquatic, bloodthirsty, or airborne, might have caught the Black Joke up, but all were feared.
After dispatching a prize crew to Freetown, the little brig had last been seen on the way to Ascension, the closest port to its location, for a much-needed resupply. The crew of the Black Joke had had no fresh provisions for two months before seizing Dos Amigos, and sending a prize crew (and with it, as a favor to the colonial governor, some fifty-odd Kroomen who’d previously been stranded in the area) on a ship that had had all of its food dumped meant extra rations gone, such that even the tender’s by-now-tiresome dry goods, supplemented by a few fresh yams still remaining from Dos Amigos’s stores, were looking scarily thin. The Black Joke left modern-day Cameroon for Ascension with just over three weeks of stores for the much smaller complement than it normally carried, as upward of seven to ten members of the crew had left the same place in the Spanish brigantine, bound for Freetown.
The prize crew had, for supplies, what de Muxica had left on board as food for his crew and what Ramsay believed the rest of the Black Joke crew could spare, but Dos Amigos now contained its captain and crew, the prize-crew Black Jokes, and the large group of Kroomen, and the journey to Sierra Leone could be treacherous and easily lengthened by adverse conditions. (To make sure everything lasted, the Black Jokes and Kroomen ate shortened rations, while they gave the slaver’s crew the absolute minimum, which was sometimes nothing at all.) Obviously, the prize crew had made it and, given the length of the Dos Amigos trial, were in no hurry to leave, but as weeks passed, news of the Black Joke had yet to materialize. It had had enough supplies to make it to the island, and Ramsay had confiscated additional rope and hull-protecting paint the Black Joke desperately needed from the captured slaver. (These were part of the aforementioned inventory discrepancies, demonstrating how much sympathy for the exigencies of life at sea was available.) The Black Joke had, by all accounts, arrived at Ascension and departed again, but from there… nothing. At the end of 1830, the Black Joke was the first tender of the West Africa Squadron entered into the Royal Navy’s Navy List, the official record of officers and their commands, but those on the ship still didn’t know about the recognition that had finally been afforded the tender’s service. Wherever it was, it was His Majesty’s Brig Black Joke now, not just some auction-bought tender to the Dryad, meaning that its fate would ultimately be up to the Admiralty, rather than Commodore Hayes, to decide.
Hayes still had to find the little brig, though, and to that end sent Plumper out to search for the Black Joke. In the interim, the new commodore had a squadron to run—from administrative changes to ship deployment, Hayes was a man of ideas and planned to leave no aspect of the Squadron’s functioning unexamined. This is not to say he didn’t have the utmost respect for Collier—quite the opposite. The two men had almost certainly met during the interregnum between their respective services on the coast, after Collier had returned to England in 1830 and before Hayes left on September 30 of the same year. During that meeting, it’s likely that Collier gave Hayes every piece of information he could to improve both the service and the Squadron, particularly considering that the first two issues the new commodore took up with the Admiralty upon his arrival were ones near and dear to Collier (thus beginning Hayes’s own series of increasingly frustrated correspondence back to London). The first was the Kroomen, who were still not being paid prize money; Hayes was happy to add his voice to Collier’s refrain, writing that these men had “done the deadly work of the Squadron” and “preserved many valuable European lives” and ought to be paid accordingly, in a manner equivalent to their Royal Navy counterparts. The second was the proliferation of French flags on the coast, still such a problem in 1831 that Hayes wrote that their number was “increasing daily” and that he was now seeing slavers skipping the formality of a flag and simply flying white tablecloths, as the effect from even a short distance was much the same as an actual French flag of the era. (Clearly the long-term effects of the July Revolution of the previous year—including a switch back to the tricolor—had yet to quite trickle down to the coast.) He’d also brought one more, rather memorable, element of Collier’s tenure with him to the coast, a familiar face, perhaps to further ease the transition: Commander William Turner.
Cleared of any wrongdoing on the mysterious charges leveled against him of plundering prize ships, the first captain of the Black Joke, and still, perhaps, the best loved, Turner had returned to the coast in his new rank as the captain of the new flagship, Dryad. Though the fifth-rate frigate Dryad was, to be sure, Commodore Hayes’s ship, a commander (or even a full-fledged post-captain—someone of appropriate rank to command a vessel) commonly saw to the day-to-day operations of the Squadron leader’s vessel. This organizational structure allowed the leader of a squadron (in this case Hayes) to provide appropriate attention to the movements of the whole without getting bogged down by the full-time job of running his own ship.
Commodore Hayes had every intention of staying busy, because while he had certainly internalized Collier’s advice, he was also determined to do at least a few things differently. Almost as soon as he arrived, Hayes began implementing changes to how the West Africa Squadron operated. True to his word, Hayes issued “most positive orders” on the use of “those valuable people,” the Kroomen. Not only were the Kroomen to be protected from what Hayes referred to as unnecessary harassment (presumably resulting from racism, misplaced notions of cultural superiority, or both), the commodore demanded that the near-exclusive use of Kroomen for boat work in the interior cease. The commodore reasoned, correctly, that while the Kru might have more protections from some illnesses thought to be prevalent inland, as native inhabitants of the general vicinity (generously read), they were not immune to disease, and the Royal Navy was using the Kroomen as so much biological cannon fodder while failing to even pay them a truly equitable wage. (Given that the Kru were from in and near modern-day Liberia and, in accordance with the Squadron’s official patrol, might work as far south as Benguela, roughly two thousand miles away from their native land as the crow flies, and as far north as Cape Verde, over eleven hundred miles away, they were indigenous only to a small area as one approached the center of the WAS’s territory from the north, not to the West African coast entire.)
In fact, Commodore Hayes didn’t want anyone risking exposure to “bad air” by going upriver anymore unless it was strictly necessary, and probably not even then—his exact words were “on no account whatever.” (Hayes also didn’t want small boats sent in chase if there was a chance that they might lose sight of their parent ship—one has to wonder if the ongoing deposition of Dos Amigos influenced his rationale, as that capture might not have happened had this rule been instituted weeks earlier.) Collier, well reputed for the cleanliness of his ships yet nonetheless more than once laid low by disease, had been shaken by the experience, and he no doubt warned Hayes that whatever extremity of measures he was contemplating, it was unlikely to be enough. This prompted the new commodore to think of additional measures he might take, beyond just disallowing trips to the “injurious climate” of the interior. Freetown was plenty coastal, yet had still clearly been a problem in this regard, so Hayes had the local agent of the Victualling Board convert the special launch allocated to the flagship in the town harbor reconfigured as a stores lighter, which would allow ships in the harbor to send small boats to do their resupply without a single sailor stepping foot on the dry land of Freetown proper. The new commodore instituted a lighter workday, ending at 4:00 p.m., for ships that were docked in Freetown, lest the sailors become overtaxed and thus more susceptible to illness, and at the Admiralty’s behest committed to at least attempting to put a medical officer on every prize crew. It couldn’t be done every time—there simply weren’t enough medical personnel to go around—but the WAS, Hayes determined, would at the least make the effort.
This wasn’t the only Admiralty policy Hayes publicly committed to, and the next was sure to be less popular than the sundry measures implemented to keep everyone healthy. No one was going to miss boat service upriver or balk at a shorter day when harbored in Freetown, but Hayes also reemphasized the Admiralty’s position on improper use or removal of stores found in prizes and attached severe punishment to misconduct. Again, that the Dos Amigos Mixed Commission trial was happening during Hayes’s first stay in Freetown—well, stay in the Dryad in the harbor of Freetown, because the commodore had no interest in tempting fate (or more aptly, mosquitoes) himself—seems relevant. The propriety of the Black Joke’s use of Dos Amigos supplies had wound its way to the top of the command chain well before Captain Gordon was charged for the discrepancies, in part because Hayes was already there. As the Mixed Commission itself wrote back to London, the “H.M.S. ‘Dryad’ lying in the [harbor] at the time, we deemed it necessary to desire the Registrar […] to communicate with Commodore Hayes upon the subject of that deficiency, in order that an explanation thereof, might accompany our report of the case.” Hayes was not an inflexible man, his seeming embrace of the Admiralty’s much-loathed inventory policy notwithstanding, and in writing back to defend the Black Joke’s actions, it’s obvious he sympathized with Ramsay:
[Having] called upon the Commanding Officer of the “Black Joke” for his explanation of the case, which I have received, and examined with your attested inventory; and having duly considered the whole, and how likely it is for mistakes to arise, with respect to the contents of the different casks, and how exceedingly improbable that any improper transaction has taken place in this case, I can only add that I feel perfectly satisfied with the explanation given by Lieutenant Ramsay.
Because, yes, finally, the Black Joke was back. Plumper had returned from its aborted search mission none the wiser but not empty-handed, having run into the Maria, a Spanish schooner and slaver, during its search, and—in a rare turn of events for Plumper—on December 26, Boxing Day, they’d actually captured it. The Black Joke, unassisted, would limp into Freetown a fortnight later in January of 1831, over two months after it had last been sighted, and to this day no one knows where they were or what happened to so inordinately delay Ramsay and his crew. What Hayes did know was that, as commodore, the Black Joke was now his problem—Collier’s bequest was that its service was tendered to the flagship—and it was desperately in need of yet another refit. Hayes liked the lines and the look of the little brig, even much abused by two months of mysterious hard sailing, and he certainly wasn’t planning to abandon a beautiful ship, if more than a little worse for the wear, with such a reputation for speed and handling and the damnedest luck catching slavers.
Commodore Hayes loved ships. The tender he’d brought, the cutter Seaflower, was one of his own design. The Admiralty was, it seems, tired of alternately relying on and cursing American shipwrights in the Chesapeake, and Hayes had already proven to have the best designed craft in trials among various designers in 1826; he’d given the design, which could be replicated in five different sizes, to the Royal Navy in the hopes of persuading it to assume a complete standardization of shipbuilding, which Hayes believed would both streamline the creation of ships and ensure the most efficacy in their designs. (The Seaflower, constructed by the Royal Navy, was a smaller version of the ship Hayes had run in the trials.)
Plan […] for Arrow (1823), a ten-gun single-masted cutter, as designed and built by Captain Hayes (© NMM).
But just because Hayes had brought his own tender didn’t mean he was averse to having more, and as the Black Joke spent the rest of January undergoing its second refit in as many years, the commodore eyed its prize, Dos Amigos, still waiting for a ruling in the Freetown harbor.
As soon as the brigantine was condemned and came up for auction, Hayes snapped it up as a “replacement” for Black Joke, rechristening it the Fair Rosamond and finally ending the former slaver’s antagonistic relationship with the Black Joke, its crew, and nearly everyone employed by the Mixed Commission. The two former slavers would go on to have a significant and positive role in each other’s future, almost like, well, two friends.
Dryad now had three ships assigned to it—Black Joke, Fair Rosamond, and Seaflower—and though it wouldn’t be wise to discount the influence of advice passed from Collier as it had been received by him from Bullen, given how much attention Hayes paid to shipbuilding, it’s unclear whether the new commodore had actually needed it. Hayes had a number of notable relations, but the most important for the purpose of understanding the man was his uncle Adam Hayes, Esq., the Master Shipwright of the Deptford Dockyard. Adam was childless and wanted to pass on his craft to someone in his family and help him rise as high as he had, or higher still, to Surveyor of the Navy. To that end the master shipwright had chosen one of young John’s older cousins, but the boy just wasn’t good enough for the old man, and when John showed exceptional promise at just seven years old, Adam abandoned the shipping education of his other nephew. Adam asked for and was granted custody of John, and for the next five years Adam was John’s only family, his sole source of education, and essentially his boss, an arrangement that only ended with the old man’s death from gout. Adam had been around the navy for a long time and knew all the tricks; seeking to give John a head start on seniority in the cutthroat competition in the officers’ ranks, Adam entered the child onto a ship’s books as soon as the boy arrived to stay with him at the dockyards. So John had been in the navy since he was seven but in truth spent his childhood under the wing of a master shipwright until, with his uncle’s death, he finally went to sea, where he had the odd distinction of serving in both the first and last frigate battles in the wars with Napoléon. Hayes was something of a prodigy when it came to the operation of ships, and this, in conjunction with his previous training, ingenuity, and calm under pressure, earned him the appellation “Magnificent.” (It was not a descriptor, although all agreed that such a superlative was apt, but the name of a ship he’d commanded that had been trapped in reefs and rocks during a terrible storm, and that would not have survived without a masterful display of seamanship that was still being used as a teachable moment decades later.) Even the death of his patron, usually an ominous portent for career prospects, couldn’t keep Hayes down; after making post-captain at the young age of twenty-seven, he spent time as head of squadrons in Jamaica and elsewhere. One lieutenant serving under him described Hayes by saying his
presence […] was always a source of pleasure to those who served under him; he combined, with a high reputation as an officer, a scientific mind, and the kindest of tempers, a perfect knowledge of seamanship in its superior as well as subordinate branches. He could fit the rigging, rig the ship, govern and work her afterwards in so masterly a manner, that from the officer to the merest boy on board, he was sure of confidence and support in any enterprise in which he might engage; in short, he could build, rig, govern, and sail the ship with equal ease and credit.
As commodore of the West Africa Squadron, Hayes would need every bit of flexibility and creativity he could muster, especially when dealing with Governor Findlay of Sierra Leone, who still had a strong penchant for complaining to anyone who would listen. Findlay still felt the WAS wasn’t paying sufficient attention to (not entirely inaccurate) reports of increased slavery and predation near the colony, including incidents of “liberated” Africans being kidnapped and resold into slavery. As soon as Hayes arrived, he, too, was the recipient of an epistolary earful from the ever-noisome governor, complaining of both Collier’s and Gordon’s inattentiveness. Seeking to finally satisfy whatever Findlay was on about now and also perhaps ultimately solve the problem of protecting sailors from sickness in Freetown, Hayes sent Gordon to get a feel for the movements of the trade to better inform future deployment decisions, and stationed his two slowest ships in a novel manner—one would stay in the harbor to receive prize crews, meaning those men could spend even less time onshore, while the other would cruise the coast around Sierra Leone, and they would alternate every three weeks. Findlay still wasn’t satisfied, especially when the commodore’s new rules about going upriver stymied a capture the governor badly wanted, and Hayes would discover later that, staying on brand, Findlay had written a letter to the Admiralty complaining that Hayes had been utterly insensible to the governor’s pleas for help and had provided none at all to the colony, a blatant falsehood. The colonial governor had gone so far as to request a ship of the Squadron be placed under his authority for the protection of the colony, but the Admiralty demurred, as such a posting—the placing of a Royal Navy vessel under the command of a colonial government—would be “contrary to custom.” (In so many words, such a thing had never before happened, wasn’t going to happen, and would never happen, at least not on its watch.)
Findlay wasn’t the only person displeased with the new commodore. Gordon and Hayes didn’t hit it off, which would culminate with Hayes, in a display of pettiness to rival Collier and Owen’s battle of the beards, bringing Captain Gordon up on formal court-martial charges for, essentially, writing a nasty note about him. Collier was one of the judges for the trial, which occurred on board the Victory back in England in 1832, and Gordon was cleared of three charges and found guilty of two minor ones, for which he received what amounted to a slap on the wrist and a stern talking-to. Hayes got the stern talking-to as well—despite not being on trial, he was informally censured for bringing frivolous (if technically true in some aspects) charges. One of the allegations was that Hayes had transferred Ramsay without informing Gordon, and it’s at least true that the Atholl’s first lieutenant was doing a bit of ship hopping. Hayes had decided to replace the Atholl’s first lieutenant, William Ramsay, with William Castle, first lieutenant from the Dryad, at the helm of Black Joke. (Castle would be the fourth William to serve as captain of Black Joke.) It’s not that Castle didn’t deserve the chance at promotion, given that he’d served as first lieutenant on multiple ships, including the flagship Isis in the West Indies Squadron, and more recently both Sybille and Dryad, and that after he’d commanded a schooner, Speedwell, in the fight against Cuban pirates in the early 1820s. Knowing, however, how difficult promotion was to achieve during this period, and how much the ability to make them happen could alter the perception of a captain as a patron worthy of following, the change irked Gordon at least a little, and Ramsay—still a lieutenant, though now the first lieutenant of the Dryad—possibly more. As far as Ramsay would have been concerned—and glad though he almost certainly was to take a break from the tiny tender on which he’d been effectively trapped for months for the roomier environs of the flagship—Castle couldn’t earn promotion fast enough, as Hayes’s actions strongly implied that Ramsay would get his tender back once Castle had had sufficiently meritorious success to reach commander. As for Gordon, one of the other court-martial charges against him had been complaining of Hayes’s transfer of Ramsay in a letter using intemperate language, so Gordon’s feelings can be surmised.
Castle, for his part, was happy to oblige; he’d convinced his superior to put him on the Black Joke, at least for one cruise, precisely because the tender was reputed to be lucky, and he only had to look to Dryad’s own commander to see just how lucky the swift brig could be. Black Joke successfully completed its second refit in mid-February 1831, leaving Freetown to cruise for the first time since November of the previous year, and if Hayes hadn’t been too sure how the ship that had barely made it into harbor a month ago could be considered fortuitous throughout the Squadron, he soon found out. Much like William Turner before him, scarcely a week had gone by since Castle’s assumption of command when, on February 22, the Black Joke encountered the Spanish schooner Primero. All day—the Primero had been spotted at 8:00 a.m.—the crew of the Black Joke chased the slaver. As night settled over the water, the schooner’s captain relaxed and eased up, assuming the Black Joke couldn’t possibly chase him all night as well. He underestimated Lieutenant Castle, who’d likely done that and worse at night when chasing pirates across the Caribbean and back again, and using his night glass in conjunction with the cover of darkness, he not only caught up to the Primero, but cut off any viable means of its escape. The slave trader refused to accept defeat and again tried to run. Castle fired blank rounds at the schooner in warning, to no effect, as the captain remained primed to make a break for it if given even the tiniest gap.
Only then did someone see the tornado.
Castle’s sense of urgency must have ratcheted up a hundredfold. He had to choose. The night had already been dark, and the storm that accompanied the approaching tornado wasn’t helping. Rain had begun to fall, intensifying so much that Castle was convinced that if he didn’t bring the slaver in, right here and now, it would escape into the storm. But if he took too long to capture the slaver, the Black Joke might not be successful in fleeing a tornado. The slaver’s captain remained obdurate, certain that now the famous brig would have to relent and let him go. But the lieutenant had not waited so long to give up what could well be his last chance at promotion. He hadn’t nigh on begged the commodore for this opportunity just to lose the Primero in the rain. The time for the niceties of the dance of flags and the guns aimed high had passed. Castle fired into the ship.
WAS captains tried to avoid firing into ships—as opposed to across their deck, or into their rigging, masts, and sails—for two primary reasons, and much like service in the Squadron itself, they were both mercenary and humanitarian. The more damaged a ship was, the less valuable it was as a prize, particularly if that damage was to the hull, rather than the more easily repaired or replaced rigging and masts, because a slave trader’s salvage value was based on its price at auction, not its original value or an objective scale based on size as measured in “tons burthen.” Also, the slave hold was belowdecks, meaning that any shot so aimed might kill or injure the captive people on board; the ostensible purpose of the WAS was to suppress the slave trade, and that included liberating or at least recapturing the enslaved, not killing them (though, realistically, they, too, were less valuable dead).
Castle’s shot, which did halt the Primero, “with sails shaking and booms cracking,” killed two enslaved children and wounded two more. The crew discovered this after a party from Black Joke boarded; beyond the losses among the enslaved, the slaver’s crew had lost the cook to the blast, while its mate and four sailors were injured. It’s hard to know how bad Castle felt about that first tally. Long service often engendered callousness in the men of the WAS, who, if not inured to the horrors of the slave trade, did become at least somewhat accustomed to the regular sight of its depravity in the visceral, living flesh. However, being directly responsible for the death of children would surely have weighed on all but the hardest (or most racist) of Squadron sailors. What they found in the hold probably eased Castle’s mind a least a little, but not for any positive reasons.
The inhumanity with which slave ships were built and cruelty with which they were run were frequently one of the primary indictments of the trade used by abolitionists on the home front. The crew soon discovered that the confinements on the Primero were even more appalling than usual in a trade known for employing any degradation that might profit. At 130 tons burthen, the Spanish schooner was (very) slightly smaller than what could be considered a medium-size slaving vessel, but it was packed particularly tight, with 311 people trapped in the hold, made more squalid by the presence of animals, in this case, a number of exceedingly dirty monkeys. Of these 311, like an even more nightmarish version of Parrey’s prize Cristina, 155 were young and 4 were babies, meaning over half the slaver’s cargo had been imprisoned children. One of the babies was a newborn who had been born since the Primero had left Gallinas, just eight days before, and “whose mother, unhappy creature, sickly and emaciated, was [suckling] it on deck, with hardly a rag to cover either herself or her offspring.” Those with pressing or infectious health problems—such as giving birth in utter filth in the former case and dysentery in the latter—remained on deck for limited medical care or to halt the spreading of contagion, but those considered “healthy” most likely spent at least sixteen hours a day, at minimum, on the brink of suffocation in the hold, impossibly confined to a slave deck that, on Primero, measured only twenty-six inches in height. (Thirty-six inches might have been closer to the standard usable height, and though still unbearable, the extra ten inches could be the difference between life spent, at least in part, as someone’s chattel and excruciating death from slow suffocation, far from the sight of any shore.)
Slave hatches—latticed apertures, grates really, but made of either wood or iron—were placed between the deck and the slave deck to allow “a sufficiency of air” to reach below, but it was never enough. The hatches were sometimes accompanied by scuttles, small holes cut in the side of the ship, also for air, though if these existed, there were only two or three, and those were not always open. Some slavers held men and women in separate sections of the slave deck, some divided by age, and others didn’t bother sorting through the misery. Crouched as best they could, the enslaved sat in the stink and wet of every discharge a body could produce, from the daily waste of urine and feces, to harbingers of illness such as pus and vomit, to the rotting flesh of those who had died in the hold and not yet had their lifeless bodies removed.
Peter Leonard, lieutenant to the Dryad, was serving on Black Joke and was on the Primero when the slaver’s hatches were opened. It is his words that reveal the Primero’s greatest horror:
The small space in which these unfortunate beings are huddled together is almost incredible […] they can hardly even sit upright. The [after] part of the deck is occupied by women and children, separated by a wooden partition from the other slaves. The horrors of this infernal apartment—the want of air—the suffocating heat—the filth—the stench—may be easily imagined; although it IS remarked that this ship is one of the cleanest that ever was brought to the colony.
Of every act of deliberate and wanton cruelty aboard that schooner of horror, ultimately the worst thing about the Primero might have been that, as awful as it was, even the conditions described were barely a glimpse of the worst horrors the trade had to offer.
