CHAPTER ELEVEN
Marinerito
April 1831,
496 enslaved people
Commodore Hayes despised the slave trade as a business “of horrible crimes, worse than murder,” and as prizes such as the Primero came into Freetown’s harbor or escaped condemnation under the French flag, his disgust with the whole “nefarious traffic” undergirded each report he sent back to the Admiralty. These were official reports, and in most circumstances the standard language was a distanced, spare retelling of facts. The prize crew on the Primero lost only one more person on their journey back to Sierra Leone; only five (known) dead enslaved Africans since the time of embarkation—four of them killed as a result of the capture of the ship—was an astonishingly good result. Compare that description and result to this letter from Hayes to his superiors about two French slave ships the Black Joke had attempted to detain:
The scalding perspiration was running down from one to the other, covered also with their own filth, and where it is no uncommon occurrence for women to be bringing forth children, and men dying by their side, with full in their view, living and dead bodies chained together, and the living, in addition to all their other torments, labouring under the most famishing thirst. […Reflect] on what must be the sufferings of upwards of five hundred of these miserable people chained together, and crammed in between the decks of a vessel only half the tonnage of a Ten Gun Brig. Gracious God! Is this unparalleled cruelty to last for ever?
It was going to last for a while longer, to be sure. Hayes’s level of impassioned horror was not the norm, neither on the coast nor back in London, especially when British lives were lost in the pursuit and capture of a slave ship. Particularly back in England, abolitionist sentiment or no, the populace, in the commodore’s estimation, had no notion of the grisly sights to be found on a slaver, nor the extent of the battle yet to be waged against the traffic. This work “where [English] blood is spilt,” Hayes knew, was “viewed in England by many (who reflect not on, or take into their consideration, the sufferings, the unspeakable sufferings, of the poor unhappy Africans,) as most horrid affairs, but when their sufferings be considered, I think it will appear in another light.”
Even still, the commodore’s personal feelings could only make so much difference, even in his own command. Sailors in the West Africa Squadron were regularly exposed to the brutality of the slave trade, yet as far as Peter Leonard on the Dryad (and lately of the Black Joke) could tell, remained largely insensate to the greater aim of their collective efforts. Leonard seemingly had an attitude more typical to service on the coast than did his superior and was much more blasé about whether those effecting suppression actually cared about slavery. After witnessing the particularly violent action aboard one slaver, the lieutenant wrote, “It is gratifying to think that Jack”—Jack, or Jack Tar, was a common nickname for the average Royal Navy rating, those who weren’t officers (commissioned, warrant, petty, or otherwise)—“is still the same—that he fights for the love of it just as he was wont to do—for it is not to be supposed that any notions concerning the inhumanity of slave-dealing, or the boon of emancipation which he is about to confer […] enter into his thoughtless head.” In using so broad a brush Leonard basically asserted that the lower decks were incapable of political thought and surely elided over at least some awareness among the sailors for the reasons and rationale for their service, particularly for any men who risked kidnapping and enslavement with every pirate and slaver encounter on account of their hue. However, Leonard wasn’t entirely wrong about the general mindset in the WAS.
He was, though, mistaken in attributing the primacy of love of duty (and a good fight) to just the seamen. After his capture of the Primero, Castle continued to cruise for prey and, in February 1831, thought he had a line on a schooner near Cape Mesurado when he realized he wasn’t alone in his pursuit. An unknown frigate was also firing on the schooner, which, out of options, decided it would rather risk the forty-four-gun frigate than the Black Joke. Surprising just about everyone, said frigate promptly hoisted an American flag and identified itself as the USS Java. Castle decided this definitely merited investigation, so as the schooner was being boarded by the frigate, he ordered his little brig to sidle up alongside to take a better look. All appeared to be in order, and even though the American captain, Kennedy, wouldn’t allow a boarding party from the Black Joke (hey, the War of 1812 hadn’t been that long ago), he did consent to receive Castle alone on the Java and was the picture of courtesy. The Americans were headed back to the United States, but Kennedy assured Castle that the Black Joke should give chase to any American-flagged slaver it might encounter, and the Java would do likewise should it happen upon a British slave trader, and, essentially, have a nice life. It wasn’t much, considering that if British political will regarding policing the slave trade was low, American interest was lower still, and slavers didn’t seem to have much bothered with American flags for years, but it was nice of him to say, and since the schooner had been boarded by the Americans and was thus out of the Royal Navy’s purview, that would have been the end of it… if the Black Joke hadn’t happened upon Java again two days later. This time, Kennedy assured Castle that should the US frigate happen upon a slaver, it would signal the tender and detain the quarry until the speedier ship could arrive. So of course it was this time that the Black Joke never saw or heard from the Java again.
The frigate had been stationed in the Mediterranean and had only been in the area because Kennedy was looking in on the Colony of Liberia. Having conducted that business, USS Java left the coast, continuing back to Norfolk, Virginia. Imperialist interests notwithstanding, the US and the English home fronts didn’t hold a monopoly on disinterest in the disposition of the slave trade. The officer corps of the Royal Navy was as rife with apathy if not outright antipathy toward the mission of the Squadron as it was abolitionist fervor, and perhaps none typified this bent more than Dryad senior lieutenant Henry Huntley, who was, in April 1831, presented with a choice between three commands: the cutter from England, Seaflower; the proven, but tired, Black Joke; or its former prize and new partner in arms, the freshly rechristened Fair Rosamond. However, if Huntley picked Black Joke, which might “barely last six months” before the ship had to be scuttled, the other assignments to the two tenders would stand until a natural vacancy presented itself, and Commodore Hayes couldn’t guarantee Huntley would get another opportunity to command.
Lieutenant Castle’s time on the Black Joke was short-lived; soon after his odd encounters with the Java, circumstances (read: death and Commodore Hayes) conspired to transfer Castle to acting commander of another ship in the Squadron, the Medina, where that October he would finally receive the promotion he sought. Hayes had no intention of reneging on his understanding with Ramsay that he’d get another chance at the helm, but Huntley had served with the commodore longer, and that probably contributed to his having first pick for a mission he felt was entirely pointless: not only could Africa not be “civilized,” but Huntley was certain that “to keep up a squadron for the purpose of suppressing the Slave Trade is a monotonous and idle absurdity.” Huntley also believed in duty, however, and he took the choice Hayes offered seriously, providing one of the only known descriptions of how Black Joke and Fair Rosamond sailed respective to the other. The lieutenant described the latter as “a fine schooner, though not equal to the sailing of the Black Joke by the wind, but she was certainly her superior when going well ‘free.’ ” (These terms describe the action of the ship on the water: in “by or on the wind” the sails were positioned such that a ship was propelled along its length, while “going free” or “sailing off the wind” was considered a more natural movement in which the ship was directly propelled forward by the wind.) Huntley apparently didn’t put much stock in something so nebulous as “luck,” and mindful of Hayes’s warning, chose the newer, shinier Fair Rosamond, which had yet to even face a serious repair (seeing as, even when captured, the ship hadn’t been fired upon), over the much-embattled and twice-refit Black Joke. His choice brought Lieutenant William Ramsay back to the famous tender that spring, only three months after his last command.
This bothered Ramsay, who apparently did put stock in the winds of fortune, not at all; had he been given the choice, he might well have ended up on the same ship he was assigned by default. It would have been the right choice. Commodore Hayes had intelligence on the possible whereabouts of heavily armed slave traders, and he wanted his lieutenants to act, sending the Black Joke for a cruise in its old stomping grounds, the Bight of Biafra, while he sent Huntley and the Fair Rosamond to the Bight of Benin. As for the rest of the Squadron, in the spring of 1831, it was more short of ships and men than it had arguably ever been—the Atholl remained and had been joined by Favorite; Conflict and Plumper held the rotating duty in Sierra Leone, and the Dryad, thought much too slow for duty on the coast, had lost most of its men to staffing the tenders. (The manpower problems went deeper than that as the complement of the Plumper consisted almost entirely of Kroomen, with only six White sailors aboard.) First, however, the Black Joke had to stop at Clarence Cove.
In a fit of irony—or perhaps just in the absence of Collier—the navy had finally elected to try Fernando Pó, which was still firmly in rapid (and ordered) decline under Colonel Nicholls, as the Victualling Depot for the West Africa Squadron. This made the island, however temporarily, the main rendezvous point for Squadron ships on patrol, much as Captain Owen had once dreamed and schemed of its being. Of more concern to Ramsay, awaiting him there were fresh sweeps (oars) sent from England. Given what the lieutenant had already been through on the Black Joke, it’s no wonder he wanted them to hand before beginning the tender’s cruise in earnest. While in harbor in Clarence Cove, the Black Joke chanced upon a friendly colonial vessel, a palm oiler, helmed by a Captain Mather. The two men swapped news, and Mather mentioned a heavily armed slave ship, with five guns and a well-disciplined crew, flying Spanish colors and nearing departure from nearby Duke’s Town. It was, without question, the finest slave ship Mather had seen in the area for quite some time. The ship’s captain was, Mather was certain, unworried by the prospect of capture.
Mather was so sure because, though no one was allowed on board this Marinerito, he’d had dinner onshore with its officers. This wasn’t at all unusual, as the crews of licit and illicit traders who found themselves in the same settlements often interacted. There are numerous accounts of even men in the Squadron sharing meals with, and enjoying the hospitality of, slave traders. The mixed-nationality officers of this Spanish brig had boasted to the palm-oil captain that, if approached, they had every intention of fighting their way out, but on the whole, they weren’t especially worried about the prospect. Black Joke was too weak to take them, seeing as it was small and outgunned, they had assured Mather. As for the rest of the Squadron, well, that was even more laughable. Every other ship was too slow; they had nothing to fear from the British. It hadn’t been surprising to Mather that Black Joke had come up in conversation—the brig’s fame was global, and discussion of the bane of the trade was ubiquitous among slavers. But to then stumble on the notorious tender itself, and so nearby! That was something else, and Mather, ever helpful, could not only tell Ramsay where he’d left the cocky officers, but also provide a solid estimate of when they might disembark, fully laden with the enslaved.
The Black Joke, according to Mather’s best guess, could get in position in time to intercept, but it was a tight window. Ramsay wasted no more time, scooping up the new equipment and his supplies at record pace, and immediately headed out to confront the confidence of the Marinerito. He anchored out to sea near the mouth of the Old Calabar River, but out of sight of the harbor, on the evening of April 23. The next morning, Ramsay moved the tender out to sea, in case a slaver came out of the river and spotted the little brig, then moved back to the river at night. Another morning broke, and the crew repeated the maneuver. It proved worth the trouble when, at 11:00 a.m. on the second day of their watch, April 25, 1831, someone on the Black Joke spotted the Spanish brig coming out of the Old Calabar River, headed in their direction from the northwest. If they’d remained in their nighttime spot, the tender would almost immediately have been spotted, which would not only have forced Ramsay to uncomfortably reminisce about how well chasing a ship upriver had worked out for him in pursuit of Dos Amigos, but also near certainly have warned every slaver in the vicinity and beyond of the Black Joke’s appearance in the Bights. Ships of all speeds and armaments had taken to avoiding the Black Joke’s patrol area entirely, if possible, and if the ship appeared while the slavers were in port, they stayed, sometimes for months, until they were sure the British brig had gone on its way.
Just in case, though, Ramsay ordered some of the sails struck to better disguise the distinctive ship. This worked well enough that the sublimely unconcerned Marinerito was in sight from the deck, not the rigging, of the Black Joke before recognizing the very subject of their amused dinner conversation with that friendly merchant captain of perhaps a week past. Once the Spanish brig recognized its foe, however, the joking stopped, and the Marinerito swiftly caught a southeasterly wind trying, unsuccessfully, to escape; Ramsay did have the only ship on the water they’d been worried about catching them. The two ships sailed all day, until suddenly, at nine o’clock at night, they both hit a dead calm, barely within gun range. The Black Joke asked for the Spanish brig’s surrender with a warning shot aimed to cut the ship off in front; Marinerito answered as they said they would, with a three-gun broadside. The fight was on.
Stopping for replacement equipment had already been plenty fortuitous, since Mather’s intel had been proven correct, and now Ramsay could be even more grateful he’d stopped—he was going to need those sweeps. In the bright moonlight on a totally calm sea, with the Cameroon mountains rising in the background, the Black Joke’s men rowed toward the slave ship under a barrage of grapeshot that only steadied as they approached. This was the scene that prompted Leonard to wax eloquent about the glory of the fighting spirit and the uncomplicated mind of Jack Tar, this strong beat of men eagerly rowing into a fight as deadly projectiles streamed overhead, with no thought to their place in a larger mission. For all the glory Leonard saw after the fact, the hour they spent—from 1:00 to 2:00 a.m., under the constant fire of grapeshot, round shot, and musketry—as the crew steadily rowed toward the barrage likely felt interminable to those manning the sweeps; they’d already had one man, Isaac Fail, wounded in the initial onslaught. Thankfully the wind finally came back and Ramsay was able to bring the tender alongside to taunting cries from the slaver, reputedly hearing a voice call out, “Come aboard, ye English blackguards, and fight us fairly!”
Ever since the sweeps had been ordered, Ramsay had been sitting on the port gunwale with eyes only for the Marinerito, sword point in the wood of the deck, and he laconically responded to the jeers from the other deck, “I’m coming, mon [sic], I’m coming as fast as I can.” Bringing the brig alongside, Ramsay gave a signal to the grizzled, one-eyed boatswain’s mate, Peter Kenney, who blew a loud whistle for all the crew to hear and called, “All hands to board! Give us a rope to lash the devil with!” As the ships met, he leaped across, followed by several men. Just then, at the crucial moment of boarding, the wind that Ramsay had been waiting for turned against him. With a sudden shift, Black Joke picked up speed so quickly that it practically ricocheted off the Marinerito. The movement was so swift that the sailors hadn’t managed to lash the ships together for a proper boarding before Black Joke careened away, but as was the procedure, boarding had already commenced. Kenney, Ramsay, his mate C. J. Bosanquet, and nine others were the only ones to make it to the deck of the Marinerito, where they faced seventy-seven men long prepared for this moment. The Spanish brig had five eighteen-pounders to the Black Joke’s two, and as every gun on both ships fired, all hell well and truly broke loose.
It was a teenage midshipman who saved the day. Edwin Hinde, scarcely fifteen years old and tiny with it—and also quite possibly the highest-ranked individual still on the tender, what with so many officers having made the fateful leap to the Marinerito—had only been in the Royal Navy for two years, but he nonetheless rallied the crew of the Black Joke like the commander he hoped someday to become. Hinde ordered the men back to the starboard sweeps. A cry rose up from Isaac Fail, his young son looking on: “Hurrah, boys, hurrah! God bless King William!”—and with his final strength given to the call to rally, Fail died in assistant surgeon Douglas’s arms. The crew managed to bring the ship alongside Marinerito once more, where the fighting was getting desperate, and Hinde successfully led a second boarding of nearly the entire crew to the slaver. The first boarding party, though heavily wounded, had held out until reinforcements arrived, and together they soon overcame the Spanish slaver.
Fail was the only man dead from the Black Joke, though Ramsay and Bosanquet were both severely injured, and five more were wounded. The Marinerito, by contrast, had thirteen men killed or drowned in the action, and another fifteen wounded. Now that the battle was won, the Black Jokes still standing noticed the slave hatches had been battened down and rushed to open them, only to discover a horrific scene: “The living were found sitting on the heads and bodies of the dead and dying below.” The hatches had, it seemed, been closed since the chase began nearly twenty-four hours prior, and the enslaved Africans on board were simultaneously suffocating and dying of thirst, with the still-living crouched perilously on the bodies of the recently dead. The enslaved of the Marinerito had not been given water for days, since before the slaver had exited the river, and when they were released from belowdecks, a second, smaller pandemonium ensued as the Black Jokes began to hand out water. The enslaved crowded the tubs of fresh water, insensate from prolonged dehydration, lapping the deck for every spare drop, even attempting seawater when they could not access the tubs and jugs being hastily provided. Of the 496 enslaved people who had been embarked on the Spanish slaver, 26 were already dead of suffocation and/or dehydration, and 107 were so close to death that Ramsay believed that the only way to save their lives would be to land them at the nearest friendly harbor, Clarence Cove, rather than risk trying to get them to Freetown and the Mixed Commission for their formal liberation. Of those so landed, 60 still died. As for the Marinerito’s crew, “even the hardest heart” on Black Joke had been moved by the harrowing scene on the slave deck, and so close after a hard-fought victory, emotions were high.
Treaties dictated that a slaver’s crew either be dropped at the nearest port—from thence to go forth and enslave again, presumably, but officially to be “tried and punished according to the laws of their country”—be placed on another ship, or be brought to Freetown as witnesses. Ramsay, taking the tenor of his men, went for a fourth option, much-discussed among naval officers but rarely carried out, particularly in the nineteenth century. The crew of the Black Joke, in rebuke of the abject misery they’d just witnessed, agreed to a man to first (and illegally) imprison the surviving crew of the Marinerito at Fernando Pó for a few weeks before conspiring with the crew of Atholl, Ramsay’s previous berth, to set them “adrift,” which in this case meant abandonment on an island, Anabona (modern-day Annobón), without any seacraft whatsoever. (Black Joke couldn’t do it because Ramsay would be expected to testify against Marinerito before the Mixed Commission.) Describing the island, Leonard said:
The Island of Anabona—in one degree twenty-two minutes south latitude, five degrees twenty-seven minutes forty-nine seconds east longitude—is about twenty-four miles in circumference, and its summit from two thousand to three thousand feet high. Its appearance, as we approach, is remarkably pleasing. Without either the romantic rocky outline of Prince’s Island, or the deep forest shade of Fernando Po, its sunbright surface is surmounted by a few craggy and conical eminences, while its sloping sides consist of undulating hills, many of which are almost free from wood, and covered with waiving grass embrowned by the sun, forming bright yellow glades, which relieve the deep green of the spreading groves and clumps of trees covering the other hills in their vicinity. These hills are intersected with dells and ravines, shaded with numerous tall trees and leafy shrubs,—deep and wide gullies formed by the original convulsion of Nature, but now bearing in their bosom the placid brook, or affording a bed to the rushing mountain torrents during the periodical rains. In many places the island is steep and precipitous from the very beach. At others the ascent is more gradual; but, excepting a few acres in two or three places close to the sea shore, there is little or no level land, so far as I could observe, on the whole island.
It doesn’t sound like the worst place to be left, especially since Annobón was far from unpopulated. The poetic context is that Annobón was then administered by a native government extremely hostile to Spaniards, whom the whole of the island had successfully ousted as overlords, yet who still plagued the populace as kidnappers and sellers of flesh. In what could well be viewed as a rather cosmic justice, at least some of the slaver’s crew—possibly those who were actually Spanish, as other nationalities likely received a comparatively warmer reception—attempted to canoe to São Tomé. Nine men in three canoes left Annobón. Two canoes were taken up in a tornado, while the third one barely survived. The storm took out nearly all of their stores, such that when the Black Joke happened upon that last canoe a month later, the two men left had been without food, drinking only what water fell from the sky, for ten days. The tender picked them up, but like so many from belowdecks on the Marinerito, these two from above were in dire straits, and unlikely to survive. Thus ever to slavers.
Once the Black Joke and the Marinerito prize crew arrived in Sierra Leone with the remaining African survivors, plus the few crew members of the slaver who’d traveled as witnesses, “liberation” began. Once a ship was spotted coming into Freetown, a signal gun was fired. Lookouts posted to the signal hill eyed the vessel and announced, by way of a colored ball lifted on a long stick or staff, its apparent make and origins—the Marinerito would have been announced as a brig from the south. Once arrived, an official boat would meet the prize and climb on board, and there witness a segregated group of enslaved Africans who were sick or dying; a deck “thronged with men, women and children, all entirely naked” and likely covered in all manner of filth; and the smell. This mass of people might be only a small portion of the prize’s total human cargo, and if more enslaved were on board, they were still in the very slave deck on which they’d been embarked, if with slightly more space. Each individual would be subject to an inspection, which reads less like a liberation and more like the precursor to an auction:
[The enslaved were] drawn up through the small hatchway from their hot, dark confinement. A black boatswain seized them one by one, dragging them before [the inspectors] for a moment, when the proper officer at a glance decided the age, where above 14; and they were instantly swung again by the arm into their [loathsome] cell, where another negro boatswain sat, with a whip or stick, and forced them to resume the bent and painful attitude necessary for the stowage of so large a number.
There the enslaved remained until the prize was condemned, unless their health merited landing or transfer. (Suddenly, Dos Amigos being taken without 560-odd enslaved Africans on board has a rather peculiar silver lining.) Presuming it was condemned—Marinerito certainly was—the enslaved were rowed to the King’s Yard in Freetown to receive their much-ballyhooed liberation. It was not freedom. The newly liberated Africans became British, whether they wanted to or not, and the adults were given three options—they could become “free apprentices in the West Indies,” join a segregated regiment of troops, or settle on one of the estates bordering Freetown. There was an unofficial fourth option, as those who attempted to liberate themselves on the Manzanares could tell anyone, which was to cause or seem like enough trouble that the colonial government shipped the lot of you off to the hinterlands and ceased to interfere. And a fifth possibility, as as many as 15 percent of the newly arrived Africans succumbed to illnesses contracted on board slave ships or in Freetown itself and died within four months of their arrival.
One could easily be forgiven for forgetting that this process was ostensibly meant to be liberatory. Apprenticeship was rather slavery adjacent, in that the people who “chose” it would be shipped, usually (but not always) against their will, to one of the British colonies in the Americas, where they were required to perform labor, with minimal or no compensation, for a term “not exceeding” fourteen years. (After the British abolished slavery in all its colonial holdings, guess what 80 percent of relocated “liberated” Africans did as “apprenticeship”? Harvested sugarcane in Jamaica, British Guiana, and Trinidad.) When joining a regiment, the British registrar might change someone’s name because it was hard for the registrar to say or just for a lark—one such secretary changed every African’s name, just so his records would be preemptively alphabetized. And settling on an estate might also sound disturbingly familiar—this option came with an allotment of land, one the “liberated” were to work for a supervisor (each responsible for upward of a thousand similarly situated Africans), and provided a cook pot, a shovel, and a spoon, plus one and a quarter yards of fabric for some clothes, since nothing, sometimes not even slavery, seemed to offend British sensibilities like nudity.
This hadn’t always been the policy. The nature and goals of the Liberated African Department had, for a stretch, appeared to be entirely at the whim of the colonial government of Sierra Leone. Kenneth Macaulay, who’d himself served as acting governor for six months in 1826, summed up this history in 1827:
The colony [of Sierra Leone] has been grievously injured by the want of any systematic plan or rule of conduct having been laid down for its government, by which its prosperity might have been promoted. […] Every Governor has been left to follow his own plans, however crude and undigested; and no two succeeding Governors have ever pursued the same course. This remark applies more particularly to the management of the liberated Africans. Mr. [Thomas] Ludlam [1806–08, his third tenure] pursued the system of apprenticing them. Mr. [Thomas Perronet] Thompson [1808–10] set that aside, and turned them loose in the colony, without any other superintendance than its general police. Captain [Edward H.] Columbine [1810–11] employed them on the public works, or apprenticed them. Colonel [Charles William] Maxwell [1811–15], after delivering over […] all the men fit for his Majesty’s service, apprenticed a part of the remainder, and then commenced forming villages with those who could not be so disposed of. Sir Charles MacCarthy [1815–20; 1821–24] gave up apprenticing, except in particular cases, and adopted the plan of forming them into villages, under such civil superintendance and religious instruction as he could command, keeping the youths and children in schools, or making mechanics of them; neglecting perhaps too much, in his successful attempt to make them orderly and quiet citizens, the equally desirable object of making them industrious agriculturalists and growers of exportable produce. [Major] General [Sir Charles] Turner [1824–26] dissolved, in great measure, the schools, and the institutions for mechanics, and threw the people more on their own resources; but did not afford, indeed he did not possess, the means of duly superintending their settlement and progress, or directing their energies.
In essence, some governors had allowed the apprentice system to be used as a proxy slavery, where the contract could be bought, sold, and extended for transgressions. Others placed more emphasis on conscription, and for a few years nearly 80 percent of recaptive African men were sent to the Royal Army. Some governors thought the colony, especially Freetown and its immediate environs, was too full and focused on shipping recaptives back out to places such as the West Indies for “apprenticeships,” again proxy slavery, usually harvesting sugar; others felt there wasn’t enough farming and focused on increasing the population of the colony for the benefit of the agricultural economy. The common bond throughout was colonization; the jobs being assigned to recaptive Africans were unquestionably in service of British empire. From an account of the Primero:
[The children] were singing on board the schooner, in anticipation of the boat’s return, and continued their song all the way on shore, laughing and clapping their hands. But the men and women, after they reached the yard, when the momentary gratification of setting foot on land once more had passed away, looked sullen and dissatisfied, but not dejected. It struck me that on landing they expected to be allowed to go wherever they pleased, and were consequently disappointed and angry when they found themselves still under control.
Recognizing that emancipation without freedom was nothing much to speak of, some Africans pretended to docilely accept their new name or their new job, then melted away, either to escape the rigidity of British conceptions of liberty in Freetown, avoid being shipped out again, or simply to finally return to their homeland.
