CHAPTER TWELVE
Regulo
September 1831,
460 enslaved people
Rapido
September 1831,
450 enslaved people
The courageous action against the Marinerito would prompt another spate of promotions across the Black Joke—nobody mentioned the direct contravention of obligations under the treaty vis-à-vis the slaver’s crew—but the ship had suffered considerable damage and was once again in need of repair. Even before the latest damage, Hayes had begun to worry about the state of the Black Joke. He only had five regular navy ships—Atholl, Conflict, Dryad, Favorite, and the oft-maligned Plumper, still holding on—while the bulk of the work of the Squadron was being done by Dryad’s tenders, Seaflower, Fair Rosamond, and the eldest, Black Joke. Hayes had received eight sets of official Instructions (with blanks where a tender’s name might appear) in January 1831, but major changes in government in Britain were a portent of likewise seismic changes in the Admiralty, the sort of shifting and political maneuvering that could well have rendered those signatures worthless for the commodore’s purposes.
There really isn’t a short version, but again risking massive oversimplification, the attempt must be made. Events could have been said to commence near the end of June 1830, when “George IV put an end to his unpopularity by dying” and made William IV king of England. William was a third son who was never expected to rise to the throne and was thus raised in the service, which was only part of the reason he had the appellation the “Sailor King.” William was also pretty much obsessed with all things Royal Navy; he’d even served as the first Lord High Admiral in over a century in 1827 (an appointment that, coincidentally, occurred the same year his older brother Frederick died, making William the heir presumptive) before being forced to resign after only a year. This had been during the previous administration, an administration embodied in the Duke of Wellington, victor over Napoléon at Waterloo, but more recently known as the only man who could be trusted to successfully wrangle the previous monarch, George IV, who had been… excessive. (His taste was superb, his spending was outrageous, his love life was an entire buffet of scandal, and though he may or may not have been addicted to laudanum, he undoubtedly was a drinker.)
This was the previous administration because escalating reform movements and news of France’s July Revolution, also in 1830, prompted many in England (those with the franchise, anyway) to back the Whigs, rather than the conservative Tories. The big Whig win, also in 1830, was nevertheless an upset. Whigs were in favor of the suppression of the slave trade, and of working with France to finally effect real change. Conversely, William IV was not particularly liberal, he did not care to be entangled in foreign matters, and he did not like countries whose navies could approach his own, France very much included, and inevitably insulted their diplomats at state dinners. William IV very much wanted a say in who served on the Admiralty Board, and he was king. Commodore John Hayes had Ship’s Instructions signed by Lord Melville and Sir George Cockburn. Lord Melville resigned when the 1830 elections fundamentally altered the balance of political power. Sir George Cockburn was a precipitating factor of William IV’s forced resignation from the position of Lord High Admiral (back when he was Duke of Clarence) and then took the job for himself. Neither of them would be on the next Admiralty Board, clearly.
Though the commodore couldn’t yet tell which way the wind was blowing, the horizon didn’t look promising. Though it would never dissipate entirely, popular support for the Squadron’s mission in England was ebbing. Perhaps if Hayes was expecting a board heavily influenced by the liberal Whigs in Parliament, rather than a conservative king, he might have had more optimism, but he wasn’t foolish. First Bullen, then Collier, had lauded the benefits of the tender system as practiced within the West Africa Squadron. Though the government was liberalizing, the Admiralty had already been conservative and would in some ways only become more so with the regime change, and the conservative view was dim on tenders in the WAS, in part because some, including the new sovereign, were dubious on the project of the Squadron as a whole. (While still the Duke of Clarence, William had advocated against abolishing the slave trade in the first place.) That tenders were more effective had been amply demonstrated, and that they were cheaper was plain to see; with half the money it took to send a single newly designed ship from England, Hayes could buy enough tenders to patrol the coast for three years. The commodore had the papers for all the tenders he could hope to buy and didn’t even know if he had the requisite permissions to purchase more. So even as he fought to preserve the tender system in the WAS, Hayes prepared for its demise. He told the Admiralty that he’d acquired the Black Joke’s wily quarry Dos Amigos in February of 1831 as a replacement for the Black Joke, but then had the Black Joke’s hull caulked and the entire ship repaired when it came back from its fierce contest against the Marinerito, assuring anyone who asked that he was just doing a mild refit to prepare the tender to cruise in the immediate vicinity of Freetown. The commodore had staved off the end for as long as he could, but he must have been deeply disappointed when his worst fears were realized, and the news he didn’t want (but definitely expected) arrived. It was official—the Admiralty had decreed that, effective immediately, no more tenders would be purchased for the West Africa Squadron.
But none of this meant the commodore couldn’t use the ones he had. The first of the new-style tenders and the last, the Black Joke and her former prize Fair Rosamond, would become frequent companions that year. Hayes was still leery of the Black Joke’s seaworthiness, given the sheer quantity of repairs alone, not to mention the disappearing act, and tended to station the ships somewhat near each other, usually in the Bights. In September of 1831, Huntley, aboard the Fair Rosamond, was again stationed in the Bight of Benin, while Ramsay, on the Black Joke, waiting for news of his near-certain promotion for his action against the Marinerito, was back in the Bight of Biafra, but this time it was Huntley who ran into an informative skipper in Clarence Cove. The skipper had heard tell of two heavily armed slavers that had decided to sail together for better protection from the West Africa Squadron and told Huntley they were headed through the Black Joke’s patrol area. Now it was Huntley’s turn to move with all possible speed. The Fair Rosamond quickly finished resupplying at Fernando Pó’s (recently arrived) full Victualling Depot and hurried over to the Bonny River, hoping to find Ramsay and the Black Joke nearby. Huntley’s timing was excellent, as a lookout on the Fair Rosamond sighted the Black Joke that afternoon near the mouth of the Bonny.
What happened next might have been awkward in most other circumstances, but Ramsay and Huntley were close friends. (This is despite what appears to be differing views on the merits of the Squadron’s mission: Huntley thought it pointless; Ramsay would fire up no less than Charles Darwin to even greater heights of abolitionist fervor with stories of the horrors of the Marinerito and slavers like it.) When the two tender captains met on board Fair Rosamond, Huntley shared his news, and far from its catching the other lieutenant off guard, Ramsay proffered that he’d recently boarded a French slaver who’d told him about the same two ships and said they’d be more than a match for even “the dread Black Joke.” Now Huntley was still angling for a promotion, and probably kicking himself for discounting whatever magic the Black Joke clearly had, while Ramsay knew, positively knew, he’d be promoted any day now, so as the longtime friends resolved to battle together, Ramsay offered Huntley the leading position in the hope that he might soon join Ramsay at the rank of commander. Uniting forces would turn out to be an excellent idea, and the two moved farther out to sea, out of view of the river.
When the two slave ships, the Regulo and the Rapido, ambled out of the Bonny, sailed past the hazards near the shore, and finally noticed what was on their horizon, they hadn’t been expecting anyone; however, if they had been expecting anyone, it was certainly the Black Joke alone. The two fastest ships of the West Africa Squadron were not a problem the slavers wanted to tackle. Then again, who’d ever seen two such vessels stationed together? Maybe it wasn’t the British at all, and if they were pirates, well, the Regulo and the Rapido were definitely prepared for that. The two slavers stopped and conferred, eventually opting to wait for the unidentified ships to come closer and see what they decided to do.
As the Black Joke and Fair Rosamond rapidly approached, the slavers recognized them and, realizing that it was much too late to change course, weighed anchor and made ready to stand and fight, using a light wind that had sprung up to ideally position themselves relative to the British brig and brigantine. For the next half hour, the four ships moved ever closer, until just, almost, the Black Joke and Fair Rosamond were in gun range. The captain of the Rapido broke, lost his nerve, and made to run back upriver with the hopes of landing the enslaved on board his vessel. The Regulo, now unequivocally outnumbered, was forced to do likewise, but for either ship to make it, they would have to navigate the treacherous outer banks back to the mouth of the Bonny.
The slave traders each had pilots on deck, but Huntley—by now leading Ramsay due to the better condition of his ship and the graciousness of his fellow lieutenant—had only recent survey maps to guide the tenders in their pursuit. As each ship carefully threaded its way forward, balancing risk of disaster with speed, the more ably crewed Fair Rosamond and the Black Joke steadily gained on the two slavers during their last-ditch efforts to elude capture. The route took them past the anchorage of several palm-oil ships working the area, all of which were British manned, and some few of which likely had former Royal Navy sailors of their own. When the WAS tenders passed, a resounding cheer rose up, one that followed the two tenders up the river and only faded as the last merchant vessel disappeared from sight. There, as the Squadron ships maneuvered deeper into the Bonny’s tributary waters and then farther upriver, the slavers could only still be seen from high up in the rigging, trees and dense bush blocking visibility on the winding river. Suddenly, a lookout sounded pained alarm; both ships appeared to be tossing people overboard. As Fair Rosamond and the Black Joke cleared the last bend, the situation became clearer, and uglier—the Regulo had become wedged in the mud of the river and was a panic of bodies and canoes as the crew ungently tried to disembark as many slaves as possible into the waiting boats below, literally pushing the enslaved off the decks with no regard to their landing and little for their survival.
Huntley, still in the lead, had seen more than enough and fired a warning shot across the Regulo’s bow, declaring that if a single person on the slaver was off-loaded into a single canoe, he’d open fire on everyone. Clearly, Huntley and Ramsay were friends for a reason—even if their political differences meant that Huntley didn’t care one whit about the suppression of the slave trade, while Ramsay had gone out of his way to maroon the larger part of a slaver crew in direct contravention of international law on account of its being incredibly inhumane in a business built on inhumanity. Beyond threats to fire on whatever was most inconveniencing them at the moment, the two shared a pettiness that could be potentially fatal to the recipient. Huntley had once chased a slaver and caught it, only to find no enslaved on board. When he asked the captain of the ship why he’d run if he had no illegal cargo, and the captain replied that he just wanted to see how his vessel might fare against a Royal Navy cruiser, Huntley, displeased but realizing he couldn’t just destroy a ship for wasting his time, instead set his men to unbend every sail, dismantle every inch of rigging, throw anything movable overboard, including the guns, and drop the anchors on the slave ship as far as they would go, then abandoned the captain to the disarray. And this time both lieutenants were irritated. Everyone on the Regulo stopped moving.
Ramsay, mindful of his secure promotion and of his word to let Huntley take whatever action presented itself, kept the Black Joke back to stay and deal with the mess of the subdued Regulo, allowing the Fair Rosamond to continue up the river, around Bonny Island, and catch Rapido. The geography of the area allowed for some wiggle room around Hayes’s order to avoid going upriver, but Huntley did not risk a leisurely pace; across the still-wide water he could see that something monstrous was happening. Where the Regulo had had canoes sort of waiting and was attempting some kind of landing—dangerous and haphazard though it had been—the crew of the Rapido was simply throwing the enslaved overboard, still shackled in twos, to drown or be eaten by crocodiles and sharks. (Sharks were known to sometimes follow slave ships, waiting for the inevitable bodies from above.) The crew of the Fair Rosamond saved one pair of men by catching them by their shackles with a hook as the ship passed the place they’d gone in, but these were the only known survivors of the enslaved on the Rapido. The ship didn’t end up faring much better than the Regulo—by the time both ships had been taken, the tide had run out and everyone was grounded.
During the week it took to free the ships, the Black Joke’s medical staff, namely Douglas, discovered a number of cases of smallpox among the 220 enslaved people who had not been drowned or successfully landed by the Regulo’s crew. Ramsay refused to risk it and ordered the sick landed as well, lest the crew of the Black Joke take ill. These people had already been through a lot that day; they weren’t from this area of Africa and had likely been brought to the coast by caravan—none of them spoke the local language. They were comprehensible enough to be heard begging, pleading, to be taken back on board for much of the night. Then in the morning, when Ramsay looked to see how they’d fared, they’d completely disappeared—no one remaining. Neither the crews of Black Joke and Fair Rosamond, the crews of the slavers, the 164 other survivors of the Regulo, nor the two survivors of the Rapido, ever saw them again.
The easy cruelty with which these two ships sought to evade capture—and that the Rapido might actually have avoided condemnation via the expedient of murdering its unwilling cargo had those two men not been pulled from the river—reverberated across the ocean, particularly for Huntley. He had a model of the Rapido made and exhibited in London and, upon his return, regaled crowds by turns horrified and fascinated with his tales of evil slavers and their appalling degradations, playing on abolitionist sympathies he didn’t share. (One has only to look to his memoir, Seven Years’ Service on the Slave Coast of Western Africa, for the evidence of that.) Nonetheless, Huntley’s cash grab was (inadvertently) helpful to the cause, as the publicity his exhibition and others like it—Butterfield once commented offhandedly about just bringing back an actual slave ship and had several serious offers—generated kept the horrific acts of the Rapidos of the slaving world in the news and on the minds of those back in England, the same citizens that Hayes had been so intent on making understand the true nature of the fight against slavery and why it was worth the cost.
It was the scandal Britain needed to push harder for equipment clauses, amendments to treaties that would allow ships equipped for slaving to be detained with or without bodies on board, which would have prevented the incident. These efforts were assisted by the rise of King Louis Philippe in France, whose pro-abolition regime would, in a few years, accomplish what Collier and Hayes had spent years saying was the only thing that could make this entire project work—denying slavers the protection of the French flag, and thereby ridding the slave coast of nearly all French slavers. Diplomatic developments happening in this moment, all around the world, would once again fundamentally alter the laws of the sea with reverberations for decades to come. The world the Black Joke would soon leave behind had been difficult to imagine four years prior.
