CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Frasquita
February 1832,
290 enslaved people
Though Ramsay’s choice to land and functionally abandon the sick of the Regulo was ruled by the Foreign Office to be “unprecedented and improper,” he’d been right about a forthcoming promotion. So when the Black Joke underwent yet another secretive refurbishment to hide its condition from the Admiralty, as being stuck in the mud of the Bonny had had a rather deleterious effect, command of the ship shifted from Ramsay, promoted to commander, to Huntley, who’d recanted on his previous decision about which tender he wanted to captain. Even though Huntley was already at the helm of the Fair Rosamond, he’d finally realized that there was something that wouldn’t be denied about the Black Joke, and he was ready to steer the lucky ship toward his own promotion. This wasn’t the only change afoot. Higher up the ranks, the Admiralty was making major moves as well.
The appellation “Sailor King” should have been more comfort to Commodore Hayes—it certainly was to much of the rest of the navy, and stunts such as Huntley’s exhibition might not have been half so popular were everything navy-related not all the rage. In Hayes’s case, however, there may have been few worse places to be stationed than the West Africa Squadron when one’s king is less than enthusiastic about abolition, the West Africa Squadron when one’s king doesn’t enjoy foreign entanglements, or, look at that, the West Africa Squadron when one’s king likes to avoid the reminder that other places have decent navies, too, because it might require him to treat with their governments as if their sea power could possibly come to rival his own. Since the spark of the July Revolution in France, reformist zeal—at least from the populace, if not the monarchs—had raged across Europe and throughout England (and hadn’t yet flagged enough to ignore), and the Admiralty knew that dismantling the West Africa Squadron outright was out of the question. That being said, the budget, deployment, manpower, and refusal to enact a tender policy that would make the Squadron function efficiently and as intended all told the same story—though the First Lord of the Admiralty since the 1830 political shake-up, Sir James Graham, was, for now, a Whig (the party representing liberal reform ideals; he switched to the conservatives a few years later in 1834 over reform of the Church in Ireland), the new predominately Tory Admiralty Board was just as disinterested in the WAS as its old Tory forebears, and perhaps even more so.
Both Hayes and Collier had written, argued, begged, and sworn that suppression was a job that could be done, and done right, if anyone was willing to fund it or had the political pull to firmly back it. So it probably particularly stung for Hayes that, just as the flag of France—of which he’d complained mightily as the last obstacle to making real progress with suppression—was no longer of real use to slavers, the West Africa Squadron was being collapsed into the Royal Navy’s Cape of Good Hope Station. Graham, in his position atop the Admiralty, was genuinely interested in reform of naval policy and practice and made many key changes throughout the service (despite leaving impressment as a problem for someone else, at another, later, date); this, unfortunately, was not one of his better ideas. Such a huge shift in how the oceans surrounding Africa would be managed and policed necessarily came with major changes, not the least of which was Hayes’s job. The commodore’s position at the top of the WAS was folded into the responsibilities of the commander in chief of the Cape Station, currently Commodore Schomberg. Rather than choose one over the other—and given how things turned out, something both Hayes and Schomberg would likely have preferred, no matter who ended up employed—the Admiralty wanted someone in charge who was a little more in its image, a bit more aligned with its policies, goals, and direction. So neither commodore would keep his job as currently constituted; the Admiralty chose to replace them both with Rear Admiral Warren, a move that would not be without conflict or drama.
Descended from famous doctors on both sides of the family—his father, Richard, was a personal physician of George III’s, his maternal grandfather, the same to Georges II and III—Frederick Warren was fifty-six years old in 1831 and had just made rear admiral the previous year. His naval career had already taken him to Halifax, China, the West Indies, the Baltic, Lisbon, and the Mediterranean, but he had no experience, absolutely none, on the coast of Africa, where he was now charged with the administration of two once-independent stations tasked with a heinously difficult mission several thousand miles apart. Sailing on the Isis, Warren brought with him two redesigned coffin brigs, Charybdis and Brisk, both commanded by star lieutenants who’d made names in service on the coast, the latter by Lieutenant Edward Harris Butterfield, once a master’s mate on Black Joke under Turner, when the brig had been new to the mission and taken its first prize, Gertrudis. Warren was also accompanied by some of the latest naval technology going, the Pluto, a paddle steamer that could be powered by wood or coal, in order to document the ship’s capabilities and fuel performance. As he cruised along the coast of Gambia toward Freetown, Warren didn’t get off to a popular start. One of his first moves as commander of both stations had been to recommend to the Admiralty that any wine purchases made for the public service must be from the Cape, where it was cheaper than in the Wine Islands (Madeira, Tenerife, etc.), entirely ignoring the thousands of miles anyone stationed more northerly who needed (or wanted) to purchase wine for his ship would have to go to get this supposedly “cheaper” wine. The Admiralty took the recommendation. The policy was not well received, nor were Warren’s other recommendations, likely on behalf of the lieutenant governor of Gambia, that the Mixed Commission should be moved to the settlement at Bathurst (now the capital, Banjul) and recaptive Africans placed around the nearby river. (On the other hand, he, like every head of the Squadron before him, had little good to say about Fernando Pó.)
These suggestions weren’t as readily embraced as changing wine suppliers, but Warren was obviously there, at least in part, to cut costs and to make the suppression effort less expensive. The Admiralty could not have been pleased to hear, then, that even Warren, arriving at the coast in the wake of major international developments that prompted a relative ebb in the trade, could not see a way to operate on the Western coast with fewer than six ships—though he seemed to be the first head of the Squadron to fail to insist that, to do an effective job, they’d ideally have quite a few more. His recommendations weren’t based on hard-won experience, or terrible images burned into the mind; even now, Warren had yet to see a slaver, much less experience the difficulties to be had in chasing or boarding one. Though possessed of an impressive record during the Napoleonic Wars (two court-martials notwithstanding), the rear admiral was now, in essence, a bureaucrat, one who cared more for the Admiralty’s ledgers than for the comforts of the men in his command or the ultimate duty to which they’d been assigned. So, lacking, it seemed, both finesse and geographical knowledge of the area, the rear admiral then sent word to Hayes to meet him in Freetown upon his arrival. (This being accomplished by using swifter boats for post than Warren’s flagship.) Hayes happened to be near the area and received the message in time, and managed to arrive in Sierra Leone in late January 1832, only a day after Warren himself.
Whatever reception Hayes was expecting, it certainly wasn’t the one he got. Without fanfare or even pleasantries—much less refreshments—the rear admiral reiterated his purpose on the coast before brusquely insisting that Hayes could either bring down his broad pennant, which indicated the presence of a commodore on a ship, and remain in the West Africa Squadron as post-captain under Warren’s command, or Hayes could leave for England with pennant still flying. This might have been wholly unnecessary. Commodore was used to describe someone in command of multiple ships, and seeing as Warren, a rear admiral, was now in charge of two stations over thirty-six hundred miles apart, maintaining some degree of localized control by retaining commodores for each squadron seems like it could have been a workable administrative compromise. (It’s unclear whether the immediate-ultimatum part was the Admiralty’s idea or Warren’s.) Hayes was taken completely by surprise by the demand—he’d had no idea he was being replaced and less idea any such action was being contemplated, so much so that he’d preemptively off-loaded the precise sorts of provisions his crew would have needed for a long journey to England to improve the ventilation on Dryad for continued service on the coast. He’d need to make those stops again, now, to resupply, and after receiving what must have felt like curt permission to do so, Hayes had no problems with immediately foisting one of his most pressing problems—as the former WAS commodore—directly into Warren’s lap.
The reasons people might already not like Warren, if piling up, were simple and seem not to have been all that personal, but do speak to the sort of leader he was. After Collier and Hayes, the difference for the men must have been dishearteningly stark. And the Admiralty wasn’t done with unpopular decisions. As Hayes relayed to Warren, the Admiralty had ordered the Black Joke destroyed the previous fall—a choice that was its to make once Black Joke entered the Navy List—but when Hayes prepared to dismantle the vessel, the Dryad’s carpenter, Mr. Roberts, had discovered the ship was savable and had repaired it “at trifling expense.” Whether Hayes prevaricated on how much work had had to be done to make the Black Joke seaworthy is an open historical question, but the ship had literally sailed, and now, as of February 1832 and contrary to Hayes’s warning to Huntley, HM Brig Black Joke was “now as strong as when first built,” both crewed and condemned; Warren would have to decide what to do. The rear admiral was not the sort to let his lack of experience get in the way of his decision making, but records suggest that he did initially make at least some effort on behalf of the Black Joke. He tried transferring its service to the colonial government in Sierra Leone, where Governor Findlay had finally received permission (from the Colonial Office, the Admiralty still refused) to buy a harbor guard and short-haul messenger ship, a task for which the Black Joke would have been well suited, even in mild disrepair. Warren suggested that Findlay take the tender, rather than purchase another ship entirely, and Findlay agreed, but the Admiralty shot this solution down for what could have been a few, possibly intersecting, reasons: the Admiralty wouldn’t give Black Joke to Findlay because it had already refused to give Findlay a ship of the Royal Navy that was under his authority and not the Admiralty and hadn’t changed its mind; Findlay couldn’t buy the Black Joke due to policy surrounding the sale of tenders; or it wanted the tender system destroyed utterly, and why not start with the most famous one to prove the point. Regardless of the rationale—and that Findlay was always a problem—it’s not uncharitable to wonder at the decision making.
It couldn’t have been a question of seaworthiness. After Huntley got Hayes to give him another chance at the helm, the Black Joke was cruising alone, several hundred miles from Freetown’s safe harbor, and in February 1832 made the most of its temporary reprieve from the Admiralty’s order of the previous year. Though no slaver had been captured by any ship in the West Africa Squadron since the Regulo and Rapido the previous September, only two weeks after Warren’s arrival in Freetown, the little brig, now officially declared “unfit,” would end that over-four-month drought. The Black Joke detained the Spanish schooner Frasquita with ease fifty miles south of the Bonny, and the slaver came quietly, though sixty-two of the recaptive Africans were still lost on the voyage back to the Mixed Commission. It did not go down without a legal fight, however, when its master refused to appear in court, claiming to have some sort of pox. After weeks of back-and-forth, a house visit from a representative of the Mixed Commission and colonial surgeon Boyle amply demonstrated that the master was not remotely sick, and since malingering is not contagious, he was brought forth to appear, and Frasquita was summarily condemned.
A week later, that same February, Warren requested that Huntley put the Black Joke through its paces against Brisk and Charybdis, the two new additions to the WAS that had been specially remodeled and refitted for service against slavers, representing the Royal Navy’s latest efforts to build, rather than source, an effective fleet. As the rear admiral had brought them down himself, one imagines he felt rather certain of the outcome, the capture of the Frasquita notwithstanding, sure enough, at least, to pull Huntley and his crew for the sailing trial from where they were awaiting a trafficker embarking the enslaved upriver. (The slaver was Downes’s old quarry and subject of Black Joke’s most famous action, El Almirante, repurchased by slavers and renamed Cherouka.) The Black Joke, presumably worn-out, nonetheless sailed circles around the two other ships in the trials—something Warren was loath to report, as these were his “pet” ships. So he didn’t. After the Black Joke’s triumph, Warren ordered yet another onboard inspection of the tender, to be conducted personally. After this survey, on his word alone and the brig’s having just beat the pants off his ships, Warren declared the Black Joke unfit for service, again, despite heaps of evidence to the contrary. Only this second report made it back to his superiors in London, meaning he sat on the results of the trial, and just… didn’t reveal them to the Admiralty. The ambivalence, if not outright animosity, that many in naval command felt toward the Black Joke could have been a function of what this last, meaningless victory represented. As much as the tender typified the best of the West Africa Squadron to its sailors and the people of the “Slave Coast,” perhaps when the Admiralty looked at it, all it saw was the embodiment of the Royal Navy’s failures—the failure of British shipyards to come up with a better-designed ship, the failure of the Mixed Commission to prevent slave ships from reentering the market and eventually the water, the failure of the Admiralty to use the tender system to supplement the WAS’s preventive efforts, and the failure of the Squadron (and policy) to halt transatlantic slavery. What is certain is that the Admiralty did not have the best information regarding Black Joke in this, arguably the most crucial moment in the ship’s storied history.
Whatever the rationale, without all of the relevant details, the Black Joke’s fate was sealed. It’s impossible to know if anything would have changed had Warren reported the actual results of the Black Joke’s sailing trial, but the ship remained consigned to unceremonious decommission. In a move some historians believe must have been born out of spite or animosity, though no one has yet found the source, Warren decided that Hayes, who’d done his duty by the navy but also tried quite hard to save the Black Joke, should preside over the tender’s demise on the Dryad’s way home to London. Furthermore, rather than simply taking the ship apart, as had been the plan—a customary practice used to note the construction and design of ships for future use or replication—the legendary Black Joke was so worthless it was just to be burned. One wonders if this was a deliberately cruel yet entirely practical move to protect Warren’s lie of commission regarding the fitness of the ship, or his lie of omission in failing to report the results of the trial. The move was deeply unpopular on Dryad and, as the news spread, throughout the Squadron—the tender had been the men’s mascot and their brightest star over four difficult years. It was equally unpopular among the nonslaving population of the African coast—indeed, the free Africans of Freetown presented a petition to save the Black Joke, saying they would raise money for its purchase and assume responsibility for its care. While Hayes was picking up supplies in Fernando Pó for the return to England, the freed Africans there presented him with yet another petition, and when he was leaving the island for Freetown and the irretrievable moment, a crowd gathered to entreat the previous commodore, one last time, to not go through with it, reaching out to the already reluctant Hayes, who had always loved beautiful ships, wrapping their arms around him, pleading with him not to destroy something so clearly worth saving.
It was of no use. Fifty-two months after the Black Joke had been rechristened into service of the Royal Navy, the terror of the illicit seas was soon to be so much ash. The little brig was stripped of the hogsheads, barrels, casks, and kegs that had sustained its ever-shifting population of volunteers and conscripts, former smugglers and formerly enslaved, free Africans and British subjects alike. The canvas hammocks, normally lashed on board with nets in case of tempests man- or nature-made, in which the sailors slept and were often buried, were swept away, the rigging and sails removed. As emotional onlookers watched—some, residents of Sierra Leone released from the holds of slave ships due to the extraordinary success of this very vessel; others, sailors who’d crewed it, made livelihoods from it, been inspired by it—the soon-to-be ex-commodore did as he’d been directed. On orders from Rear Admiral Frederick Warren, John “Magnificent” Hayes, in his penultimate act at sea after a lifetime of service, deliberately set the Black Joke ablaze.
Huntley would be left to dispose of its carcass—its salvaged masts, sails, and stores. Hayes took the Dryad’s remaining tenders with him, lest they face the same fate. And slave traders celebrated. The ship’s destruction would be “hailed as the happiest piece of intelligence that has been received [in Havana], and wherever else the slave trade is carried on, for many years,” wrote Peter Leonard. Whether with the opening of dark, wax-sealed bottles of fine rum and whiskey or the finest European wine, whether with smiles in spite or victory or relief, Black Joke’s demise was toasted in places as far-flung as Jamaica and Nantes, Bahia and Ouidah. The ship had “done more towards putting an end to the vile traffic in slaves than all the ships of the station put together,” and arguably more than any other single ship ever would, but all that was left was a snuffbox made from its timbers and the samples of the wood sent back to London to condemn it, the latter long since crumbled into dust in the naval archives.
Wooden snuff box […] made from the timbers of the brig Black Joke. […] The lid of the snuff box shows a view of the ship fully rigged. The back and sides are carved in deep relief with representations of African life; the front is similarly carved with a scene copied from the medal commemorating the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 (© NMM).
The year 1832 saw big changes in the Royal Navy—soon there would be no more tenders on the coast at all. The Navy Board was collapsed into a larger, more streamlined command structure, Fernando Pó would be abandoned as a depot before the settlement finally failed two years later, and the pace of modernization increased, both technologically and as an organization. These next few years saw other significant shifts, beyond the navy’s scope. In 1833, Britain finally abolished slavery, not just the trade, employing a gradualist approach in most (but not all) of its colonies, and France followed suit and abolished slavery for a second time in 1848. Back in England, 1837 saw the death of William IV, the coronation of Victoria, and the passage of the Slave Compensation Act, to redress the economic losses slaveholders sustained with broader abolition. But the quasi-enslaved in the “apprentice” system would continue to be a point of contention in British politics for years to come. And it would be decades before anyone would call the battle for suppression won.
