Dan Snow's History Hit - HMS Black Joke

Episode Date: May 16, 2022

Please note that this episode contains mentions of racial trauma, slavery and violence.The most feared ship in Britain’s West Africa Squadron, His Majesty’s Black Joke was one of a handful of ships tasked with patrolling the western coast of Africa in an effort to end hundreds of years of global slave trading. Once a slaving vessel itself, only a lucky capture in 1827 allowed it to be repurposed by the Royal Navy to catch its former compatriots.A.E. Rooks is an expert in this little-discussed facet of the transatlantic slave trade. Rooks joins Dan on the podcast to chronicle this history of the daring feats of a single ship - whose crew and commanders would capture more ships and liberate more enslaved people than any other in the Squadron.Produced by Hannah WardMixed and Mastered by Dougal PatmoreIf you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hey everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. This is a great story on the podcast today, the story of one ship's battle against the slave trade. The British West African Squadron, the Royal Navy, deploying to try and interdict the flow of enslaved African people across the Atlantic to the plantations of the New World. One ship, called the Black Joke, in just two years accounted for 11 slave ships captured. In all that time, the British only intercepted 13 slave ships and she accounted for 11 of them. She was a weapon, a fast sailor manned by a highly professional crew. It was a great backstory.

She was built in the US super fast, a blockade runner. She was then employed by Brazilian owners to bring Africans to Brazil. She was then captured by the Royal Navy and the poacher became the gamekeeper and did a pretty impressive job. This is a great story. It's been researched. It's been shared. It's been written up by A.E. Rooks. She's a historian writer from the US. And as you'll hear, she's absolutely brilliant. She's written a book called The Black Joke, which I urge you all to read. Before we hear from Rooks, don't forget, you can go and check out all of our other podcasts. We've got lots of podcasts about the Atlantic world, about the slave trade,

about all the things you'll hear mentioned in today's episode. All those other podcasts and also TV shows all dealing with that over at History Hit TV. History Hit TV is our digital history channel. It's like Netflix, just for history. We've got audio on there as well. We've got documentaries. It's a safe place for utter history geeks. There's tens of thousands of people like you

out there that are now subscribing. So please head over there and do that. You can follow the link in the description of this podcast. Just tap on that link. You're taken there straight away and you get two weeks free if you sign up today. So head over there and do that. You can follow the link in the description of this podcast. Just tap on that link. You're taken there straight away and you get two weeks free if you sign up today. So head over there and do that. But in the meantime, here is the excellent Rooks talking about the black joke. Rooks, how's it going? It's going well. How are you doing?

I'm great. Thank you very much for coming on this podcast. I'm all the better for seeing you on this podcast. This is a great naval history that I don't know about. That's my jam. So thank you for bringing this to my attention. Oh, you're welcome. It was also naval history that I didn't know about. So, you know, we all get to experience this journey together at some point or another. Great minds. Great minds think alike. So talk to me about the Black Choke. Well, I mean, the basic overview is that we have a former slaver, a ship that was transporting enslaved people from what was then known as the slave coast on the western coast of Africa to Brazil, in this case, Bahia. And then it's eventually captured by the British. That's a little more eventually, that eventually is doing a lot of work. And the British capture it because as part of the suppression of the trade and

enslaved people? Yeah, absolutely. That is exactly why. So by the time that the Henry Kedda, which is what it was known as then, was sailing, it would have been 1827. So the abolition had been in effect for approximately 20 years at that point. And listen, we hear a lot about this in the UK, because British politicians like to give us a lot of credit for this bit. They don't like to talk about any of the other bits that are going on. But we hear a lot about the West African anti-slave patrols. OK, so this is that happening, right? This is absolutely that. I will say that as Americans, we do have the same tendency. So I'm not going to judge in that particular regard.

But yes, so this is the West Africa Squadron. I think maybe the reason that the Black Joke isn't discussed as often is because its story does not give as much of sort of a laudatory shine to the actions of the British government and to sort of what could have happened as opposed to what did happen. So, okay, well, let's do this. So it's fast, right? It's designed as a kind of a blockade buster,

like moving fast across the Atlantic. Absolutely. Its design history derives from privateers that were being used in what we call the War of 1812. I think y'all call it yet another theater in the Napoleonic Wars because American shipping couldn't compete with these sort of towering ships of the line. And we didn't have the manpower, didn't have the guns and the sort of reliable guns and

didn't have the shipping in that way. However, American shipwrights were known for the quality of their shipping, and they ended up designing what would become the Baltimore Clipper. So this is on the way to that design school wherein you have these incredibly fast ships that are built solely for the purpose of enacting the slave trade. Before we move on to her role suppressing the slave trade, I think it's important that we rehearse the Middle Passage. Tell me about the conditions in which those people would be held whilst she was a slaver on the Middle Passage. Yeah, so it's one of the sort of toughest

bits to sort of think about in here. So I'm going to say some things that are probably a bit disturbing for folks just in case. But you have instances wherein once someone was embarked, first of all, in order to get to be embarked on a ship, if one could phrase it that way, they would potentially have to travel hundreds of miles from the interior of Africa. They would be potentially stored or held rather in barracoons. A slaver could eventually pick them up because there might be a lot of waiting involved. Then they would be embarked on a vessel. Then that trip could take six weeks longer to get across the Atlantic. Over the course of that, your average slave deck was between

two feet and change and five feet in height. Five feet was very rare to be clear. It was much more in that sort of three foot range. And so folks would be coffled together, usually separated by gender, though not always, and then sort of forced to be below decks at minimum, I believe, 16 to 18 hours a day, very little air. They could only defecate and anything like that in large tubs that were communally shared, so obviously a breeding ground of disease. And then you have sort of all sorts of vermin as well that are on slave ships. They weren't cleaned very often, especially compared to Royal Navy ships. There may or may not have been medical care of any kind available. If there was, it was probably pretty minimal.

And the medical area would have just been on the deck. So you also had a situation where the crews could get sick and could pass disease around. If they made it into harbor on the other side, there are multiple accounts of being able to smell a slave ship before it came in because the stench was so overwhelming that you could literally smell one coming a half a mile, even a mile away from a port city, which were not exactly places of delicious smells at that time period regardless. So it's really an order of magnitude. And then, you know, folks are sold. And she managed to make several journeys, I guess, and you're talking thousands of people transported on this one ship. Yes, over 3,000 people on just the Henry Kedda and made six

successful voyages, was almost captured on one of them by the previous commodore of the squadron, Bullitt, and the HMS Maidstone. But subsequently, then once it's turned around, it's on the seventh voyage that it's captured by Collier and the Sibyl. So it's captured in September 1827. I've been to a remarkable place in St. Helena, where often these Africans were landed and then kind of abandoned. And so I guess that might have been part of the story of the Black Joke. Possibly. There's a lot of stuff that was going on in St. Helena. But yeah, I would say that that was probably either after or actually also before.

Because St. Helena's history is really, really long when it comes to sort of colonization and interaction with Europeans and whatnot. And so when we're talking about where Black Joke is based out of with Freetown, obviously that's only been around for Europeans for about 30, 40 years at that point. So where were the hundreds of enslaved Africans on board? When they fell into the hands of the British, were they liberated instantly or they repatriated, taken somewhere else? One would think that it might be easiest to simply liberate them instantly, but that is not how that worked. They would dispatch a prize crew to pilot the vessel back to adjudication in Freetown, where it would go before a court of mixed commission, which were sort of formed especially for this purpose, because during

the Napoleonic Wars, when the policy had been started, you could just send a captured prize vessel to a vice admiralty court. No harm, no foul. We don't need any special international law for that. It's a war. But in this case, once the war is done, you don't have that ability anymore. So these courts were established in order to specifically adjudicate cases like this. There was one in Freetown, one in Havana, one in Rio, and then one in, I believe, Suriname, although that one doesn't come up very much with the Dutch. So they'd go back to Freetown. The ship would be put in harbor. the Dutch. So they'd go back to Freetown. The ship would be put in harbor. The folks on board would be cataloged and they would be given one of three choices. The choices that they were proposed were either A, and this is probably the most common, they would work the land in the

colony to make it more viable as a colony and more productive. B, if they were men, they could be sent to a segregated unit of the Royal Marine Station in Africa. Or C, and this is the sort of really unfortunate, well, they're all unfortunate. This is the most unfortunate of unfortunate choices, I guess, was that they would be sent to apprentice, quote unquote, in Jamaica or other islands in the West Indies harvesting sugar for a term not to exceed 14 years, but that pretty much always exceeded 14 years and was usually lifelong. So liberation has a particular context at this time. So our ship though, she is converted to the Black Joke. And tell me about her service.

Well, so the Black Joke has a really, really distinguished sort of history. It gets this reputation over the four years that it serves under that name as a lucky ship, basically, because promotions are very few and far between at this point because there are fewer opportunities to sort of be in combat and gain necessary experience and sort of come to the attention of one's commanders. And this was a place where people got promoted. It was a very big part of its reputation within the squadron. Every single captain but for one of the Black Joke was promoted after being on board because they were successful on that ship. And so over the course of those four years, it captures or detains or interacts with in ways that are important about 13 vessels, 11 to 13, depending on how you're counting it. And its reputation then becomes one that is so huge because the ship is so fast that it creates a chilling effect wherein you have slavers by the end of Black Joke's tenure who are entirely avoiding its entire patrol area, which was also at the time one of the

most popular paces to pick up enslaved people, being the Bites the time one of the most popular places to pick up enslaved people, the bites or the bite of Phineas. You listen to Dan Snow's history, we're talking of the black joke. More coming up. How can toilet training cows help save the planet? Should we start renting our clothes? And why on earth is Bez from the Happy Mondays now keeping bees? I'm Jimmy Doherty, TV presenter, farmer and conservationist. And these are just a few of the questions we'll be answering on my new podcast on Jimmy's Farm from History Hit. Join me on the farm to hear from the likes of the founder of the Eden Project, Sir Tim Smit.

It is only people who don't know what they're doing that can do marvellous things in some areas, because received wisdom will sometimes, you'll talk yourself out of it if you've got lots of people who've done it before. Professor Dieter Helm on how to stop climate change. There may be all sorts of products like avocados and everything will have palm oil in it, etc etc and these have not just long distances involved in but they're not actually producing what could be produced on the land of the frame that it's set and my old friend jamie oliver i think i was stupid enough naive enough and unspoiled enough about the world that we live in listen Listen to On Jimmy's Farm now, wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Matt Lewis.

And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends. Murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. HMS Black Joke is a curious name for a 19th century naval vessel.

What's the genesis of that? Yeah, so it involves a word that I'm pretty sure I'm not going to say. But it's interesting to see the title because Collier, we would obviously think of it, right? In the way that it immediately comes from, like there is sort of layers of meaning there and it's racialized. However, the most common usage of black joke at the time was actually in what I believe is a 17th century body jig. And so the lyric is, she showed him her black joke and her belly so white in the chorus. So if one is still a little unclear and looked it up in a slang dictionary from back in the day, it would say the female monosyllable. So that leaves us with two words.

One starts with a C, one starts with a T. They're both four letters, but that's what it means. That's literally what it means. So what Collier was thinking. HMS Vagina. Okay. Basically, basically. That's kind of strange. Yeah. Okay. Well, anyway. It wasn't the only one though. It was technically the third. There had been two previous tenders in the Royal Navy named Black Joke. And there was a pirate ship that was pretending to be Black Joke named Verla Negra. So you can get the same joke in Spanish. Wow. And give me a few examples of ships that she intercepted. So there's some fun ones. You have one good example that I haven't really gotten a lot of time to talk about. So this is exciting for me is the Presidente. They were pirates. Okay. And I feel like one of the greatest tricks modern media has ever sold is that pirates were fun dudes.

I mean, some were, many weren't. And in this particular case, they had sort of run around capturing and destroying enslaved vessels and British vessels alike. Spoiler alert, when the crew of the Presidente is captured, they're actually sent back to England because many of them are English to go on trial for participating in the slave trade. And it's discovered that they probably were responsible for a major sailing atrocity that had happened a few months before, but they didn't have sufficient evidence to actually prosecute that case. They're pretty bad dudes. And they were sailing in a group. There were three ships at this time and only one Black Joke. And nonetheless, Black Joke does end up sort of winning the day. There's another instance where there's an enslaved revolt on the Manzanares. And so it was one of those interesting cases where you're reading about it

and you read a couple of things that say it was a pretty uneventful capture. And you go back to the actual sort of correspondence that's being sent at the time. And you see that there's been like three amputations since this ship has been picked up. And you're like, that's not normal. You don't just see a rash of amputations every time a ship is captured. Something happened. And it turns out that at the time that the Black Joke was taking over the Manzanaras and taking it from its original captors, the enslaved used that sort of moment of confusion to rise up against the crew, because for them, it sort of all looks the same. They're not going to be freed. And they don't know, obviously, what's happening next with

the Liberated African Department. But even then, prize crews would still often rechain people to make it more organized and easier for folks to manage. They still had to ration water and food because they had to work with whatever was on board and whatever their ship could spare. Sometimes they used whips because the Navy was a violent place itself. So there wasn't really a hesitancy to do that. So the enslaved folks had no way of being able to tell that this was better. It could have been anybody. And so the medical officer on Black Joke ends up getting seriously injured, but he recovers. And in this particular case, what the colony chose to do was actually the fourth option, which never, never happened,

which is they sent them to the Sierra Leone hinterlands, is what they called them, up into the mountains and said, just go, go. We're not going to return you back to where you came from, but we're not going to repatriate you into the side of the colony because you're too rebellious. You're too willing to rise up and revolt. You're too organized. We don't want to deal with it. You look like trouble. And they just sort of sent them off into the woods and said, nevermind, we wash our hands of this one. Another fascinating example of fighting back, right? And in that middle passage, there are so many examples, wonderful researchers like you are coming up with endless examples of the enslaved Africans rising up and trying to take the

ships. It's a long and glorious tradition. Absolutely. It was one of those things that I was really sort of both pleased and intrigued to discover was how much more often revolts happen and rebellions happen and uprisings happened on these ships than I think we're led to believe, especially here in the States, because you sort of hear about Amistad and then nothing, right? It's just Amistad is the example. And instead, it turns out that it's actually

incredibly common. Maybe as many as a quarter of these ships would have had some sort of uprising or rebellion over the course of their journey. And so that's a lot. So the Black Joke is one of the most successful anti-slaving ships. And yet you say this is not a story that makes Britain look good. So tell me why. What's the legacy? Why don't we all remember and celebrate the Black Joke, apart from the difficult name? We can sort of ally to the name, right? Like nobody needs to know with that. But I think a big reason for that is how the story ends, essentially. So spoiler alert. You have a situation wherein the Black Joke is operating as a tender, right, to a larger vessel. And this is a novel use.

Canning even had to sort of write a letter and do a little research saying that this was an okay way to use tenders. But as a system that Boland originated and then Collier sort of expanded on, it was ridiculously effective, right? They're catching these ships all the time anyway. It's just, they're literally going out to catch slave ships. That's the job. When they are condemned, they're resold at auction. So incredibly quality shipping at a very low price that wasn't fired into the body because they were trying to preserve life. So usually the most damage was to the rigging. So the sort of easiest to replace bits in a lot of ways. Nonetheless, though, the Admiralty not only did not have a policy to purchase these ships themselves, when Black Joke was purchased, it was purchased out of Collier's pocket, as were all of his other tenders, same for Hayes and so on and so forth. controls on who did buy them. And so while it couldn't be an obvious known slave trader or slave merchant or slave robber baron in the case of someone like the original owner of the Henry Quetta, whose name I will butcher, but I will say anyway, Di Sicchera Lima. But in those cases,

they would just have proxies or agents, sometimes British agents, to buy the ships. And so you would end up in a situation where we have multiple examples of Black Joke and other ships in the squadron at this time, catching and recaatching the exact same vessel, sometimes only under barely a different name, over and over and over again. In one case, there was even a former tender, The Hope, that when Bullen left the coast, he'd sold it. That was pretty standard. It had been repurchased by slavers and then put back into the service. So you have a former Royal Navy vessel now that was formerly a slave ship before that, that has gone back to being a slave ship again.

So the optics of that are terrible. And rather than do anything about that, the policy didn't really change until I believe 1836 or 1837, where the admiralty sort of put a foot down on who could buy what or stop selling these ships altogether. And so you have a system wherein you have cheap ships that are incredibly effective at the job that the admiralty will not buy. And you have chief ships that are also incredibly effective at slaving that the admiralty has not bought that are now going right back into the service. also incredibly effective at slaving that the admiralty has not bought that are now going right back into the service. And it becomes a situation where if someone at the sort of admiralty or

higher level, someone back in London had changed these policies in the way that even then Bolin, Collier, Hayes in succession complained about the fact that we could be doing a better job of this if you would let us, essentially. And the answer was, no, we're good. That's fine. And so you end up with Black Joke itself being burned by the Admiralty. It wasn't captured. It did not fall in battle. Someone decided the ship was used up, despite the fact that it had made a capture very recently before and beaten some ships brought specifically from England for the purpose. Nonetheless, it was condemned. They decided it wasn't even worth taking the lines off and getting the design. So we don't even know what it looks like. So you talk about political will, more ships could have been intercepted. Was this

a posturing or was this a serious attempt to interdict the flow of enslaved people across the Atlantic? I think that's difficult to say, right? Well, the answer is both. It just depends on who you're talking to. Because there was a movement that was very, very serious about we want the slave trade to end. We need this to stop. This is a blight against humanity, against our Christian souls, you know, all of the rhetoric. And those folks were dead serious. Now, were they less vociferous and active than they had been in 1807, getting the abolition passed?

Yes. By the late 1820s, sort of as much of the fervor had died down, and it would come back again for the abolition of slavery itself, which had not been affected yet. But on the other side, you had the people who were fighting them, the reason that it had to be such a battle in the first place. And those folks hadn't gone away. And I read one article that said before abolition, slavery was as much as 10% of the British economy. And this is at the height of the industrial revolution, right? Like the British economy is about to go full Pax Britannica and be like the sort of juggernaut that we came to know in the 20th century. And folks were concerned that to attempt to not only remove themselves from the slave trade, since Britain was the biggest player at that point, but also create a gaping market hole for

Portugal and Spain and these other imperial powers who had no compunction about continuing the slave trade to fill would be incredibly detrimental to the economy. And so by the time you get to 1832, when we're talking about the Black Joke's demise, William IV, the Sailor King, as the Duke of Clarence, had literally argued against abolishing the slave trade in the first place in the House of Lords back in 1807. So there wasn't the political will at the highest level to get it done, regardless of popular will and regardless of sort of the vibe coming from within the squadron, which was more mixed than I think people would give it credit for. But nonetheless, still wanted to do a job and do it effectively.

George III's kids, man. They went, something went badly wrong there. So Rooks, thanks so much for coming on and talking about that. That was great. I love the book. Tell us what it's called. It is called The Black Joke, The True Story of One Ship's Battle Against the Slave Trade.

Man, that's a good title. Nice one. Good luck with it. Thank you so much. And really, I super appreciate being on and you being so interested in the story because I think it's really interesting too. I feel we have the history on our shoulders.

All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thank you for making it to the end of this episode of Dan Snow's History. I really appreciate listening to this podcast. I love doing these podcasts. It's a highlight of my career. It's the best thing I've ever done. And your support, your listening is obviously crucial for that

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