The Black Joke
The True Story of One Ship's Battle Against the Slave Trade
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A groundbreaking history of the Black Joke, the most famous member of the British Royal Navy’s anti-slavery squadron, and the long fight to end the transatlantic slave trade.
The most feared ship in Britain’s West Africa Squadron, His Majesty’s brig 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. Sailing after the spectacular fall of Napoleon in France, yet before the rise of Queen Victoria’s England, Black Joke was first a slaving vessel itself, and one with a lightning-fast reputation; only a lucky capture in 1827 allowed it to be repurposed by the Royal Navy to catch its former compatriots. Over the next five years, the ship’s diverse crew and dedicated commanders would capture more ships and liberate more enslaved people than any other in the Squadron.
Now, author A.E. Rooks chronicles the adventures on this ship and its crew in a brilliant, lively narrative of the history of Britain’s suppression efforts. As Britain slowly attempted to snuff out the transatlantic slave trade by way of treaty and negotiation, enforcing these policies fell to the Black Joke and those that sailed with it as they battled slavers, weather disasters, and interpersonal drama among captains and crew that reverberated across oceans. In this history of the daring feats of a single ship, the abolition of the international slave trade is revealed as an inexplicably extended exercise involving tense negotiations between many national powers, both colonizers and formerly colonized, that would stretch on for decades longer than it should have.
Harrowing and heartbreaking, The Black Joke is a crucial and deeply compelling work of history, both as a reckoning with slavery and abolition and as a lesson about the power of political will—or the lack thereof.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Jeopardy! winner Rooks debuts with an accessible history of the Black Joke, the flagship of Britain's anti-slavery West African Squadron. Enforcing multinational treaties banning the slave trade, the Black Joke captured 13 slave ships off the west coast of Africa between 1828 and 1832 and freed at least 3,000 people. Describing the Black Joke as "an image of morality and principle, regularly disrupted by waves of indifference to and profit from the trade in human chattel," Rooks documents its early use as a Brazilian slave ship (called the Henriqueta), its capture by the Royal Navy, and its repurposing to fight the slave trade. She then delves into each of the Black Joke's victories, profiling captains and crew members and reproducing documents from Sierra Leone's Liberated African registers listing the people who were freed. Rooks also describes the politics behind Britain's attempts to get other European powers to follow its lead in abolishing the slave trade and draws a vivid picture of life aboard the Black Joke, where dangers included disease, pirates, and foul weather. Though the writing occasionally lacks polish, Rooks succeeds in capturing the human dimensions of the story. This is an enlightening take on a lesser-known aspect of the fight to end slavery. Illus.
