THE BLACK JOKE

An archival deep dive into the last days of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Polymath Rooks, a two-time Jeopardy! champion who has degrees in theater, law, and library science, turns her prodigious research skills to what amounts to a historical footnote to hundreds of years of human misery—though this footnote is well worth a close look. Toward the end of Britain’s involvement in the slave trade, during which the nation “shipped approximately 3.1 million enslaved Africans to ports scattered throughout the Americas,” the Admiralty allowed British seafarers to seize slave ships and return their human cargo to Freetown, in Sierra Leone. If the captain of the slave ship were convicted, the ships became booty, and the enslaved people aboard would be freed. Rooks looks closely at one ship, the Henriqueta, which had brought thousands of enslaved people to Brazil. Seized in midjourney, the fast-running ship became the Black Joke, with a taunt in its very name, which went on to seize another dozen slave ships in its time. This was perilous work, as Rooks shows, involving dangerous weapons and disease, and freedom in Sierra Leone wasn’t really freedom at all. “The newly liberated Africans became British,” she writes, “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.” In any instance, the people were still in servitude, whether fighting Britain’s wars or harvesting sugar cane in the Caribbean. Rooks lauds the anti-slavery sentiments of the British sailors, albeit driven by self-interest, for exhibiting the “political will to do the right, hard thing,” though it took decades for Britain to take full account and make restitution.

A tale skillfully teased out of the vaults and made vivid by an artful narrative.