The Rewards of their Exertions: Prize Money and British Abolitionism in Sierra Leone, 1808–1823*

In early August 1815, in Freetown, Sierra Leone, the rainy season had made the air thick and humid, almost solid. A boy stood in the yard outside the water-swollen wood barracks. He was about fourteen years old, roughly five feet tall. He had four noticeable scars: on his right elbow, on his back, on his chest, and on his left calf. Months before, he had been sold at Calabar and imprisoned aboard the Spanish-owned brigantine Intrepida. Before it could begin the Middle Passage, the Intrepida was captured by H.M.S. Comus, and brought to Freetown. When the Intrepida arrived in port, the colonial Superintendent of Captured Negroes was instructed to ‘receive, protect and provide for’ the boy until he could be ‘disposed of according to the true meaning’ of the 1807 act of parliament which had abolished the British slave trade.¹ If the boy’s ‘African name’ was not ‘sufficiently easy, clear and distinctive’, the superintendent was entitled to give him any name he chose. He could not resist a sour little joke. The boy was renamed ‘Tattoe’: many of his shipmates wore ink, but he wore scars.²

The Comus claimed the right to seize the Intrepida under the 1807 Slave Trade Act, which declared it illegal for British ships and ships calling at British ports to carry slaves. The law placed slave ships in the same category as ships belonging to Britain’s enemies: if a slave ship were lawfully captured and condemned, then the captors would be eligible to receive the auction value of the ship as a prize. On 8 August 1815, the case of the Intrepida was heard at the Sierra Leone Court of Vice-Admiralty. Before weighing at Calabar, the Intrepida had sailed from Spain to Rio de Janeiro. At Rio, the ship’s master had …