Huzzah for the HMS Pickle!

One of the best things about the Georgian Era was the 1807 Act suppressing the slave trade. King George III, die-hard conservative Tory and intermittently insane though he may have been, agreed with the majority of the Tories and Whigs that the slave trade was a disgusting affront to God and Humanity and Decency and happily signed away slave trading. (King George III was much more moral, religious, and intelligent than most people bother to remember.)

Happily, pressure from the largely-abolitionist public lead the British government to make a commitment to ACTIVELY enforcing the suppression of the slave trade via the Royal Navy, even though its budget was stretched thin by the Napoleonic Wars and multiple domestic problems. Thus, a fleet of British warships were sent to the Caribbean and West Indies to stop slavers from smuggling their illicit HUMAN cargo into slave-owing ports.

Huzzah!

British suppression of the slave trade particularly ticked off the recently-independent Americans, since the slaves were usually imported from Africa via the Caribbean Islands, and the big ol’ meanies in the tricorn hats kept stopping slave ships and freeing slaves on the way to American markets. (How very dare they!) By the time slavery was officially over in the USA (roughly 50 years later), the British had captured over 500 slave ships and freed approximately 150,000 enslaved Africans otherwise doomed to life as American chattel.

The British public, while sometimes grumbling about the cost of maintaining the anti-slave squadron, were justifiably proud of the way their Royal Navy African Squadron crushed slavers. Soon, the “pursuit and capture of slave ships became celebrated naval engagements, widely reported back in peace-time Britain with its expanding print culture, and was often memorialised in souvenir engravings” to the public’s delight.

One of the most famous captures of an American-bound slave ship was by the HMS Pickle. (Which is my all-time favourite name for a ship, ever). On 5 June 1829 the Pickle, a 5 gun schooner just recently put to sea in 1827 under the command of J.B.B. MacHardy, caught sight of a suspicious-looking ship off the coast of Cuba, not far from Puerto de Naranjo. The ship fled, further arousing the distrust of Captain MacHardy, and the Pickle sped after it. It was nearing midnight before the Pickle caught up with the ship it was pursuing.

A ferocious battle ensued. In the wee hours of 6 June, the valiant crew of the Pickle succeeded in forcing a surrender after blowing their rival ship’s main masts to smithereens. The ship they captured was the heavily armed slaver the Voladora (also spelled Baladora). The Voladora, sailing under the alias Mulata was indeed a slave ship. After his capture, the captain — Ignacio Domingo del Corral — confessed that the Voladora had begun its voyage at Havana on 1 October 1828 and had first travelled to Little Popo loaded with aguardiente and money, which it exchanged for recently captured African slaves. On 29 April 1829, the ship ship left Africa with 367 captives, but 32 enslaved people had died of the disgusting conditions below deck during the passage from their home continent to the West Indies.

The Voladora had 60 crew members, outnumbering the crew of the Pickle 2:1.  However, not only did the Pickle win, they lost only 4 crewman compared to the 10 slavers who were killed in the battle aboard the Voladora.  The surviving crew of the Pickle freed the slaves, tended to the badly abused captives, and towed the Voladora into Gibara. At harbor and with the slavers imprisoned in their own nasty chains, the Pickle’s crew jury rigged some masts for the crippled Voladora before sailing it (with considerable difficulty) to Cuba’s main port to turn it over to the Havana Slave Trade Commission. The courts of the Commission condemned this ship to be sold (earning a nice bounty for the Pickle’s crew) and emancipated the 330 Africans who had survived their initial enslavement and the voyage to the New World. In total, 223 men and 97 women escaped the brutal bonds of slavery thanks to the efforts of the HMS Pickle.

The capture of the Voladora (Boladora)  and rescue of 300 enslaved people caught the public’s imagination. Several artists commemorated it, both at the time of incident and in later decades. Two of those artists was John Moore of Ipswich and Edward Duncan, both of whom have paintings of the battle hanging in the Royal Museums Greenwich.

Dunkin slaver versus HMS Pickle

Edward Duncan’s painting was produced in 1831, while John Moore’s was an homage to it painted much later.

Pickle versus the slave ship

Moore’s painting shows the Voladora flying the American flag, because the slaves were bound for American plantations, but to be fair the ship never flew under those colours.

According to the Royal Museums Greenwich, the name ‘Voladora’ either means ‘flying fish’ or is the name of “a witch who could turn herself into a bird in the mythology of Chiloe (an island on the Chilean coast)”. Either way, the ship was bragging to could practically fly across the water, it was so fast at sea. Nonetheless the Pickle caught it, bagged it, and clipped its evil wings. A Pickle of the fleet was the fleetest of all, no?

       

2 thoughts on “Huzzah for the HMS Pickle!


  1. I found this fascinating. Thank you so much for a great article. It’s perfect because I am researching it for my new book. I’m off to buy the books you have referenced.

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