The Guerrero Refugees

The British are an odd race. Whatever they do is mandatory, and they make everyone else join in. Whatever they do not do is forbidden, and they stop everyone else from doing it either.

When Britain outlawed the transatlantic slave trade in 1807, the Royal Navy began chasing peaceful law-abiding slave traders, seizing their cargoes and selling them for prize money.

In December 1827, the Spanish brig “Guerrero,” carrying 400 Africans to Cuba was chased across the Gulf Stream by a British frigate enforcing the slave trade ban.

She ran aground near Key West. As the Guerrero broke up, about half of the unfortunate Africans were taken in chains to Cuba by other Spanish ships. The rest were rescued from the reef by Key West wreckers.

Eighty-nine survivors became the responsibility of the local U.S. Treasury Department representative, William Pinkney. Federal law said that rescued Africans were to be housed until transportation could be arranged back to Africa. But Pinkney had no budget for room and board, and it could take months for the feds to arrange a ship. What was he to do with them? He could not just let them starve. So, he assigned the Africans to local planters who used their labor until their ship arrived.

For fifty-three of the refugees, everything went without a hitch. They were assigned to Don José Mariano Hernandez. His Malacompra sugar plantation was on what is now highway AlA between Flagler Beach and Marineland, Florida. The fifty-three Africans worked for Hernandez for eighteen months. Then, in August 1829, the U.S. Navy schooner “Washington’s Barge” sailed into St. Augustine with orders to take the Africans home. Hernandez turned them over to the Navy, and that was apparently that.

But for the other thirty-six Africans, things got more complicated. They had been loaned to Anna Kingsley. When the Naval officers came for them, they refused to go. They pleaded with Anna to stay. She explained that they were being taken home, but they merely wailed and clutched her skirts. So she ordered her foremen to “explain it” to them. The booted, mounted overseers cracked their whips and sternly ordered the thirty-six Africans to collect their belongings and their rug-rats, and get themselves aboard the Africa-bound vessel.

The refugees promptly bolted for the woods!

Most were easy to catch. They would creep up to the big house at night, pleading with Anna to be allowed to stay. It took a month to round up the last one. U.S.S. Washington’s Barge sailed for Ghana with all the Africans aboard, on September 30, 1829.