SCRIBNER, HARDCOVER, 1ST EDITION, 1ST PRINTING, 2022. 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. 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. As Britain slowly attempted to snuff out the translantic slave trade by way of treaty and negotiation, enforcing these policies fell to the Black Joke and those who sailed with it as they warred with slavers, weather disasters, and internal politics that reverberated across oceans. Rooks hopes to always be a student of history, though that hasn’t stopped her from studying everything else. 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 Preventative Squadron. The Black Joke: The True Story of One Ships Battle Against the Slave Trade.

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 slave traders. 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 slave trading. Told with wit, verve, and deadly seriousness, the story of the Black Joke is a history in miniature of the demise of global slave trading and a gripping tale of one ship's haunting adventures. In this groundbreaking history, the most feared ship in the British Royal Navy's antislavery squadron cuts a bold path through dramatic battles at sea, tussles with pirates, and ultimately the long, slow abolition of the international slave trade.

The Black Joke by A.E. Rooks