The Full Story
19 October 1840. The Hermosa, a schooner out of Richmond, Virginia, was bound for the slave markets of New Orleans. Below deck were 38 enslaved people. Her papers listed them as cargo.
She struck a reef off Abaco, in the Bahamas. British ground.
Bahamian boatmen rowed out through the surf, free Black men who worked these reefs for a living, and carried all 38 safe to Nassau. Britain had abolished slavery 6 years before.
The captain refused to let them ashore, and called for another ship to carry them back to bondage. Then British magistrates came aboard, with armed men at their backs. No fleet. No proclamation. A local court doing its ordinary work.
In Virginia, paper made those 38 people property. On British ground, no paper on Earth could. One by one, 38 people stepped ashore at Nassau, free. The owners demanded them back for years, and never got them.
Nobody famous freed those 38. Boatmen rowed out. Magistrates climbed aboard. Ordinary hands, keeping Britain's word.
Why This Matters
The Hermosa is one of a run of American slave ships, alongside the Comet, Encomium, Enterprise and the better-known Creole, wrecked or driven into British Caribbean ports in the 1830s and 1840s, where British abolition law freed the enslaved people aboard. It shows abolition working not as a grand proclamation but as ordinary people doing ordinary jobs: free Black Bahamian wreckers, and a local magistrate applying the law of the ground he stood on. The law reached the beach before the owners did.
Key Facts
- ✓The Hermosa, a US schooner carrying 38 enslaved people from Richmond, Virginia toward New Orleans, wrecked off the Abaco cays on 19 October 1840 (Wikipedia; Bahamas Historical Society)
- ✓Bahamian wreckers, largely free Black Bahamians for whom salvage was an everyday trade, brought the ship and people to Nassau (Wikipedia; Bahamian historical accounts)
- ✓Slavery had been abolished across most of the British Empire under the 1833 Act, in force from 1 August 1834, so 6 years before the wreck (legislation.gov.uk)
- ✓Captain Chattin refused to surrender the enslaved people; British magistrates, backed by armed force, removed and freed the 38 (Wikipedia)
- ⚠The freed 38 were never returned. The owners pursued claims for years, and a US claims tribunal awarded compensation paid in 1855. The video centres the freedom; the compensation is the honest other half of the record.