In 1837, a Portuguese slave ship named Arrogante was intercepted off the coast of Cuba by the British Royal Navy’s HMS Snake. What at first seemed like a typical enforcement of Britain’s anti-slavery patrols soon spiraled into one of the most disturbing and most often denied, horrors of the transatlantic slave trade: cannibalism.
The Arrogante was owned by Pedro Martinez & Co., a Havana-based commercial firm known for its involvement in the illegal slave trade. Though Britain had outlawed the transatlantic slave trade in 1807 and was actively policing the Atlantic, Portuguese and Spanish ships continued to transport enslaved Africans to the Americas, often under forged documents or false flags.
In late 1837, the Arrogante set sail from the Gallinas coast in present-day Sierra Leone, carrying over 330 Africans, many of them children, crammed into the ship’s deck. Like most slaving vessels, the conditions were inhumane: suffocating quarters, rampant disease, starvation, and death.
The plan was to deliver them to Cuba, where they would be sold into plantation labor. But British patrols operating in the Caribbean had other plans.
HMS Snake, under orders to enforce Britain’s anti-slavery laws, spotted and seized the Arrogante near Cape San Antonio. The captured vessel was redirected to Jamaica, a major British colonial outpost, where the surviving Africans were disembarked in Montego Bay and Kingston.
British authorities placed the liberated Africans into an apprenticeship system, a transitional arrangement intended to prepare them for “freedom,” though in practice it often resembled a continuation of forced labour under another name.
Shortly after their arrival in Jamaica, disturbing allegations emerged. Several of the liberated Africans, especially children, reported that during the voyage, one of their fellow captives had been killed by the crew, cooked, and fed to the others. Witnesses claimed that the man’s heart and liver were eaten by the sailors themselves, while the rest of his body was cut into pieces and served with rice.
The testimonies were horrifying, but consistent. Multiple children described the same sequence of events despite being separated during questioning, and the allegations were serious enough to prompt an inquiry by Jamaican officials.
However, in the colonial legal system of Jamaica in 1837, African testimonies were rarely granted full credibility, especially when they challenged the word of white Europeans. Courts often refused to accept testimony from Africans unless corroborated by Europeans. As a result, no formal charges were brought against the Arrogante’s captain or crew. The case was simply set aside and quietly forgotten.
The Arrogante was later destroyed in 1840, erasing a physical piece of what many considered a floating crime scene. Some members of the crew reportedly returned to the illegal slave trade without facing any consequences, continuing their brutal work as sellers of human beings.
Sources:
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/americas/events/2016/nov/white-cannibalism-slave-trade-curious-case-schooner-arrogante
https://www.ehess.fr/en/conference/conference-manuel-barcia-university-leeds
