The Le Rôdeur massacre was the deliberate drowning of 36 enslaved African people by the crew of the French slave ship Le Rôdeur during its voyage across the Atlantic in April 1819. The ship was owned by French traders engaged in the illegal transatlantic slave trade and had taken out insurance on the lives of the enslaved Africans as cargo. Fifteen days into the journey from Bonny, in present-day Nigeria, to Guadeloupe in the Caribbean, an outbreak of ophthalmia, a highly contagious eye infection, left nearly all of the captives and crew blind. As blindness made the enslaved unsellable, the crew threw dozens overboard in order to claim insurance money for their deaths.
Le Rôdeur had set sail from Le Havre, France, in January 1819 under the command of Captain Jean-Baptiste Boucher. The ship’s destination was the bustling slave port of Bonny, located in present-day Nigeria. From there, 162 enslaved Africans were forcibly loaded onto the vessel, destined for the slave markets of Guadeloupe in the French Caribbean. But just fifteen days into the voyage across the Atlantic, catastrophe struck.
The ship’s conditions quickly deteriorated as a mysterious illness began spreading among the captives. What was first blamed on the foul, stagnant air below decks, or on the low water rations, reduced to a single small glass per person per day, was soon identified as ophthalmia, a severe and highly contagious eye infection.
In an attempt to provide relief, the Captain of the ship ordered the enslaved Africans brought above deck for fresh air. But the relief brought little comfort. Many of the captives, gripped by overwhelming grief and a condition physicians at the time called nostalgia, then thought to be a psychological illness caused by homesickness and despair, threw themselves into the sea, locked in each other’s arms, choosing death over the suffering that lay ahead.
In response to these suicides, Captain Boucher escalated his cruelty. Several captives who were caught attempting to jump overboard were hanged or shot in front of the others as a warning. Still, the desperate will to die persisted, and the only option left to the captain was to chain the remaining captives back below deck in the uncomfortably hot, diseased air.
The disease continued its rampage. All of the captives were eventually afflicted, their eyes red and swollen, many going blind. Soon after, the crew was struck down too, nearly every one of the 22 French sailors lost their sight. By the time the ship neared Guadeloupe, only one crew member could still see.
The ship became a floating prison of the blind, gliding through the ocean with nearly all navigation and order lost. In an era where enslaved Africans were viewed not as human beings but as marketable property, the disease spelled economic disaster. Blind captives were considered unsellable, “damaged goods.” And under the slaving industry’s perverse logic, a dead enslaved African was often more profitable than a live one who couldn’t work. Insurance policies would reimburse slavers for deaths at sea, but not for diseased or disabled slaves who arrived unsold.
So, nearing the Caribbean, Captain Boucher made a cold calculation. Thirty-six Africans, whose blindness was deemed permanent, were selected for death. Weights were tied to their legs and they were cast into the ocean. The logbook omitted their names, identities, or any gesture of humanity. Their lives were discarded into the Atlantic with the same indifference given to spoiled cargo.
The only reason the world knows about these killings is a medical journal entry published in 1820. Unlike the infamous Zong massacre of 1781, where over 130 enslaved Africans were thrown overboard by a British crew for insurance claims, the Le Rôdeur incident has received far less attention.
The Le Rôdeur eventually made its way back to France, arriving at the port of Le Havre in October 1819. But its return was anything but triumphant. Almost the entire crew, along with the few surviving enslaved Africans, were blind.
The Le Rôdeur massacre is a sad reminder of how the transatlantic slave trade turned ocean waters into mass graves, and how the legacy of that dehumanisation continues to echo today.
The story of Le Rôdeur left such a deep impression that, in 1846, American abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier memorialized it in his powerful poem The Slave-Ships. The excerpt below, captures the horror of the killings at sea:
Corpse after corpse came up,
Death had been busy there;
Where every blow is mercy,
Why should the spoiler spare?
Corpse after corpse they cast
Sullenly from the ship,
Yet bloody with the traces
Of fetter-link and whip
Sources:
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1h280.html
https://gahistoricnewspapers.galileo.usg.edu/lccn/sn89053279/1822-05-13/ed-1/seq-2.pdf
