On May 5, 1825, the crew of the French brig Le Jeune Louis gathered together shortly after their surgeon, Denis Béjaud, died of dysentery, the same disease that had killed the ship owners’ representative on board, Jean-Baptiste Ménard, less than two weeks before. Probably sitting around a table in the captain’s cabin, they set out to write and sign a short declaration in which they explained the despairing situation they found themselves in. As they sailed in the vicinity of Ascension Island heading for Cuba with a human cargo in their hold, they lamented the ravages that dysentery and ophthalmia had caused both to themselves and to the slaves. Affected by these two diseases—and probably also by others they did not mention—they attempted a head count of the remaining Africans, noting that out of the 344 they had embarked near Cape Formosa in the Bight of Biafra, 304 remained alive, but were all suffering from one or more diseases. At sea, far from their desired destination, and being “unable of caring for the cargo, and hardly able to maneuver the vessel” due to the blindness caused by the ophthalmia, they probably thought that all was lost, as each of them signed his name on the small sheet of paper.
By mid-June, however, 229 Africans and a handful of sailors, including the captain François Demouy, had made it alive to Havana, where the French consul, Jacques Marie Angelucci, and the cosignatories of the vessel took care of restoring their health and of justifying the voyage before the Spanish and French authorities, after producing many documents, which included the death certificates of a number of Africans. Before too long they also expedited the loading of the vessel, sending it back to Europe less than two months later with a cargo of sugar boxes belonging to Cuban planter and prominent slave trader Gabriel Lombillo.
Perhaps better than any other, the case of Le Jeune Louis encapsulates the dangers associated with slave-trading expeditions to the coast of Africa during the illegal period that followed the signing of bilateral treaties between Britain and a number of slave-trading nations and states. Not only were the crew and the slaves exposed to fatal, debilitating, and incapacitating diseases, but within days of departing from the African coast they were left without the man responsible for the hundreds of slaves they had on board and, more significant, without their only health practitioner. In addition to all these tribulations, Le Jeune Louis had been previously stopped and searched at least twice by anti-slave-trade patrols since departing from Bordeaux, and had been forced to remain in the Bight of Biafra for approximately four months, sailing back and forth to the island of Principe, until a full human cargo was finally procured.