| Notes | This Portuguese brig, under the command of João José Fonseca and José Cotarro, began its voyage at Salvador, Brazil and set sail for Lagos on 8 February 1824. On 24 April, this ship sailed from Africa with 437 people on board and 37 individuals died during the middle passage. In June, the privateer Romano seized the brig María de la Gloria off the coast of Cuba between the port of Mariel and Cabañas. While being escorted to Havana, the Spanish brig Marte, under the command of José Apodaca, intervened and escorted the ship to Havana. On 16 July 1824, the case was forwarded to the newly-formed Havana Slave Trade Commission, but the commissioners declared it incompetent to judge a Portuguese vessel in a Spanish colony and sent the case to local authorities. According to the Spanish rules of privateering, the case came under the competency of the Spanish Admiralty Court of Havana, and the slaves on board fell under its authority instead of being transferred to the Captain General. Litigation on the validity of the prize was initiated, and the case went up to the supreme court for war and maritime affairs in Spain. Local authorities ruled that the slaves from the Maria de la Gloria could not be declared Liberated Africans (emancipados), and, accordingly, the people on board were never registered. Because of the complications of a Portuguese ship being tried in a Spanish court, these people remained in legal limbo for several decades. In January 1868, the captain general received the order to declare the surviving people from Maria de la Gloria and their descendants free, a freedom they did not officially obtain until September 1869, that is 45 years after the ship was first captured. |
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| Sources | "Abstract of the Proceedings in the Admiralty Court, in the Case of the Vessel with Negroes, detained by the Spanish Brig of War, Marte," 21 Jun. 1824, in “Class A. Correspondence with the British Commissioners at Sierra Leone, the Havannah, Rio de Janeiro, and Surinam, relating to the Slave Trade, 1824-1825,” in T. P. O'Neill, T. F. Turley, et al., eds., Irish University Press Series of British Parliamentary Papers: Slave Trade, vol. 10 (Shannon: Irish University Press, 1968-1969), 39; "Statement of Emancipados proceeding from Seizures by Local Authorities in Cuba," 10 Oct. 1854, in “Class A. Correspondence with the British Commissioners at Sierra Leone, Havana, the Cape of Good Hope... 1854,” in T. P. O'Neill, T. F. Turley, et al., eds., Irish University Press Series of British Parliamentary Papers: Slave Trade, vol. 41 (Shannon: Irish University Press, 1968-1969), 31-32; Inés Roldán de Montaud, "The Misfortune of Liberated Africans in Colonial Cuba, 1824–76," in Richard Anderson, and Henry B. Lovejoy, Liberated Africans and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1807-1896 (Rochester: Rochester University Press, 2020), 153-173; SlaveVoyages, www.slavevoyages.org (accessed 2020), Voyage ID: 2357. |
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