‘The French ship, Le Rodeur, with a crew of 22 men, and with 160 negro slaves, sailed from Bonny, in Africa, April, 1819’. So recounts Benjamin Constant, a Swiss-French activist, in a speech he delivered in the Chamber of Deputies in Paris nearly a year later on 17 June 1820. He observes, ‘On approaching the line, a terrible malady broke out – an obstinate disease of the eyes – contagious, and altogether beyond the resources of medicine’. As another contemporary, and anonymous, author confides, ‘The sufferings of the people, and the number of the blind augmented every day; so that the crew – previously alarmed by the apprehension of a revolt among the negroes, were seized with the farther dread of not being able to make the West Indies’. Immediately fearing for the loss of profit from the sale of their ‘property’, the white crew acted on the ‘advice of the physician’ and ordered that the enslaved individuals who were afflicted with this ‘terrible malady’ be ‘brought on deck occasionally’. Ultimately, these emergency measures were to no avail. Constant bears witness to a tragic reality by testifying to the fact that ‘some of the poor wretches, locking themselves in each other's arms, leaped overboard, in the hope, which so universally prevails among them, of being swiftly transported to their own homes in Africa’. The corroborating testimony of another unnamed ‘ocular witness’ hauntingly reports: ‘They were successively taken on deck to get air, but they were obliged to desist from that practice, because the negroes threw themselves overboard in each other's embraces’.

Acts of self-liberation and collective emancipation on the part of Black diasporic peoples were not to be tolerated, however. According to Constant, the retribution ordered by the white captain was both terrible and immediate: ‘[he] ordered several, who were stopped in the attempt, to be shot or hung before their companions’. And yet there can be no doubt that white persecution was no match for Black resistance. The free will of enslaved African diasporic women and men won out. As Constant declared: ‘this severity proved unavailing, and it became necessary to confine the slaves entirely to the hold’.