In 1839, a Mende rice farmer named Sengbe Pieh, later known to Americans as Joseph Cinqué, was kidnapped in what is now Sierra Leone and shipped to Havana aboard the Tesora. This episode follows how Spanish plantation owners Ruiz and Montes used forged passports to disguise illegally smuggled captives as Cuban-born slaves, and how a rusty file found in the hold of the coastal schooner La Amistad let Sengbe Pieh free his fellow captives and seize the ship.

The conversation covers the two-month ordeal as Montes secretly steered north instead of toward Africa, the interception by the USS Washington off Long Island, and the naval officers’ salvage claim that treated human beings as cargo. It then unpacks how Yale linguist Josiah Gibbs found translator James Covey by counting to ten in Mende on the docks, how President Van Buren positioned the USS Grampus to deport the captives before an appeal, and how Roger Sherman Baldwin and John Quincy Adams won at the Supreme Court in 1841 by attacking the fraudulent documents rather than slavery itself.

• The Spanish loophole that kept the Cuban sugar trade supplied despite international bans
• Why La Amistad’s merchant design, not a slave-ship hold, made the uprising possible
• Salvage rights, mutiny charges and a jail in New Haven with no way to communicate
• Van Buren’s interference and the legal strategy that framed the captives as kidnapped free people
• The year-long fundraising campaign, the 1842 return to Sierra Leone and the birth of the American Missionary Association