Sengbe Pieh

Sengbe Pieh, known in the United States as Joseph Cinqué, was born around 1813 or 1814 in the town of Mani in Mendeland, in present-day Sierra Leone. He was a rice farmer and trader, married with three children, and is said to have been the son of a local chief. He had never left his home country.

In early 1839 slave traders kidnapped him while he was working in the rice fields. He was sold to a Spanish slave trader, and on 28 June 1839, with more than fifty other men, women and children, he was put aboard the schooner La Amistad, bound for plantations near Puerto Príncipe in Cuba.

Three days into the voyage, on 30 June, Pieh freed himself and others from their shackles and led a revolt in which the ship's captain and cook were killed. He ordered the two Spanish owners, Pedro Montes and José Ruiz, to sail east to Africa, but they secretly steered west and north at night, and after two months the ship was seized off Long Island by a U.S. Navy brig.

The captives were imprisoned in Connecticut and tried for murder and piracy, in a case that became a national sensation and mobilised the abolitionist movement. With the help of lawyers including Roger Sherman Baldwin, interpreters such as James Covey, and Black abolitionists, they told their story. The courts, from the district court to the Supreme Court, ruled in their favour.

In March 1841 the Supreme Court, with former president John Quincy Adams arguing for the captives, ruled 7 to 1 that the Africans had been illegally taken and were free. Only about 35 of the original captives were still alive. Pieh returned to Sierra Leone with the others in 1842, and is believed to have died there around 1879, near a Mende mission station.