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 U ...