African Slave Trade Patrol
The Africa Squadron's cruising area eventually ranged from Cape Frio to the south (about 18 degrees south latitude), to Madeira in the north. However, the squadron's supply depot was in Cape Verde Island, approximately 2500 miles from the northern-most centers of the slave trade in the Bight of Biafra and southward. The Navy department did not move the depot location until 1859, when it was set up at St. Paul de Luanda, in present-day Angola, about 8 degrees south latitude. At the same time the department put Madeira out of bounds for the squadron.
The majority of the squadron's cruising in its first decade was along the coast of Western Africa, with particular attention to Liberian interests. By the 1850s much of the slave trade in this area had been eliminated by the British, based in their colony at Sierra Leone, as well as the Liberians.
Read more about this topic: Africa Squadron
Famous quotes containing the words african, slave and/or trade:
“So in Jamaica it is the aim of everybody to talk English, act English and look English. And that last specification is where the greatest difficulties arise. It is not so difficult to put a coat of European culture over African culture, but it is next to impossible to lay a European face over an African face in the same generation.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“In some withdrawn, unpublic mead
Let me sigh upon a reed,
Or in the woods, with leafy din,
Whisper the still evening in:
Some still work give me to do,—
Only—be it near to you!
For I’d rather be thy child
And pupil, in the forest wild,
Than be the king of men elsewhere,
And most sovereign slave of care:
To have one moment of thy dawn,
Than share the city’s year forlorn.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“My trade and my art is living. He who forbids me to speak about it according to my sense, experience, and practice, let him order the architect to speak of buildings not according to himself but according to his neighbor; according to another man’s knowledge, not according to his own.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)