Sweet Water and Bitter: The Ships That Stopped the Slave Trade

"In 1807, at the height of the Napoleonic war, ships of nearly all the European nations crowded the malarial wharves of West Africa where merchants traded at the great slaveholding pens and packed their human property into the holds of ships bound for the sugar mills of Cuba and Haiti, and the tobacco plantations of Virginia. In that same year Great Britain passed the Abolition Act, and the last English slave ship left the African coast with its cargo, shortly to be replaced by the ships and men of the Royal Navy's Preventive Squadron. For the next fifty years this small fleet patrolled 3,000 miles of treacherous coastline in a determined, unilateral, and only quasi-legal effort to interdict vessels with their human cargoes."--Dust jacket flap.