Combat· West Africa Anti-Slavery Patrol
USS Cyane vs 5 slave schooners off West Africa
Among the earliest American captures under the new anti-slavery law.
Off Cape Mount and the Gallinas River, a notorious stretch of the West African slaving coast, the USS Cyane under Captain Edward Trenchard took five slave schooners, the Marines aboard furnishing the boarding parties that searched and secured each vessel. The Slave Trade Act of 1820, branding the trade as piracy, had only just taken effect, and the Cyane's haul was an early and emphatic demonstration that the United States meant to enforce it on the African coast itself rather than merely on paper. The captures were bloodless. The Cyane had been sent out specifically to support the new colony of freed Blacks that would become Liberia and to interdict the slavers working the nearby rivers, and her sweep here marked the real beginning of American anti-slavery patrolling in African waters.
Record no. 286