Combat· West Africa Anti-Slavery Patrol
USS Grampus vs slave brig Fenix
A capture that shows the patrol's reach extending across the Atlantic.
The schooner USS Grampus, a hard-worked veteran of the West Indies anti-piracy campaign, took the slave brig Fenix off Cap-Haïtien on the north coast of Haiti, the Marine guard providing the boarding party. The seizure illustrates that the anti-slavery effort was not confined to the African coast: slavers and their prizes turned up throughout the Caribbean, and American warships enforced the prohibition wherever they found them. The capture was bloodless. By 1830 the same ships and the same methods that had broken Caribbean piracy in the 1820s were being applied to the slave trade, and officers like those of the Grampus moved naturally from one mission to the other. The Fenix was one link in a long chain of such captures that ran on, with varying intensity, until the Civil War.
Record no. 288