Combat· West Africa Anti-Slavery Patrol
USS Perry captures American ship Martha
A capture that became a celebrated case in the fight against the illegal slave trade.
Off Luanda on the Angolan coast, Marines aboard the brig USS Perry took part in the seizure of the Martha, an American-flagged vessel caught fitting out for the trade. When the Perry approached, the Martha's crew tried to pass her off as Brazilian and threw her papers overboard, but the boarding party detained her under the 1820 Slave Trade Act and the Webster-Ashburton Treaty mandate. The capture was bloodless. The Martha case drew attention because it exposed how American ships and capital were still feeding the trade decades after it had been outlawed, and because it demonstrated that the African Squadron, often criticized as ineffective, could and did make significant seizures. The Perry's action was characteristic of the patrol's grinding, mostly thankless work along the West African coast in the years before the Civil War.
Record no. 366