Africa Squadron
Africa Squadron

Author: Donald L. Canney

Publisher: Potomac Books, Inc.

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 407

ISBN-13: 1597974641

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Donald L. CanneyOCOs study is the first book-length history of the U.S. NavyOCOs Africa Squadron. Established in 1842 to enforce the ban on importing slaves to the United States, in twenty yearsOCO time the squadron proved ineffective. To officers and enlisted men alike, duty in the squadron was unpopular. The equatorial climate, departmental neglect, and judicial indifference, which allowed slavers back at sea, all contributed to the sailorsOCO frustration. Later, the most damaging allegation was that the squadron had failed at its mission. Canney investigates how this unit earned a poor reputation and whether it is deserved. Though U.S. warships seized slave vessels as early as 1800, four decades passed before the Navy established a permanent squadron off the western coast of Africa to interdict U.S.-flag vessels participating in this trade. Canney traces the NavyOCOs role in interdicting the slave trade, Great BritainOCOs pressure on the U.S. government to curb slave traffic, the creation of the squadron, and how individual politicians, department secretaries, captains, and squadron commanders interpreted the laws and orders from higher authorities, changing squadron operations. While famous ships and captains served on this station, none won distinction in the Africa Squadron. In the final analysis, the squadron was unsuccessful, even though it was the NavyOCOs only permanent squadron with a specific, congressionally mandated mission: to maintain a quasi-blockade on a foreign shore. While Canney exonerates southern-born naval captains, who approached their work as diligently as their counterparts from the north, he demonstrates how the secretaries of the NavyOCopro-slavery southern politiciansOConeglected the squadron."

Britain's War Against the Slave Trade
Britain's War Against the Slave Trade

Author: Anthony Sullivan

Publisher: Frontline Books

Published: 2020-04-30

Total Pages: 440

ISBN-13: 1526717956

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The true story of the Royal Navy’s sixty-year campaign to stop slavery across the British Empire, decades before the American Civil War. Long before recorded history, men, women and children had been seized by conquering tribes and nations to be employed or traded as slaves. Greeks, Romans, Vikings, and Arabs were among the earliest of many peoples involved in the slave trade, and across Africa the buying and selling of slaves was widespread. There was, at the time, nothing unusual in Britain’s somewhat belated entry into the slave trade, transporting natives from Africa’s west coast to the plantations of the New World. What was unusual was Britain’s decision, in 1807, to ban the slave trade throughout the British Empire. Britain later persuaded other countries to follow suit, but this did not stop this lucrative business. So the Royal Navy went to war against the slavers, in due course establishing the West Africa Squadron, which was based at Freetown in Sierra Leone. This force grew throughout the nineteenth century until a sixth of the Royal Navy’s ships and marines was employed in the battle against the slave trade. Between 1808 and 1860, the West Africa Squadron captured 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 Africans. In Britain’s War Against the Slave Trade, naval historian Anthony Sullivan reveals the story behind this little-known campaign. Whereas Britain is usually, and justifiably, condemned for its earlier involvement in the slave trade, the truth is that in time the Royal Navy undertook a major and expensive operation to end what was, and is, an evil business.

Squadron
Squadron

Author: John Broich

Publisher: Abrams

Published: 2017-11-28

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 1468314009

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This naval history reveals the story of Victorian-era officers and abolitionists who fought the illegal slave trade in the Indian Ocean. Though the British Empire outlawed the slave trade in 1807, many British ships continued the practice for decades along the eastern coast of Africa. The Royal Navy’s response was to dispatch a squadron charged with patrolling the African coast for rogue slave ships. In Squadron, John Broich tells the story of the four Royal Naval officers who made it their personal mission to end the still-rampant slave trade. The campaign was quickly cancelled when it began to interfere with the interests of the wealthy merchant class. But in time, a coalition of naval officers and abolitionists forced the British government’s hand into eradicating the slave trade entirely. Drawing on firsthand accounts and archives throughout the U.K., Broich tells a tale of defiance in the face of political corruption, while delivering thrills in the tradition of high seas heroism. If it weren’t a true story, Squadron would be right at home alongside Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander series.

The Black Joke
The Black Joke

Author: A.E. Rooks

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2022-01-18

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 1982128283

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A groundbreaking history of the Black Joke, the most famous member of the British Royal Navy’s anti-slavery squadron, and the long fight to end the transatlantic slave trade. The most feared ship in Britain’s West Africa Squadron, His Majesty’s brig Black Joke was one of a handful of ships tasked with patrolling the western coast of Africa in an effort to end hundreds of years of global slave trading. Sailing after the spectacular fall of Napoleon in France, yet before the rise of Queen Victoria’s England, Black Joke was first a slaving vessel itself, and one with a lightning-fast reputation; only a lucky capture in 1827 allowed it to be repurposed by the Royal Navy to catch its former compatriots. Over the next five years, the ship’s diverse crew and dedicated commanders would capture more ships and liberate more enslaved people than any other in the Squadron. Now, author A.E. Rooks chronicles the adventures on this ship and its crew in a brilliant, lively narrative of the history of Britain’s suppression efforts. As Britain slowly attempted to snuff out the transatlantic slave trade by way of treaty and negotiation, enforcing these policies fell to the Black Joke and those that sailed with it as they battled slavers, weather disasters, and interpersonal drama among captains and crew that reverberated across oceans. In this history of the daring feats of a single ship, the abolition of the international slave trade is revealed as an inexplicably extended exercise involving tense negotiations between many national powers, both colonizers and formerly colonized, that would stretch on for decades longer than it should have. Harrowing and heartbreaking, The Black Joke is a crucial and deeply compelling work of history, both as a reckoning with slavery and abolition and as a lesson about the power of political will—or the lack thereof.

Combat Squadrons of the Air Force; World War II.
Combat Squadrons of the Air Force; World War II.

Author: United States. USAF Historical Division

Publisher:

Published: 1969

Total Pages: 856

ISBN-13:

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This collection of squadron histories has been prepared by the USAF Historical Division to complement the Division's book, Air Force Combat Units of World War II. The 1,226 units covered by this volume are the combat (tactical) squadrons that were active between 7 December 1941 and 2 September 1945. Each squadron is traced from its beginning through 5 March 1963, the fiftieth anniversary of the organization of the 1st Aero (later Bombardment) Squadron, the first Army unit to be equipped with aircraft for tactical operations. For each squadron there is a statement of the official lineage and data on the unit's assignments, stations, aircraft and missiles, operations, service streamers, campaign participation, decorations, and emblem.

Envoys of Abolition
Envoys of Abolition

Author: Mary Wills

Publisher: Liverpool Studies in Internati

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1789620783

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Drawing on substantial collections of previously unpublished papers, this book examines personal experiences of British naval officers employed in suppressing the transatlantic slave trade from West Africa in the nineteenth century. It illuminates cultural encounters, the complexities of British abolitionism, and extraordinary military service at sea and in African territories.

Secret SAS Missions in Africa
Secret SAS Missions in Africa

Author: Michael Graham

Publisher: Casemate Publishers

Published: 2017-10-30

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 1526712482

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The untold story of Rhodesian special forces and their defense of British Colonies in Africa during the Cold War, told by a soldier who was there. In Secret SAS Missions in Africa, a former senior member of the little-known C (Rhodesia) Squadron of Britain’s Special Air Service recounts their military operations in Africa during the Cold War. The Squadron was involved in almost continuous anti-communist operations over the period 1968 to 1980. In the unstable final stages of British colonial rule, the Squadron was constantly on the move. African nationalist movements, backed by Russia and China, posed a constant and deadly threat to colonial regimes. Small detachments of the SAS, with highly developed bush warfare skills, proved devastatingly effective at countering rebel factions in Kenya, Mozambique, Rhodesia, and elsewhere on the continent.

African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade
African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade

Author: Anne Bailey

Publisher: Beacon Press

Published: 2005-01-02

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 0807055190

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It's an awful story. It's an awful story. Why do you want to bring this up now?--Chief Awusa of Atorkor For centuries, the story of the Atlantic slave trade has been filtered through the eyes and records of white Europeans. In this watershed book, historian Anne C. Bailey focuses on memories of the trade from the African perspective. African chiefs and other elders in an area of southeastern Ghana-once famously called "the Old Slave Coast"-share stories that reveal that Africans were traders as well as victims of the trade. Bailey argues that, like victims of trauma, many African societies now experience a fragmented view of their past that partially explains the blanket of silence and shame around the slave trade. Capturing scores of oral histories that were handed down through generations, Bailey finds that, although Africans were not equal partners with Europeans, even their partial involvement in the slave trade had devastating consequences on their history and identity. In this unprecedented and revelatory book, Bailey explores the delicate and fragmented nature of historical memory.

Dreams of Africa in Alabama
Dreams of Africa in Alabama

Author: Sylviane A. Diouf

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2009-02-18

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 0199723982

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In the summer of 1860, more than fifty years after the United States legally abolished the international slave trade, 110 men, women, and children from Benin and Nigeria were brought ashore in Alabama under cover of night. They were the last recorded group of Africans deported to the United States as slaves. Timothy Meaher, an established Mobile businessman, sent the slave ship, the Clotilda , to Africa, on a bet that he could "bring a shipful of niggers right into Mobile Bay under the officers' noses." He won the bet. This book reconstructs the lives of the people in West Africa, recounts their capture and passage in the slave pen in Ouidah, and describes their experience of slavery alongside American-born enslaved men and women. After emancipation, the group reunited from various plantations, bought land, and founded their own settlement, known as African Town. They ruled it according to customary African laws, spoke their own regional language and, when giving interviews, insisted that writers use their African names so that their families would know that they were still alive. The last survivor of the Clotilda died in 1935, but African Town is still home to a community of Clotilda descendants. The publication of Dreams of Africa in Alabama marks the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. Winner of the Wesley-Logan Prize of the American Historical Association (2007)