The UC Santa Barbara Undergraduate Journal of History

In the early nineteenth century, the Transatlantic Slave Trade was in a period of rapid transformation. Britain’s abolition of its own slave trade in 1807, and active British attempts to suppress the trade in the following years, caused massive shifts in the patterns of the trade. Slave traders developed new methods to maximize profits in an increasingly dangerous business, while the British navy and parliament debated how to deal with recaptured slaves. Caught in the middle of these struggles were the more than one million people sold into slavery from 1807 to 1869. This study attempts to retrace, in as much detail as possible, the lives of 437 of them: the shipmates of the Ana Maria, who were “freed” by a British vessel in 1821 and resettled in the colony of Sierra Leone. Drawing on accounts of the Ana Maria’s voyage and capture, firsthand descriptions of life in Sierra Leone, and secondary sources, this paper follows the shipmates’ attempts to develop new identities and communal strategies in the face of intense hardship. Additionally, it brings into focus the highly ambiguous legacies of Britain’s “war against the slave trade.” Despite its humanitarian mission, racism, a shortage of funds, and a strong cultural belief in the enlightening power of Christianity and hard labor created a harshly policed and desperately unsafe colonial regime in Sierra Leone that replicated many of the conditions of slavery in the Americas.