The American merchantman Mary Ann was primly named, but she had a scandalous history. In i8j8 she cleared lor West Alrica, ostensibly on a trading voyage lor such products as palm oil, which the new American railroads and factories used as a lubricant. He mates and crew seemed to have signed on unaware that any other scheme was in the wind. Eut the course her captain set took her not to the mouths of the Niger, locus of the palm oil trade, but to the Gallinas River area, notorious for its bootleg slave markets.

Forty years beTore, Great Britain and the United States had outlawed the slave trade, and eventually the whole western world followed suit. Subsequently the United States had declared slave trading to be piracy, subject to capital punishment. Dut booms in sugar and colTee kept Cuba and Brazil hungry lor slave labor, and immense profits from slave smuggling brought unscrupulous seamen and shipowners—“the matured villainy of the world,” a U.S. Navy commander called them—Hocking like buzzards into a rich racket.

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