The Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron Hunts Slave Ships for Six Decades
Britain polices the ocean it once dominated as a slave trader, freeing 150,000 people while more than a million are still trafficked illegally
Quick facts
- Active
- 1808-1867
- Base
- Freetown, Sierra Leone (est. 1819)
- Ships seized
- over 1,600
- People freed
- approximately 150,000
- Estimated still trafficked in the 19th century
- about 1 million
What happened
Formed in 1808, the year after the Slave Trade Act took effect, the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron patrolled the West African coast to intercept ships still illegally carrying enslaved people, a mission that continued, with interruptions, until 1867. Operating out of a naval station established at Freetown, Sierra Leone in 1819, the squadron at its mid-nineteenth-century peak deployed roughly 25 vessels and 2,000 British personnel plus another 1,000 local sailors. Over its full run, the squadron seized more than 1,600 slave ships and freed approximately 150,000 Africans found aboard them. Despite this sustained effort, historians estimate that a further one million people were still enslaved and transported across the Atlantic during the nineteenth century by traders evading or outrunning British patrols, chiefly to Brazil and Cuba, where slavery remained legal for decades after Britain's ban.
Why it matters
The squadron's existence shows Britain attempting to enforce internationally what it could no longer compel through law alone, using its navy to suppress a trade it had itself dominated a generation earlier. Its limited success, freeing 150,000 while roughly a million more were still trafficked, is direct evidence of how much demand for enslaved labor persisted in Brazil and Cuba long after Britain and the United States had banned their own participation in the trade.
How we know
The National Archives (UK) holds Royal Navy patrol records, court records from British colonial vice-admiralty courts that tried captured slave ships, and photographs and reports from Royal Navy officers documenting anti-slaving operations into the 1860s and 1890s.
Sources
- The National Archives (UK). Slavery · Primary source (author-declared)nationalarchives.gov.uk · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Slavery and Remembrance. Sierra Leone · General sourceslaveryandremembrance.org · Cited as a "reference" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
See something wrong? . Corrections with a source get fixed fastest.
Part of a timelineThe Atlantic Slave Trade29 events · Four centuries in which European traders forced an estimated 12.5 million Africans onto ships bound for the Americas, and the enslaved people, revolts, and abolitionists who fought it from the first crossing to the lastView all →