"In 1844 the USS Yorktown sailed from New York, as part of the U.S. Navy's newly established African Squadron, to interdict slave ships leaving the African coast. Aboard the sloop of war was Master's Mate John C. Lawrence, an educated New Yorker in his early twenties. Over the next two years Lawrence kept a private journal describing his reactions to events that took place during the extraordinary voyage. His frank and vivid observations take readers into a world known to few."

"Through Lawrence's eyes we see the men of the Yorktown in action and encounter many other nineteenth-century figures engaged in or attempting to combat the slave trade. Among the cast of characters are an infamous slave-ship captain, an abolitionist slave-owning minister, the Yorktown's admirable skipper, Liberian colonists, and native Africans.

In a final journal entry we bear witness to Lawrence's nearly overwhelming confrontation with the horrors of slavery as he records his experiences aboard a captured slave ship on the way to Liberia with more than nine hundred slaves."

"In addition to Lawrence's never-before-published journal, this book includes material that narrates the parts of the slavery story that Lawrence could not tell. C. Herbert Gilliland sets the journal in historical context to give readers a full understanding of events as they unfolded in the mid-1840s.

Although many books have been written on the slave trade and many others on life in the antebellum navy, no other book has succeeded so well at bringing to life the issues of America's role in the Middle Passage while exposing the thoughts of a nineteenth-century naval officer."--Jacket.