A Middy of the Slave Squadron: A West African Story

The year is 1822. The West African coast swelters under a merciless sun, and the British corvette Psyche lies in wait near the Benin River, its crew scanning the horizon for the sails of slave ships. Young Richard Fortescue, a midshipman barely out of boyhood, stands at the bow with his telescope and his duty, a combination that will test every ounce of his courage and conviction. This is naval adventure at its most vivid: the creaking timbers of a warship in tropical heat, the tension of pursuit across moonlit seas, the brittle politics of international law applied to a trade in human lives. Fortescue and his shipmates must navigate not only the treacherous currents of the West African coast but the moral complexities of an era when Britain had outlawed the slave trade within its own territories but could not yet enforce that ban beyond them. The enemy is cunning, the stakes are measured in human lives, and the navy of 1822 had only sails and wood and determination with which to fight. First published in 1911 but set a century earlier, this is a boy's-own adventure laced with genuine moral gravity, an adventure story that remembers what it was actually fighting for.