This declaration of British paternalism and assistance was written in 1852 by Royal Navy Commander Arthur Parry Eardley-Wilmot, as part of a long and passionate letter to the Commander-in-Chief of forces at Abeokuta (present day south-west Nigeria). Commander Wilmot delivered his message as a representative of ‘HM the Queen’ and an officer of the Royal Navy’s West Africa squadron, sent to enforce the terms of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act (1807). For six decades, the squadron was active in suppressing the transatlantic slave trade between West Africa and the plantations of the Americas, as Britain exerted increasing pressure – diplomatic and coercive – on other nations continuing the trade. Naval suppression involved intercepting and detaining slave ships embarked from the West African coast, and releasing captive Africans found on board. It also encompassed an increasingly assertive mission to eradicate the trading in human lives within West African societies. Hence Wilmot offered the people of ‘the land of slaves’ Britain's protection as a nation ‘mighty everywhere’. This proclamation was reinforced by his quotation of the opening couplets of the poem The West Indies by the abolitionist poet James Montgomery, first published in 1809. These lines illuminate the new relationship forged between Britain and West Africa in the years following Britain's abolition of the transatlantic slave trade and, later, slavery in the British Caribbean, Mauritius and the Cape (via the Emancipation Act of 1833). Africa is personified as the pleading slave liberated from her slave-trading past; the British have the dominant role in releasing her and dismantling slavery. In his letter Wilmot thus presents concerns and assurances that were at the heart of the British abolitionist campaign in West Africa in the early to mid-nineteenth century. This book is about the unique role played by Wilmot and his naval colleagues in Britain's anti-slavery cause.