launched a vessel, the British Queen providing mail service between England and America, but this venture was unprofitable. It then added another vessel, the President which disappeared en route to England from New York. The company did not survive the disappearance of the President and the navigation firm was liquidated in 1841. Despite the unsuccessful expedition, Laird continued to stimulate interest in promoting commercial trade in the hinterland of West Africa, particularly within the settlements closest to the mouth of the Niger. He advised merchants to cultivate trade with coastal middlemen as a primary business objective, and as a secondary objective, to send a steam vessel inland to woo communities in the interior and bypass the coastal middlemen. In 1841, when the British blockade of the coast of West Africa failed to halt the transatlantic slave trade, Laird's believe in legitimate trade as a deterrent to slave trading soon gradually gave way to the idea that cheap labour through unrestricted emigration to the West Indies would cripple the demand for slaves while also increasing production of sugar. In 1838, after the apprenticeship system in West Indies was eliminated ending slavery, Laird advocated voluntary emigration of Africans to West Indies as a way to curtail slavery and also bring Africans in contact to Europeans and their culture, views he voiced to a parliamentary select committee on the West Coast of Africa in 1842 and to the General Anti-Slavery Convention in 1843. A Return to West African Trade: The African Steam Navigation Company Laird never went back to West Africa, however, upon renewed government interest in the affairs of West Africa after the appointment of John Beecroft as consul in the Oil Rivers and the 1851 annexation of Lagos, Laird submitted a proposal to the government for regular mail communication by steamship between England and West Africa. Laird's proposal found favour with the government and he was given a mail contract including government subsidies. In 1852, he co-founded the African Steam Navigation Company and in 1854, set up, with the support of the British government, a small steamer, the Pleiad, which under W. B. Baikie made so successful a voyage that Laird induced the government to sign contracts for annual trading trips by steamers specially built for navigation of the Niger and Benue. Various stations were founded on the Niger, and though government support was withdrawn after the death of Laird and