the patriarchs of a family dynasty of traders and chiefs in the region. Shortly after being reassigned to The Gambia, he died on a business trip to England in 1700, but his descendants in Sierra Leone did well. After Great Britain abolished the international African slave trade in 1808 in partnership with the United States, it used the former RAC trading fort on Sherbro Island as a base for naval operations against illegal slave traders. Liberated slaves were resettled in the Freetown colony. But for decades more, both Spain and Portugal continued to buy African slaves for their colonies in the Caribbean, and Central and South America. In 1815 Paul Cuffe, a successful African-American ship maker of Boston, Massachusetts, became interested in resettling free blacks in west Africa. The British had undertaken this at Freetown, Sierra Leone since 1792. There Black Loyalists from Nova Scotia (African Americans freed in the American Revolution) had been joined by Maroons deported from Jamaica, Liberated Africans freed from illegal traders, and some of the ethnic groups in the territory of Sierra Leone who were interested in western culture. Cuffe believed that skilled American blacks could help develop trade between Sierra Leone and the United States, benefiting both. In 1815, he resettled a group of 88 American freedmen on Sherbro Island. After returning to the US, Cuffe marketed his cargo of goods taken on at Freetown. Cuffe died in 1817, but the American Colonization Society (ACS), founded in 1820 by both abolitionists and slaveholders, continued the effort to resettle free blacks in Africa. They commissioned a survey of possible areas, including Sherbro Island. They found John Kizell, a Sherbro born locally who had returned after being captured and held in slavery in South Carolina. He gained freedom with the British during the American Revolutionary War and was among 1200 Black Loyalists resettled here in 1792. He led a number of Sherbro people. The U.S. Congress passed an act on March 3, 1819, authorizing transport of freed blacks to their "motherland". The ACS began to develop a colony in Africa for free American blacks. It later became known as the Republic of Liberia. In this period, most free blacks (and enslaved) in the US were native to the nation; they had family and history there. They wanted to gain equal rights and non-discriminatory treatment in the US. In 1821, the ship Elizabeth from New York carried