This is the latest of a series of occasional articles on the shared histories of Bermuda and the United States, which celebrates the 250th anniversary of its independence this year. The articles, by Heritage Matters author Edward Cecil Harris, will run throughout the year.

It is a few weeks until the August 1, which is celebrated in Bermuda as Emancipation Day, marking the anniversary of the Slavery Abolition Act 1833, which freed some 800,000 people of sub-Saharan descent in the dominions of the worldwide British Empire. A much larger number remained enslaved in other countries, like Brazil, and in Arabia slavery, continued in some places into recent times.

The Act took effect a year following and in Bermuda the day is a national holiday called Cup Match, when teams from the east and west ends compete in matches of the English sport, cricket. For some, the game is a never-ending addiction, for others it is the equivalent of internet downloading at 50mgs, the slowness excruciatingly painful.

It has been suggested that people of sub-Saharan origins were in Bermuda by 1616 and a group arrived via Virginia on the Earl of Warwick’s privateer ship Treasurer in 1619.

Others followed, enslaved and otherwise, so that it may be said that by the dissolution of the Bermuda Company in 1684, the population of Bermuda was a mix of European and African peoples, with probably some numbers from other regions of the world.

Most of the Africans would be enslaved until 1834, but earlier in 1807, Britain outlawed the trade in slaves itself, the first major country to do so. Following that, the Royal Navy devoted several squadrons of its vessels to interdict slave ships on the west coast of Africa, in the Atlantic Ocean and in the Caribbean Sea over some decades: several Bermuda-built vessels were engaged in that war of attrition on slavers.

While this note will bring to the fore a story of the young United States Navy and the Royal Navy working to destroy the African slave trade on the high seas, another mention, suggested by Peter Barrett, may be of interest.

You will recall that nephew Matthew Somers took the remains — minus his heart and other offals — of his uncle, Sir George Somers, back to his home town of Lyme Regis from Bermuda in the locally-built boat, Patience, in June 1611.

One researcher in that town is of the opinion that the Patience was destroyed a decade later by the Barbary pirates and its complement captured into slavery by said chaps. Being built of Bermuda cedar, it must have given off good incense as it was burnt in the Mediterranean.

Later, in the early 1800s, the United States Navy put paid to such terrorism on their ships, but the whole piracy business there was finally finished off in 1830 when the French conquered Algeria.

In the Fay and Geoffrey Elliott Collection at the Bermuda National Trust (cared for by the Bermuda Archives) there is a fine drawing (reproduced here) of two ships by the island’s first prolific artist, Thomas O’Brien Mills Driver (whose descendants yet thrive hereabout). Driver arrived here in 1814, after a tour of the war-devastated north coast of Spain (we sent some of his drawings thus to the Basque country for an exhibition in 2013).

Fay Elliott, in her biographical sketch of Driver in the Bermuda Journal of Archaeology and Maritime History, records that he visited the Caribbean in 1818 and “again in the summer of 1822, he sailed in the brig Harrington to the West Indies and painted coastal profiles of St John’s, Tortola and St Thomas, and Demerara”, the last now part of Guyana.

Driver left Bermuda in 1835, leaving behind two daughters, one the offspring of a “free woman of colour”: a descendant of that child, Emma Driver, was lately the Chief Justice of Bermuda — artistry of a different calibre.

Driver’s drawing shows the pirate ship Palmyra in the harbour of St Thomas on August 21, 1822, which had lately been captured as an outlaw by the USS Grampus, on patrol for the United States Navy in the Caribbean in the 1820s.

Five such schooners had recently been built for the suppression of piracy and slavery on the high seas and Grampus had only been launched in 1821 as part of the West Indies Squadron. Grampus remained on such maritime duties for 20 years, including on the Africa Squadron of the US Navy, but was lost with all hands in 1843 off Charleston, South Carolina, another set of naval men lost in service against the Atlantic Slave Trade.

The story of Palmyra and Grampus resonated down the decades and in 1890, the duo appeared on the cover of Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly magazine.

In 1829, Grampus crossed sea paths with HMS Monkey, also on anti-slave ship duties in the Caribbean Sea (of which more in the next few weeks, culminating on August 1, this year a Saturday). Under the command of Lt Joseph Sherer (in Bermuda briefly in 1827, where he sketched the Commissioner’s House and Dockyard fortifications, published by HC Wilkinson in Bermuda: From Sail to Steam in 1973), several slave ships were captured by his sloop-of-war, Monkey.

On one such vessel English and American men were also taken, the former were condemned to death and sent to Britain, while the latter were to be handed in chains to the first US Navy ship to appear at Havana: that proved to be the USS Grampus.

It is not known what fate awaited the Yankees, but the Brits were apparently reduced to life servitude in Australia, which some, even today, might see as a terminal sentence.

• Dr Edward Harris is the founding executive director emeritus of the National Museum of Bermuda