This is the latest in 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.

“The most spectacular antislavery picnic was held at Tranquility Grove, Hingham, southwest of Boston, two summers later [on 2 August, 1844] … White star medallions were distributed among the crowd. On one side of the medallion was a picture of a shackled, suppliant ‘Negro’, with one knee bent, hands folded and extended, and wrists bound by chains to his ankles with the legend underneath.” — from A Voice from Great Britain to America 1834 (Jeffrey Kerr-Ritchie, Rites of August First: Emancipation Day in the Black Atlantic World.)

Emancipation Day, namely August 1, 1834, was an historic 24 hours during which the “Slavery Abolition Act 1833” came into legal force. Promulgated from the later 1700s by English Abolitionist Societies and notables such as William Wilberforce, the first significant Parliamentary action in the 19th century was the Act ending the slave trade in British dominions in 1807. That meant that it was illegal to conduct business in the transport, selling or any other enterprise in human beings from Africa.

It would be another 27 years, however, before the enslaved peoples in those lands controlled by Britain would themselves (some 800,000 souls) be freed on that Friday, 192 years ago.

It would be another 29 years before such a “Day of Jubilee” was celebrated on January 1, 1863, when enslaved persons in the United States were finally freed because of the Civil War.

It would be another 147 years, after Emancipation Day 1834, before Mauritania, in 1981, had the apparent distinction of crossing the end of slavery line — at least to legally abolish it under the law.

When the tide turned against the millennia-old slave trade worldwide, the new, irreversible current was started by the British, who fortuitously controlled much of the ocean seas through the vessels and men of the Royal Navy, several thousand of whom lost their lives in the tracking down and capture of slave shipping.

By contrast, in what is claimed to be the first modern war, the anti-slavery Union Forces lost over 650,000 personnel, dead, wounded or just plain missing, in the Civil War that brought the freedom of enslaved people in the United States.

For over half a century from 1807, the Royal Navy captured some 1600 slavers, including three by one Lieutenant Joseph Sherer, whose story, with Bermuda connections, has now been published in Fire & Ice, a booklet authored by Edward Harris and Ian Robertson.

As we celebrate Emancipation Day in 2026, it might add a little perspective to see what one Royal Navy ship and its crew were doing in their emancipation work in the heat of the Bahama Banks 197 years ago.

It might also be notable to mention that at least one Bermudian-built ship, HMS Morgiana, launched in 1812, captured over a dozen slavers in the following decade on west of Africa patrols, immediately following, if you will, the Act ending the slave trade in 1807.

Lt Sherer (of the Ice in the title) began his naval career in the early 1820s on several voyages to the Arctic Ocean with Captain William Parry. (By the way, a recent discovery in the uppermost parish has led us to suggest that Capt Parry’s “first love” was here buried in 1815: someone in Somerset may have a scrapbook in which he penned her elegy, please find it!)

Lt Sherer was a fine artist, but none of his work on the search for the Northwest Passage around the frozen top of Canada is known. One drawing of the east end of the Bermuda Dockyard with Commissioner’s House exists and places him in our waters in late 1827, on his way into the Fire of anti-slavery duties in the Caribbean region.

On Saturday, 27 June 1829, near Bimini in Bahamian waters, Lt Sherer, in command of a small one-gun sloop, HMS Monkey, captured the Spanish slaver Midas, which action of 35 minutes was memorialised in a widely published lithograph of the encounter.

Of the 562 Africans embarked into slavery on that ship, 193 were lost on the trans-Atlantic voyage and another 72 died of “smallpox, diarrhoea and scurvy” before Midas could be brought into Havana and the survivors freed.

Lt Sherer captured two more slavers in 1829 and as mentioned in an earlier article, ships and men of the US Navy were also engaged in such interdictions in the Caribbean arena of that undeclared war.

Perhaps just after the capture of Midas, the image here illustrated was painted by Sherer, but sadly no further description, other than “Arrival in the West” is to be found. It seems to be a very rare illustration of enslaved people coming to the Americas: we await the opinion of experts in this field of historical studies — and yours as well. (That sketch is here published for the first time in a newspaper since its painting in 1829: we thank The Royal Gazette for its support of this series on US-Bermuda relationships.)

Meanwhile a little later, in 1843, stateside, one Jairus Lincoln (of Hingham above) published a song book, Anti-Slavery Melodies: For the Friends of Freedom. Here are two verses, a sharp parody, perhaps for all to sing at Cup Match, to the tune of an epic American patriotic hymn.

My country! ’tis of thee,

Stronghold of slavery,

Of thee I sing:

Land where my fathers died,

Where men man’s rights deride,

From every mountainside,

They deeds shall ring

My native country! thee,

Where all men are born free,

If white their skin,

I love thy hills and dales,

Thy mounts and pleasant vales,

But hate thy negro sales,

As foulest sin …

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