In 1859, America was on the verge of civil war. The country was split, literally down the middle, over the issue of slavery. Indeed, the heat of the polemic was so strong that the friction reverberated four thousand miles away. Off the coast of Africa, the ‘USS Constellation’ was at sea with a mission to intercept and stop ships smuggling Africans into slavery.

The brutal practice of capturing thousands of Africans from their homelands and forcing them into slavery had been illegal in the United States for fifty years. Yet there was still a vast black market for buying African slaves. It had to be stopped at any cost. The job had fallen to the US Navy and a small fleet of ships assigned to the task. They were called the African Squadron, and ‘Constellation’ was their flagship.

We recreate the drama of the high seas, following the crew of Constellation as they pursue illegal slave smugglers. For years, the efforts to stop the illegal traders were thwarted by indifferent and insubstantial leadership. However, in 1859, Flag Officer William Inman, commander of the African Squadron, received a mandate to step up his efforts to capture slave smugglers.

In our dramatic reconstruction, officers and sailors give first person accounts of life on the ship as they travel along the African coast, explaining the challenges of catching the swift and stealthy vessels known as ‘slavers’.

Te story of the ‘Constellation’ contains the smaller story of the plight of an African hunter captured from his village and forced into slavery. We follow the journey from his village in deepest Congo to his imprisonment with 700 other Africans on the slave ship ‘Cora’. In the programme’s epic finale, we reveal how the ‘Constellation’ spotted the ‘Cora’ and frantically pursued it. We explain that the captain of the ‘Cora’ refused to be stopped, even under fire from ‘Constellation’s powerful guns.

Although the transatlantic slave trade was long condemned for its brutality and inhumanity, many powerful economic forces in both the northern and southern United States promoted and supported the illegal trade and the institution of slavery whilst it was being heavily criticised. Shot in High Definition and filmed on location, the programme graphically and honestly recreates the horror and hypocrisy of the slave trade, the challenging mission of the US Navy’s African Squadron, and the ship’s heroic effort to stop slave smugglers.