As a result of the slave trade, societies along the Windward Coast of West Africa went from supplying rice to European vessels to experiencing food shortages.
In 1818, the British Anti-Slavery Squadron began putting pressure on major slave trading areas like Rio Pongo, the Gallinas and Dahomey. As a result, the traffic moved to previously minor ports like Cape Mount and Cape Mesurado. The area around Cape Mount alone is said to have shipped around 3,000 persons in 1823 and about 15,000 per year between 1840 and 1850.
Footnote: Dan Morgan, Merchants of Grain (New York: Penguin, 1980), pp. 454-455, and Vernon R. Dorjahn and Barry L. Isaac, Essays on the Economic Anthropology of Liberia and Sierra Leone (Philadelphia: Institute for Liberian Studies, 1979), p. 21.
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