Cape Mesurado

[2] Because Cape Mesurado was being used as a base for the illegal slave trade, in 1815 Governor William Maxwell of Sierra Leone sent an armed force there to interfere with it, seizing ships and merchandise and rescuing enslaved Africans who were working in the factories there.

For their crimes, the factory owners, Robert Bostock and John McQueen, were sentenced to fourteen years transportation to New South Wales by the Vice admiralty court.

At first, the local ruler, Zolu Duma (King Peter), was reluctant to surrender their peoples' land to the strangers, but he was forcefully persuaded (some accounts claim at gunpoint) to sell them a "36 mile long and 3 mile wide" strip of coastal land, in exchange for trade goods, supplies, weapons, and rum worth approximately $300 (a considerable sum at the time).

[6] Led by Lott Carey and Elijah Johnson, the Americo-Liberians organized a defense against local attacks, rejecting an offer of British military assistance that would have required them to hoist the Union Jack on Cape Mesurado.

[6] During the Battle of Fort Hill on 1 December 1822, a colonist named Matilda Newport is supposed to have repelled an attack by lighting a cannon with an ember from her pipe.