Guerrero was a Spanish slave ship that wrecked in 1827 on a reef near the Florida Keys with 561 Africans aboard.

Guerrero had been engaged in a battle with a British anti-slavery patrol ship, HMS Nimble, stationed on the northern approaches to Cuba.

Spanish crew members hijacked two of the wrecking vessels and took almost 400 Africans to Cuba, where they were sold as slaves.

The British Consul in Santiago, Cape Verde reported in 1827 that the ship then known as Guerrero was the former James Monroe, which was launched in 1813 in New London, Connecticut, and which had served as a letter of marque during the War of 1812.

Its later history is unclear, in part because a number of American ships were named for James Monroe after he became President of the United States in 1817.

Pepe loaded about 600 Africans at Gallinas (near the border between present day Sierra Leone and Liberia) and delivered about 570 of them to Cuba late in the year.

On 19 December 1827 Guerrero was sailing south towards Cuba in the Florida Straits carrying 561 Africans who had survived the voyage when it was spotted by HMS Nimble near Orange Cay (on the Great Bahama Bank).

[a] Nimble fired two shots to order the suspected slave ship to stop for inspection, but Guerrero ran, starting a five-hour chase during which the weather turned bad and night came on.

The crew on the lightship Caesar, stationed on Carysfort Reef near Key Largo, could see and hear the battle, which appeared to be about ten miles away.

[1] The next morning, 20 December 1827, wreckers on the schooner Thorn and sloop Surprize, who had anchored overnight in Caesar Creek,[b] saw the two ships on the reef and went to their aid.

On the other hand, Lt. Edward Holland, commander of Nimble, insisted that Guerrero had surrendered before the ships hit the reef, and was therefore a British prize.

Thorn had not left by late afternoon, and Lt. Bolton requested that it anchor close to Nimble overnight so that the warship could help protect the wrecker from the Spanish crewmen on it.

[7] Surprize, which had taken on 12 of the Spanish crewmen and 122 Africans, anchored for the night near the wreck of Guerrero in the company of two other wreckers, the sloop Capital and schooner General Geddes.

[8] Nimble, Capital and General Geddes reached Key West on 24 December and Florida and Thorn returned from Cuba the next day, their crews having been released unharmed.

Lt. Holden refused to submit to the arbitration procedure established by Florida territorial law, which would have let a panel of local residents, almost all of whom had a financial stake in wrecking, decide how much in salvage fees were due the wreckers.

Six had died in Key West, and one was kept by the captain of the revenue cutter that escorted the ship carrying the Africans to St.

In April 1828 President John Quincy Adams requested Congress to pass a supplementary law dealing with the Guerrero Africans, but it failed to act.

A year later, in March 1829, Congress appropriated funds to reimburse Waters Smith and transport the Guerrero Africans to Liberia.

There were delays when the ship had to be replaced, and the departure point for the Africans was moved from St. Augustine to Fernandina, Florida.

When Smith called for the hired-out Africans to be returned to him so that they could be shipped to Africa, Kingsley and Hernandez refused to do so, based on an opinion by the Collector of Customs for St. Augustine that the Africans were free men and therefore Smith had no authority to hire them out as slaves or to remove them from the possession of Kingsley and Hernandez and order them sent to Africa.

They were settled in New Georgia, a town a few miles from Monrovia, where they joined people who had been recaptured from the slave ship Antelope by the U.S. Revenue Cutter Dallas in 1820 and sent to Liberia in 1827.

Underwater excavations in 2010 and 2012 by the Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Society and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration identified the wreck through a cologne bottle from the early 1800s, bone china, lead shot, blue-edged earthenware, metal rigging, copper fasteners, and wooden plank fragments recovered from the wreck site.