George Francis Dow, historian and collector of antiquities, author of many books about the past of America, is sure that there were no blacker pages in the naval annals than those that tell about the voyages of slave ships. All sea-going ships, with their holds full of black slaves captured during tribal wars or kidnapped in peacetime, were sent from the coast of the Gulf of Guinea to the West Indies, to the American colonies that became the United States, where the unfortunates were sold or exchanged for a variety of goods. The book contains memoirs of ship doctors, captains and passengers, as well as written reports for parliamentary commissions investigating the slave trade, and describes its commercial structure.