Amistad Freedom Schooner in New Haven, New Haven County, United States | Tours | Cruises

The Amistad Freedom Schooner, Connecticut's Flagship and Tall Ship Ambassador whose home is the Port at Long Wharf Pier, New Haven, Connecticut United States. Open to the public for sails, Tours and educational programs.

The two-masted Amistad Freedom Schooner, whose home port is New Haven, Connecticut, is a full-scale recreation of La Amistad, a swift Spanish vessel that dodged international law to smuggle illegally imported Africans from one Cuban plantation to another. But on the night of July 2, 1839, her African captives rose up in revolt.

Successfully seizing control of the vessel, they ordered the crew to sail back to Africa, but 63 days at sea brought them instead to the coast of Long Island, where they were thrown into a Connecticut jail on charges of murder and piracy.

For two years, the captives languished in jail as their case wound its way through the court system of a slave-holding nation. Anti-slavery activists, black and white alike, flocked to their defense, and as their story spread, they become heroes to American blacks.

Against the U.S. government's assertion that the Amistad rebels were outlaws and murderers, the captives, with former President John Quincy Adams himself as their champion, insisted that they had only exercised the natural right of self-defense against individuals trying to take away their freedom.

Acquitted on a technicality?since the ship was acting in violation of international law, the Supreme Court considered the captives illegally enslaved and thus justified in their efforts to liberate themselves?the rebels returned home to Sierra Leone in 1841. Though only 35 survived to see their homeland again, those who did so had successfully reversed the infamous Middle Passage, returning to Africa, free.