Generally speaking, the Portuguese trained and employed Africans of various origins to carry out tasks involved with seafaring. The Kru people from what is now Liberia were among those who took on this ambiguous role in their interactions with the Portuguese and the English. Rather than trading enslaved people with the Europeans, they supplied the trade with local products and put forward sailors for the European vessels; they came to be known in the anglophone nautical world as Kroomen (Person, 2010, pp. 760-763). Kru Pidgin English, the result of the fusion between Kru and English, remained the language of sailors and migrants from British colonies in West Africa (McGowan, 1990, p. 9; Martin, 1985, pp. 401-423; Breitborde, 1991, pp. 186-201).  
An autobiographical text written in the mid-nineteenth century by Canot, a European slave trader, bears witness to the people's skills as sailors. One of his reports tells of an overnight storm in which the crew of a slave ship rowed to land in skiffs. One of the crew members was able to steer the canoe in spite of the danger; they crossed the reefs by means of an opening, thereby winning Canot's approval. 'This is the skill and the daring of the kroomen', he writes. Canot worked in a tent set up on a beach open to the ocean, in an area where docking was dangerous even when the sea was calm: 'In actual fact, disembarking in New Sestros [as he referred to the area] would have been inviable if it hadn't been for these kroomen, whose canoes break through and conquer the waves [...]'. The Kru dominated the coast for miles and, as sailors, were a vital component of slave ship operations. Ships flying various flags would await their human cargo in docks far from the beach; the Kru, using their own canoes carved from a single trunk of wood, would transport the cargo to them (Mayer and Canot, 2007, pp. 125-126, pp. 345-346).