The Royal Navy spearheaded the campaign for abolition of the Indian Ocean slave trade from its base at Bombay (Pereira, 2006, p. 236) where young liberated African men were deposited. As they were too old to be placed in orphanages, with local families or sent to Nasik, they were employed as stevedores. Many were subsequently taken on board British merchant and Royal Navy ships (Harris, 1977, p. 17). The Royal Navy enlisted so many of these liberated Africans that by the 1850s the government observed that the majority of Bombay-recruited seamen were Africans (Harris, 1977, p. 18). The Royal Navy referred to these Africans as 'Seedies' or 'Sidis', following the popular use of these terms to describe Africans in South Asia. Their memory of African languages and wish to remain free made these crewmen indispensable in the abolition campaign, where there was a lack of British interpreters in Kiswahili and other African languages to distinguish dhows carrying legitimate passengers from those carrying enslaved Africans. These crewmen were dispersed throughout coastal eastern Africa and perhaps around the Indian Ocean. Little is known of their lives, but many eventually settled and merged with the cosmopolitan communities of eastern African port cities, including Cape Town and Durban (Pereira, 2007, p. 5).