It was, of course, Francisca da Silva's concern for her sons, Domingos and Thomé, that motivated her, in 1835, to intervene with civil authorities on their behalf and then, supported by José Pedro Autran, to lead members of their household and religious community to emigrate to Ouidah. The political exodus, post-Malê, of Francisca da Silva, José Pedro Autran, and over a thousand other Africans like them, marked a turning point in the history of the African diaspora connecting the littoral of the Bight of Benin with Brazil because it inaugurated a sustained, if uneven, flow of freed people from Brazil to West Africa that would last for the rest of the century. The number of returnees ebbed in the 1840s, when most, like Francisco Gomes de Andrade, were men already working in the transatlantic slave trade. Some of these men built on the political, economic, and social alliances they had forged through their commercial or other activities to open new coastal towns to settlement. The foundation Francisco Gomes de Andrade helped lay at Lagos proved significant less than a decade later when Britain took a fateful step toward its colonization, the slave trade from the port ended, and there was a new commerce in palm oil that would soon make the town the most prosperous and dynamic settlement on the West  
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[^0]:    7 On the number and origin of slaves imported into Bahia in the nineteenth century, see Eltis, 2004; Reis and Mamigonian, 2004; Ribeiro, 2008.  
African coast. From the 1850s, Lagos became a site of renewed immigration on the part of Brazilian freedwomen and children, as well as men (Da Cunha, 1985, pp. 479-91; Strickrodt, 2004; Parés, 2015; Castillo, 2016; Mann, 2007, ch. 3, 4).