Most were so-called 'apprentices' sent from the Caribbean colonies and Mauritius, but there were six military offenders from British army regiments who were court-martialled for desertion or mutiny in the Caribbean between 1833 and 1838. ${ }^{18}$ There was nothing in their commonplace names to distinguish them from the great mass of English and Irish convicts arriving in the penal colonies sentenced by military courts, except that these men gave their native place as Africa. Moreover, they had distinct ritual scar patterns that indicated they had reached adolescence in Africa. Although it is not possible to say exactly where they were from, strong variations in their scar patterns suggest they came from various African locations. Given that the British slave trade had stopped in 1808, it was unlikely these men had come to the Caribbean as enslaved workers. In fact, they were 'liberated slaves', taken from impounded slave ships at Sierra Leone and then impressed into British military regiments. Between 1808 and 1825, 2,738 liberated Africans entered the services and most went into the West Indian regiments, with quite dramatic rises in 1827 and 1828 and further sharp rises in the mid-1830s. ${ }^{19}$ As Roger Buckley has shown, the African soldier became indispensable in the defence of the British Caribbean slave plantations (Buckley, 1979, pp. 136-138).