After the Spanish slave ship Guerrero, carrying 561 enslaved Africans to plantations in Cuba, struck a reef off Key Largo on December 19, 1827, 520 survivors were rescued. Smugglers sold 398 as slaves in Cuba, but about 120 reached Key West on another ship and were taken in February 1828 to St. Augustine, where they were held at Fort Marion. Eighty-nine Africans who could work were hired out to plantation owners, including 36 to Zephaniah Kingsley. In 1829, the U.S. Government gathered the remaining 100 at Fernandina, housed them at the site of Fort San Carlos, and sent them on Washington’s Barge to Liberia on September 30, 1829, ending a nearly two-year ordeal in a free settlement called New Georgia. Although slavery was legal in the United States and the importation of slaves had been prohibited since 1808, the shipwrecked Africans were treated as cargo rather than people, creating a political dilemma involving President John Quincy Adams, Congress, and the U.S. Government.