Captain Elijah Cobb stayed at home on the farm until the end of the war. Then he resumed his voyages to Europe, uneventfully, and engaged in the African trade in 1818, commanding the ship _Ten Brothers_. There was no worse pest hole on earth than the West Coast and its slave ports, no area so indelibly stained with man’s inhumanity to man. A land of treacherous surf and steaming jungle, of tawny beaches and sluggish rivers, the infamies of centuries cursed the names of Goree and Gambia, the Bight of Benin and the Bight of Biafra, Calabar, Anamaboe, and the Congo. In 1819 the slave trade had been outlawed by England and the United States, but many thousands of the poor wretches were annually smuggled into the West Indies and the southern ports of this country. The barracoons and factories were flourishing when Captain Cobb sailed on his lawful trading voyages to Prince’s Island in the Gulf of Guinea. Like many another American shipmaster he risked the deadly fever in order to sell his goods to the natives and carry home palm oil, ivory, coffee, and gold dust. The most lucrative traffic was in New England rum, muskets, and gunpowder, but Captain Cobb makes no mention of these as in his invoice, and it is fair to give him the benefit of the doubt. Not that it would have discredited him in the reputable circles of Boston or Brewster. A man could be a deacon and still peddle Medford rum to the benighted Africans. Captain Cobb stocked his ship with the customary trade goods, gaudy cotton prints, tobacco, beads and brass pots, bandana hankerchiefs, flour and meal, salt beef, pork, and fish, candles, tinware, and crockery. His letters are pretty doleful reading. Several other American vessels were with him at Prince’s Island, their captains ill or dead of fever, his own ship rotten with it. What they called fumigation was crude and ineffectual. They suffered grimly. It was all in the day’s work, and they could only commit themselves “to a mercifull just God who always acts for the good of his Creaturs, & happy would it be for us; if we could always bow with humble submission to His righteous dispensations.” Even this consolation was not enough to make Captain Cobb endure more than two voyages to the Guinea Coast. His ship had to be scuttled at a Boston wharf, so foul she was with deadly fever, and there was fear that the contagion might spread ashore. This was the end of his seafaring career of nearly forty years. To a ripe old age he dwelt in Brewster, a distinguished citizen and active farmer, “tall & straight of fine figure his face very pleasant to look upon.” The imperious traits of the quarter-deck were carried into his religious activities. As a Universalist he played a lone hand for some years, and “met with violent opposition to his views, yet waxing only the more valiant in the fight, he came off conquerer.”