Captain J.E. Alexander in a book published in 1833 says that he was assured by a planter of forty years' standing that persons in New Orleans were connected with slave traders in Cuba, and that at certain seasons of the year they would go up the Mississippi River and meet slave ships off the coast. They would relieve these of their cargoes, return to the main stream of the river, drop down in flat boats and dispose of the negroes to those who wished them.[51] Thomas Powell Buxton makes the statement, upon what he claims to be high authority, that fifteen thousand negroes were imported into Texas from Africa in one year, about 1838.[52] The "Liberator" quoting the "Maryland Colonization Herald," says a writer in that paper was assured, in 1838, by Pedro Blanco, one of the largest slave traders on the coast of Africa, that for the preceding forty years the United States had been his best market through the west end of Cuba and Texas.[53] "Between 1847 and 1853," says Du Bois, "the slave smuggler Drake had a slave depot in the Gulf, where sometimes as many as sixteen hundred negroes were on hand, and the owners were continually importing and shipping." Drake himself says: "Our island was visited almost weekly by agents from Cuba, New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston and New Orleans, ... the seasoned and instructed slaves were taken to Texas or Florida, overland, and to Cuba, in sailing boats. As no squad contained more than half a dozen, no difficulty was found in posting them to the United States, without discovery, and generally without suspicion.... The Bay Island plantation sent ventures weekly to the Florida Keys. Slaves were taken into the great American swamps, and there kept till wanted for market. Hundreds were sold as runaways from the Florida wilderness. We had agents in every slave State, and our coasters were built in Maine and came out with lumber. I could tell curious stories ... of this business of smuggling Bozal negroes into the United States. It is growing more profitable every year, and if you should hang all the Yankee merchants engaged in it, hundreds would fill their places."[54] Owing to the increasing demand, and to the high price of slaves from 1845 to 1860, and to the fact that the Southern people were becoming more and more favorable to the reopening of the African slave trade, thus making it easier to practice smuggling successfully, we have no reason to doubt the truth of these accounts of this illicit traffic.