Extensively researched and compassionate, vividly humanizing, THE PRICE THEY PAID is the nonfiction narrative of a basically untold era of the early 19th century, an era in which International Society and Government (specifically British) began to turn against the Slave Trade, but during which the American domestic Slave Trade continued apace. Because the overland trip from the Upper Mid-Atlantic region (Virginia and Maryland, primarily) was exceedingly fraught with hardships, for the most part Slavery brokers arranged to ship enslaved persons along the East Coast and around Florida into the Gulf of Mexico, heading to the huge slave markets at New Orleans. Author Jeff Forret relates four instances in particular between 1830 and 1841 in which lack of proper navigation plus inclement weather propelled four different slave-transport ships into wrecks in the Caribbean, where governmental entities on the islands refused to let the enslaved be again transported back to the U. S., so that these individuals were finally allowed freedom to an extent. Mr. Forret recounts the strident insistence of American slaveowners and brokers, and the insurance companies covering the enslaved "property," in demanding reparations payments from the British government (which controlled the Caribbean islands).