The Amistad Incident of 1839 is an international story rooted in Connecticut that reflects a unique struggle for equality and human rights. It is one of the first human-rights cases in United States history to be argued in the American court system on behalf of Africans. In 1839, fifty-three Africans were illegally kidnapped from West Africa and sold into the transatlantic slave trade. Shackled aboard the Portuguese slave vessel, Tecora, the forty-nine men and four children (three girls and a boy) were brought to Havana, Cuba, where they were fraudulently classified as native, Cuban-born slaves. They were illegally purchased by Spaniards Jose Ruiz and Pedro Montez, who transferred the captives to the coastal cargo schooner, La Amistad, for transport to another part of the island. Three days into the journey, a twenty-five year old Mende rice farmer named Sengbe Pieh, or "Cinque" to his Spanish captors, led a revolt. After sixty-three days, La Amistad and her African "cargo" were seized as salvage by the United States Naval Revenue Cutter USS Washington, near Montauk Point in Long Island, New York, and towed to Connecticut’s New London harbor. The Africans were held in a jail in New Haven on charges of mutiny and murder. The case took on historic proportions when former President John Quincy Adams successfully argued before the United States Supreme Court on behalf of the captives. In 1841, the thirty-five surviving Africans were returned to Africa.