209 years ago today, Britain ARMED an African king. 🇬🇧 Muskets. Gunpowder. Ten thousand gun flints. Four hundred red coats. 💂 British sergeants to train his army. A salary in gold and silver, every year. 💰 Britain wanted him to win. 👑 Valley after valley. Chief after chief. Until two-thirds of Madagascar was under his rule. 🗺️ On purpose. 👀 Why? 🤔 Because on that island, chiefs raided villages and sold the people. To French slave ships. To Arab dhows. To other African kingdoms. ⛓️ Then they bought guns with the money. To raid more villages. 🔥 Guns for people. People for guns. 🔁 Britain had banned its own slave trade in 1807. But it couldn’t guard every beach on an island nearly a thousand miles long. 🌊 So a sergeant from Cork travelled 28 days, by canoe and on foot, to reach the king. 🛶 For two months they bargained. Then he made an offer nobody had authorised. 🤝 Every gun the slave trade gave the king, Britain would give him free. If he stopped selling people. ✋ On 23 October 1817, the king signed. Selling his people abroad would be punished by death. ✍️ Then Britain helped him take the island. Port after port, every one closed to the slave ships. ⚓ They teach you Britain profited from slavery. 📚 They never teach you how we got them to stop selling their own people. 🤫 Britain armed an African king. On purpose. 🇬🇧 Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧 Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧

They teach you the world got connected in the 1990s. 
Not that a British ship did it in 1866. 🇬🇧 Watch the full story. 🎥 When Abraham Lincoln was shot, London didn’t find out for twelve days. ⏳ An American called Cyrus Field dreamed of a wire under the ocean. 
But nobody in America could make it. Only Britain could. 🇬🇧🏭 Two warships tried to lay it. HMS Agamemnon and USS Niagara. 🚢 
It snapped. It broke. Again and again. 💔 In August 1858 it finally held. America went wild. 🎆 
Three weeks later the cable was dead. For seven years the ocean stayed silent.
Then Britain took it on. 🇬🇧 A new cable from Greenwich. 
The only ship on earth big enough to carry it: Brunel’s giant, the Great Eastern. ⚓ In 1865, twelve hundred miles out, the cable snapped. 
It sank more than two miles down. 🌊 Most people would have given up… 
They made another cable instead. 💪 July 1866. Heart’s Content, Newfoundland. 
Britain and America were joined. News that took twelve days now took minutes. ⚡ But the job wasn’t finished. 
They went back for the cable they’d lost. Two and a half miles down. Nearly thirty attempts. 🪝 Then the spot of light moved. 
The cable was alive. ✨ The wharf is still there in Greenwich. The house on it is a pub now. 
You can drink a pint where the world was wired. 🍺 We come from people who go back for it. 🇬🇧 Help us bring Britain back up from the dark: proudofus.co.uk Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧
Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧