ABSTRACT
AFTER Captain Owen's return home the East Coast of Africa relapsed into its former obscurity. Only a few officials had watched his meteoric incursion into the politics of the Indian Ocean, and they strongly disapproved of it. The British public knew nothing about the situation in that part of the world until the revelations of Livingstone and other explorers half a century later roused once more something of the old abolitionist enthusiasm. For the first part of the century the eyes of all those interested in the suppression of the trade were fixed on West Africa and the West Indies. East Africa never formed the subject of Parliamentary debates and Select Committees, and so few were the ships that visited it that there was little information about the conditions which prevailed on that coast.
