ABSTRACT
The attention of British merchants has long been turned to Central Africa as an untrodden, and therefore profitable field for commercial enterprise. The information obtained directly from English travellers, and indirectly from captured slaves, describing that country as one on which Nature had profusely bestowed her choicest treasures, with the fact that that immense territory, comprising one eighth part of the surface of the globe, had been for ages excluded from all direct communication with the civilised world, seemed to hold out the most flattering prospects of success to those fortunate individuals who should be the first to break into its secluded vales. The increase in the consumption of palm-oil in this country, the gradual decline in the supply of ivory, added to the inconvenience arising from the caprice and extortion of the petty chiefs at the mouths of the principal rivers of the African coast, stimulated the merchant to the discovery of new and unrestricted markets ; while the knowledge that with the imperfect means of transit possessed by the natives, they already exported produce to the value of one million sterling annually to this country, presented to his mind the ready inference that a more direct intercourse between the producer and the consumer would tend to the benefit of both.
