ABSTRACT
Among the great difficulties which officers meet with in the execution of this duty at first, is the want of personal experience and the absence of any document or record of the experience of others who have preceded them; and it is partly to meet this want, so much dwelt on in the evidence given before a Select Committee of the House of Commons, that I have been induced thus to record my own experience; in doing which I have, in the first place, confined myself as much as possible to a simple narrative of facts, subsequently dwelling more fully on the slave-trade as it now exists on that coast, and especially on that part of it claimed by the
Portuguese. A vast branch of this nefarious trade (that in so-called "free negroes")—which has been almost lost sight of through the apparently sincere profession of the Portuguese Government to abolish it, and through the absence of any European Consul to watch it-is still going on, though in a far more subtle way, to as great an extent as ever, and with greater cruelties than any practised by the Arabs.
