A Voyage to the River Sierra Leone, Containing an account of the trade and productions of the country and of the civil and religious customs and manners of the people . . . with an Additional Letter on the African Slave Trade (London, B. White and Son, 1788)

Abstract

John Matthews's account was published in 1788 (printed for B. White and Son and J. Sewell, London). It has been reprinted in modern times (London, Frank Cass, 1966), and excerpts from it were included in an anthology of source material for the history of Sierra Leone, Sierra Leone Inheritance, edited by Christopher Fyfe (London, Oxford University Press, 1964). Matthews was a naval officer who, during a period of unemployment following the end of the American Revolutionary War, went out to West Africa in the employment of a British firm engaged in the slave trade, to re-establish its factory at the River Sierra Leone in 1785. He remained in residence as manager of this factory until 1787. Although entitled a Voyage it is rather, as the sub-title makes clear, a general account of the country based upon Matthews's experience over the whole period of his residence. The text is cast in the form of a series of letters to a correspondent in England, but this is probably a literary fiction. The 'Additional Letter', presented as written in 1788, after his return to England, is an explicit defence of the slave trade; but in fact Matthews's anti-abolitionist sentiments are also clear in the main part of the text describing Sierra Leone. Matthews also testified in defence of the slave trade to the Inquiry of the Privy Council into the Slave Trade in 1788. Despite this bias, his account, being based on extensive first-hand experience, is unusually informative on the African societies from which slaves were purchased, and has been extensively drawn upon by modern historians of this region, notably Walter Rodney, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast 1545-1800 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1970).