Formerly governor of Senegal, the French naval captain Édouard Bouët-Willaumez led the anti-slavery patrol on the coast of Africa in the 1840s, and founded the French settlement for freed slaves, Libreville. In this book, he is suspicious of British motives in abolishing the slave trade, and critical of Britain's interference in the French policing of the slave trade in the nineteenth century, but he is firmly opposed to slavery and the slave trade. He describes the trade as an "odious scourge" which had "degraded Europe" and "desolated unhappy Africa" (185). The book describes the remaining slaving forts or "barracoons" along the African coast. It contrasts this continuing trade with the "civilising influence" of other forms of trade, and gives a detailed account of improving trading possibilities on the African coast, in areas such as rubber, indigo, palm oil, and dyeing woods.