The reader can hardly conceive how my mind was agitated and distressed on these different accounts.  To have travelled more than two months, to have seen many who could have materially served our cause, and to have lost most of them, was very trying.  And though it is true that I applied a remedy, I was not driven to the adoption of it till I had performed more than half my tour.  Suffice it to say, that after having travelled upwards of sixteen hundred miles backwards and forwards, and having conversed with forty-seven persons, who were capable of promoting the cause by their evidence, I could only prevail upon nine, by all the interest I could make, to be examined.

On my return to London, whither I had been called up by the committee to take upon me the superintendence of the evidence, which the privy council was now ready again to hear, I found my brother:  he was then a young officer in the navy; and as I knew he felt as warmly as I did in this great cause, I prevailed upon him to go to Havre de Grace, the great slave-port in France, where he might make his observations for two or three months, and then report what he had seen and heard; so that we might have some one to counteract any false statement of things which might be made relative to the subject in that quarter.

At length the examinations were resumed, and with them the contest, in which our own reputation and the fate of our cause were involved.  The committee for the abolition had discovered one or two willing evidences during my absence, and Mr. Wilberforce, who was now recovered from his severe indisposition, had found one or two others.  These added to my own made a respectable body:  but we had sent no more than four or five of these to the council when the King’s illness unfortunately stopped our career.  For nearly five weeks between the middle of November and January the examinations were interrupted or put off so that at the latter period we began to fear that there would be scarcely time to hear the rest; for not only the privy council report was to be printed, but the contest itself was to be decided by the evidence contained in it, in the existing session.

The examinations, however, went on, but they went on only slowly, being still subject to interruption from the same unfortunate cause.  Among others I offered my mite of information again.  I wished the council to see more of my African productions and manufactures, that they might really know what Africa was capable of affording instead of the Slave-trade, and that they might make a proper estimate of the genius and talents of the natives.  The samples which I had collected, had been obtained by great labour, and at no inconsiderable expense:  for whenever I had notice that a vessel had arrived immediately from that continent, I never hesitated to go, unless under the most pressing engagements elsewhere, even as far as Bristol, if I could pick up but a single new article.  The Lords having consented, I selected several things for their inspection out of my box, of the contents of which the following account may not be unacceptable to the reader.