Travel journal of a British naval lieutenant posted to the Indian Ocean on anti-slaving duty. Barnard describes his journey, calling at Mauritius and Madagascar, and sailing along the East African coast several times from the Cape to Mozambique and Zanzibar. He describes these Portuguese colonial ventures in East Africa, founded on speculation and huge profits from the slave trade, and marked by corruption: "bribery, peculation and disease, go hand in hand with slavery and grasping avarice" (196) Barnard's cruiser is mainly engaged in trying to catch slave ships bound for the Americas, but he also notes sightings of dhows trading in the Indian Ocean. He is pessimistic about the ultimate success of the anti-slavery patrols, contrasting his own experience with the "impossible theories of orators who have never been out of England" (277).