Wife of Michael Melville, the Registrar of the Mixed Court, Helen Melville was one of a handful of European women settled, with her children, on the fever-ridden West African coast in the 1840s. British interest in West Africa declined between the Napoleonic Wars and the mid nineteenth century and the government came very close to withdrawing completely from the region. Melville's account, edited by her cousin, opens with an impassioned plea for the future of the West African Squadron, which operated from Freetown with the express purpose of suppressing the slave trade. Unsurprisingly Melville is greatly concerned with climate and disease, but her descriptions of landscape and people are heavily suffused with philanthropic and abolitionist sentiments typical of her age, and if anything are rather rosy.