In 1805, naval officer Captain Philip Beaver (1766-1813) published his African Memoranda: Relative to an Attempt to Establish a British Settlement on the Island of Bulama, on the Western Coast of Africa, in the Year 1792. Beaver-s text in this modern scholarly edition provides an absorbing testimony of his efforts to assist British colonisers in establishing their African settlement. Despite the colonial ambitions of this project, the -Bulama Committee- members were reformists at heart. Their high-minded intentions in purchasing the island and settling it were to demonstrate the anti-slavery principle that propagation by -free natives- would bring -cultivation and commerce- to the region and ultimately introduce -civilization- among them. Beaver-s journal tells the extraordinary account of how the colonists- ambitions to benefit the African economy and set a precedent of humanitarian labour for the slave-owning lobby in Britain led to the extraordinary emigration of 275 men
