The town of Lagos on the West African coast, located in what is today southwestern Nigeria, developed into a major port in the Atlantic slave trade only at the end of the eighteenth century, late in the history of the ignoble commerce. About 60 percent of the approximately 540,000 slaves shipped from the Bight of Benin between 1801 and 1867 were taken to northeastern Brazil. A succession of slave rebellions in Bahia, in northeastern Brazil, that culminated in the Malê uprising of 1835 led slaveholders and government officials there to fear freed blacks, whom they believed had conspired with slaves in the revolt. Despite the interpretive challenges with which British colonial court records present historians, they constitute one of the few sources for Lagos and other British settlements where stories told by persons of slave origin about their lives are documented in significant numbers.