This book narrates the life and times of an ingenious and charismatic Yorkshireman by the name of Henry Smeathman (1742–1786), a self-taught naturalist who set out for Sierra Leone on the Upper Guinea coast towards the end of 1771. Basing himself for four years on the picturesque Banana Islands off the south-west tip of the Sierra Leone peninsula, Smeathman was funded by a small but wealthy group of London-based collectors keen to enrich their cabinets with exotic naturalia. The chief movers of the scheme were the silversmith Dru Drury, owner of one of the finest entomological collections in Europe, the eminent Quaker physician John Fothergill, and the celebrated Joseph Banks, recently returned from the first Cook voyage. Other prominent patrons of the expedition were the physician William Pitcairn and the ornithologist Marmaduke Tunstall. Once Smeathman had settled on the Bananas (as the island group was usually called), he collected far and wide along the continent's coasts and estuaries. The credibility of his venture was such that, eighteen months into his expedition, others were persuaded to join in: the Duchess of Portland, wealthiest woman in Britain, and another Quaker physician, John Coakley Lettsom. As we will see, the Quakers played a key role in shaping Smeathman's life and thought.

Smeathman's arrival on the Upper Guinea coast coincided with a marked acceleration in the volume of British slave trading from this area, a trade carried out in ships principally sailing from Liverpool. The increased traffic would make his life easier, in terms of the number of ships available for transporting specimens back home, but as a newcomer to the coast, interested in natural history rather than slaves, he was bound to look odd. Perhaps he sounded odd too, the Quaker Fothergill having impressed upon him a set of antislavery beliefs before these were widely held in Britain. Believing that sugar cane was ‘indigenous’ to Africa where it thrived ‘luxuriantly’, Fothergill argued that, instead of enslaving Africans to labour ‘by the dread of torture’ in the West Indies, they should be ‘employed as servants for hire’ in their own country. Thus, a free plantation system in Africa would undermine the slave economy of the West Indies. This was a long-standing position for Quakers and other antislavery agitators, and no doubt Smeathman's expedition to West Africa was in part designed to shed light on the feasibility of this scheme.