In 1811, Thomas Baber, magistrate for North Malabar, uncovered an ‘inhuman traffic’ in slaves between the princely state of Travancore and the EIC territories in Malabar. This trade, he reported, involved the kidnapping of ‘free-born children … of the superior castes’, who were ‘stolen from their relations in the night-time, cloths thrust in their mouths, and in this state carried to Aleppi’. From ‘Aleppi’ (Alappuzha), ‘Moplah’ (mapilla—a Kerala Muslim community) merchants took the children by boat to Mahe, before selling them on. The most shocking feature of the incident, however, was that nine children were discovered in the house of Wallapagata Assen Ally, the confidential servant of Mr Murdoch Brown, British owner of the Randaterra plantation at Anjarakandy. On questioning the children, a high-caste boy named Coon Yangaree told Baber that his brother Nestha and three other kidnapped children had already been sent to Anjarakandy. As ‘not even bondsmen, much less free-born children, could under the existing laws of Travancore be legally sold and sent out of that country’, and as the British proprietor of Randaterra was also subject to metropolitan laws against slave-trading, Baber determined to recover the four children, together with any others who might be found ‘under similar unhappy circumstances’. With that in mind, he sent several Indian officials to Randaterra to investigate the nature of the plantation's workforce, and asked Brown to provide a list of any recently purchased slaves, together with the names of the people from whom he had acquired them.