Journal of a Residence Among the Negroes of the West Indies

British politician, poet, and novelist Lewis (1775-1818) inherited his family estate in Jamaica in 1812, and visited it in 1815 and 1817. On his second visit, he contracted yellow fever and died on the way back to England. The slave trade had been outlawed in Britain in 1807, but the existing slaves in the British West Indies would not be emancipated until 1833, the year before his journal was first published.