The Authoress will not imitate a threadbare prevailing custom, viz. assure the Public, the following letters were written without any design or intention of sending them into the world; on the contrary, she candidly confesses having some idea of the kind when writing them, though her mind was not fully made up on the business until towards the beginning of April – nay, for some time before then (from a consciousness of the inability of her pen) she had actually relinquished all thoughts of publishing them, which determination she would certainly have adhered to, if her will had not been overruled by the importunities of her friends.

In her first Voyage, she has given her reasons for going to Africa, described the incidents and occurrences she met with and (from ocular observations) the manners, customs, &c. of the people inhabiting those places she visited – she has also made an humble attempt to delineate their situations and qualities, with a superficial History, of the Peninsula of Sierra Leone and its environs, which she certainly would have enlarged upon during her second Voyage, had not Lieutenant Matthews, previous to her returning to England in 1791, taken a start of her, by publishing his voyage to that Country – that being the case, it would not only have been superfluous, but discovering more vanity than she could wish the World to suppose her possessed of, had she offered to tread in a path already travelled over by such an ingenious and masterly pen, to which she begs to refer the inquisitive reader.

This consideration, and this alone, induced the Authoress to confine the letters of her last Voyage principally to the transactions and progress of a Colony, whose success or downfall she is persuaded the Inhabitants, at least the thinking part, of almost every civilized Country, must feel more or less interested about, and she is sorely afflicted to warn the reader, of an uncompromising account which could not be otherwise, unless she had done violence to veracity.