Captured by slavers as a boy, freed by the Royal Navy, and raised at a mission, Samuel Crowther in 1864 became the first African to be ordained as an Anglican bishop. As a priest, he accompanied the Scottish merchant MacGregor Laird on his expedition to West Africa in 1854, and celebrated Sunday services in a variety of bizarre locations and perilous conditions. This 1855 book is Crowther's detailed record of his journey aboard the steamboat Pleiad. Written from the unusual perspective of an African-born, London-educated clergyman, it is a congenial and evocative account of the day-to-day difficulties confronting the explorers, their interactions with native peoples, and encounters with slavery and civil war. Crowther, a keen linguist, went on to publish several books on African languages including Nupe, Igbo and Yoruba. This book includes a substantial appendix comparing the grammar and vocabularies of the languages he encountered.

This 1859 publication contains the journals kept by Samuel Crowther (who in 1864 became the first African bishop of the Anglican church) and John Christopher Taylor during their respective missions to the banks of the Niger in 1857 and 1858. Crowther, a rescued slave educated at the Anglican mission in Sierra Leone, and Taylor, another Sierra Leonean, travelled on a trade expedition endorsed by the British government. Taylor disembarked at Onitsha and founded the first mission among the Ibo people, while Crowther landed further up the river, at Rabba. Revealing great Christian zeal and enthusiasm, both journals offer compelling insights into the daily life of a missionary in Africa and also serve as a valuable source of local history. The book includes the account of a canoe expedition undertaken by Crowther, along with a table of expenses for the trip, and a fascinating collection of Ibo proverbs compiled by Taylor.