Candler, an English Quaker, coasted Haiti in 1839 on a missionary voyage to Jamaica and later travelled through the country. What struck him first was emptiness: mountains and shoreline running for hundreds of miles with no house, no field and no one in sight, a prospect he found grand and depressing at once.

Inland he found something else. He rides through villages, is fed by strangers, notes cane land gone back to pasture, and describes the coffee trade, the schools, the priests, the gaols and the army. Where Europeans charged Dessalines and Christophe with barbarity, he answers with Leclerc and Rochambeau drowning ironed prisoners in the bay off Cap Haïtien, and asks who was crueller.

His verdict is sympathetic but unsparing. Serious crime is rare and travellers safe; what holds the republic back, he argues, is ignorance, a clergy content to keep it so, and a military system that breeds petty vice.