Candler, an English Friend, travelled through Haiti at the beginning of 1841 and set his observations down for an abolitionist readership at home. He notes the long river that floats mahogany to the sea, the lakes and mineral springs, the ore left in the ground for want of capital, and the closed custom-house at Cap Haitien on the anniversary of independence.

There are no inns of the European sort, so travellers lodge as guests; he stays with a widow running a shop on the waterfront, and later takes rooms in the capital where merchants, planters and priests come to table. He calls on the country's principal ecclesiastic, who describes the church's revenues as thin.

Riding inland he finds pasture and provision grounds where cane once grew, and villages still ruined by bombardment. Passing the bay where Leclerc's and Rochambeau's men drowned their prisoners, he asks who has the better claim to charge the other with cruelty.