Accounts of the fall of Whydah in 1727 have leaned on William Snelgrave, who reached the coast four weeks afterwards and put the defeat down to a people made soft and cowardly by trade. Law prints a four-page manuscript that unsettles this. It is a letter written at Whydah on 13 March 1727 by Ringard, captain of the Nantes ship Le Mars, forwarded by the mayor of Nantes to ministers in Paris, and now surviving only among the Radcliffe family papers in the Hertfordshire record office for reasons nobody can explain. Ringard was in the capital during the fighting and left two days before it fell. He describes a Whydah army said to number forty thousand taking the field on 5 and 6 March and being broken by a Dahomian force of about three thousand, half of them women and children. The full text is given with annotation and comparison.