Descourtilz stepped ashore at Port-au-Prince in April 1799 and began, characteristically, by admiring the butterflies. This second volume follows him overland and by coastal sloop through Saint-Domingue, past Arcahaie, Saint-Marc, Gonaives, the Artibonite and Gros-Morne, cataloguing plants, birds, mahogany stands and fruit trees left, he supposes, by providence beside the roads for tired travellers.

Natural history is only half the book. He is an equally busy observer of colonial society: the manners and jealousies of creole women, colonists who compared Le Cap to Paris when its streets were narrow and its buildings graceless, hosts reduced by war to boiled fodder and a chipped saucer of coffee passed around, and Artibonite estates stripped of their splendour by what he calls the revolutionary thunderbolt.

He also turns back to Columbus and the conquest, and says plainly that what Europe carried to these islands was desolation, slavery and death.