Bulfinch Lambe worked for the Royal African Company at its factory in Jakin, the port of Allada, until the king of Allada seized him in 1722 as security against an unpaid debt. When Agaja of Dahomey conquered Allada in 1724, Lambe passed into his hands and was carried inland to Abomey.

Agaja soon formed the idea, perhaps at Lambe's prompting, of negotiating a commercial agreement with the Company. Writing that November to Jeremiah Tinker, who governed the Company's factory in neighboring Whydah, Lambe reported the king's interest in establishing a correspondence and in having Europeans come to him, and offered himself as intermediary, which doubled as a route out of captivity. His release in 1726 came with the expectation that he would come back: Agaja told the trader William Snelgrave the following year that Lambe had sworn to return with a ship.

Law builds on Marion Johnson's earlier account of the episode in this journal.

Dahomey's conquest of Whydah under King Agaja in March 1727 was unquestionably a major event. Dahomian tradition remembered it, with some simplification, as the moment the kingdom entered the Atlantic slave trade and as the high point of his reign, recalled in his surname Hunyito, taker of ships, and in the ship he took as an emblem.

Europeans on the scene were struck by it too, one eyewitness calling it a great revolution. Part of the impression came from the scale of destruction, described at the time as desolation by sword, fire, and famine visited on a country that had lately been populous and prosperous. The outcome had also been unforeseen: Bulfinch Lamb, an English trader held captive in Dahomey, had warned Agaja against attacking, arguing that Whydah's numbers and its imported European firearms made success unlikely.

Law introduces a neglected French account of the war, the Relation de la guerre de Juda by the Sieur Ringard of Nantes.