Suffice it to say, that after having travelled upwards of sixteen hundred miles backwards and forwards, and having conversed with forty-seven persons, who were capable of promoting the cause by their evidence, I could only prevail upon nine, by all the interest I could make, to be examined.
On my return to London, whither I had been called up by the committee, to take upon me the superintendence of the evidence, which the privy council was now ready again to hear, I found my brother: he was then a young officer in the navy; and as I knew he felt as warmly as I did in this great cause, I prevailed upon him to go to Havre de Grace, the great slave-port in France, where he might make his observations for two or three months, and then report what he had seen and heard; so that we might have some one to counteract any false statement of things, which might be made relative to the subject in that quarter.
At length the examinations were resumed, and with them the contest, in which our own reputation and the fate of our cause were involved.

The committee for the abolition had discovered, one or two willing evidences during my absence; and Mr.Wilberforce, who was now recovered from his severe indisposition, had found one or two others.

These, added to my own, made a respectable body; but we had sent no more than four or five of these to the council, when the king's illness unfortunately stopped our career.

For nearly five weeks between the middle of November and January, the examinations were interrupted or put off, so that at the latter period we began to fear, that there would be scarcely time to hear the rest; for not only the privy council report was to be printed, but the contest itself was to be decided by the evidence contained in it, in the existing session.
The examinations, however, went on; but they went on only slowly, being still subject to interruption from the same unfortunate cause.

Among others I offered my mite of information again.