had read extensively on Africa and spoken with people in European Geographical Societies. However, at the time most of the published accounts, especially on the eastern Bight of Benin from Lagos to the Benin Rivers, focussed on the coastal district with very little information on the interior. Thus, when he met Osifekunde, he must have been pleased to see someone knowledgeable about the coastline and the hinterland but also Yorubaland, which until then had been poorly documented. But D'Avezac was also an ethnographer and orientalist who needed more data than the average geographer. He was interested in Africans and their culture. D'Avezac might have other curiosities as well-about his own family history. He was the great grandson of Pierre Valentin Davezac de Castera, a French bureaucrat turned successful plantation owner in Saint-Domingue in the late eighteenth century. Even more interesting is the fact that his wife, Marie Terese Genevieve Durand, whom he met on the island, was also the daughter of a rich mixed family of planters. ${ }^{37}$ Several members of these families fled the Caribbean in the wake of the Saint-Dominque revolution.