By mid-1844, Francisco had manumitted himself, and travelled back and forth between Lagos and Salvador, in the company of known slave traders on at least one occasion. Identified as a trader in his passport application to leave Brazil in May of that year, he apparently subsequently made his home in Lagos, where, by 1846, he had fathered three children by two different mothers and begun to establish a family. By the early 1850s, Francisco was a leader of the growing community of Brazilian freed people in the town. Ironically, the experience he had gained, connections he had forged, and economic and social resources he had accumulated while living in Lagos as an enslaved Brazilian and working in the slave trade enabled him to play that role. His transatlantic travel, moreover, had allowed him to carry messages between his family members and others on opposite sides of the Atlantic.  
That Francisco had three of his children baptized in a collective celebration of that sacrament when the first Roman Catholic priest visited Lagos in the 1860s testifies to his identification as a Brazilian (Da Cunha, 1985, pp. 152-204; Strickrodt, 2004; Parés, 2015). The strong ties he and Luisa Ajatu, who herself returned to Lagos from Bahia in 1854, re-established and maintained with their Owu kin, Ayebomi and Ayiku, as well as other Owu country folk from whom they had been separated by enslavement roughly 30 years before, demonstrate their enduring bonds with their long-dispersed family and destroyed homeland.