Further Light on Bulfinch Lambe and the “Emperor of Pawpaw:” King Agaja of Dahomey's Letter to King George I of England, 1726

The story of Bulfinch Lambe (or Lamb) and his mission to London on behalf of the king of Dahomey (or “Emperor of Pawpaw”) has been told by Marion Johnson in an earlier article in this journal. Lambe was an employee of the Royal African Company in its factory at Jakin, the port of the kingdom of Allada, who was seized and detained by the king of Allada, as security for an unpaid debt, in 1722. He was still held prisoner in Allada when it was conquered by Agaja of Dahomey in 1724, and thus became a prisoner of the latter, who carried him off to his own capital at Abomey, further inland. Agaja soon conceived, perhaps at Lambe's suggestion, the idea of negotiating some sort of commercial agreement with the Royal African Company. A letter which Lambe wrote from Abomey to Jeremiah Tinker, Governor of the Company's factory in the neighboring kingdom of Whydah, in November 1724 reported that Agaja “talks much of settling a Correspondence with the Company, and of having White Men come here.” Lambe evidently offered himself as an intermediary, as a means of securing his release from captivity, and expressed the hope that he might persuade Agaja to acquiesce in his proposals “about my going and returning again with more White Men from the Company.” When Lambe was eventually released in 1726, this was on the understanding that he would return: Agaja himself told the English trader William Snelgrave in the following year that Lambe “had taken an Oath, and promised on his Faith, to return again in a reasonable Time with a Ship.”