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Autograph Letter Signed. 2pp. + stampless address leaf. To shipping magnate E. D. Kimball, Salem, Mass.

Nathaniel Isaacs, a British Jew, lived an adventurous life in pre-colonial Africa, recounted in his classic 1836 account of the Zulu people before British colonization of Natal.  Six years before he wrote this letter to Kimball - his "only correspondent" in America - Isaacs, who had a thriving business on the island he had bought off the coast of present-day Guinea, was accused of illegal slave-trading by the British Governor of Sierra Leone.  He reportedly fled to avoid impending arrest, but his British accuser, while sailing back to England, lost written proof of Isaac’s alleged crimes in a shipwreck. Without that evidence, the British courts had refused to proceed with the prosecution, leaving Isaacs free to return to his island home, where he remained until his death in 1872.

Isaacs wrote to Kimball after the Massachusetts shipping magnate's Bark Orlando arrived at Sierra Leone; Isaacs had tried to sell its Captain Stevens “a few thousand hides”, but they could not agree on the price, Stevens offering no more than what he paid “petty traders”. As for imports, Isaacs was certain that “the unsettled state of your Country” – Civil War loomed – would limit American exports to Africa, but ships from Europe would surely make up the difference. Isaacs had turned to Kimball because “yours is the best market for our hides”. If the price was right, he could also supply Kimball with “indigenous” India Rubber,. Isaacs was then loading a ship, but had not yet decided on its destination. He had as yet had “no engagements” with Europe and hoped to make “the most money” by a profitable new trade with politically- “unsettled” America.