With this I received a letter from Mr Russel, which informed me that astronomers had begun to cool in the sanguine expectations of discovering the precise quantity of the sun’s parallax by observation of the transit of Venus, from some apprehension that errors of the observers would probably be more than the quantity of the equation sought, and that they now ardently wished for a journey into Abyssinia, rather than an attempt to settle a nicety for which the learned had now begun to think the accuracy of our instruments was not sufficient. A letter from my correspondent at Alexandria also acquainted me, that the quadrant, and all other instruments, were in that city.
What followed is the voyage itself, the subject of the present publication. I am happy, by communicating every previous circumstance that occurred to me, to have done all in my power to remove the greatest part of the reasonable doubts and difficulties which might have perplexed the reader’s mind, or biassed his judgment in the perusal of the narrative of the journey, and in this I hope I have succeeded.
I have now one remaining part of my promise to fulfil, to account for the delay in the publication. It will not be thought surprising to any that shall reflect on the distant, dreary, and desert ways by which all letters were necessarily to pass, or the civil wars then raging in Abyssinia, the robberies and violences inseparable from a total dissolution of government, such as happened in my time, that no accounts for many years, one excepted, ever arrived in Europe. One letter, accompanied by a bill for a sum borrowed from a Greek at Gondar, found its way to Cairo; all the rest had miscarried: my friends at home gave me up for dead; and, as my death must have happened in circumstances difficult to have been proved, my property became as it were an _hereditas jacens_, without an owner, abandoned in common to those whose original title extended no further than temporary possession.
A number of law-suits were the inevitable consequence of this upon my return. One carried on with a very expensive obstinacy for the space of ten years, by a very opulent and active company, was determined finally in the House of Peers, in the compass of a very few hours, by the well-known sagacity and penetration of a noble Lord, who, happily for the subjects of both countries, holds the first office in the law; and so judicious was the sentence, that harmony, mutual confidence, and good neighbourhood has ever since been the consequence of that determination.