A voyage to Africa: including a narrative of an embassy to one of the interior kingdoms in the year 1820. With remarks on the course and termination of the Niger, and other principal rivers in that country

William Hutton was formerly the British acting consul to Ashanti, a powerful West African state in the region of present-day Ghana, and an officer serving in the British African Company of Merchants. He made four voyages to the Gold Coast between 1816 and 1820.

Hutton was employed as a writer with the British African Company of Merchants. In 1819, Hutton travelled with Joseph Dupuis, British Consul at Kumasi, to the Cape Coast. It is an account of these events that led Hutton to write A Voyage to Africa.

In January 1820, Hutton was part of a British party that received Adum, the nephew of the King of Ashanti, at Cape Coast.

One of the aquatint illustrations depicts Adoo Quamina, a captain and courtier to the Ashanti king. He described the warrior as appearing "in his war-dress, with his body covered with fetishes, in gold and silver cases, and small brass bells, shells, and knives. His cap had gilded ram's horns, projecting in front, with eagle's feathers; and he wore cotton trousers, with large boots of red leather. This dress alone cost the king eleven slaves. The loss of one of his eyes in the late wars with the Buntakoos, gave him all the appearance of an old warrior. The horse he rode was a very good one, something of an Arabian breed."

References:

Claridge, W. Walton (1915). A History of the Gold Coast and Ashanti, Vol. 1. London: John Murray. p. 303.

Gray, J.M. (1940). History of the Gambia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 341–342.