A ship captain's journal often details mundane information about weather, coordinates and ship conditions. So when Dr. Jeff Pardue examined William Fitzwilliam Owen's diary, a British captain from the early 19th century, he was excited to discover a wealth of material about an island whose history had remained largely unexplored.

"My original focus was purely on the British attempts to suppress the slave trade along the coast of West Africa in the 1820s," said Pardue, professor and department head of history, anthropology and philosophy at the University of North Georgia (UNG). "But it soon became clear that this diary was one of the first written accounts of the land and peoples of Fernando Po."

Pardue used these accounts for his master's thesis years ago. Recently, he turned it into an article that was published in January 2020 by Itinerario, a journal of imperial and global interactions from Cambridge University Press.

Titled "Antislavery and Imperialism: The British Suppression of the Slave Trade and the Opening of Fernando Po, 1827–1829," it chronicles the construction of the first permanent foreign settlement on the island off the coast of Cameroon and today called Bioko. Owen led that effort and recounted the experience in his journal.

"Owen's account allowed me to see the connections between abolitionism and imperialism," Pardue said.

Once the paper published, it received a boost in recognition from Naviga NewsEdge, a real-time global news management and distribution solution for business professionals.

"It's exciting," Pardue said. "You always hope your research is useful and helpful for other scholars and the public at large."