Summary: In April 1812, Samuel Samo, a trader who operated factories at Bangara in the Rio Pongo and at the Iles de Los, was on trial at Freetown, Sierra Leone, charged with selling slaves in violation of the Slave Trade Felony Act that Parliament had passed in 1811. By English standards, the record of this trial is minimal at best. Yet, in its time it was an important trial, and by 1815 it had generated a series of pamphlets and articles in periodicals, most of which dealt with aspects that had little to do with Samo’s guilt or innocence. An anonymous author wrote and published a book about it in 1813. Mixed among the legal arguments and reasons to question the leadership of the Sierra Leone colony and events surrounding the trial was information about circumstances faced by traders when the legal slave trade ended in 1808.