Career
He was commissioned by King William IV of the United Kingdom to suppress the slave trade by force off the West Coast of Africa. Melville was an ethnic Scot from Dublin where his family had lived since the middle of the Eighteenth century. In September 1818 both of Melville"s parents died within a few days of each other.
His loss aroused the pity of King George IV who, in November of that year, granted the boy an annual pension from the Civil List.
At some stage in the 1820s Meville joined the Foreign Office. By 1827 he was serving as a Justice of the Peace and in 1835 Hansard lists Melville as King"s Advocate and Registrar of the Vice Admiralty Court in Freetown, Sierra Leone.
He interposed his tours of duty in Africa with study at Lincoln"s Inn being called to the bar in 1843. In February 1841 Melville was made a Judge.
The following year the Earl of Aberdeen, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, appointed Melville to sit on the Mixed British and Foreign Courts of Commission for the Suppression of the Slave Trade.
The book is one of the only surviving accounts of life in mid-Nineteenth Century Africa written from the perspective of a woman and contains descriptions of life and society in early Victorian Freetown and the countryside nearby as well as her husband"s work seizing slave ships, prosecuting their crews, and overseeing the breaking up of the vessels at a place called "Destruction Bay". After his service in Sierra Leone, Melville returned to Britain. In 1862 he became a Director of the London and North Western Railway.