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Michael Linning Melville, born 1805 in Ireland died 22 June 1878 in Kensington, Middlesex, was a Scots Barrister, Judge and Lieutenant Governor of Sierra Leone. He was commissioned by King William IV of the United Kingdom to suppress the slave trade by force off the West Coast of Africa. ==Background and career== Melville was an ethnic Scotsman from Dublin where his family had lived since the middle of the Eighteenth century. He was named after his godfather, the writer Michael Linning, and went on to marry the latter's niece Elizabeth Helen Callender. In September 1818 both of Melville's parents died within a few days of each other. The boy's loss aroused the pity of King George IV who, in November of that year, granted the thirteen year-old an annual pension from the Civil List. 〔On Financial Reform, Third Edition, by Henry Brooke Parnell, Baron Congleton, published by John Murray, Albemarle Street, London 1832 () page 388 〕 〔Journals of the House of Commons, Volume 81 Volume 86, Appendix (E.), Civil List, 2 Decembria continued, Journal, p 143, published The Stationery Office, London 1830 ()〕 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. 〔The Royal Kalendar, and Court and City Register for England, Scotland, Ireland, and the Colonies, T. C. Hansard, Paternoster-row Press, London 1834 () page 406〕 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 Gentleman's Magazine, and Historical Chronicle, Volume 50, Sylvanus Urban, "Gazette Promotions" () 1841, p. 422〕 The following year the Earl of Aberdeen, at that time 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.〔Letter from Lord Howard de Walden dated 14 October 1842, quoted in General Report of the Emigration Commissioners, Volume 2, (), p225〕 His service in West Africa was to form the basis for his wife Elizabeth's 1849 memoir A Residence in Sierra Leone Described from a Journal Kept on the Spot and from Letters Written to Friends at Home Edited by Mrs. Norton, which was edited by her first cousin Caroline Norton. 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". 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Michael Linning Melville」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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