Beginning with an uncomfortable voyage toward Jamaica, Trollope travels through Kingston and the countryside and examines how Black, coloured, and white communities live within the social order that followed emancipation, while also considering the decline of the sugar economy and the workings of colonial government through observations that reveal both contemporary British assumptions and his own prejudices, and as he continues through Cuba and the Windward Islands to British Guiana he compares different systems of labour, race, economy, and colonial administration, presenting the West Indies as a region where striking natural beauty exists alongside deep social and political tensions.