Charles Rawden Maclean

[6] In a tribute to him during the re-dedication of his grave in Southampton in 2009, the Zulu War author and broadcaster Ian Knight said:Maclean was a champion of liberty and his stone will be one of the few inscriptions in a British cemetery which commemorates a positive interaction between the British and Zulu people; most existing memorials commemorate individuals who were involved in Anglo-Zulu conflict.

Stephen Gray[8] identifies three contemporary sources from which information pertaining to Maclean can be drawn – works by Nathaniel Isaacs,[9] Francis Fynn,[10] and McLean himself.

En route to Cape Town, the Mary called in at St Helena where Isaacs boarded as a "companion" to King.

[14] Leaving Cape Town on 26 August 1825 The Mary made several stops along the Southern African coast, anchoring off Port Natal on 1 October.

Isaacs wrote "... when John Ross Lieutenant King's apprentice, a lad of about fifteen years of age, acute, shrewd and active, was appointed to go the journey".

[5] In addition to Isaacs and Maclean, she also carried three Zulu ambassadors led by Chief Sothobe from Shaka who were instructed to make contact with King George.

On 22 September, Shaka was assassinated at Dukuza by his half-brother Dingane and on 1 December many of the white residents of Port Natal, including Farewell, Isaacs and Maclean, put to sea for their own safety.

In 1846 he was involved in an incident in Wilmington, North Carolina in which The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter hailed Maclean as a man of "firmness".

The incident arose when he docked at Willmington and refused to comply with the local slavery regulations and surrender his black crew members to the harbour authorities.

[23] It is ironic that the tenth article, in which he made a passing reference to the Wilmington incident, appeared as Isaacs was being investigated for assisting in the slave trade.

[25] In 1875, by now the sole survivor of the Port Natal white community on the 1820s (Isaacs having died in 1872), he wrote a celebrated letter to The Times in support of Langalibalele who had been sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island for insurrection.

Maclean died aboard ship on 13 March 1880 in the Solent and was buried in a pauper's grave in the Old Cemetery in Southampton.