she also carried three Zulu ambassadors led by Chief Sothobe from Shaka who were instructed to make contact with King George. After the vessel made land at Port Elizabeth, the ambassadors were poorly treated and returned with King, Maclean and Isaacs, reaching Port Natal on 17 August. King, who had contracted dysentery died in Port Natal on 7 September. 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. St Lucia In 1830 Maclean went back to sea and was only to return to Port Natal when a ship on which he was serving put into port, but most of his work was in the sugar trade, sailing between London and St Lucia. In 1831 Maclean made his first trip to St Lucia aboard the barque Sandwich and by 1840 had become master of the Susan King. 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. The authorities retaliated by refusing to allow local blacks to unload Maclean's ship. In the 1850s Maclean wrote a number of articles for The Nautical Magazine. The first was a series of eleven articles relating to his experiences and observations in Natal. Articles one to nine appeared between January 1853 and January 1854, followed by a thirteen-month gap after which the last two appeared. 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. In the last of his writings in The Nautical Magazine, published in 1857 in four parts, Maclean described his travels to and from St Lucia. Shortly after writing these articles, Maclean settled in St Lucia where he held many civic posts, including that of stipendiary magistrate where he was the de facto mediator between the interests of the white settler community and the emancipated slave community. Maclean obtained his Master's Certificate of Competence in 1852 and in 1856 while captain of the barque Gilbert Munro he and his wife