Punishment of one of King Whidah's Wives from Thomas Astley's Voyages 1745-47

ASTLEY, Thomas; CHILD, G: Punishment of one of the King of Whidah’s Wives & her Gallant.
 
London, in A New General Collection of Voyages and Travels, vol. II, 1745-47 (plate dated “Plate 171, No. 98, Vol. 2, p. 374”).
 
Copper engraving. Image area c. 220 × 140 mm (sheet larger, untrimmed). Engraved by G. Child.
Broad sheet with deckle edges, central plate mark visible. Light overall toning and scattered foxing; small marginal chips and edge tears (not affecting image); faint offset from facing text on verso. Good, honest survival.
 
Dramatic ceremonial scene depicting the execution by burning of one of the wives of the King of Whydah and her alleged lover, carried out before a massed assembly of armed retainers and onlookers. The composition shows the condemned bound to a stake amid rising smoke, flanked by soldiers with spears and swords, while the crowd forms a formal semicircle, underscoring the public, ritualised nature of royal justice as understood by European observers. 
 
The plate derives from early eighteenth-century travel narratives circulating through the Dutch and English trading factories on the Slave Coast, and was popularised in Astley’s vast compendium, which became the standard English-language visual sourcebook for Africa, Asia, and the Americas in the mid-Georgian period.