Elder Dempster had a shipping contract with the Congo Free State for the connection between Antwerp and Boma. Due to his knowledge of French, Morel was often sent to Belgium, where he was able to view the internal accounts of the Congo Free State held by Elder Dempster. The knowledge that the ships leaving Belgium for the Congo carried only guns, chains, ordnance and explosives, but no commercial goods, while ships arriving from the colony came back full of valuable products such as raw rubber and ivory, led him to the conclusion that Belgian King Leopold II's policy was exploitative and a type of slavery. According to author Adam Hochschild, Morel's conclusions were correct—the value of the goods coming from the Congo Free State was five times that of the goods coming from Europe, and the difference was being extracted from the Congolese population through force and mass atrocities.