Page:West African Studies.djvu/586

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510
NATIVES OF THE NIGER COAST
app.

last effort I can't speak from personal observation, as I left this river shortly afterwards myself; in fact, it was on my last visit to Abonema that I conveyed in my steamer, the Quorra, the missionary and his wife to their new home from Brass. They were a young couple of very well educated and most intelligent Sierra Leone natives.

BONNY AND THE PEPPLE FAMILY

This river was the most important slave market in the Delta, as a matter of fact surpassing in numbers of slaves exported any other single slave-dealing station on the West or South-West Coast of Africa.

According to Mr. Clarkson, the historian of the abolition of the slave-trade, this river and Old Calabar exported more slaves than all the other slave-dealing centres on the West and South-West Coasts of Africa combined.

It is a well-known fact that for about two hundred years the average annual output of slaves through the Bonny River was about 16,000 (this included the shipments from New Calabar), totalling up to the immense number of 3,200,00 souls taken out of this part of Africa during two centuries.

The above figures do not represent the total depletion this part of Africa suffered during this time. To the above immense number of slaves exported must be added the number of lives lost in the raids made on the Ibo villages for the purpose of capturing the people to sell as slaves; we must also add the number that died on their way down from the interior to the coast, and to these again must be added the slaves refused by the European trader by reason