Lost history · 1767
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In 1767 British ship captains offered to make peace between two feuding Efik towns. Old Town believed them. Around 300 of its people were killed, and the town never got its trade back.
By the middle of the 1700s, Old Calabar on the Cross River was a major port in the Atlantic slave trade. Ships came from Britain to buy captives, and the Efik merchants who sold them grew rich and powerful. Many of those merchants could write in English or pidgin; one of them, Antera Duke, even kept a diary.
Old Calabar was not one town. It was a cluster of Efik settlements. The Efik, Ibibio speakers, had settled at Creek Town some time before 1650 and over the next century split into wards, each with its own houses and its own merchants. The names the British used for them still sound strange today: Old Town, also called Obutong; Duke Town; Henshaw Town; Creek Town.
In the early 1760s, Old Town was on top. Its traders had dominated the early slave trade on the river. But the wards were rivals, and their quarrels slowed down business. A British captain waiting for a full cargo was losing money with every week his ship sat in the river. Delays caused by fighting among the wards frustrated the captains badly.
There was a body meant to keep this rivalry in check. It was Ekpe, a graded society of adult men that, Lovejoy and Richardson write, was probably founded around the mid-1700s. The richest merchants held its top grades, and they had the power to "blow" Ekpe: to punish offenders and enforce debts. The two historians think Ekpe's rise from the 1750s was probably part of the background to what came next. But in 1767, Ekpe did not hold the peace.
The British captains, for their part, had good relations with Old Town. They traded with its merchants, lent them goods on credit, and knew its leaders personally. That closeness is the bitter centre of this story. Lovejoy and Richardson argue that those very relationships were what made the trap possible.
What happened in 1767 is known mostly from evidence given to the British Parliament in 1790, when the slave trade was being investigated. The details that survive are few, but the shape of the thing is clear.
The British captains in the river sided with the merchants of Duke Town. Together, according to these reports, they set up a fake mediation. The captains offered to bring the two sides together and settle the dispute between Old Town and its rivals. The plan only worked if the people of Old Town believed that the captains truly wanted to reconcile them. They did believe it.
The Old Town men came to the meeting trusting the offer of peace. Instead of a settlement, there was a slaughter. British and Duke Town traders together killed some 300 Old Town residents.
Those who were not killed were taken. The prisoners became, in the cold language of the trade, an immediate supply of slaves for the waiting ships. Among them were two sons of the head of Old Town. Many were carried across the Atlantic to the Americas.
It is worth stopping on what this meant for the captains. They had been waiting on slow deliveries. In a single act of betrayal, they got cargo on board, and they got rid of a rival town that had been part of the hold-ups. Lovejoy and Richardson call it perhaps the most obvious example of opportunism in the Anglo-Efik trade: people who had built trust used that trust to destroy the ones who gave it.
Old Town never recovered. With so many of its people dead and so many others shipped off as slaves, it stopped being a serious force in the export trade. It was not even a large source of captives after that. Duke Town took over. Its dominance of Old Calabar's trade lasted until the trade itself ended in the 1840s.
Some questions remain open, and it is fair to leave them open. We do not know whether the British expected so many people to die. Lovejoy and Richardson raise the possibility that the captains, who deceived Old Town, were themselves misled by their Duke Town allies about how far the plot would go. The records do not settle it, and the numbers and blame are still argued over.
Trust between Calabar and the British had always been fragile, and it ran both ways. The trade worked on credit. Captains handed over goods in advance, and Efik merchants gave people as pawns, held as security until the debt was paid. Pawns were not supposed to be shipped, but sometimes they were. In 1761 William Earle, a Liverpool merchant, promised Duke Abashy of Old Town that his two sons, shipped by mistake, would be brought back. In 1773 Grandy King George of Old Town complained that a ship had carried off his pawns, four of his own sons among them.
Those letters, written years before and after the massacre, show the same thing from two angles. Old Town's leaders dealt with the British as partners, writing to them and expecting fair treatment. Again and again, that trust was broken.
For Old Town, the memory of that peace meeting is the end of a story. It is a reminder that in Calabar's trading world, a friendly captain and an offer of reconciliation could hide something else entirely.
