ABSTRACT
BONNY was inspected next, and the visit was not a particularly pleasant one. I had not looked forward with any degree of satisfaction to a call there, for several acquaintances were good enough to inform me that this was "the ghastliest place in Africa," and I had already seen a fair number of ghastly places. The settlement appeared to justify the description, for standing as it does near the mouth of one of the foulest of foul rivers with a maze of quagmires about it, Bonny town is a singularly uninviting spot. This watery desolation occupies what is strictly speaking the eastern extremity of the delta, for the Opobo river, which hems it in, thirty miles to the east, is the last of the waterways connected by interlacing creeks with the parent river. The Niger Coast Protectorate, however, stretching about a hundred miles farther east, takes in the estuary of Old Calabar, fed chiefly by the wide Cross river, which rises no white
man knows where, in a mysterious land to the north.
