For some few years previous the chief of the Barboy House, Will Braid, had incurred the displeasure of the Amachree house, which was the king's house. For certain private reasons the king, with whom sided most of the
various creeks from the white men since the abolition of the slave trade, I may point to this creek, which is clearly marked and the soundings given in the old charts, circa 1698, but was quite unknown to the present generation of traders, until Capt. Cawthorne, of the African Steamship Company rediscovered it about 1882-4. I well remember this creek being carefully described to me by Bonny men in 1862 as the haunt of lawless outcasts from Bonny and the surrounding countries, cannibals and pirates. About this time I was stationed in New Calabar, and in roaming about the creeks looking for something to shoot, I came across this beautiful wide creek and followed it until I sighted Breaker Island; but being only in a small shooting canoe I was forced to turn back the way I had come. The next morning I was favoured by the visit of King Amachree, the father of the present king, who said he had heard from his people that I had been down this creek, and he had come to warn me of the danger I ran in visiting that creek, giving me the same description that the Bonny men had done some months earlier. I laughed and told him I had heard the same yarn from the Bonny men. Later in the same year I mentioned my visit to an old freeman in Bonny, named Bess Pepple. He being a little inebriated at the time, let his tongue wag freely, and informed me that it was a creek often used by the slavers during the time the preventive squadron was on the coast, to take in their cargo. In one instance that he remembered he said there were five slavers up that creek when two of Her Majesty's gunboats were in Bonny, about the year 1837. About this time (1862) a mate of a ship who was in charge of a small schooner running between New Calabar and Bonny was forced by stress of weather to anchor inside the seaward mouth of this creek, and was attacked during the night by some natives, carried on shore, tied to a tree and flogged, the cargo of the schooner plundered, and the Kroomen also flogged. Complaint being made to the kings of New Calabar and Bonny, they both replied with the same tale: "We no done tell you we no fit be responsible for dem men who live for dem creek; he be dam pirate." This was true they had, but the mate swore he recognised some Bonny men amongst his assailants.
