keep white men from proceeding to his markets, he got himself entangled in a number of disputes which culminated in his being taken out of the Opobo River in September, 1887, by Her Britannic Majesty's Consul, Mr. H. H. Johnston, C.B., now Sir Harry Johnston, and conveyed to Accra, where he was tried before Admiral Sir Hunt Grubbe, who condemned him to five years' deportation to the West Indies, making him an allowance of about £800 per annum and returning a fine of thirty puncheons of palm oil, value about £450 in those days, which the late Consul Hewett had imposed upon him, a fine that the Admiral did not think the Consul was warranted in having imposed.
Poor Ja Ja did not live to return to his country and his people whom he loved so well, and whose condition he had done so much to improve, though at times his rule often became despotic. One trait of his character may interest the public just now, as the Liquor Question in West Africa is so much en evidence, and that is, that he was a strict teetotaler himself and inculcated the same principles in all his chiefs. In his eighteen years' rule as a king in Opobo he reduced two of his chiefs for drunkenness—one he sent to live in exile in a small fishing village for the rest of his life, the other, who had aggravated his offence by assaulting a white trader, he had deprived of all outward signs of a chief and put in a canoe to paddle as a pull-away boy within an hour of his committing the offence.
During the Ashantee campaign of 1873 Sir Garnet Wolseley sent Captain Nicol to the Oil Rivers to raise a contingent of friendly natives; on his arrival in Bonny he was not immediately successful, so continued on to
