Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, fifth series, no. 132, vol. III, July 10, 1886

No. 132.—Vol. III.
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SATURDAY, JULY 10, 1886.
Rumours of war came floating down the Bonny river to the traders at its mouth. The oil-canoes which came sluggishly alongside the towering black hulks brought whispers of solemn palavers and Egbo meetings in the recesses of the far river reaches; and the long black war-canoes of the Bonny chiefs, with their forty or fifty little black slave-boy rowers, were manœuvring every day with an amount of shrieking and yelling out of all proportion to the result attained. Will Braid and Yellow, two mighty black chiefs, were understood to be in open rebellion against their lawful sovereign, King Amachree of New Calabar. Forts of mud and wattles had been thrown up on the New Calabar river, and Gatling guns and other gruesome instruments had been mounted thereon, and the two recalcitrant niggers were having a high good time of it challenging the universe at large to mortal combat, and, what was of much more importance, stopping the all-dominating palm-oil trade on the New Calabar river. The puissant kingdom of Bonny, too, next door, was supposed to be mixed up in the quarrel, and was lending more or less overt assistance to the rebellious chiefs, and things were tending generally to one of those lingering, little, all-round wars which so delight the West African nigger, and so sorely afflict the unfortunate white or rather yellow traders who wear out their few years of life on hulks at the mouths of the fever-breeding oil-rivers.
At this juncture, the great king-maker, righter of wrongs, and arbitrator-in-chief, Her Majesty’s Consul-general at Fernando Po, was invoked; and the result was the convocation of the greatest ‘palaver’ that had taken place for years, on board the big hulk Adriatic in the Bonny river. One by one the long war-canoes shot alongside, the glistening brown backs of the long line of rowers bending like one great machine to the rhythm of their shrill song, and the swish and dig of their paddles in the green water. One by one the gorgeous beings who sat on a raised platform in the centre of each canoe emerged from under the great umbrellas that covered them, and took their places on the quarter-deck of the hulk. They were a motley lot to look upon, these owners of thousands of their fellow-men, many of them decked up for the occasion with gaudy, ill-fitting European garments, but mostly wearing bright plush waistcoats, high hats, and what is called a fathom of cloth round their loins, this fathom of cloth being two large-sized, brilliant-patterned cotton handkerchiefs joined together.