In the circumstances, the Calabar elites turned their attention to Sierra Leone, where an apprenticeship programme was equipping 'liberated Africans' with knowledge and skills in trade, teaching, tailoring, carpentry, photography, printing, welding and bakery, among other things; if those people came and participated in the economy, that could arrest the decline. Fortunately for Calabar, the liberated Africans of Sierra Leone, compelled by the inclement weather conditions and geography, and the hatred they received there from earlier settlers, were seeking homes in other British 'spheres of influence' along the coast of West Africa, places where they would be protected as British subjects and thus realize the promise of freedom. Some were 'slaves sold from Calabar in bypast times, and hearing that a mission was established in the country, they returned to end their days where they had been in childhood' (Goldie, 1901, p. 189). When the missionary William Anderson and his wife passed through Sierra Leone en route to Calabar in January 1849, some fifty to sixty liberated Africans offered to follow them (Marwick, 1897, p. 195). The number migrating to Calabar then increased from 1852, when the African Steamship Company was  
chartered by the British Government to convey goods, passengers and mail from Europe to the West African coast (Dike, 1956, p. 114).  
In May 1853, a three-man delegation led by the Reverend Edward Jones was sent from Sierra Leone to the Niger delta region of Nigeria to negotiate the return of emancipadoes from the region who had been sold into slavery (Goldie, 1901, p. 166). In Igboland and Bonny, the Reverend Jones' proposal was met with hostility and the people there were fiercely opposed to the reintegration of formerly enslaved persons and their offspring into society (Ayandele, 1974, p. 12).