Christian influences shaped the identity of the colony's principal settlement at Freetown in a variety of ways. The London-based directors of the Sierra Leone Company considered that Protestant Christianity was vital to efforts to undermine the Atlantic slave trade and to reform African society, culture and economy. As Freetown was established in a wider region of slave supply in West Africa, the company directors argued that policies based on commerce, civilization and Christianity could be used to stem the outward flow of Africans to the Americas. In the period between the mid-sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries, slave trading based around the Sierra Leone River supplied an estimated 148,000 Africans for export; most of these individuals were transported between 1750 and 1807 (Lovejoy and Schwarz, 2015, p. 5, p. 13, p. 24). The company's plans to undermine the Atlantic slave trade by promoting alternative forms of trade in the natural resources of Africa were overly ambitious and based on a very limited understanding of African societies and economies. Lacking any significant military resources, the company attempted unsuccessfully to use methods of persuasion and example to encourage African merchants to turn away from the export of enslaved Africans. Moreover, the leading abolitionist Thomas Clarkson argued that reforming trading systems also provided a mechanism through which Christianity could be spread across West Africa. In a report to company directors in 1791, he expressed confidence that through trade 'a road would be opened to the Christian missionary to lay before unenlightened nations the gospel of reconciliation and peace' (Schwarz, 2007, pp. 265-266; Law, Schwarz and Strickrodt, 2013, pp. 1-6).