Human trafficking and the slave trade did not cease with British abolition. In the age of abolition, the lagoon waterway, rivers and numerous creeks in southeastern Yorubaland were particularly suitable for slave traders who needed to conceal their activities from British antislavery patrol boats. For example, several islands on the lagoon were separated from the mainland by long, winding, and shallow waterways and the Atlantic coastline was too shallow for naval vessels to sail close to land or find any landing place between Lagos and River Benin. On the contrary, traders on the lagoon could haul their small canoes over land, sometimes carried by their operators and hidden in the forest should anti-slavery patrols be sighted. The islands and islets also afforded many places for concealment in addition to waterways (parallel to the lagoon) that could be  
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[^0]:    10 Jacques Quesné, 1823, Mémoires du Capitaine Landolphe: Contenant l'Histoire de ses Voyages Pendant trente-six ans, aux côtes d'Afrique et aux deux Amériques, Paris, Bertand, II, pp. 85-88.
11 On Ijo migration, see E. J. Alagoa, 1972, A History of the Niger Delta: An Historical Interpretation of Ijo Oral Tradition, Ibadan University Press, pp. 26-42.
12 Quesné, Mémoires du Capitaine Landolphe, 1-113 and Pernille Roge, "Britain, Danish and French Colonial Projects on the Coast of West Africa, 1780s and 1790s," in Robert Aldrich and Kirsten McKenzie, eds., 2014, The Routledge History of Western Empires, London, Routledge, pp. 72-86.  
used without going near Lekki. Therefore, enslaved people were carried with impunity between Lagos and the Niger delta. ${ }^{13}$