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[^0]:    1 As told to author by the elder Efiong U. Aye, aged over 96 years, in an oral interview conducted at 11 Ikot Effanga Road, Calabar, on 13 April 2011.
2 The 'trust' was an arrangement under which a European trader supplied goods on credit to Calabar trading partners in return for the future delivery of produce of an equivalent value. For further details, see Noah (1980, pp. 87-90).  
their oil without fear of molestation (Noah, 1980, p. 90); and, as supporters of the British policy of economic liberalism and free trade, the liberated Africans challenged the self-proclaimed monopoly of the supercargoes insisting that Calabar and its resources belonged to Britain and that, as such, British citizens should not have competitors in the Calabar trade. As a last resort, the supercargoes began to confiscate goods subject to a trust arrangement to keep the local merchants perpetually in debt. On 1 November 1855, a Captain Joseph Cuthbertson of Liverpool seized sixteen puncheons of palm oil awaiting shipment on the seafront that belonged to a Peter Nicholls - a liberated African from the Cross River region who had been sold into slavery but was rescued by a Royal Navy patrol and then settled in Sierra Leone - on the claim that he had given trust to King Eyo (Noah, 1980, p. 94; Latham, 1973, p. 60); in 1856, another Liverpool supercargo, Edward Davis, seized the oil of a Daniel Hedd, claiming that it had been bought in Calabar, which as a 'trust river', belonged to the English (Dike, 1956, p. 119); and in January 1857, a 'Mr Hearn seized oil belonging to James Haddison' (Latham, 1973, p. 61). Fundamentally, the supercargoes argued, Calabar merchants must liquidate their existing trust debts before selling to the newcomers. The Efik, however, supported by liberated Africans, insisted that while the trust must eventually be honoured, there was no time limit by which the debts must be paid and that they could, in the meantime, sell to whomsoever they wished (Ibid.).