The situation was very different in Calabar, where King Eyo Honesty II gave his full backing to the scheme, saying: 'Let them come I will be glad to see them and give them land. I will look on them as white men because they have learnt white men fashion. Let them come and teach my people. Nobody will trouble them' (Dike, 1956, p. 67). King Eyo's position rested on his conviction that the education and training received by the liberated Africans - or 'recaptives' - in Sierra Leone placed them ahead of other people anywhere else in Africa. He told the Reverend Hope Waddell, rather prophetically, that those who would rule the world would not be enslaved persons or palm oil traders but those who saby book (who knew the Bible). Another Calabar chief concurred, saying that: 'Book be great thing; it pass everything far; it make man's head fine; it settle all palaver' (Waddell, 1863, p. 410).  
Eyo, whose influence was such that Calabar people regarded him as 'their god on earth' (Goldie, 1901, p. 173), pursued the project with vigour and, with the assistance of the Presbyterian Church, seven families arrived in Calabar from Freetown in 1854. Among them was an elderly man who had been sold away 40 years earlier by Duke Ephraim, who ruled Calabar from 1814 to 1834 (Waddell, 1863, p. 532). Comparing themselves to the biblical character Joseph, not many of the returnees bore a grudge against the people that had sold them into slavery. One, a Mrs Macaulay, told those who were amazed at her passion and kindness towards the elderly woman that had sold her at the age of 15 in Duke Town, Nigeria, that: 'it be good thing she be sent so, for then she hear the big thing that Jesus do for poor sinners' (Goldie, 1901, p. 190).