African initiative was central to the spread of Protestant Christianity in nineteenth-century West Africa. When Thomas Clarkson referred in 1791 to how trade would be the means by which 'a road would be opened to the Christian missionary', he was no doubt thinking in terms of European missionaries and traders spreading the gospel of Protestant Christianity to Africans unfamiliar with the Bible. In contrast, the pattern that emerged in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Sierra Leone was characterized by the extensive and influential roles played by Africans in transmitting Christianity outside the boundaries of the colony. As Lynn has emphasized, the entrepreneurial behaviour of 'liberated Africans' and their descendants in developing new trading opportunities outside the colony provided an important means through which Christian influences spread along coastal commercial routes in the mid-nineteenth century (Lynn, 1992, pp. 423-427; Ajayi, 1969, pp. 26-29).