Istwa Nou

New Calabar, in the eastern Niger delta, was the leading point of embarkation in the Bight of Biafra through the late seventeenth century. Old Calabar and Bonny both grew fast afterwards and passed it, and New Calabar settled into being a substantial secondary port serving mainly British ships. A large share of the people taken from it were landed on Caribbean islands that came under British rule between 1763 and 1807, the territories Britain won from France and Spain in the Seven Years War and after, where new sugar estates were being cut out of forest and wanted labour at once. When Britain withdrew from the trade at the start of the nineteenth century the port's traffic fell away quickly, because it had no Brazilian or Cuban business to fall back on the way Lagos and Ouidah did. The delta ports rose and declined according to which empire was buying that decade.