Rio del Rey

Rio del Rey is a broad estuary on the eastern shore of the Bight of Biafra, where tidal creeks wind through mangrove forests. Its waterways brought coastal communities into contact with traders arriving by sea. By the seventeenth century, commerce with Europeans had become established along this coast; inland networks supplied goods and enslaved people to the ports of the bight. Farther west, the Efik settlements of Old Calabar became a major center of the same Atlantic trade.