Bonny-town is the worst and dirtiest to be found on the West Coast of Africa; the houses are small “wattle and daub” structures, and there are no streets even of the poor description that are found in towns on the Gold Coast. The huts are scattered about in indescribable confusion amongst pools of mud, heaps of refuse, and cess-pits; and one cannot walk more than a few hundred yards in any given direction without finding a bar to further progress in the shape of a muddy creek. The Bonny traders do not often honour the town with their presence, nor is there any inducement for them to do so. The Ju-ju house is the only “sight” in Bonny. It is a mud hut in a ruinous condition, in which, piled up in wattle racks, are innumerable human skulls, the remains of persons who have been sacrificed to the Ju-ju, or fetish. A glimpse of these, and of a number of rudely-carved wooden idols, can be obtained by peeping through an aperture in the broken-down wall of the house; and even this must be done by stealth, as the natives do not care to have white men prying into the mysteries of their religion; and, being quite an independent people, they could inflict any fine or punishment they might think proper on an inquisitive stranger.
The few acres on which Bonny-town is built, a sandy strip at Rough Corner at the eastern entrance of the river, and about two acres on Peterside, opposite Bonny-town, is all the dry land to be found within miles; all else is interminable mangrove swamp, intersected with creeks, to which the sharks from the river-bar come to breed. Should a man fall overboard in Bonny river he is never seen again after the first plunge, and it is supposed that there is a powerful under-current which tows the body under, though others ascribe its disappearance to the ubiquitous sharks.
A visitor to Bonny cannot fail to notice the number of old cannon and carronades lying about uncared-for in the town. These are simply neglected because they are out of date, for the natives of the Niger delta, though so behindhand in civilisation, keep up their armament to the style of the day. There is a battery of four Armstrong guns at Peterside, where the river is one mile and a-half wide, and there are several of these guns in Bonny-town. When making war upon another tribe, the natives dismount these guns and lash them upon a sort of deck built in the bows of one of their large canoes, which can carry from thirty to forty persons. The gun then is of course immovable, so in action the canoe is manœuvred till the piece points in the right direction, when it is discharged. As they aim point-blank whether the object aimed at be distant a mile or only a few yards, they do not do much execution, except by accident. Besides these Armstrongs there are thousands of breech-loading rifles, Sniders, Martini-Henrys, and Winchester repeaters, in the hands of the natives, almost every man possessing one. These are all imported by British merchants, and are manufactured so cheaply in Birmingham that a trader in the oil rivers can afford to sell a Snider rifle for 2_l._ and then make a slight profit. Directly these natives obtain such rifles they want to go and try their effect on something, and as they are useless for purposes of sport, except against large game, which is not found in the delta, they go and rake up some old quarrel with an insignificant tribe, and try the efficacy of their weapons upon its members. To this cause may be attributed most of their wars.