Happily the Secession Church adopted the Calabar scheme, and after
securing funds and a ship--one of the first subscriptions, it is
interesting to note, was L1000 from Dr. Ferguson--Mr. Waddell, with
several assistants sailed in 1846, and after many difficulties, which
he conquered with indomitable spirit and patience, founded the Mission.
In the following year it was taken over by the United Presbyterian
Church, which had been formed by the union of the United Secession and
Relief Churches.

In no part of the foreign field were conditions more formidable.
Calabar exhibited the worst side of nature and of man. While much of it
was beautiful, it was one of the most unhealthy spots in the world--
sickness, disease, and swift death attacking the Europeans who ventured
there. The natives were considered to be the most degraded of any in
Africa. They were, in reality, the slum-dwellers of negro-land. From
time immemorial their race had occupied the equatorial region of the
continent, a people without a history, with only a past of confused
movement, oppression, and terror. They seem to have been visited by
adventurous navigators of galleys before the Christian era, but the
world in general knew nothing of them. On the land side they were shut
in without hope of expansion. When they endeavoured to move up to the
drier Sahara and Soudanese regions they were met and pressed back by
the outposts of the higher civilisations of Egypt and Arabia, who
preyed upon them, crushed them, enslaved them in vast numbers. And just
as the coloured folk of American cities are kept in the low-lying and
least desirable localities, and as the humbler classes in European
towns find a home in east-end tenements, so all that was weakest and
poorest in the negro race gravitated to the jungle areas and the
poisonous swamps of the coast, where, hemmed in by the pathless sea,