Why it is on record
One of the four merger constituents of the United African Company; its hulks anchored at Bonny were the prototype for the floating European trading post on the Oil Rivers.
Record held
Founding constituent of the UAC → NAC → Royal Niger Company lineage.
Deep dive
Hatton & Cookson, the Liverpool palm-oil house active in the Bight of Biafra from the 1850s, was one of the principal pre-RNC commercial counter-parties of the Niger Delta city-states. Its Calabar and Bonny establishments were part of the commercial substrate on which the British consular system in the Oil Rivers was eventually built.