The expedition up the River Niger established a missionary presence in several cities along the coast of the river, including Bonny in present-day Rivers State, Onitsha in present-day Anambra State, Asaba in present-day Delta State, and Lokoja in present-day Kogi State.
The leading missionary was Samuel Crowther, a Yoruba man who had been rescued from a slave ship in 1822 and taken to Freetown. He was ordained in 1843, consecrated Bishop of the Niger Territories in 1864, and died in 1891.
Crowther first visited Onitsha in 1841 while serving as an interpreter for an expedition up the Niger, but this visit did not result in immediate missionary work.
In 1857, now ordained, Crowther traveled up the Niger again. On this occasion, two Ibos whom Crowther had brought up in Sierra Leone remained in Onitsha: the Rev. J. C. Taylor and Simon Jonas.
Much of the pioneering missionary work along the Niger was carried out by Africans, who were better able to withstand the diseases of the region, later referred to as “Man’s Grave,” and who possessed greater facility with local languages.
Rev. J. C. Taylor produced the first Bible translations into Igbo. He translated the four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and some of St. Paul’s Epistles, which were published by the British and Foreign Bible Society between 1860 and 1866.
These translations were based on the Authorized Version and were extremely literal, reflecting an inadequate command of English idiom.
The work did not sufficiently account for the peculiarities of the Onitsha dialect and therefore failed to gain popularity among Onitsha readers, for whom it was primarily intended. It was also poorly adapted to the needs of Bonny and other Igbo stations of the Church Missionary Society in the Niger Delta.