Missionaries took the view that the deplorable war had been in some way manipulated by divine providence to make China accessible to the gospel. Missionary societies from the main sects sent teams to all six places. The Perry ultimatum to Japan in 1853 was followed, five years later, by the arrival of the first Christian mission since the destruction of Japanese Christianity in the seventeenth century. The same year, the end of the Second Chinese War brought the further concession of toleration for Christianity throughout China, and in effect ensured the protection of missionaries and their penetration of the interior. In both countries the ability of missionaries to operate was conditional on western military preponderance, and the willingness to exert it. In Africa, the process was taken a stage further when the British government (followed by others) became directly involved in missionary enterprise. This was, to some extent, inevitable because government needed missionary help in suppressing the slave-trade, and the churches were eager to supply it. But it was in Africa, too, that the British ruling establishment first became fully involved in the evangelizing effort. The upper-class Evangelicals moved straight from anti-slavery to missions. Thomas Fowell Buxton, who succeeded Wilberforce as leader of the anti-slavery campaign, coined the phrase: ‘It is the Bible and the plough that must regenerate Africa.’ The Reverend Charles Simeon, the key figure in the Evangelical takeover of bishoprics and parishes, also began to deal in colonial appointments, and to send out his proteges to be, as he put it, ‘princes in all lands’. The Evangelicals dominated the Anglican Church Missionary Society, and in 1840 they launched the new African campaign with an enthusiastic meeting at Exeter Hall, attended by Prince Albert, Sir Robert Peel, Mar Gladstone, Lord Shaftesbury, the French Ambassador, the leader of the Irish Nationalists, Daniel O'Connell and, among others, the young David Livingstone. Archdeacon Wilberforce, William's sonorous son, told the distinguished throng that their purpose was to make sure ‘that every ship laden with commerce might also bear the boon of everlasting life, that from no part of the earth should they receive only, without giving for the gold of the west and the spices from the east the more precious wealth - the more blessed frankincense of Christ their master’. Fowell Buxton persuaded the government to turn this pledge into reality by providing £80,000 for an expedition to open up the Niger in West Africa. It set off in 1841 in three iron ships, the A/bert, the Wilberforce and the Soudan, but was defeated by malaria, which struck down 130 out of the 145 European members of the expedition, and killed 40 of them. But two more sorties were made, under Admiralty protection, and Christianity was established permanently under the aegis of a British presence which inevitably turned into a series of colonies. Some of the local African rulers, such as Eyo Honesty II, king of Greek Town in Old Calabar, were inclined to welcome Christian evangelism, believing it would strengthen their authority. In fact the missionaries tended sooner or later to provoke violence, leading to armed European intervention, a constitutional crisis, and outright annexation. The pattern was not necessarily deliberate, but it was remarkably similar in various parts of the African coast. The missionaries might seek to dissociate themselves from European colonization, but the fact is that most of them, in Africa at least, found it far more convenient (and safe) to operate with whites in control. In Calabar the missions soon focused their hostility on the Old Town and Duke Town, described as ‘an African Sodom and Gomorrah’, where obnoxious customs, such as infanticide, were said to flourish. They promptly formed a Society for the Abolition of Inhuman and Superstitious Customs and for Promoting Civilization in the area, and the British Consul was signed up as a founder member. The missionary stationed in the Old Town, the Reverend Samuel Edgerley, made no secret of his anxiety to change the habits of those he termed 'a degraded and heathen people’. In 1849 he kicked over a religious drum; and in 1854, following an alleged massacre of fifty slaves by the deposed king of Old Town, Willie Tom, Edgerley smashed up images in a local shrine and broke its sacred egg; he also removed various objects as souvenirs. In the ensuing trouble, the missionaries, seconded by European traders, persuaded the Consul that he would be ‘forwarding the work of civilization’ if he got HMS Antelope to bombard Old Town; and this 126