[1] It extends eastward for about 640 kilometres (400 mi) from Cape St. Paul to the Nun outlet of the Niger River, which marks the westernmost point of the Bight of Biafra.

These efforts would continue until the 1890s and cost Britain significant sums of money, and the Royal Navy hundreds, if not thousands, of sailors’ lives from tropical diseases.

The old Royal Navy rhyme says: A variation goes: This is said to be a slavery jingle or sea shanty about the risk of malaria in the Bight.

[4] A third version of the couplet is: In R. Austin Freeman's 1927 novel A Certain Dr. Thorndyke, Chapter II, "The Legatee," mention is made of this location.

[6] Flash For Freedom!, George MacDonald Fraser's 1971 picaresque novel of Harry Flashman's misadventures in—among other places and situations—an English stately home, the 1840s slave trade, antebellum plantation life, and meeting with then-congressman Abraham Lincoln, quotes another variant of the couplet: Oh, sailor beware of the Bight o' Benin.

David Bramhall's series of novels "The Greatest Cape" also mentions the rhyme, one of the characters in the first volume, The Black Joke, having been a pirate and a slaver.