In 1821, the British captain Nelly approached the island of Fernando Pó. He found it abandoned and founded the establishments of ''Melville Bay'' (now Riaba) and ''San Carlos'' (now Luba). Some years later, another British captain, William Fitzwilliam Owen, decided to colonize the island and in the north of it — on the site of the present capital — erected a base for British ships hunting slave traders. Thus, on 25 December 1827, ''Port Clarence'' was founded on the ruins of a previous Portuguese settlement.The name was chosen in honor of the Duke of Clarence, who later became King William IV. The Bubis indigenous to the island called it ''Ripotó'' (place of the foreigners). The population of the capital was increased by the arrival of slaves freed by the British. These freedmen were settled in Port Clarence before the establishment of Sierra Leone as a colony for freed slaves. The descendants of these freed slaves remained on the island. They joined other migrants who arrived as free workers from Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Benin, Nigeria and Cameroon, and became the population group called Creole or fernandinos, whose language was Pichinglis, a Bantu-English Creole with some Spanish elements.