Bunce Island

Where is Bunce Island and what was it?

Bunce Island lies in the estuary of the Sierra Leone River, in West Africa, about 20 miles upstream from where Freetown was founded in 1787.

English slave traders settled and fortified the island in about 1670. It was run first by the Gambia Adventurers and then by the Royal African Company, which held a royal charter for English trade in West Africa. People were being sold there by the 1680s. The island became the biggest British slave-trading post in this part of the coast, known as the Rice Coast because rice had long been grown there.

Who held power on the Sierra Leone River around 1715?

The fort flew an English flag, but the river belonged to African states. The Temne people lived along the river and its estuary. Coastal rulers kept European traders away from the inland routes and made them pay rent and gifts to trade at all. Captives were brought down to the coast by African merchants, and in the early 1700s wars connected with a religious movement in Futa Jallon, in the highlands inland, sent more people into the trade.

Many of the most important brokers were Luso-African (Afro-Portuguese) families, whose Portuguese-based trade language was used all along this coast. There were also Afro-English families: Thomas Corker, who came to work for the Company in 1684, founded the Caulker family, who were later major slave traders.

The Company relied on African labour too. It hired paid African workers known as grumetes, and in its later years it replaced many of them with enslaved workers.

What was traded at Bunce Island?

The main trade was in people. The fort bought captives from African and Luso-African traders and held them until ships came to take them across the Atlantic. The region also sold ivory, beeswax and camwood, the heartwood of a West African tree that gives a strong red dye and was shipped to Europe from the 1600s. Rice was the main local food, and as the slave trade grew, feeding so many captives pushed up its price.

The Company was supposed to control English trade here, but its monopoly had ended in 1698, and private English traders worked the river alongside it. In about 1725 a Company employee named Alexander Archbold, who had served seven years at Sierra Leone, wrote a report on its trade here; it survives in the Senate House Library in London.

Did pirates come to Bunce Island?

Yes, to the river at least. On 1 April 1719 pirates under Thomas Cocklyn captured William Snelgrave’s slave ship at the mouth of the Sierra Leone River, and Howell Davis and Olivier Levasseur soon joined them. The 1724 General History of the Pyrates, a partly embellished book, says three pirate crews attacked and took a fort there. Heritage summaries say pirates attacked the island in 1719 and 1720.

The river was friendly to pirates because of the private English traders who lived there, some of them former seamen and buccaneers. One was John Leadstone, known as “Old Captain Cracker”, a former Company man who had guided a French attack on Bunce Island in 1704. He sold captives and ivory to anyone, stole people from a local settlement in 1715, and entertained pirates at his house.

In June 1721 Black Bart Roberts put in to the river. According to the 1724 book and the historians who follow it, the traders told him two Royal Navy warships, Swallow and Weymouth, had been there and were not expected back until about Christmas. Roberts sailed on down the coast. The Swallow caught up with him in February 1722, and his surviving crew were tried at Cape Coast Castle.

What happened to the fort in 1728?

In 1728 José Lopez da Moura, a Luso-African trader, led an attack that destroyed the Company’s fort. The historian Sean Kelley argues that it was not one man’s raid. Luso-African middlemen, paid African workers and enslaved labourers joined in, and local rulers backed them. The slave trade had grown fast, rice had become dear, and Company cost-cutting had soured its dealings with the rulers. The Company never came back, and the island stood empty until the mid-1740s.

How is Bunce Island linked to the Gullah?

Most of the island’s link with North America came after the game’s era. In 1748 a London firm, Grant, Oswald & Company, took over, led by the Scots Richard Oswald and Alexander Grant. From the 1750s its agent in Charleston was Henry Laurens, a rice planter and slave dealer who sold captives for a commission. Planters in South Carolina and Georgia valued people from the Rice Coast for their skill in growing rice, and ships from New England also called. Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center says the island shipped “tens of thousands” of people in all.

One of them was a young girl now called Priscilla. In 1756 the ship Hare left Sierra Leone on 9 April and reached Charleston on 17 June, and Laurens sold her to the planter Elias Ball. Records suggest most captives on the Hare were bought at river mouths along the coast, perhaps some at Bunce Island.

The Gullah Geechee people of coastal South Carolina and Georgia descend from enslaved Africans like Priscilla, and their speech, customs and rice dishes still show links to Sierra Leone. The anthropologist Joseph Opala was the first scholar to show how much Bunce Island means to them. Gullah “homecomings” to the island followed in 1989, 1997 and 2005, when Priscilla’s descendant Thomalind Martin Polite visited.

What is Bunce Island like today?

The French destroyed the castle in 1779 and the traders rebuilt it; the last fort dates from 1796. After Britain banned its slave trade in 1807, the island was used for a cotton farm and a sawmill, and it was abandoned around 1840.

In 1948 it became Sierra Leone’s first protected historic site. Its ruins include the main trading house, a walled yard where captives were held, with a separate smaller area for women and children, watchtowers, a gun battery, a gunpowder store, cannon marked for King George III, and graves of slave traders. Tree roots and heavy rain are breaking the walls apart. Sierra Leone’s civil war halted early preservation plans, and from about 2010 a group called the Bunce Island Coalition worked to save the ruins.