Cape Coast Castle

What was Cape Coast Castle?

Cape Coast stands on a point of land on the coast of today’s Ghana, which Europeans called the Gold Coast. Its Fante name is Oguaa. In the game’s years the town lay in the land of Fetu (also written Efutu), a small kingdom whose capital was inland; Cape Coast was Fetu’s trading town by the sea.

Portuguese traders set up a lodge here in 1555 and called the point Cabo Corso, “short cape”, which became “Cape Coast” in English. In the 1650s Henrik Carloff, working for a Swedish company, got permission from the king of Fetu to build a timber trading post. Danes, the Dutch and a Fetu chief then seized it in turn, until an English force under Robert Holmes took it in 1664.

From 1672 it was the Gold Coast headquarters of the Royal African Company, which held a royal charter for English trade in West Africa. The English turned it into a stronger castle by about 1700.

Who held power at Cape Coast around 1715?

The castle flew an English flag, but it stood on African land. The Company paid local rulers a regular ground rent, a “water custom” for using the shore, gifts, and salaries to African officials, partly in guns, gunpowder, alcohol and fine cloth. One study of Company accounts from 1679 to 1704 found that payments rose when a ruler’s cooperation mattered more, for example to keep rival traders out.

In the game’s years the Fante states were growing stronger. They stepped into Fetu’s affairs between 1707 and 1711 and tightened their hold around 1720. The historian Rebecca Shumway shows that Fante middlemen were vital to the trade of the rising inland kingdom of Asante, and that the Fante were both victims of constant violence and brokers of enslaved people.

Europeans generally did not raid inland: African rulers and merchants brought captives to the coast. But it was European demand that drove the trade, and the Company bought, imprisoned and shipped the people it held. Powerful African merchants of the period included John Kabes and John Konny. At Cape Coast the Company also relied on local canoemen, labourers and interpreters.

What was traded at Cape Coast Castle?

Europeans first came for gold, but by the early 1700s they were buying more and more captives. Cape Coast was one of many European forts trading along this shore, among them Elmina. Trade worked by barter, swapping goods for goods. Ships brought cloth from India and Europe, guns and gunpowder, brandy and rum, and brass pans and other metal goods. One economic historian found that alcohol was used more often to buy gold, while guns and cheaper cloth were used more often to buy people.

What were the dungeons at Cape Coast Castle like?

Under the castle’s parade ground a dungeon was cut into the rock. It existed by the 1680s, when the French slave-trader Jean Barbot wrote that it could hold about a thousand people. Britannica gives up to about 1,500 at a time, probably for the larger castle of later years.

There were separate dungeons for men and for women, with little light or fresh air; the British called them “slave holes”. Many people held there had been brought from hundreds of miles inland, and they waited there until a ship came to take them. Directly above them were the comfortable rooms of the Company’s officers, a contrast the historian William St Clair stresses.

What is the Door of No Return?

Captives left the castle through a gate on the sea side and were taken by canoe to ships waiting offshore. Today that gate is called the “Door of No Return”. The name appears to be a modern one. Writers and visitors have used it widely since the 1990s.

Today’s door is a large arched gate, and the exact route captives took in the 1720s is not certain.

In 1998, on Ghana’s first Emancipation Day, the remains of two people of African descent, from New York and from Jamaica, were carried back in through the door. Since then its sea side has been signed “Door of Return”.

How many enslaved people were shipped from the Gold Coast?

No reliable count exists for Cape Coast Castle alone. People were shipped from many forts and beaches along this coast.

For the Gold Coast as a whole, estimates from the SlaveVoyages database put the number of people forced aboard ships at about a million in the 1700s, and about 1.2 million across the whole trade. Each was a person with a name, a family and a home.

What happened to Black Bart Roberts’ crew at Cape Coast Castle?

In February 1722 the Royal Navy ship Swallow caught Black Bart Roberts off Cape Lopez, in today’s Gabon. Roberts was killed on 10 February, and his surviving crew were brought to Cape Coast Castle, where 19 trials were held between 29 March and 19 April.

Of 168 men tried, 77 were acquitted as men forced to serve and 52 were hanged; most of the rest were sentenced to labour for the Company or prison in London. Seventy-five Black men from the crew were never tried. Many had come from slave ships, and some had joined the pirates by choice, but the Royal African Company sold them into slavery.

What is Cape Coast Castle like today?

Since Ghana’s independence in 1957 it has been cared for by the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board. A museum opened in 1974, and the building was restored in the early 1990s. Much of what stands today, including some dungeons, was built after a French bombardment in 1757. In 1979 UNESCO listed it as a World Heritage Site, with the other forts and castles of Ghana’s coast.

It is a memorial as well as a museum. In the men’s dungeon there is a shrine to Nana Tabir, a local deity, where visitors leave wreaths and offerings. Barack and Michelle Obama and their daughters walked through the door in July 2009, and Ghana’s 2019 “Year of Return”, marking 400 years since 1619, when enslaved Africans were landed in Virginia, brought many people of African descent here.