James Island (Kunta Kinteh Island)

Where is James Island, and what is it called today?

James Island sits in the middle of the River Gambia, in West Africa, about 30 kilometres upstream from the sea. It is less than two miles from the villages of Albreda and Juffureh on the north bank. In 2011 the government of The Gambia renamed it Kunta Kinteh Island, and UNESCO changed the name of its World Heritage listing the same year.

The island is very small and very low. Tides and storms have worn it away, and it is now thought to be only about a sixth of the size it was when the fort was busy.

Who built the fort on James Island?

A Portuguese expedition reached the river in 1456 and called the island St Andrew’s Island, after a sailor they buried there. The first lasting fort was built in 1651 by settlers from the Duchy of Courland, a small Baltic state in today’s Latvia. The island had no fresh water of its own, so the garrison relied on the King of Barra, on the north bank, from the start.

The English captured the fort in 1661 and named the island after James, Duke of York, the king’s brother and later King James II. After several other English companies, the Royal African Company took charge in 1684. This was the company, chartered by the king, that ran England’s forts in West Africa; its ships carried about 187,000 enslaved people from Africa to English colonies between 1672 and 1731.

The fort was fought over again and again. French forces took it in 1695, 1702 and 1704, and the English left it empty from 1709 to 1713. By the game’s era it was a battered post that the company struggled to keep supplied.

Who held power on the River Gambia around 1715?

The fort flew a British flag, but the river belonged to African states. On the north bank lay Niumi, also called Barra, a Mandinka kingdom whose ruler, the mansa, was chosen in turn from a group of royal towns. Niumi’s leaders grew rich on the river trade by charging tolls to passing merchants and to the Europeans who lived there. Niumi was also a source of salt for peoples further inland.

From about 1681 France kept a trading post at Albreda, within sight of the island. Captives from states further up the river were marched down to Albreda and Juffureh and sold to British and French ships.

The Senegalese historian Boubacar Barry shows how the Atlantic slave trade strengthened warrior rulers across Senegambia, the lands of the Senegal and Gambia rivers, and fed raiding and war. People were taken in wars between states, in raids on villages and by kidnapping on the roads.

What was traded at James Island?

European ships brought cloth, iron bars, beads, guns and gunpowder and alcohol. In return the Gambia sold gold, ivory, hides, beeswax and ebony. By the 1700s the main business at James Island was in people. Captives bought along the river were held on the island until a ship came to carry them across the Atlantic.

The company’s grip was weak. It had lost its legal monopoly in the 1690s, and private English traders, the French at Albreda and later American ships all bought in the river.

How did Howell Davis capture the fort in 1719?

Howell Davis was a Welsh sailor from Milford Haven who turned pirate in 1718. Early in 1719, he sailed up the Gambia. The fullest account comes from the 1724 General History of the Pyrates, a partly embellished book. It says Davis and his officers dressed as merchants and claimed to be from Liverpool, offering to buy slaves. Invited to dine with the governor, Davis drew a pistol on him instead and his men locked the soldiers in the guardroom, without a fight.

The book says the pirates found about £2,000 in bar gold, less than they hoped, spent two days in the fort, took the guns off their carriages and wrecked the defences. Davis sailed on to the Sierra Leone River and was killed at Príncipe a few months later. His crew then elected Bartholomew Roberts as captain.

Pirates came out of the fort, too. In June 1721 John Massey, an officer sent to guard the hungry garrison, sailed off with his soldiers and George Lowther, a mate on the company ship Gambia Castle. They soon turned to piracy.

Who was Ayuba Suleiman Diallo?

One of the few people from this river whose own story survives is Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, known in England as Job ben Solomon. He was born in about 1701 in Bundu, inland in today’s Senegal, and was an educated Muslim and a merchant. In February 1730 his father sent him to the Gambia to sell two captives. While he was trading across the river, Mandinka raiders seized him and his interpreter and sold them to an English captain.

Ayuba was shipped to Annapolis, in Maryland, and set to work in the tobacco fields. He ran away, was jailed in 1731, and wrote a letter to his father. It reached James Oglethorpe, a leader of the Royal African Company, who paid for his freedom. In 1734 he sailed home on a company ship, and Francis Moore, a company clerk at James Fort from 1730, wrote about his return.

What is Kunta Kinteh Island like today?

The fort was destroyed and rebuilt several times. The French destroyed it for the last time in 1779, and it has been a ruin ever since.

Today the island holds the ruins of the fort, a small jetty and old baobab trees. It became a national monument in 1995 and, with Albreda, Juffureh and Fort Bullen, a World Heritage Site in 2003. Its new name honours Kunta Kinte, the hero of Alex Haley’s book Roots, which tells of a young Gambian shipped to Annapolis in 1767, long after the game’s era.