Bunce Island: The British Slave Castle in Sierra Leone

Bunce Island is a small island in the Sierra Leone River where British traders ran a fortified slave-trading post from about 1670 until the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807. Tens of thousands of Africans were held there before being shipped across the Atlantic. The island is especially significant for its links to the rice plantations of South Carolina and Georgia and to the Gullah Geechee people of the American Lowcountry.

Origins of the fort

Bunce Island lies about 30 kilometres upriver from today’s Freetown, at the highest point that large ocean-going ships could easily reach. Its position made it a natural meeting place between European ships and African traders who brought captives down the rivers of the interior.

English traders built the first fort on the island around 1670. It was soon operated by the Royal African Company, which held a royal monopoly over English trade with West Africa. The fort suffered repeated attacks and changes of fortune: it was raided by pirates and by rival traders, and the company’s presence weakened in the 1720s, when the island was attacked by local and Afro-Portuguese traders and partly abandoned.

Grant, Oswald and Company

In 1748 the island was taken over by a group of London merchants, most of them Scots, headed by Alexander Grant and Richard Oswald. Under Grant, Oswald and Company the post was rebuilt and became one of the busiest British slave-trading stations on the Upper Guinea coast.

The owners organised a regular trade in which European goods, textiles, guns and alcohol were exchanged for captives brought from the interior. Those captives were held in open yards behind the fort before being loaded onto slave ships. Contemporary accounts record that the managers even laid out a small golf course on the island for themselves and visiting captains, a detail that historians often cite to show the gulf between the traders and the people they held.

After Oswald’s company, the island passed to the Anderson family of London, who continued the trade until Parliament abolished the British slave trade in 1807. The fort was also burned by French naval forces in 1779, during the American War of Independence, and rebuilt.

The rice connection

Bunce Island lay in a region that Europeans called the Rice Coast, where African farmers had grown rice for centuries. Planters in South Carolina and Georgia, whose wealth depended on rice, were willing to pay high prices for people from this region because many already knew how to grow, process and irrigate rice.

The Charleston merchant Henry Laurens acted as the agent for Bunce Island’s owners, selling captives landed from their ships. Laurens later became President of the Continental Congress. Remarkably, Richard Oswald represented Britain in the peace negotiations that ended the American War of Independence in 1782 and 1783, while Laurens was one of the American commissioners.

The enslaved people taken to the Lowcountry contributed farming knowledge, language and culture. Their descendants include the Gullah Geechee people, whose Creole language and traditions show clear connections with Sierra Leone. Since the late 20th century, visits between Gullah communities and Sierra Leone have strengthened public awareness of this link.

The slave trade in context

Bunce Island was one part of the vast system described in the Middle Passage and in the triangular trade. Compared with the great castles of the Gold Coast it was small, but for much of the 18th century it was among the most important British slave-trading posts in the region.

Downriver, in 1787, British abolitionists founded a settlement for formerly enslaved people, the Province of Freedom, which would grow into Freetown. For two decades a slave-trading fort and a colony founded in the name of freedom operated on the same river.

Legacy

After 1807 the fort fell into ruin. In the 19th century the island was used briefly for a sawmill and other ventures, and the tropical forest gradually covered the walls. In 1948 Bunce Island was declared a national monument of Sierra Leone.

Since the 1970s historians and archaeologists have studied the site, and it has become a place of remembrance for people of African descent in the United States. The remains include parts of the fort walls, gun emplacements, cannons and the gravestones of European traders who died on the island.

Timeline

• c. 1670: English traders build the first fort on Bunce Island.
• 1670s-1720s: The Royal African Company operates the post, with repeated attacks and interruptions.
• 1748: Grant, Oswald and Company take over the island and expand the slave trade.
• 1750s-1770s: Henry Laurens sells captives from Bunce Island in Charleston.
• 1779: French naval forces burn the fort; it is later rebuilt.
• 1787: A settlement for freed Black Britons is founded near the future Freetown.
• 1807: Britain abolishes the slave trade and the post soon closes.
• 1948: Bunce Island becomes a national monument of Sierra Leone.

Why it matters

Bunce Island connects West Africa directly with the plantation economy of North America. Its ruins document the business of the British slave trade and help explain the origins of the Gullah Geechee people and their enduring ties to Sierra Leone.