Bunce Island

Bunce Island is a small island in the Sierra Leone River in West Africa, about 32 kilometres upriver from the capital, Freetown. It is only about 500 metres long and 107 metres wide, but it holds the ruins of a castle built by the Royal African Company around 1670. The island sits where large ocean-going ships could go no farther up Africa's largest natural harbour, which made it a handy base for European traders.

For well over a century the castle was a major post of the Atlantic slave trade. Tens of thousands of Africans were shipped from here to North America and the Caribbean, and many African Americans today, especially the Gullah people of the Carolina and Georgia coast, have ancestors who passed through it. Today the island is a place of memory and a protected historic site.

Who ran the castle

English traders fortified the island around 1670. Two London firms ran it in the early years, the Royal African Company and a spin-off called the Gambia Adventurers. In 1728 a powerful Luso-African trader named José Lopez da Moura raided and destroyed it. After the island lay empty until the mid-1740s, the firm Grant, Oswald and Company took over in 1748 and made it highly profitable. French forces attacked it four times and pirates twice, and the traders rebuilt it each time.

Link to America

Many captives were sold to rice planters in South Carolina and Georgia, who prized farmers skilled in growing rice. Ships from London, Liverpool, Bristol and New England ports also stopped at Bunce Island for water and supplies. The island's owner, Richard Oswald, later helped negotiate the Treaty of Paris, which ended the American War of Independence.

Ruins and remembering

Britain banned the slave trade in 1807 and the Royal Navy based its patrol squadron at Freetown. Bunce Island was shut down as a slave trading post and then abandoned around 1840. Still standing are the remains of the headquarters house, watchtowers, a gun platform and the gunpowder store, plus old graves. It became Sierra Leone's first protected historic site in 1948, and in 2007 to 2008 a team at James Madison University made a 3D reconstruction of the castle as it looked in 1805.

On the globe

The model shows the small island with its ruined fort. Look at the walls that are all that remains of the old castle.