Bunce Island (also spelled "Bence," "Bense," or "Bance" at different periods) is an island in the Sierra Leone River. It is situated in the estuary of the Rokel River and Port Loko Creek, about upriver from Sierra Leone's capital city Freetown. The island measures about by and houses a castle that was built by the Royal Africa Company in c.1670.

Tens of thousands of Africans were shipped from here to the North American colonies of South Carolina and Georgia to be forced into slavery, and are the ancestors of many African Americans of the United States.

Although the island is small, its strategic position at the limit of navigation for ocean-going ships in Africa's largest natural harbour made it an ideal base for European slave traders. To mark the 2007–2008 bicentennial of Britain's abolition of the slave trade, a team at James Madison University created a three-dimensional animation of the castle as it was in 1805, and an exhibit on the site that was displayed to museums all across the U.S. which is now held by the Sierra Leone National Museum.

History

right|thumb|Bunce Island in 1726 during the period of the Royal African Company

Bunce Island was first settled and fortified by English slave traders circa 1670. During its early history, the castle was operated by two London-based firms: the Royal African Company and its offshoot, the Gambia Adventurers, the latter a "Crown-chartered company" or parastatal subsidised by the Crown. On October 31, 1678, at Gresham College the latter offered the former the contents of their investment on the island for 4,644l. 4s. 9d. The castle was not commercially successful but it served as a symbol of English influence in the region, where Portuguese slave traders had been established since the 1500s.

The early phase of the castle's history ended in 1728 when Bunce Island was raided by José Lopez da Moura, a Luso-African slave trader based in the area. He was the richest man in present-day territory of Sierra Leone, the grandson of a Mane king and part of the hybrid Luso-African community that had developed along the lower rivers. This class acted as middlemen, resisting efforts by the Royal African Company to monopolise trade with African rulers. Lopez led others in destroying the Bunce Island factory.

Bunce Island was abandoned until the mid-1740s. It was later operated by the London-based firm Grant, Oswald & Company, founded by Scottish merchants Richard Oswald and Alexander Grant, who took over in 1748.

In 1785 Bunce and a number of other dependent islands were conveyed to the company of John and Alexander Anderson.]]

Bunce Island is best known as one of the chief processing points for slaves to be sold to planters in Lowcountry of the British colonies of South Carolina and Georgia, including the Sea Islands, where they developed extensive rice plantations. Rice requires a great deal of technical knowledge for its successful cultivation. South Carolinan and Georgian planters were willing to pay premium prices for slave labour brought from what they called the "Rice Coast" of West Africa, the traditional rice-growing region stretching from what is now Senegal and Gambia in the north down to present-day Sierra Leone and Liberia in the south. Still, records of the port of Charleston show that nearly 40 percent of the slaves came from Angola.

Bunce Island was the largest British slave castle on the Rice Coast. African farmers with rice-growing skills were kidnapped from inland areas and sold at the castle or at one of its many "outfactories" (trading posts) along the coast before being transported to North America. Several thousand slaves from Bunce Island were taken to the ports of Charleston (South Carolina) and Savannah (Georgia) during the second half of the eighteenth century. Slave auction advertisements in those cities often announced slave cargoes arriving from "Bance" or "Bense" Island.

American colonist Henry Laurens served as Bunce Island's business agent in Charleston, and was a wealthy planter and slave trader. He later was elected as President of the Continental Congress during the Revolutionary War, and was later appointed as the United States envoy to the Netherlands. Captured by the British en route to his post in Europe during the war, he was imprisoned in the Tower of London. After hostilities ended, he became one of the Peace Commissioners who negotiated United States independence under the Treaty of Paris. The chief negotiator on the British side was Richard Oswald, the principal owner of Bunce Island; he and Laurens had been friends for thirty years.

Bunce Island was also linked to the Northern colonies in America. Slave ships based in northern ports frequently called at Bunce Island, taking on supplies such as fresh water and provisions for the Atlantic crossing, and buying slaves for sale in the British islands of the West Indies and the Southern Colonies. The North American slave ships that called at Bunce Island were sailing out of Newport (Rhode Island), New London (Connecticut), Salem (Massachusetts), and New York City. The Atlantic slave trade continued to be legal for the next two decades.

In 1807 the British parliament voted to abolish the slave trade. The following year Freetown became a Crown Colony and the Royal Navy based its Africa Squadron there. They sent regular patrols to search for slave vessels violating the ban. Bunce Island was shut down for slave-trading; British firms used the castle as a cotton plantation, a trading post and a sawmill. These activities were economically unsuccessful and the island was abandoned around 1840, after which the buildings and stone walls fell into decay. Historian David Hancock documented Bunce Island during the period of Grant, Oswald & Company in his study, Citizens of the World (1997).

In 2006, television actor Isaiah Washington visited the island after learning through a DNA test he was descended from the indigenous Mende people of Sierra Leone. Washington later donated US$25,000 to a project to create a computer reconstruction of Bunce Island as it appeared in 1805, to mark the bicentennial of the abolition of the African slave trade by the UK and the United States. Their ancestor Thomas Walker (AKA "Beau Walker") came from Bristol, one of Britain's principal slaving ports. Walker was involved in 11 slaving expeditions; he immigrated with his fortune to the US, where he became naturalised in 1792. One of his descendants, Dorothy (Walker) Bush, was the mother of George H.W. Bush.

In October 2010, the Bunce Island Coalition (US) and its local partner organisation announced the start of the Bunce Island Preservation Project, a five-year, US$5 million effort to preserve the ruins of the castle as a historic landmark and to build a museum in Freetown devoted to the island's history and the influence of the Atlantic slave trade in Sierra Leone.

Notable visitors

General Colin Powell, then Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, visited Bunce Island in 1992 while on an official visit to Sierra Leone. Powell spoke of his feelings in a farewell speech he made before leaving the country; "I am an American ... but today, I am something more ... I am an African too ... I feel my roots here in this continent".

Climate

Like the climate for the rest of Sierra Leone, the climate for Bunce Island is tropical, with two seasons determining the agricultural cycle: the rainy season from May to November, and a dry season from December to May, which includes harmattan, when cool, dry winds blow in off the Sahara Desert and the night-time temperature can be as low as . The average temperature is and varies from around during the year.

References

Bibliography

Citations

Further reading

  • Ball, Edward (1998), Slaves in the Family, New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux.
  • Brooks, George (2003), Eurafricans in Western Africa: Commerce, Social Status, Gender, and Religious Observance from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century, Athens: Ohio University Press.
  • DeCorse, Christopher (2007), "Bunce Island Cultural Resource Assessment," Report prepared for the U.S. Embassy in Sierra Leone and the Sierra Leone Monuments and Relics Commission.
  • Farrow, Anne, Joel Lang & Jenifer Frank. (2005) Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, New York: Ballantine Books.
  • Fyfe, Christopher (1962), A History of Sierra Leone, London: Oxford University Press.
  • Hancock, David (1995), "Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Landsman, Ned C. (2001), Nation and Province in the First British Empire: Scotland and the Americas, 1600–1800, Cranbury, NJ: Bucknell University Press.
  • Kup, Alexander Peter. (1961) A History of Sierra Leone, 1400–1787, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Opala, Joseph (2007), "Bunce Island: A British Slave Castle in Sierra Leone (Historical Summary)" in DeCorse (2007).
  • Rodney, Walter (1970), A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545–1800, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
  • Historical and heritage sites - Visit Sierra Leone
  • My Return to Sierra Leone: Bunce Island

Historical importance

  • "Bunce Island: A British Slave Castle in Sierra Leone", Official website for the Bunce Island exhibit
  • Joseph A. Opala, "Bunce Island in Sierra Leone", The Gullah: Rice, Slavery and the Sierre Leone-American Connection, 2003, Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, Yale University
  • "Bunce Island Computer Reconstruction Project", CBS News, 14 Mar 2007
  • "Priscilla's Homecoming", USF Africana Heritage Project

Preservation project

  • "Bunce Island preservation project", Providence Journal, 22 June 2011
  • US Funded Coalition Restores Key West African Slave Trade Castle", Christian Science Monitor, 5 August 2011
  • "Former JMU prof continues groundbreaking research into TransAtlantic slave trade", "Old South High" website, 9 July 2013, Harrisonburg, Virginia
  • "Bunce Island Virtual Archaeology Project"

Images

  • Polly de Blank, "In Photos: Bunce Island", BBC News, 2007
  • "The Slave Fortress and Bunce Island": Photos by Peter Andersen, Sierra Leone Web
  • Photos of Bunce Island, by Matthew Oldfield 1
  • Photos of Bunce Island, by Matthew Oldfield 2
  • Bunce Island, Global Heritage Network, Satellite photos

Videos

  • Family Across the Sea, Full-length documentary by SCETV, 1990
  • The Language You Cry In, Full-length documentary by INKO Productions, 1998
  • Tour of Bunce Island for MSNBC's Rock Center, 15 February 2012