Bunce Island - Eclipse of Bunce Island

Eclipse of Bunce Island

British philanthropists involved with the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor established Freetown in 1787, a settlement for freed slaves, on the Sierra Leone Peninsula, just 20 miles downriver from Bunce Island. The Atlantic slave trade continued to be legal for the next two decades. During that period, Bunce Island slave traders harassed the fledgling colony by inciting local African chiefs against it, organizing trade boycotts to isolate it, and at one point kidnapping and selling as slaves some Freetown colonists whom they accused of stealing goods at the castle.

In 1807 the British Parliament outlawed the Atlantic slave trade. The following year Freetown became a Crown Colony, and the British Navy based its Africa Squadron there. They sent out regular patrols to search for slave vessels violating the ban. Bunce Island shut down for slave trading. British firms used the castle for other purposes: a cotton plantation, a trading post and a sawmill. These activities were economically unsuccessful, and the island was abandoned around 1840. The buildings and stone walls deteriorated.

Today, substantial ruins stand on the north end of the island. Bance Island House, the headquarters building where the Chief Agent lived with his senior officers, is at the center of the castle. Parts of the building still rise to second-story level. Immediately behind it is the open-air slave yard, divided between a large area for men and a smaller one for women and children. Remnants stand of two watchtowers, a fortification with places for eight cannons, and a gunpowder magazine. Some of the cannons bear the royal cipher of King George III). At the south end of the island, several inscribed tombstones mark the graves of slave traders, slave ship captains, and the foreman of African workers.