Tracing the Trade in Enslaved Africans back to Bunce Island, Sierra Leone

Once at the fort, kidnapped Africans were tightly controlled and surveilled. Men were confined to an open-air prison yard that offered no shelter; the small area for women and children had a couple rooms to give a bare minimum of privacy.

The existence of a stately home cheek-by-jowl with a place of profound human suffering, writes historian Joseph Opala, is what creates the site’s “strange and unsettling character—it was a combination fortress, trading post, prison, and rich man’s estate.”

But cultivating rice required both manual labor and technical know-how. Meanwhile, the mosquitoes that bred in the standing water of the fields exposed European settlers to diseases against which they had neither resistance nor particularly effective treatment.

Southern rice farmers were therefore in search of a way to maximize their profits while keeping themselves out of harm’s way. For these white planters, the answer was the enslavement of Africans with the skills needed to work the fields for them.

Knowing planters were willing to pay a premium for Africans with this knowledge, the British merchants who ran Bunce ramped up trade to meet this rising demand.

A particularly clear example of the entanglement between Bunce and the white rice farmers of the American South can be seen in the relationship between Henry Laurens, a wealthy South Carolinian rice planter and slave trader, and Richard Oswald, Bunce’s proprietor.

After the war, the two found themselves on opposite sides of the negotiating table at the Treaty of Paris, where Laurens successfully convinced Oswald that the British should return enslaved people who had fought against the rebels to their former enslavers.

In 1947, Macormack Charles Farrell Easmon sailed across the waters of the Sierra Leone River out to an island some distance from the shoreline. Greeting him on the promontory was a dramatic sight: stone ruins buried beneath a nearly impenetrable thicket of roots and vines.

The long-abandoned Bunce Island had become, as Easmon would later call it, “the place where history sleeps.”

By contrast, Bunce’s position of relative remove meant that it preserves intact evidence and artifacts that may have been lost elsewhere. Furthermore, Bunce Island has not undergone the significant reconstruction that has occurred at a number of similar sites.

Today, Bunce Island is Sierra Leone’s most-studied archeological site, and in 2012 it was listed as a tentative nominee for UNESCO World Heritage Site status. Preserving the fort is key to bearing witness to the horrors of slavery and honoring its victims and their descendants.