Bunce Island

Bunce Island lies in the Sierra Leone estuary, where ships from the Atlantic could meet traders coming downriver. Its small size belies the reach of the commerce once conducted there: a fortified trading station on the island became a centre of the transatlantic slave trade. Local African and Afro-European merchants supplied captives to its European operators, linking inland networks to ships bound across the ocean.

An English trading post was established here in the late seventeenth century. After an attack in 1728, the fort was rebuilt, and later in the eighteenth century London merchants made Bunce Island a major supplier of enslaved Africans to plantations in South Carolina and Georgia. Many of those transported were taken from rice-growing regions of West Africa. The fort and its yards bear witness to a trade that tore people from their homes and carried them across the Atlantic.