Sherbro Coast

The Sherbro coast is a world of islands, estuaries and channels on the Atlantic shore of Sierra Leone. English traders sought camwood here from the seventeenth century, and the Royal African Company established a post on York Island in 1688. Some foreign merchants married into influential Sherbro families; their descendants became intermediaries between African communities and overseas traders. In the eighteenth century these lineages played a prominent part in the trade that sent captive Africans across the ocean.