Yawri Bay

Yawri Bay opens onto the Atlantic south of the Sierra Leone peninsula. Along the coast beyond it, Sherbro communities received foreign traders who sought goods from the rivers and inland country. In the seventeenth century some English merchants married Sherbro women, establishing families with ties to local rulers. Their descendants became influential intermediaries in coastal commerce, and in the eighteenth century participated in the trade that carried enslaved Africans across the Atlantic.