1670c. 1670–1807 · Bunce Island, Sierra Leone River

Bunce Island and the Sierra Leone slave trade

Watercolour of the white-walled slave fort on Bunce Island in the Sierra Leone River, around 1805 — Archival image: Joseph Corry. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

From about 1670 British companies ran a fortified trading post on a small island in the Sierra Leone River, shipping tens of thousands of captives across the Atlantic. Many went to the rice plantations of South Carolina and Georgia, where planters prized West African rice-growing skills; Gullah Geechee communities there trace ancestry to the region. The trade ended with Britain's 1807 abolition act.