The area was infamous in the 1800s for its active participation in the
Atlantic slave trade under the
Gallinas people. The Gallinas area was actually not very active in the slave trade, or any kind of trade for that matter, before this time. Its forbidding dense mangrove swamps and relatively sparse population, led the Gallinas River to be largely overlooked by European traders. During the heyday of the slave trade, the major entrepots in the region were elsewhere, notably at
Bunce Island,
Sherbro Island, and
Cape Mount. It is only towards the end of the 18th Century, as demand for slaves kept rising, that slave traders took an interest in previously marginal areas like the Gallinas River. After the British ban on the slave trade in 1808, closing down the major depots, the obscurity of Gallinas River allowed slave traders to continue their activities there.
Pedro Blanco, a notorious Spanish slave trader, was based on the coast of Sierra Leone at Gallinas between 1822 and 1838. In 1840
Richard Doherty, the
Governor of
Sierra Leone, discovered that Fry Norman, a
Black British subject and her child were being held as slaves on the islands at the mouth of the Gallinas River, which prompted Lieutenant
Joseph Denman commanding the
Wanderer to force the king both to free Norman and abolish the slave trade in his dominions. Denman promptly sailed up the Gallinas River to destroy Spanish slave barracoons. ==References==