Bunce Island was first settled and fortified by English slave traders circa 1670. During its early history, the castle was operated by two London-based firms: the
Royal African Company and its offshoot, the Gambia Adventurers, the latter a "Crown-chartered company" or
parastatal subsidised by
the Crown. On October 31, 1678, at
Gresham College the latter offered the former the contents of their investment on the island for 4,644l. 4s. 9d. The castle was not commercially successful but it served as a symbol of English influence in the region, where Portuguese slave traders had been established since the 1500s. The early phase of the castle's history ended in 1728 when Bunce Island was raided by José Lopez da Moura, a
Luso-African slave trader based in the area. He was the richest man in present-day territory of Sierra Leone, the grandson of a
Mane king and part of the hybrid Luso-African community that had developed along the lower rivers. This class acted as middlemen, resisting efforts by the Royal African Company to monopolise trade with African rulers. Lopez led others in destroying the Bunce Island factory. Bunce Island was abandoned until the mid-1740s. It was later operated by the London-based firm
Grant,
Oswald & Company, founded by Scottish merchants
Richard Oswald and Alexander Grant, who took over in 1748. In 1785 Bunce and a number of other dependent islands were
conveyed to the company of
John and Alexander Anderson. Bunce Island is best known as one of the chief processing points for slaves to be sold to
planters in Lowcountry of the British colonies of
South Carolina and
Georgia, including the
Sea Islands, where they developed extensive rice plantations. Rice requires a great deal of technical knowledge for its successful cultivation. South Carolinan and Georgian planters were willing to pay premium prices for slave labour brought from what they called the "Rice Coast" of West Africa, the traditional rice-growing region stretching from what is now
Senegal and
Gambia in the north down to present-day
Sierra Leone and
Liberia in the south. Still, records of the port of Charleston show that nearly 40 percent of the slaves came from
Angola. Bunce Island was the largest British slave castle on the Rice Coast. African farmers with rice-growing skills were kidnapped from inland areas and sold at the castle or at one of its many "outfactories" (trading posts) along the coast before being transported to North America. Several thousand slaves from Bunce Island were taken to the ports of
Charleston (South Carolina) and
Savannah (Georgia) during the second half of the eighteenth century. Slave auction advertisements in those cities often announced slave cargoes arriving from "Bance" or "Bense" Island. American colonist
Henry Laurens served as Bunce Island's business agent in Charleston, and was a wealthy planter and
slave trader. He later was elected as
President of the Continental Congress during the
Revolutionary War, and was later appointed as the
United States envoy to the Netherlands. Captured by the British en route to his post in Europe during the war, he was imprisoned in the
Tower of London. After hostilities ended, he became one of the Peace Commissioners who negotiated United States independence under the
Treaty of Paris. The chief negotiator on the British side was
Richard Oswald, the principal owner of Bunce Island; he and Laurens had been friends for thirty years. Bunce Island was also linked to the Northern colonies in America. Slave ships based in northern ports frequently called at Bunce Island, taking on supplies such as fresh water and provisions for the Atlantic crossing, and buying slaves for sale in the British islands of the West Indies and the Southern Colonies. The North American slave ships that called at Bunce Island were sailing out of
Newport (Rhode Island),
New London (Connecticut),
Salem (Massachusetts), and
New York City. The
Atlantic slave trade continued to be legal for the next two decades. In 1807 the
British parliament voted to
abolish the slave trade. The following year Freetown became a
Crown Colony and the
Royal Navy based its Africa Squadron there. They sent regular patrols to search for slave vessels violating the ban. Bunce Island was shut down for slave-trading; British firms used the castle as a cotton plantation, a trading post and a sawmill. These activities were economically unsuccessful and the island was abandoned around 1840, after which the buildings and stone walls fell into decay. Historian David Hancock documented Bunce Island during the period of Grant, Oswald & Company in his study,
Citizens of the World (1997). In 2006, television actor
Isaiah Washington visited the island after learning through a DNA test he was descended from the indigenous
Mende people of Sierra Leone. Washington later donated US$25,000 to a project to create a computer reconstruction of Bunce Island as it appeared in 1805, to mark the bicentennial of the abolition of the African slave trade by the UK and the United States. Their ancestor
Thomas Walker (AKA "Beau Walker") came from
Bristol, one of Britain's principal slaving ports. Walker was involved in 11 slaving expeditions; he immigrated with his fortune to the US, where he became naturalised in 1792. One of his descendants, Dorothy (Walker) Bush, was the mother of George H.W. Bush. ==Conservation==