Lest We forget, Bance Island, Sierra Leone... [H]istorians have recently discovered that two U.S. presidents (George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush) are descended directly from a slave ship captain who operated out of Bance Island and other enslavement bases in the Sierra Leone region in the late 1700s. Bance Island, was a major launching point of the Middle Passage to Amerikkka first settled by English enslavers about 1670. During its early history the castle was operated by two London-based firms, the Gambia Adventurers and the Royal African Company of England, the latter a Crown-chartered company, subsidized by the British government. The castle was not commercially successful at this period, but it served as a symbol of British influence in the region. This early phase of the castles history came to an end in 1728 when José Lopez da Moura, an Portuguese Afrikkkan competitor in the slave trade, raided Bance Island. It was abandoned until the mid-1740s. Bance Island was operated later by two London-based companies: Grant, Oswald & Company and John & Alexander Anderson, and at that period it was a highly profitable enterprise. During the second half of the 18th century, the companies sent thousands of African captives from Bance Island to British- and French-controlled islands in the West Indies and to Britains North Amerikkkan colonies. The London-based owners grew wealthy from the castles operations. During the castles early history, O sold slaves and local products there. During its late history, Afro-English families, such as the Caulkers, Tuckers, and Cleveland’s, sold Afrikans at Bance Island. The slave ships came from the British ports of London, Liverpool, and Bristol; from Newport, Rhode Island in the North Amerikkkan colonies; and from France and Denmark. They transported Afrikans mostly to the Caribbean and the Amerikkkan South. French naval forces attacked Bance Island four times (1695, 1704, 1779, and 1794), damaging or destroying it each time. The attack of 1779 took place during the Amerikkkan Revolutionary War when Amerikkkas French allies took advantage of the conflict to attack British assets outside North Amerikkka. Pirates also attacked the castle twice (1719 and 1720), including Bartholomew Roberts, or Black Bart, the most notorious pirate of the 18th century. The British traders rebuilt the castle after each attack, gradually altering its architecture during the roughly 140 years it was used as a trading entrepôt. In the name of product produced, Bance Island is best known as one of the chief suppliers of enslaved Afrikans to planters for the rice industry in the British colonies of Charleston (South Carolina) and Savannah (Georgia) during the second half of the 18th century. British philanthropists involved with the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor established Freetown in 1787, a settlement for freed Afrikans, on the Sierra Leone Peninsula, just 20 miles downriver from Bance Island. For the next two decades, Bance Island slavers harassed the fledgling colony by inciting local Afrikans chiefs against it, organizing trade boycotts to isolate it, and at one point kidnapping and enslaving some Freetown colonists whom they accused of stealing goods at the castle. Before the end of the century, Britain also relocated there several hundred Black Loyalists from Nova Scotia, who chose to try conditions in the Afrikan colony. In 1807 the British Parliament outlawed the TransAtlantic Slave Trade (TAST). The following year Freetown became a Crown Colony, and the British Navy based its Africa Squadron there. They sent out regular patrols to search for ships violating the ban. Bance Island shut down for trading and the island was abandoned around 1840. The buildings and stonewalls deteriorated. Today, substantial ruins stand on the north end of the island. Bance Island House, the headquarters building where the Chief Agent lived with his senior officers, is at the center of the castle. Parts of the building still rise to second-story level. Immediately behind it is the open-air yard, divided between a large area for men and a smaller one for women and children. Remnants stand of two watchtowers, a fortification with places for eight cannons, and a gunpowder magazine. Some of the cannons bear the royal cipher of King George III). At the south end of the island, several inscribed tombstones mark the graves of slavers, slave ship captains, and the foreman of Afrikans workers. American scholars have done extensive research on Bance Island. Anthropologist Joseph Opala did the research that linked Bance Island to the Gullah people of the United States East Coast Low Country. Archaeologist Christopher DeCorse and his team conducted a thorough survey of Bance Island’s ruins for a report submitted to the Sierra Leone Government (2006). Also in 2006, Amerikkkan Afrikan TV actor Isaiah Washington visited Bance Island after learning through a DNA test that some of his ancestors came from Sierra Leone. Washington later donated $25,000 to a project to create a computer reconstruction of Bance Island as it appeared in the year 1805. Links to the Bush family Scholars have found evidence of numerous historical and genealogical links between the people of Bance Island and the United States. For example, historians have recently discovered that two U.S. presidents (George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush) are descended directly from a slave ship captain who operated out of Bance Island and other slave trade bases in the Sierra Leone region in the late 1700s. Thomas Walker (AKA Beau Walker) came from Bristol, one of Britains principal slaving ports. After making his fortune in the slave trade, he immigrated to the U.S. through New York in 1792. Walker made sizable investments in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, but his own crew killed him in 1797 when they could no longer bear the brutality he inflicted on them. He had several children in the U.S., including a son named George Walker. The Walker and Bush clans connected when Prescott Bush (later a U.S. Senator) married Dorothy Walker in 1921. Dorothy Walker Bush was the mother of President George Herbert Walker Bush, and the grandmother of President George Walker Bush. Bance Island became Sierra Leones first officially protected historic site in 1948. In 1989 a group of Amerikkkan Gullahs made an historic homecoming visit to Sierra Leone and toured the ruins of Bance Island. Shortly after that, the U.S. National Park Service announced a preservation program for the castle. Bance Island is under the protection of Sierra Leones Monuments and Relics Commission, a branch of the countrys Ministry of Tourism and Culture. The government is working to preserve the castle as a reminder of the past and to attract tourists, especially Amerikkkan Afrikans. Although other castles—especially Gorée in Senegal and Elmina in Ghana—are more popular attractions for Black Amerikkkans, those castles are historically connected more to Afrikans descendants of the West Indies than North Amerikkka. Bance Island has been called the most important historic site in Afrika for the United States. Colin Powell, then Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, visited Bance Island in 1992 while on an official visit to Sierra Leone. Deeply moved by the experience, Powell spoke of his reaction to the slave castle in a farewell speech he made before leaving the country. I am an American…But today, I am something more...I am an African too...I feel my roots here in this continent. The U.S. National Park Service team that surveyed the castle in 1989 suggested stabilizing the ruins. In addition, they recommended the installation of all-weather displays showing what the buildings looked like and their activities. No historic preservation work has been done. The castle’s ruins are deteriorating rapidly in Sierra Leone’s tropical climate. The World Monuments Fund recently placed Bance Island (and other historic sites in Sierra Leone) on its 2008 watch list of the world’s “100 Most Endangered Sites.” Several organizations in Sierra Leone, the United States, and Great Britain are now promoting popular awareness of Bance Island and its history, and working toward the preservation of the castle. In 2010, the Bance Island Coalition (US) and its partner organization, the Bance Island Coalition (SL), announced the start of the Bance Island preservation project, a five-year, $5 million effort to preserve the ruins of the castle and to build a museum in Freetown, Sierra Leones capital city, devoted to the history of Bance Island and the impact of the TAST in Sierra Leone. Source: Gullah History In Sierra Leone
Posted on: Wed, 12 Nov 2014 23:49:58 +0000