Image from Google Maps

Sierra Leone is a small West African nation about the size of South Carolina. A former British colony, it gained its independence in 1961.

Sierra Leone’s capital city of Freetown is located at the entrance to a great natural harbor called the "Sierra Leone River." Freetown was established in 1787 as a settlement for freed slaves, but the great harbor and its islands had been a hotbed of slave trading for centuries.

Bunce Island lies about 17 miles upriver from Freetown in the upper reaches of the great harbor. A tiny, finger-shaped island only about 1600 feet long, it was strategically located at the limit of deep water in the great harbor, the place where the slave ships sailing upriver came to anchor.

Bunce Island was the center of commerce in Sierra Leone for more than a century before Freetown was established. Seeing the uninhabited island today, Sierra Leoneans find it surprising that such a tiny island could have such a long and terrible history.

The Sierra Leone Government is now looking for international support to help preserve Bunce Island and transform it into a fully interpreted historic site. When that happens, the Bunce Island Virtual Archaeology Project will donate the images it has created for the site's interpretation.

Photo by Vera Viditz-Ward

Bunce Island is a slave castle, one of the large fortified trading posts European slave merchants built on the coast of West Africa during the period of the Atlantic slave trade.

British slave traders operated on Bunce Island between about 1670 and 1807, putting about 30,000 African captives aboard slave ships bound for the West Indies and North America.

While other slave castles shipped the vast majority of their African captives to the West Indies, Bunce Island sent slaves to both the West Indies and the North American Colonies. Bunce Island’s commercial ties to North America were strong enough that the castle would actually figure in various ways in the American Revolutionary War. For these reasons, Bunce Island is arguably the most important historic site in Africa for the United States.

Today, the Bunce Island castle lies in ruins. Many of its walls have collapsed, and tropical vegetation now covers the entire site. Without the work of historians and archaeologists, it would be impossible to know what Bunce Island looked like when it last operated 200 years ago.

 

European slave traders built about forty major slave castles along the coast of West Africa. These fortified trading posts – some resembling medieval castles -- are scattered along a 3,000-mile stretch of Atlantic coastline from Mauritania in the north to Benin in the south.

Several European nations -- including Britain, France, Holland, Denmark, and Sweden -- operated the slave castles. European traders purchased African captives at the castles, imprisoned them, and loaded them aboard slave ships bound for the Americas. The West African slave castles have been called "Warehouses of Humanity."

Elmina Castle in Ghana is the largest of all the slave castles. Established by the Portuguese in 1482, it was later seized by the Dutch, and later still, by the English. Many African Americans visit Elmina every year to learn what their ancestors endured during the Atlantic slave trade.

But Bunce Island has a much stronger connection to African Americans than Elmina and the other slave castles in West Africa. While Elmina and the other castles sent the vast majority of their captives to the West Indies, Bunce Island had strong links to both the West Indies and the North American Colonies. No other slave castle is so strongly connected to African Americans.

© 2008 Chatelain and Opala

Virtual archaeology uses 3-D computer graphics to visualize archaeological findings. Since archaeologists uncover vast amounts of data from their surface surveys and excavations, analyzing these findings has always been difficult and time-consuming. But computers are now making it possible to see and understand archaeological data in greater depth than ever before.

The most vivid tool of virtual archaeology is the 3-D reconstruction of ancient buildings and landscapes. Using computer graphics and animation archaeologists can now transform the data they collect into photo-realistic images of houses, forts, settlements, and even entire cities, showing them in naturalistic detail as they existed hundreds or thousands of years ago.

Virtual archaeology is particularly valuable for the recreation of historic sites related to the Atlantic slave trade. Unlike the Jewish holocaust and other terrible events of the 20th century that should never be forgotten, the Atlantic slave trade took place before the invention of photography, and we can only imagine its horrors based on written accounts of the period. But virtual archaeology is now making it possible to see the Atlantic slave trade as it really was.

An African historian once called Bunce Island a "Place Where History Sleeps." Virtual archaeology is now waking Bunce Island from its long sleep, and when Sierra Leoneans finally succeed at preserving the castle and developing it as an historic site, these computer-generated images will help visitors understand the castle and its meaning for the modern world.

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European slave traders put about 12 million African captives aboard slave ships bound for the New World between about 1500 and 1850. Many captives died during the terrible middle passage, the torturous voyage across the Atlantic, and their bodies were thrown overboard.

The Atlantic slave trade was based on the plantation economy in the Americas. Sugar was the most lucrative of all the plantation crops grown with slave labor, and the slave trade was largely driven by sugar production in tropical areas of the West Indies and Northeastern Brazil. Sugar yielded vast fortunes for American planters and for European importers and ship owners.

Although the North American plantation crops – tobacco, cotton, rice, and indigo – were also valuable, they were nowhere near as valuable as sugar, and only about 4% of the African captives taken across the Atlantic went to what is now the United States. Most African captives were taken to the tropical sugar-growing areas in the Caribbean and Brazil.

Bunce Island sent the majority its captives to the Caribbean Basin, but it also sent many to North America, and especially to the rice-growing colonies of South Carolina and Georgia. African farmers in Sierra Leone and other parts of the West African "Rice Coast" had been growing rice for centuries, and they were experts at its cultivation. South Carolina and Georgia planters knew that the captives brought from Bunce Island had the technical skills they were looking for.

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We are reconstructing Bunce Island as it appeared in 1805, the year a British traveler, named Joseph Corry, made the last known period drawing of the castle. Corry’s drawing is detailed, but it also inaccurate in many respects, and by using the tools of virtual archaeology we can show what Bunce Island actually looked like when Corry visited it 200 years ago.

The project directors are Joseph Opala, an historian with 30 years’ experience studying Bunce Island’s history and archaeology, and Gary Chatelain, a specialist in Computer Assisted Design and the history of interior design. Both are professors at James Madison University in Virginia.

We are drawing on all the available historical evidence for our reconstruction of Bunce Island, including not just Corry’s 1805 drawing, but also four other period drawings made during earlier phases of the castle’s development. We are also drawing on period documents describing the castle’s architecture, and on detailed archaeological studies of the ruins.

Since the project began in 2004, we have reconstructed the island itself, the slave castle and its buildings, and the African village that lay outside the walls of the castle. But this is a work in progress. We are now beginning to recreate the interiors of the castle’s rooms by adding period furnishing and artifacts, and we will ultimately add human figures, including the British slave traders and their African workers in period dress, and the captives locked in the slave prisons.

Our ultimate goal is to represent Bunce Island during the period of the Atlantic slave trade so accurately and in as such great visual detail that people today can see the Atlantic slave trade for themselves and understand its terrible impact on the lives of millions.