The Bunce Island Attack of 1728: The Disruption and Transformation of the Slave Trade in the Sierra Leone Estuary
In 1728, a coalition of Luso-African middlemen, African wage laborers, and enslaved laborers, with the support of local rulers, attacked the Royal African Company (RAC) fort on Bunce (Bence, Bance) Island in the Sierra Leone River. The assault resulted in the permanent expulsion of the Company and severely disrupted the slave trade. Historians have correctly seen the episode as an effort by Luso-African merchants to regain their position as brokers in the regional slave and commodity trades. However, this does not explain why the fort’s free and enslaved laborers participated in the attack, nor why local polities allowed the attack to take place.
This paper argues that the attack was a response to the tensions caused by a sudden increase in the regional slave trade. In the fort itself, accelerated slave trading prompted the RAC to replace wage-earning laborers (“grumetes”) with enslaved laborers, which had region-wide ramifications. Increased slave trading also placed great pressure on the local food supply, driving up prices for the main staple, rice. Finally, cost-cutting measures implemented by the RAC undermined relations between the Company and local rulers. In the short term, the attack destroyed the regional slave trade, but in the long term the removal of the RAC paved the way for a significant increase in slave trading over, removing an inefficient, monopolistic company and creating a more competitive field of small dealers. The increased availability of low-priced captive labor contributed to the spread of enslaved labor, both in the slaving installations and in regional polities, where it was needed to provision the slave ships. The paper is based on a close reading of RAC records, contextualized within the literature on indigenous political and economic institutions.
