Journal of an African Cruiser by Bridge, Horatio, 1806-1893, Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804-1864

Before quitting the coast, I must not forget that our cruising-ground has a classical claim upon the imagination, as being the very same over which Robinson Crusoe made two or three of his voyages. That famous navigator sailed all along the African shore, between Cape de Verd and the Equator, trading for ivory, for gold dust, and especially for slaves, with as little compunction as Pedro Blanco himself. It is remarkable that De Foe, a man of most severe and delicate conscience, should have made his hero a slave-dealer, and should display a perfect insensibility to anything culpable in the traffic. Morality has taken a great step in advance, since that day; or, at least, it has thrown a strong light on one spot, with perhaps a corresponding shadow on some other. The next age may shift the illumination, and show us sins as great as that of the slave-trade, but which now enter into the daily practice of men claiming to be just and wise.

CHAPTER XXI.

Sierra Leone--Sources of its Population--Appearance of the Town and surrounding Country--Religious Ceremonies of the Mandingoes--Treatment of liberated Slaves--Police of Sierra Leone--Agencies for Emigration to the West Indies--Colored Refugees from the United States--Unhealthiness of Sierra Leone--Dr. Fergusson--Splendid Church--Melancholy Fate of a Queen's Chaplain--Currency--Probable Ruin of the Colony.

_October_ 15.--We arrived off the point of Sierra Leone, last night, and were piloted up to the town, this morning.

This is one of the most important and interesting places on the coast of Africa. It was founded in 1787, chiefly through the benevolent agency of Mr. Granville Sharp, as a place of refuge for a considerable number of colored persons, who had left their masters, and were destitute and unsheltered in the streets of London. Five years later, the population of the colony was recruited by above a thousand slaves, who had fled from the United States to Nova Scotia, during the American revolution. Again, in 1800, there was an addition of more than five hundred maroons, or outlawed negroes, from Jamaica. And finally, since 1807, Sierra Leone has been the receptacle for the great numbers of native Africans liberated from slave-ships, on their capture by British cruisers. Pensioners, with their families, from the black regiments in the West Indies, have likewise been settled here. The population is now estimated at about forty-five thousand; a much smaller amount, probably, than the aggregate of all the emigrants who have been brought hither. The colony has failed to prosper, but not through any lack of effort on the part of England. It is the point, of all others on the African coast, where British energy, capital, and life, have been most profusely expended.