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Sierra Leone first became inhabited by indigenous African peoples at least 2,500 years ago. The Limba were the first tribe known to inhabit Sierra Leone. The dense tropical rainforest partially isolated the region from other West African cultures, and it became a refuge for peoples escaping violence and jihads. Sierra Leone was named by Portuguese explorer Pedro de Sintra, who mapped the region in 1462. The Freetown estuary provided a good natural harbour for ships to shelter and replenish drinking water, and gained more international attention as coastal and trans-Atlantic trade supplanted trans-Saharan trade.
Bunce Island is an island in the Sierra Leone River. It is situated in Freetown Harbour, the estuary of the Rokel River and Port Loko Creek, about 20 miles upriver from Sierra Leone's capital city Freetown. The island measures about 1,650 feet by 350 feet and houses a castle that was built by the Royal Africa Company in c.1670. Tens of thousands of Africans were shipped from here to the North American colonies of South Carolina and Georgia to be forced into slavery, and are the ancestors of many African Americans of the United States.
Sherbro Island is in the Atlantic Ocean, and is included within Bonthe District, Southern Province, Sierra Leone. The island is separated from the African mainland by the Sherbro River in the north and Sherbro Strait in the east. It is 32 miles (51 km) long and up to 15 miles (24 km) wide, covering an area of approximately 230 square miles (600 km2). The western extremity is Cape St. Ann. Bonthe, on the eastern end, is the chief port and commercial centre.
Paul Cuffe, also known as Paul Cuffee was an African American businessman, whaler and abolitionist. Born free into a multiracial family on Cuttyhunk Island, Massachusetts, Cuffe became a successful merchant and sea captain. His mother, Ruth Moses, was a Wampanoag from Harwich, Cape Cod and his father an Ashanti captured as a child in West Africa and sold into slavery in Newport about 1720. In the mid-1740s, his father was manumitted by his Quaker owner, John Slocum. His parents married in 1747 in Dartmouth.
The Sherbro people are a native people of Sierra Leone, who speak the Sherbro language; they make up 1.9% of Sierra Leone's population or 134,606. The Sherbro are found primarily in their homeland in Bonthe District, where they make up 40% of the population, in coastal areas of Moyamba District, and in the Western Area of Sierra Leone, particularly in Freetown. During pre-colonial days, the Sherbro were one of the most dominant ethnic group in Sierra Leone, but in the early 21st century, the Sherbro comprise a small minority in the nation. The Sherbro speak their own language, called Sherbro language.
The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, also known as the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and sometimes referred to as the Abolition Society or Anti-Slavery Society, was a British abolitionist group formed on 22 May 1787. The objective of abolishing the slave trade was achieved in 1807. The abolition of slavery in all British colonies followed in 1833.
Thomas Canry Caulker, (Sherbro) was born into a prominent African family, and his father ruled as King of Bompey, an African polity established in 1820 in what is now Sierra Leone. Caulker is among an early generation of West Africans sent to England for their education. His father wanted him prepared for demands for government and commerce in his homeland, before the Sierra Leone Protectorate was established by Great Britain. His father's ambition for him was influenced by the evangelical Christianity in the region, introduced largely by British abolitionists.
Lieutenant John Clarkson was a Royal Navy officer and abolitionist, the younger brother of Thomas Clarkson, one of the central figures in the abolition of slavery in England and the British Empire at the close of the 18th century. As agent for the Sierra Leone Company, Lieutenant Clarkson was instrumental in the founding of Freetown, today Sierra Leone's capital city, as a haven for chiefly formerly enslaved African-Americans first relocated to Nova Scotia by the British military authorities following the American Revolutionary War.
Thomas Corker was known as an English agent for the Royal African Company on York Island. He married a Sherbro woman and had two sons with her before his early death.
Seniora Doll, or Senora Doll, was a Sherbro princess. She held the position of the duchess of the Ya Kumba ruling house of the Yawri Bay Area between the Sierra Leone peninsula and the Sherbro estuary. In the late 17th century, she married an English trader and Royal African Company agent, Thomas Corker, and their two sons Stephen and Robin ruled as the first Caulker chiefs through her royal lineage. She died in 1722, twenty-two years after Thomas Corker died in 1700 in England.
The Tuckers of Sherbro are an Afro-European clan from the Southern region of Sierra Leone. The clan's progenitors were an English trader and agent, John Tucker, and a Sherbro princess. Starting in the 17th century, the Tuckers ruled over one of the most powerful chiefdoms in the Sherbro country of Southern Sierra Leone, centered on the village of Gbap.
John Tucker was an English slave trader for the Royal African Company from London, England.
John Kizell was an American immigrant who became a leader in Sierra Leone as it was being developed as a new British colony in the early nineteenth century. Believed born on Sherbro Island, he was kidnapped and enslaved as a child and shipped to Charleston, South Carolina, where he was sold again. Years later, after the American Revolutionary War, during which he gained freedom with the British and was evacuated to Nova Scotia, he eventually returned to West Africa. In 1792, he was among 50 native-born Africans among the 1200 predominantly African-American Black Loyalists resettled in Freetown.
Henry Smeathman (1742–1786) was an English naturalist, best known for his work in entomology and colonial settlement in Sierra Leone.
King James Cleveland was King of the Banana Islands in Sierra Leone.
William Clevland was an Anglo-Scot who became the self-appointed King of the Banana Islands off the coast of present-day Sierra Leone.
Caulker is a surname. Notable people with the surname include:
Stephen Caulker was a king of the Banana Islands off the coast of present-day Sierra Leone. He had some distant Anglo-Irish ancestry and was mostly Sherbro in ancestry. Caulker was part of a hereditary dynasty that ruled as chiefs of the states of Bumpe and Shenge (Kagboro) in Sierra Leone from 1820 into the late 20th century.
Richard Canreba Caulker (18??–1901), also known as Canrah Bah Caulker, was ruler of the Bumpe Chiefdom, 1864–1888 and 1894–1901. This area became incorporated into the Sierra Leone Protectorate in 1888, and is now part of the Moyamba District of the independent Sierra Leone nation.
Thomas Stephen Caulker, also known as Bar Tham, was the chief of Kagboro in Sierra Leone Protectorate (1888–1898).
References
- ↑ Tattersfield, Nigel (1991). The Forgotten Trade: Comprising the Log of the 'Daniel and Henry' of 1700 and Accounts of the Slave Trade From the Minor Ports of England 1698–1725 (1778). London. pp. 309–19.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) - ↑ Reeck, Darrell (1976). Deep Mende: Religious Interactions in a Changing African Rural Society. Brill Archive. ISBN 978-90-04-04769-3.
- ↑ "Cleveland Tombstone". www.sierraleoneheritage.org. Sieera Leone Heritage. Retrieved 7 July 2023.