1680 to 1867 · Africanspan
148,000 people were shipped from the Sierra Leone estuary
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Regular slaving from the Sierra Leone estuary began in the late seventeenth century, and most of the people taken from it left between 1750 and 1807. British ships carried the bulk of that traffic, an estimated 148,000 Africans in total. About 70 percent of the figure rests on documented voyages and the rest on estimates built from partial evidence, which is the normal proportion in this field. When Britain abolished the trade in 1807 shipments from the estuary fell away quickly and permanently. The same estuary then took on a second role. Freetown, founded on it in 1792 as a settlement for freed people from Britain and Nova Scotia and later joined by Maroons deported from Jamaica, became the base of the naval squadron that intercepted slavers and the port where recaptured Africans were put ashore. Tens of thousands landed there, some within sight of the water they had been shipped from weeks earlier.
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