1653 to 1808 · Africanspan
Cape Coast Castle changed hands three times in a decade
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Cape Coast Castle on the Gold Coast was built by the Swedes, seized by the Danes in 1663 and taken by the English a year after that. Under English control it became the headquarters of the Royal African Company, which held a legal monopoly on English slave trading in West Africa for several decades. When that monopoly was broken the castle carried on as a trading venue for independent British merchants, most of them based in London, and it stayed in use until slave trading there ended in 1808. The building still stands on the coast of Ghana and is now one of the country's principal visitor sites, with the dungeons kept as they were and the door to the beach still in place. Three European flags flew over the same walls inside ten years. The changes of ownership made no difference whatever to what the walls were built to hold.
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