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Early European Connections

The first Europeans to view Sierra Leone were Portuguese explorers, part of the effort, begun by Prince Henry the Navigator, to find a route around Africa to the Indian Ocean. Prince Henry’s successor, Pedro da Sintra, visited the country’s coast in 1462. He found the large peninsula upon which Freetown was later to sit, its mountain mass rising from the sea for nearly 3,000 feet, the most spectacular site on the coasts he passed. The peninsula’s prominence and the huge harbor it sheltered were to bring the Portuguese back again. On this first visit da Sintra labeled the area the Lion Mountains (in Portuguese), reportedly because of the wild nature of the terrain. Italian domination of mapping in the next century led to the coast’s eventually being given an Italian variant of the name. Sierra Leone. The body of water behind the peninsula was named the Sierra Leone River.

In 1482 Portuguese forces began a fort on an island at the end of the bay. This was soon abandoned in favor of a site at the head of navigation at Port Loko that continued to serve as a center of Portuguese commerce in the area for more than 200 years. Trade goods were exchanged at first for the gold brought from inland and for the fine ivory works of the Sapi. Because of the opening of European plantations in the New World during the 1500s, however, the major commodity the Portuguese and other European traders sought was slaves. Sierra Leone was to remain a source of raw material for the slave trade for 300 years.

The Portuguese government had little interest in Sierra Leone. It leased the right to establish trading posts to individuals who sought to align themselves with local chiefs, exchanging trade goods both for the right to use the post and for the slaves whom the chiefs could provide by making war on their neighbors. This system continued into the middle of the nineteenth century and contributed significantly to the fragmentation and constant warfare.

By the 1650s the increased activity of other maritime nations in the Atlantic had ended the limited degree of Portuguese control over the coastal trade. Thereafter British and French and in lesser numbers Dutch and Danish trading companies were granted licenses by their governments to build trading stations (under the control of a representative or factor, hence called factories) in this coasal region. The new factors were added to the scattered Portuguese and Afro-European (mixed-blood) private traders, middlemen, adventurers, and outright pirates who already inhabited the coast.





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