Colonial Rule and Recaptives
Two major actions were taken by the British Parliament in 1807 that were to shape the future of the Colony permanently: the government accepted direct control of the Colony (effective at the beginning of 1808) from the Sierra Leone Company, and Great Britain outlawed the involvement of its citizens in the slave trade. A British naval patrol was based in Freetown and charged with intercepting slave ships on the open seas. The ships captured were taken into Freetown, where their recently enslaved cargo was released. The recaptives, as the newly liberated Africans were called, were to provide the major source of the Colony's population growth over the next half-century.
In the first five years 1,200 were released; 5,000 more were freed in the next three. By 1836 more than 55,000 had been landed. The harshness of their earlier treatment was telling, however; in one perhaps typical case a fourth of them died within the first three months in Sierra Leone. Other recaptives, particularly those originally from adjacent countries, fled the Colony for their homelands. As a result, despite the inflow, the total population of the Colony was only 33,628 in 1836.
The number of slaves released continued to grow, declining only with the gradual ending of the slave trade itself. By the end of the antislavery patrol in 1870 the number brought to Freetown had passed the 70,000 mark. The recaptives came from nearly every ethnic group on or near the Atlantic coast of the African continent and occasional- ly from beyond. It was thus possible to describe the Colony as a major world melting pot in which European, North American, and West Indian influences mixed with those of a variety of African cultures.
The mix was not smooth, however, The three settler communities, at first divided among themselves, for many years regarded the recaptives as uncultured heathens no matter what their personal achievements. The recaptives in turn, as they began to adjust to the changes and grow in number, formed ethnic societies. Some eventually reestablished ties with their homelands. Gradually the position of the more successful of the recaptives improved so that by midcentury the settlers and recaptives could be spoken of as part of a single society that they themselves labeled Creole and other Africans called Sierra Leonean.
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