An Abolitionist’s map of Sierra Leone

A rare map of West Africa from the Gambia River south through Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone to Cape Mezuradi in Liberia, where Monrovia was founded a quarter of a century later. Text and insets give a wealth of informative detail about the slave trade. The map was published in ''An Essay on Colonisation Particularly Applied to the Western Coast of Africa'', by Swedish abolitionist Carl Bernhard Wadström (1746-99). In this work he argued that a colony would profit more from trade with the locals than exploited them as slaves. It contained descriptions of the attempts by the Sierra Leone Company to found colonies of former slaves from the Americas, at Freetown in Sierra Leone and, unsuccessfully, on the island of Bolama in Guinea-Bissau. Of interest is the plan of Timbo, Guinea, one of the very few maps of an indigenous town; the route of an expedition through the interior by Thomas Masterman Winterbottom (1766-1859), the physician to the colony of the Sierra Leone Company in 1792; and depictions of the coins issued by the company for use in the colony.