The first fortress was built by the British around 1670.

There was ‘little else but iron, rock & gravel’, claimed a 1773 visitor to the island.

In their day the island was a largely open space over which the great outer walls of the fortress loomed formidably. Believing that malaria was caused by miasmas that emanated from vegetation, rather than by mosquitoes, the European agents who ran commercial operations at Bunce Island had the undergrowth cut back regularly and saplings hacked down. The trees of Bunce Island, and the thick vegetation beneath them, make it difficult to imagine what the fortress looked like during its heyday. This litany of destruction and reconstruction is testimony to the importance of the island to the British and evidence of the outrageous profits generated by the trade in enslaved Africans. Attacked and destroyed on six different occasions – four times by the French (1695, 1704, 1779, and 1794) and twice by pirates (1719, 1720) – the ruins are the remains of the seventh Bunce Island fortress. Three and a half centuries after it was built the ruins of the citadel remain impressive. This position, and the island’s natural defensive qualities, made it the ideal location in the seventeenth century for English traders to establish a slave fortress. As Bunce also sits near the confluence with the Rokel River, it can be reached by river traffic from across a wide hinterland. The island is situated close enough to the mouth of the Sierra Leone River for the channel to still be deep enough for ocean-going ships to navigate, but is far enough upstream for the island to be easily accessible by small river craft. That structure was built there because for a century and a half Bunce Island’s location made it a perfect meeting place. One is made of concrete blocks, the other of square-cut blocks of local stone, blackened, barnacled and ancient, while on the northern tip of the island, standing at the crest of a low hill, are the ruins of a large and substantial structure, clearly visible from the shoreline despite the thick undergrowth.

Two small jetties, only a few metres apart, project from the western shore. The shoreline is a narrow strip of coarse dark-orange sand, strewn with grey rocks, and it is only when approaching the island that any man-made structures become visible. When viewed from the water little can be seen of Bunce Island, covered as it is by a dense canopy of trees. About twenty miles upriver from Freetown, the hilly capital of Sierra Leone, is a small oval-shaped island which from a distance looks no different to any of the other small, oval-shaped islands that are irregularly dotted along the Sierra Leone River.

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