Kunta Kinteh Island

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Detail InformationEdit

James Island is an island in the Gambia River, 30 km from the river mouth and near Juffureh in the country of The Gambia. On 6 February 2011 it was renamed Kunta Kinteh Island to give the Island a Gambian name. Fort James is located on the island. It is less than two miles from Albreda on the river’s northern bank that served a similar purpose for the French.
As an important historical site in the West African slave trade, it is now listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, together with related sites including Albreda, Juffureh and Fort Bullen. James Island is suffering heavy erosion, and is now approximately 1/6 of the size during the time when the fort was active. Ruins of several of the British administrative buildings (including a single cell, apparently used to house the most troublesome captives), a small jetty and a number of skeletal baobab trees remain. The ruins have been stabilised and protected by a capping. Because the island is low-lying, during high tide and storms sometimes waves will beat against some of the surviving structures.

HistoryEdit

The first European settlers on the island came from Duchy of Courland and Semigallia (dependency of Poland), who also had other colonial possessions in the area. They called it St. Andrews Island, though the English Crown had previously granted the island to two separate companies in 1588 and 1618. In 1651, the settlers built a fort that they named Jacob Fort after Jacob Kettler, the Duke of Courland, and used it as a trade base. The Dutch briefly held the fort from 1659 until the English captured it in 1661; the Dutch formally ceded the fort to the English in 1664.
The Six-Gun Battery (1816) and Fort Bullen (1826), now included in the James Island UNESCO World Heritage Site and located on both sides of the mouth of the River Gambia, were built with the specific intent of thwarting the slave trade once it had become illegal in the British Empire after the passing of the Slave Trade Act in 1807. These sites along with the island itself were abandoned in 1870.

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