Browse Items · Lowcountry Digital History Initiative

Bunce Island, Sierra Leone, ca. early 2000s (top), 1726 (bottom), images courtesy of Comet Multimedia and The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. The Bunce Island slave fortress was a major supplier of enslaved West Africans to rice plantations in the British colonies of South Carolina and Georgia. Slave trader Henry Laurens was Bunce Island's business agent in Charleston.

Bowens family

The descendants of the enslaved population who were forced to migrate against their will are among the most powerful reminders of South Carolina's historical ties to Barbados. Nearly a century and a half after slavery ended and almost three and a…

Map of Barbados, by Richard Ligon, ca. 1647-50, courtesy of the Latin American Library, Tulane University. Ligon, who lived in Barbados between 1647 and 1650, wrote about the enslaved society that contributed a significant number of the first permanent African descended settlers in Carolina. Large sugar estates identified on Ligon's map occupied the best land on the island, displacing many small farmers. By the mid seventeenth century, an enslaved black majority grouped together on large plantations was a constant source of anxiety to the declining white population. Ligon may have been thinking of a failed slave revolt that took place in Barbados in the 1640s when he included the drawing of runaways being pursued by the militia on the map. The militia were responsible for controlling the slave population and defending white English rule on the island.

In this beautifully detailed map Richard Ligon, who lived in Barbados between 1647 and 1650, described the enslaved society that contributed a significant number of the first permanent African descended settlers of South Carolina. Large sugar estates…