ABSTRACT
The Re-Captured Negro is set in Sierra Leone after the Parliamentary abolition of the slave trade in 1807. A Vice-Admiralty court had been constituted in Freetown in 1808. A small West Coast of Africa squadron, of two to four ships, began apprehending slave-traders and ‘liberating’ their human cargo. When slave ships were intercepted, no attempt was made to repatriate the enslaved Africans. Instead, the ‘captured Negroes’, from a number of groups, including Vai, Jolof, Mandinka, Susu, and Mende, were ‘condemned.’ Many of the physical details originate from Thomas Winterbottom’s ethnography, An Account of the Native Africans in the Neighbourhood of Sierra Leone. However, in a typical evangelical move, Sherwood conflates deliverance from slavery with spiritual rebirth into Christ. ‘Negro’ being a term of opprobrium early in Sierra Leone, by 1822 the ‘Captured Negroes Office’ was renamed the ‘Liberated African department’.
