Freetown John

Around this time last year I wrote about Freetown John, a man who was connected to my ancestors (we still do not know exactly how) and who died in Sierra Leone in 1823. At that time we wondered about the cause of his death. Now we know that he died of the black vomit, the toxic form of yellow fever, a viral disease transmitted by female mosquitos and potentially devastating for Europeans who caught it. Two years before he died it had killed thousands of people in Barcelona.


At the time of his death John O'Neill Walsh was acting Colonial Secretary. By then Freetown was thirty years old and had been a British Crown Colony since 1808. It also served as the capital of British West Africa and the base for the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron whose responsibility it was to stamp out the slave trade. The founders of Freetown, who cleared dense forest for land on which to settle, were freed African American slaves, but they had been joined by liberated West Indians and Africans.


A drawing on Wikipedia from 1856 shows a hill overlooking a harbour, mountains rising in the background into a leaden sky. A road runs along the sea front with houses at intervals along it, and behind other hillside houses can be seen their bases hidden in vegetation. In the harbour, the largest natural harbour on the continent of Africa, a sailing ship, bare masted, lies at anchor.


By the end of the eighteenth century there were on this peninsula, separated from the Atlantic Ocean by beaches of white sand, three or four hundred houses, wooden structures built on solid stone foundations. During the following two decades these had been replaced by more comfortable houses and there were almost a hundred Europeans living in the town.


John O'Neill Walsh was also Secretary to the Agricultural Society. Liberated slaves had each been allocated four acres of land on which to grow the maize, sugar cane and cassava they needed to feed their families. Some managed to grow food for cash.Walking down from villages and towns in the mountains they carried on their heads to the market in Freetown pineapples, oranges and various other fruits, cocoa roots and leaves and ground nuts. There was fresh meat for sale in the town in sheds supported on stone pillars and, near the sea front a fish market.
Freetown may have been founded as a haven for liberated slaves, but by 1923 the colonists were not above appropriating large tracts of land for their own use. Companies of gentlemen were being formed for the purpose of growing coffee, cotton, ginger, arrowroot, pepper and other crops, and the Man from Magherafelt was deeply involved, that is if he was still alive.