Sherbro Island is in the Atlantic Ocean, and is included within Bonthe District, Southern Province, Sierra Leone.

(See: Navigantium Atque Itinerantium Bibliotheca) In the seventeenth century, the Royal African Company, chartered as a monopoly in England, began to operate here and on the Guinea Coast as traders.

While originally seeking gold, particularly along the Gambia River, by the early eighteenth century the RAC became involved in slave trading, which its monopoly covered.

Thomas Corker, who was from Falmouth, Cornwall, had been working with the RAC for more than a decade when he was appointed agent here in the late seventeenth century.

Shortly after being reassigned to The Gambia, he died on a business trip to England in 1700, but his descendants in Sierra Leone did well.

But for decades more, both Spain and Portugal continued to buy African slaves for their colonies in the Caribbean, and Central and South America.

In 1815 Paul Cuffe, a successful African-American ship maker of Boston, Massachusetts, became interested in resettling free blacks in west Africa.

There, Black Loyalists from Nova Scotia (African Americans freed in the American Revolution) had been joined by Maroons deported from Jamaica, Liberated Africans freed from illegal traders, and some of the ethnic groups in the territory of Sierra Leone who were interested in western culture,[4] coalesced into the Creole/Krio ethnicity.

[5][6] Cuffe believed that skilled American blacks could help develop trade between Sierra Leone and the United States, benefiting both.

[4] Cuffe died in 1817, but the American Colonization Society (ACS), founded in 1820 by both abolitionists and slaveholders, continued the effort to resettle free blacks in Africa.

They found John Kizell, a Sherbro born locally who had returned after being captured and held in slavery in South Carolina.

[7] The survivors relocated in April 1822 to Providence Island at Cape Mesurado in what developed as the nation of present-day Liberia.