The View from “White Man’s Bay”: The Captain John Matthews Papers on Sierra Leone at the Firestone Memorial Library, Princeton University

Abstract

Abstract In 2017, the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at the Firestone Memorial Library, Princeton University, acquired the papers of a British enslaver who operated in the region of greater Sierra Leone during the late-eighteenth century. This article offers an introduction to these papers for potential researchers. Focusing on two journals that cover Matthews’s time in the region between 1785 and 1787, it suggests three topics for which the collection might be of value to scholars of early-modern West Africa. These three topics are the local workings of the transatlantic slave trade in greater Sierra Leone; the production of European knowledge about Africa and Africans; and the history of the region immediately preceding the settlement of Freetown. In addition, this article includes four images of Sierra Leone. Black and white versions of these images were printed in 1791, but the watercolors are reproduced here for the first time.