The White Man’s Grave.

Hawera Star, Volume XLV, 7 November 1925, Page 13

The White Man’s Grave .

gIERRA LEONE is one of the smallest of Britain’s possessions in the great African continent. But it is often in the smallest places that the greatest, events in the history of the world have had their beginnings. If Sierra Leone is, or was, the White Man’s Grave—so called because of its unhealthy climate—it could also be termed the Black Man’s Salvation. It -was in this small unhealthy corner of the world that, twenty years before Great Britain officially declared the slave trade illegal, Granville Sharp, the great anti-slave reformer, took the first practical step towards the abolition of slavery by founding a settlement. Granville Sharp first came into prominence by befriending a negro slave who had been brought to England and had run away. Sharp took the matter to the Courts, and succeeded in obtaining the epochmaking judgment that a slave setting foot in England became free, and could not be carried back ;igain into slavery. After the war of American Independence, the negroes who had been serving on the British ships of war were ruthlessly dismissed, and, but for the help of Granville Sharp, Wilberforcc and other slavery abolitionists, they would have died through starvation. It was to help these people, who were known at the time as the Black Poor, that Granville Sharp purchased some twenty square miles of country in what is now known as Sierra Leone. As a rule, land for the purpose of forming a settlement was only rented from tho native chiefs, and the fact that, in this instance, it was purchased outright, gave it the importance of being a real British possession. Thus the colony which had its humble beginning over a hundred years ago as an asylum for freed slaves, is now one of Britain’s most, flourishing possessions.