This is another post where I ponder some historical mysteries of Sierra Leone. Mysteries to me, anyway, I am sure someone out there could figure this all out immediately.

There are two sort of related things in this post. The first is the piece of artillery pictured right above. I noticed it pretty quickly in our time in Sierra Leone, as it is located right out front of the Freetown city offices. That also puts it out right in front of the The View restaurant, which is what we were visiting, so maybe you can get lunch while you’re checking it out. Unfortunately the gun does not come with an explanatory plaque, at least as far I saw, which leaves us with a bit of a mystery of why and how it wound up in the middle of the street and cared for enough at least to be painted.

Thanks to Reddit we can identify the gun as a British mid-1800’s Armstrong RML gun. That initial identification surprised me as I had guessed was that it would have been brought to Freetown during World War I, but Christopher Fyfe in A History of Sierra Leone reminds us that Sierra Leone was the United Kingdom’s only non-foreign coaling station on the Atlantic coast until South Africa, and worth protecting in case the French ever decided to capture it. I wasn’t able to ever measure the muzzle diameter of the gun directly (it would have been weird for me to be standing in the middle of the street with a tape measure), but based on the carriage looking exactly like the carriage for this gun, I am inclined to think that it is specifically a RML 10-inch 18-ton gun. Wikipedia tells us that the guns were in service from 1868-1904? [sic] (note it isn’t listed on Wikipedia’s list of surviving examples, so we may have made a discovery here).

The other mystery I wanted to solve was the origin of some gun emplacements at Fourah Bay College. These are here. These too I spotted early in our time and they too remained somewhat mysterious. I say only “somewhat” because I knew early on that the location of Fourah Bay College on top of Mount Aureal was originally a military barracks and/or military hospital. It is definitely a great location for defensive artillery, with a commanding view over the harbor.

Despite the clear connection between the base on Mount Aureol and the gun emplacements, I wanted more detail though, like when they were built, and for what threat, and if the gun downtown was related. Some more clues came from Vistas of the Heritage of Sierra Leone (published in 2002, and I will write more about it, probably in the next post):

Again, until recently, the topography of Mount Aureol had physical evidence of a strong military presence, which was inaugurated in 1879 when the War Office acquired the property. Before the Colonial military forces left Mount Aureol in 1945, making way for students of Fourah Bay College returning to Freetown from Mabang, to which place they had been evacuated during World War II, to occupy this beautiful location, it had variously been a rifle range, a sanatorium, a garrison for soldiers with a gun emplacement at a strategic spot, below which an underground passage wended its way into the city, some say, right under State House. The Nissen Huts, where, as students at Fourah Bay College in the 1960s, we had our first residence, have disappeared. In their places were erected modern blocs for students’ hostels, science laboratories, functional buildings like the Administrative building, and the 9 storied “sky scraper,” the Kennedy building, easily the tallest building in Sierra Leone, constructed with money received from the United States of America during the Presidency of John F. Kennedy.

At the risk of pulling a Herodotus, that bit about the underground I can’t really believe. That would be a remarkable engineering feat, and I’m not sure of the tactical necessity. However, once I finally managed to actually take some pictures of the emplacements, I can see why you would think that maybe they led to a tunnel:

This expedition at least cleared up when exactly the emplacements were built: 1903. That plaque says specifically “E.H. 1903,” and what the E.H. could stand for I have no clue, though I am sure specialists will know immediately.

Going back to Fyfe, it turns out that in 1879 the British authorities were looking at how to beef up Freetown’s defensives, which included replacing the unusable guns at Falconbridge battery, which at that point was Freetown’s main defensive work. Those replacements happened apparently in 1884, which I think clears up the mystery of the gun downtown. That year is squarely in the middle of the RML 10-inch 18-ton gun years of operation, and Falconbridge battery is only 1000 feet from the gun’s current location. You can see on this map (page with other maps here) that Falconbridge point was the eastern edge of downtown Freetown. So I bet that the gun downtown originally came from Falconbridge battery and was moved to its current location at some point as a monument, maybe the next time the defenses needed beefing up I assume during WWI. This does open up a whole new mystery I won’t be able to solve, namely that this is the first time I have read about Falconbridge battery. I wonder if anything is left? I can’t find a picture of what it would have looked like, but I wonder if there are old plans somewhere in the British archives.

Back to the Mount Aureol gun emplacements. No definitive answers there, beyond our 1903 date, but what I would hazard to guess is that they were put up as part of the British solidifying their control over the Protectorate of Sierra Leone. Although Freetown had been a colony for a century, the British only laid firm claim to the hinterlands in 1896, extending a protectorate and a tax that broke out into the Hut Tax War of 1898. The British used their military might to crush the rebellion, and then their industrial might to extend control. They built Hill Station starting in 1902, and the railway reached Rotifunk in 1900 before making it to Liberia in 1908. I would hazard a guess that improvements to the military defenses of Freetown were wrapped up in that project of cementing imperial control, and included the building of new and improved gun emplacements.

In conclusion, we started off this post with two mysteries: where the gun downtown came from, and where the gun emplacements on Mount Aureol came from. And at the end of this blog post, I think we are left with something like three mysteries: what did Falconbridge battery look like (and relatedly, what did the other defenses of Freetown look like), was there a previous version of the Mount Aureol battery before the 1903 version was built, and what guns were used at the Mount Aureol battery (and when)? And maybe: did the underground tunnel from the Mount Aureol battery ever actually exist? Perhaps someone out there will know.