A Note on Naming: Kormantin as a place name has been spelled numerous ways and has been applied to both “Great Kormantin,” an ancient hilltop town a quarter-mile inland from the Atlantic coast and “Little Kormantin,” also known as Cormantine (English) and Abandze (Fante). The African Diaspora name Coromantee derives from this location, although the connection between people in the Americas who call themselves Coromantee and the actual village of Kormantin is far from clear.
The history of Kormantin goes back at least six hundred years, when a community from the forested interior built a hilltop town slightly inland a quarter-mile from modern-day Abandze. They were already established when the Fante people settled around them a century later. The following timeline related the area’s complex, intertwined and international history, highlighting the interrelationship between local and global events in shaping the dynamic experiences of the Africans and Europeans who fought, traded, cohabited, and mutually made one of Ghana’s many gold- and slave-trade sites.
ca. 1400
Oral tradition holds that an inland group migrating to the coast established the hilltop town of Kormantin, and that their arrival preceded that of the Fante nation which came to surround them.
1482
The Portuguese build Elmina Castle 20 miles west of Kormantin, establishing the first permanent European trading center on the “Gold Coast.”
1558
Englishman William Towerson trades textiles and ironware for gold with residents of Mouri, Cape Coast, Winneba and Kormantin in spite of Portugal’s claim to the whole coast. He was chased away by an arriving armada from Lisbon.
1580 – 1640
Union of the Kingdoms of Spain and Portugal.
April 1582
Portuguese Governor Pimentel sends two war galleys to attack a French ship trading at Kormantin. The becalmed French ship is hammered by cannon fire which killed or wounded 22 of the crew; the rest abandoned ship and fled ashore. The captured ship was taken back to Elmina Castle, where it was salvaged for parts (Vogt, 129)
1590s
Dutch trading vessels encroach on Portugal’s gold trade and barter extensively at villages from Axim to Accra. The small under-supplied garrison at Elmina is virtually powerless to stop them.
1612
The king of Sebou invites Dutch traders to build a permanent trading lodge at Mouri. The small stone fort the erect becomes the first Dutch outpost in West Africa.
1618
England’s King James I charters the Company of Adventurers of London Trading to the Ports of Africa, a private joint-stock enterprise. The Guinea Company (as it was more commonly known) gained exclusive trading privileges in West Africa, but initially concentrated on the redwood trade in Gambia and searching for gold in Sierra Leone. One of the first English-language descriptions of West Africa, Richard Jobson’s The Golden Trade (London, 1623), reported on the Guinea Company’s failed efforts to locate inland sources of African gold.
1620
War breaks out between the Sebou and the Fante. Dutch soldiers assist the Sebou in battle and raids, earning them longstanding Fante hatred.
June 1621
Creation of the Dutch West India Company, which takes over all forts, lodges and trading operations in West Africa. Private Dutch traders are thereafter prohibited from calling there.
Oct. 25, 1625
Battle of Elmina. A large Dutch army fails to capture the Portugues castle, thanks largely to a clever ambush that African Elmina warriors staged.
1631
London Merchant Nicholas Crispe takes over the Guinea Company and obtains a new charter giving it exclusive trade rights to the entire African coast between Cabo Blanco and the Cape of Good Hope. Crispe decisively shifts the company’s focus to the Gold Coast and recruits two highly experience but disgruntled ex-Dutch West India Company factors, Arent de Groot and Jeremias Nuyts, to open English trade with coastal communities they already knew well.
1632
Under Arent de Groot’s leadership, the English Guinea Company establish a trading lodge at Cormantine Beach, built with the help of workers from nearby Great Kormantin. The Dutch West India Company protests this incursion and stations a floating trade vessel (a “legger”) anchored in Cormantine Bay to compete with the English post. The English presence led to the growth of a strong service economy around the English trading lodge and the adjoining beach, which attracted many families from Old Kormantin to relocate there and establish a new “Crom” (village adjoining a fort or trading post) on the hilltop to the west of the post. Villagers provided food and accommodations to Accanist merchants arriving with gold to trade and the dozens of slave porters who accompanied them, and profited during the weeks the inland visitors spent bartering within the fort. Others, mostly fishermen, profited by running inland traders and the goods they purchased through the hazardous surf between Cormantine Beach and the Dutch leggers anchored offshore. African trade with rival Dutch and English factors spurred additional demand for fish, grain, fresh water, canoes, and temporary warehouse space, further expanding the local economy. Anglo-Dutch commercial competition, in short, quickly transformed this New Cormantine site into a sizeable economically diversified maritime entrepot and a regional magnet for interior gold trading nations.
August 25-28, 1637 – Dutch Capture of Elmina Castle
The Dutch West India Company sends a felt of nine ships with 400 sailors, 800 soldiers, and an unstated number of Brazilian Indian warriors from Pernambuco, Brazil, to surprise and capture Elmina Castle. The fleet arrives at Komenda on Aug. 19, and WIC Director Nikolaas Van Yperen persuades the King of Komenda to supply 200 additional manned canoes with promises of rewards after the castle is taken. The combined forces land at Cape Coast on Aug. 23 and march overland to attack Elmina. After defeating a Portuguese-Elmina ambush with heavy losses, Dutch forces capture St. Jago Hill and haul cannon to its summit. A Kommenda army attacks Elmina Town from the west on Aug. 26, initiating a siege. After a day-long combined Dutch naval and land bombardment of Elmina Castle on Aug. 27, the Portuguese surrender. The WIC thereafter makes Elmina Castle its operational headquarters in West Africa and its primary regional warehouse.
1638
In defensive reaction to Dutch conquest of Portuguese bases, the English Guinea Company begins converting its Cormantine trading post into a fort. A fire breaks out in June 1639 which destroys trade goods and halts construction, which the Guinea Company blames on Dutch-backed saboteurs.
Oct.-Dec. 1640
Guinea Company factors at Cormantine launch a new regional trade with Portuguese Sao Tome in 2 yachts, which return with cargoes of sugar. Two other ships operating from Cormantine trade along the coast to the east, supplied with cargoes from Cormantine’s store rooms. Profits from the gold trade and these additional activities reportedly reach £45,000 (Porter, 192)
1641 – 1643
The outbreak of Civil War in England profoundly reduces English overseas trade and settlement. Nicholas Crispe, a Royalist, is removed from the Guinea Company and wartime disruptions interrupt the flow of English goods to Cormantine and other English trading posts for several years. London merchant and Barbados investor Maurice Thompson and others sponsor rival trade missions to Guinea to procure slaves for Caribbean plantations beginning to experiment with sugar production, purchasing the first documented American-bound Ghanaian slaves at Winneba in 1642.
1646-1647
Maurice Thompson and other English merchants orchestrate a hostile takeover of the English Guinea Company and revamp its operations. After a decade of tolerating (or being unable to oust) Dutch legger trading ships anchored nearby, the Guinea Company purges Cormantine Village of its pro-Dutch faction, forcing Ammadou, their “captain,” to negotiate with Dutch West India Company Director General Jacob van der Well to create a new village for them on the north side of the Benya River adjoining Elmina Castle[1]. The Guinea Company replaced Crispe’s earlier post with Cormantine Castle, a substantial stone fortification with multiple gun batteries, ample warehouse space, and living quarters for several dozen company factors, craftsmen, and garrison soldiers. The sole surviving image for Cormantine Castle portrays a square keep with a large centrally positioned square tower, surrounded by a lower battery with either round or faceted ramparts in each corner (the image is ambiguous). The castle was situated atop the seaward-facing cliffs on a promontory extending into the Atlantic Ocean. The sketch also shows a detached round tower some distance to the west of the main fort, but it is not known whether this was constructed at the same time as the core of Cormantine Castle or at a later date. Source: Johannes Vingboons Atlas, 1665.
1652-1654
First Anglo-Dutch War breaks out, but English and Dutch company employees and factors independently agree to not attack each other’s posts.
1657-1663 – The East India Company in West Africa
In December 1657 Maurice Thompson, as governor of both the East India and English Guinea Companies, arranges for the EIC to lease the Guinea Company’s West African trade monopoly for an annual payment of £1,300. The shift radically changes commercial operations at Castle Cormantine. The EIC focuses exclusively on the gold trade in order to obtain bullion to purchase its goods in India and is willing to even sell at a loss in Africa because the resulting gold is far more valuable in Asian markets. During its six-year operations, the EIC dispatched 15 ships to Cormantine and transshipped more than 5,562 Marks (2,781 pounds) of gold to Fort St. George in Surat. The EIC substantially repair Cormantine Castle after its first agent, James Conget, found “the castle walls . . . ready to fall to the ground” upon his arrival (Makepeace 1991, 12). Most EIC ships stayed less than a month, dispatching large cargoes of mainly textiles and iron and collecting gold that company factors obtained through trade. By 1660, the volume of arriving English cargoes overwhelmed Cormantine Castle’s warehouses and the EIC opened a secondary trading lodge at Cape Coast. Like the Guinea Company, the EIC struggled to keep Cormantine Castle adequately staffed: of 111 employees sent out at least 55 died, often within weeks of arrival.
The EIC focused almost exclusively on the gold trade – it exported a grand total of 47 enslaved men and women, or rather transferred them to other EIC outposts in St. Helena and India, and apparently imported more than this number of enslaved workers from the Kingdom of Ardra (aka Allada, Benin) to maintain Cormantine Castle. Because it was not concerned with the slave trade (and lacked the staff to police its trade monopoly), the EIC ignored other English “interlopers” bartering for slaves elsewhere in West Africa as long as they did not also trade for gold. Indeed, Governor Thompson and other EIC investors with West Indian plantations and investment likely dabbled in both trades simultaneously, since demands and prices for enslaved African workers rose sharply in the 1650s as the Caribbean sugar economy expanded. While Kormantin became a specialized gold market, nearby Anomabu and Winneba grew as destinations for English merchants seeking slaves. The sale of guns became a bone of contention between English Kormantin factors and the EIC. As a slave-trading interloper, Gov. Maurice Thompson knew that musket sold quickly and fetched a high price and accordingly had the EIC ship more than 600 guns to Cormantine Castle to sell. The EIC’s Kormantin factors, however, refused to sell them, arguing that gun sales dangerously destabilized interior Accanist gold traders’ trade routes, put their own lives at risk, and, when EIC firearms were offered, were rejected as inferior (“new slender muskets . . . breaking in the fireing them” when “the Cuntrey now desire old heavy gunns”) compared with those of other nations’ wares (Makepeace 1991, 9). Indeed, when the EIC closed its West African operations, more than 3,000 muskets were found unsold, moldering in Cormantine Castle’s storerooms.
1660-1665 – England’s Restoration and the Royal Adventurers into Africa
In May 1660, Charles II returned after nine years in exile and was restored as England’s king after agreeing to share power with Parliament. Charles II was granted an independent annual income £1.2 million derived mainly from customs and excise taxes, which gave him a powerful incentive to increase English commerce. Within a year, Charles restated and expanded the Commonwealth’s Navigation Act, which banned English colonies from trading with foreign shipping and confining most high-value colonial exports solely to English markets – the better to increase his duties-based royal revenue stream. The 1661 Navigation Act was chiefly aimed at the Netherlands and aimed to stop Dutch merchants from exchanging cheaper Dutch manufactured goods for English tobacco and sugar. He made his younger brother James, Duke of York, Lord High Admiral and tasked him with global enforcement of Dutch commercial exclusion.
The Royal family further sought to repair its shattered fortunes through direct involvement in Atlantic trade and fixed its attention upon West Africa as a potentially enormous source of profit. In December 1660, Charles created a new company, the Company of Royal Adventurers into Africa (RAA) and named his brother James as its governor. And royal it was: charter members included Princesses Maria and Henrietta, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, Dukes Bedford and Albermarle, the earls of Pembroke, St. Albans, Sandwich, Ossery, and Bath, and ten lords, barons, and knights, personages that included the king’s, mother, sister, brother, cousin, and at least one illegitimate son. Most company members had been strong allies who loyally supported Charles in exile and helped orchestrate his return to the throne. The RAA charter ran roughshod over the Guinea Company’s existing territorial trade claim, which was set to expire in 1662, as well as the EIC’s sublet of Gold Coast trade. As a result, both the RAA and EIC sent ships to West Africa during the first two years of RAA operations (Zook 1919, 8019; Svalastog 2021, 192-188, 240-241) .[1]
1663 was a pivotal year for English activities on the Gold Coast. After two years of sharing Cormantine Castle and other English outposts, the EIC’s operations officially ceased in March 1663 and the RAA took over the Guinea and East India Company’s personnel, buildings, artillery, and other assets. King Charles II granted the RAA a new charter in January 1663 that explicitly gave it exclusive rights to trade for African slaves between Morocco and modern-day South Africa – marking the English state’s first explicit claim to controlling the Atlantic slave trade and the right to trade slaves to the English colonies, now the enclave of the king’s family and friends. Besides officially banning all other English merchants from the African slave trade (which the Guinea and East India Companies had tacitly ignored), the new 1663 RAA charter expanded the company’s capital by more than £50,000 through attracting new investors – especially those with colonial investments seeking to expand the flow of African slaves into the Caribbean and North America. Company membership more than doubled from 31 to 66 investors, including the king’s mother and wife, several East India and Guinea Company members welcomed into the new company, and leading members of the Council of Trade and Committee of Foreign Plantations, who were tasked with expanding the imperial economy and enforcing the Navigation Acts. When Charles II issued a patent for colonizing land south of Virginia two months later in March 1663, four of the eight Lords Proprietors of Carolina were RAA members. With a new explicit focus on buying enslaved laborers to send to American colonies that could not legally purchase them from England’s competitors, the RAA radically departed from past English Gold Coast commerce. Slaves, rather than gold, became the RAA’s primary commodity, which prompted reconfiguring the established trade network it had inherited. (Svalastog 2021, 156, 183-186, 198-200)
March 2, 1663
A local Kormantin man shoots an English corporal, who later died of his wounds. In retaliation, the new RAA commander takes “rigorous revenge for the security of the Nation as also for our owne particular Honours.” By destroying Kormantin Town after village leaders would not turn over the murderer to the fort. It is not clear from documents, however, whether the English destroyed Great Kormantin or the Crom adjoining the fort: both were in range of English guns. (Makepeace, 250).
Aug. 1663-Feb. 1665
The RAA ships 3,075 slaves to Barbados obtained at Cormantine Castle and its other lodges (Makepeace, 250).
Dec. 1663-May 1664
The RAA aggressively expands operations in West Africa to challenge Dutch regional domination. As Lord High Admiral of the Royal Navy, James, Duke of York, lends warships to the RAA (which he governed) and orders Captain Robert Holmes to use this fleet to “kill, take, sink, or destroy [any] such as shall oppose you” in West Africa, but particularly the Dutch West India Company for interfering with the RAA’s Gold Coast trade, especially at its Cape Coast lodge. After capturing Dutch ships and the WIC’s fort at Goree, Senegal, en route, Holmes sacks the Dutch fort at Takoradi and besieges Fort Carolusburg at Cape Coast, which the Dutch had only recently themselves captured. Continuous bombardment between April 29 and May 11 caused the WIC garrison to mutiny and surrender, whereupon Holmes garrisoned the fort with fifty men and immediately began repairing it.
June 1664
Holmes’s fleet attacks Anomabo and Egya, with Fante permission. Anomabu surrenders but Dutch Fort Good Hope at Egya remains defiant. Holmes and an English-African force from Cormantine storms the fort but suffers heavy losses. Facing inevitable defeat, the unnamed Dutch commander placed gunpowder among the trade goods in his storeroom as a trap, which blew up eighty of the victorious English-Kormantin troops. Africans retaliated by beheading their Dutch prisoners (Porter, 590). After this final action, Holmes departs the Gold Coast with plundered gold worth between £2000 and £3,000.
Jan.-Feb. 1665 — The Dutch Strike Back
News of Holmes’s depredations reached the Netherlands in July. While States General diplomats publicly protested these peacetime attacks, it also secretly ordered Admiral Michiel de Ruyter to sail for West Africa and restore the WIC’s lost holdings. De Ruyter’s fleet of 13 ships and 2,200 men captures numerous richly laden returning RAA ships and seizes English forts at Goree and Sierra Leone en route. Arriving at Axim in January 1665, he found no English ships on the coast and the RAA’s forts and lodges accordingly vulnerable.
After regrouping at Elmina Castle and raising an auxiliary force of 200 to 300 Elminian war canoes, de Ruyter considered attacking England’s new Cape Coast Castle but deemed it too formidable to capture, given its strong local Efutu support. Instead, he targeted Cormantine, as England’s established administrative capital and commercial headquarters. The Admiral admired his Elminian allies, armed with muskets and spears: they “were well armed according to their country’s fashion, some of them having caps made like helmets, adorned with feathers and horns of beasts, and swords hanging before upon their belly, whereon instead of handles they put bones of tigers, lions, and other beasts. Their faces generally painted with red and yellow, so also on their bodies, which made a very strange and terrible sight.”
Feb. 7, 1665 – The First Battle of Cormantine
After a diplomatic mission gave a gift of 250 bendas (31.25 pounds) of gold to the Fante Braffo to not oppose his attack, de Ruyter lands around 900 Dutch troops near Anomabo fort, which the English abandon and blow up rather than surrender. While the Dutch advance from the west, 500 war canoes with 1000 Elmina and 200 Mouri men threaten to land to the east of Cormantine Castle. Kormantin headman and strong English ally John Cabes led 300 Kormantin men to oppose the Dutch advance and inflicted heavy casualties from a small two-gun tower or battery west of the fort, but the defenders were forced to retreat.
The Dutch-Elmina army torched the town as it advanced to revenge Cabes’s resistance. Under cover of smoke from the burning town, de Ruyter’s forces surrounded the fort, unleashed mortars and grenades inside, and used storming ladders to scale the walls. Knowing that his garrison of fifty men and the few dozen slaves belonging to the fort could not defend it, Director Thomas Selwyn surrendered just as Dutch forces poured over the walls – ignoring John Cabes’ demand that he blow up the fort with gunpowder rather than submit. “Desperate from displeasure, Cabes denounced the English as faithless and timid dogs, and went onto the battlements, where he openly stood, hoping to be killed by the enemy.” When this didn’t happen, he slashed his own throat and threw himself from the fort’s walls. He survived the fall, however, and friends carried him to Old Kormantin, where he died two days later.
The Dutch were highly impressed by Cabes’ bravery and loyalty. De Ruyter felt “he was more true to the English than any of His Majesty’s subjects.” In the wake of battle, fighting broke out between Dutch, Elmina and Fante men over plundering the fort’s goods and the town, and Dutch officers only barely managed to save the fifty English prisoners granted quarter from being decapitated for bounties. One report stated that a young Englishwoman was also captured -Selwyn’s mistress.
De Ruyter’s fleet returned to Elmina on Feb. 13, after renaming the captured castle “Fort Amsterdam” and garrisoning it with 82 men – 52 of his own, 10 English defectors, and 20 Africans. He lost 49 men taking it. While at Elmina, he received orders to proceed to the Caribbean and inflict all possible damage on English holdings there. Formal declaration of the Second Anglo-Dutch War came several weeks later, largely due to the mutual depredations in West Africa that sprang from blurring English-Royal African and Dutch-West India Company national/corporate interests, competition, and activities.
1672 – 1674 Third Anglo-Dutch War
1679: Jean Barbot visits “Agga” (Egya) and its three white residents, a cluster of five or six small villages about a musket-shot apart from one another (Barbot 1679, 317). The Dutch built Fort Good Hope at Egya in 1647 but the English captured it in 1664; the English settled there during the Third Anglo-Dutch War in 1672.
1679 Jean Barbot notes the landing at Kormantin was difficult, that the fort built on a steep hill, was flanked with four bastions, “like a castle – its outer walls had deep spiked ditches; and that it commanded a large well-populated town on the slope of the hill, partly hidden from the sea” (Barbot 1679, p. 319). JB drew Fort Amsterdam from the anchorage; a considerably revised version sketch appears in 1688 (1732 ed, plate 14, p. 177) with the main change being the loss of the upper part of a tower and the replacement of a pyramid dome by a curved cupola. There is a set of engravings of Gold Coast forts, circa 1690s, that is so different from JB’s views as regarding the interior buildings (appearing unfinished) that either it represents a drawing made at another time (or deliberate revision) or it is confused with another fort (Lawrence, plate 68b). Some rebuilding was needed after 1679, when rain destroyed much of the original fortification (ARA Abramsz 23.11.1679). JB asserts in 1679 that Fort A had 4 bastions and 18 cannon, manned by 150 whites, and also had cisterns (JB 1679, p. 318-319). Dutch sources (Abramsz) reports only 19 whites. Tilleman (1697, 83-84) reports 24 cannon and 33 whites in the early 1690s.
1679 Version of Fort A (Barbot): the fort is strengthened “by three small and one fine large battery, mounted with 20 pieces of cannon; and within is a very large square tower, in the midst of it, design’d to have a cupola on it, where the flag-staff stands. There are very good lodgings, and all offices for the service of the commander and garrison, consisting of 25 white men, besides Grometto Blacks. The breastworks are large, and the prospect from the top of the tower delightful, overlooking all the sea and country. Large convenient cisterns are made in it to hold rain-water. The buildings were not quite finish’d, when I was there last.
Early 1680s
Danish visitor Eric Tilleman estimates the number of warriors along the coast as: Apam: 300; Cormantin: 300; Cape Coast: 400; Mouri: 100; Elmina: 1,000 (Tilleman 1994, 19-24)
Tilleman provides the following description of the Kormantin area: “Outside the aforementioned bay, on a mountain, lies the Dutch Fortress Cormantin where one anchors directly in front of the Negeri, at seven fathoms in good ground. It is provided with twenty-four cannons, a chief merchant, an assistant merchant, two assistants, a barber, a sergeant, a corporal, four Adets-Burser, a constable, a drummer, and twenty common soldiers, as well as the Natureller; and the Negeri can muster three hundred men with guns. This fort lies at almost the same height as the aforementioned [Brandenburgh Fort Gross] Friderichsberg, and was taken from the English by Admiral Ruyter; and there is much poor gold to be had, where one can easily be cheated if he is not familiar with it.”
1694-1700
The Kommenda Wars within the Eguafo Kingdom disrupt the gold trade along the coast. The conflict pitted the Dutch West India Company and its Eguafo allies against Royal African Company-backed factions over the right to trade and maintain forts at Kommenda and succession to the Eguafo throne. The war also involved inland Akan Denkyira and Twifo traders seeking coastal access to European trading partners. The six-year conflict severely disrupted trade, significantly depopulated the area, produced widespread “panyaring” (kidnapping) of rival groups that led to increased Dutch and English exports of slaves, and established English commercial dominance at Kommenda.
1701
Weakened by the Kommenda Wars, the interior Denkyira nation is defeated by its former tributary state, the kingdom of Asante at the Battle of Feyiase and launching the latter’s meteoric expansion.
1702
Dutch West India Company factor Willem Bosman described Fort Amsterdam’s situation: “The Negroes of Fantyn drive a very great Trade with all sorts of Interlopers, and that freely and boldly in the sight of both Nations; I mean the English and Dutch, neither of them daring to hinder it: For if they should attempt it, ‘twould ruine them there, we [the Dutch] not having the least Power over this Nation. There are, I believe, four Thousand Fishermen in this country.” (Bosman 1705, 57)
“At the Village . . . Little Cormantyn stands our Fortress Amsterdam, the chief Residence of the English til they were driven from thence by Admiral De Ruyters in 1665. This Fort being sufficiently large, is strengthened by three small and a fine large Battery containing twenty Pieces of Cannon (See the Drawing No. 10 and 11). The Governour set over this Fort is a chief Factor, as that of Mouree . A moderate Charge would very much improve this Fortress but the Commerce of the place not being sufficient to bear the Expense, ‘ tis better to let alone. This Village is so small and wretchedly poor it is not worth our thoughts.” (Bosman, 1705, 58)
“But Great Cormantyn, a Town which lies a Cannon – shot below our Fort upon a high Hill, is so large and populous that it very well deserves the Name of Great. All the Inhabitants, besides Mercantile Traders, are Fishermen amounting to the number of 700 or 800, and sometimes 1000. From this place the Country of Fantyn reaches 7 or 8 Miles on the Shore, being all the way replenished with small Villages very pleasant to observe in passing by in a Canoa.” (Bosman, 1705, 58)
“Within these two last Years [1700-1702, Kommenda Wars] the Chief Factors of Mouree and Cormantyn had also the Advantage of the Slave Trade of Fida and Ardra [to the east], which turned to some account, and was indeed more advantageous to them than the Gold Trade [since] the Commerce there being at so low an ebb, that without the mentioned Slave Traffick they could not live up to the Port which the Dignity of their Posts required, without suffering by it [losing money].” (Bosman 1705, 97)
“The National Diseases here are the Small Pox and Worms . . . with the latter they are miserably afflicted in all parts of their Bodies, but chiefly in their Legs, which occasions a grievous Pain which they are forced to bear till they can get the Worm quite out, that being sometimes a Month. . . . As soon as the Worm is broken thro ‘ the Tumour, his Head commonly first making its way, after they have drawn it out little way , they make it fast to a stick, about which they every day wind a small part of it, till continuing this tedious Method, they have entirely wound out the whole and the Patient is freed from his Pain. But if the Worm happens to break, they are put to a double Torture, the remainder part of the Worm either rotting in the Body or breaking out at some other place. . . . This Worm-Diseaſe is frequent all the Coast over but our Men are most tormented with it at Cormantyn and Apam, which perhaps may be occasioned by the foul Water which they are obliged to drink there.” (Bosman 1705, 109)
1732
Jean Barbot’s published account: “the little village of Aggia lies a cannon-shot further East (of Anomabu). The Danes formerly had a fort there, and on its ruins the English have built a small lodge of turf, where they keep a factor and two white men. The Dutch too used to have a hut here, on the other side of the village, which is divided into three parts, like hamlets, each containing 20-25 huts. This Dutch lodge was fortified by a small outer wall in the manner of a redoubt.” (Barbot 1992, 2:417)
1732 (really pre-1712), Jean Barbot, Kormantin: “This village is the most important one on the [Fante] coast, both on account of the number of inhabitants, which almost equals that of Mouree, and on account of its advantageous location. It also used to be the principal trading post of the English, before they made themselves masters of Cape Corso. They built this castle on hard and mountainous terrain, alongside the village, and flanked it with four bastions. Access to it was extremely difficult, both because of the hill, which is almost a bluff cliff, and because the breakers prevent boats from landing on the shore. During the years 1681-2 the Dutch (who took it from the English) entirely changed the shape of this place, making it much more convenient and placing it in a much better state than it had been. Here is how it appears from the roadstead:
“As I went inside it on each of my voyages, I had a chance to observe its situation and shape. The Dutch engineer who had been sent there at that time even consulted me on several matters. The fort is strongly built on a high hill, which is escarped and precipitous in several places. It can only be reached by a path cut into the rock of the slope. It is a square fort, flanked by four bastions, of which two are round and two are rectangular. The curtains and all the remainder of the outer wall are of large black stones, mortared with lime (made from oyster-shells). The parapets are fine and large. The interior of the place is compact.
“At the entrance you find a parade-ground, on one side of which is a keep, which serves as living quarters and a store. Above this is a fine platform, from which one can see very far, and on which the flag is housed. The fort has 20 cannon and a garrison of 25 white men, not counting the paid blacks. It is called Fort Amsterdam.”
“The Moors’ village called Cormentin lies to the West and North of this fort. The country inland is mountainous and uneven. The village of Little Cormantin or Tantonquerry [ERROR} is a league away, on the other side of the bay, where there is nothing worth noting except the goodness of the air and the fertility of the soil in maize and other natural products.”
1770-1772
Dutch Suriname, an important African slave importer, suffers an economic collapse due to planters defaulting on huge debts accumulated by purchasing slaves on credit. During the financial crisis of 1773, most planters went bankrupt and slave imports dropped sharply, from 3,600 per year in 1770 to 1,400. per year by 1776. In an attempt to revive the collapsing Dutch slave trade, the States General abolished taxes and duties on Dutch slave ships, but to no avail. (Emmer, 105-106)
Dec. 1780 – Great Britain declares war on the Netherlands due to its longstanding supply of war material to the United States via St. Eustatius. Operating from Cape Coast Castle, a British-Fante alliance thereafter attacked Dutch Gold Coast possessions as extension of the American War for Independence/Fourth Anglo-Dutch War (Feinberg, 111).
Feb-June 1782 The British Invasion of Dutch Gold Coast
Great Britain declares war on the Netherlands on Dec. 20, 1780 for the latter’s long and notorious support for the United States in its war for Independence. Early in 1781, Lord Germain raises two new Independent Companies to serve in West Africa, largely by drafting convicted criminals languishing in the Savoy Prison and on convict hulks. (Britain had formerly transported convicts to its North American colonies but with no outlet during the Revolution the British domestic prisoner population grew sharply; Australia was colonized as a penal colony principally to solve this problem.)
A Royal Navy squadron under Captain Thomas Shirley left with the companies in November 1781 and stopped en route at Goree to recruit additional volunteers from the 75th Regiment garrison. The fleet arrived at Cape Coast in early February and immediately attacked Elmina Castle by land and sea. Strong black Elminian resistance and the reported cowardice of Captain Kenneth MacKenzie during the British assault on Fort St. Jago produced a costly failure with heavy losses.
Giving up on taking Elmina, Captain Shirley’s flagship HMS Leander and land forces from Cape Coast advanced methodically eastward, demanding the surrender of each Dutch fort in succession by threatening commanders with “no quarter” if they fought. Moure’s Fort Nassau surrendered on March 3. With the HMS Leander’s guns trained on Fort Amsterdam at near point-blank range, Fort Amsterdam’s Dutch captain surrendered on March 6 without firing a shot. Apam’s Fort Patience capitulated on the 17th and Berraku on the 15th. Fort Crevecoeur at Accra, however, resisted, and from April 1 through the 18th, the Dutch garrison and Black fighters from its Crom fought off repeated assaults under constant bombardment from both Shirley’s ships and nearby English Fort James. The total destruction of Fort Crevecoeur’s Crom and the late arrival of 300 English-allied Black warriors from Winneba turned the tide of battle, but the Dutch commander and his surviving men escaped on the eve of British capture. Shirley thereafter razed Fort Crevecoeur to the ground and carted away its cannon. The British suffered at least 144 casualties, which crippled further offensive action. Just before Shirley’s fleet departed for the West Indies in June, two British supply ships arrived to save the severely under-provisioned Independent Companies – or what remained of them after the battle for Accra.
Holding the captured Dutch forts proved severely challenging, however. Independent Company commander MacKenzie placed 19 men at Fort Amsterdam, 40 at Moure, and 11 at Anomabu, but within five months most of them had died or deserted. The losses partly stemmed from the British Army’s misguided policy of issuing troops with company merchandise instead of food rations and expecting them to barter with them to feed themselves – despite being an occupying force in long-established Dutch strongholds. In mid-May, an arriving British Army ensign led a mutiny against the unpopular Captain MacKenzie that cause the entire British garrisons of Moure and Kormantin to abandon their posts and attack Cape Coast Castle. By August, only 49 of the original 200 soldiers were well – but few were still armed, since most had sold their muskets to buy food. MacKenzie squandered another 28 men when he illegally seized a German trading vessel and put these soldiers aboard as a prize crew to sail it back to England – never mind that none of the former convict-soldiers knew how to sail. The ship thereafter vanished.
Discipline completely collapsed in early August when MacKenzie, on an inspection visit to Fort Moure, had a convict soldier summarily executed without trial by lashing him to the muzzle of one of the fort’s cannon and blowing him asunder – a murder for which MacKenzie was arrested, sent to London, and eventually capitally convicted.
Although Fort Amsterdam and Kormantin were nominally in British control between March 1782 and May 1784 (when the peace treaty between Great Britain and the Netherlands restored all captured forts to their original owners), very few British soldiers occupied the site and trade entirely ceased, since British African committee merchants had no interest there. (Crooks 1923, 47-75
1780s
The Dutch slave trade remained stagnant due to low demand in war-torn Dutch colonial economies at a time when the British, French, and Portuguese slave trades rose to unprecedented heights. Royal Navy captures of the few remaining Dutch slave ships during the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War led to a virtual collapse; Dutch slaving voyages dropped to only three or four a year, delivering only 500 slaves annually on average. (Emmer, 33-34, 106).
1791
The Dutch West India Company declares bankruptcy and its operations and forts were transferred to the Dutch Republic.
1795-1813
The French Revolution destabilized the Netherlands government; a succession of shifting governmental bodies administrated Dutch Gold Coast possessions and provided little support or restocking of West African posts. No more than a handful of Dutch ships visited during these two decades. Dutch personnel manning the forts dwindled and their physical conditions deteriorated due to poor maintenance. The Dutch African slave and gold trades came to a virtual standstill due to posts having no goods with which to trade. (Larry Yarak, Asante and the Dutch, 1744-1873 (Oxford, 1990), 101-102)
1804
Dutch secretary Jan de Marree visits “Klein-Cormantine . . . which the Negroes call Abahandee” (Abandze). He observed “quite a few houses” inhabited mainly by fishermen. Great Cormantine, “about a quarter of an hour from the fortress, northeast a little from the beach on a fairly high and steep hill,” was even more populous. Marree relates that local tradition held that this town was the oldest in the “Fantine land” but its inhabitants were reputed to be deceitful, which Marees attributed to their poverty: they were always “begging of the whites” and even the wealthiest residents thought it “no disgrace to ask for a pipe of tobacco or brandy” even if “he had gold enough to buy this ten times over.” (de Marree, Reizen op en Beschrijving van de Goudkust van Guinea, 2 vols. (’s Gravenhage, 1817-1818) I: 171-173)
1807
Great Britain abolishes the African slave trade by act of Parliament and pressures its European allies to do the same.
1807 – The Second Battle of Kormantin
In early 1807 war broke out between the Asante and the Assin after Kwadwo Tsibu, a vassal Assin chief of the Asante, refused to submit to arbitration under the newly enstooled Asantehene Osei Bonsu. Rather than face justice, Tsibu fled with his people to neighboring Fante territory. The conflict escalated after the Fante murdered Asante envoys bearing a golden axe and sword (representing that they spoke for the Asantehene himself) and taunted Bonsu to come and fetch his axe and sword himself. Bonsu complied with a large army. As the Asante pushed south, the Fante called up warriors or allies from the coastal villages at Mouri, Kormantin, Apam, and Senya Beraku, promising them that “the English Governor and White men would provide them all with . . . great swords and firearms” with which to defeat the Asante. After an Assini chief Apute (“Appotuij”) promised peaceful trade with Asante merchants but then robbed and enslaved a large caravan of four hundred traders, Osei Bonsu swore to destroy the Fante as a nation.
Led by Osei Badu’s son, the Asante army pushed into Fante territory, capturing Abora, the Fante capital in May, killing its leaders and enslaving its ten thousand inhabitants. Kwadwo Tsibu fled further south to Anomabu and the Asante army inexorably followed, ravaging the Fante countryside en route. Confident of their martial prowess, Anomabu leaders hoped to lure Osei Badu and his army far from home into defeat, which would enhance their prestige and power; they even reportedly prevented the English at Cape Coast from trying to negotiate a truce.
Unfamiliar with coastal geography and the geopolitical loyalties of coastal settlements, the main Asante army first reached the Atlantic Ocean near Fort Amsterdam. As the Asante army approached, free traders living in the fort’s Crom fled and the village’s women and children took shelter inside the fort. Fort Amsterdam’s commandant, Le Comte, loaded the fort’s cannon and prepare a defense, but with the courtyard packed with panicked refugees and only a dozen Dutchmen to face an army of ten thousand, the situation looked bleak. Thick smoke rose from the Asante sacking of nearby Great Kormantin formed a grim backdrop for the advancing army.
Le Comte raised a white flag and informed arriving Asante envoys that this was a Dutch fort and that the local inhabitants were “Dutch Blacks,” with whom the Asante were in alliance. It seemed that peace would prevail – the Asante vanguard shouldered their arms and began to march away – but then a small group of Fante fighters who had hid in the deserted Crom ambushed the retreating Asante and a skirmish broke out. As enraged Asante warriors swept into Abandze, some local men sheltering inside Fort Amsterdam fired down onto the Asante army and even fired the fort’s cannon into the town below. But not for long: the Asante vanguard rushed the fort, got under the fort’s cannon, scaled the walls, and quickly captured the fort to prevent its firing on the army below. Soon thereafter, the Asante general entered the fort and upbraided Le Comte for his treachery in raising a flag of truce and then attacking. The Dutch commander confessed that he had been equally deceived by the hidden Fante and was not responsible for the attack but the general didn’t care. He declared “all the Blacks” in the fort as his prize and if Le Comte claimed them as his people, he could buy them back for sixty ounces of gold. Otherwise, they were all Asante slaves. Thereafter, the Asante army occupied Fort Amsterdam as its coastal headquarters over the next few weeks and revenged themselves on their Kormantin Fante attackers by destroying town surrounding the fort. After his victory, the Asante general reportedly thrust his sword into the ocean three times to symbolize his inland nation’s conquest of the coast and sent a bottle of sea water back to Kumasi as a war trophy. While the Asante regrouped at Kormantin, made battle plans, and set up a vanguard at Egya, English and Anomabu Fante leaders braced for attack.
Anomabu struck first. On June 14, the town’s entire military force attacked the Asante at Egya and forced a retreat, but during this skirmish the main Asante body circled around them inland toward Anomabu itself. The next day, the army routed the town’s defenders and poured into the town. Ignoring cannon and musket fire from English Fort William, the Asante army drove their Fante enemy onto the beach and into the water, where “thousands died in a terrible slaughter.” For the rest of the day, Asante musketeers pounded Fort William with fire but could not capture it. Fighting only stopped after darkness fell. Over two decisive days of battle, more than two-thirds of Anomabu’s 15,000 inhabitants were killed, piled in heaps around the fort or strewn along the beach as far as the eye could see.
England’s Cape Coast Castle Governor George Torrence arranged a truce and surrendered fugitive Kwadwo Tsibu as a gift to open talks (who was promptly tortured and executed). Torrence’s tiny sixty-man retinue looked pitiful as it passed by thousands of resting Asante soldiers en route to Osei Bonsu’s richly dressed court. Torrence mainly worried about Fort William’s English garrison and the 2,000 elderly, women, and children civilians sheltering there. The Asantehene asserted that since he had conquered the town, all its inhabitants were his slaves, to be disposed of as he wished. Powerless against overwhelming force, Torrence “begged [Bonsu] for half” the survivors -and was stunned when the Asantehene agreed. Soon thereafter, the Asante army returned inland and left Abandze and Anomabu empty, desolate wastelands. Much to England’s shame, Torrence viewed the thousand women and children inside Fort William as his personal gift, property that he sold to English slave ships over the next few months.
The 1807 Asante invasion marks a pivot point in Ghanaian and Atlantic history. After its conquest, the Asante claims dominion over all coastal settlements and demands land rents from the English and Dutch, forcing them to accept tributary status. Surviving Fante rulers reject Asante authority for a few years and lashed out toward Elmina and Accra, whom they considered Asante allies, but this only provokes a second more decisive Asante invasion in 1814 that led to the capture and occupation of Cape Coast Castle. Having eliminated the middlemen trading nations standing between the Asante and various European coastal forts and trading ships, the kingdom was poised to send a steady lucrative supply of enslaved interior people to European buyers. At that moment, however, British abolitionists finally persuaded Parliament to end its Atlantic slave trade to the Americas after decades of lobbying. The Netherlands quickly followed suit, due to British moral pressure and naval threats of interdiction. With a devastated population and no gold or slave trade to sustain it, the Dutch had no reason to rebuild Fort Amsterdam. Ironically, the fort fell victim to the ending of the trade in humans which it had helped start a century and a half earlier.
1811 – The Last Battle of Kormantin
In retaliation for the Asante destruction of Anomabu and to punish the Dutch, who were perceived as Asante allies, a Fante army working with the exiled King of Akyem is said to have attacked and destroyed Fort Amsterdam and pillaged Dutch Fort Patience at Apam in 1811. It is not clear whether Fort Amsterdam was reoccupied or repaired between 1807 and 1811 and details of the fort’s final capture remain elusive. Due to overwhelming Fante hostility in the surrounding hinterland, the Dutch Republic permanently abandons Fort Amsterdam (ARA, MKWI 51p: de Veer to Minister, Elmina, Aug. 2, 1811)
13 Aug. 1814
King William I of the newly created Kingdom of the Netherlands issues a royal decree forbidding his subjects from engaging in the Atlantic slave trade. The declaration was the result of intense British pressure and a threat not to return Dutch colonies it had captured during the Napoleonic Wars. Between 1814 and 1818, Royal Navy ships patrolling the West African coast did not encounter a single Dutch ship, but it is questionable whether this was due to strict adherence to the Dutch Abolition decree or the de facto collapse of Dutch slave trading from the mid-1790s onward. (Emmer, 117)
Sept. 1951
Archaeologist, fortifications expert, and U.K. Chief Inspector of Ancient Monuments Bryan Hugh St. John O’Neil surveys surviving Gold Coast forts and ruins at the request of the English Gold Coast Colony Chairman and members of the Monuments and Relics Commission. During his visit, O’Neil singled out “Fort Amsterdam at Kormantin, the English fort at Komenda, and Groot Fredericksburg at Princes Town (only partly ruined)” as heritage sites “of’ the greatest importance and should be preserved, but only as ruins.” Influenced by contemporary trends that favored popular Romantic tastes among tourists, he advised that “On no account should they be restored for use, a process which in such cases would destroy their interest.” O’Neil warned that “there will be trouble at Kormantin unless work is put in hand soon” but noted “the villagers desire it to be done.” (O’Neill 1951, 4-5)
After visiting the fort, O’Neil advised that it “should be cleared of vegetation and all the masonry should be consolidated according to approved methods . . . . The fine northwestern bastion is being undermined on the western side and there are cracks down both sides near the point. It is in urgent need of underpinning and other repair. The whole building, ramparts, bastions, spur, and internal building should be treated as a ruin, with courtyard cleared of debris and kept tidy by a custodian, because it is one of the most interesting and impressive buildings in the Colony.”
As a noted expert on heritage preservation, O’Neil’s advice carried considerable weight. Aside from interpretations of individual forts, his most consequential recommendation was to “urge with all the authority and experience at my command, that a specialist organization entirely and absolutely divorced from [the British Colonial] Public Works Department be set up for the care of the historic monuments of the Gold Coast, especially the castles end forts, one that it be placed under your commission as one of your chief duties. The archaeological element in this organization could be supplied for the time being if an arrangement could be made with the University College of the Geld Coast to draw upon the services of the Department of Archaeology, the head of which, Professor A.W. Lawrence has made a long study of’ fortification. The structural specialist, I suggest, might well be Mr. A. Peters of the Public Works Department at Axim, where he is repairing the Fort.” Within months, the Ghana Museums and Monuments Board was created to do precisely what O’Neil had prescribed, and one of its first acts was to publish O’Neil’s report (O’Neill 1951, 5).
1956
Dr. Robert Edward Lee (1920-2010), an South Carolinian dentist, emigrated to Ghana, and quickly became a central political figure for African American expats in Accra. He even hosted a dinner in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during his 1957 visit to attend the country’s independence ceremonies; Julius Nyerere, a Tanzanian anti-colonial activist, also attended the dinner. (Bayo Holsey, author of Routes of Remembrance and anthropology prof at Emory, mentions working with Lee in her acknowledgements…she could be a good resource)
1960s and 70s
The growing pan-Africanism movement encouraged African Americans to resettle in Ghana. These new residents took an interest in restoring the country’s decaying slave forts, including Fort Amsterdam. (Holsey, Routes of Remembrance, 163)
1971
Lee began a project to restore the crumbling Fort Amsterdam as part of the African Descendants Association Foundation (ADAF) efforts to restore the forts around Ghana in order to preserve the history of slaves. To raise funds for the restoration, the ADAF held cultural events at the fort, like a memorial service for Louis Armstrong, who claimed Cormantin ancestry. The foundation also proposed an International African Festival of the Arts to take place in the town and a library to be established at the fort. (Schramm, African Homecoming, 83). The Dutch Embassy condemned the ADAF’s accusatory tone about the fort’s slave history, as it clashed with the Dutch and Ghanaian governmental efforts to “close the book” on the slave history of the country.
1972
The municipality of Amsterdam gifted Fort Amsterdam with a plaque commemorating the “Historical Ties Between Ghana and the Netherlands,” omitting any mention of slavery.
5 February 1973
Dr. Lee received a letter from the Ghana Museum and Monuments board dissolving his lease on Fort Amsterdam and ordering that “activities should cease forthwith.” (Schramm, 85)
1994
Lee delivered a lecture at Elmina Castle, expressing concern that government tourism officials would turn Ghana’s slave castles into “disco houses or hotels for fun lovers” instead of treating them as sacred spaces. (Holsey, 166)
[1]K. Ratelband, Vijf Dagregisters van het Kasteel Sao Jorge da Mina aan de Goudkust, 1645-1647 (The Hague, 1953), 205; Harvey Feinberg, “Elmina, Ghana: a History of its Development and Relationship with the Dutch in the Eighteenth Century,” (PhD diss., History, Boston University, 1969), 120
SOURCES
De Marree, Jan. 1817-1818. Reizen op en Beschrijving van de Goudkust van Guinea, 2 vols. The Hague.
Feinberg, Harvey. 1969. Elmina, Ghana: a History of its Development and Relationship with the Dutch in the Eighteenth Century. PhD dissertation, Dept. of History, Boston University.
Makepeace, Margaret. 1985. English Traders on the Guinea Coast, 1657-1668: An Analysis of the East India Company Archive. History in Africa 16: 237-284.
Makepeace, Margaret, ed. 1991. Trade on the Guinea Coast 1657-1666: The Correspondence of the English East India Company. University of Wisconsin, Madison.
O’Neil, Bryan H. St. John. 1951. Report on the Forts and Castles of Ghana. Ghana Museums and Monuments Board, Accra.
Ratelband, K. ed., 1953. Vijf Dagregisters van het Kasteel Sao Jorge da Mina aan de Goudkust, 1645-1647. Nijhof Press, The Hague.
Sparks, Randy J. 2014. Where the Negroes Are Masters an African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Svalastog, Julia. 2021. Mastering the Worst of Trades: England’s Early African Companies and their Traders, 1618-1672. Brill Press, Leiden.
Zook, George. 1919. The Company of Royal Adventurers Trading Into Africa. Lancaster, Pa.