Housing the Nova Scotian Settlers on Bolama

Four illustrations of a blockhouse on Bolama, Guinea-Bissau, built during the attempt to settle 275 former slaves from America on the island: an elevation, a cross-section, a plan of the rooms and a map of the gardens and outhouses. The house was built under the orders of Philip Beaver (1766-1813), a British Naval officer who led the attempt. However by the time of publication of this map, the colony had collapsed, with most of the settlers dying and the remainder moving to Freetown in Sierra Leone in November 1793. Beaver returned to London to attempt to revive the colony. The map was published on three years after the foundation of Freetown, in ''An Essay on Colonisation Particularly Applied to the Western Coast of Africa'', by Swedish abolitionist Carl Bernhard Wadström (1746-99). In this work he argued that a colony would profit more from trade with the locals than exploited them as slaves.