Fort St James: a 1910s traveller's view of the same ruin

The Australian-British writer Mary Gaunt travelled up the River Gambia on the steamer Mungo Park around 1910 and recorded passing the ruins she called Fort St James, roughly seventeen miles above Bathurst where the river narrows. She described a rocky islet with a few scattered trees, the ruined fort's crumbling stones visible from the deck, and no one living there any longer. This is the same fort later renamed Kunta Kinteh Island; her account is a visitor's impression, not an archaeological record. ^{[river-gaunt-1912]}

Gaunt repeated a local tradition that the fort's small garrison had been prone to duelling and that the many vacancies in its ranks were not always due to climate, alongside her own comment that the heat and monotony of the post could easily provoke a hasty quarrel. She also linked the ruin to an earlier trade in palm oil, slaves and ivory that had once passed down the river beside it. Her account reflects the period's own colonial and often romanticised idiom about West Africa, and its judgments about that history are hers, not this archive's. ^{[river-gaunt-1912]}