Account of the Native Africans in the Neighbourhood of Sierra Leone

Sierra Leone in West Africa is the subject of this 1803 work by English physician Thomas Winterbottom (1766-1859). In the 1790s he spent four years there working for the Sierra Leone Company (established by abolitionists to resettle ex-slaves), and combating diseases such as malaria and scurvy. He displays none of the pejorative views of Africa or its inhabitants that some of his contemporaries expressed, but has a very positive opinion of the country. Winterbottom describes the women as beautiful and graceful, and he dismisses racial differentiations based on skin colour as being absurd. In Volume 1 he draws a many-faceted picture of the climate, history and traditions of Sierra Leone, describing the limited diet of the inhabitants (consisting mainly of rice and palm oil), and seeking to give scientific answers to such questions as why the hair of the inhabitants is mostly of a 'woolly' type.