CHAPTER XLVIII.
UPPER GUINEA.
Guinea is usually divided into Northern, or Upper Guinea, and Lower Guinea.
Upper Guinea has several divisions, which still retain the characteristic names first given to them. These names were founded mostly on the productions of different sections, and becoming popular were retained.
Sierra Leone, named from its bold front "Lion Mountain," stretches from Rokelle River in the north to Kater River in the south, and for about twenty miles inland. It is a British colony, founded in 1787 for the suppression of the slave trade in West Africa, and has been maintained for that purpose.
SIERRA LEONE.
The larger portion of the colony is a rugged peninsula of mountains. This has a sterile soil, but it is surrounded by a belt of fertile coast land with a humid and pestilential climate.
The population consists mostly of those who were once slaves, but who have been liberated. In 1869 the population numbered over fifty-five thousand; of these only one hundred and twenty-nine were white men. Freetown is the capital. Next to St. Louis it is the largest European town on the western coast of the continent.