Liberia <«- 



Customs duties. Usually these men married daughters of 

 native chiefs, had a brood of mulatto children, and became very 

 powerful, turning their efforts towards establishing a close 

 monopoly in trade. It was desirable in the debatable lands 

 between Liberia and Sierra Leone to establish more effective 

 control over these independent traders, or their trading without 

 heed of Customs duties would be detrimental to the more 

 settled establishments farther west and east. It may be that 

 the pioneer traders themselves invited the intervention of the 

 British Government, to enforce claims justifiable and unjustifi- 

 able against natives for debts or robbery. 



In the early days of the Sierra Leone colony (1817 and 

 1825) some attempt was made by the Governors of that colony 

 (Sir Charles MacCarthy, for example, in 1817, and Sir Charles 

 Turner in 1B25) to extend British political influence along the 

 coast eastwards past Sherbro Island ; and on September 24th, 

 1825, a convention with the chiefs of Sherbro and the ad- 

 joining islands and mainland was concluded, which certainly 

 brought the British frontier to the vicinity of the Sewa 

 River. It is true that by a subsequent proclamation Sir 

 Charles Turner, though expressly leaving the Gallinhas 

 territory outside British limits, instanced the intersection of the 

 7th degree N. Lat. with the coast as being in some way the 

 British boundary. But in that case he claimed a boundary to 

 which he had no treaty rights, and for which apparently it was 

 not thought worth while to acquire any. 



No attempt was made to contest the right of the Liberians 

 to the coast-line up to the Sewa River and the Turner 

 Peninsula until i860, when trouble arose through a trader 

 named John Myers Harris, who had taken advantage of the 

 lack of any effective Liberian occupation to the west of Cape 

 Mount, to establish himself between the River Sulima and the 



242 



