Sierra Leone, a British colony—since 1888 a separate and distinct colony—on the west coast of Africa, stretching 180 miles along the coast, from the French colony of Rivieres du Sud in the north to Liberia in the south, with an area of 4000 sq. m. (including the Los, the Banana, Tasso, and Sherbro islands). In 1896 a hinterland of 40,000 sq. m. was proclaimed a protectorate, and was organised after the troubles about the hut-tax in 1898 (which for a time caused some anxiety). The name Sierra Leone is more strictly confined to a densely-wooded peninsula, 26 miles long by 12 broad, jutting out to the NW., just south of the Sierra Leone (i.e. the river Rokelle) estuary, which rises to 3000 feet in Sugar Loaf Mountain. The climate is very hot and very moist. The rains last from April to December, and the annual rainfall ranges from 144 to 170 inches. The thermometer varies between 64.5° and 100.5° F. The low-lying districts are infested with a good deal of fever and malaria; but the higher parts are comparatively healthy. Sierra Leone is often called the 'White Man's Grave;' but the title would be just as appropriate to any of the adjacent coast-regions of that part of Africa. The resources of the colony are by no means fully developed. Agriculture and trading employ each only about one-fifth of the population, which in 1890 numbered 75,000 individuals (60,546 in 1881; 37,039 in 1871). They are nearly all negroes, about one-half the descendants of liberated slaves, the others belonging to almost all the tribes of that part of Africa. But all the negroes are alike indolent, and the soil does not yield anything like what it is capable of yielding. Coffee, cocoa, tapioca, ginger, maize, cassava, and cotton are grown; but the bulk of the exports (ground-nuts, kola-nuts, benni-seed, ginger, lides, palm-oil and kernels, india-rubber, and gums) come from the interior. These commodities are exported to the annual average value of £332,600, of which Sierra Leone itself contributes but a very small part. Of the total value an average of £141,000 represents the exports to England. The import trade ranges between £248,000 (1886) and £390,000 (1890) a year, England's share falling between £190,500 (1888) and £295,000 (1890). Clothing, provisions, wine and spirits, iron and steel goods, haberdashery, gunpowder, and tobacco are the principal imports. The harbours of the colony are entered by 715 vessels of 250,000 tons every year. There is a little boat-building, mat-making, and cloth-weaving. The capital is Freetown (q.v.), now a fortified naval depôt and coaling station. The colony is provided with good roads, and has a frontier police of 290 men (organised in 1890), besides part of the West India regiment (400 men). Fouray Bay College (1828), near Freetown, belongs to the Church Missionary Society, and was affiliated in 1876 to Durham University. There are four or five good schools, a lunatic asylum (100 inmates), and a savings-bank (1120 depositors, holding £16,485 in 1890) in the colony. Sierra Leone gives title to an Anglican bishop, and contains many Methodists, besides a large body of Mohammedans. The governor is assisted by an executive council of five members, and the same officials together with three other persons nominated by the crown constitute the legislative council. In 1897 the revenue was £106,000, and the expenditure £111,678; the public debt in 1897 was £25,000, but the sinking fund paid it off in 1898.
This district was discovered and named (from the lion-like thunder on its mountain-tops, Sierra Leone = Lion Mountain) by the Portuguese navigator, P. de Cintra, in 1462. In 1787 a body of freed slaves were planted here as a colony; but the enterprise was not a success. Four years later a second attempt was made by the Sierra Leone Company (which included amongst its promoters men like Granville Sharp, W. Wilberforce, and Sir R. Carr Glyn). But this scheme, even though supported by the arrival of 1200 freed negro slaves from North America, was not an unqualified success, and in 1807 the company transferred their rights to the crown. The boundaries of the colony have been gradually extended on all sides, except to the west, since 1862.
See T. R. Griffith, in Proc. Roy. Colonial Institute (1881-82); and Banbury, Sierra Leone (1888).