Cape Coast Castle

The dungeons and the Door of No Return

Cape Coast Castle stands on the shore of Ghana's Central Region, one of about forty slave castles, large commercial forts that European traders built along what they called the Gold Coast. The Portuguese had a trading post here from 1555, Cabo Corso, the short cape, a name later worn down in English to Cape Coast.

The castle began with Hendrik Caerloff, a former officer of the Dutch West India Company working for the Swedish Africa Company, who won permission from the king of Fetu and in 1653 raised a timber lodge named Carolusborg after King Charles X of Sweden. It was built for timber and gold. Caerloff later changed sides, sailing back for the Danish West India Company to capture the forts he had founded, with Dutch help, and after more changes of hands the English took Carolusborg in 1664, on the eve of the Second Anglo-Dutch War, and fortified it so heavily as Cape Coast Castle that no one challenged them again. In 1672 the Royal African Company was granted a monopoly on English trade along the whole west coast of Africa, and the agent-general at the castle supplied its trading forts with goods to exchange for gold, ivory and slaves.

Gold first drew the Europeans, but enslaved Africans became the main trade, and the castle was altered to hold them. By about 1682 a dungeon had been cut into the rock beneath the parade ground. The French traveller Jean Barbot described its vaulted cellars, divided into several rooms, as able to hold a thousand captives, let down through an opening made for the purpose, and noted that keeping them underground protected the garrison against revolt. Above them the European officers lived in comparative luxury. Food depended on the local price of corn, and in June 1683 a factor wrote that his prisoners were starving. From the dungeons captives passed through the gate of no return to the ships for the Americas, above all the Caribbean.

Later the British merchants who ran the Gold Coast sat here, and George Maclean presided over their committee at the castle from 1830 to 1844. The British Public Works Department restored it in the 1920s. Today the castle and dungeon, as it is officially called, is a museum, and guided tours take visitors into the dungeons, past the artefacts of the museum and up to the governor's chambers, with the Atlantic below.

In 1979 UNESCO listed it with the other forts and castles of Ghana, built between 1482 and 1786 along some 500 km of coast between Keta and Beyin by Portuguese, Spanish, Danish, Swedish, Dutch, German and British traders, as testimony to the gold trade and the slave trade that followed it.