Charles MacCarthy
Charles MacCarthy governed Sierra Leone for ten years, built Freetown's villages for the Africans the Royal Navy freed from slave ships, and marched into Asante territory with a few hundred men and was killed. He was born in Cork in 1764 to a French father and an Irish mother of the MacCarthy family, whose name he took, was commissioned in the Irish Brigade of the French army before the Revolution, passed through the Dutch service into the British in 1794, and served in the West Indies and Canada. He governed Senegal and Gorée from 1811 while Britain held them, and in 1814 became governor of Sierra Leone, the colony founded for freed Black people in 1787 that the Crown had taken over in 1808. His colony's business was the anti-slavery squadron. Ships condemned by the Mixed Commission court at Freetown landed their cargoes there, and MacCarthy settled the liberated Africans in villages in the hills behind the town, each with a church, a school and a Church Missionary Society superintendent, and gave them names like Regent, Gloucester, Wilberforce and Wellington; the Krio people of Sierra Leone descend from them. He was knighted in 1820. In 1821 the Company of Merchants that had run the Gold Coast forts was abolished and its posts were put under him, which brought him into the quarrel between the coastal Fante and the Asante Empire that claimed them. He decided to fight it. In January 1824 he led about five hundred men, most of them Fante allies, across the Pra towards an Asante army of perhaps ten thousand, and at Nsamankow on 21 January the two met. His column ran out of ammunition; the story that the reserve boxes were found to contain macaroni is old and unproven. He was wounded, shot himself or was killed, and his head was taken to Kumasi, where the skull was reported to serve the Asantehene as a drinking cup and was carried into battle for years afterwards. Britain took fifty years to sack Kumasi in return.
- Lived: 1764 CE – 1824 CE
- Nationality: British
- Roles: colonial_administrator, governor, general
