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About an hour’s row up the river from Bathurst is the island of St. James, which was the site of the first British settlement established in the Gambia. This isle, now so silent and deserted, was, towards the end of the seventeenth century, the scene of much bloodshed. During our numerous local wars with the French on this coast it was captured by them, and re-captured by us, no less than three times. On the last occasion a French naval force under the Count de Genes, in 1703, destroyed all the houses and devastated the entire settlement; and it was after this that the building of the town of Bathurst was commenced. Why the new colonists did not re-occupy James Island it is difficult to say, as it is fertile, well wooded, and fairly healthy, while St. Mary’s is barren, treeless, and pestilential. The ruins of the old fort, built in 1669, can still be distinguished from the river, covered with brushwood and shrouded in trees. The island is now entirely uninhabited, and its silence is never disturbed except by the advent of an occasional fisherman from the neighbouring Mandingo town of Sikka.