other offshoots developed along the coast, and particularly in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Seafaring From the late eighteenth century onward, Krumen began working on European ships. By the 1790s the inhabitants of their original region were being hired as free sailors on European ships engaged in the slave trade. As the so-called "legitimate trade" replaced the slave trade in the nineteenth century and as trade along the West Africa coast increased, many Krumen signed on to the new vessels as seamen. In the process there developed Krumen communities around all the major trading factories of the coast, from Sierra Leone around to the mouth of the Congo River. A number of Kroomen (between 20 and 30) are buried in the Seaforth Old Burial Ground in Simon's Town, South Africa, where their graves can still be seen, and Kroomen is the name used to describe them on their gravestones. They were active in the Royal Navy from 1820 to as late as 1924, e.g. landed a camp party with 12 Krumen in Elephant Bay in June of that year. Many Kroomen joined the dockyard staff, others remained on board RN ships as seamen. They were given Western names by the men on the ships, leading to names that are amusing to the Western eye, Tom Ropeman and Will Cockroach amongst them. They were clearly commonly employed, and the names bestowed were not original, since the cemetery contains for example the remains of Tom Smith Number 1, to distinguish him from another Tom Smith. Although the earliest Krumen mariners may have come from the five core towns, people from many other places and ethnicities joined the original Krumen, creating a mixed but strongly held identity, not only in their home district, but in the many trading posts and towns where they came to settle, and then people from those places also became effectively Krumen by taking on their identity and behavioral characteristics. Some scholars maintain that in fact the term Krumen and indeed even Kru originated in the maritime branch of the culture alone, being transported back to the homelands from the dispersed communities, but others contend that the process of identity formation was more complex involving both maritime and shore communities. Krumen sailors were organized as small companies under a headman. They would paddle in small canoes as far as a dozen miles out to see to meet ships as they arrived