African slave trade by the UK and the United States. A reconstructed slave ship was docked at the island. Project directors Joseph Opala and Gary Chatelain at James Madison University created a three-dimensional image of the castle using computer-aided design and historic drawings. It is part of an exhibit portraying the island's history and depicts the buildings as they appeared 200 years ago. Evidence of numerous historical and genealogical links between Bunce Island and the United States has been found. In 2013, historians reported learning that two U.S. presidents, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, are directly descended from a slave-ship captain who operated out of Bunce Island and other ports in the Sierra Leone region in the late 1700s. Their ancestor Thomas Walker (AKA "Beau Walker") came from Bristol, one of Britain's principal slaving ports. Walker was involved in 11 slaving expeditions; he immigrated with his fortune to the US, where he became naturalised in 1792. One of his descendants, Dorothy (Walker) Bush, was the mother of George H.W. Bush. Conservation In 1948, Bunce Island was designated Sierra Leone's first officially protected historic site. The same year, Sierra Leonean amateur historian and medical doctor M.C.F. Easmon led an expedition that cleared the vegetation, mapped the ruins and photographed them for the first time. Research at the island has been underway since the 1970s. A hurricane struck in 1974, damaging structures. Bunce Island is now protected by the Sierra Leonean Monuments and Relics Commission, a branch of the country's Ministry of Tourism and Culture. The government is working to preserve the castle as an important historic site and as a destination for tourists, especially African Americans. Bunce Island has been called "the most important historic site in Africa for the United States" because thousands of slaves were shipped from here to ports in the American South. Gorée Island in Senegal has become better known than Bunce and has attracted African-American tourists and support for preservation since the 1980s. In October 2010, the Bunce Island Coalition (US) and its local partner organisation announced the start of the Bunce Island Preservation Project, a five-year, US$5 million effort to preserve the ruins of the castle as a historic landmark and to build a museum in Freetown devoted to the island's history and the influence of the Atlantic slave trade in Sierra Leone. Notable visitors General Colin Powell, then Chairman of the