which plays the role of a site of memory of slavery. In June 2013, President of the United States Barack Obama visited the House of Slaves. The island of Gorée was one of the first places in Africa to be settled by Europeans, as the Portuguese settled on the island in 1444. It was captured by the United Netherlands in 1588, then the Portuguese again, and again the Dutch. They named it after the Dutch island of . The British took it over under Robert Holmes in 1663, but it was soon recaptured by Michiel de Ruyter. French colonial rule After the French invasion in 1677, during the Franco-Dutch War, the island remained chiefly French until 1960. There were brief periods of British occupation during the various wars fought by France and Britain. The island was notably taken and occupied by the British between 1758 and 1763 following the Capture of Gorée and wider Capture of Senegal during the Seven Years' War before being returned to France at the Treaty of Paris (1763). For a brief time between 1779 and 1783, Gorée was again under British control, until ceded again to France in 1783 at the Treaty of Paris (1783). During that time, the infamous Joseph Wall served as Lieutenant-Governor there, who had some of his men unlawfully flogged to death in 1782; for these crimes, Wall was later executed in England. Gorée was principally a trading post, administratively attached to Saint-Louis, capital of the Colony of Senegal. Apart from slaves, beeswax, hides and grain were also traded. The population of the island fluctuated according to circumstances, from a few hundred free Africans and Creoles to about 1,500. There would have been few European residents at any one time. In the 18th and 19th century, Gorée was home to a Franco-African Creole, or Métis, community of merchants with links to similar communities in Saint-Louis and the Gambia, and across the Atlantic to France's colonies in the Americas. Métis women, called from the Portuguese descendants of African women and European traders, were especially important to the city's business life. The owned ships and property and commanded male clerks. They were also famous for cultivating fashion and entertainment. One such signare, Anne Rossignol, lived in Saint-Domingue (the modern Haiti) in the 1780s before the Haitian Revolution. In February 1794 during the French Revolution, France abolished slavery, and the slave trade from Senegal