of an area. At this time the local military advantage was still on the side of the Africans, and there is a 1714 report of a king seizing RAC goods in retaliation for a breach of protocol. Local Afro-Portuguese merchants often acted as middlemen, the Europeans advancing them goods to trade to the local people, most often for ivory. In 1728, an overly aggressive RAC governor united the Africans and Afro-Portuguese in hostility to him; they burnt down the Bunce Island fort and it was not rebuilt until about 1750. During the time that the Royal African Company was operating, the firm of Grant, and Oswald provisioned the trading stations. When the RAC abandoned Bunce Island, Sargent and his partners purchased its factory in 1748, repaired it, and used it to trade in timber. They expanded to Batts, Bobs, Tasso, and Tumbu Islands and along the banks of the river, eventually becoming involved in the slave trade. The French sacked it again in 1779, during the American Revolutionary War. During the 17th century the Temne ethnolinguistic group was expanding. Around 1600, a Mani still ruled the Loko kingdom (the area north of Port Loko Creek) and another ruled the upper part of the south shore of the Freetown estuary. The north shore of the estuary was under a Bullom king, and the area just east of Freetown on the peninsula was held by a non-Mani with a European name, Dom Phillip de Leon (who may have been a subordinate to his Mani neighbour). By the mid-17th century this situation had changed: Temne, not Bullom was spoken on the south shore, and ships stopping for water and firewood had to pay customs to the Temne king of Bureh who lived at Bagos town on the point between the Rokel River and Port Loko Creek. (The king may have considered himself a Mani—to this day, Temne chiefs have Mani-derived titles—but his people were Temne. The Bureh king in place in 1690 was called Bai Tura, Bai being a Mani form.) The Temne had thus expanded in a wedge toward the sea at Freetown, and now separated the Bulom to the north from the Mani and other Mande-speakers to the south and east. In this period there are several reports of women occupying high positions. The king of the south shore used to leave one of his wives to rule when he was