PBA Galleries

1pg. Edgerley's retained copy of a “diplomatic” agreement with a local African “King" Dipenda in present-day Cameroon providing for purchase of half a mini-nation. Date chipped off at bottom of document, but ca.1850, prior to Edgerley's death in 1857.

Hitherto unknown historical record of a resident merchant in the seaside town of Victoria (now named Limbe), in southwest Cameroon.   Edgerley’s agreement with Dipenda specifies that the King and Chiefs of Wooje  “voluntarily and of our own free will” sold the trusted trader - for 10 British Pounds - “sovereignty” over “half our country”, promising to have “no palaver” or treaty agreement with any other town, country or foreign government, or to sell any “portion of our lands” without Edgerley’s knowledge and consent.

Edgerley had been an English merchant in Jamaica for 18 years before returning to Britain in the mid-1840s, when he and his wife, who was apparently white, sailed from Liverpool to Africa, bringing with them a “mulatto” boy whom Edgerley had either adopted or fathered in Jamaica.  After his father’s death, Samuel Edgerley Jr. remained in Victoria to found a prominent mixed-race family.  In 1877, the famous British missionary explorer George Grenfell married Rose Edgerley, his native housekeeper who was pregnant with his child; she would accompany him on many of his most adventurous journeys in the Congo.