capital, chief port, and largest city of Sierra Leone, on the rocky Sierra Leone Peninsula, at the seaward tip of a range of wooded hills, which were named Serra Leôa (“Lion Mountains”) by the Portuguese navigator Pedro de Sintra when he explored the West African coast in 1462. By the 1650s the increased activity of British, French, Dutch, and Danish trading companies ended the limited degree of Portuguese control over the coastal trade. An English abolitionist (abolitionism), Granville Sharp (Sharp, Granville), selected the site (south of the mouth of the Sierra Leone River) in 1787 as a haven for African slaves, freed and destitute in England. (They were known as the Black Poor.) In 1792 the Sierra Leone Company assumed responsibility and helped settle slaves from Nova Scotia who had fought for the British in the American Revolutionary War, the “Maroons,” runaway slaves of Jamaica, and others from captured slave ships. They were landed at King Jimmy's Watering Place (now a bustling marketplace). Their descendants, known as Creoles, are now outnumbered by Mende and Temne immigrants from the interior. In 1821 Freetown became the seat of government for all of Great Britain's West African possessions, a position it retained (with slight changes) until 1874. Freetown, incorporated as a municipality in 1893, became the country's capital in 1961.