William Clevland (king)
King of the Banana Islands
William Clevland (1720 – 6 December 1758) was an Anglo-Scot who became the self-appointed King of the Banana Islands off the coast of present-day Sierra Leone which at the time was part of Guinea (region).
Early life and family
William Clevland was the son of Commodore William Clevland, a Scotsman who settled at Tapeley Park, near Bideford, Devon. His brother was John Clevland, who was appointed as Secretary of the Admiralty.
Career
In the 1730s Clevland was working for the Royal African Company, which had a monopoly on trade at Sierra Leone. He was on board a slave ship that was wrecked off the Banana Islands. He and surviving African slaves made their way to the islands, which they settled. Clevland took power and named himself king.
His children included:
By Kate Corker, daughter of King Skinner Corker:
John Clevland (1740–1764)
Elizabeth Clevland Hardcastle (1741–1808) who settled in South Carolina.
By Ndamba, a Kissi woman. Their children included:
James Cleveland (1754?
“William Clevland (king)” enters the record as king of the Banana Islands. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what William, Clevland and king can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“William Clevland (king)” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, William, Clevland and king provides the most credible route into that argument.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 10, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q8006897. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1720, 1758, 1740 and 1764.
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This entry incorporates text from “William Clevland (king)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.