Little Scarcies River

The Little Scarcies River is a river in west Africa that begins in Guinea and flows into Sierra Leone, after which it empties into the Atlantic Ocean. It is surrounded by extensive marshlands. The river is also known as the Kaba River.

The Great Scarcies River flows into the same bay of the Atlantic Ocean (8°54′00″N 13°11′00″W / 8.90000°N 13.18333°W), just to the north of the mouth of the Little Scarcies River. This area was settled by the Temne people who migrated from Futa Jalon to the north.^[1]

An earlier alternative form of the name was Scassos;^[2] the English name is derived from the Portuguese Rio dos Carceres.^[3]

Notes

1. Fyfe, Christopher (1962). A Short History of Sierra Leone. London: Longmans.
2. Carl Bernhard Wadström, An Essay on Colonization, Particularly Applied to the Western Coast of Africa, with Some Free Thoughts on Cultivation and Commerce (Darton and Harvey, 1794), p. 237.
3. P. E. H. Hair (ed.), Hawkins in Guinea, 1567-1568 (Leipzig: Institut fur Afrikanistik, Universitat Leipzig, 2000; ISBN 3932632656), p. 57: "The 'Causserus' is River Scarcies, an important waterway NW of the Sierra Leone estuary, whose local name was probably Kase but which became known to the Portuguese as first Rio de Case/Caces and then as Rio dos Carceres; hence, by English corruption, 'Scarcies'."