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Richard Pepys, surveyor of Old Street, was admitted to the Honourable Artillery Company as a cadet on 6
March 1781, with the written consent of his father because he was then only eighteen. The minutes of the
Court of Assistants show that he was born on 29 June 1762 for they note that he would be 'aged 19 yrs 29th
June next'. The online International Genealogical Index and the parish register held at the Guildhall Library
(MS9225/4) establish that he was the son of George and Agnes Pepys of the Minories and was christened at
St. Botolph without Aldgate church within the City of London. George Pepys was apparently not a direct
descendant of the famous seventeenth century diarist; he is not included in Genealogy of the Pepys Family
(1887), compiled by Walter Courtenay Pepys. On 6 September 1781 Richard Pepys suffered a serious
accident during the firing of a salute on the Artillery Garden for a General Court. His right hand and arm
were shattered by the premature ignition of the gun cartridge he was loading and immediately had to be
amputated just below the elbow.

The formal appointment of Pepys as the Company's first surveyor in November 1784 was in part recognition
of the injury he had suffered three years earlier. In December 1791 the Court voted a further £150 to Pepys
on his appointment as surveyor to the recently-established Sierra Leone Company and on condition he
relinquish all claim for future favours. Having previously referred to the 'many instances of support &
friendship I have experienced from the Honble Artillery Company, both individually and collectively', Pepys
thanked the Court for a sum 'which he said was beyond his expectations'.

Pepys, accompanied by his wife and child, was among more than one hundred Europeans in the Sierra Leone
Company's expedition to re-establish a free colony on the coast of West Africa for freed slaves and African-
American loyalist refugees from Nova Scotia. They travelled on the first ship, which arrived in Sierra Leone
in February 1792. At first Pepys was surveyor of buildings but he soon took on the additional responsibility
of surveyor of lands when the holder of that post became unwell and returned to England. His duties included
land surveying, bush clearance and laying out some of the streets in Freetown, as well as preliminary work
on simple fortifications that subsequent events suggest ought to have taken priority over other work he was
instead pressed to complete by settlers in the Colony.

Pepys was also a member of the Sierra Leone Council. In the distribution of land to the settlers, the Court of
Directors of the Company acknowledged that he 'attempted with the greatest spirit to begin his operations,
together with a party of Nova Scotian, even before the rains were over; but he was repeatedly stopped by
sickness'. Delays over the allocation of land to settlers caused resentment, in a Colony where squabbles seem
to have been commonplace, and Pepys aroused the enmity of another settler, a white American loyalist, Isaac
DuBois, who dismissed him intemperately in his Journal as an 'atheist' and 'as black a hearted insinuating
villain as this day exists'. When a squadron of French ships attacked Freetown on 28 September 1794, Pepys
and his family took refuge in the woods outside the settlement. His house in Freetown was looted and he
learned of rumours 'that a price was set on his head'. Sleeping outdoors without adequate shelter during
heavy rains, Pepys contracted a fever and died early in October 1794. He was only thirty-two years old. The
Governor of Sierra Leone saw his corpse in Granville Town on the coast a few miles from Freetown on 10
October. His wife and child survived.

An unflattering depiction of Pepys and his poor attitude to the black settlers in Sierra Leone can be found in
Professor Simon Schama's book Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (2005).
It is to be hoped that at least his layout of some of the earliest streets in Freetown has survived the passage of
time and the destructive civil war fought in Sierra Leone between 1991 and 2002.

References
1. Anna Maria Falconbridge, Narrative of Two Voyages to the River Sierra Leone during the years 1791-1792-1793
and the Journal of Isaac DuBois, ed by Christopher Fyfe, Liverpool University Press, 2000, pp175, 183
2. Christopher Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone, Oxford University Press, 1962, pp41, 44, 47, 49, 59 & 61.
3. The Long Room, Journal of the HAC, 28 (1951), pp109-111.
4. G.A. Raikes, The History of the Honourable Artillery Company, 2 vols, Bentley, London 1878-79, Vol II, pp 86-
87, 112, 122-124.
5. Substance of the Report Delivered by the Court of Directors of the Sierra Leone Company to the General Court
of Proprietors on Thursday the 27th March 1794, London, James Phillips, 1794, p15.
6. Substance of the Report of the Court of Directors of the Sierra Leone Company Delivered to the General Court
of Proprietors on Thursday the 26th February 1795, London, James Phillips, 1794, pp7, 12-14.