TO THE GOLD COAST FOR GOLD

In treating this part of the subject I shall do my best to avoid bitterness and harsh judging as far as the duty of a traveller—that of telling the whole truth—permits me. It is better for both writer and reader to praise than to dispraise. Most Englishmen know negroes of pure blood as well as 'coloured persons' who, at Oxford and elsewhere, have shown themselves fully equal in intellect and capacity to the white races of Europe and America. These men afford incontestable proofs that the negro can be civilised, and a high responsibility rests upon them as the representatives of possible progress. But hitherto the African, as will presently appear, has not had fair play. The petting and pampering process, the spirit of mawkish reparation, and the coddling and high-strung sentimentality so deleterious to the tone of the colony, were errors of English judgment pure and simple. We can easily explain them.

The sad grey life of England, the reflection of her climate, has ever welcomed a novelty, a fresh excitement. Society has in turn lionised the marmiton, or assistant-cook, self-styled an 'Emir of the Lebanon;' the Indian 'rajah,' at home a munshi, or language-master; and the 'African princess,' a slave-girl picked up in the bush. It is the same hunger for sensation which makes the mob stare at the Giant and the Savage, the Fat Lady, the Living Skeleton, and the Spotted Boy.

Before entering into details it will be necessary to notice the history of the colony—an oft-told tale; yet nevertheless some parts will bear repetition.

[Footnote: The following is its popular chronology:—
1787. First settlers (numbering 460) sailed.
1789. Town burnt by natives (1790?).
1791. St. George's Bay Company founded.
1792. Colonists (1,831) from Nova Scotia.
1794. Colony plundered by the French.
1800. Maroons (560) from Jamaica added.
1808. Sá Leone ceded to the Crown; 'Cruits' introduced.
1827. Direct government by the Crown.]

According to Père Labat, the French founded in 1365 Petit Paris at 'Serrelionne,' a town defended by the fort of the Dieppe and Rouen merchants. The official date of the discovery is 1480, when Pedro de Cintra, one of the gentlemen of Prince Henry 'the Navigator,' visited the place, after his employer's death A.D. 1463. In 1607 William Finch, merchant, found the names of divers Englishmen inscribed on the rocks, especially Thos. Candish, or Cavendish, Captain Lister, and Sir Francis Drake. In 1666 the Sieur Villault de Bellefons tells us that the river from Cabo Ledo, or Cape Sierra Leone, had several bays, of which the fourth, now St. George's, was called Baie de France. This seems to confirm Père Labat. I have noticed the Tasso fort, built by the English in 1695. The next account is by Mr. Surveyor Smith, [Footnote: He is mentioned in the last chapter.] who says 'it is not certain when the English became masters of Sierra Leone, which they possessed unmolested until Roberts the pirate took it in 1720.' Between 1785 and 1787 Lieutenant John Matthews, R.N., resided here, and left full particulars concerning the export slave-trade, apparently the only business carried on by the British.

Modern Sá Leone is the direct outcome of Lord Chief Justice Mansfield's memorable decision delivered in the case of Jas. Somerset v. Mr. James G. Stewart, his master. 'The claim of slavery never can be supported; the power claimed never was in use here or acknowledged by law.' This took place on June 21, 1772; yet in 1882 the Gold Coast is not wholly free. [Footnote: Slavery was abolished on the Gold Coast by royal command on December 7, 1874; yet the Gold Coast Times declares that domestic slavery is an institution recognised by the law-courts of the Protectorate.]

Many 'poor blacks,' thrust out of doors by their quondam owners, flocked to the 'African's friend,' Granville Sharp, and company. Presently a charitable society, with a large command of funds and Jonas Hanway for chairman, was formed in London; and our people, sorely sorrowing for their newly-found sin, proposed a colony founded on philanthropy and free labour in Africa. Sá Leone was chosen, by the advice of Mr. Smeathman, an old resident. In 1787 Captain Thompson, agent of the St. George's Bay Company, paid 30l. to the Timni chief, Naimbana, alias King Tom, for the rocky peninsula, extending twenty square miles from the Rokel to the Ketu River. In the same year he took out the first batch of emigrants, 460 black freed-men and about 60 whites, in the ship Nautilus, whose history so far resembled that of the Mayflower. Eighty-four perished on the journey, and not a few fell victims to the African climate and its intemperance; but some 400 survived and built for themselves Granville Town. These settlers formed the first colony.

In 1790 the place was attacked by the Timni tribe, to avenge the insult offered to their 'King Jimmy' by the crew of an English vessel, who burnt his town. The people dispersed, and were collected from the bush with some difficulty by Mr. Falconbridge. This official was sent out from England early in 1791, and his wife wrote the book. In the same year (1791) St. George's Bay Company was incorporated under Act 31 Geo. III. c. 55 as the 'Sierra Leone Company.' Amongst the body of ninety-nine proprietors the foremost names are Granville Sharp, William Wilberforce, William Ludlam, and Sir Richard Carr Glynn. They spent 111,500l. in establishing and developing the settlement during the first ten and a half years of its existence; and the directors organised a system of government, closely resembling the British constitution, under Lieutenant Clarkson, R.N.

Next year the second batch of colonists came upon the stage. The negroes who had remained loyal to England, and had been settled by the Government in Nova Scotia, found the bleak land utterly unsuitable, and sent home a delegate to pray that they might be restored to Africa. The directors obtained free passage in sixteen ships for 100 white men and 1,831 negroes. Led by Lieutenant Clarkson, they landed upon the Lioness range in March (1792), after losing sixty of their number.

Bred upon maize and rice, bread and milk, the new comers sickened on cassava and ground-nuts. They had no frame-houses, and the rains set in early, about mid-May, before they had found shelter. The whites were attacked with climate-fever, which did not respect even the doctors. Quarrels and insubordination resulted, and 800 of the little band were soon carried to the grave. Then a famine broke out. A ship from England, freighted with stores, provisions, and frame-houses, was driven back by a storm. Forty-five acres had been promised to each settler-family; it was found necessary to diminish the number to four, and the denseness of the bush rendered even those four unmanageable. Disgusted with Granville Town, the new comers transferred themselves to the present site of Freetown, the northern Libreville.

The Company offered annual premiums to encourage the building of farm-houses, stock-rearing, and growing provisions and exportable produce. Under Dr. Afzelius, afterwards Professor at Upsal, who first studied the natural history of the peninsula, they established an experimental garden and model farm. An English gardener was also employed to naturalise the large collection of valuable plants from the East and West Indies and the South Sea Islands supplied by Kew. The Nova Scotians, however, like true slaves, considered agriculture servile and degrading work—a prejudice which, as will be seen, prevails to this day not only in the colony, but throughout the length and breadth of the Dark Continent.

Meanwhile war had broken out between England and France, causing the frequent detention of vessels; and a store-ship in the harbour caught fire, the precursor of a worse misfortune. On a Sunday morning, 1794, as the unfortunates were looking out for the Company's craft (the Harpy), a French man-of-war sailed into the roadstead, pillaged the 'church and the apothecary's shop,' and burnt boats as well as town. The assailant then wasted Granville, sailed up to Bance Island, and finally captured two vessels, besides the long-expected Harpy. Having thus left his mark, he disappeared, after granting, at the Governor's urgent request, two or three weeks' provision for the whites. Famine followed, with sickness in its train, and the neighbouring slave-dealers added all they could to the sufferings of the settlement.

In the same year Zachary Macaulay, father of Lord Macaulay, became Governor for the first time. The Company also made its earliest effort to open up trade with the interior by a mission, and two of their servants penetrated 300 miles inland to Timbo, capital of that part of Pulo-land. A deputation of chiefs presently visited the settlement to propose terms; but the futility of the negro settler was a complete obstacle to the development of the internal commerce, the main object for which the Company was formed. Yet the colony prospered; in 1798 Freetown numbered, besides public buildings, about 300 houses.

In 1800 the Sierra Leone Company obtained a Charter of Justice from the Crown, authorising the directors to appoint a Governor and Council, and to make laws not repugnant to those of England. During the same year the settlers, roused to wrath by a small ground-rent imposed upon their farms, rose in rebellion. This movement was put down by introducing a third element of 530 Maroons, who arrived in October. They were untamable Coromanti (Gold Coast) negroes who boasted that among blacks they were what the English are among whites, able to fight and thrash all other tribes. They had escaped from their Spanish masters when the British conquered Jamaica in 1655; they took to the mountains, and, joined by desperadoes, they built sundry scattered settlements. [Footnote: In 1738, after regular military operations, the Maroons of Jamaica agreed to act as police and to deliver up runaways. In 1795 the Trelawny men rebelled, and, having inflicted a severe loss upon the troops, were deported to Nova Scotia and Sá Leone.] Introducing these men fostered the ill-feeling which, in the earlier part of the present century, prevented the rival sections from intermarrying. Many of the disaffected Sá Leonites left the colony; some fled to the wilds and the wild ones of the interior, and a few remained loyal.

Rumours of native invasions began to prevail. The Governor was loth to believe that King Tom would thus injure his own interests, until one morning, when forty war-canoes, carrying armed Timnis, were descried paddling round the eastern point. Londoners and Nova Scotians fled to the fort, and next day the Timni drum sounded the attack. The Governor, who attempted to parley, was wounded; but the colonists, seeing that life was at stake, armed themselves and beat off the assailants, when the Maroons of Granville Town completed the rout. After this warning a wall with strong watch-towers was built round Freetown.

Notwithstanding all precautions, another 'Timni rising' took place in 1803. The assailants paddled down in larger numbers from Porto Loko, landed at Kissy, and assaulted Freetown, headed by a jumping and drumming 'witch-woman.' Divided into three storming parties, they bravely attacked the gates, but they were beaten back without having killed a man. The dead savages lay so thick that the Governor, fearing pestilence, ordered the corpses to be cast into the sea.

The first law formally abolishing slavery was passed, after a twenty years' campaign, by the energy of Messieurs Clarkson, Stephen, Wilberforce, and others, on May 23, 1806. In 1807 the importation of fresh negroes into the colonies became illegal. On March 16, 1808, Sá Leone received a constitution, and was made a depôt for released captives. This gave rise to the preventive squadron, and in due time to a large importation of the slaves it liberated. Locally called 'Cruits,' many of these savages were war-captives; others were criminals condemned to death, whom the wise chief preferred to sell than to slay. With a marvellous obtuseness and want of common sense our Government made Englishmen by wholesale of these wretches, with eligibility to sit on juries, to hold office, and to exercise all the precious rights of Englishmen. Instead of being apprenticed or bound to labour for some seven years under superintendence, and being taught to clear the soil, plant and build, as in similar cases a white man assuredly would have been, they were allowed to loaf, lie, and cheat through a life equally harmful to themselves and others. 'Laws of labour,' says an African writer, [Footnote: Sierra Leone Weekly Times, July 30, 1862.] 'may be out of place (date?) in England, but in Sierra Leone they would have saved an entire population from trusting to the allurements of a petty, demoralising trade; they would have saved us the sight of decayed villages and a people becoming daily less capable of bearing the laborious toil of agricultural industry. To handle the hoe has now become a disgrace, and men have lost their manhood by becoming gentlemen.' I shall presently return to this subject.

Thus the four colonies which successively peopled Sá Leone were composed of destitute paupers from England, of fugitive Nova Scotian serviles, of outlawed Jamaican negroes, and of slave-prisoners or criminals from every region of Western and inner Africa.

The first society of philanthropists, the 'Sierra Leone Company,' failed, but not without dignity. It had organised a regular government, and even coined its own money. In the British Museum a silver piece like a florin bears on the obverse 'Sierra Leone Company, Africa,' surrounding a lion guardant standing on a mountain; the reverse shows between the two numbers 50 and 50 two joined hands, representing the union of England and Africa, and the rim bears 'half-dollar piece, 1791,' the year of the creation of the colony. The Company's intentions were pure; its hopes and expectations were lofty, and the enthusiasts flattered themselves that they had proved the practicability of civilising Africa. But debt and native wars ended their career, and transferred, on January 1, 1808, their rights to the Crown. The members, however, did not lose courage, but at once formed the African Institution, the parent of the Royal Geographical Society.

The government of the Crown colony has undergone some slight modifications. In 1866 it was made, with very little forethought, a kind of government-general, the centre of rule for all the West African settlements. The unwisdom of this step was presently recognised, and Sá Leone is now under a charter dated December 17, 1874, the governor-in-chief having command over the administration of Bathurst, Gambia. Similarly farther south, Lagos, now the Liverpool of West Africa, has been bracketed, foolishly enough, with the Gold Coast.

The liberateds, called by the people 'Cruits,' and officially 'recaptives,' soon became an important factor. In 1811 they numbered 2,500 out of 4,500; and between June 1819 and January 1833 they totalled 27,167 hands. They are now represented by about seventeen chief, and two hundred minor, tribes. A hundred languages, according to Mr. Koelle, increased to a hundred and fifty by Bishop Vidal, and reduced to sixty by Mr. Griffith, are spoken in the streets of Freetown, a 'city' which in 1860 numbered 17,000 and now 22,000 souls. The inextricably mixed descendants of the liberateds may be a total of 35,430, more than half the sum of the original settlement, 53,862. Being mostly criminals, and ergo more energetic spirits, they have been the most petted and patronised by colonial rule. There were governors who attempted to enforce our wise old regulations touching apprenticeship, still so much wanted in the merchant navy; but disgust, recall, or death always shortened their term of office. Naturally enough, the 'Cruits' were fiercely hated by Colonists, Settlers, and Maroons. Mrs. Melville reports an elderly woman exclaiming, 'Well, 'tis only my wonder that we (settlers) do not rise up in one body and kill and slay, kill and slay! Dem Spanish and Portuguese sailors were quite right in making slaves. I would do de same myself, suppose I were in dere place.' 'He is only a liberated!' is a favourite sneer at the new arrivals; so in the West Indies, by a curious irony of fate, 'Willyfoss nigger' is a term of abuse addressed to a Congo or Guinea 'recaptive.' But here all the tribes are bitterly hostile to one another, and all combine against the white man. After the fashion of the Gold Coast they have formed themselves into independent caucuses called 'companies,' who set aside funds for their own advancement and for the ruin of their rivals.

The most powerful and influential races are two—the Aku and the Ibo. The Akus [Footnote: This is a nickname from the national salutation, 'Aku, ku, ku?' ('How d'ye do?')] or Egbas of Yoruba, the region behind Lagos, the Eyeos of the old writers, so called from their chief town, 'Oyo,' are known by their long necklaces of tattoo. They are termed the Jews of Western Africa; they are perfect in their combination, and they poison with a remarkable readiness. The system of Egba 'clanship' is a favourite, sometimes an engrossing, topic for invective with the local press, who characterise this worst species of 'trades-union,' founded upon intimidation and something worse, as the 'Aku tyranny' and the 'Aku Inquisition.' The national proverb speaks the national sentiment clearly enough: 'Okàn kau lè ase ibi, ikoko li asi ìmolle bi atoju ìmolle taù, ke atoju ibi pella, bi aba kû ara enni ni isni 'ni' ('A man must openly practise the duties of kinship, even though he may privately belong to a (secret) club; when he has attended the club he must also attend to the duties of kinship, because when he dies his kith and kin are those who bury him').

The Ibos, or 'Eboes' of American tales, are even more divided; still they feel and act upon the principle 'Union is strength.' This large and savage tribe, whose headquarters are at Abo, about the head of the Nigerian delta, musters strong at Sá Leone; here they are the Swiss of the community; the Kruboys, and further south the Kabenda-men being the 'Paddies.' It is popularly said that while the Aku will do anything for money, the Ibo will do anything for revenge. Both races are astute in the extreme and intelligent enough to work harm. Unhappily, their talents rarely take the other direction. In former days they had faction-fights: the second eastern district witnessed the last serious disturbance in 1834. Now they do battle under the shadow of the law. 'Aku constables will not, unless in extreme cases, take up their delinquent countrymen, nor will an Ebo constable apprehend an Ebo thief; and so on through all the different tribes,' says the lady 'Resident of Sierra Leone.' If the majority of the jury be Akus, they will unhesitatingly find the worst of Aku criminals innocent, and the most innocent of whites, Ibos, or Timnis guilty. The Government has done its best to weld all those races into one, and has failed. Many, however, are becoming Moslems, as at Lagos, and this change may have a happier effect by introducing the civilisation of El-Islam.

Trial by jury has proved the reverse of a blessing to most non-English lands; in Africa it is simply a curse. The model institution becomes here, as in the United States, a better machine for tyranny than any tyrant, except a free people, ever invented. The British Constitution determines that a man shall be tried by his peers. Half a dozen of his peers at Sá Leone may be full-blooded blacks, liberated slaves, half-reformed fetish-worshippers, sometimes with a sneaking fondness for Shángo, the Egba god of fire; and, if not criminals and convicts in their own country, at best paupers clad in dishclouts and palm-oil. The excuse is that a white jury cannot be collected among the forty or fifty eligibles in Freetown. It is vain to 'challenge,' for other negroes will surely take the place of those objected to. No one raises the constitutional question, 'Are these half-reclaimed savages my peers?' And if he did, Justice would sternly reply, 'Yes.' The witnesses will forswear themselves, not, like our 'posters,' for half a crown, but gratis, because the plaintiff or defendant is a fellow-tribesman. The judge may be 'touched with a tar-brush;' but, be he white as milk, he must pass judgment according to verdict. This state of things recalls to mind the Ireland of the early nineteenth century, when the judges were prefects armed with a penal code, and the jurymen vulgar, capricious, and factious partisans.

Surely such a caricature of justice, such an outrage upon reason, was never contemplated by British law or lawgiver. Our forefathers never dreamt that the free institutions for which they fought and bled during long centuries would thus be prostituted, would be lavished upon every black 'recaptive,' be he thief, wizard, or assassin, after living some fourteen days in a black corner of the British empire. Even the Irishman and the German must pass some five years preparing themselves in the United States before they become citizens. Sensible Africans themselves own that 'the negro race is not fitted, without a guiding hand, to exercise the privileges of English citizenship.' A writer of the last century justly says, 'Ideas of perfect liberty have too soon been given to this people, considering their utter ignorance. If one of them were asked why he does not repair his house, clear his farm, mend his fence, or put on better clothes, he replies that "King no give him work dis time," and that he can do no more than "burn bush and plant little cassader for yam."'

But a kind of hysterica passio seems to have mastered the cool common sense of the nation—a fury of repentance for the war about the Asiento contract, for building Bristol and Liverpool with the flesh and blood of the slave, and for the 2,130,000 negroes supplied to Jamaica between 1680 and 1786. Like a veteran devotee Great Britain began atoning for the coquetries of her hot youth. While Spain and Portugal have passed sensible laws for gradual emancipation, England, with a sublime folly, set free by a stroke of the pen, at the expense of twenty millions sterling the born and bred slaves of Jamaica. The result was an orgy for a week, a systematic refusal to work, and for many years the ruin of the glorious island.

If the reader believes I have exaggerated the state of things long prevalent at Sá Leone, he is mistaken. And he will presently see a confirmation of these statements in the bad name which the Sá Leonite bears upon the whole of the western coast. Yet, I repeat, the colony is changed for the better, physically by a supply of pure water, morally by the courage which curbed the black abuse. Twenty years ago to call a negro 'nigger' was actionable; many a 5l. has been paid for the indulgence of lèse-majesté against the 'man and brother;' and not a few 50l. when the case was brought into the civil courts. After a rough word the Sá Leonite would shake his fist at you and trot off exclaiming, 'Lawyer Rainy (or Montague) lib for town!' A case of mild assault, which in England would be settled by a police-magistrate and a fine of five shillings, became at Freetown a serious 'bob.' Niger, accompanied by his friends or his 'company,' betook himself to some limb of the law, possibly a pettifogger, certainly a pauper who braved a deadly climate for uncertain lucre. His interest was to promote litigation and to fill his pockets by what is called sharp practice. After receiving the preliminary fee of 5l., to be paid out of the plunder, he demanded exemplary damages, and the defendant was lightened of all he could afford to pay. When the offender was likely to leave the station, the modus operandi was as follows. The writ of summons was issued. The lawyer strongly recommended an apology and a promise to defray costs, with the warning that judgment would go by default against the absentee. If the defendant prudently 'stumped up,' the affair ended; if not, a capias was taken out, and the law ran its course. A jury was chosen, and I have already told the results.

At length these vindictive cases became so numerous and so scandalous that strong measures became necessary. Governor Blackall (1862-66) was brave enough to issue an order that cases should not be brought into the civil courts unless complainants could prove that they were men of some substance. Immense indignation was the result; yet the measure has proved most beneficial. The negro no longer squares up to you in the suburbs and dares the 'white niggah' to strike the 'black gen'leman.' He mostly limits himself to a mild impudence. If you ask a well-dressed black the way to a house, he may still reply, 'I wonder you dar 'peak me without making compliment!' The true remedy, however, is still wanting, a 'court of summary jurisdiction presided over by men of honour and probity.' [Footnote: Wanderings in West Africa, ii. pp. 231-23.]

It cannot be said that the Sá Leonite has suffered from any want of religious teaching or educational activity. On the contrary, he has had too much of both.

After the collapse of Portuguese missionary enterprise on the West Coast, the first attempts to establish Wesleyan Methodism at Sá Leone were made in 1796, when Dr. Thomas Coke tried and failed. The Nova Scotian colonists in 1792 had already brought amongst them Wesleyans, Baptists, and Lady Huntingdon's connexion. This school, which differs from other Methodists only in Church government, still has a chapel at Sá Leone. Thus each sect claims 1792 as the era of its commencement in the colony. In 1811 Mr. Warren, the first ordained Wesleyan missionary, reached Freetown and died on July 23, 1812. He was followed by Mrs. Davies, the prima donna of the corps: she 'gathered up her feet,' as the native saying is, on December 15, 1815. Since that time the place has never lacked an unbroken succession of European missionary deaths.

The Church Missionary Society, founded in 1799, sent out, five years afterwards, its first representatives, MM. Renner and Hartwig, Germans supported by English funds. In 1816 they devoted themselves steadily to converting the 'recaptives,' and many of them, together with their wives, fell bravely at their posts. In twenty years thirty-seven out of seventy died or were invalided. The names of Wylander and W. A. B. Johnson are deservedly remembered. Nearly half a million sterling was spent at Sá Leone, where the stone church of Kissy Road was built in 1839, and that of Pademba Road in 1849. The grants were wisely withdrawn in 1862. At the present moment only 300l. is given, and the church is reported to be self-supporting. The first bishopric was established in 1852. In 1861 Bishop Beckles instituted the native Church pastorate: its constitution is identical with that of the Episcopalians, whose ecclesiastical functions it has taken over.

According to the last census-returns, Sá Leone contains 18,660 Episcopalians; 17,093 Wesleyans and Methodists of the New Connection; 2,717 Lady Huntingdonians; 388 Baptists, and 369 Catholics. These native Christians keep the Sundays and Church festivals with peculiar zest, and delight in discordant hymns and preaching of the most ferocious kind. The Dissenting chapel combines the Christy minstrel with Messieurs Moody and Sankey; and the well-peppered palaver-sauce of home cookery reappears in hotly spiced, bitterly pious sermons and 'experiences;' in shouts of 'Amen!' 'Glory!' and 'Hallelujah!' and in promiscuous orders to 'Hol' de fort.' Right well do I remember while the rival pilots, Messieurs Elliot and Johnson, were shamelessly perjuring themselves in the police-court, [Footnote: Wanderings in West Africa, i. pp. 256-58.] the junior generation on the other side of the building, separated by the thinnest of party-walls, was refreshing itself with psalms and spiritual songs.

We went to hear the psalmody. Ascending the staircase in the gable opposite the court-house, we passed down the hall, and saw through the open door the young idea at its mental drill in the hands of a pedagogue, apparently one of the [Greek: anaimosarka], who, ghastly white and thatched with Paganini hair, sat at the head of the room, the ruling body of the unruly rout. Down the long length, whose whitewashed walls were garnished with inscriptions, legal, moral, and religious, all sublime as far as size went, were ranged parallel rows of négrillons in the vast costumal variety of a ragged school. They stood bolt upright, square to the fore, in the position of ' 'tention,' their naked toes disposed at an angle of 60º, with fingers close to the seams of their breeches (when not breekless), heads up and eyes front. Face and body were motionless, as if cast in ebony: nothing moved but the saucer-like white eyes and the ivory-lined mouths, from whose ample lips and gape issued a prodigious volume of sound. Native assistants, in sable skins and yellowish white chokers, carrying music-scores and armed with canes, sloped through the avenues, occasionally halting to frown down some delinquent, whose body was not perfectly motionless, and whose soul was not wholly fixed upon the development of sacred time and tune. I have no doubt that they sang—

The sun, the moon, and all the stars, &c.

precisely in the same spirit as if they had been intoning—

Peter Hill! poor soul!
Flog 'um wife, oh no! oh no!

and that famous anthropological assertion—

Eve ate de appel,
Gib one to daddy Adam;
And so came mi-se-ry
Up-on dis worl'.
Chorus (bis) Oh sor-row, oh sor-row!
Tri-bu-la-tion
Until sal-va-tion day.

It is a pity that time and toil should be thus wasted. The negro child, like the Hindu, is much sharper, because more precocious, than the European; at six years he will become a good penman; in fact, he promises more than he can perform. Reaching the age of puberty, his capacity for progress suddenly disappears, the physical reason being well known, and the 'cute lad becomes a dummer Junge. Mrs. Melville thus describes her small servant-girl from one of these schools: 'She looks almost nine years old; and, as far as reading goes, she knows nothing more than her alphabet; can repeat the Prayer-Book Catechism by rote, and one or two hymns, utterly ignorant all the while of the import of a single word.' Even in Europe education, till lately, exercised the judgment too little, the memory too much; consequently there were more learned men than wise men. The system is now changing, and due attention is paid to the corpus sanum, the first requisite for the mens sana. The boys at Sá Leone are kept nine hours in school, learning verse by heart, practising a vocalisation which cannot be heard without pain, and toiling at the English language, which some missionaries seem to hold a second revelation. Far better two or three hours of the 'three Rs' and six of the shop or workyard. Briefly, the system should be that of the Basle Missionary Society, [Footnote: I deeply regret that Wanderings in West Africa spoke far less fairly of this establishment than it deserves. My better judgment had been warped by the prejudiced accounts of a fellow-traveller.] which combines abstract teaching with practical instruction in useful handicraft, and which thus suggests the belief that work is dignified as it is profitable.

The Sá Leonites from their earliest days were greedy to gain knowledge as the modern Greeks and Bulgarians; but the motive was not exalted. Their proverb said, 'Read book, and learn to be rogue as well as white man.' Hence useless, fanciful subjects were in vogue;—algebra, as it were, before arithmetic;—and the poor made every sacrifice to give their sons a smattering of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. The desire of entering the 'professions' naturally affected the standard of education. What is still wanted at Sá Leone is to raise the mass by giving to their teaching a more practical turn, which shall cultivate habits of industry, economy, and self-respect, and encourage handicrafts and agriculture as well as trade.

I have already noticed the Fourah Bay College. The Church Missionary Grammar-School, opened in 1845, prepares boarders and day-scholars for university education; and the curriculum is that of an ordinary English grammar-school. The establishment, which has already admitted over 1,000 boys, is now self-supporting, and has an invested surplus, with which tutors are sent to England for higher instruction in 'pædagogia.' The Wesleyan High School for Boys, opened in 1874, receives youths from neighbouring colonies; that for girls, originating with Mrs. Godman, the wife of a veteran missionary still on the Coast, was founded in 1879. It was cordially taken up by the natives, who subscribed all the funds. The founders thought best to adopt the commercial principle; but no one as yet has asked for profit, and the school shows signs of prosperity and progress. The Annie Walsh Memorial School for Girls, dating from a bequest by the lady whose name it bears, is under the management of the Church Missionary Society. The Catholics are, as usual, well to the fore. The priests keep a large school for boys, and the sisters educate young women and girls. I have before described the dark novice,—

Under a veil that wimpled was full low;
And over all a black stole shee did throw.

The masters also make their children learn Arabic and English. There is a manliness and honesty in the look of the Mandenga and the Susu never seen in the impudent 'recaptive.' The dignity of El-Islam everywhere displays itself: it is the majesty of the monotheist, who ignores the degrading doctrine of original sin; it is the sublime indifference to life which kazá wa kadar, by us meagrely translated 'fatalism,' confers upon the votaries of 'the Faith.' These are not the remarks of a prejudiced sympathiser with El-Islam: many others have noted the palpable superiority of the Moslem over the missionary convert and the liberated populace of Sá Leone.

As a rule journalism on the West Coast is still in the lowest stage of Eatanswillism, and the journal is essentially ephemeral. The newspapers of twenty years ago are all dead and forgotten. Such were the 'African Herald,' a 'buff' organ, edited by the late Rev. Mr. Jones, a West Indian, and its successor, the 'African Weekly Times.' The 'Sierra Leone Gazette' succumbed when the Wesleyans established (1842) the 'Sierra Leone Watchman.' Other defuncts are the 'Free Press,' a Radical paper, representing Young Sá Leone, and a fourth, the 'Intelligencer,' which strove to prove what has sometimes been asserted at negro indignation-meetings, namely, that 'a white man, if he behave himself, is as good as a black man.' Cain, like the rest of the family, was a negro; but when rebuked by the Creator he turned pale with fear, a tint inherited by his descendants. The theory is, par parenthèse, as good as any other. The only papers now published are the 'West African Reporter,' whose proprietor and editor was the late Hon. Mr. Grant, and the 'Watchman,' a quasi-comic sheet.

The worst feature of journalism in West Africa is that fair play is unknown to it. The negroes may thoroughly identify themselves with England, claim a share in her greatness, and display abundant lip-loyalty; yet there is the racial aversion to Englishmen in the concrete, and to this is added the natural jealousy of seeing strangers monopolise the best appointments. The Sá Leonite openly declares that he and his can rule the land much better and more economically than the sickly foreigner, who spends half his service-time on board the steamers and at home. 'Dere goes another white raskel to his grave!' they will exclaim at the sight of a funeral. 'Wish dey all go and leave colony to US.' And as the reading and paying public is mainly composed of Nigers, the papers must sooner or later cater for their needs, and lose no opportunity of casting obloquy and ridicule upon the authorities and Albus in general. We can hardly blame them. I have shown that the worst and most scandalous display of journalism comes from London.

After the church, the school, and the newspaper, the most important civilising institution is the market. Sá Leone is favourably situated for collecting the interior trade, and yet seven-tenths of the revenue is derived from articles passing through the Loko and Rokel rivers; the rest is levied from wines, spirits, and tobacco, and in the form of preposterous harbour-dues. The export duties are light, but the exports do not seem to have increased as rapidly as they should have done during the last twenty years; this, too, despite missions into the interior and the hospitable reception of native chiefs and their messengers. There are no assessed or house taxes. The revenue and expenditure of the past five years have averaged, respectively, 63,869l. and 59,283l., leaving a surplus of 4,586l., which might profitably be expended upon roads. But the liabilities of the colony early in 1881 still amounted to 50,637l., being the balance of a debt resulting principally from the harbour-works.

The present population of the original settlement—including British Kwiáh (Quiah), an early annexation—is 53,862. The dependencies, Isles de Los, Tasso, Kikonkeh, and British Sherbro, according to the census of 1881, add 6,684, a figure which experts would increase by 4,000. The total, therefore, in round numbers, would be nearly 65,000. At the last census only 163 were resident whites; the crews and passengers of ships in port added 108.

On the whole the Sá Leonite cannot be called a success. Servants in shoals present themselves on board the steamers, begging 'ma'sr' to take them down coast. In vain. The fellow is handier than his southern brother: he can mend a wheel, make a coffin, or cut your hair. Yet none, save the veriest greenhorn, will engage him in any capacity. As regards civility and respectfulness he is far inferior to the emancipado of Cuba or the Brazil; with a superior development of 'sass,' he is often an inveterate thief. He has fits of drinking, when he becomes mad as a Malay. He gambles, he overdresses himself, and he indulges in love-intrigues till he has exhausted his means, and then he makes 'boss' pay for all. With a terrible love of summonsing, and a thorough enjoyment of a law-court, he enters into the spirit of the thing like an attorney's clerk. He soon wearies of the less exciting life in the wilder settlements, where orgies and debauchery are not fully developed; home-sickness seizes him, and he deserts his post; probably robbing house or till.

Even a black who has once visited Sá Leone is considered spoilt for life, as if he had spent a year in England. Hence the eccentric Captain Phil. Beaver declared that he 'would rather carry a rattlesnake than a negro who has been in London.' I have met with some ugly developments of home-education. One was a yellow Dan Lambert, the son of a small shopkeeper, who was returning—dubbed a 'Templar'—from the Land of Liberty. He was not a pleasant companion. His face was that of a porker half-translated; he yelped the regular Tom Coffee laugh; and when asked why Sá Leone had not contributed to the Crimean Widow Fund, he uttered the benevolent wish that 'the damned —— and their brats might all starve like their husbands.' Another was a full-blooded negro, a petty huckster at the 'Red Grave,' who, in his last 'homeward' voyage, had met at Madeira the Dean and Deaness of Oxbridge. The lady resolved to keep up the creditable acquaintanceship: so strong is feminine love for the 'black lion.' Shortly afterwards Niger paid his promised visit, which he described graphically and sans sense of shame—how he had been met at the station by a tall gentleman in uniform and gold-laced hat, how he was invited to enter a carriage, and how great was his astonishment when the 'officer' preferred standing in the open air behind to accompanying him inside. After this naïve début he showed tact. Mr. Dean wished to know if anything could be done towards advancing the interesting guest in his 'profession'—not trade. We talk of an English school-master, but a mulatto or a negro becomes a 'professor.' Niger whispered 'No,' which, ladylike, meant a distinct 'Yes.' He ended by graciously accepting an introduction to a Manchester firm, and soon relieved it of 16,000l.

No one who knows the West African coast will assert that the influence of Sá Leone has been in any way for good. All can certify that this colony, intended as a 'model of policy,' and founded with the object of promoting African improvement, has been the greatest obstacle to progress. She fought to keep every advantage to herself, and she succeeded in securing a monopoly of 'recaptives,' who were more wanted elsewhere. She became an incubus in 1820, when all British possessions from N. Lat. 20º to S. Lat. 20º were made her dependencies. The snake was scotched in 1844 by the Gold Coast achieving her independence. Yet Sá Leone raised herself to a government-general in 1866, and possibly she will do so again.

The Sá Leonite has ever distinguished himself by kicking down, as the phrase is, the ladder which raised him. No man maltreats his wild brother so much as the so-called 'civilised' negro: he never addresses his congener except by 'You jackass!' and tells him ten times a day that he considers such trash like the dirt beneath his feet. Consequently he is hated and despised withal, being of the same colour as, while assuming such excessive superiority over, his former equals. No one also is more hopeless about the civilisation of Africa than the semi-civilised African returning to the 'home of his fathers.' He feels how hard has been his struggle to emerge from savagery; he acknowledges, in his own case, a selection of species; and he foresees no end to the centuries before there can be a nation equal even to himself. Yet in England and in books he will cry up the majesty of African kings,—see, for a specimen, Bishop Crowther's 'Niger Diary.' He will give his fellow-countrymen, whom he thoroughly despises, a thousand grand gifts of morals and industry. I have heard a negro assert, with the unblushing effrontery which animates the Exeter Hall speechifier, that at some African den of thieves men leave their money with impunity in the storehouse or on the highway. I read the assertion of a mulatto, who well knew the contrary, 'A white man who supposes himself respected in Africa, because he is white, is grievously mistaken.' The 'aristocracy of colour' is a notable and salient fact in Africa, where the chiefs are lighter hued and better grown than their subjects; and the reason is patent—they marry the handsomest women.

Finally, the Sá Leonite is the horror of Europeans on the West Coast. He has been formally expelled by his neighbours, the Liberians. At Lagos and Abeokuta he lost no time in returning to his original fetishism, which the 'recaptive' apparently can never throw off. Moreover, he became an inveterate slave-dealer, impudently placing himself under native protection, and renegading the flag that saved the crime-serf from lifelong servitude. These 'insolent, vagabond loafers' were the only men who gave me much trouble in the so-called 'Oil rivers,' where one of them accused a highly respected Scotch missionary of theft. Finally, the Gaboon merchants long preferred forfeiting the benefits of the mail-steamers to seeing themselves invaded by a locust tribe, whose loveliest view is, apparently, that which leads out of Sá Leone.

Some of this demoralisation arose from the over-tenderness of the British Government, in deference to the philanthropist and the missionary. Throughout the Bights of Benin and Biafra, where the chief stalks about with his fetishman and his executioner, there is still some manliness amongst men, some modesty amongst women. There the offending wife fears beheading and 'saucy water;' here she leaves with impunity her husband, who rarely abandons the better half. Consequently the sex has become vicious as in Egypt—worse than the men, bad as these are. Petty larceny is carried on to such an extent that no improvement is possible: as regards property, the peninsula contains the most communistic of communities. The robbers are expert to a degree; they work naked and well greased, and they choose early dawn or the night-hour when the tornado is most violent. The men fight by biting, squeezing, and butting with the head, like the Brazilian capoeira. The women have a truly horrible way of putting out of the world an obnoxious lover. Ask an Aku if an Ibo is capable of poisoning you: he will say emphatically, 'Yes.' Put the same question to an Ibo touching an Aku, and he will not reply, 'No.'

With respect to the relative position of Japhet and Ham—perhaps I should say Ham and Japhet—ultra-philanthropy has granted all the aspirations of the Ethiopian melodist:—

wish de legislator would set dis darkie free;
Oh, what a happy place den de darkie world would be!
We'd have a darkie parliament,
An' darkie code of law,
An' darkie judges on de bench,
Darkie barristers and aw.

I own that darkey must be defended, and sturdily defended too, from the injustice and cruelty of the class he calls 'poor white trash;' but the protection should be in reason, or it becomes an injustice. Why, for instance, did the unwise negrophile propose to protect the Jamaica negro against the Indian coolie? Because Niger wants it? Pure ignorance and prejudice of gentlemen who stay at home! Though physically and mentally weaker than Europeans, the negro can hold his own, as Sá Leone proves, by that combination which enables cattle to resist lions. Japhet Albus is by nature aggressive; if not, he would not now be dwelling in the tents of Shem and the huts of Ham. He feels towards Contrarius Albo as the game-cock regards the dunghill-fowl. Displays of this sentiment on the part of the white population must be repressed; but this should be done fairly and without passion.

I do not for a moment regret our philanthropical move, despite its awful waste of life and gold. England, however can do her duty to Africa without cant, and humbug, and nonsense about the 'sin and crime of slavery.' Serfdom, like cannibalism and polygamy, are the steps by which human society rose to its present status: to abuse them is ignorantly to kick down the ladder. The spirit of Christianity may tend to abolish servitude; but the letter distinctly admits it, and the translators have unfairly rendered 'slave' and 'bondsman' by 'servant,' which is absurd. England can fight, if necessary, against a traffic which injures the free man, but she might abstain from abusing those who do not share her opinions. The anti-slavery party has hitherto acted rather from sentiment than from reason; and Mr. Buckle was right in determining that morality must be ruled by, and not rule, intellect. We have one point in our favour. The dies atra between 1810-20, when a man could not speak what he thought upon the subject of slavery, ended as the last slave left the West African coast; and yet I doubt whether the day is yet come when we can draw upon the great labour-bank of Africa and establish that much-wanted institution, the black ouvrier libre.

There are several classes interested in pitting black man against white man. An unscrupulous missionary will, for his own ends, preach resistance to time-honoured customs and privileges which Niger has himself accepted. An unworthy lawyer will urge litigation; a dishonest judge or police-magistrate will make popularity at the expense of equity and honour; a weak-minded official will fear the murmurs, the complaints, and the memorials of those under him, and the tomahawking which awaits him from the little army of negrophiles at home. But the most dangerous class of all is the mulatto; he is everywhere, like wealth, irritamenta malorum. The 'bar sinister,' and the fancy that he is despised, fill him with ineffable gall and bitterness. Inferior in physique to his black, and in morale to his white, parent, he seeks strength by making the families of his progenitors fall out. Had the Southern States of America deported all the products of 'miscegenation,' instead of keeping them in servitude, the 'patriarchal institution' might have lasted to this day instead of being prematurely abolished.

My first visit to Sá Leone showed me the root of all her evils. There is hardly a peasant in the peninsula. Had the 'colony-born' or older families, the 'King-yard men,' or recaptives, and the creoles, or children of liberated Africans, been apprenticed and compelled to labour, the colony would have become a flourishing item of the empire. Now it is the mere ruin of an emporium; and the people, born and bred to do nothing, cannot prevail upon themselves to work. But the 'improved African' has an extra contempt for agriculture, and he is good only at destruction. Rice and cereals, indigo and cotton, coffee and arrowroot, tallow-nuts and shea-butter, squills and jalap, oil-palms and cocoas, ginger, cayenne, and ground-nuts are to be grown. Copal and bees'-wax would form articles of extensive export; but the people are satisfied with maize and roots, especially the cassava, which to Sá Leone is a curse as great as the potato has proved to Ireland. Petty peddling has ever been, and still is, the 'civilised African's' forte. He willingly condemns himself to spend life between his wretched little booth and his Ebenezer, to waste the week and keep the Sabbath holy by the 'holloaing of anthems.' His beau idéal of life is to make wife and children work for, feed and clothe him, whilst he lies in the shady piazza, removing his parasites and enjoying porcine existence. His pleasures are to saunter about visiting friends; to grin and guffaw; to snuff, chew, and smoke, and at times to drink kerring-kerry (caña or caxaça), poisonous rum at a shilling a bottle. Such is the life of ignoble idleness to which, by not enforcing industry, we have condemned these sable tickets-of-leave.

Before quitting the African coast I diffidently suggested certain steps towards regenerating our unhappy colony. For the encouragement of agriculture I proposed a tax upon small shopkeepers and hucksters, who, by virtue of sitting behind a few strings of beads or yards of calico, call themselves traders and merchants. This measure, by-the-by, was attempted in 1879 by Governor Rowe, but the strong opposition compelled him to withdraw it. I would have imposed a heavy tax upon all grog-shop licenses, and would have allowed very few retail-shops in the colony. Police-magistrates appeared to me perfectly capable of settling disputes and of punishing offenders. I would have discouraged the litigation which the presence of lawyers and a bench suggests, and which causes such heartburn between Europeans and Africans. I would have established a Court of Summary Jurisdiction, and never have allowed a black jury to 'sit upon' a white man, or vice versâ; and in the case of a really deserving negro or mulatto I would rather see him appointed Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland than Governor or Secretary of Sá Leone.

On my last journey I met the Hon. Mr. T. Risely Griffith, a West Indian and Colonial Secretary at Sá Leone. He kindly read what I had written about the white man's Grave, and found it somewhat harsh and bitter. At the same time he gave me, with leave to use, his valuable lecture delivered before the Royal Colonial Institute. [Footnote: The Colonies and India, a weekly newspaper. London: December 17, 1881.] Making allowance for the official couleur de rose, and reading between the lines, I found that he had stated, in parliamentary language, what had been told by me in the rude tongue of a traveller. The essay, he assured me, had been well received at Sá Leone; and yet, to my knowledge, the newspapers of the western coast had proposed to make it the subject of an 'indignation-meeting.'

Hear what Mr. Griffith has to say upon the crucial question—agriculture. 'The ordinary observer cannot fail to be impressed with the great number of traders and hawkers. In the peninsula of Sierra Leone there are returned 53,862; of these, traders and hawkers number 10,250, or about 19 per cent., or, including hucksters, 23 per cent. Little good can result to a country as long as one-fourth of its people are dependent for their livelihood for what they sell to the remaining three-quarters.... The same tendency to engage in the work of distribution rather than the production of wealth seems to be a general characteristic of the negro race.

'The real number of artisans or mechanics who have any right to the term is very limited; and it is to be regretted that in Sierra Leone, where the people are apt to learn, and tolerably quick to apply, there is not a greater number of thorough workmen to teach their handicrafts and make them examples for the rising generation. A youth who has been two years with a carpenter, boat-builder, blacksmith, or mason, arrogates the name to himself without compunction, and frequently, whilst he is learning from an indifferent teacher the rudiments of his trade, he sets up as a master. There is hardly a single trade that can turn out half a dozen men who would be certificated by any European firm for possessing a thorough knowledge of it. Of all trades in Sierra Leone, and certainly in Freetown, that of tailoring is the most patronised, but this arises from the love of dress, which is inherent.

'The proper cultivation of the soil is, and must always be, the true foundation of prosperity in any country. The shop cannot flourish unless the farm supports it, and the friends of the colony regard with anxiety the centralisation of capital at Freetown. I have been gratified, however, to notice that the desire to acquire land and cultivate it has lately increased to a very great extent, and I regard it as a very hopeful sign for the future. The people still want two things, capital and scientific agricultural knowledge. The native implements are of the rudest kind—their hoes little more than sufficient to scratch the ground, and their only other implement a cutlass to cut down the bush. Ploughs are unknown, and spades very little used. Wheelbarrows are detested, although they are not quite unknown; the people would sooner "tote" the soil in a box on their heads, and instances are on record where the negro has "toted" the wheelbarrow itself, wheel, handle, and all.'

Mr. Griffith further informs us that the Colonial Government is desirous of fostering and encouraging agriculture; that it proposes to establish, or rather to re-establish, a model farm; that lands have been granted at a trifling sum to Mr. William Grant on condition of his devoting capital and labour to the development of agriculture; that Mr. Thomas Bright has laid out a coffee and cocoa farm at Murray Town; and that Mr. Samuel Lewis, a barrister-at-law, universally well spoken of, is engaged in cultivation, with a view of studying the best methods and of influencing his fellow-countrymen in favour of agricultural pursuits. Major Bolton also is working the land seventeen miles down coast, and planting cocoa-nuts, chocolate, and Kola-trees. The latter, when ten years old, are said each to fetch 15l. per annum. Here, therefore, we have at least a beginning.

During the discussion on Mr. Griffith's lecture, some home-truths were told by the Hon. Mr. Grant, [Footnote: This 'eminent African,' who had gone to England with the view of buying agricultural implements and an ice-machine, died in London on January 28, 1881. His speech, therefore, was delivered only a week or so before his death. Much fulsome praise of him followed in the press, which seemed completely surprised that a black man could talk common sense.] a full-blooded negro, of the Ibo tribe, and a member of the Sierra Leone Legislative Council. He objected to the term 'white man's Grave.' He bravely and truly told his audience that if the French held possession of Sá Leone they would have made it a 'different thing.' After praising the present Governor's instruction-ordinance he spoke these remarkable words:—

'But education from the point I allude to is that practical education which develops the man and makes him what he is, not the education which makes him simply the blind imitator of what he is not. Of course the education, as originally introduced into the colony, was an experiment, and a grand experiment it was. They said, "There are these people, and we will educate them as ourselves." It was a good idea, but it was defective, because there is as great a difference between the negro and the white man as there can be. He is capable of doing anything that the white man can do; but then, to get him to do that, you must educate him in himself. You must bring him out by himself: you must not educate him otherwise. He must be educated to carry out a proper and distinct course for himself. The complaint has been general of the want of success in the education of the negro; but it is not his fault: the fault is from the defect of his education. He fancies, by the sort of education which you give him, that he must imitate you in everything—act like you, dress in broadcloth like you, and have his tall black hat like you. Then you see the result is that he is not himself; he confuses himself, and when he comes to act within himself as a man he is confused, and you find fault that he has not improved as he ought to do. But if he is properly educated you will find him of far greater assistance to you than you have any idea of.'

The remarks on agriculture and on capital were equally apposite; and Captain Cameron remarked that these were the 'truest words of wisdom about Africa that it ever was his lot to hear.' They will leave a sweet savour in the reader's mouth after a somewhat acid chapter.

But the ingrained idleness of generations is not so easily cleared away. The real cure for Sá Leone will be an immigration of Chinese or of Indian coolies, that will cheapen labour and enable men of capital to farm on a large scale. It may be years before agriculture supplants trade with its light work and ready profits; but the supplanting process itself will do good. At present Sá Leone finds it cheaper to import salt from England than to lay out a salina, and to make an article of commerce which finds its way into the furthest interior. Immigration, I repeat, is the sole panacea for the evils which afflict the Lioness Range.

CHAPTER XIII. — FROM SÁ LEONE TO CAPE PALMAS.

Frowsy old Sá Leone bestowed on us a parting smile. After a roaring tornado at night and its terminal deluge, the morning of January 19 broke clear and fine. We could easily trace, amongst the curious series of volcanic cones, the three several sanitary steps on the Leicester or Lioness Hill. These are, first the hospice of the French Jesuits, now officers' quarters; then a long white shed, the soldiers' hospital; and highest (1,700 feet) the box which lodges their commandant. Even the seldom-seen 'Sugarloaf' was fairly outlined against the mild blue vault. Although the withering hand of summer was on the scene, the old charnel-house looked lovely; even the low lines of the Bullom shore borrowed a kind of beauty from the air. The hues were those of Heligoland set in frames of lapis lazuli above and of sapphire below; golden sand, green strand of silky Bermuda-grass, and red land showing chiefly in banks and thready paths. Again we admired the dainty and delicate beauties of the shore about Pirate Bay and other ill-named sites. Then bidding adieu to the white man's Red Grave and steering south-west, we gave a wide berth to the redoubted 'Carpenter,' upon which the waves played; to the shoals of St. Anne, and to a multitude of others which line the coast as far as that treacherous False Cape and lumpy Cape Shelling or Shilling, whose prolongation is the Banana group.

Sherbro, fifty miles distant, was passed at night. Then (sixty miles) came the Gallinas River, a great centre of export, which has not forgotten Pedro Blanco. This prince of slavers, whose establishment appears on the charts of 1836-38, imported no goods; he bought cargoes offered to him and he paid them by bills on England, drawing, says the Coast scandal, upon two Quaker brothers at Liverpool. Not a little curious that our country supplied the money both to carry on the traite and to put it down. Three miles south of the Gallinas the Sulaymá River flows in. Here the scenery suggests a child's first attempt at colouring in horizontal lines; a dangerous surf ever foams white upon the yellow shore, bearing an eternal growth of green. Two holes in the bush and a few thatched roofs, separated by a few miles, showed the Harris factories, which caused frequent teapot-storms between 1865 and 1878. The authorities of Liberia, model claimants with a touch of savage mendicancy, demanded the land and back-dues from time immemorial. 'Palaver' was at last 'set' by the late lamented David Hopkins, consul for the Bights, in the presence of a British cruiser and two American ships of war.

The weather resumed its old mood, a mixture in equal parts of 'Smokes' and of Harmatan or Scirocco. At noon next day we steamed by Cape Mount, the northernmost boundary of Liberia, [Footnote: The 'liberateds' of Liberia, who lose nothing by not asking, claim the shore from the Sam Pedro River southwards to the Jong, an affluent of the Shebar or Sherbro stream, 90 miles north of Cape Mount. We admit their pretensions as far only as the Sugary River, four miles above the Máfá (Mafaw), or Cape Mount stream.] a noble landmark and a place with a future. Approaching it, we first see the dwarf bar of the Máfá, draining a huge lagoon ('Fisherman's Lake'). On the banks and streams are sundry little villages, Kru Town and Port Robert, the American mission-ground. The harbour is held to be the first of five, the others being Monrovia; Grand Bassá (Bassaw), with Edina; Sinou, and Cape Palmas.

The Mount is an isolated rocky tongue rising suddenly like an island from the low levels, and trending north-west to south-east. The site is perfectly healthy; the ground is gravel, not clay, and the stone is basalt. The upper heights are forested and full of game; the lower are cleared and await the colonist. With the pure and keen Atlantic breeze ever blowing over it, the Mount is a ready-made sanatorium. Its youth has been disreputable. Here Captain Canot, [Footnote: Wanderings in West Africa, vol. i. chap. v.] the Franco-Italian lieutenant of Pedro Blanco, sold the coast till compelled by H.M. cruisers to fall back upon honest trade. His name survives in 'Canot's Tree,' under whose shade he held his palavers. Let us hope that the respectable middle age of Cape Mount will be devoted to curing the sick coaster.

Beyond this fine headland, a handsome likeness of Holyhead seen from the south, stretch the long, low, dull shores of Liberia, canopied by unclean skies and based on dirty-looking seas. The natives, who, as usual, are new upon the coast, and who preserve curious traditions about their predecessors, are the Vái (not Vei), a Mandengan race still pagan. They call, however, the world 'duniyá,' and the wife 'námúsi,' words which show whence their ideas are derived. Their colour is lighter than the Kruman's; there are pretty faces, especially amongst the girlish boys, and the fine feet and delicate hands are those of 'les Gabons.' And they are interesting on two other counts. Their language combines the three several forms of human speech, the isolating (e.g. 'love'), the agglutinating ('lovely'), and the polysynthetic ('loving,' 'loved'). Furthermore they developed an alphabet, or rather a syllabary, which made much noise amongst missionary 'circles,' and concerning which Lt. Forbes, R.N., Mr. Norris, and Herr Koelle wrote abundant nonsense. Its origin is still unknown. Some attribute it to direct inspiration (whatever that may mean), others to marks traced upon the sand originally by boys stealing palm-wine. My belief is that the suggestion came from the Moslems. Of late years it has been waxing obsolete, and few care to write their letters in it.

The Vái, who extend as far as Little Cape Mount River, are depicted in a contrast of extremes. Mr. H. C. Creswick, [Footnote: Late manager of the 'Gold Coast Mining Company.' Mr. Creswick treated the subject in 'Life amongst the Veys' (Trans. Ethnol. Soc. of London, 1867). He tells at full length the curious legend of their immigration, and notes the same reverence for the crocodile which prevails at Dixcove and prevailed in Egypt.] who long dwelt amongst them, and dealt with them from Cape Mount, gives a high character to those who have not been perverted by civilisation. He found the commonalty civil, kind, and hospitable; active and industrious, to a certain extent. Their palm-oil is the best on the coast, and can be drunk like that of the olive or the cod-liver. The chiefs he describes as gentlemen. The missionaries assert that they are wholly without morals, never punishing the infringement of marital rights; petty thieves, and idle and feckless to the last degree. Certain Monrovia men have laid out farms of coffee and cacáo (chocolate) upon the St. Paul River, which, heading in Mandenga-land, breaks the chord of the bay; but nothing can induce these ex-pets or their congeners, the Golás and the Pesis, to work.

Like most of the coast-races, the Vái seem to be arrant cowards. The headmen salute their visitors Arab-fashion, with flourishes of the sword; but swording ends there. Of late they were attacked by the savages of the interior, Gallinas, Pannis, and Kúsús. The latter, meaning the 'wolves' or the 'wild boars,' is the popular nickname of the Mendi or Mindi tribes, occupying the Sherbro-banks. They did excellent service in the last Ashanti war (1873-74) by flogging forward the fugitive Fantis. Winwood Keade, [Footnote: The Story of the Ashanti Campaign. Smith & Elder, London, 1874. It is a thousand pities that the volume was pruned, to use the mildest term. My friend's memory seems to brighten with the years, doubtless the effect of his heroic honesty in telling what he held to be the truth. His Martyrdom of Man, in which even his publisher did not believe, has reached a fourth edition; it was quoted by Mr. Gladstone, and Mrs. Grundy still buys it, in order to put it behind the fire.] an excellent judge of Africans, declares that they are very courageous, 'keen as mustard' for the fray. On the raid they creep up to and surround the doomed village; they raise the war-cry shortly before sunrise, and, as the villagers fly, they tell them by the touch. If the body feels warm after sleep, unlike their own dew-cooled skins, it soon becomes a corpse. They advance with two long knives, generally matchets, one held between the teeth. They prefer the white arm because 'guns miss fire, but swords are like the chicken's beak, that never fails to hit the grain.' Some 250 of these desperadoes lately drove off 5,000 of the semi-civilised recreants and took about 560 prisoners, including the 'King' of the Vái.

After covering forty-three miles from Cape Mount we anchored (5 P.M.) in the long, monotonous roll under Mount Mesurado. The name was probably Monserrate, given by the early Portuguese. It is entitled the Cradle of Liberia. The idea of restoring to Africa recaptured natives and manumitted slaves was broached in 1770 by the Rev. Samuel Hopkins, of Newport, R.I. The scheme for 'civilising and christianising' the natives assumed organic form at Washington in 1816. In January 1820 the first emigrants embarked from New York for 'Liberia.' The original grant of land was made (April 1822) to the 'American Society for Colonising the Free People of the United States,' by King Peter and sundry chiefs of the Grain Coast, who little knew what they were doing. The place was described in those days as an Inferno, the very head and front of the export trade, the waters swarming with slavers, the shore bearing forty slave-factories, and the whole showing scenes of horror which made the site 'Satan's seat of abominations.' It has now changed its nature with its name, and has become the head-quarters of Dullness, that goddess who, we are assured, never dies.

Mesurado Mount, with the inverted cataract rushing white up its black rocks, is a picturesque feature. Halfway clearings for coffee-plantations, with a lime-washed bungalow, the President's country-quarters, lead to the feathered and forested crest which bears the 'pharos.' This protection against wreck is worse than nothing; it is lighted with palm-oil every night, and then left to its own sweet will. Consequently the red glimmer, supposed to show at thirteen miles, is rarely visible beyond three. A dotting of white frame-houses and curls of blue smoke betray the capital. It lurks behind the narrow sand-bar which banks the shallow and useless Mesurado River, and few men land without an involuntary ablution in the salt water. Usually the stream mouths by an ugly little bar at some distance from the roadstead; after heavy rains it bursts the sand-strip and discharges in straight line.

We had visitors that evening from the Yankee-Doodle-niggery colony, peopled by citizens who are not 'subjects.' Bishop C. C. Pinnock, absent from his home at Cape Mount, dined with us and told me about the death of an old friend, good Bishop Payne. His successor objects to learning and talking native tongues, and he insists upon teaching English to all the mission-scholars. His reasons are shrewd, if not convincing; for instance, 'most languages,' says the Right Reverend, 'have some term which we translate "love." But "love" in English is not equivalent to its representative in Kru or in Vái. Therefore by using their words I am expressing their ideas; I bring them over to mine by the reverse process.'

We shipped for Grand Bassá two citizens, a lawyer and an attorney. Of course one was an 'Honourable;' [Footnote: Even the Coast English are always confounding the Hon. John A. (son of a peer) with the Hon. Mr. A. (official rank), and I have seen sundry civilians thus mis-sign themselves.] as Mr. H. M. Stanley says, [Footnote: Coomassie and Magdala. New York, Harpers, 1874.] 'mostly every other man is here so styled.' They talked professionally of the 'Whig ticket' and the 'Re-publican party,' but they neither 'guess'd' nor 'kalklated,' and if they wore they did not show revolvers and bowie-knives. They did not say, 'We air a go-ahead people,' they were not given to 'highfalutin',' nor did they chew their tobacco. They were, however, accompanied by an extremely objectionable 'infant,' aged seven, who lost no time in laying hands upon Miss M.'s trinkets, by way of returning civility. Her father restored them, treating the theft as a matter of course.

The citizens gave me sundry details about the 'rubber'-trade, which began in 1877. Monrovia now exports to England and the Continent some 100,000 lbs., which sell at 1s. 4d. each. Gum-elastic is gathered chiefly by the Bassá people, who are, however, too lazy to keep it clean; they store it in grass-bags and transport it in canoes. Liberian coffee is, or rather would be, famous if produced in sufficient quantities to satisfy demand. At present it goes chiefly to the United States, where, like Mocha, it serves to flavour burnt maize. Messieurs Spiers and Pond would buy any quantity of it, and of late years Brazilian coffee-planters have taken shoots to be grown at home. Here it fetches 1s. per lb.; in England the price doubles. This coffee requires keeping for many months, or the infusion is potent enough to cause the 'shakes;' it is the same with Brazilian green tea. The bouquet is excellent, and the flavour pretty good. There is a great difference in the shape of the beans, which range between the broad flat Harar and the small, round, horny Mocha.

I could obtain few details concerning the 'Black Devil Society,' which suggests the old 'Know-nothings.' It has been, they say, somewhat active in flogging strangers, especially Sá Leone men. Most of the latter, however, have been expelled for refusing to change their style from 'subjects' to 'citizens'—a foreign word in English and Anglo-African ears.

At the time of our visit the republic was in a parlous state. H.E. Mr. Gardiner, the new President, refused to swear in the Upper House, and the Lower refused to acknowledge the Presidential authority. Consequently business had been at a standstill for six weeks. We were disappointed in our hopes of being accompanied by the Honourable Professor E. W. Blyden, ex-minister to England and afterwards principal of the college. He had travelled with Winwood Reade, and I looked forward to hearing the opinions of an African Arabic scholar touching the progress and future of El-Islam in the Dark Continent. That it advances with giant steps may be proved by these figures. Between 1861 and 1862 I found at most a dozen Moslems at Lagos; in 1865 the number had risen to 1,200, and in 1880, according to my old friend M. Colonna, Agent Consulaire de France, it passes 10,000, requiring twenty-seven mosques.

The latest charts of Liberia show no less than twenty-six parallelograms stretching inland, at various angles with the shore, and stated to have been acquired by 'conquest or purchase' between 1822 and 1827; but the natives, especially the Krumen, complain that after allowing the foreigners to dwell, amongst them they have been despoiled of their possessions, and that, once lords of the soil, they have sunk to mere serfs. Hence the frequent wars and chronic bad blood. Every African traveller knows the meaning of land-purchase in these regions. There are two ideas peculiar to the negro brain, but apparently inadmissible into European heads. The first is the non-alienation of land. Niger never parts with his ground in perpetuity; he has always the mental reservation, while selling it to a stranger, that the soil and its improvements return to him by right after the death or the departure of the purchaser. Should the settler's heirs or assignees desire to remain in loco, they are expected to pay a fresh gratification; the lessor will raise his terms as high as possible, but public opinion will oblige him to remain content with a 'dash,' or present, equivalent to that paid by the original lessee.

The second idea is even more repugnant to European feelings. In Africa a born chattel is a chattel for ever: the native phrase is, ''Pose man once come up slave, he be slave all time.' There is no such thing as absolute manumission: the unsophisticated libertus himself would not dream of claiming it. We have on board a white-headed negro in an old and threadbare Dutch uniform, returning from Java on a yearly pension of fifteen dollars. According to treaty he had been given by the King of Ashanti to the Hollanders, and he had served them so long that he spoke only Low German and Malay. He will be compelled to end his career somewhere within the range of our fort-guns, or his owner's family will claim and carry off their property.

At 8 A.M. we steamed against a fine fresh wind past mount Mesurado en route for Grand Bassá (Bassaw), distant fifty-five miles. To port lies Montserrado County, where the shore-strip looks comparatively high and healthy. The Bassás begin some thirty miles below the Jong River, and now we enter the regions of Grand, Middle, and Little Piccaninny (pequenino), Whole and Half, i.e. half-way. Thus we pass, going south-wards, Bassá, Middle Bassá, Grand Bassá, and Bassá Cove, followed by Cestos and Cess, Settra and Sesters, Whole and Half. The coast is well known, while the interior is almost unexplored. Probably there is no inducement to attract strangers.

We are grateful for small mercies, and note a picturesque view from the open roadstead of Grand Bassá. The flats are knobbed with lumpy mounds; North Saddle Hill, with its central seat; Tall Hill; the blue ridges of the Bassá Hills, and St. John's Hill upon the line of its river. Nothing can be healthier than these sites, which are well populated; and the slopes are admirably fitted for that 'Arabian berry' whose proper home is Africa. But, while hill-coffee has superior flavour lowland-coffee is preferred in commerce, because the grain is larger and heavier.

Grand Bassá is the only tract in Liberia where the Sá Leonite is still admitted. The foreshore of yellow sand, pointed and dotted by lines and falls of black rock, fronts a shallow bay as foul and stony as the coast. Here are three settlements, parted by narrow walls of 'bush.' Edina, the northernmost, is said to do more business than any other port in the republic; she also builds fine, strong surf-boats of German and American type, carrying from one to five tons. The keels are bow-shaped, never straight-lined from stem to stern; and the breakers are well under the craft before their mighty crests toss it aloft and fling it into the deep trough. They are far superior to the boats with weather-boards in the fore which formerly bore us to land. The crew scoop up the water as if digging with the paddle; they vary the exercise by highly eccentric movements, and they sing savage barcarolles the better to keep time.

The middle settlement is Upper Buchanan, whose river, the St. John's, owns a bar infamous as that of Lagos for surf and sharks. The southernmost, Lower Buchanan, is defended by a long and broken wall of black reef, but the village is far from smooth water. All these 'towns' occupy holes in a curtain of the densest and tallest greenery. They are composed of groups and scatters of whitewashed houses, half of them looking like chapels and the other like toys. Each has its adjunct of brown huts, the native quarter. These Bassá tribes must not be confounded with their neighbours the Krumen; the languages are quite different, and the latter is of much harsher sound. There is no doubt of this being a good place for engaging labour, and it is hoped that in due time Bassá-hands, who work well, will be engaged for the Gold Coast mines. At present, however, they avoid English ships, call themselves 'Americans,' and willingly serve on board the Yankee craft which load with coffee, cam-wood, and palm-oil.

We steamed along the Cape, River, and Town of Sinou, the very home of the Kráo, or Krumen, strictly speaking a small tribe. Returning homeward-bound, we here landed a host of men from the Oil-rivers, greatly to my delight, as they had cumbered the deck with their leaky powder-kegs, amid which wandered the sailors, smoking unconcernedly. In the 'good old times' this would not have been allowed. At least one poor fellow was drowned, so careful were the relatives to embark the kit, so careless of the owner's person. Next day we sighted the 'Garraway-trees,' silk cottons some 200 feet high, fine marks for clearing the Cape shoals. Then came Fishtown and Rocktown, once celebrated for the exploits of Ashmun and his associates; and at 2.15 P.M. we anchored in the heavy Harmatan roll off

The Cape of Palmas, called from palmy shade.

A score of years ago the A.S.S. steamers lay within half a mile of shore; and, 'barrin'' the ducking, it was easy to land. But the bay is bossed with rocks and skirted with shoals; they lurk treacherously under water, and have brought many a tall ship to grief. As for the obsolete hydrographic charts, they only add to the danger. Two wrecks give us ample warning. One is a German barque lying close to the bar of the fussy little river; the other, a huge mass of rust, is the hapless Yoruba. Years ago, after the fashion of the Nigritia and the Monrovia, she was carelessly lost. Though anchored in a safe place, when swinging round she hit upon a rock and was incontinently ripped up; the injured compartment filled, and the skipper ran her on the beach, wrecking her according to Act of Parliament. They once managed to get her off, but she had not power to stem the seas, and there she still lies high and dry.

Cape Palmas, or Bamnepo, with its outlying islet-reef of black rock, on which breaks an eternal surf, is the theoretical turning-point from the Windward coast, which begins with the Senegal, to the Leeward, and which ends in the Benin Bight. We are entering the region

Unde nigerrimus Auster Nascitur.

Practically and commercially the former is worked by the Bristol barques and the latter commences at Cape Threepoints. The bold headland, a hundred feet tall and half a mile broad by a quarter long, bounded north by its river, has a base of black micaceous granite supporting red argillaceous loam. Everywhere beyond the burning of the billows the land-surface is tapestried with verdure and tufted with cocoas; they still show the traditional clump which gave the name recorded by Camoens. The neck attaching the head to the continent-body is a long, low sand-spit; and the background sweeps northward in the clear grassy stretches which African travellers agree to call 'parks.' These are fronted by screens of tall trees, and backed by the blue tops of little hills, a combination which strongly reminded me of the Gaboon.

The prominent building is still the large white-washed mission-house with its ample windows and shady piazzas: the sons of St. Benedict could not have placed it better. In rear lies the square tower yclept a lighthouse, and manipulated like that of Monrovia; its range is said to be thirteen miles, but it rarely shows beyond five. An adjacent flagstaff bears above the steamer-signal the Liberian arms, stripes and a lone star not unknown to the ages between Assyria and Texas. The body of the settlement lying upon the river is called Harper, after a 'remarkable negro,' and its suburbs lodge the natives. When I last visited it the people were rising to the third stage of their architecture. The first, or nomad, is the hide or mat thrown over a bush or a few standing sticks; then comes the cylinder, the round hovel of the northern and southern regions, with the extinguisher or the oven-shaped thatch-roof; and, lastly, the square or oblong form which marks growing civilisation. The American missionaries laboured strenuously to build St. Mark's Hospital and Church, the latter a very creditable piece of lumber-work, with 500 seats in nave and aisles. But now everything hereabouts is 'down in its luck.' This puerile copy, or rather caricature, of the United States can console itself only by saying, 'Spero meliora.'

CHAPTER XIV. — FROM CAPE PALMAS TO AXIM.

I had no call to land at Cape Palmas. All my friends had passed away; the Rev. C. E. Hoffman and Bishop Payne, both in America. Mr. Potter, of the stores, still lives to eat rice and palm-oil in retirement; but with the energetic Macgill departed the trade and prosperity of the place. Senator John Marshall, of Marshall's Hotel, has also gone to the many, and the stranger's only place of refuge is a mean boarding-house.

Much injury was done to the settlement by the so-called 'Grebo war.' These wild owners of Cape Palmas are confounded by Europeans with the true Krumen, their distant cousins. The tribal name is popularly derived from gré, or gri, the jumping monkey, and it alludes to a late immigration. A host of some 20,000 savages closely besieged the settlement and ravaged all the lands belonging to the intruders, especially the fine 'French farm.' Fighting ended with a 'treaty of peace and renewal of allegiance' (sic!) at Harper on March 1, 1876, following the 'battle of Harper' (October 10, 1875). The latter, resulting from an attack on Grebo Big Town, proved a regular 'Bull's Run,' wherein the citizens lost all their guns and ammunition, and where the Grebes slaughtered my true and trusty steward, Selim Agha.

I must allow myself a few lines in memory of a typical man. Selim was a Nubian of lamp-black skin; but his features were Semitic down to the nose-bridge, and below it, like the hair, distinctly African: this mixture characterises the negroid as opposed to the negro. In the first fourth of the present century he was bought by Mr. Thurburn—venerabile nomen—of Alexandria, and sent for education to North Britain. There he learned to speak Scotch, to make turtle-soup, to stuff birds, to keep accounts, and to be useful and valuable in a series of ways. Then his thoughts, full of philanthropy, turned towards the 'old mother.' The murder of Dr. Barth's companion, Vogel, in 1856, originated seven fruitless expeditions to murderous Wadáy, and he made sundry journeys into the interior. I believe that he took service for some time with Lieutenant (now Sir John H.) Glover before he became my factotum between 1860 and 1865. When I left the Coast he transferred himself to Liberia, where, he wrote, they proposed to 'run him for the presidency.' Selim joined the Monrovians during the Grebo war as an assistant-surgeon, his object being to mitigate the horrors of the campaign; and he met his death on October 9, 1875, during the mismanaged attack on Grebo Big Town. Captain A. B. Ellis, in his amusing and outspoken 'West African Sketches,' quotes from the 'Liberian Independent' the following statement: 'Mr. Selim Agha was also overtaken by the barbarous Greboes, and one of them, "Bye Weah" by name, after allowing him to read his Bible, which he had by him in his pocket, and which he made a present of to the barbarian, chopped his body all about, chopped off his head, which he took to his town with eighteen others, and threw the body with the gift into the swamp.' The account sounds trustworthy, especially that about the Bible: it is exactly what the poor fellow would have done. But many have assured me that he was slaughtered by mistake during the rout of his party. R.I.P.

Another reminiscence.

Although it has melancholy associations, I can hardly remember without a smile my last visit to good Bishop Payne. He led me to the mission-school, a shed that sheltered settles and desks, tattered books, slates and boards, two native pedagogues, and two lines of pupils sized from the right, the biggest being nearest the 'boss.' We took our places upon the bench, and the catechiser, when bade to begin, opened, after a little hesitation, as follows:—

Q. Who he be de fuss man?—A. Adam.
Q. Who he be de fuss woman?—A. Ebe.
Q. Whar de Lord put 'em?—A. In de garden.
Q. What he be de garden?—A. Eden.
Q. What else he be dere?—A. De sarpint.
Q. What he be de sarpint?—A. De snake.
Q. Heigh! What, de snake he 'peak?—A. No, him be debbil.

And so forth. The reading was much in the same style. The whole scene reminded me of a naïve narrative [Footnote: The Gospel to the Africans: Narrative of the Life and Labours of the Rev. William Jameson. London: Hamilton, Adams, & Co., 1861.] which gives the 'following account of the fall of our First Parents from the lips of an aged negro at the examination of candidates:'—

'Massa (God) said Adam must nyamee (eat) all de fruit ob de garden, but (be out, except) de tree of knowledge. And he said to Adam, "Adam! you no muss nyamee dis fruit, else you dead." De serpent come to say to Mammy Eve, "Dis fruit berry good; he make you too wise." Mammy she take lillee (little) bit, and bring de oder harf gib Daddy Adam. Daddee no will taste it fuss time, but Mammy tell him it be berry good. Den him nyamee de oder harf. Den Daddy and Mammy been know dat dem be naked. Dey go hide for bush. Massa come from heaven, but Him no fin' Adam all about. Den Massa strike Him foot on de ground and say, "I wage Adam been nyamee de fruit." Massa go seek Adam and fin' him hidin' in de bush, and put him out ob de garden. Then Daddy and Mammy dey take leaves and sew 'em for clothes.'

The Bishop looked on approvingly. We then spoke of the mysterious Mount Geddia, the Lybian Thala Oros of Ptolemy. [Footnote: Lib. iv. 6, §§ 12, 14, 16, the home of the Thála tribe.]

The people say that it may be seen at times from Settra Kru, that the distance by round road is some 200 miles, and that none have ascended it on account of the intense cold. If this be fact, there is a Kilima-njáro 18,000 feet high in Western Africa. The glitter of the white cap has been visible from great distances, and some would explain it by a bare vein of quartz—again, Kilima-njáro. The best time to travel would be in October or November, after the rains; and the Grebo rascals might be paid and persuaded to supply an escort.

At Cape Palmas we engaged thirty so-called Krumen: only seven were ready to accompany us, and the rest came nearly two months behind time. This is the farming season, and the people do not like to leave their field-lands. Jack Davis, headman, chief, crimp and 'promising' party, had been warned to be ready by Mr. R. B. N. Walker, whose name and certificate he wore upon a big silver crescent; but as Senegal appeared on Sunday instead of Saturday, he gravely declared that his batch had retired to their plantations—in black-man's English, 'small countries.' We were compelled to make an advance, a measure unknown of old, and to pay more than double hire for working on the Gold Coast. These races, Kruboys, Grebos, and their cognates, have not improved during the last score of years. Their headmen were old hands approaching the fifties: now they are youths of twenty-five. The younger sort willingly engaged for three years; now they begin to notch their tallies for every new moon, and they wax home-sick after the tenth month. Once they were content to carry home a seaman's chest well filled with 'chow-chow' and stolen goods; in these days they must have ready money to deal with the Bristol barques.

Having before described the 'Kráo' and the Kru republic, with its four recognised castes, I need not repeat myself. [Footnote: Wanderings, &c., vol. ii. chap. vi., which ends with a short specimen of the language.] We again admired the magnificent development of muscle, which stood out in bunches as on the Farnese Hercules, set off by the most appropriate dress, a coloured oblong of loin-cloth, tucked in at the waist. We marvelled too at the contrast of Grecian figure and cynocephalous features, whose frizzly thatch, often cut into garden-plots, is unnecessarily protected by a gaudy greasy cap.

In morals too these men are as peculiar as they are contradictory. They work, and work well: many old Coasters prefer them to all other tribes. They are at their best in boats or on board ship, especially ships of war, where they are disciplined. For carrying burdens, or working in the bush, they are by no means so valuable and yet, as will be seen, they are highly thought of by some miners in the Gold Mines. In the house they are at their worst; and they are a nuisance to camp, noisy and unclean. Their chief faults are lying and thieving; they are also apt to desert, to grow discontented, to presume, and ever to ask for more. These qualities are admirably developed in our headman, Toby Johnson, and his gang. I should not travel again with Krumen on the Gold Coast.

Another of their remarkable characteristics is the fine union of the quarrelsome with the cowardly. Like the Wányamwezi of East-Central Africa, they will fight amongst themselves, and fight furiously; but they feel no shame in telling their employers that they sell their labour, not their lives; that man can die but once; that heads never grow again, and that to battling they prefer going back to 'we country.' If a ship take fire all plunge overboard like seals, and the sound of a gun in the bush makes them run like hares. Yet an English officer actually proposed to recruit a force of these recreants for field-service in Ashanti. He probably confounded them with the Wásawahili, the 'Seedy-boys' of the east coast, a race which some day will prove useful when the Sepoy mutiny shall repeat itself, or if the difficulties in Egypt be prolonged. A few thousands of these sturdy fellows would put to flight an army of hen-hearted Hindús or Hindís.

We left Cape Palmas at 5 P.M., and duly respected the five-fathom deep 'Athole Rock,' so called from the frigate which first made its acquaintance. The third victim was the B. and A. s.s. Gambia (Captain Hamilton). [Footnote: Curiously enough a steamer carrying another fine of palm-oil has come to grief, owing, as usual, to imperfect charts.] She was carrying home part of the 400 puncheons exacted, after the blockade of 1876, by way of fine, from Gelelé, King of Dahome, by the senior naval officer, Captain Sullivan, the Dhow-chaser. The Juju-men naturally declared that their magic brought her to such notable grief.

We then passed Grand Tabú (Tabou), in the middle of the bay formed by Point Tahou—a coast better known fifty years ago than it is now. The only white resident is Mr. Julio, who has led a rather accidented life. A native of St. Helena, he fought for the Northerners in the American war, and proved himself a first-rate rifle-shot. He traded on the Congo, and travelled like a native far in the interior. Now he has married a wife from Cape Palmas, and is the leading man at Tabú.

This place, again, is a favourite labour-market. The return of the Krumen repeats the spectacles of Sinou, and war being here chronic, the canoe-men come off armed with guns, swords, and matchets. After a frightful storm of tongues, and much bustle but no work, the impatient steamer begins to waggle her screw; powder-kegs and dwarf boxes are tossed overboard, and every attention is bestowed upon them; whilst a boy or two is left behind, either to swim ashore or to find a 'watery grave.'

Presently we sighted the bar and breakers that garnish the mouth of the Cavally (Anglicè Cawally) River: the name is properly Cavallo, because it lies fourteen miles, riding-distance, from Cape Palmas. Here Bishop Payne had his head-quarters, and his branch missions extended sixty miles up-stream. On the left bank, some fifteen or sixteen miles from the embochure, resides the 'Grand Devil,' equivalent to the Great God, of Krúland. The place is described as a large caverned rock, where a mysterious 'Suffing' (something) answers, through an interpreter, any questions in any tongue, even English, receiving, in return for the revelations, offerings of beads, leaf-tobacco, and cattle, which are mysteriously removed. The oracle is doubtless worked by some sturdy knave, a 'demon-doctor,' as the missionaries call him, who laughs at the beards of his implicitly-believing dupes. A tree growing near the stream represents 'Lot's wife's pillar;' some sceptical and Voltairian black was punished for impious curiosity by being thus 'translated.' Skippers who treated their 'boys' kindly were allowed, a score of years ago, to visit the place, and to join in the ceremonies, even as most of the Old Calabar traders now belong to the 'Egbo mystery.' But of late years a village called Hidya, with land on both banks, forbids passage. Moreover, Krumen are not hospitable. Masters and men, cast ashore upon a coast which they have visited for years to hire hands, are stripped, beaten, and even tortured by women as well as by men. The savages have evidently not learnt much by a century's intercourse with Europeans.

Leaving Cavally, the last place where Kruboys can be shipped, we coasted along the fiery sands snowed over with surf and set in the glorious leek-green growth that distinguishes the old Ivory Coast. The great Gulf Stream which, bifurcating at the Azores, sweeps southwards with easting, now sets in our favour; it is, however, partly a wind-current, and here it often flows to the west even in winter. The ever-rolling seas off this 'Bristol coast' are almost clear of reef and shoal, and the only storms are tornadoes, which rarely blow except from the land: from the ocean they are exceedingly dangerous. Such conditions probably suggested the Bristol barque trade, which still flourishes between Cape Palmas and Grand Bassam. A modern remnant of the old Bristolian merchant-adventurers, it was established for slaving purposes during the last century by Mr. Henry King, maintained by his sons, Richard who hated men-of-war, and William who preferred science, and it is kept up by his grandsons for legitimate trade.

The ships—barques and brigs—numbering about twenty-five, are neat, clean, trim craft, no longer coppered perpendicularly [Footnote: Still occurs sometimes: the idea is that as they roll more than they sail less strain is brought on the seams of the copper.] instead of horizontally after the older fashion. Skippers and crews are well paid for the voyage, which lasts from a year to fifteen months. The floating warehouses anchor off the coast where it lacks factories, and pick up the waifs and strays of cam-wood, palm-oil, and kernels, the peculiar export of the Gold Coast: at times a tusk or a little gold-dust finds its way on board. The trader must be careful in buying the latter. Not only have the negroes falsified it since the days of Bosnian, but now it is made in Birmingham. This false dust resists nitric acid, yet is easily told by weight and bulk; it blows away too with the breath, whilst the true does not. Again, the skippers have to beware of 'fetish gold,' mostly in the shape of broken-up ornaments of inferior ley.

The Bristolians preserve the old 'round trade,' and barter native produce against cloth and beads, rum and gin, salt, tobacco, and gunpowder. These ship-shops send home their exports by the mail-steamers, and vary their monotonous days by visits on board. They sail home when the cargoes are sold, each vessel making up her own accounts and leaving 'trust,' but no debts. The life must be like making one's home in a lighthouse, plus an eternal roll; and the line gives a weary time to the mail-steamers, as these never know exactly where the Bristol barques will be found.

After hugging the coast and prospecting Biribi, we sighted the Drewins, whose natives are a powerful and spirited race, equally accustomed to either element. There are no better canoe-men on the coast. They ship only on board the Bristol ships, and they have more than once flogged a cruel skipper caught ashore. Passing King George's Town, we halted (11 A.M., January 23) opposite the river and settlement of Fresco, where two barques and a cutter were awaiting supplies. Fresco-land is beautified by perpendicular red cliffs, and the fine broad beach is feathered with cocoas which suggest kopra—the dried meat of the split kernel. At 3.15 P.M. came Grand Lahou—Bosman's Cabo La Hoe—180 miles from Cape Palmas. The native settlements of nut-brown huts in the clearings of thick forests resemble heaps of withered leaves. The French have re-occupied a fort twenty miles up the pretty barless river, the outlet of a great lagoon; it was abandoned during the Prusso-Gallic war. Nine Bristol barques were lying off Three Towns, a place not upon the chart, and at Half-Jack, 205 miles from the Cape. Here we anchored and rolled heavily through the night, a regular seesaw of head and heels. Seamen have prejudices about ships, pronouncing some steady and others 'uncommon lively.' I find them under most circumstances 'much of a muchness.'

The next morning carried us forty miles along the Bassam country and villages, Little, Piccaninny, and Great, to Grand Bassam. It is a regular lagoon-land, whose pretty rivers are the outlets of the several sweet waters and the salt-ponds. Opposite Piccaninny Bassam heads, with its stalk to the shore and spreading out a huge funnel eastward and westward, the curious formation known as the 'Bottomless Pit.' The chart shows a dot, a line, and 200 fathoms. In these days of deep-sea soundings I would recommend it to the notice of the Hydrographic Office. We know exactly as much about it in A.D. 1882 as in A.D. 1670, when Ogilvy wrote, 'Six miles beyond Jak, in Jakko, [Footnote: Bosman's Jaqui-Jaqui] is the Bottomless Pit, so called from its unfathomable deepness, for the seamen, having Sounded with their longest Lines and Plummets, could never reach the bottom.' It would be interesting to know whether it is an area of subsidence or a volcanic depression. The adjacent Gold Coast suffers from terrible earthquakes, as Accra learnt to her cost in 1862.

At 10 A.M. we made Grand Bassam, where the French have had a Résidence for many years. Here the famous Marseille house of Régis Frères first made fortune by gold-barter. The precious ore, bought by the middlemen, a peculiar race, from the wild tribes of the far interior, appears in the shape of dust with an occasional small nugget; the traders dislike bars and ingots, because they are generally half copper. We have now everywhere traced the trade from Gambia to the Gold Coast, and we may fairly conclude that all the metal comes from a single chain of Ghauts subtending the maritime region.

Grand Bassam is included in the French Côte d'Or, but not in the English Gold Coast, which begins east of the Ivory Coast. The Dutch was even narrower, according to Bosnian: 'Being a part of Guinea, it is extended about sixty miles, beginning with the Gold River (Assini) twelve miles above Axim, and ending with Ponni, seven or eight miles east of Accra.' Grand Bassam has only two European establishments. Eastward lies the 'Blockhouse' of M. Verdier, 'agent of the Government at Assini,' so called from its battlemented roof. It is the old Fort Nemours, built in 1843. The 'Poste,' abandoned during the war of 1870, was let to Messieurs Swanzy; it is a series of ridge-roofs surrounded by a whitewashed stockade. Both have been freely accused of supplying the Ashantis with arms and ammunition during the last war. Similarly the Gambia is said to have supported the revolteds of Senegal. The site is vile, liable to be flooded by sea and rain. The River Akbu or Komo (Comoe), with its spiteful little bar, drains the realms of Amatifú, King of Assini. It admits small craft, and we see the masts of a schooner amid the trees. The outlet of immense lagoons to the east and west, it winds down behind the factories, and bears the native town upon its banks. Here we discharged only trade-gin, every second surf-boat and canoe upsetting; the red cases piled upon the beach looked like a bed of rose-buds. The whole of this coast, as far as Axim, is so dangerous that men land with their lives in their hands. They disembark when outward-bound and re-embark when homeward-bound, and in the interim they never tempt surf and sharks.

The Senegal left Grand Bassam at 5.30 P.M., to cover the eighty-five miles separating us from our destination. The next important feature is the Assini River, also the outlet of enormous navigable lagoons, breaking the continuity of forest-backed sands. It lies fourteen to fifteen miles (which the chart has diminished to seven) west of the French settlement, of old Fort Joinville. The latter shows a tiled and whitewashed establishment, the property of M. Verdier, outlying the normal ant-hill of brown huts. In 1868 Winwood Reade here found a poste and stockade, a park of artillery, a commandant, a surgeon, and a detachment of tirailleurs sénégalais levied amongst the warlike Moslem tribes of Senegambia. Like Grand Bassam it was under the station admiral, who inspected the two once a year, and who periodically sent a gunboat to support French interests.

By night we passed New Town, not on the charts, but famed for owning a fine gold placer north of the town-lagoon. After my departure from the coast it was inspected by Mr. Grant, who sent home specimens of bitumen taken from the wells. Then came the two Assinis, eastern and western, both places of small present importance. The 'Assini Hills' of the chart lie to the north, not to the south of the Tando water; and by day one can easily distinguish their broken line, blue and tree-clad. The Franco-English frontier has been determined after a fashion. According to Mr. Stanford's last map, [Footnote: Gold Coast, November 20, 1873. A foot-note tells us, 'The whole coast belongs to the English, the French having withdrawn since 1870 from Grand Bassam and Assini' (Winwood Reade). This is obsolete in 1882. The limits of Ashanti-land are immensely exaggerated by this map.] the westernmost point was in west long. 2º 55' (G.) Thus our territory begins between Great Assini and New Town, the latter being included in the Protectorate. This position would reduce the old Gold Coast from 245 direct geographical miles of shore-line between the River Assini (W. long. 3º 23') and the Volta mouth (E. long. 0º 42') to some 217 or 220 in round numbers. Inland the limit should be the Tando valley, but it has been fancifully traced north from the Eyhi lagoon, the receptacle of the Tando, on a meridian of W. long. 2º 50' (G.) to a parallel of N. lat. 6º 30', or ninety-eight miles from the coast about Axim (N. lat. 4º 52'). Thence it bends east and south-east to the Ofim, or western fork of the Bosom Prah, and ascends the Prah proper, separating Ashanti-land (north) from Fanti-land (south).

It should be our object to acquire by purchase or treaty, or both, the whole territory subject to Grand Bassam and Assini. The reasons may be gathered from the preceding pages.

By night we also passed Cape Apollonia and its four hummocks, which are faintly visible from Axim. The name has nothing to do, I need hardly say, with Apollo or his feasts, the Apolloniæ, nor has it any relationship with the admirable 'Apollinaris water.' It was given by the Portuguese from the saint [Footnote: Butler's Lives gives 'S. Apollonia (not Appolonia, as the miners have it), v.m. February 9.' This admirable old maid leaped into the fire prepared for her by the heathen populace of Alexandria when she refused to worship their 'execrable divinity.' There are also an Apollonius (March 5), 'a zealous holy anchorite' of Egyptian Antinous; and Apollinaris, who about A.D. 376 began to 'broach his heresy,' denying in Christ a human soul.] who presided over the day of discovery. In the early half of the present century the King of Apollonia ruled the coast from the Assini to the Ancobra Rivers; the English built a fort by permission at his head-quarters, and carried on a large trade in gold-dust. Meredith (1800) tells us that, when his Majesty deceased, some twenty men were sacrificed on every Saturday till the 'great customs' took place six months afterwards. The underlying idea was, doubtless, that of Dahome: the potentate must not go, like a 'small boy,' alone and unattended to the shadowy realm. The 'African Cruiser' [Footnote: Journal of an African Cruiser, by an officer of the U.S. navy. Edited by Nathaniel Hawthorn. Aberdeen: Clark and Son, 1848.] speaks of the royal palace being sumptuously furnished in European style; of gold cups, pitchers, and plates, and of vast treasures in bullion. When the King died sixty victims were slain and buried with their liege lord; besides a knife, plate, and cup; swords, guns, cloths, and goods of various kinds. The corpse, smeared with oil and powdered cap-à-pié with gold-dust, looked like a statue of the noble ore.

As the Senegal advanced under easy steam, we had no rolling off this roller-coast, and we greatly and regretfully enjoyed the glorious Harmatan weather, so soon about to cease. The mornings and evenings were cool and dewy, and the pale, round-faced sun seemed to look down upon us through an honest northern fog. There was no heat even during the afternoons, usually so close and oppressive in this section of the tropics. I only wished that those who marvelled at my preferring to the blustering, boisterous weather of the Northern Adriatic the genial and congenial climate of West Africa could have passed a day with me.

CHAPTER XV. — AXIM, THE GOLD PORT OF THE PAST AND THE FUTURE.

All the traveller's anxiety about the Known and apprehensions of the Unknown fell from him like a garment as, after passing the hummocks of Apollonia, his destination, Axim, [Footnote: The port lies in N. lat. 4º 52' 20" (say 5º round numbers) and in W. long. (Gr.) 2º 14' 45": it must not be confounded, as often occurs in England, with 'Akim,' the region north of Accra.] peeped up over the port-bow at dawn of the 25th of January.

The first aspect of Axim is charming; there is nothing more picturesque upon this coast.

After the gape of the Ancobra River the foreshore gradually bends for a few miles from a west-east to a north-south rhumb, and forms a bay within a bay. The larger is bounded north by Akromasi Point, the southern wall of the great stream; the bold foreland outlain with reefs and a rock like a headless sphinx, is known from afar, east and west, by its 'one tree,' a palm apparently double, the leader of a straggling row. On the south of the greater bay is Point Pépré, by the natives called Inkubun, or Cocoanut-Tree, from a neighbouring village; like the Akromasi foreland, it is black and menacing with its long projection of greenstone reefs, whose heads are hardly to be distinguished from the flotilla of fishing canoes. The lesser bay, that of Axim proper, has for limits Pépré and the Bosomato promontory, a bulky tongue on whose summit is a thatched cottage.

The background of either bay is a noble forest, a wall of green, the items being often 150 feet high, with branchless white boles of eighty, perpendicularly striping the verdure. The regular sky-line—broken by tall knolls and clumps, whose limits are rivulet-courses and bosky dells; thrown up by refraction; flecked with shreds of heavy mist

That like a broken purpose waste in air;

and dappled with hanging mists, white as snow, and 'sun-clouds,' as the natives term the cottony nimbus—is easily mistaken, in the dim light of dawn, for a line of towering cliffs.

The sea at this hour is smooth as oil, except where ruffled by fish-shoals, and shows comparatively free, today at least, from the long Atlantic roll which lashes the flat coast east of Apollonia. Its selvage is fretted by green points, golden sands, and a red cove not unlike the crater-port of Clarence, Fernando Po. The surface is broken by two islets, apparently the terminal knobs of many reefs which project westward from the land. To the north rises Asiniba ('Son of Asini'), a pyramid of rock below and tree-growth above. Fronting the landing-place is Bobowusúa, [Footnote: The Hyd. Chart calls them Suaba and Bobowassi; it might be a trifle more curious in the matter of significant words.] or Fetish Island, a double feature which we shall presently inspect. The foreshore is barred and dotted perpendicularly by black reefs and scattered diabolitos, or detached hard-heads, which break the surges. At spring-tides, when rise and fall reach at least ten feet, and fourteen in the equinoctial ebb and flow, it appears a gridiron of grim black stone. [Footnote: Not as the Hyd. Chart says—'rise and fall at springs six or seven feet.']

The settlement, backed by its grand 'bush' and faced by the sea, consists of a castle and a subject town; it wears, in fact, a baronial and old-world look. Fort Santo Antonio, a tall white house upon a bastioned terrace, crowns proudly enough a knob of black rock and low green growth. On both sides of it, north and south, stretches the town; from this distance it appears a straggle of brown thatched huts and hovels, enlivened here and there by some whitewashed establishments, mining or 'in the mercanteel.' The soil is ruddy and rusty, and we have the usual African tricolor.

The agents of the several Aximite houses came on board. We drained the normal stirrup-cup and embarked in the usual heavy surf-boat, manned by a dozen leathery-lunged 'Elmina boys' with paddles, and a helmsman with an oar. There are smaller surf-canoes, that have weather-boards at the bow to fend off the waves. Our anchorage-place lies at least two miles south-west-and-by-south of the landing-place. There is absolutely nothing to prevent steamers running in except a sunken reef, the Pinnacle or Hoeven Rock. It is well known to every canoeman. Cameron sounded for it, and a buoy had been laid by fishermen, but so unskilfully that the surge presently made a clean sweep. Hence a wilful waste of time and work. I wrote to Messieurs Elder and Dempster, advising them to replace it for their own interests and for the convenience of travellers; but in Africa one is out of the world, and receiving answers is emphatically not the rule.

There is no better landing-place than Axim upon this part of the African coast. The surf renders it impracticable only on the few days of the worst weather. We hugged the north of the Bobowusúa rock-islet. When the water here breaks there is a clear way further north; the southern passage, paved with rocks and shoals, can be used only when the seas are at their smoothest. A regular and well-defined channel placed us on the shingly and sandy beach. We had a succulent breakfast with Messieurs Gillett and Selby (Lintott and Spink), to whose unceasing kindness and hospitality we afterwards ran heavily in debt. There we bade adieu to our genial captain and our jovial fellow-travellers.

The afternoon was spent in visiting the Axim fort. Santo Antonio, built by the Portuguese in the glorious days of Dom Manuel (1495-1521), became the Hollander Saint Anthony by conquest in 1682, and was formally yielded by treaty to the Dutch West Indian Company. It came to us by convention at the Hague; and, marked 'ruined' in the chart, it was repaired in 1873 before the Ashanti war. It can now act harbour of refuge, and is safe from the whole power of the little black despotism. Bosman [Footnote: Eerste Brief, 1737: the original Dutch edition was lent to me by M. Paulus Dahse.] shows 'Fort St. Antonio' protected by two landward bastions and an old doorway opening upon a loopholed courtyard. Barbot (1700) sketches a brick house in gable-shape, based upon a triangular rock.

Passing the Swanzy establishment, a model board-house, with masonry posts, a verandah all round, and a flying roof of corrugated iron, we ascend the old paved ramp. Here we remark that the castle-gateway of the Dutch, leading to the outer or slave court, has been replaced by a mean hole in the wall. The external work was demolished, lest the enemy effect a lodgement there. We can walk seawards round the green knob scattered with black boulders, and pick an excellent salad, a kind of African dandelion, which the carnivorous English miners called 'grass,'—with a big, big D. Entering the hole in the wall, and passing through a solid arched gateway and across a small court upon which the prison opens, we ascend the steps leading to the upper work. This is a large square house, pierced in front for one door and three windows, and connected by a bridge, formerly a drawbridge, with the two tall belvideres, once towers guarding the eastern entrance. The body is occupied by the palaver-hall of the opper koopman (chief factor), now converted into a court-house and a small armoury of sniders. It leads to the bedrooms, disposed on three sides. The materials are trap, quartz, probably gold-bearing, and fine bricks, evidently home-made. The substantial quarters fronting the sea are breezy, comfortable, and healthy; and the large cistern contains the only good drinking-water in Axim. Life must be somewhat dull here, but, after all, not so bad as in many an out-station of British India. The chief grievance is that the inmates, the District-commissioner and his medico, are mere birds of passage; they are ordered off and exchanged, at the will of head-quarters, often before they can settle down, and always before they learn to take interest in the place. The works consist of two bastions on the land side; a large one to the south-east, and a smaller to the north-east. Seawards projects a rounded cavalier, fronted by dead ground, or rather water. In the days of the Dutch the platforms carried '22 iron guns, besides some patteraroes.' Now there are two old bronze guns, two 'chambeis' bearing the mark 'La Hague,' and an ancient iron tube dismounted: a seven-pounder mountain-gun, of a type now obsolete, lurks in the shadows of the arched gateway. I afterwards had an opportunity of seeing the ammunition, and was much struck by a tub of black mud, which they told me was gunpowder. The Ashantis at least keep theirs dry.

The dispensary appeared equally well found. For some weeks there was a native assistant; then Dr. Roulston came, and, after a few days, was ordered off at a moment's notice to the remotest possible station. He had no laudanum, no Dover's powders, no chlorodyne, no Warburg; and, when treating M. Dahse for a burst vein, he was compelled to borrow styptics from our store. This style of economy is very expensive. To state the case simply, officials last one year instead of two.

The late Captain P. D. O'Brien, District-commissioner of Axim, did the honours, showing us the only 'antiquity' in the place, the tomb of a Dutch governor, with a rudely cut inscription set in the eastern wall:—

WILLEM
SCHOORWAS
COMAD. OP AXEM
1659.

Amongst the slave-garrison of twenty-five Hausás I found a Wadai-man, Sergeant Abba Osman, who had not quite forgotten his Arabic. Several Moslems also appeared about the town, showing that the flood of El-Islam is fast setting this way. They might profitably be hired as an armed escort into the pagan interior.

Axim, preferably written by the Portuguese 'Axem,' was by them pronounced Ashim or Ashem: no stress, therefore, must be laid upon its paper-resemblance with Abyssinian Axum. [Footnote: I allude to The Guinea or Gold Coast of Africa, formerly a Colony of the Axumites (London, Pottle and Son, 1880), an interesting pamphlet kindly forwarded to me by the author, Captain George Peacock. I believe, as he does, that the West Coast of Africa preserves traces of an ancient connection with the Nile valley and the eastern regions; but this is not one of them.] Barbot calls it 'Axim, or Atzyn, or Achen.' The native name is Essim, which, in the language of the Mfantse or Mfantse-fo (Fanti-race), means 'you told me,' and in the Apollonian dialect 'you know me.' These fanciful terms are common, and they allude to some tale or legend which is forgotten in course of time. The date of its building is utterly unknown. The Fanti tradition is that their race was driven coastwards, like their kinsmen the Ashantis, [Footnote: In Wanderings in West Africa, (ii. 98) I have given the popular derivation of Fanti (Fan-didi = herb-eater) and Asyanti (Sán-didi = corn-eater). Bowdich wrote 'Ashanti' because he learnt the word from the Accra-men.] by tribes pressing down upon them from the north. They must have found the maritime lands occupied, but they have preserved no notices of their predecessors. The port-town became the capital of an upper factor, who ruled the whole coast as far as Elmina. It was almost depopulated, say the old authorities, by long wars with the more powerful Apollonia; but its commanding position has always enabled it to recover from the heaviest blows. It is still the threshold of the western Gold-region, and the principal port of occidental Wásá (Wassaw).

We may fairly predict a future for Axim. The town is well situated to catch the sea-breeze. The climate is equatorial, but exceptionally healthy, save after the rainy season, which here opens a month or six weeks earlier than on the leeward coast. The downfall must, however, have diminished since the times when 'the blacks will tell you the wet weather lasts eleven months and twenty-nine days in the year.' The rains now begin with April and end in September. The position is south of the thermal equator (22º R. = 81 5º F.), which runs north lat. 6º on the western coast, 15º in the interior, and 10º on the eastern seaboard. [Footnote: Berghaus, following Humboldt, places the probable equator of temperature (80º 16') in N. lat. 4º, or south of Axim, rising to N. lat. 13º in Central and in Eastern Africa] Add that the average daily temperature is 75º-80º (F.), rising to 96º in the afternoon and falling after midnight to 70º, and that the wet season on the seaboard is perhaps the least sickly. We were there in January-March, during an unusually hot and dry season, following the Harmatan and the Smokes and preceding the tornadoes and the rains; yet I never felt an oppressive day,—nothing worse than Alexandria or Trieste in early August. The mornings and evenings were mostly misty; the moons were clear and the nights were tolerable. An excessive damp, which mildews and decays everything—clothes, books, metals, man—was the main discomfort. But we were living, as it were, in the open, and we neglected morning and evening fires. This will not be the case when solid and comfortable houses shall be built. The improvement of lodging and diet accounts for the better health of Anglo-Africans, as of Anglo-Indians, in the present day. Our predecessors during the early nineteenth century died of bad shelter, bad food, and bad drink.

The town, built upon a flat partly formed by cutting away the mounds and hillocks of red clay, was well laid out by Mr. Sam, the District-commissioner, after its bombardment during the Ashanti war. The main streets, or rather roads, running north-south, are avenued with shady Ganian or umbrella figs. I should prefer the bread-tree, which here flourishes. These thoroughfares are kept clean enough, and nuisances are punished, as in England. Cross lines, however, are wanted; the crooked passages between the huts do not admit the sea-breeze. Native hovels, also, should be removed from the foreshore, which, as Admiralty property, ought to be kept for public purposes. The native dwellings are composed of split bamboo-fronds (Raphia vinifera), thatched with the foliage of the same tree. They are mere baskets—airy, and perhaps too airy. Some are defended against wind and wet by facings of red swish; a few, like that of the 'king' and chief native traders, are built of adobes (sun-dried bricks), whitewashed outside. Of this kind, too, are the stores and the mining establishments; the 'Akankon House,' near the landing-place; the 'Gold Coast House,' in the interior; the Methodist chapel, a barn-shaped affair; the Effuenta House to the north, and the Tákwá, or French House, to the south.

'Sanitation,' however, is loudly called for; and if cholera come here it will do damage. The southern part of the narrow ledge bearing the town, and including the French establishment, is poisoned by a fetid, stagnant pool, full of sirens, shrimps, and anthropophagous crabs, which after heavy rains cuts a way through its sand-bar to the sea. This marigot is the 'little shallow river Axim,' the Achombene of Barbot, which the people call Awaminísu ('Ghost's or Deadman's Water'). To the north also there are two foul nullahs, the Eswá and the Besáon, which make the neighbourhood pestilential. In days to come the latter will be restored to its old course east of the town and thrown into the Awaminísu, whose mouth will be kept open throughout the year. The eastern suburbs, so to call them, want clearing of offal and all manner of impurities. Beyond the original valley of the Besáon the ground rises and bears the wall of trees seen from the offing. There is, therefore, plenty of building-room, and long heads have bought up all the land in that direction. Mr. Macarthy, of the School of Mines, owns many concessions in this part of the country.

All the evils here noted can easily be remedied. As in the Cairo of Mohammed Ali's day, every house-holder should be made responsible for the cleanliness of his surroundings. The Castle-prison, too, rarely lodges fewer than a dozen convicts. These men should be taken away from 'shot-drill' and other absurdities of the tread-mill type, which diversify pleasant, friar-like lives of eating and drinking, smoking, sleeping, and chatting with one another. Unfortunately, humanitarianism does not allow the lash without reference to head-quarters. Labour must therefore be light; still it would suffice to dig up the boulders from the main thoroughfares, to clean the suburbs, and to open the mouths of the fetid and poisonous lagoons.

Mr. William M. Grant, the clever and active agent of our friend Mr. James Irvine, came on board to receive us, and housed us and our innumerable belongings in his little bungalow facing 'Water Street.' We found life at Axim pleasant enough. Even in these days of comparative barbarism, or at best of incipient civilisation, the station is not wholly desert. The agents of the several firms are hospitable in the extreme. Generally also a manager of the inner mines, or a new comer, enlarges the small circle. There is a flavour of England in 'A. B. and Co., licensed dealers in wine and spirits, wholesale and retail,' inscribed upon boards over the merchants' doors; also in the lawn-tennis, which I have seen played in a space called by courtesy a square: Cameron, by-the-bye, has hired it, despite some vexatious local opposition, and it will be a fine locale for the Axim Hotel now being opened. Sunday is known as a twenty-four hours of general idleness and revelry: your African Christian is meticulous upon the subject of 'Sabbath;' he will do as little work as possible for six days, and scrupulously repose upon the seventh. Whether he 'keeps it holy' is quite another matter, into which I do not care to enquire. Service- and school-hours are announced by a manner of peripatetic belfry—a negroling walking about with a cracked muffin-bell. From the chapel, which adjoins some wattled huts, the parsonage, surges at times a prodigious volume of sound, the holloaing of hymns and the bellowing of anthems; and, between whiles, the sable congregation, ranged on benches and gazing out of the windows, 'catches it 'ot and strong' from the dark-faced Wesleyan missionary-schoolmaster.

We were never wearied of the 'humours' of native Axim. The people are not Fantis, but Apollonians, somewhat differing in speech with the Oji; both languages, however, are mutually intelligible. [Footnote: Oji is also written Otschi, Tschi, Chwee, Twi, Tswi, Otyi, Tyi, or whatever German ingenuity can suggest. I can hardly explain why the late Keith Johnston (Africa) calls the linguistic family 'Ewe' (Ewhe, or properly Whegbe), after a small section of the country, Dahome, Whydah, &c. He was probably led to it by the publications of the Bâle and other German missions.] The men are the usual curious compound of credulity and distrust, hope and fatalism, energy and inaction, which make the negro so like the Irish character. But we must not expect too much from the denizens of African seaports, mostly fishermen who will act hammock-bearers, a race especially fond of Bacchus and worshippers of the 'devil Venus.' Perhaps a little too much license is allowed to them in the matter of noisy and drunken 'native customs,' palavers, and pow-wows. They rarely go about armed; if you see a gun you know that the bearer is a huntsman. They are easily commanded, and, despite their sympathies with Ashanti-land, they are not likely to play tricks since their town was bombarded. In the villages they are civil enough, baring the shoulders, like taking off the hat, when they meet their rulers. Theirs, also, is the great virtue of cleanliness; even when the mornings are coldest you see them bathing on the beach. They are never pinched for food, and they have high ideas of diet. 'He lib all same Prince; he chop cow and sheep ebery day, and fowl and duck he be all same vegeta'l.' They have poultry in quantities, especially capons, sheep with negro faces like the Persian, dwarf milch-goats of sturdy build, dark and dingy pigs, and cattle whose peculiarity it is to be either black or piebald. The latter are neat animals like the smallest Alderneys, with short horns, and backs flat as tables. There are almost as many bulls as there are cows, and they herd together without fighting. Being looked upon as capital, and an honour to the owner, they are never killed; and, although the udders of cows and goats are bursting with milk, they are never milked.

The women differ very little from their sisters of the Eastern Gold Coast. You never see beauty beyond the beauté du diable and the naïve and piquant plainness which one admires in a pug-pup. The forms are unsupported, and the figure falls away at the hips. They retain the savage fashion of coiffure shown in Cameron's 'Across Africa,' training their wool to bunches, tufts, and horns. The latter is the favourite; the pigtails, which stand stiff upright, and are whipped round like pricks of tobacco, may number half a dozen: one, however, is the common style, and the size is said to be determined by a delicate consideration. Opposed to this is the highly civilised atufu, 'kankey,' or bussle, whose origin is disputed. Some say that it prevents the long cloth clinging to the lower limbs, others that it comes from a modest wish to conceal the forms; some make it a jockey-saddle for the baby, others a mere exaggeration of personal development, an attempt to make Aphrodite a Callipygé. I hold that it arose, in the mysterious hands of 'Fashion,' from the knot which secures the body-cloth, and which men wear in front or by the side. Usually this bussle is a mere bundle of cloth; on dress occasions it is a pad or cushion. I had some trouble to buy the specimen, which Cameron exhibited in London.

Men and women are vastly given to 'chaffing' and to nicknaming. Every
child, even in the royal houses, takes a first name after the week-day
[Footnote:
Men. Women.
Adwo (Monday-born) ... Kajo (Cuddjo) ... Adwoa.
Bena (Tuesday-born) ... Kwábina ... Abiena.
Wuku (Wednesday-born) ... Kwáko ... Akudea.
Tan (Thursday-born) ... Kwáo ... Yá (Yawá).
Afio (Friday-born) ... Kofi (Coffee) ... Afuá.
Amu (Saturday-born) ... Kwámina ... Amma.
Ayisi (Sunday-born) ... Kwasi ... Akosúa (Akwasiba).

Monday is the first day of the Oji week. The Sunday-born is corrupted to 'Quashy,' well known in the United States; hence also the 'bitter cup' of guassia-wood. The names of the days are taken from the seven Powers which rule them. Kwa-Si would be Kwá (=akoa, man, slave), and Ayisi (a man) belonging to Ayisi. Amongst the Accra people the first-born are called Téte (masc.) and Dede (fem.), the second Tété and Koko, and the rest take the names of the numerals. So we have Septimus, Decimus, &c.] of its birth, and strangers after that on which they land. Cameron, who shaved his hair, was entitled 'Kwábina Echipu'—Tuesday Baldhead. I became Sásá Kwési (Fetish Sunday), from a fancied clerical appearance, Sásá being probably connected with Sásábonsam, 'a huge earth-demon of human shape and fiery hue.' He derives from asase ('earth'), and abonsam, some evil ghost who has obtained a permanent bad name. Missionaries translate the latter word 'devil,' and make it signify an evil spirit living in the upper regions, or our popular heaven, and reigning over Abonsamkru, the last home of souls, or rather shades of the wicked. Thus sasabonsam would be equivalent to Erdgeist, Waldteufel, or Kobold, no bad nickname for a miner. The people have a wealth of legend, and some queer tale attached to every wild beast and bird. In days to come this folk-lore will be collected.

The gorbellied children are the pests of the settlement. At early dawn they roar because they awake hungry and thirsty; they roar during the day when washed with cold water, and in the evening they roar because they are tired and sleepy. They are utterly spoiled. They fight like little Britons; they punch their mothers at three years of age; and, when strong enough, they 'square up' to their fathers.

The first mining business we had to transact was with Kwámina Blay, of Attabo, Ahin (Ahene) or King of Amrehía, Western Apollonia. He came to visit us in state on January 28. The vehicle, a long basket, big enough to lodge a Falstaff, open like a coffin, and lined with red cloth to receive the royal person and gold-hilted swords, was carried stretcher-fashion by four sturdy knaves. King Blay is an excellent man, true and 'loyal to the backbone;' but his Anglo-African garb was, to say the least, peculiar. A tall cocked hat, with huge red and white plume, contrasted with the dwarf pigtail bearing a Popo-bead, by way of fetish, at the occiput. His body-dress was a sky-blue silk, his waist-cloth marigold-yellow, and he held in hand the usual useless sword of honour, a Wilkinson presented to him for his courage and conduct in 1873-1874. The Ashanti medal hung from his neck by a plaited gold chain of native Trichinopoly-work, with a neat sliding clasp of two cannons and an empty asumamma, or talisman-case. The bracelets were of Popo-beads and thick gold-wire curiously twisted into wreath-knots. Each finger bore a ring resembling a knuckle-duster, three mushroom-like projections springing from each oval shield.

Ahin Blay dismounted with ceremony, and was as ceremoniously received. His features are those of the Fanti, somewhat darker than usual, and his expression is kindly and intelligent: though barely fifty-five his head is frosty and his goatee is snowy. The visit was a state affair, a copy in small of Ashanti and Dahome.

On the left, the place of honour, sat the 'King's father,' that is, eldest uncle on the female side, evidently younger than his nephew: the language makes scanty difference between the relationships, and here, as in other parts of Africa, the ruler adopts a paternity. Six elders, safahins and panins, [Footnotes: The 'Opanyini' (plur. of 'Opanyin') are the town-elders forming the council of the Ahin (king) or Caboceer, each with his own especial charge. The Safahin (Safohine or Osafohene) is the captain of war; the Ofotosanfo is the treasurer; the Okyame is spy and speaker, alias 'King's Mouf;' and the Obofo is the messenger, envoy, or ambassador. The system much resembles that of the village-republics in Maráthá-land.] sat down, in caps and billycocks; the other fifteen stood up bareheaded, including the 'King's Stick,' called further south 'King's Mouf.' This spokesman, like the 'Meu-'minister of Dahome, repeated to his master our interpreter's words; and his long wand of office was capped with a silver elephant—King Blay's 'totem,' equivalent to our heraldic signs. So in Ashanti-land some caboceers cap their huge umbrellas with the twidam, or leopard, the Etchwee, or panther, of Bowdich, [Footnote: Mission, &c., p. 230 (orig. fol.). The other two patriarchal families which preside over the eight younger branches, making a total of twelve tribes, are the Ekoana (Quonna), from eko (a buffalo), and the Essona, from esso (a bush-cat).] and others are members of the Intchwa, or dog-division. These emblems denote consanguineous descent, and the brotherhood (ntwa) of the 'totems' is uniformly recognised. Our guest's particular ambition is a large state-umbrella, capped with a silver elephant carrying in trunk a sword. He presently received one sent, at my request, by Mr. Irvine.

Amongst the elders were scattered small boys, relations of the headmen. They were all eyes and ears, and in Fanti-land they are formally trained to make the best of spies. When you see a lad lounging about or quietly dozing within ear-shot you know at once his mission.

The notable parts of the suite were the swordbearers and the band. The former carried five afõa, peculiar weapons, emblems of royalty. The blades are licked when swearing; they are despatched with messengers as a hint to enforce obedience; and they are held, after a fashion, to be holy. I have never seen more conventional, distorted, and useless weapons. Three blades showed the usual chopping-bill shape, pierced, like fish-slicers, with round, semicircular, and angular holes. One, measuring twenty-three inches and three-quarters, was leaf-formed, dotted with a lozenge-pattern and set with copper studs. Another was partially saw-toothed. All were of iron, rusty with the rust of years and hardly sharp enough to cut a pat of butter. The impossible handles were worthy of the blades, bulging grips between two huge balls utterly unfitted for handling; four were covered with thin gold-plate in repoussé work, and one with silver. The metal was sewn together with thin wire, and the joints had been hammered to hide them. Cameron sketched them for my coming 'Book of the Sword;' and Ahin Blay kept his promise by sending me a specimen of the weapon with two divergent blades used to cut off noses and ears. Bowdich [Footnote: Mission, &c., p. 312] mentions finely-worked double blades springing parallel from a single handle; here nothing was known about them.

The band consisted of two horns and three drums. Of the latter one was sheathed in leopard-skin and rubbed, not struck, with two curved sticks. A second was hourglass-shaped; the sticks were bent to right angles, and the drummer carried, by way of cymbal, a small round iron plate adjusted to the fingers with little rings loosely set in the edge. The horns were scrivelloes, elephant-tusks of small size. At times a horrid braying denoted the royal titles, and after every blast the liege lord responded mechanically, 'Kwámina Blay! atinásu marrah' (Monday Blay! here am I).

Interviews with African 'kings' consist mainly of compliments, 'dashes' (presents or heave-offerings), and what is popularly called 'liquoring up.' Gifts are a sign of affection; hence the proverb, 'If anyone loves you he will beg of you.' Money, however, is considered pay; curiosities are presents, and drink is 'dash.' The 'drinkitite' these men develope is surprising; they swallow almost without interval beer and claret, champagne and shandigaff, cognac, whisky, and liqueurs. Trade-gin, [Footnote: This article is made at Hamburg by many houses; the best brand is held to be that of Van Heyten, and the natives are particular about it. The prime cost of a dozen-case, each bottle containing about a quart, fitted with wooden divisions and packed with husks, chaff, or sawdust, is 3s. 6d.; in retail it is sold for 6s., or 6d. per bottle. Strange to say, it has the flavour of good hollands. The latter, however, in small bottles is always to be bought on the Gold Coast, and can be drunk with safety.] being despised, is turned over to the followers. Before entering upon this time-wasting process I persuaded the Ahin and panins to sign the document enabling me formally to take possession of the 'Izrah Mine.' The paper was duly attested and witnessed; and the visit ended with a royal 'progress' to the fort, where the District-commissioner did the rest of the needful.

Next day the King made a friendly call without basket or band. His cocked hat was exchanged for a chimney-pot so 'shocking bad' that no coster would dare to don it. Such is the custom of the chiefs, and if you give them a good tile it goes at once into store. He made us promise a return-visit and set out to collect bearers.

Hereabouts a week is as a day. Whilst carriage was collecting we inspected the neighbourhood of Axim. Our first visit was to Bobowusúa island, a 'fetish place for palavers,' where the natives object to guns being fired. Here it was that Admiral van Ruyter built his battery of twelve cannons and forced Fort Santo Antonio to surrender on January 19, 1642. The rock is of trap, greenstone, or whinstone, which miners call iron-stone and Cornishmen 'blue elvan:' this diorite, composed of felspar and the hardest hornblende, contains granular iron and pyrites like silver. Some specimens are beautifully banded in onyx-fashion and revetted with 'spar' (quartz) of many colours, dead-white and crystalline, red and yellow. We find the same trap on the mainland. Near the smaller Akinim or Salt-pond village there is a mass threaded with quartz-veins from north to south (1º 30'), bossed by granite dykes [Footnote: It is generally believed that these granite injections have been cooled and consolidated deep below earth's surface.] trending east-west (96º 50'), and traversed by a burnt vein striking 67º. From the surf-boat we remarked that there were no sharks; apparently they shun coming within the reefs. Our landing was not pleasant for the Krumen; the shallow bottom was strewed with rounded pebbles, and the latter are studded with sharp limpets and corallines. We climbed round the seaward bluff, fissured with deep narrow clefts, up which the tide-waves race and roar. Here the trap has a ruddy hue, the salt water bringing out the iron. Corallines, now several feet above water, clothed the boulders. This, corroborated by a host of other phenomena, argues a secular upheaval of the island, and we find the same on the mainland. There were fragments of grey granite, but not in situ; all had been washed from the continent, where it outlies all other formations. Water-rolled bits of brickstone also appeared; and hence, probably, Dr. Oscar Lenz [Footnote: Geolog. Karte von West-Africa. Gotha, Justus Perthes, 1882.] makes Axim and the neighbourhood consist of rother Sandstein upon laterite.

Bobowusúa is a cabinet of natural history. The northern flank is ever wet with dew and spray; the southern shows a little dry earth and sand. The latter in this and in other parts of the islet is a medley of comminuted shells. We collected cowries of four kinds, large and small, crabs and balani, lobsters and sea-urchins (erinacei) with short spines; diminutive rock-oysters and a large variety with iridescent mother-o'-pearl, pink, red and yellow. The latter yields a white seed-pearl, and here, perhaps, we might attempt to develope it into

That great round glory of pellucid stuff,
A fish secreted round a grain of grit.

A single snake-slough and an eight-ribbed turtle were found. The short, sandy neck of the eastern knob is a playground for 'parson-crows' and scavengers (turkey-buzzards); hawks, kites, and fish-eagles, white and black, while the adjacent reefs are frequented by gulls, terns, and small cranes.

Above the rock-line is a selvage of low vegetation—ipom[oe]a, white and mauve-flowered; rushes and tangle-grass, a variety of salsolaceæ, and the cyperus, whose stalk is used like the kalam, or reed-pen, further east. These growths are filmed with spiders' webs, whose central shafts lead to their nests. The highest levels, only a few feet above water, are grown with a dense bush that wants the matchet. Here are remains of plantations, a little knot of bananas, a single tall cocoanut, many young palms, and a few felled trunks overgrown with oysters. Europeans have proposed to build bungalows on Bobowusúa, where they find fresh sea-air, and a little shooting among the red-breasted ring-doves, rails, and green pigeons affecting the vegetation. It appears to us a good place for mooring hulks. The steamers could then run alongside of them and discharge cargo for the coming tramway, while surf-boats carrying two or three tons could load for the Ancobra River.

The eastern or inner continuation of Bobowusúa is Poké islet, a similar but smaller block. During spring-tides they are linked together and to the shore by reefs that stand up high and dry. Poké is the rock where, according to Barbot, 'the negroes put their wives and children when they go to war.' The tradition is that the Dutch mined it for silver. The metal is known to exist in several places on and behind the coast, at Bosumato, upon the Ancobra River south of 'Akankon,' and even at Kumasi. Besides, gold has not yet been found here unalloyed with silver.

I was fortunate in collecting from this part of Africa stone-implements before unknown to Europe. My lamented friend Winwood Reade, [Footnote: The Story of the Ashantee Campaign (pp. 2-4 and 314). London, Smith and Elder, 1874.] one of those

Peculiar people whom death has made dear,

was the first to bring them home from the eastern regions, Akwapim (Aquapim), Prahsu, and the Volta River. Arrived at Axim, I nailed to the walls of our sitting-room a rough print showing the faces and profiles of worked stones. The result was a fair supply from the coast both up and down till I had secured thirteen. [Footnote: I read a paper upon these stone-implements (July 11, 1882) before the Anthropological Society at the house of my friend, the President, General A. Pitt-Rivers; and made over to him my small stock. It will find a home at Oxford, with the rest of his noble anthropological collection, lately presented to the University.] All were of the neolithic or ground type; the palæolithic or chipped was wholly absent, and so were weapons proper, arrowpiles and spear-points.

Mr. Carr, the able and intelligent agent of Messieurs Swanzy, brought me sundry pieces and furnished me with the following notes. The 'belemnites' are picked up at the stream-mouths after freshets; but the people, like all others, call them 'lightning-stones' (osráman-bo) or abonua, simply axe. They suppose the ceraunius to fall with the bolt, to sink deep in the earth, and to rise to the surface in process of time. The idea is easily explained. All are comparatively modern, and consequently thinly covered with earth's upper crust; this is easily washed away by heavy rains; and, as thunder and lightning accompany the downfalls, the stones are supposed to be the result.

The osráman-bo are used in medicine; they 'cool the heart;' and water in which they are steeped, when given to children, mitigates juvenile complaints. One of my collections owes its black colour to having been boiled in palm-oil by way of preserving its virtues; it resembles the básanos of Lydian Tmolus; but the Gold Coast touchstone is mostly a dark jasper imported from Europe. The substance of the thunder-stone is the greenstone-trap everywhere abundant, and taking with age a creamy patina like the basalt of the Haurán. I heard, however, that at Abusi, beyond Anamabo (Bird-rock), and other places further east worked stones of a lightish slaty hue are common. About New Town and Assini these implements become very plentiful. Mr. S. Cheetham informs me that the thinner hatchets, somewhat finger-shaped, are copied in iron by the peoples of the Benin River. These expert smiths buy poor European metal and, like other West Africans, turn out a first-rate tool.

Axim seems to have been a great centre of stone-manufacture. Mr. Carr showed us a dozen huge boulders of greenstone, chiefly at the eastern angle of the wart that bears, in dangerous proximity to his stores, his powder-magazine. The upper surfaces are scored and striped with leaf-shaped grooves, formed like old Greek swords; some of them are three feet long by three inches wide and three deep. I made a sketch of the place; Cameron photographed it, and on return carried off a huge slice of the block, which is now in the British Museum. We afterwards found these striated stones on the sea-ward face of St. Anthony Fort, in northern Axim, and on other parts of the seaboard.

Axim, the gate of this El Dorado, has not yet much reason to thank England for ruling her. A mean economy annually hoards from 20,000l. to 30,000l, [Footnote: In 1878 the revenue was 105,091l. and the expenditure 68,410l., and in other years the contrast was even greater. The omniscient 'Whittaker' tells us that in 1879 the figures stood at 54,908l. income versus an outlay of 46,281l.; and there was no debt.] forwarded to the colonial caisse, to be wasted upon 'little wars,' and similar miseries, instead of being spent upon local improvements. The unwholesome bush (the Dutch 'bosch') or wood, backed by the primæval forest, surges up to the very doors. The little plank-bridges are out of repair, and the merchants will not supply the Government with new boards, save for ready money; otherwise payment may be delayed for a year. The highway to head-quarters, Cape Coast Castle, is a yellow thread streaking the green, a hunter's path trodden in the jungle. For 16s. 6d. a private messenger goes to and returns from the capital, a distance of eighty-two miles, in four or five days. The public post starts on Wednesdays, halts without reason between Fridays and Mondays at Sekondi (Seecondee), and consumes a week in the down-march. I have already noted the want of sanitation, the condition of the ammunition, and the absence of medical stores. It moves one's sense of the absurd to compare the desolate condition of the Goldland, which is to supply the money, with the civilised machinery in England which is to work it, companies and syndicates, shares, debentures, and what not.

I have treated the subject of Axim with a minuteness that is almost 'porochial;' its future importance must be my excuse. The next chapter will show that we are truly in the Land of Gold, in an Old New California.

And now to conclude this unpleasant account with the good words of old Barbot: 'Axim, in my opinion, is the most tempting of any on the coast of Guinea, taking one thing with another. You have there a perpetual greenness, which affords a comfortable shade against the scorching heat of the sun, under the lofty palm and other trees, planted about the village, with a sweet harmony of many birds of several sorts perching on them. The walk on the low flat strand along the seaside is no less pleasant at certain hours of the day; and from the platform of the fort is a most delightful prospect of the ocean and the many rocks and small islands about it.'

CHAPTER XVI. — GOLD ABOUT AXIM, ESPECIALLY AT THE APATIM OR BUJIÁ CONCESSION.

Any one who has eyes to see can assure himself that Axim is the threshold of the Gold-region. It abounds in diorite, a rock usually associated with the best paying lodes. After heavy showers the naked eye can note spangles of the precious metal in the street-roads. You can pan it out of the wall-swish. The little stream-beds, bone-dry throughout the hot season, roll down, during the rains, a quantity of dark arenaceous matter, like that of Taranaki, New Zealand, and the 'black sand' of Australia, which collects near the sea in stripes and patches. The people believe that without it gold never occurs; and, if they collect the common yellow sand, it is to extract from it the darker material. If the stuff does not answer the magnet, it is probably schorl (tourmaline), hornblende, or dark quartz. Strangers have often mistaken this emery-like rock for tin, which occurs abundantly in the northern region. It is simply titaniferous iron, iserine, pleonaste, ilmenite [Footnote: Or peroxide of iron, with 8 to 23 per cent, of blue oxide of titanium.] and degraded itabirite, the iron and quartz formation so called in the Brazil; and it is the same mineral which I found so general throughout the gold and silver fields of neglected Midian. It is found striating white sandstone about Tákwá and other places in the interior. The surface-stone is decomposed by the oxide of iron, and thus the precious dust with its ingrained gold is dissolved and separated from it. At a greater depth the itabirite will be found solid; and the occurrence of these oldest crystalline formations in large layers is a hopeful sign. When Colonel Bolton was interested in the Gold Coast diggings I advised him to send for a few tons of this metal, and to test it as 'pay-dirt.' A barrelful was forwarded from the coast to the Akankon Company: it was probably thrown away without experiment.

At Axim, as at Cape Coast Castle and other parts of the shore, women may be seen gold-gathering even on the sea-sands. They rarely wash more than 40 lbs., or a maximum of 50 lbs., per diem; and they strike work if they do not make daily half a dollar (2s. 3d.) to two dollars. They have nests of wooden platters for pans, the oldest and rudest of all mechanical appliances. The largest, two feet in diameter, are used for rough work in the usual way with a peculiar turn of the wrist. The smallest are stained black inside, to show the colour of gold; and the finer washings are carried home to be worked at leisure during the night. This is peculiarly women's work, and some are well known to be better panners than others; they refuse to use salt-water, because, they say, it will not draw out the gold.

The whole land is impregnated with the precious metal. I find it richer in sedimentary gold than California was in 1859. Immediately behind the main square of Axim a bank of red clay leads eastward to a shallow depression, the old valley of the Besáon, a swamp during the rains backed by rising and forested ground to the east. On the inland versant a narrow native shaft has been sunk for gold by Mr. Sam, now native agent under Mr. Crocker. We pounded and panned the rock, which yielded about twopence per 2 lbs., or one ounce to the ton. Observing its strike, we concluded that it must extend through Mr. Irvine's property. Throughout the Gold Coast auriferous reefs ran north-south, with easting rather than westing; the deviation varies from 5º west to 15º-22º east; and I have heard of, but not seen, a strike of north-east (45º) to south-west. This confirms the 'meridional hypothesis' of Professor Sedgwick, who stated, 'As some of the great physical agencies of the earth are meridional, these agencies may probably, in a way we do not comprehend, have influenced the deposit of metals on certain lines of bearing.' We may also observe that all the great mineral chains of the old and new world are meridional rather than longitudinal, striking from north-east to south-west. The geologist's theory, combined with the knowledge that the noble metal is 'chiefly found among palæozoic rocks of a quartzose type,' is practically valuable on the Gold Coast. Every mound or hillock of red clay contains one or more quartz-reefs, generally outcropping, but sometimes buried in the subsoils. They can always be struck by a cross-cut trending east-west. The dip is exceedingly irregular: some lodes are almost vertical, and others quasi-horizontal.

We now take the main road leading to the Ancobra. After crossing the fetid Besáon by its ricketty bridge of planks, we find on the right hand, facing Messieurs Swanzy's, a fine bit of rising ground, which I shall call, after its proprietor, 'Mount Irvine.' Over the southern slope runs a cleared highway, which presently becomes a 'bush-path;' it is named the 'Dudley Road,' after an energetic District-commissioner. This is the first Tákwá line, whose length is described to be about fifty miles, or four days' slow journey for laden porters. Mr. Gillett, who had covered twenty-six (sixteen?) miles of it, describes the path as unbroken by swamps or streams. Further north, according to the many native guides whom I questioned, travellers pass two rivulets, and finally they are ferried over the Abonsá, or Tákwá River. The second road follows closely the left bank of the Ancobra: it is used by the Hausá soldiers, but only in the heart of the Dries, and it must be impassable during the Rains. Dr. J. Africanus B. Horton, who contributes to a characteristic paper, [Footnote: The African Times, January 2, 1882. The paper is full of inaccuracies; it begins by placing Tomento (Tumento) ninety-five miles (for thirty) along the river-course from the mouth, and he makes steam-launches 'take from two to four days (say one) to go up to it.'] has never heard of the former when he says 'from Axim to Taquah (Tákwá) there is no direct route,' and he justly deprecates the latter. But he cries up the Bushua or Dixcove-Tákwá line, upon which he has large concessions. I shall return to this subject in a future chapter.

On the north side of Mount Irvine is a second nullah, the Eswá, which flows, like the Besáon, through the dense growth of bush covering the eastern uplands. A few minutes' walk along the right bank leads to a broadening of the bed, a swamp during the Rains and a field of cereals in the Dries. Thence we plunge into the jungle, and after a couple of hundred yards come upon signs of mining. In the Eswá bed, where the gulch is choked by two mounds or hillocks, appear the usual 'women's washings,' shallow pits like the Brazilian catas, whence the pay-dirt has been extracted. On the right bank, subtending the bed, their husbands have sunk the usual chimney-hole to scratch quartz from the bounding-wall of the reef. These rude beginnings of shafts reach a depth of 82 feet, and perhaps more. All are round, like the circular hut of the African savage; similarly in Australia the first pits were circular or oval. They are descended in sweep-fashion by means of foot-holes, and they are just large enough for a man to sit in and use his diminutive tool. The quartz is sent up to grass by a basket, and carried to the hut. After a preliminary roasting, the old custom of Egypt, it is broken into little bits and made over to the women, who grind it down upon the cankey-stone which serves to make the daily bread. In some parts of Africa this is men's work, and it is always done at night, with much jollity and carousing.

I named this place the 'Axim Reef.' It had been taken by Dr. J. Ogilby Ross, formerly district medical officer, Axim, and now preparing to explore the regions behind the Ancobra sources. He allowed, however, his prospecting term to elapse, and thus it has been secured by Mr. Grant for Mr. J. Irvine. It taught us three valuable lessons.

1. Wherever catas, or 'women's washings,' are found, we can profitably apply the hydraulic system of sluicing and fluming not by an upper reservoir only, but also from below by a force-pump. Water is procurable at all seasons by means of Norton's Abyssinian tubes, [Footnote: The Egyptian campaigners seem to have thought of these valuable articles somewhat late in the day. Yet two years ago I saw one working at Alexandria.] and the brook-beds, dammed above and below, will form perennial tanks. I am surprised that English miners on the Gold Coast have not borrowed this valuable hint to wash from the people who have practised it since time immemorial. Wherever we read, as on Mr. Wyatt's map, 'Gold-dust found in all these streams;' 'Natives dive for gold in the dry,' and 'Old gold-shafts all along this track,' we should think of 'hydraulicking.'

2. The natives, here and elsewhere, prospect for and work the bank-reefs after the subtending gutter-bed has proved auriferous. There is, however, no connection between the two, and the precious metal in the subsoil is either swept down by the floods or washed out of the sides, as we shall see on the Ancobra River.

3. The negroes, who ignore pumps and steam-navvies, have neglected the obvious measure of deep-digging in all the stream-beds, where much detrital gold and even nuggets will assuredly be found. This should be done either by shafting or by opening with 'steam-navvies' the whole course of the channel during the 'Dries.'

Regaining the main road and passing towards the northern town, which is separated from southern Axim by the fort and the grassy drill-ground, we cast a look at a heap of rotting cases at last stored under a kind of shed. Though labelled 'Akim' by the ungeographical manufacturer, they contain a board-house, with glass windows and all complete, intended for Axim, and eventually for the District-commissioner, Tákwá. But, with a futility worthy of the futile African, certain authorities at Head-quarters, after buying and landing the proposed bungalow, which probably cost 500l., discovered that they could not afford the expense of sending it to its destination. Consequently it was made over to the white ants, and it has now duly qualified for fuel.

At the end of the northern town a noble bombax notes the last resting-place of Europeans; and on it hangs a tale deserving a place in 'Spiritualistic prints.' A certain M. Thiebaut, transport-manager to the French Tákwá-Company, died at Axim, and was here buried in July 1881. Many persons, including Mr. Grant's mother and wife, declare that they saw during broad daylight his 'spirit' standing over his grave. And no wonder if he walked; a decent 'ghost' would feel unhappy in such a 'yard,' then a receptacle for native impurities. We represented the case to Mr. Alexander Allan, who succeeded poor Captain O'Brien, and that active and energetic 'new broom' at once took steps to abate the nuisance. The 'ghost' has not been seen since its last home has been surrounded by a decent paling and inscribed 'Ci-gît Thiebaut.' The same pious service was then done for one of our countrymen, Mr. Crawford who died at Axim in the same year.

Leaving on the left a neat bungalow, the 'Effuenta House,' we see to seaward of it the wooded knoll Bosomato. [Footnote: Abosom, Obosom or Bosom, vulg. Bossum, are imaginary beings, guardians and so forth, worshipped by the people and called 'fetishes' by Europeans. The word 'fetish' is properly applied only to charms, philters, amulets, and all that genus. See p. 78, Wit and Wisdom from West Africa, London, Tinsleys, 1865.] Here a thatched hut shows where the late M. Bonnat proposed to build a trading establishment, and to disembark his goods despite rock and reef. A few yards further the road is crossed by the Breviya ('where life ends'), another foul lagoon-stream, haunted by sirens and crossed by a corduroy-bridge. It leads to a village of the same name, which the Anglo-African calls 'Stink-fish Town,' [Footnote: As usual it is a translation; the natives call the preserve 'bomom,' from 'bon,' to stink.] alluding tersely and picturesquely to its sun-dried produce.

From this knot of huts and hovels we turn sharp to the east, or inland, and presently enter the Apatim or Bujiá concession, which has been leased for mining purposes to Mr. Irvine. There is a shorter road further north, but it is barred, we were assured, by a bad swamp. Our path, fairly open, ran up and down a succession of round-topped, abrupt-flanked hills, thrown together without system, and showing no signs of a plateau. They are parted by creek-valleys, gulches, and gullies, thick with tangled vegetation and varying in depth from a few feet to two and even three hundred. Many of them carry water even in the driest season. The country is remarkably like that behind Cape Coast Castle, where the Home Government, during the last Ashanti war (1873-74), proposed to lay down a tramway.

The land is not heavily timbered, but there is wood sufficient for everyday purposes. Its chief growth is the spiny bombax, whose timber is hardly durable enough for permanent shafting. Here, however, and in all the mines upon and near the seaboard, carpenter-work should be imported from England; it will be at once cheaper and better. The country is everywhere seamed with reefs and ridges of naked quartz, beginning near the coast and striking in the right direction. There must be many more underground, and all will be bared by 'washing' the country. Mr. R. B. N. Walker, whose energy and enterprise obtained this, as well as other concessions, tells me that during a second visit one of his company 'picked up two or three small pieces of quartz showing "free gold" among the refuse around the native pits.'

We progressed slowly enough, as we delayed to botanise, to net butterflies, [Footnote: Our large collection all came to grief, because we had neglected to carry camphor. The hint may be useful to those who follow us.] and to shoot for specimens. The path crossed and recrossed the Impima rivulet, which in parts was dammed and double-dammed; its bed of quartz-gravel and red ironstone again suggested deep digging. After a two hours' stroll we traversed the snaking course by a rude bridge, and presently came to the half-way plantation, Impatási: it is faced by a dwarf clearing, and we noted a fine clump of bamboo-cane. The next village was Edu-Kru, marked upon the maps 'Edu.' We then passed over the dry bed of the Bujiá wady, which looked as 'fit' as the Impima; and, at about twenty-five yards north of the bed we breasted the rough ascent of the Apatim Hill.

Here we turned to the right and found Mr. Grant's trial-shaft. It had been sunk amongst a number of round holes dug by the native miner, and it appeared to us that they had been working the southern butt-end of the eastern reef. He had preferred it to another pit sunk a little distance from the centre by a man named Jones, whose venture yielded the poorest results. Cameron drew my attention to the necessity of 'hydraulicking' this hill-side; and from three pounds of its yellow clay, gathered at random, we washed about fourpence worth of gold-dust, upwards of 8l. a ton. Other specimens assayed 1 oz. 13 dwts. and 13 grains. The quartz at a little lower than a fathom had yielded poorly, [Footnote: Messieurs Johnson and Matthey found only 0.650 oz. gold and 0.225 silver.] but better results were expected from a deeper horizon.

A few minutes of uphill-walk led us to the little Apatim village, our objective. We had spent three hours and a half over a distance which would be easily covered in two. The march may be about two and a half miles (direct geographical) from Axim, and five along the native path. During the night my companion took a good observation of Castor and Pollux, and with the aid of his chronometer laid down the position of the Apatim village at N. lat. 4º 55' and W. long. (G.) 2º 14' 2". Consequently the nearest point from Central Axim is 2,200 yards, and 200 from the shore. The north-western angle runs clean across the Ancobra River. [Footnote: Mr. Walker wrote to me, 'I am inclined to believe that the concession will be found to extend to the River Ankobra on the west and north-west sides. But I do not feel certain that this would be of any material advantage, the distance from Axim by land being so short, and the road between that port and the property being capable of improvement, so as to render transport a matter of small expense.'] The concession measures 4,000 square yards, the centre being an old native shaft a little north of the Bujiá bed. The quadrangle lies between N. lat. 4º 53' 56" and 4º 55' 56", and W. long. (G.) 2º 12' 48" and 2º 14' 48". The lease costs 12l. per annum, paid quarterly, and 120l. when the works shall open. Its lessor had forbidden his fraudulent people to prospect or to mine, because, as usual, they systematically robbed him of his royalty. This universal practice has made the kings and chiefs throughout the country ready and even anxious to sell mining-lands for small sums which will be paid honestly and regularly. They are also fully alive to the prospective advantages of European staffs settling amongst them. Like them we shall find the systematic dishonesty and roguery of the natives a considerable drawback; the fellows know good stone at sight and can easily secrete it. The cure for this evil will be the importation of labour, especially of Chinese labourers.

At Apatim, the name of the district as well as the village, we were civilly received by the chief, Kwábina Sensensé. He is also lessor of the unfortunate Akankon concession, and his right to sell or to let either of them has been seriously disputed. This practice, again, may lead, unless checked, to serious difficulties. When the local government shall have established a regular department and a staff of Gold-commissioners, every owner should be compelled legally to prove his title to the land. West Africans know nothing of yards and fathoms; they have hardly any words to express north or south. [Footnote: The four points are taken from the buried body, the feet being to the east and the head lying west.] Consequently they will sell, either wittingly or in their ignorance of dimension and direction, the same ground, or parts of it, to two or three purchasers. Indeed, they would like nothing better, and consequently 'jumpers' must be expected.

Sensensé is a dark man, apparently on the wrong side of fifty. His grizzly beard, grown comparatively long, his closely-trimmed mustachios, and his head-cloth, worn like a turban, made me take him at first sight for a Moslem. He has a cunning eye, which does not belie his reputation. His fad is to take money and to do no work for it; he now wants us to pay for the clearing of an uncleared path. The villagers fear him on account of certain fetish-practices which, in plain English, mean poison; and he keeps up their awe by everywhere displaying the outward signs of magic and sorcery. A man with this gift can rise at night when all sleep; cast off his body like a snake's slough; become a loup-garou; shoot flames from eyes and ears, nose, mouth, and arm-pits; walk with his head on the ground and kill man either by drinking his blood or by catching his kra (umbra), which he boils and devours. Here the sign of 'fetish' is mostly the koro, or pot full of rubbish. At Axim and Akankon we shall find our chief a mighty bore, each visit being equivalent to a bottle of gin.

After a restful sleep in the cool and pleasant air of Apatim, we proceeded to visit the valley east of the settlement, despite Sensensé's warning that the ground was 'fetish.' He had made the same objection to M. Bonnat, his evident object being to keep the rich placer for private use or for further sale. There are evil reports about the origin of the Frenchman's fatal illness after disregarding this and similar warnings. The deep and steep-banked depression runs north-south, and is apparently the head of the Bujiá stream. The vegetation, especially near the water, which flows some 300 feet below the village, was exceedingly dense and tangled, except where the ground had been cleared for bananas, maize, or ground-nuts. The bottom, especially at the sharp corners, gave the idea of exceeding richness; and there were many old works apparently deserted. The 'fetish-pot' stood everywhere, filled with oil, water, and palm-wine, leaves, cowries, eggs, and all manner of filth. This stuff, stirred by the komfo diviner, answers questions and enables man to soothsay. It also corresponds with the obeah of the West Indies, the ubio of the Efik race, a charm put into the ground to hurt or kill. How hot the rich hole was! What a perspiration and what a thirst came out of the climb!

In the evening we walked about half a mile to the south-west of the village, and prospected the central shaft, whence the measurements were made. Here it is sunk in a western reef, palpably running parallel with the eastern, which we first inspected. And this visit gave us a fair idea of the property. It consists of at least three ridges of clay running from north to south, and each containing one or more meridional walls of quartz. Some of the latter may turn out to be 'master lodes.'

I regret that this fine Apatim concession was not thrown into the market before the so-called 'Izrah.' The distance from Axim to the mining-ground is so small that provisions and machinery could be transported for a trifle. The village lies 220 feet above sea-level; and a hillock in its rear, perhaps 80 feet higher, commands a noble view, showing Axim Bay: it could be used as a signal-station. The rise is a fine, healthy position for the dwellings to be occupied by the European staff, and in such air white men could work for years.

Moreover, the short distance from the shore offers peculiar advantages for 'hydraulicking.' Flumes and sluices could carry the golden subsoil to the sea and discharge it into a series of tanks and cisterns, which would be cradled for 'pay-dirt.' Finally, it will be easy to baffle the plundering negro workman by sending all stone containing free gold to be worked in England, where superior appliances extract more than enough to pay transport-costs. Indeed, it is a question with me whether, despite great expenses, reduction at home even of inland produce will not be found preferable. [Footnote: Mr. C. H. Creswick, of the Gold Coast Mining Company, kindly drew up for me the following table of expenses from Abontiyakon (his diggings) to England, and the costs of reducing a ton of ore.

l s. d. 3 15 0 canoe-transport to the Abonsá River. 1 10 0 Abonsá to Axim by a boat of thirteen hands carrying five tons 0 3 6 landing at Axim and shipping on board steamer. 1 15 0 freight and landing charges at Liverpool. 0 15 0 carriage to reduction-works. 2 12 6 costs of reduction. ————— 8 11 0 which practically would rise to 9l. or 10l.

For local reduction Mr. Creswick calculates the outlay at 2l. per ton, including interest on prime cost of machinery, allowance for wear and tear, and labour-pay.] This remark applies only to rich ore; the poorer can be worked upon the spot.

We returned to Axim with the highest opinion of 'Apatim,' and I rejoiced to hear that the mine will be opened without delay.

CHAPTER XVII. — THE RETURN—VISIT TO KING BLAY; ATÁBO AND BÉIN.

I spare my readers the slightest description of the troubles that attended our departure from Axim on January 31. Briefly, we began loading at dawn and the loads were not headed before 10 A.M.

The black caravan, or rather herd, was mustered by its guide and manager, the energetic W. M. Grant. His personnel consisted of seven Kruboys from Cape Palmas and forty-three Axim carriers, who now demand eight and sixpence for a trip which two years ago cost a dollar. They stray about the country like goats, often straggling over four miles. As bearers they are the worst I know, and the Gold Coast hammock is intended only for beach-travelling. The men are never sized, and they scorn to keep step, whilst the cross-pieces at either end of the pole rest upon the head and are ever slipping off it. Hence the jolting, stumbling movement and the sensation of feeling every play of the porters' muscles, which make the march one long displeasure. Yet the alternative, walking, means fever for a new comer. On return we cut long bamboos and palm-fronds and made the Krumen practise carrying, Hindu-fashion, upon the shoulder.

The rest of the moving multitude was composed of the servantry and the camp-followers. One bouche inutile bore a flag, a second carried a gun, and so forth, the only principle being to work as little as possible and to plunder all things plunderable. There were exceptions. Joe (Kwasi Bedeh) of Dixcove, Cameron's old servant, who boasts of being a pagan, and who speaks English, French, and Dutch, a handy and intelligent young fellow, who can cook, sew, carpenter, or lead a caravan—in fact, can serve as factotum—and his accounts, marvellous to recount, are honestly kept. I should want no better servant in these coast-countries and in exploring the far interior. The cook, 'Mister Dawson,' of Axim, is a sturdy senior of missionary presence: having been long employed in that line, he wears a white tie on Sundays, and I shrewdly suspect him of preaching. A hard worker, beginning early and ending late, he is an excellent stuffer of birds and beasts, and the good condition of our collection is owing entirely to him. His son, Kwasi Yau (Sunday Joe), is a sharp 'boy' in the Anglo-Indian sense. The carpenter, our model idler, who won't work and can't work, receives 3l. per mens., when $8 should be the utmost; we cleared him out on return to Axim. Meanwhile he saunters about under an umbrella, and is always missing when wanted for work.

Our companions and body-guards are Bianco and Nero, both bought by Cameron at L'pool for a suspiciously trifling sum. The former is a small smooth-haired terrier, who dearly loves to bark and bite, and who shows evident signs of early training in the cab-line. A dog with all the manners of a doggess, he eventually found a happy home in the fort, Axim. The second, a bastard Newfoundland with a dash of the bloodhound, and just emerging from puppyhood, soon told us the reason why he was sold for a song. That animal was a born murderer; he could not sight a sheep, a goat, or a bullock without the strongest desire to pull it down; therefore he had been sold into slavery, African and old-English fashion, instead of being hanged. He had fine qualities—obedience, fidelity, affection, a grand voice, and a ferocious presence. All these good gifts, however, were marred by an over-development of destructiveness. He survived his journeys by passing many of his hours in the water, and he was at last 'dashed' to Dr. Roulston, of Tákwá.

We took once more the northern road to Brévia, or 'Stink-fish Town,' and crossed its tongue of red clay bounded by the bed of the Anjueri stream. Here again appeared a large block of greenstone deeply grooved by the grinder. Thence we debouched upon the surf-lashed shore, tripped over by the sandpiper and the curlew and roped by the bright-flowered convolvulus. Streaks of the auriferous black sand became more frequent and promising as we advanced.

We ran close to Akromasi, or One-tree Point, upon whose flat dorsum linger the bush-grown ruins of a fort. It was named Elisa Cartago by its founders, the Portuguese, who were everywhere haunted by memories of the classics. Bowdich [Footnote: Folio, p. 271.] is eminently in error when he places the remains 'at the extreme navigable point of the river,' and opines that the work was built by Governor Ringhaven (Ruyghaver), buried at Elmina in 1700. He was misinformed by Colonel Starrenberg, a Dutch officer who canoed three days up the Bosom Prah River, a fact probably unknown to Commodore Commerell. Bosman [Footnote: Letter I. 1737.] shows 'Elisa Cartago op den Berg Ancober,' crowning the head of Akromasi Point, with a road leading up to the palisades which protect the trade-houses. Lieutenant Jeekel, [Footnote: Map of the former Dutch possessions on the Gold Coast (districts of Apollonia, Azim, Dixcove, Sekondi, Chama, and El-Mina), by Lieut. C. A. Jeekel, Royal Dutch Navy. Lithographed at the Topographical Depôt of the War Office, Major C. W. Wilson, R.R., Director, 1873. It extends only from the Ebumesu to the Sweet River (Elmina) and up the Ancobra valley; and it is best known for the seaboard.] an excellent authority, also places it at the river-mouth. According to some it was taken in early days by the French, who still hold it. Captain Ellis has transferred to this site the story of Fort Eguira, an inland, or rather up-stream, work, destroyed, as Dr. Reynhaut and others tell us, in an 'elendige manier' (a piteous way).

The gallant Mynheer commanding fought the natives till his men were shot down, after using 'rock-gold' (nuggets) for bullets. He rolled sundry powder-barrels under the palaver-hall, and stationed there a boy with a match to be applied when he stamped on the floor. He then flung open the gates, hung out a flag of trace, and invited the bloodthirsty savages, who were bent on killing him by torture, to take the hoard of gold for which the attack was made. When all crowded the great room he reproached them with their greed of gain, gave the sign, and blew them and himself into eternity. I am told by a good authority that the natives, whose memories are tenacious on some points, will not show to strangers the ruins which cost their forefathers so dear.

The last village on the sands is Kukakun, where the wreck of a schooner saddens the scene. Within a few hundred yards of Akromasi we bent abruptly eastward and exchanged the sands for the usual stiff soil of red clay. The gut is formed by the point-bluff and a southern block, and the surface is covered with dense second-growth—pandanus, the false sugar-cane, ferns large and small, and the sloth-tree, the Brazilian ubá or Preguiça, with tall, thin white trunk and hanging palmated leaves. The African palm-birds (orioles of the Merulidæ family), whose two colours, red (ntiblii) and golden yellow (enadsi), apparently divide them into as many fighting factions, give a touch, a bright colour to the dulness, and chatter over their pensile homes, which strangers would mistake for cocoa-nuts.

Severely hustled and horribly shaken up, we ran down the little valley of the Avin streamlet. It comes from afar, heading, they say, in Abasakasu, a region where gold abounds. In three-quarters of an hour we had cleared the four short miles which separate Axim from the Ancobra ferry. This is the line of a future tramway, which will transport goods from the port to the river; at present they must be shipped in bar-boats, which cost much and carry little. The ground divides itself into three sections—the red clay north of Axim; the sands, whose green-grown upper levels are fitted to support iron-pot sleepers; and the Avin valley, which debouches upon the left bank of the Ancobra. The first and the last divisions are safe for creosoted wood. My friend Mr. Russell Shaw would, I doubt not, take the contract for 4,000l., and a macadamised cart-road could be made for 500l.

This would be the beginning of a much-wanted change. At present the prices of transport are appalling. The French mines pay from 2l. to 2l. 10s. per ton from England to Axim; from Axim to Tákwá, forty miles by river and thirty by land, costs them 600 francs (24l.) per ton. Moreover, native hands are not always forthcoming.

The Ancobra River, the main artery and waterway of this region, must not be written after the Jonesian or modern mode, 'Ankobra' and 'Ankober,' nor with Bosman 'Rio Cobre' (River of Copper). It has evidently no connection with Abyssinian Ankober. To the native name, 'Anku' or 'Manku,' the Portuguese added Cobra, expressing its snaky course. Bowdich, followed by many moderns, calls it Seënna, for Sánmá or Sánumá, meaning 'unless a gale (of wind).' The legend is that a savage and murderous old king of the Apollonians, whose capital was Atábo, built a look-out upon a tall cocoanut-tree, and declared that nothing but a storm could lay it low. Sánmá is still the name of the settlement on the right bank near the rivermouth.

We rested at Kumprasi, a few huts close to the embouchure of the iron-bedded Avin streamlet and backwater. The little zinc-roofed hut, called by courtesy a store, belonging to Messieurs Swanzy, was closed. Katubwé, the northern hill on the left bank, had been bought, together with Akromasi Point and the Avin valley, by the late M. Bonnat, who cleared it and began shafting it for gold in the usual routine way. During the last six months it has been overgrown with dense vegetation. Mr. Walker believes, not unreasonably, that this lode is connected with the Apatim or Bujiá reefs.

Ferrying across, we could note the wild features of the Ancobra's mouth. The bar, which in smooth weather allows passage to a load of five tons, not unfrequently breaks at an offing of four miles, and breaks obliquely. The gape is garnished on either side by little black stumps of rocks, and the general effect is very unpleasant. A fine school of sharks fattens on the fish inside the bar. At this season the entrance narrows to a few feet, the effect of a huge sandspit on the right lip, and carries only six feet of water. During the rains it will rise eleven feet at Sánmá, and at Tumento twenty-four feet in a day, falling with the same dangerous rapidity. We shall see more of the Ancobra, which here separates two districts. Between it and Cape Threepoints the land is called Avaláwé; and the westward region, extending to Cape Apollonia, is named Amrehía, the Amregia of Jeekel and Dahse, meaning, 'where people meet.'

We halted for breakfast at Sánmá, where Messieurs Swanzy have another storehouse, and where the French Company is building one for itself with characteristic slowness. The settlement is ill-famed for the Chigo or jigger (Pulex penetrans), unknown in my day upon the West African coast. It has killed men by causing gangrenous sores. From 'Tabon,' [Footnote: 'Tabon' is evidently corrupted from the popular greeting ''Sta bom?' (Are you well? How d'e do?)] the Brazil, it crept over to São Paulo de Loanda, and thence it spread far and wide up and down coast, and deep into the interior. This fact suggests that there may be truth in the theory which makes the common flea of India an immigrant from Europe.

At 1 P.M. we resumed our way along the beach, under sunshine tempered by the 'smokes.' These mists, however, are now clearing away for the tornado-season, and 'insolation' will become more decided. We ran by sundry little bush-villages: their names will be found in my companion's careful route-survey. I shall notice only those which showed something notable.

There is sameness in the prospect, which, however, does not wholly lack interest. Soon after dawn the village urchins begin disporting themselves among the breakers and billows upon broken bits of boat, while their fathers throw the cast-net nearer shore. The brown-black pigs and piglets root up the wet sand for shell-fish; and, higher up, the small piebald cattle loiter in the sun or shade. From afar the negro-groups are not unpicturesque in their bright red and brimstone yellow sheets, worn like Roman togas. A nearer view displays bridgeless, patulous noses, suggesting a figure of [Symbol: Figure-8 on its side.]; cheek-bones like molehills, and lips splayed out in the manner of speaking-trumpets: often, indeed, the face is a mere attachment to the devouring-apparatus. Throughout the day sexes and ages keep apart. The nude boys perch upon stones or worn-out canoes. Their elders affect the shade, men on one side of the village and women on the other. All the settlements are backed by cocoa-trees in lines and clumps. Those who view Africa biliously compare them with hearse-plumes; I find in them a peculiar individuality and likeness to humankind. There is the chubby babe, six feet high; the fast-growing 'hobbedehoy;' the adult, bending away from you like a man, or, woman-like, inclining towards you; there is the bald, shrunken senior; and, lastly, appears death, lean and cold and dry.

Between sea and settlement stand the canoes, flat-bottomed and tip-tilted like Turkish slippers; where the land is low and floods are high, each is mounted upon four posts. Fronting and outside the village stands a wall-less roof of flat matting, the palaver-house. The settlement is surrounded by a palisade of fronds stripped from the bamboo-palm and strengthened by posts; the latter put forth green shoots as soon as stuck in the ground, and recall memories of Robinson Crusoe. The general entrance has a threshold two to two and a half feet high. The tenements are simple as birds' nests, primitive as the Highlander's mud-cabin and shieling of wattle and heather. The outer walls are of bamboo-palm fronds, the partitions are of bamboo-palm matting, and the roofs are of bamboo-palm thatch. Each place has its osafahin, or headman, and each headman has his guest-house, built of better material, swish or adobe.

The only approach to grandeur are the long surges and white combers of the mournful and misty Atlantic. They roll like the waving prairie-land, curl their huge heads, and dash down in a fury of foam. 'On the top of a billow we ride,' with a witness. Here and there black dots peer through the surf, and to touch them is death. This foul shore presents a formidable barrier to landing: there absolutely is no safe place between Apollonia and the Ancobra. European employés avoid tempting the breakers; they disembark and re-embark for home, and that is all. Mr. Grant assures us that there is no risk; Mr. Grillett, who has worked the coast since 1875, says the contrary; no man knows it better or fears it more. Some places are worse than others; for instance, Inenyápoli is exceptionally dangerous. The sea is shallow, and ships, requiring eight fathoms, must, to be safe, anchor four miles out. The coast-soundings in the Admiralty charts are positively unsafe, and will remain so until revised. On the other hand, the reefs and rocks of Axim Bay have wholly disappeared, with some exceptions seen off Kikam and Esyáma.

Looking inland we find the shore mostly subtended by a marigot, or salt-water lagoon, a miniature of those regular rivers which made the Slave Coast what it was. And along the sea we can detect its presence by the trickling of little rills guttering and furrowing the sandy surface. The formation of these characteristic African features, which either run parallel with or are disposed at various angles to the coast, is remarkably simple. There is no reason to assume with Lieutenant R. C. Hart that they result from secular upheaval. [Footnote: Page 186, Gold Coast Blue Book. London, 1881]. The 'powerful artillery with which the ocean assails the bulwarks of the land' here heaps up a narrow strip of high sand-bank; and the tails of the smaller streams are powerless to break through it, except when swollen by the rains. They maintain their level by receiving fresh water at the head and by percolation through the beach, while most of them are connected with the sea.

We halted for rest at the Esyáma village; its landmarks are the ronnier, the glorious palmyra (Borassus flabelliformis), here called 'women's cocoa-tree.' The village looked peculiarly neat with its straight, sandy street-roads, a quarter of a mile long; and the tenements generally are better than those of Axim. We noticed the usual feature, a long thatched barn of yellow clay—school-cum-chapel. The people are fond of planting before their doors the felfa, croton or physicnut (Jatropha curcas), whose oil so long lighted Lisbon. It is a tree of many uses. Boys suck the honey of the flower-stalk; and adults drink or otherwise use, as corrective of bile, an infusion of the leaves and the under bark. They could not give me the receipt for the valuable preparation of the green apple, well known to the Fantis of Accra.

After returning to Axim we heard of rich diggings two hours' march inland, or north with easting from Esyáma. They are called 'Yirima,' or 'Choke-full'—that is, of gold. The site is occupied by King Blay's family, and the place is described as containing three or four reefs which have all been more or less worked by the natives. After we left the coast Yirima was visited by Mr. Grant, who reported it as exceptionally promising.

About sunset we hit the Ebumesu, or 'Winding Water.' The people declare that it had a single mouth till the earthquakes of July 1862, which shook down Accra, raised a divide, and made a double embouchure. The eastern fork, known as the Páná, is the drain of a large and branchy lagoon, brackish water, bitumen-coloured or brassy-yellow, with poisonous vegetation, and bounded by mangroves abounding in tannin. These water-forests grow differently from the red and white rhizophores of Eastern Africa. We shall again be ferried over the upper part of the western mouth. Both have bad bars, especially the latter. I therefore can by no means agree with Mr. Walker's report:—'The western outlet of the Ebumesu, near the village of Eku Enu, or Ekwanu, is quite practicable for ordinary surf-boats during the dry season—say half the year—and even in the middle of June I found the bar smooth and safe. Having for thirty years worked some of the worst bars and beaches' (the Gaboon? or the Sherbro?) 'along some hundreds of miles of the West Coast, I am able to state that the Ebumesu bar might be safely utilised for landing goods and machinery; but during the heavy surf of the rainy season goods could always be disembarked at Axim, and, if necessary, carried along the beach to the mouth of the Ebumesu, and thence by boat to the tramway from that river to the mine.' This last statement is quite correct.

All the Aximites described the Ebumesu bars as practically impassable. Cameron and I agreed that the only way of entering them is by running the boat ashore, unloading her, and warping her round the point, as we shall afterwards do at Prince's. But the best line to the Izrah concession has not yet been discovered. I strongly impressed the necessity of careful search upon Mr. A. A. Robertson, the traffic-manager of the Company. For the present I hold the surf along shore and the Ebumesu bar to be equally dangerous. The land-tongue between the two streams is the favourite haunt of mosquitoes and sand-flies, and it produces nothing save mud and mangroves, miasma and malaria. Yet here in 1873-74 loyal and stout-hearted King Blay defended himself against the whole Apollonian coast, which actively sympathised with the Ashantis. [Footnote: Captain Brackenbury, vol. ii, p. 29, The Ashanti War, &c., gives an account of King Blay fighting the Ashantis on the Ebumesu.] He was at last relieved by the Wásás (Wassaws) coming to his side; and now he has little to fear. He can put some 5,000 musketeers into the field; and, during the late Ashanti scare, he offered to aid us with 7,000, if we could supply the extras with arms and ammunition.

When the 'Queen of Shades' arose, and it became too dark to see the world, we halted at the Sensyéré village, and found good sleeping-quarters in the guest-house of the headman, Bato. Fortunately we had brought mattresses. The standing four-poster of the country offers only cross-planks covered with the thinnest matting. As the ancient joke of many a lugubrious African traveller says, it combines bed and board. Next morning, despite the chilly damp and the 'old-woman-cannot-see,' as the Scotch mist is here called, our men were ready within reasonable limits. After two hours' hammock we found ourselves at Atábo, capital of eastern Apollonia, about to pay our promised return-visit to good King Blay. It is useless to describe the settlement, which in no way differs from those passed on the path. The country-people related its origin as follows:—A Fanti man from the country between Secondee (Sekondi), or Fort Orange, and Shamah (Chamah), at the mouth of the Bosom Prah, when driven out by war, first founded 'Kabeku,' near the present place of that name. His sons built Béin, or Behin, [Footnote: The aspirate is hardly audible. Captain Brackenbury, generally so careful, manages to confound Béin and Benin.] meaning a 'strong man,' and Atábo, in Fanti atába, the name of a tree with a reddish-yellow fruit. The latter was paramount till late years, when turbulent and unruly Béin was allowed to set up for herself an independent king; and the sooner things return to the status quo ante the better for peace.

King Blay's guest-house of whitewashed swish is a model of its kind. You pass through a large compound, which contains the outhouses, into a broad, deep verandah, generally facing away from the sea. It opens upon a central room adorned with German prints of Scriptural subjects—Mariahilf, for instance, all gaudy colour and gilt spangles. On each side of this piece are sleeping-rooms. The furniture of the five is exceedingly simple—a standing bedstead, a table, and a few wooden chairs. But Ahin Blay is a civilised man who strews his floors with matting, and has osier fauteuils from Madeira. These quarters are quite wholesome and comfortable enough for temporary use. They would be greatly improved by mounting on pillars or piles; and they might serve for all seasons save the rainy.

Mr. Graham, who dispenses elementary knowledge to the missionary pupils, came to us at once, and kindly offered his aid as 'mouf.' These useful men, who serve as go-betweens and interpreters, are called 'scholars' by the people, and are charged with making profit out of whites and blacks. In the afternoon Mr. Graham brought me two neolithic stone-implements. We then set out for the 'palace,' a large congeries of houses and huts, guided by a mighty braying of horns and beating of drums, and by Union Jacks, with the most grotesque adjuncts of men and beasts, planted in the clean and sandy street-road. King Blay received us in his palaver-hall, and his costume now savoured not of Europe, but of 'fetish.' He had been 'making customs,' or worshipping after country-fashion, and would not keep us waiting while he changed dress. The cap was a kind of tall hood, adorned with circles of cowries and two horns of the little bush-antelope; the robe was Moorish, long and large-sleeved, and both were charged with rolls of red, white, and blue stuff, supposed to contain grígrís, or talismans. The Ashanti medal, however, was still there; indeed, he wore it round his neck even on the march, when his toilette was reduced to a waist-cloth and a billycock. After discussing palm-wine in preference to trade-gin, we persuaded King Blay, despite all his opposition, that 'time is gold,' and that with strange and indelicate haste we must set out early on the morrow for the Izrah mine. His main difficulty was about clearing the path; he had issued strong orders upon the subject, but African kings often command and no one cares to obey. The monarchy is essentially limited, and the lieges allow no stretch of power, unless the ruling arm be exceptionally long and strong.

Hearing that the gold-hilted official swords of the King of Béin were for sale, and wishing to inspect the place, we set off at 3.30 P.M. to cover the 4,769 yards measured along the sands by Mr. Graham. Reaching our destination, eighteen miles distant from Axim, we were carried up the long straight street-road which leads to the old English fort. It is the normal building, a house on bastions, both well and solidly made of stone and lime. Amongst the materials I found a fine yellow sandstone-grit and a nummulite so weathered that the shells stood out in strong relief. Both were new to us on this trap-coast, and no one could say where they were quarried; many thought they must have come from Europe, others that they are brought from inland. The masonry of the sea-front was pitted with seven large wounds, dealt by as many shells when we broke down our own work. Such was the consequence of sympathising with the Ashantis in 1873, when Axim also was bombarded.

What changes these factory-forts have seen, beginning with the days of the jolly old Hollanders, who, in doublets and trunk-hose, held high state, commanding large garrisons and ruling the rulers of the land. What banquets, what carousals, with sopies of the best schiedam, and long clay-pipes stuffed with the finest tobacco, when an exceptional haul of gold-dust or captives had come to hand! But Time got the better of them; the abolition of the export slave-trade cut the ground from under their feet; diminished profits made economy necessary, and the forts were allowed to become the shadows of their former selves. Then came the cession to England, when all appeared running on the road to ruin. Now, however, things are again changed, and 'Resurgam' may be written upon these scenes of decay. The Mines will once more make the fortune of the Gold Coast, and the old buildings will become useful as hospitals, and store-houses, and barracoons for coolie emigrants.

The Béin fort has been repaired and whitewashed inside by the lessees, Messieurs Swanzy, whose agent, Mr. Carr, we found here in possession. Unlike Axim, it still preserves intact the outer work with its dwarf belfry over the strong doorway. But the cistern in the middle of this slave-court must make the cleanly old Netherlanders turn in their tombs.

Opposite the fort is the normal school-room, occasionally served by Mr. Graham, of Atábo; Béin has a tide-waiter, but no pedagogue. Beyond it rises the large and uneven swish-house of the 'King,' who has lately been summonsed, as a defaulting debtor, to Cape Coast Castle: the single black policeman who served the writ evidently looked upon us as his colleagues. The people eyed us with no friendly glances; they were 'making custom' for the ruler's return. The vague phrase denoted, in this case, a frantic battering of drums, big and little; a squeaking of scrannel pipes; a feminine 'break-down' of the most effrénée description, and a general libation to the Bacchus of Blackland. A debauched and drunken Ashanti, who executed for our benefit a decapitation-dance, evidently wishing that we had been its objects, thanked us ironically for a sixpence. We met some difficulty in seeing the swords, which were not to be sold. They were the usual rusty and decayed fish-slicers; Cameron, however, was kind enough to sketch them for me, and they will appear in my coming book.

Most of the adult males had travelled inland to the Tákwá or French mines, where the Apollonians bear the highest reputation. Whole gangs flock to the diggings, bringing their own provisions and implements. Thus they have begun working on tribute and contracting for piece-work. [Footnote: This information was given to me by M. Plisson, traffic-manager to the Company.] This is a favourable phase of the labour-question. At the same time it is clear that the labourer can easily keep the richest specimens for himself and palm off the worst stuff upon the stranger.

Here we are next door to the Ivory Coast, and elephants, they say, are still to be found within two days north of Béin. The hunters cross a broad stream (the Tando?) and a dry swamp; they then enter an uninhabited forest; and, after a couple of marches, they reach the animals' haunts. Small tusks are at times brought in, but no Europeans, so far as I know, ever killed a tusker in these wilds. My informants heard that a route from Béin leads to Gyáman, and that it may be travelled without difficulty.

The following note, by Mr. Edward L. McCarthy, describes an excursion from Béin to the unvisited Essuá-tí, made by him in August 1881:—

'Accompanied by Prince John Coffee, heir to King Blay, three other chiefs, their servants, and my own party of Krumen, we left the town of Béin, Apollonia, to go up to the village in the bush called Essuá-tí. Half a mile from the town we found canoes awaiting us, and in these we were poled along for over half an hour over what in the dry season is a native path, but now a narrow channel of water winding about in a dense jungle of reeds. Here and there we came upon small hillocks covered with trees, in which numerous monkeys sported about. Emerging from these reeds, one broad sheet of water presented itself to the eye, encircled by a low shore fringed with canes, bush, and palm-trees, and at its western extremity a range of hills rose out of the background. The lagoon receives several small streams, and empties itself into the sea by the Ebumesu river, its mouth being about half-way between Béin and the Ancobra. According to the natives the river used to be navigable to its mouth, but of late years has become overgrown with reeds. A few years back they set to work to cut a channel through them, but getting tired of the work gave it up. The length of the lagoon appears to be about three to four miles, and about one to one and a half in breadth. Its major axis runs parallel to the coastline, or nearly due east and west. Twenty minutes' paddling brought us round the point of a small headland, where we came in sight of a pretty lake-village built upon piles, at some little distance from the shore, the whole forming a most picturesque and animated scene. From house to house canoes laden with people, plantains, &c., were passing to and fro; groups of villagers, some standing, others sitting, upon the raised bamboo-platforms outside their houses, were busy bartering fish for plantains, while the children played around, apparently unconscious of any danger from falling into the water. The settlement consisted of over forty houses, mostly of bamboo, a few of "swish," forming one long irregular line, and three or four standing away from the rest round a corner of land, after the Fanti custom. These houses were built on a bamboo-platform supported by piles, and raised above the water some three and a half feet. One half of the platform is covered by the house; the other half, left free, is used to fish from, for the children to play about on, and for receptions when palavers are held.

'The distance from the shore varies with the overflow of the lake, at the time of my visit about thirty to forty yards, though for miles beyond this the ground was saturated with water, whose depth varied from three and a half to nine feet. The piles are made of stout sticks; the mode of driving them in is to lash two canoes abreast by means of two sticks or paddles, placed transversely, leaving an open space of about two and a half feet between them. Two men in each canoe, and facing each other, then vigorously twist and churn about the pole, or rather stick, into the soft bottom of the lagoon. Some fifteen of these poles are thus driven in and firmly braced together by cross-pieces, upon which the platform is constructed, and on this again the house is built.

'We stopped here to breakfast before ascending the Bousaha River; and, while so doing, I counted at one time over forty natives sitting round us on the platform. I was not without my fears that we should all be precipitated into the water, but the structure, though in appearance frail and very rude, was far stronger than what it looked.

'I closely questioned the natives as to why they had built their village upon the lake, and they invariably gave as their reason that they chiefly fished at night; and, as the water often overflowed, they would have to build their houses too far away to be able to come and go during the night; whereas "now," they said, "we are close to where we catch our fish, and we often catch them even from our houses." Underneath each house were tied from one to five, and sometimes more, canoes. These were much lighter, more rounded off in the keel, stem, and stern, than the beach-canoes.

'Three white men, they told me, had visited their village—Captain Dudley in 1876, judging from the age of a child who was born at the time of his visit; Captain Grant and Mr. Gillett, in 1878, I afterwards learnt, were the other two. None of them went further into the interior.

'After breakfast we crossed the lagoon, passing on our way several canoes fishing in the middle. The water was very clear and blue, and of considerable depth, judging from a stone dropped in. Unfortunately I had no other means of sounding. Not until a dozen yards from the shore were any signs of a stream discernible. Pushing aside some reeds, we entered a narrow lane of water, varying from three feet to eighteen feet in width, deep, and, according to the natives, navigable for three days by canoes. This stream is known by the name of Bousaha, and the lagoon by Ebumesu. After two hours' hard paddling in a northerly direction we stopped to walk to the village of Níbá, a large place, principally engaged in raising food for the coast fishing-villages and Béin, and also in elephant-hunting.

'Elephants at the time of my visit were reported in large numbers two days' journey in the bush, and the villagers were then organising a party for a hunt. Outside the village I came across the skull of a young elephant, from which I extracted the teeth. The only report of a white man having been here before was long ago, when, some of the old men told me, he came from Assini direction, but turned back again. The village was neatly laid out in streets and was beautifully clean.

'Another three hours' pull, still bearing northwards, brought us to the village of Essuati, a smaller place than Níbá, but very prettily laid out with trees, surrounded by seats in its central street. The people here, as at Níbá, were mainly engaged in agriculture.

'Crowds came to see the "white man," many of the women and children never having been to Axim, the nearest place where whites are to be found, and, consequently, had never seen one before.

'After a few days' stay here I returned to the coast. While there I came across a curious fish-trap, a description of which may not be uninteresting. Across a stick planted in the river-bed a light piece of bamboo was tied, and at its further extremity was suspended a string carrying fish-hooks. Above these a broad piece of wood, suspended so as to be half in and half out of the water, acted as a float and spindle. Above this again were tied four large shells, so that when a fish is hooked the shells begin to jingle, and the fishermen, hid in the bush, immediately rush out and secure the fish.'

CHAPTER XVIII. — THE IZRAH MINE—THE IKYOKO CONCESSION—THE RETURN TO AXIM.

The next day (February 2) showed me my objective, Izrah, after a voyage of nearly three months. The caravan, now homeward-bound after a fashion, rose early, and we hammocked in the cool and misty morning along shore to Inyenápoli—the word means Greater Inyena, as opposed to Inyenachi, the Less. In the house of Mr. J. Eskine I saw his tradesman bartering cloth for gold-dust. The weighing apparatus is complicated and curious, and complete sets of implements are rare; they consist of blowers, sifters, spoons, native scales, weights of many kinds, and 'fetish gong-gongs,' or dwarf double bells.

To The Gold Coast for Gold: A Personal Narrative. Vol. II

TO THE GOLD COAST FOR GOLD

A Personal Narrative

By Richard F. Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron

In Two Volumes—Vol. II.