# Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons/Chapter 2

CHAPTER II
THE GOLD COAST
Cape Coast Castle and then Accra were the next places of general interest at which we stopped. The former looks well from the roadstead, and as if it had very recently been white-washed. It is surrounded by low, heavily-forested hills, which rise almost from the seashore, and the fine mass of its old castle does not display its dilapidation at a distance. Moreover, the three stone forts of Victoria, William, and Macarthy, situated on separate hills commanding the town, add to the general appearance of permanent substantialness so different from the usual ramshackledom of West Coast settlements. Even when you go ashore and have had time to recover your senses, scattered by the surf experience, you find this substantialness a true one, not a mere visual delusion produced by painted wood as the seeming substantialness of Sierra Leone turns out to be when you get to close quarters with it. It causes one some mental effort to grasp the fact that Cape Coast has been in European hands for centuries, but it requires a most unmodern power of credence to realise this of any other settlement on the whole western seaboard until you have the pleasure of seeing the beautiful city of San. Paul de Loanda, far away down south, past the Congo.
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CAPE COAST.
​to the climate, the latter to my kind friends, Mr. Batty, and Mr. and Mrs. Dennis Kemp. I was taken round the grand stone-built houses with their high stone-walled yards and sculpture-decorated gateways, built by the merchants of the last century and of the century before, and through the great rambling stone castle with its water-tanks cut in the solid rock beneath it, and its commodious accommodation for slaves awaiting shipment, now almost as obsolete as the guns it mounts, but not quite so, for these cool and roomy chambers serve to house the native constabulary and their extensive families.
This being done, I was taken up an unmitigated hill, on whose summit stands Fort William, a pepper-pot-like structure now used as a lighthouse. Our peregrinations having been carried on under a fancy temperature, I was inclined to drink in the beauty of this building from a position at its base, and was looking round for a shady spot to sit down in, when my intentions were ruthlessly frustrated by my companions, who would stop at nothing short of its summit, where I eventually found myself. The view was exceedingly lovely and extensive. Beneath, and between us and the sea, lay the town in the blazing sun. In among its solid stone buildings patches of native mud-built huts huddled together as though they had been shaken down out of a sack into the town to serve as dunnage. Then came the snow-white surf wall, and across it the blue sea with our steamer rolling to and fro on the long, regular swell, impatiently waiting until Sunday should be over and she could work cargo. Round us on all the other sides were wooded hills and valleys, and away in the distance to the west showed the white town and castle of Elmina and the nine-mile road thither, skirting the surf-bound seashore, only broken on its level way by the mouth of the Sweet River. Over all was the brooding silence of the noonday heat, broken only by the dulled thunder of the surf.
After seeing these things we started down stairs, and on reaching ground descended yet lower into a sort of stone-walled dry moat, out of which opened clean, cool, cellar-like chambers tunnelled into the earth. These, I was informed, ​had also been constructed to keep slaves in when they were the staple export of the Gold Coast. They were so refreshingly cool that I lingered looking at them and their massive doors, ere being marched up to ground level again, and down the hill through some singularly awful stenches, mostly arising from rubber, into the big Wesleyan church in the middle of the town. It is a building in the terrible Africo-Gothic style, but it compares most favourably with the cathedral at Sierra Leone, particularly internally, wherein, indeed, it far surpasses that structure. And then we returned to the Mission House and spent a very pleasant evening, save for the knowledge (which amounted in me to remorse) that, had it not been for my edification, not one of my friends would have spent the day toiling about the town they know only too well. Mr. Dennis Kemp was chairman and superintendent of the Wesleyan Mission on the Gold Coast when I was last there, and he had filled this important position for some time. This is the largest and most influential Protestant mission on the West Coast of Africa, and it is now, I am glad to say, adding a technical department to its scholastic and religious one. The Basel Mission has done a great deal of good work in giving technical instruction to the natives, and practically started this most important branch of their education. There is still an almost infinite amount of this work to be done, the African being so strangely deficient in mechanical culture; infinitely more so, indeed, in this than in any other particular. All the other Protestant missions are following the Basel Mission's lead, and, recognising that a good deal of their failure arises from a want of this practical side in their instruction, are now starting technical schools the Church of England in Sierra Leone, the Wesleyans on the Gold Coast, and the Presbyterians in Calabar.
In some of these technical schools the sort of instruction given is, to my way of thinking, ill-advised; arts of no immediate or great use in the present culture-condition of West Africa—such as printing, book-binding, and tailoring—being taught. But this is not the case under the Wesleyans, who also teach smith's work, carpentering, bricklaying, waggon​building, &c. Alas! none of the missions save the Roman Catholic teach the thing that it is most important the natives should learn, in the face of the conditions that European government of the Coast has induced, namely, improved methods of agriculture, and plantation work.
The Wesleyan Mission has only four white ministers here. Native ministers there are seventeen, and the rest of the staff is entirely native, consisting of 70 Catechists, 144 day school teachers, 386 Sunday-school teachers, and 405 local preachers. The total number of fully accredited members of this sect in 1893 was stated in the Gold Coast Annual to be 7,066.
The total amount of money raised by this mission on the Gold Coast in 1893 was £5,338 14s. 9d. This is a very remarkable sum and most creditable to the native members of the sect, for almost all the other native Christian bodies are content to be in a state of pauperised dependency on British subscriptions. The headquarters of the Wesleyan Mission were, up to last year, at Cape Coast, but now they have been removed to Aburi on the hills some twenty-six miles behind Accra, and Cape Coast is no longer the head-quarters of any governmental or religious affair. The Government removed to Accra from Cape Coast several years ago, on account of the great unhealthiness of the latter place and in the hope that Accra would prove less fatal. Unfortunately this hope has not been realised; moreover the landing at Accra is worse than at Cape Coast, and the supply of fresh water very poor.
Accra is one of the five West Coast towns that look well from the sea. The others don't look well from anywhere. First in order of beauty comes San. Paul de Loanda; then Cape Coast with its satellite Elmina, then Gaboon, then Accra with its satellite Christiansborg, and lastly, Sierra Leone.
What there is of beauty in Accra is oriental in type. Seen from the sea, Fort St. James on the left and Christiansborg Castle on the right, both almost on shore level, give, with an outcrop of sandy dwarf cliffs, a certain air of balance and strength to the town, though but for these and the two old castles, Accra would be but a poor place and a flimsy, for the ​rest of it is a mass of rubbishy mud and palm-leaf huts, and corrugated-iron dwellings for the Europeans.
Corrugated iron is my abomination. I quite understand it has points, and I do not attack from an aesthetic standpoint. It really looks well enough when it is painted white. There is, close to Christiansborg Castle, a patch of bungalows and offices for officialdom and wife that from a distance in the hard bright sunshine looks like an encampment of snow-white tents among the coco palms, and pretty enough withal. I am also aware that the corrugated-iron roof is an advantage in enabling you to collect and store rain-water, which is the safest kind of water you can get on the Coast, always supposing you have not painted the aforesaid roof with red oxide an hour or two before so collecting, as a friend of mine did once. But the heat inside those iron houses is far greater than inside mud-walled, brick, or wooden ones, and the alternations of temperature more sudden: mornings and evenings they are cold and clammy; draughty they are always, thereby giving you chill which means fever, and fever in West Africa means more than it does in most places.
Going on shore at Accra with Lady MacDonald gave me opportunities and advantages I should not otherwise have enjoyed, such as the hospitality of the Governor, luxurious transport from the landing place to Christiansborg Castle, a thorough inspection of the cathedral in course of erection, and the strange and highly interesting function of going to a tea-party at a police station to meet a king,—a real reigning king—who kindly attended with his suite and displayed an intelligent interest in photographs. Tackie (that is His Majesty's name) is an old, spare man, with a subdued manner. His sovereign rights are acknowledged by the Government so far as to hold him more or less responsible for any iniquity committed by his people; and as the Government do not allow him to execute or flagellate the said people, earthly pomp is rather a hollow thing to Tackie.
On landing I was taken in charge by an Assistant Inspector of Police, and after a scrimmage for my chief's baggage and my own, which reminded me of a long ago landing on the distant island of Guernsey, the inspector and ​I got into a 'rickshaw, locally called a go-cart. It was pulled in front by two government negroes and pushed behind by another pair, all neatly attired in white jackets and knee breeches, and crimson cummerbunds yards long, bound round their middles. Now it is an ingrained characteristic of the uneducated negro, that he cannot keep on a neat and complete garment of any kind. It does not matter what that garment may be; so long as it is whole, off it comes. But as soon as that garment becomes a series of holes, held together by filaments of rag, he keeps it upon him in a manner that is marvellous, and you need have no further anxiety on its behalf. Therefore it was but natural that the governmental cummerbunds, being new, should come off their wearers several times in the course of our two mile trip, and as they wound riskily round the legs of their running wearers, we had to make halts while one end of the cummerbund was affixed to a tree-trunk and the other end to the man, who rapidly wound himself up in it again with a skill that spoke of constant practice.
The road to Christiansborg from Accra, which runs parallel to the sea and is broad and well-kept, is in places pleasantly shaded with pepper trees, eucalyptus, and palms. The first part of it, which forms the main street of Accra, is remarkable. The untidy, poverty-stricken native houses or huts are no credit to their owners, and a constant source of anxiety to a conscientious sanitary inspector. Almost every one of them is a shop, but this does not give rise to the animated commercial life one might imagine, owing, I presume, to the fact that every native inhabitant of Accra who has any money to get rid of is able recklessly to spend it in his own emporium. For these shops are of the store nature, each after his kind, and seem homogeneously stocked with tin pans, loud-patterned basins, iron pots, a few rolls of cloth and bottles of American rum. After passing these there are the Haussa lines, a few European houses, and the cathedral; and when nearly into Christiansborg, a cemetery on either side of the road. That to the right is the old cemetery, now closed, and when I was there, in a disgracefully neglected state: a mere jungle of grass infested with snakes. Opposite to it is the ​cemetery now in use, and I remember well my first visit to it under the guidance of a gloomy Government official, who said he always walked there every afternoon, "so as to get used to the place before staying permanently in it,"—a rank waste of time and energy, by the way, as subsequent events proved, for he is now safe off the Gold Coast for good and all.
He took me across the well-kept grass to two newly dug graves, each covered with wooden hoods in a most business-like way. Evidently those hoods were regular parts of the cemetery's outfit. He said nothing, but waved his hand with a "take-your-choice,-they-are-both-quite-ready" style. "Why?" I queried laconically. "Oh! we always keep two graves ready dug for Europeans. We have to bury very quickly here, you know," he answered. I turned at bay. I had had already a very heavy dose of details of this sort that afternoon and was disinclined to believe another thing. So I said, "It's exceedingly wrong to do a thing like that, you only frighten people to death. You can't want new-dug graves daily. There are not enough white men in the whole place to keep the institution up." "We do," he replied, "at any rate at this season. Why, the other day we had two white men to bury before twelve o'clock, and at four, another dropped in on a steamer."
"At 4.30," said a companion, an exceedingly accurate member of the staff, "How you fellows do exaggerate! Subsequent knowledge of the Gold Coast has convinced me fully that the extra funeral being placed half-an-hour sooner than it occurred is the usual percentage of exaggeration you will be able to find in stories relating to the local mortality. And at Accra, after I left it, and all along the Gold Coast, came one of those dreadful epidemic outbursts sweeping away more than half the white population in a few weeks. It is customary for the Government authorities to pooh-pooh the mortality, or to allege that it is owing to the bad habits of the white men; but this latter statement is far more untrue than any fever story an old coaster will tell you. The authorities at home, both of merchant firms and mission societies, follow suit and make the same statements. The true statistics ​are difficult to get at in English colonies, because the Government reports are as a general rule very badly prepared, and dodge giving important details like this with an almost diabolical ingenuity. And, added to this, they come out so long after the incidents referred to in them have taken place, that they are only fit for the early literature shelves of the British Museum.
But to return to our state journey along the Christiansborg road. We soon reached the castle, an exceedingly roomy and solid edifice built by the Danes, and far better fitted for the climate than our modern dwellings, in spite of our supposed advance in tropical hygiene. We entered by the sentry-guarded great gate into the courtyard; on the right hand were the rest of the guard; most of them asleep on their mats, but a few busy saying Dhikr, etc. towards Mecca, like the good Mohammedans these Haussas are, others winding themselves into their cummerbunds. On the left hand was Sir Brandford Griffiths' hobby—a choice and select little garden, of lovely eucharis lilies mostly in tubs, and rare and beautiful flowers brought by him from his Barbadian home; while shading it and the courtyard was a fine specimen of that superb thing of beauty—a flamboyant tree—glorious with its delicate-green acacia-like leaves and vermilion and yellow flowers, and astonishing with its vast beans. A flight of stone stairs leads from the courtyard to the upper part of the castle where the living rooms are, over the extensive series of cool tunnel-like slave barracoons, now used as store chambers. The upper rooms are high and large, and full of a soft pleasant light and the thunder of the everlasting surf breaking on the rocky spit on which the castle is built.
From the day the castle was built, now more than a hundred years ago, the surf spray has been swept by the on-shore evening breeze into every chink and cranny of the whole building, and hence the place is mouldy—mouldy to an extent I, with all my experience in that paradise for mould, West Africa, have never elsewhere seen. The matting on the floors took an impression of your foot as a light snowfall would. Beneath articles of furniture the cryptogams ​attained a size more in keeping with the coal period than with the nineteenth century. That unhappy furniture! Ilow it suffers! From everything save one noble old gilt chair with the arms of Denmark embroidered on its throne-like form which is apparently acclimatised, the veneer hung in strips, as if each article had been trying to throw its clothes off to get cooler.
The looking-glasses, too, were in a sorry plight. You only saw yourself in sections in them. A dangerous thing, I should imagine, for shaving operations, just to be able to dimly catch sight of the top of your head, one eye, a portion of your nose, and a bit of shirt front. One member of the Government, I observed, was considerably done up with sticking-plaster round the jaw, which I mentally put down to a shaky hand, until I had trouble with my back hair with those governmental mirrors. One must never judge a fellow creature unkindly, especially on the Gold Coast.
Along the front of the living-rooms facing the sea is a single immense verandah. This is the place for social gatherings, and after dinner the ladies arrange themselves in a hard and fast row on chairs, while the gentlemen hang round about and talk. Conversation is carried on under difficulties, because of the ceaseless roar of the surf. In the middle of January I found conversation with a new-comer consisted of "You should have been here last week." "Eh?" "You should have been here last week when we had the races (f)." "Oh! you have a race-meeting? (m.f)." "Yes, we have a regular race-course, you know (ff)." Then details regarding the races which you don't quite catch, but you say "Indeed," "Really though!" "That must have been very nice," at random, and get regarded as being sympathetic, and are rewarded with more details. Another individual, whose name you do not catch, is introduced. He says something. You say "Eh?" He says, "You should have been here last week when we had our races (ff)." Then come the details as before, and so on, da capo, throughout the evening. The other subjects of conversation with which one had to deal during meals relate to the new cathedral and Ashanti affairs. You of course know about the cathedral, and you ought to know about Ashanti affairs, and ​the real reason why King Kwoffe Karri Karri crossed the Prah in '74. But you usually don't, for both these subjects require sound previous education; superficial dealings with them are quite impossible, for the names of places and people in Ashanti are strange and choppy, and you will get mixed as to which is which if you don't take care.
Superficial things may have changed now Sir Brandford Griffiths has left the Gold Coast after his long term of service—the longest term, I think, ever served on the whole West Coast by a Governor. But they cannot have improved either in the way of courteous hospitality or in the thoughtful personal kindness which the late Governor gave his visitors.
For example, when we left the castle after receiving from him all manner of kind wishes, to say nothing of pipes and walking-sticks, he energetically went out of his way to save the life and reason of a young member of our party, a mere new-comer, who wore a light felt hat in the blazing mid-day sun. My chief and I went off respectively in go-carts to the landing-place at James Town, and the young man, who had also to return to the Batanga, followed not for some minutes. When he rejoined us we observed beautiful cool green leaves sticking out from under his hat in a wreath. The Governor had not done what many an old coaster would have done, namely, said: "There! that fellow will certainly peg out with that fool of a hat," and preserved a masterly inactivity. No, he had gathered with his own hands certain suitable herbs from his own garden, and filled the inadequate hat with them.
While we were waiting for the surf-boat, we had an object lesson in the surf trouble. Several stalwart negroes strolled to and fro along the sand in front of us, poking down iron bars into it ever and anon. Ever and anon they left these sticking in and strolled off, not as one might hastily have thought because they had had enough of the job, but to go and fetch a spade. What they were sounding for in the sand were the iron rails which had been capsized in coming ashore and which belong to a tramway in course of construction for running goods from the beach to the sheds. When we got on board the Batanga, we saw ​more of this tramway. A large surf-boat was being laden with its rails, and as it persisted, owing to the long heavy swell, in playing bob cherry with every bundle of them, the time came when the man at the winch "came back a bit" suddenly instead of "softly, softly" as he had been carefully ordered to do. This happened when the boat was nearly laden, and one of the bundles of rails hanging on the chain swung round and speared that lively surf-boat right through.
A scene of some excitement followed, accompanied by a perfect word-fog of directions and advice. The chain was hastily lowered into the boat and put round bundles of rails which were as hastily hauled back on to the Batanga's deck, but still the boat with the balance of the rails continued sinking, and her black crew when they realised this went "for water one time" and swam round at a respectful distance so as to avoid the coming down suck, in spite of being most distinctly requested to return to the boat and sling rails like fury. Then Captain Murray came upon the scene and rose to the occasion, ordering ropes to be passed bodily under the boat and round her in such a manner that she was held up, whether she would or no, until she was unloaded. Then she was hauled on deck and repaired during the rest of the voyage by my old friend the Portuguese carpenter, although he announced himself as "suffering from rheumatism under the influence of the doctor."
The Gold Coast is one of the few places in West Africa that I have never felt it my solemn duty to go and fish in. I really cannot say why. Seen from the sea it is a pleasant-looking land. The long lines of yellow, sandy beach backed by an almost continuous line of blue hills, which in some places come close to the beach, in other places show in the dim distance. It is hard to think that it is so unhealthy as it is, from just seeing it as you pass by. It has high land and has not those great masses of mangrove-swamp one usually, at first, associates with a bad fever district, but which prove on acquaintance to be at any rate no worse than this well-elevated open-forested Gold Coast land. There are many things to be had here and in Lagos which tend to make ​life more tolerable, that you cannot have elsewhere until you are south of the Congo. Horses, for example, do fairly well at Accra, though some twelve miles or so behind the town there is a belt of tsetse fly, specimens of which I have procured and had identified at the British Museum, and it is certain death to a horse, I am told, to take it to Aburi.
ON A GOLD COAST BEACH.
The food-supply, although bad and dear, is superior to that you get down south. Goats and sheep are fairly plentiful. In addition to fresh meat and tinned you are able to get a quantity of good sea fish, for the great West African Bank, which fringes the coast in the Bight of Benin, abounds in fish, although the native cook very rarely knows how to cook them. Then, too, you can get more fruit and ​vegetables on the Gold Coast than at most places lower down: the plantain, not least among them—very good when allowed to become ripe, and then cut into longitudinal strips, and properly fried; the banana, which surpasses it when served in the same manner, or beaten up and mixed with rice, butter, and eggs, and baked. Eggs, by the way, according to the great mass of native testimony, are laid in this country in a state that makes them more fit for electioneering than culinary purposes, and I shall never forget one tribe I was once among, who, whenever I sat down on one of their benches, used to smash eggs round me for ju-ju. They meant well. But I will nobly resist the temptation to tell egg stories and industriously catalogue the sour-sop, guava, grenadilla, aubergine or garden-egg, yam, and sweet potato.
The sweet potato should be boiled, and then buttered and browned in an oven, or fried. When cooked in either way I am devoted to them, but in the way I most frequently come across them I abominate them, for they jeopardise my existence both in this world and the next. It is this way you are coming home from a long and dangerous beetle-hunt in the forest; you have battled with mighty beetles the size of pie dishes, they have flown at your head, got into your hair and then nipped you smartly. You have been also considerably stung and bitten by flies, ants, &c., and are most likely sopping wet with rain, or with the wading of streams, and you are tired and your feet go low along the ground, and it is getting, or has got, dark with that ever-deluding tropical rapidity, and then you for your sins get into a piece of ground which last year was a native's farm, and, placing one foot under the tough vine of a surviving sweet potato, concealed by rank herbage, you plant your other foot on another portion of the same vine. Your head you then deposit promptly in some prickly ground crop, or against a tree stump, and then, if there is human blood in you, you say d—n!
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FERNANDO PO AND AMBAO ISLAND FROM THE N.E.
​There is something about those oranges I should like to have explained. They are usually green and sweetish in taste, nor have they much white pith, but now and again you get a big bright yellow one from those trees that have been imported, and these are very pithy and in full possession of the flavour of verjuice. They have also got the papaw on the Coast, the Carica papaya of botanists. It is an insipid fruit. To the newcomer it is a dreadful nuisance, for no sooner does an old coaster set eyes on it than he straightway says, "Paw-paws are awfully good for the digestion, and even if you just hang a tough fowl or a bit of goat in the tree among the leaves, it gets tender in no time, for there is an awful lot of pepsine in a paw-paw,"—which there is not, papaine being its active principle. After hearing this hymn of praise to the papaw some hundreds of times, it palls, and you usually arrive at this tired feeling about the thing by the time you reach the Gold Coast, for it is a most common object, and the same man will say the same thing about it a dozen times a day if he gets the chance. I got heartily sick of it on my first voyage out, and rashly determined to check the old coaster in this habit of his, preparatory to stamping the practice out. It was one of my many failures. I soon met an old coaster with a papaw fruit in sight, and before he had time to start, I boldly got away with—"The paw-paw is awfully good for the digestion," hoping that this display of knowledge would impress him and exempt me from hearing the rest of the formula. But no. "Right you are," said he solemnly. "It's a powerful thing is the paw-paw. Why, the other day we had a sad case along here. You know what a nuisance young assistants are, bothering about their chop, and scorpions in their beds and boots, and what not and a half, and then, when you have pulled them through these, and often enough before, pegging out with fever, or going on the fly in the native town. Did you know poor B—? Well! he's dead now, had fever and went off like a babe in eight hours though he'd been out fourteen years for A— and D—. They sent him out a new book-keeper, a tender young thing with a dairymaid complexion and the notion that he'd got the indigestion. He fidgeted about it something awful. One ​night there was a big paw-paw on the table for evening chop, and so B—, who was an awfully good chap, told him about how good it was for the digestion. The book-keeper said his trouble always came on two hours after eating, and asked if he might take a bit of the thing to his room. 'Certainly,' says B—, and as the paw-paw wasn't cut at that meal the book-keeper quietly took it off whole with him.
"In the morning time he did not turn up. B—, just before breakfast, went to his room and he wasn't there, but he noticed the paw-paw was on the bed and that was all, so he thought the book-keeper must have gone for a walk, being, as it were, a bit too tender to have gone on the fly as yet. So he just told the store clerk to tell the people to return him to the firm when they found him straying around lost, and thought no more about it, being, as it was, mail-day, and him busy.
"Well! Fortunately the steward boy put that paw-paw on the table again for twelve o'clock chop. If it hadn't been for that, not a living soul would have known the going of the book-keeper. For when B— cut it open, there, right inside it, were nine steel trouser-buttons, a Waterbury watch, and the poor young fellow's keys. For you see, instead of his digesting his dinner with that paw-paw, the paw-paw took charge and digested him, dinner and all, and when B. interrupted it, it was just getting a grip on the steel things. There's an awful lot of pepsine in a paw-paw, and if you hang, &c., &c."
I collapsed, feebly murmuring that it was very interesting, but sad for the poor young fellow's friends.
"Not necessarily," said the old coaster. So he had the last word, and never again will I attempt to alter the ways of the genuine old coaster. What you have got to do with him is to be very thankful you have had the honour of knowing him.
Still I think we do over-estimate the value of the papaw, although I certainly did once myself hang the leg of a goat no mortal man could have got tooth into, on to a papaw tree with a bit of string for the night. In the morning it was clean gone, string and all; but whether it was the pepsine, the papaine, or a purloining pagan that was the cause of its ​departure there was no evidence to show. Yet I am myself, as Hans Breitmann says, "still skebdigal" as to the papaw, and I dare say you are too.
But I must forthwith stop writing about the Gold Coast, or I shall go on telling you stories and wasting your time, not to mention the danger of letting out those which would damage the nerves of the cultured of temperate climes, such as those relating to the youth who taught himself French from a six months' method book; of the man who wore brass buttons; the moving story of three leeches and two gentlemen; the doctor up a creek; and the reason why you should not eat pork along here because all the natives have either got the guinea-worm, or kraw-kraw or ulcers; and then the pigs go—and dear me! it was a near thing that time. I'll leave off at once.
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