To the Gold Coast for Gold

R >> Richard F. Burton >> To the Gold Coast for Gold

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Though not more than 550 feet above sea-level, the climate of Heddle's
Farm is said to be wholly different from that of the lower town. The
property was bought by Government for a song, and now it occasionally
lodges a sick governor or a convalescent officer. During my last visit
the Sa Leonites spoke of building a sanatorium at Wilberforce village,
alias Signal Hill, where a flag announces the approach of vessels. The
tenement rose to nearly the first story, when it stopped short for want
of funds. Now they talk of a white regiment being stationed at the
'White Man's Grave,' and propose barracks high up the hills beyond sight
of the town-frontage. The site was pointed out to me where the
artillery-range now is, and beyond where a dwarf thatch shows the
musketry-ground of the West India regiment. We shall sight from afar,
when steaming out southwards, the three white dots which represent
quarters on Leicester Cone; now they are hidden in frowsy
fog-clouds. But all these heights have one and the same
disadvantage. You live in a Scotch mist, you breathe as much water as
air, and you exchange fever and dysentery for rheumatism, and lumbago,
and all that dire cohort.

Presently the health-officer with his blue flag gave us pratique, and
the fort-adjutant with his red flag carried off our only soldier. The
latter, with a hospitality rare, it is to be hoped, in British
regiments, would hardly recognise his quondam shipmates. We were duly
interviewed, in most civilised style, by a youth who does this work for
Mr. George A. Freeman, manager of the 'West African Reporter.' Then the
s.s. _Senegal_ was attacked and captured by a host of sable
visitors, some coming to greet their friends, other to do a little
business in the washing and the shoreboat lines.

The washerwoman lost no time in showing up, although her charges have
been greatly reduced. She formerly demanded nearly treble as much as in
London; now, however, she makes only sixteen to twenty shillings a
month, not bad pay in a place where living costs threepence, and
comfortable living sixpence, a day. These nymphs of the wash-tub are
painfully familiar and plain. The dress is a bright cotton foulard bound
on like the anatomy of a turban and garnished, as were our grandmothers'
nightcaps, with huge front bows. Gaudy shawls cover white cotton
jackets; and skirts of bright, showy longcloth suggest the parrot or the
cockatoo. The ornaments are large gold earrings and necklaces of beads
or coral. I could not but remark the difference of tone. There was none
of the extreme 'bumptiousness' and pugnacious impudence of twenty years
ago; indeed, the beach-boys, nowhere a promising class, were rather
civil than otherwise. Not a single allusion to the contrast of 'white
niggahs and black gen'lemen.' Nor did the unruly, disorderly African
character ever show itself, as formerly it often did, by fisticuffing,
hair-pulling, and cursing, with a mixture of English and Dark-Continent
ideas and phraseology, whose _tout ensemble_ was really portentous.

The popular voice ascribes this immense change for the better to the
energetic action of Governor S. Rowe (1876); and if so his statue
deserves to stand beside that of Pope Henessy. We could not fairly
complain of the inordinate noise, which would have been the death of
a sick traveller. Niger cannot speak without bawling. The charge for
landing was only threepence; _en revanche_ the poor fellows
stole every little thing they could, including my best meerschaum.

Cameron and I went ashore to hire Krumen for the Gold Coast, and herein
we notably failed. We disembarked at the camber, a huge pile of masonry,
whose weight upon an insecure foundation has already split the sea-wall
in more than one place. The interior also is silting up so fast that it
will constantly require dredging to admit boats. In fact, the colony
must deeply repent not having patronised Mr. Jenkins's project of a
T-headed pier, on one side of which landing would have been practicable
in all weathers.

The sun, despite the mist, seemed to burn our backs, and the glare from
the red clay soil roasted our eyes as we toiled up the ramp, bad as
those of 'Gib.,' which leads to Water Street, the lower line subtending
the shore. Here we could inspect St. George's Cathedral, built, they
say, at a cost of 10,000_l._ to 15,000_l._, which would be
reduced to 5,000_l._ in England--contracts in such 'colonies' cost
more than stone and slate. The general aspect is that of its Bombay
brother, and the order is called, I believe, neo-Gothic, the last insult
to ecclesiastical architecture. A single rusty tower, with
toy-battlements, pins down along ridge-back, evidently borrowed from a
barn; the light yellow-wash is mildewed and weather-stained, and the
windows show unseemly holes. Surely Bishop Cheetham could have afforded
a few panes of glass when exchanging his diocese for a rectory in
England. Let me here note that the Catholic bishop at Goa and elsewhere
is expected to die at his post, and that there is an over-worldly look
in this Protestant form of the 'nolo episcopari.' East of the cathedral,
and uncompromisingly 'Oriented' to the north, stands the unfinished
shell of a Wesleyan chapel, suggesting that caricature which has
intruded itself into the shadow of York Minster. Some 5,000_l._
were spent upon this article by the locals; but the home committee
wisely determined that it should not be finished, and now they propose
to pull it down for building-material.

We then entered the fruit and vegetable market, a neat and well-paved
bazar, surmounted by a flying roof and pierced for glass windows. The
dead arches in the long walls are externally stone and internally
brick. The building was full of fat middle-aged negresses, sitting at
squat before their 'blyes,' or round baskets, which contained a variety
and confusion of heterogeneous articles. The following is a list almost
as disorderly as the collection itself.

There were pins and needles, yarn and thread, that have taken the place
of the wilder thorn and fibre; all kinds of small hardware;
looking-glasses in lacquered frames; beads of sorts, cowries and reels
of cotton; pots of odorous pomatum and shea-butter nuts; feathers of the
plantain-bird and country snuff-boxes of a chestnut-like fruit (a
strychnine?) from which the powder is inhaled, _more majorum_,
through a quill; physic-nuts (_tiglium_, or croton), a favourite
but painful native remedy; horns of the goat and antelope, possibly
intended for fetish 'medicine;' blue-stone, colcothar and other
drugs. Amongst the edibles appeared huge achatinae, which make an
excellent soup, equal to that of the French snail; ground-nuts; very
poor rice of four varieties, large and small, red and dark; cheap
ginger, of which the streets are at times redolent, and which makes good
home-brewed 'pop;' the Kola-nut, here worth a halfpenny and at Bathurst
a penny each; the bitter Kola, a very different article from the
esculent; skewered _rots_ of ground-hog, a rodent that can climb,
destroy vegetables, and bite hard if necessary; dried bats and rats,
which the African as well as the Chinese loves, and fish _cuits au
soleil_, preferred when 'high,' to use the mildest adjective. From
the walls hung dry goods, red woollen nightcaps and comforters,
leopards' and monkeys' skins, and the pelt of an animal which might have
been a gazelle.

Upon the long counters or tables were displayed the fruits and
vegetables. The former were the custard-apple or sweet-sop (_Annona
squamosa_), the sour-sop (_A. muricata_), the Madeiran
_chirimoya_, (_A. cherimolia_), citrons, sweet and sour limes,
and oranges, sweet and bitter, grown in the mountains; bananas
(_M. paradisiaca_), the staff of life on the Gold Coast, and
plantains (_M. sapientum_), the horse-plantains of India;
[Footnote: The West Indian plantain is apparently unknown or unused]
pine-apples more than half wild; mangoes terribly turpentiney unless the
trunk be gashed to let out the gum; 'monkey-plums' or 'apples' and
'governor's plums.' The common guavas are rank and harsh, but the
'strawberry guava,' as it is locally called, has a delicate, subacid
flavour not easily equalled. The _aguacate_, or alligator-pear
(_Persea gratissima_), which was _not_ 'introduced by the
Basel missionaries from the West Indies,' is inferior to the
Mexican. Connoisseurs compare its nutty flavour with that of the
filbert, and eat it with pepper, salt, and the sauce of Worcester, whose
fortune was made by the nice conduct of garlic. The papaw [Footnote: The
leaves are rubbed on meat to make it tender, and a drop of milk from the
young fruit acts as a vermifuge.] should be cooked as a vegetable and
stuffed with forced meat; the flesh of the granadilla, which resembles
it, is neglected, while the seeds and their surroundings are flavoured
with sherry and sugar. There is an abundance of the _Eriobotrya
Japonica,_ in Madeira called the loquat and elsewhere the Japanese
medlar: it grows wild in the Brazil, where the people distil from
it. [Footnote: I cannot yet decide whether its birthplace is Japan or
South America, whose plants have now invaded Western India and greatly
altered the vegetation.]

The chief vegetables were the watercress, grown in private gardens;
onions, large and mild as the Spanish; _calavances_, or beans;
_okras_ or _gumbos_, the _bhendi_ of India (_Hibiscus
esculentus_), the best thickening for soup; _bengwas_, or
egg-plants; yams (_Dioscorea bulbifera_) of sorts; bitter Cassada
(_Jatropha manihot_) and the sweet variety (_Jatropha
janipha_); garlic; kokos (_Colocasia esculenta_); potatoes,
which the steamers are beginning to bring from England, not from
Madeira; tomatoes like musket-balls, but very sweet and wholesome; and
the _batata_, (_Convolvulus patatus_, or sweet potato), which
whilom made 'kissing comfits.' The edibles consisted of' fufu'
(plantain-paste); of 'cankey,' a sour pudding of maize-flour; of
ginger-cake; of cassava-balls finely levigated, and of sweetened
'agadi,' native bread in lumps, wrapped up in plantain-leaves. Toddy was
the usual drink offered for sale.

The butchers' yard, near the market, is no longer a 'ragged and
uncleanly strip of ground.' The long-horned cattle, small, mostly
humpless, and resembling the brindled and dun Alderney cow, are driven
in from the Pulo (Fulah) country. I have described the beef as tasting
not unlike what one imagines a knacker's establishment to produce, and
since that time I have found but scant improvement. It is sold on
alternate days with mutton, the former costing 6_d_., the latter
9_d_. a pound. Veal, so bad in England and so good in Southern
Europe, is unknown. The long, lean, hairy black-and-white sheep do not
supply an excellent article. Goats and kids are plentiful, and the flesh
would be good if it had any taste. Hogs abound, as in Ireland; but no
one eats pork, for the best of reasons. The poultry-list comprises
small tough fowls (l0_d_. to 2_s_.), partridges, ducks (2_s_.
6_d_.), geese, especially the spur-winged from Sherbro,
and the Muscovy or Manilla duck--a hard-fleshed, insipid bird, whose old
home was South American Paraguay--turkeys (10_s_. to 15_s_.),
and the _arripiada_, or frizzly chicken, whose feathers stand on
end. Milk is scarce and dear. Englishmen raw in the tropics object to
milch-goats and often put up with milch-pigs, which are said to be here
kept for the purpose. I need not tell all the old tale, 'Goat he go die;
pig he go for bush,' &c. Butter (1_s_. 8_d_. in 2-lb. tins) is
oily and rancid, with the general look of cartgrease, in this tropical
temperature. It is curious that the Danish and Irish dairies cannot
supply the West African public with a more toothsome article.

Near the meat-market is the double row of houses with shops upon the
ground-floor, not unlike a Banyan's street in outer Bombay, but smaller,
dirtier, meaner far. Here the stranger can buy dry goods and a few
curiosities of Mandenga manufacture--grigris (teraphim or charms), bows,
spears, and saddles and bridles like those of the Somal, both perfectly
useless to white men. The leather, however, is excellent as the
Moroccan, and the work dates from the days when the Saracens pushed
southwards from the Mediterranean to the Niger-valley. Wild animals are
at times offered for sale, but Darkey has heard exaggerated accounts of
prices paid in England for grey parrots, palm-birds, monkeys,
bush-antelopes, mongooses, ground-pigs, and other 'small deer' brought
from the rivulets behind Freetown. Sundry snakes were offered for sale,
the Mandenga, 4 to 5 feet long, with black marks upon a yellow ground,
and the spitting serpent, between 5 and 6 feet long, with a long head,
also dark above and silvery grey below. I doubted the fact of its
ejecting saliva till assured by the Rev. John Milum that two
missionaries at Lagos, Messieurs J. B. Wood and David, had suffered
severely from inflamed eyes after the contemptuous ophine
_crachat_. All along the coast is a cerastes (horned snake), whose
armature is upon the snout and whose short fat form suggests the
puff-adder. The worst is a venomous-looking cobra, or hooded viper, with
flat, cordate head, broad like all the more ferocious species. It is the
only thanatophid whose bite I will not undertake to cure. We carried on
the A.S.S. _Winnebah_, for the benefit of Mr. Cross, of Liverpool,
a big black ape, which the Sa Leonites called a 'black chimpanzee.'
Though badly wounded she had cost 27_l_., and died after a few days
of the cage. The young chimpanzees were valued at 6_1_.

I looked in vain for the old inn, the only thing in the place, a dirty
hovel, kept, in 1862, by a Liberian negro, inscribed 'Lunch-house' on a
sign-board flanked by the Union Jack and the U.S. 'oysters and
gridiron.' Nothing has succeeded to this 'American hotel,' and visitors
must depend upon the hospitality of acquaintances. A Frenchman lately
opened a _Gasthaus_, and lost no time in becoming bankrupt. There
is, however, a manner of boarding-house kept by a Mrs. King.

Turning south from Water Street, we passed the Wilberforce, or rather
the 'Willyfoss,' memorial, a colossal scandal noticed by every visitor
at Sa Leone, a 'folly' which has cost 3,000_l_. Its condition is
exactly what it was two decads ago--a chapel-like shell of dingy, mouldy
laterite with six lancet-windows and metal pillars. Its case is a
complicated concern. The ecclesiastical authorities wanted it for their
purposes, and so did the secular civilians, and so did the military. At
last the Sa Leonites, hopeless of obtaining a Government grant, have set
on foot a subscription which reached 500_l_.--some say 700_l_.
There are, therefore, certain fitful signs of activity, and
bricks and fire-bricks now cumber the ground; but it is all a 'flash
in the pan.' The present purpose is to make it a library, in place of
the fine old collection which went to the dogs. It is also to serve as a
lecture-room. But who is there in the 'African Liverpool' that can
lecture? What is he to lecture about? Who will stand or sit out being
lectured?

Immediately beyond this grim and grisly reminiscence are the neat
dwelling-house and the store of the Honourable Mr. Sybille Boyle, so
named from a ship and from her captain, R.N., who served in the
preventive squadron about 1824. He is an unofficial member of Council
and a marked exception to the rule of the 'Liberateds.' Everybody has a
good word to say of him. The establishment is the regular colonial,
where you can buy anything between a needle and a sheet-anchor. Bottled
ale is not wanting, and thus steamer-passengers learn to congregate in
the back parlour.

We then walked to the top of Gloucester Street, expecting to see the
Duke of Edinburgh's memorial. I left it an arch of sticks and timber
spanning this main cross-line, which leads to Government House. The
temporary was to be supplanted by a permanent marble _arc de
triomphe_, commemorating the auspicious occasion when the black
colony first looked upon a live white Royal Highness. At once
700_l_. was subscribed, and only 800_l_. was wanting; but all
those interested in the matter died, and the 350_l_. which remained
in the chest was, I believe, transferred to the 'Willyfoss.' The august
day is still kept as a public holiday, for the people are, after their
fashion, loyal-mouthed in the extreme. But the memorial is clean
forgotten, and men stare if you ask about it. Half-way up the street is
the post-office, whose white chief is not a whit more civil than the
negro head in 1862.

Upon this highly interesting spot we stood awhile to note the
peculiarities of the place and its position. The soil is a loose clay,
deep-red or brown, impregnated with iron and, where unclothed with
humus, cold and infertile, as the spontaneous aloe shows. The subsoil is
laterite, also highly ferruginous. Soft and working well with the axe
while it retains the quarry-water, it soon hardens by exposure; and,
thus weathered, it forms the best and ugliest of the local building
materials. Embedded in the earth's surface are blocks and boulders
apparently erratic, dislodged or washed down from the upper heights,
where similar masses are seen. Many are scattered, as if by an eruption;
others lie in slab or dome shape upon the shore. The shape is usually
spheroidal, and the material hypersthene (a hard and close-grained
bluish granite) or diorite, greenstone-trap blackened by sun and
rain. In the few cuttings of the higher levels I afterwards remarked
that detached 'hardheads' are puddinged into the friable laterite; but I
nowhere found the granitic floor-rock protruding above ground. The
boulders are treated by ditching and surrounding with a hot fire for
forty-eight hours; cold water, not vinegar, is then poured upon them,
and causes the heated material suddenly to contract and fracture, when
it can easily be removed. Magnetic iron also occurs, and specimens have
been sent to England; but veins have not yet been discovered.

Our walk had furnished us with a tolerable idea of 'the city's' plan,
without referring to the printed affair. Fronting north with westing, it
is divided into squares, blocks, and insulae, after the fashion of a
chessboard. This is one of the oldest as well as the newest mode of
distributions. The temples of the classical gods, being centrally
situated, required for general view broad, straight approaches. From
Washington to Buenos Ayres the modern cities of the New World have
reverted to this ancient system without other reason but a love of
regularity and simplicity. Here the longer streets flank the sea and the
shorter run at right angles up the inner slopes. Both are bright red
lines worn in the vegetation between the houses. The ribbons of green
are the American or Bahama grass; fine, silky, and creeping along the
ground, it is used to stuff mattresses, and it forms a good substitute
for turf. When first imported it was neglected, cut away, and nearly
killed out; now it is encouraged, because its velvety plots relieve the
glaring red surface, it keeps off the 'bush,' and it clears the surface
of all other vegetation. Looking upon the city below, we were surprised
to see the dilapidation of the tenements. Some have tumbled down; others
were tumbling down; many of those standing were lumber or board shanties
called 'quarter-frames' and 'ground-floors;' sundry large piles rose
grisly and fire-charred, and the few good houses looked quite
modern. But what can be expected in a place where Europeans never expect
to outstay the second year, and where Africans, who never yet worked
without compulsion, cannot legally be compelled to work?

We then walked up to Government House, the Fort Thornton of old charts,
whose roof, seen from the sea, barely tops the dense curtain of tree and
shrubbery that girds and hangs around it. Passing under a cool and shady
avenue of mangoes and figs, and the archway, guarded by a porter's lodge
and a detachment of the three hundred local police, we came in sight of
the large, rambling residence, built piecemeal, like many an English
country-house. There is little to recommend it save the fine view of the
sea and the surrounding shrubbery-ground. I can well understand how,
with the immense variety of flower and fruit suddenly presented to his
eyes, the gentleman fresh from England required six months to recover
the free and full use of all his senses and faculties.

A policeman--no longer a Zouave of the West Indian corps--took in our
cards, and we introduced ourselves to Captain A. E. Havelock,
'Governor-in-Chief of Sierra Leone and the Gambia.' He is No. 47 since
Captain Day, R.N., first ruled in A.D. 1803. I had much to say to him
about sundry of his predecessors. Captain Havelock, who dates only from
1881, has the reputation of being slightly 'black.' The Neri and the
Bianchi factions here represent the Buffs and Blues of a land further
north. He is yet in the heyday of popularity, when, in the consecrated
phrase, the ruler 'gains golden opinions.' But colonial judgments are
fickle, and mostly in extremes. After this smiling season the weather
lowers, the storm breaks, and all is elemental rage, when from being a
manner of demigod the unhappy ruler gradually becomes one of the
'meanest and basest of men.' _Absit omen!_

We returned at sunset to Government House and spent a pleasant
evening. The 'smokes' had vanished, and with them the frowse and
homeliness of morning. The sun, with rays of lilac red, set over a
panorama of townlet, land, and sea, to which distance added many a
charm. Mingling afar with the misty horizon, the nearer waters threw
out, by their golden and silvery sheen, the headlands, capes, and
tongues stretching in long perspective below, while the Sugarloaf,
father of mountains, rose in solitary grandeur high above his subject
hills. On the nearer slope of Signal Hill we saw the first of the
destructive bush-burnings. They are like prairie-fires in these lands,
and sometimes they gird Freetown with a wall of flame. Complexion is all
in all to Sa Leone, and she showed for a few moments a truly beautiful
prospect.

The Governor has had the courage to bring out Mrs. Havelock, and she has
had the courage to stand firm against a rainy season. The climate is
simply the worst on the West Coast, despite the active measures of
sanitation lately taken, the Department of Public Health, the ordinances
of the Colonial Government in 1879, and the excellent water with which
the station is now provided. On a clear sunny day the charnel-house, I
repeat, is lovely, _mais c'est la mort_; it is the terrible beauty
of death. Mrs. Melville says, with full truth, 'I felt amidst all the
glory of tropic sunlight and everlasting verdure a sort of ineffable
dread connected with the climate.' Even when leaving the 'pestilent
shore' she was 'haunted by the shadowy presence.' This is womanly, but a
little reflection must suggest it to man.

Even half a century ago opinions differed concerning the climate of the
colony. Dr. Madden could obtain only contradictory accounts. [Footnote:
See _Wanderings in West Africa_, for details, vol. i. p. 275.]
There is a tradition of a Chief Justice applying to the Colonial Office
for information touching his pension, the clerks could not answer him,
and he presently found that none of his predecessors had lived to claim
it. Mr. Judge Rankin was of opinion that its ill-fame was maintained by
'policy on the one hand and by ignorance of truth on the other.' But
Mr. Judge died a few days after. So with Dr. Macpherson, of the African
Colonial Corps. It appears ill-omened to praise the place; and, after
repeated visits to it, I no longer wonder that the 'Medical Gazette' of
April 14, 1838, affirmed, 'No statistical writer has yet tried to give
the minutest fraction representing the chance of a surgeon's return from
Sierra Leone.'

On the other hand, Mrs. Falconbridge, whose husband was sent out from
England on colonial business in 1791, and who wrote the first 'lady's
book' upon the Coast, pointed out at the beginning that sickness was due
quite as much to want of care as to the climate. In 1830 Mr. John
Cormack, merchant and resident since 1800, stated to a Committee of the
House of Commons that out of twenty-six Europeans in his service seven
had died, seven had remained in Africa, and of twelve who returned to
England all save two or three were in good health. We meet with a
medical opinion as early as 1836 that 'not one-fourth of the deaths
results merely from climate.' Cases of old residents are quoted--for
instance, Governor Kenneth Macaulay, a younger brother of Zachary
Macaulay, who resisted it for twenty years; Mr. Reffall for fifteen
years, and sundry other exceptions.

In this section of the nineteenth century it is the custom to admit that
the climate is bad and dangerous; but that it has often been made the
scape-goat of European recklessness and that much of the sickness and
death might be avoided. The improvement is attributed to the use of
quinine, unknown to the early settlers, and much is expected from
sanatoria and from planting the blue gum (_Eucalyptus globulus_),
which failed, owing to the carelessness and ignorance of the planters. A
practical appreciation of the improvement is shown by the Star Life
Assurance Society, which has reduced to five per cent. its former very
heavy rates. Lastly, the bad health of foreigners is accounted for by
the fact that they leave their own country for a climate to which they
are not accustomed, where the social life and the habits of the people
are so different from their own, and yet that they continue doing all
things as in England.

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