0200
For the moment I was very properly wrathful. Then I reflected—the white men did not understand, the majority of them, my desire to see Elmina, the most important castle on the Coast, how then should these black men understand. There was a tiny rest-house built on the bastion of the fort here, and looking at it I decided it was just the last place I should like to spend the night in. I did not expect to meet a white man at Elmina, but at least it must be far nearer civilisation than this.
I looked at my headman more in sorrow than in anger. He was a much-troubled person, and evidently looked upon me as a specimen of the genus “Massa.” I said:
“That is a very beautiful idea, headman, and does you credit. The only drawback I see to it is that I do not want to go to Cape Coast to-morrow, and I do want to go to Elmina to-night.”
He scratched his head in a bewildered fashion, transferring a very elderly tourist cap from one hand to the other in order that he might give both sides a proper chance.
“Man no be fit,” he got out at last.
“Oh, they no be fit. Send for the Chief,” and I turned away and went on with Zacco's instructions in the art of making coffee. Still, in my own mind, I was very troubled. That rest-house on the bastion was a horrid-looking hole, and I had heard it whispered that the men of Kommenda were very truculent. If I had been far from a white man at Chama, I was certainly farther still now at Kommenda. Still, my common sense told me I must not allow I was dismayed.
Presently I was told the Chief had arrived, and I went outside and interviewed him. He wasn't a very big chief, and his stick of office only had a silver top to it with the name of the village written on it in large letters. He could speak no English, but with my headman and his linguist he soon grasped the fact that I wanted more carriers, and agreed to supply them. Then I went back inside the fort and he joined the group outside who had come to look at the white woman, and who, I am glad to say, all kept respectfully outside. I seated myself again and sent for the headman.
“Headman, you bring in man who no be fit.”
The headman went outside and presently returned with the downcast, ragged scarecrow who had been carrying my bed.
“You no be fit?”
“No, Ma.”
I pointed out a place against the wall.
“You go sit there. You go back to Sekondi. I get 'nother man. Headman, fetch in other man who no be fit.”
The culprit sat himself down most reluctantly, afraid, whether of me or the Ju-ju that was supposed to reign over the place, I know not, and the headman brought in another man.
“You no be fit?”
“No, Ma”; but it was a very reluctant no.
“Sit down over there. Another man, headman,” but somehow I did not think there would be many more. And for once my intuitions were right. The headman came back reporting the rest were fit. I felt triumphant. Then the unfortunate scare-crows against the wall rose up humbly and protested eagerly: “we be fit.”
But I was brutally stern. It cost me dear in the end, but it might have cost me dearer if I had taken them on. However, I had no intention of doing any such thing. They had declared themselves of their own free will “no fit.” I was determined they should remain “no fit” whatever it cost me to fill their places. I must rule this caravan, and I must decide where we should halt. I engaged two Kommenda men to carry the loads, and when I had taken photographs of the fort—how thankful I was that they turned out well, for Kommenda is one of the most unget-at-able places I know, and before a decent photographer gets there again I don't suppose there will be one stone left on another—I started after my men to Elmina.
The carriers who were “no fit” came with us. Why, I hardly know, but they were very, very repentant.
It was four o'clock before we left Kommenda, and since we had twelve miles to go I hardly expected to arrive before dark, but I did think we might arrive about seven. I reckoned without my host, or rather without my carriers. There was more than a modicum of truth in the statement that they were no fit. The dissipation of the day before, and the lack of chop to-day—carriers always make a big meal early in the morning—were beginning to tell; besides they were very bad specimens of their class, and they lingered and halted and crawled till I began to think we should be very lucky indeed if we got into Elmina before midnight. The darkness fell, and in the little villages the lights began to appear—these Coast villagers use a cheap, a very cheap sort of kerosene lamp—and more than once my headman appealed to me. “We stop here, Ma.”
I was very tired myself, now, very tired, indeed, and gladly would I have stopped, but those negro houses seen by the light of a flickering, evil-smelling lamp were impossible; besides I realised it would be very bad to give in to my men. Finally we left the last little village behind, and before us lay a long, crescent-shaped bay, with a twinkling point of light at the farther horn—Elmina, I guessed. It was quite dark now, sea and sky mingled, a line of white marked the breakers where the water met the sands, and on my left was the low shore hardly rising twenty feet above the sea-level, and covered with short, wiry sea-grasses, small shrubs, and the creeping bean. The men who were carrying me staggered along, stumbling over every inequality of the ground, and I remembered my youthful reading in “Uncle Tom's Cabin,” and felt I very much resembled Legree. There was, too, a modicum of sympathy growing up in my mind for Legree and all slave-drivers. Perhaps there was something to be said for them; they certainly must have had a good deal to put up with. Presently my men dropped the hammock, and I scrambled out and looked at them angrily. The carriers were behind, the policeman—my protection and my dignity—was nowhere to be seen, my two servants were just behind, where they ought to have been, and my four hammock-boys looked at me in sullen misery.
“We no be fit.”
The case was beyond all words at my command, and I set my face to the east, and began to walk in the direction of the feeble little light I could see twinkling in the far distance, and which I concluded rightly, as it turned out, must be Elmina.
My servants overtook me, and Grant, who had been a most humble person when first I engaged him, who had been crushed with a sense of his own unworthiness the night before, now felt it incumbent upon himself to protest.
“You no walk, Ma. It no be fit.”
How sick I was of that “no be fit.”
“Grant,” I said with dignity, at least I hope it was with dignity, abandoning pigeon English, “there is no other way. Tell those boys if I walk to Elmina they get no pay,” and I stalked on, wishing at the bottom of my heart I knew something of the manners and customs of the African snake. In my own country I should have objected strongly to walking in such grass, when I could not see my way, and it just shows the natural selfishness of humanity that this thought had never occurred to me while my hammock-boys were carrying me. I don't suppose I had gone half a mile when Grant and the boys overtook me.
“Ma,” said Grant with importance, the way he achieved importance that day was amazing, “you get in. They carry you now.”
“They no be fit.”
“They carry you,” declared he emphatically.
“We try, Ma,” came a humble murmur from the boys, and I got in once more and we staggered along.
How I hated it all, and what a brute I felt. I thought to offer a little encouragement, so I said after a little time, when I thought the light was getting appreciably larger: “Grant, which of these men carry me best?” and thought I would offer a suitable reward.
“They all carry you very badly, Ma,” came back Grant's stern reply; “that one,” and he pointed to the unfortunate who bore the lefthand front end of the hammock, “carry you worst.”
Now, here was a dilemma. The light wasn't very far away now, and I could see against the sky the loom of a great building.
“Very well,” I said, “each of the other three shall have threepence extra,” and the lefthand front man dropped his end of the hammock with something very like a sob, and left the other three to struggle on as best they might. We were close to Elmina now. There was a row of palms on our right between us and the surf, and I could see houses with tiny lights in them, and so could the men.
“I will walk,” I said.
But the three remaining were very eager. “No, Ma; no, Ma, we carry you.”
Then there appeared a man in European clothes, and him I stopped and interviewed.
“Is that the Castle of Elmina?”
“Yes,” said he, evidently mightily surprised at being interviewed by a white woman.
“Who is in charge?” and I expected to hear some negro post office or Custom official.
“Dr Dove,” said the stranger in the slurring tones of the negro.
“A white man?”
“Yes, a white man.”
For all my weariness, I could have shouted for joy. Such an unexpected piece of good luck! I had not expected to meet a white man this side of Cape Coast. I had thought the great Castle here was abandoned to the tender mercies of the negro official.
“You can get in,” went on my new friend; “the drawbridge is not down yet.”
A drawbridge! How mediaeval it sounded, quite in keeping with the day I had spent, the day that had begun in Chama fifty years ago.
We staggered along the causeway, the causeway made so many hundreds of years ago by the old Portuguese adventurers; the sentry rose up in astonishment, and we staggered across it into the old courtyard; I got out of my hammock at the foot of a flight of broad stone steps, built when men built generously, and a policeman, not mine, raced up before me. All was in darkness in the great hall, and then I heard an unmistakable white man's voice in tones of surprise and unbelief.
“A missus, a———”
I stepped forward in the pitchy darkness, wondering what pitfalls there might be by the way.
“I am a white woman,” I said uncertainly, for I was very weary, and I had an uneasy feeling that this white man, like so many others I had met, might think I had no business to be there, and I didn't feel quite equal to asserting my rights just at that moment, and then I met an outstretched hand. It needed no more. I knew at once. It was a kindly, friendly, helpful hand. Young or old, pretty or plain, ragged, smart, or disreputable, whatever I was, I felt the owner of that hand would be good to me. Dr Duff, for the negro had pronounced his name after his kind, led me upstairs through the darkness, with many apologies for the want of light, into a big room, dimly lighted by a kerosene lamp, and then we looked at each other.
“God bless my soul! Where on earth did you come from?” said he.
“No one told me there was a white man in Elmina,” said I; “and the relief of finding one was immense.”
But not till I was washed and bathed, dressed, fed, and in my right mind did we compare notes, and then we sat up till midnight discussing things.
It seemed to me I had sounded the depths, I had mastered the difficulties of African travel. My new friend listened sympathetically as he drank his whisky-and-soda, and then he flattered my little vanities as they had never been flattered since I had set out on my journeyings.
“Not one woman in ten thousand would have got through.”
I liked it, but I think he was wrong. Any woman who had once started would have got through simply and solely because there was absolutely nothing else to be done. It is a great thing in life to find there is only one way.
Then Dr Duff descended to commonplace matters.
“I hope you don't mind,” said he; “I've kicked your policeman.”
“That,” said I, “is a thing he has been asking someone to do ever since we left Sekondi a thousand years ago.”
But one man of the ruling race—Overlooked Elmina—Deadly fever—The reason why—Magnificent position—Ideal for a capital—Absence of tsetse—Loyal to their Dutch masters—Difficulty in understanding incorruptibility of English officials—Reported gold in Elmina—The stranded school-inspector—“Potable water”—Preferred the chance of guinea-worm to trouble—Stern German head-teacher—Cape Coast—Wonderful native telegraphy—Haunted Castle—Truculent people.
Elmina means, of course, the mine, and the reason for the name is lost in the mist of ages. Certain it is there is no mine nearer than those at Tarkwa, at least two days' journey away, but in the old Portuguese and Dutch days Elmina was a rich port. It is a port still, though an abandoned one, and you may land from a boat comfortably on to great stone steps, as you may land in no other place along the Guinea Coast. On the 17th of May in this year of our Lord, 1911, there raged along the Coast a hurricane such as there has not been for many a long day, and the aftermath of that hurricane was found in a terrific surf, which for several days made landing at any port difficult, in some cases impossible. The mail steamer found she could land no mails at Cape Coast, and then was forgotten, neglected Elmina remembered, and the mails were landed there, eight miles to the west, and carried overland to their destination.
Yet is there but one man of the ruling race in Elmina, and the fine old Castle, where the Portuguese and Dutch governors of Guinea reigned, is almost abandoned to the desecrating hand of the negro officials—Custom and post office men! Why, when the Gold Coast was looking for a capital, they overlooked Elmina is explained usually by the declaration that yellow fever was very bad there; and I conclude it was for the same reason that they passed it by when they wanted a seaport for the inland railway. Somehow it seems an inadequate reason. It would have been cheaper surely to search for the cause of the ill-health than to abandon so promising a site. The reason lies deeper than that. It is to be found in that strong feeling in the Englishman—that feeling which is going to ruin him as a colonising nation now that rivals are in the field, unless he looks to his ways—that one place in “such a poisonous country” is as good or as bad as another, and therefore if people die in one place, “let's try another beastly hole.” Die they certainly did in Elmina. It was taken over from the Dutch in 1874, and in 1895 the records make ghastly reading. “Yellow fever, died,” you read, not once but over and over again. Young and strong and hopeful, and always the record is the same, and now, looking at it with seeing eyes and an understanding mind, the explanation is so simple, the cure so easy.
Round this great Castle is a double line of moats, each broad and deep and about half a mile in extent, and these moats were full to the brim of water, stagnant water, an ideal breeding place for that entirely domesticated animal, the yellow-fever mosquito—stegmia, I believe, is the correct term. Get but one yellow-fever patient, let him get bitten by a mosquito or two, and the thing was done. But sixteen years ago they were not content with such simple ways as that. It seems there was a general sort of feeling then along the Coast, it has not quite gone yet, that chill was a thing greatly to be dreaded, and so instead of taking advantage of the magnificent position so wisely chosen by the Portuguese mariners, where the fresh air from the ocean might blow night and day, they mewed themselves up in quarters on the landward side of the Castle, so built that it is almost impossible to get a thorough draught of air through them. The result in such a climate is languor and weariness, an ideal breeding ground for malaria or yellow fever. And so they died, God rest their souls; some of them were gallant gentlemen, but they died like flies, and Elmina, for no fault of its own, was abandoned.
0212
And yet the old Portuguese were right. It is an ideal site for a capital. The Castle is on a promontory which juts out into the sea, and is almost surrounded by water, for the Sweetwater River, which was very salt when I was there, runs into the sea in such a fashion as to leave but a narrow neck of land between the Castle and the mainland. The land rises behind the town, it is clear of scrub and undergrowth, so that horses and cattle may live, as there is no harbour for that curse of West Africa, the tsetse fly; there is sufficient open space for the building of a large town, and it is nearer to Kumasi, whence comes all the trade from the north, than Sekondi, which was chosen, instead of it, as a railway terminus. A grievous pity! It is England's proud boast that she lets the man on the spot have a free hand, knowing that he must be the better judge of local conditions and needs; it is West Africa's misfortune that she had so evil a reputation that the best and wisest men did not go there; and hence these grave mistakes.
I had always believed that every coloured man was yearning to come under the British flag, therefore was I much astonished to hear that in 1874, when Britain took over this part of the Coast, the natives resented the change of masters very bitterly. They would not submit, and the big village to the west of the fort, old Elmina native town, was in open rebellion. At last the guns from the fort were turned upon it, the inhabitants evacuated it hastily, it was bombarded, and the order went forth that no one should come back to it.
Even now, thirty-seven years later, the old law which prohibits the native from digging on the site of the old town is still in force, and since the natives were in the habit of burying their wealth beneath their huts, great store of gold dust is supposed to be hidden there. Again and again the solitary official in charge of Elmina has been approached by someone asking permission to dig there, generally with the intimation that if only the permission be granted, a large percentage of the hidden treasure shall find its way into the pockets of that official.
“It is hard,” said Dr Duff, “for the native mind to grasp the fact that the English official is incorruptible, and the law must be kept—but I confess,” he added, “I should like to know if there really is gold in old Elmina.”
The town has been a fine town once. The houses are substantially built of stone, they are approached by fine flights of stone steps, there are the ruins of an old casino, and picturesque in its desolation is an old Dutch garden. If I were to describe the magnificent old Castle, I should fill half the book; it is so well worth writing about. I walked up the hill behind the Castle where they have built up the roadway with discarded cannon, and there I took photographs and wished I had a little more time to spare for the place, and vowed that when I reached England the British Museum should help me to find out all there is to be known about this magnificent place and the men who have gone before.
0216
For the man of the present it must be a little difficult to live in, if it is only for the intense loneliness. It must be lonely to live in the bush with the eternal forest surrounding you, but at least there a man is an outpost of Empire, the trade is coming to him, he may find interest and amusement in the breaking of a road or the planning of a garden, while the making of a town would fill all his time, but in Elmina there are no such consolations. The place is dead, slain by the English; the young men go away following the trade, and the old mammies with wrinkled faces and withered breasts lounge about the streets and talk of departed glories.
I had not expected to find one white man here, and I found two, the other being a school-inspector who was on his way along the Coast inspecting the native schools. He was in a fix, for he had sent on his carriers and stores and could get no hammock-boys. They had promised to send them from Cape Coast and they had not come. The medical officer made both us strangers hospitably welcome, but stores are precious things on the Coast and one does not like to trespass, so he was a troubled school-inspector.
“I think I'll walk on to Kommenda,” said he.
“I wouldn't,” said I, the only one who knew that undesirable spot.
We made a queer little party of three in that old-world Castle, in the old Dutch rooms that are haunted by the ghosts of the dead-and-gone men and women of a past generation. At least, I said they were haunted, the school-inspector was neutral, and the medical officer declared no ghosts had ever troubled him. I don't know whether it was ghosts that troubled me, but the fact remains that I, who could sleep calmly by myself in the bush with all my carriers drunk, could not sleep easily now that my troubles were over, and I set it down to the haunting unhappy thoughts of the people who had gone before me, who were dead, but who had lived and suffered in those rooms; and yet in the day-time we were happy enough, and the two men instructed me as one who had a right to know in things African. The school-inspector was very funny on the education of the native. His great difficulty apparently was to make the rising generation grasp the fact that grandiloquent words of which they did not understand the meaning were not proofs of deep knowledge. The negro is like the Hindoo Baboo dear to the heart of Mr Punch. He dearly loves a long word. Hygiene is a subject the Government insist upon being taught, only it seems to me they would do more wisely to teach it in the vernacular so that it might be understood by the common people. As it is, said my school-inspector, the pupils are very pat; and when solemnly asked by the teacher what are the constituents of drinking water, rap out a list of Latin adjectives the only one of which he can understand is “potable.”
“Tut, tut,” said the inspector, “run along, Kudjo, and bring me a glass of drinking water”; and then it was only too evident that that youthful scion of the Fanti race who had been so glib with his adjectives did not understand what “potable” meant.
0220
Afterwards in the eastern portion of the Colony I was told of other difficulties and snares that lie in the way of the unlucky schoolmaster. In Africa it is specially necessary to be careful of your water, as in addition to many other unpleasant results common in other lands there is here a certain sort of worm whose eggs may apparently be swallowed in the water. They have an unpleasant habit of hatching internally and then working their way out to the outer air, discommoding greatly their unwilling host. Therefore twice a week in every English school the qualities of good water and the way to insure it are insisted upon by the teacher. But does that teacher practise what he preaches? He doesn't like guinea-worm, but neither does he like trouble, wherefore he chooses the line of least resistance and chances his water. If the worst come to the worst and he has guinea-worm, a paternal Government will pay his salary while he is ill.
At least up till lately it always has. But a change is coming over the spirit of the dream. The other day there arose in Keta, a town in the Eastern Province, a German head-teacher who got very tired of subordinates who were perpetually being incapacitated by guinea-worm, a perfectly preventable disease, and, as the Germans are nothing if not practical, there went forth in his school the cruel order that any teacher having guinea-worm should have no salary during his illness. There is going to be one more case of guinea-worm in that school, then there is going to be a sad and sorry man fallen from his high estate and dependent on his relatives, and then the teachers will possibly learn wisdom and practise what they preach. But in Elmina my school-inspector seemed to think the Golden Age was yet a long way off.
I left him and the medical officer with many hopes for a future meeting, and one afternoon took up my loads and having sent a telegram to the Provincial Commissioner—how easy it seemed now—set out for Cape Coast eight miles along the shore.
There is very little difference in the scenery all along the shore here. The surf thunders to the right, and to the left the land goes back low and sandy, covered with coarse grass and low-growing shrubs, while here and there are fishing villages with groves of cocoa-nuts around them, only the houses instead of being built of the raffia palm are built of swish, that is mud, and as you go east dirtier and dirtier grow the villages.
It took us barely two hours and a half to reach Cape Coast, one of the oldest if not the oldest English settlement on the Coast. It was the original Capo Corso of the Portuguese, but the English have held it since early in the seventeenth century, and the natives, of course, bear English names—in Elmina they have Dutch names—and remember no other masters.
Cape Coast is a great straggling untidy town with rather an eastern look about it which comes, I think, from the fact that many of the houses have flat roofs. But it is a drab-looking town without any of the gorgeous colouring of the east. The Castle is built down on the seashore behind great walls and bastions, and here are the Customs, the Commissioner's Court, the Post Office, all the mechanism required for the Government of a people, but the old cannon are still there, piles of shot and shell and great mortars, and in the courtyards are the graves of the men and women who have gone before, the honoured dead. Here lies the lady whom the early nineteenth century reckoned a poet, L. E. L., Laetitia Landor, the wife of Captain Maclean who perished by some unexplainable misadventure while she was little more than a bride, and here lies Captain Maclean himself, the wise Governor whom the African merchants put in when England, in one of her periodic fits of thriftless economy, would have abandoned the Gold Coast, and here are other unknown names Dutch and English, and oh, curious commentary on the hygiene of the time, in the same courtyard is the well whence the little company of whites, generally surrounded by a people often hostile, must needs in time of siege or stress always draw their water.
They say Cape Coast like Elmina is haunted, and men have told me tales of unaccountable noises, of footsteps that crossed the floor, of voices in conversation, of sighs and groans and shrieks for help that were unexplained and unexplainable. One man who had been D.C. there told me he could keep no servant in the Castle at night they were so terrified, but as I only paid flying visits to take photographs I cannot say of my own knowledge whether there is anything uncanny about it. There ought to be, for there are deep dungeons underground, dark and uncanny, where in old days they possibly kept their slaves and certainly their prisoners-of-war. There was no light in them then, there is very little now, only occasionally someone has knocked away a stone from the thick walls, and you may see a round of dancing sunlight in the gloom and hear the sound of the ceaseless surf. An officer in the Gold Coast regiment told me he wanted to have a free hand to dig in the earth here, for he was sure the pirates who owned it in the old days must have buried much treasure here and forgotten all about it, but he was a hopeful young man and looked forward to the days when the Ashantis should come down and besiege Cape Coast again as they had done in the old days, and he pointed out the particular gun on the bastion that in case of such an event he should train on the Kumasi road and blow those savages into the next world. I have seen those fighting men of Ashanti since then and I do not think they are ever coming to Cape Coast, at least as enemies, which perhaps is just as well, for the gun which that gay young lieutenant slapped so affectionately and called “Old Girl” is pretty elderly and I fancy might do more damage to those loading than to those at the other end of her muzzle.
But I did not lodge at the fort. The medical officer, it was always the medical officer to the rescue, very kindly took charge and I was very comfortably lodged in the hospital. And here I had proof of the wonderful manner in which news is carried by the birds of the air in West Africa. I had thought that the Provincial Commissioner was going to put me up, and I instructed my boys to that effect.
“Ask way to Government House,” which I thought lay to the west of the town. As we passed the first houses a man sprang up.
“Dis way, Ma, I show you,” and off he went, we following, and I thought my men had asked the question. Clearly Government House was not to the west, for we went on through the town and up a hill and up to a large bungalow which I was very sure was not Government House, unless we had arrived at the back.
I got out protesting, but my boys were very sure and so was our guide.
“Dis be bungalow, Ma. Missus come.”
Then I knew they were wrong, for I knew the Commissioner had no wife. But they weren't after all, for down the steps breathing kindly welcome came the medical officer's wife, a pretty bride of a couple of months, and she smilingly explained that the Commissioner had asked her to take me in because it would be so much more comfortable for me where there was another woman. “I suppose he sent you on,” said she.
But not only had he not sent me on, but he knew nothing of my coming, and was waiting in Government House for my arrival. The town, then, knew of my expected coming and his intentions with regard to me almost before he had formulated them himself. At any rate, it was none of his doing or his servants' doings that I went straight to the hospital, and the telegram stating my intention had only been sent that morning. So much for native telegraphy.
Round Cape Coast, in my mind, hangs a mist of romance which will always sharply divide it from the town as I saw it. When I think of it I have to remind myself that I have seen Cape Coast and that, apart from kindly recollections of the hospitality with which I was received, I do not like it. The people are truculent and abominably ill-mannered, and I do not think I would ever venture to walk in the streets again without the protection of a policeman.
There were two white women there, so they had hardly the excuse of curiosity, as we must have been familiar sights, yet they mobbed me in the streets, and when I tried to take photographs of the quaint, old-world streets, hustled and crowded me to such an extent that it was quite out of the question. And they did this even when I was accompanied by my two servants and my hammock-boys.
“These Fanti people catch no sense,” said Grant angrily, when after a wild struggle I had succeeded in photographing a couple of men playing draughts, and utterly failed to get a very nice picture of a man making a net. I quite agreed with Grant; these Fanti people do catch no sense, and I got no photographs, for which I was sorry, for there are corners in that old town picturesque and quaint and not unlike corners in the towns along the Sicilian coast. What they said of me I do not know, but I am afraid it was insulting, and if ever my friends the Ashantis like to go through Cape Coast again I shall give them a certain amount of sympathy. At least it would give me infinite satisfaction to hear of some of them getting that beating I left without being able to inflict.
I do not think a white woman would be safe alone in Cape Coast, and this I am the more sorry for because it has belonged so long to the English. Perhaps Dr Blyden is right when he says, and I think he spoke very impartially when speaking of his own people, that the French have succeeded best in dealing with the negro, I beg his pardon, the African. They have succeeded in civilising him, so says Dr Blyden, with dignity. The English certainly have not.
0228
The glory of the morning—The men who have passed along this road—The strong views of the African pig—An old-world Castle—Thieving carriers—The superiority of the white man—Annamabu—A perfect specimen of a fort—A forlorn rest-house—A notable Coast Chief—Tired-out mammies—The medical officer at Salt Ponds—The capable German women—The reason of the ill-health of the English women—Kroo boys as carriers—Tantum—A loyal rest-house—Filthy Appam—A possible origin for the yellow fever at Accra—Winne-bah—A check—The luckless ferryman—Good-bye to the road.
The carriers from Kommenda were only to come as far as Cape Coast, so here I had to find fresh men or rather women to replace them. I know nothing more aggravating than engaging carriers. Apparently it was a little break in the monotony of life as lived in an African town to come and engage as a carrier with the white missus, come when she was about to start, an hour late was the correct thing, look at the loads, turn them over, try to lift them, say “We no be fit,” and then sit down and see what would happen next. The usual programme, of course, was gone through at Cape Coast, the mammies I had engaged smiling and laughing as if it were the best joke in the world, and I only kept my temper by reflecting that since I could not beat them, which I dearly longed to do, it was no good losing it. They had had three days to contemplate those loads and they only found “we no be fit” as I wanted to start. Of course the men who had come on from Sekondi with me were now most virtuous; they bore me no ill-will for my harsh treatment, indeed they respected me for it, and they regarded themselves as my prop and my stay, as indeed they were.
With infinite difficulty I got off at last, taking three new carriers, mammies, where two had sufficed before.
Travelling in the early morning is glorious. The dew is on all the grass; it catches and reflects the sunbeams like diamonds, and there is a freshness in the air which is lost as the day advances. I loved going along that coast too.
I was thrown upon myself for companionship, for my followers could only speak a little pigeon English, and of course we had nothing in common, but the men and women who had gone before walked beside me and whispered to me tales of the strenuous days of old. Perhaps the Phoenicians had been here, possibly those old sea rovers, the Normans, and certainly the Portuguese; they had marched along this shore, even as I was marching along, only their own homes were worlds away and the bush behind was peopled for them with unknown monsters, such as I would not dream of. They had feared as they walked, and now I, a woman, could come alone and unarmed.
Leaving Cape Coast that still, warm, tropical morning, we passed the people coming into town to the markets with their wares upon their heads, all carried in long crates, chickens and fowls and unhappy pigs strapped tightly down, for the African pig, like the pig in other lands, has a mind of his own; he will not walk to his own destruction, he has to be carried. These traders were women usually, and they looked at me with interest and no little astonishment, for I believe that never before had a white woman by herself gone alone along this path.
0232
My carriers had been instructed to go to Accra and to Accra they went by the nearest way, sometimes cutting off little promontories, and thus it happened that, looking up on one of these detours, I saw on a hill, between me and the sea, a ruined fort. Of course I stopped the hammock and got out. I had come to see these forts, and here I was passing one. I wanted to go back. My headman demurred. Had I not distinctly said I wanted to go to Accra, and were we not on the direct road to Accra? To get to that old fort, which he did not think worth looking at, we should have to go back an hour's journey, and the men “no be fit.” I am regretful now that I only saw that fort from a distance. It was very very hot, and I don't think I felt very fit myself; at any rate, the thought of two hours extra in the hammock dismayed me and I decided to take a long-distance photograph from where I stood. It was an old Dutch fort—Fort Mori—and was built on high ground overlooking a little bay. I think now it would have been easier for me to do that two hours than to climb as I did, with the assistance of Grant and my headman, to the highest point on the roadside, through long grass, scrub, and undergrowth, there to poise myself uneasily to get a photograph of the ruins. An ideal place, whispered the men of old, for a fort in the bygone days, for it overlooked all the surrounding country, there was no possibility of surprise, and at its feet was a little sheltered bay. Now, on the yellow sands, in the glare of the sunshine, I could see the great canoes that dared the surf drawn up, the thatched roofs of the native town that drew its sustenance from the sea and in old times owed a certain loyalty to the fort and derived a certain prestige from the presence of the white men.
Regretfully I have only that distant memory of Fort Mori, and I went on. Those men who were “no fit” to take me back behaved abominably. Whenever they neared a village they endeavoured to steal from the inhabitants—a piece of suger-cane, a ball of kenky, or a few bananas—and again and again a quarrel called me to intervene. It is very curious how soon one gets an idea of one's own importance. In England, if I came across a crowd of shouting, furious, angry men, I should certainly pass by on the other side, but here in Africa when I was by myself I felt it my bounden duty to interfere and inquire what was the matter. It was most likely some trouble connected with my carriers. I disliked very much making enemies as I passed, and I endeavoured to catch them and make them pay for what they had stolen. And now I understood at last how it is white people living among a subject race are so often overwhelmed in a sudden rising. It is hard to believe that these people whom you count your inferiors will really rise against you. Here was I, alone, unarmed, only a woman, and yet immediately I heard a commotion I attended at once and dispensed justice to the very best of my ability. I fully expected village elders to bow to my decision, and I am bound to say they generally did.
Most of the villages along the Coast bore a strong family resemblance to the one in which I had spent an unhappy hour while my men attended the funeral palaver, and all the shore is much alike. Between Axim and Sekondi is some rough, rugged, and pretty country, but east and west of those points the shore is flat, and the farther east you go the flatter it becomes, till at the mouth of the Volta and beyond it is all sand and swamp. The first day out from Cape Coast it was somewhat monotonous, possibly if I went over it again I should feel that more; but there was growing up in me a feeling of satisfaction with myself—I do trust it was not smug—because I was getting on. I was doing the thing so many men had said I could not possibly do, and I was doing it fairly easily. Of course, I was helped, helped tremendously by the freehanded hospitality of the people in the towns through which I passed, for which kindness I can never be sufficiently grateful, but here with my carriers I was on my own, and I began to regard them as the captures of my bow and spear, and therefore I at least did not find the country uninteresting. Who ever found the land he had conquered dull?
In due course I arrived at Annamabu, an old English fort that the authorities on the Gold Coast hardly think worth preserving, and have given over to the tender mercies of the negro Custom and post office officials. Like Elmina, I could write a book about Annamabu alone, and I was the more interested in it because it is the most perfect specimen of the entirely English fort on the Coast, and is built at the head of a little bay, where is the best landing on the Coast for miles round.
There is a curious difference between the sites chosen by the different nations. The other nations apparently always chose some bold, commanding position, while the English evidently liked, as in this instance, the head of a little bay and a good landing.
Annamabu is quite a big native town, ruled over, I believe, by a cultured African, a man who is well read and makes a point of collecting all books about the Coast, and has, so they say, some rare old editions. I tried to see him and went to his house, a mud-built, two-storied building, where I sat in a covered courtyard and watched various members of his family go up and down a rickety staircase that led to the upper stories, but the Chief was away on his farm, and even though I waited long he never made his appearance. I should like to have seen the inside of his house, seen his books; all I did see was the courtyard, all dull-mud colour, untidy and unkempt, with a couple of kitchen chairs in it, a goat or two, some broken-down boxes and casks, and the drums of state that marked his high office piled up outside the door.
In the fort itself is the rest-house on the bastion, as untidy and dirty as the Chiefs courtyard. There are three rooms opening one into the other, and in the sitting-room, a great high room with big windows—those men of old knew how to build—there is a table, some chairs, a cupboard, and a filter, on which is written that it is for the use of Europeans only, and behind in the bedroom is the forlornest wreck of a bed, and some remnants of crockery that may have been washed about the time when Mrs Noah held the first spring cleaning in the ark, but apparently have never been touched since. It is only fair to say that every traveller, they are like snow in summer, carries his own bedding, and in fact all he needs, so that all that is really wanted for these rest-houses along the shore is a good broom and a good stout arm to wield it, and if a place is left without human occupancy the dirt is only clean dust, for the clean air along these coasts is divine.
But at Annamabu the usual difficulties came in my way; my old men were well broken-in now, but my new mammies were—well—even though I am a woman, and so by custom not permitted to use bad language, I must say they were the very devil. They carried on with the men and then they complained of the men's conduct, and when they arrived at Annamabu—late, of course, and one of them had the chop box—they sent in word to say they “no be fit” to go any farther, and there and then they wanted to go back to Cape Coast.
I said by all means they might go back to Cape Coast, but the loads would have to be left here and sent for from Salt Ponds, and therefore, as they had not completed their contract, they should be paid nothing.
They came and lay down before me in attitudes of intense weariness calculated to move the heart of a sphinx, but I came to the conclusion I must be a hard-hearted brute, for I was adamant, and those weeping women decided they would go on to Salt Ponds.
At Salt Ponds there is a little company of white people, and, so says report, the very worst surf on the Coast, with perhaps the exception of Half Assinie. The D.C. was away, so the Provincial Commissioner had telegraphed to the medical officer asking him to get me quarters. I arrived about three o'clock on a Sunday afternoon, when the place was apparently wrapped in slumber; the doctor's bungalow was pointed out to me, built on stilts on a cement foundation, and on that foundation I established myself and my loads, and made my way upstairs. A ragged and blasphemous parrot, with a very nice flow of language, was in charge, and he did not encourage me to stop, nor did he even hint at favours to come, so I went down again and waited. Apparently I might wait; towards evening I made my way—I was homeless—towards another bungalow, where a white man received me with astonishment, gave me the nicest cup of tea I have ever drunk, and sent for the medical officer, who had lunched off groundnut soup and had gone into the country to sleep it off. We all know groundnut soup is heavy.
The medical officer remains in my mind as a man with a grievance; he was kind after his fashion, but he did hate the country. If I had listened to him, I should have believed it was unfit for human habitation, and I couldn't help wondering why he had honoured it with his presence. In his opinion it was exceedingly unbecoming in a woman to be making her way along the Coast alone. To drive in these facts he found me house-room with the only white woman in the place, the charmingly hospitable wife of the German trader who had been on the Coast for a couple of years, who was perfectly well, healthy, and happy, who always did her own cooking, and who gave me some of the most delicious meals I have ever tasted. Thus I was introduced to the German element in West Africa, and began to realise for the first time that efficiency in little things which is going to carry the Germans so far. This fair-haired, plump young woman, with the smiling young face, was one of a type, and I could not help feeling sorry there were not more English women like her. I do not think I have ever met an English woman, with the exception of the nursing Sisters, who has spent a year on the Coast. The accepted theory is they cannot stand it, and in the majority of cases they certainly can't. They get sick. With my own countrywomen it is different; the Australian stays, so does the German, so does the French woman. At first I could not understand it at all, but at last the explanation slowly dawned upon me.
“Haus-fraus,” said many a woman, and man, too, scornfully, when I praised those capable German women who make a home wherever you find them, and it is thishaus-frauelement in them that saves them. A German woman's pride and glory is her house, therefore, wherever she is she has to her hand an object of intense interest that fills her mind and keeps her well. An Australian does not take so keen an interest in her house, perhaps, but she has had no soft and easy upbringing; from the time she was a little girl she has got her own hot water, helped with the cooking, washing, and all the multifarious duties of a houshold where a servant is a rarity, therefore, when she comes to a land where servants are plentiful, if they are rough and untaught, she comes to a land of comfort and luxury. Besides, it is the custom of the country that a woman should stand beside her husband; she has not married for a livelihood, men are plentiful enough and she has chosen her mate, wherefore it is her pleasure and her joy to help him in every way. She is as she ought to be, his comrade and his friend, a true helpmate. God forbid that I should say there are not English women like that, because I know there are, but the conditions in England are also very different. The girl who has been brought up in an English household, even if it be a poor one, is not only brought up in luxury, but is the victim of many conventions. Any ruffled rose leaf makes her unhappy. The servants that to the Australian are a luxury to be revelled in are very bad indeed to her. Whenever I saw one of these complaining English women, I used to think of the Princess of my youth. We all remember her. She was wandering about lost, as royalty naturally has a habit of doing, and she came to a little house and asked the inmates to give her shelter because she was a princess. They took her in, but being just a trifle doubtful of her story—when I was a little girl I always felt that was rather a slur upon those dwellers in the little house—they put on the bed a pea and then they put over it fourteen hair mattresses and fourteen feather beds—it doesn't seem to have strained the household to provide so much bedding—and then they invited the princess to go to bed, which she did. In my own mind I drew the not unnatural conclusion that princesses were accustomed to sleeping in high beds. Next morning they asked her how she slept. She, most rudely, I always thought, said she had not been able to sleep at all, because there was such a hard lump in the bed. And so they knew that her story was true, and she was a real princess. Now, the English women in West Africa always seem to me real princesses of this order. Certain difficulties there always are for the white race in a tropical climate, there always will be, but there is really no need to find out the peas under twenty-eight mattresses. In a manless country like England, many a woman marries not because the man who asks her is the man she would have chosen had she free right of choice, but because to live she must marry somebody, and he is the first who has come along. He may be the last. Her African house interests her not, her husband does not absorb her, she has no one to whom to show off her newly wedded state, no calls to pay, no afternoon teas, nomatinées, in fact she has no interest, she is bored to death; she is very much afraid of “chill,” so she shuts out the fresh, cool night air, and, as a natural result, she goes home at the end of seven months a wreck, and once more the poor African climate gets the credit.
No, if a woman goes to West Africa there is a great deal to be said for the Germanhaus-frau. At least they always seem to make a home, and I have seen many English women there who cannot.
At Salt Ponds one of my carriers came to me saying he was sick and wanting medicine, and I regret to say, instead of sending him at once to the doctor, I casually offered him half a dozen cascara tabloids, all of which to my dismay he swallowed at one gulp. The next morning he was worse, which did not surprise me, but I called in the medical officer and found he was suffering from pneumonia—cascara it appears is not the correct remedy—and I was forced to leave him behind. The mammies I had engaged at Cape Coast also declined to go any farther, so I had to look around me for more carriers, and carriers are by no means easy to come by. Finally the Boating Company came to the rescue with four Kroo boys, and then my troubles began.
I set out and hoped for the best, but Kroo boys are bad carriers at all times. These were worse than usual. One of my hammock-boys hurt his foot, or said he had, and had for the time to be replaced by a Kroo boy, and we staggered along in such a fashion that once more I felt like a slave-driver of the most brutal order. Again and again we stopped for him to rest, and my hammock-boys remarked by way of comforting me:
“Kroo boy no can tote hammock.”
“Why can Kroo boy no tote hammock?”
“We no know, Ma. We no be Kroo boy.”
We scrambled along somehow, out of one village into another, and at every opportunity half the carriers ran away and had to be rounded up by the other half. In eight hours we had only done fifteen miles. I felt very cheap, very hungry, very thirsty, and most utterly thankful when we arrived late in the afternoon at a dirty native town called Tantum. The carriers straggled in one by one, and last of all came my chop box, so that, for this occasion only, luncheon, afternoon tea, and dinner were all rolled into one about six o'clock in the evening.
The rest-house was a two-storied house, built of swish and white-washed, and was inside a native compound, where both in the evening and in the morning the women were most industriously engaged in crushing the corn, rolling it on a hard stone with a heavy wooden roller.
And the rest-house, though very loyal, there were four coloured oleographs of Queen Alexandra round the walls of the sitting-room and two at the top of the stairs, all exactly alike, was abominably dirty. It had a little furniture—two mirrors, well calculated to keep one in a subdued and humble frame of mind, a decrepid bed that I was a little afraid to be in the same room with lest its occupants would require no invitation to get up and walk towards me, a table, and some broken-down chairs. Also on the wall was a notice that two shillings must be paid by anyone occupying this rest-house. Someone had crossed this out and substituted two shillings and sixpence, and that in its turn had been erased, so, as the sum went on increasing at each erasure, at last eighteen shillings and sixpence had been fixed as the price of a night's lodging in this charming abode. I decided in my own mind that two shillings would be ample, and that if the people were civil I should give them an extra threepence by way of a dash.
I photographed Tantum with the interested assistance of a gentleman clad in a blue cloth and a tourist cap. He seemed to consider he belonged to me, so at last I asked him who he was.
“P'lice,” said he with a grin, and then I recognised my policeman in unofficial dress.
I didn't like that village. The people may have been all right, but I didn't like their looks and I made my “p'lice” sleep outside my door. My bedroom had the saving grace of two large windows, and I put my bed underneath one of them in the gorgeous moonlight; but a negro town is very noisy on a moonlight night and the tom-toms kept waking me. I always had to be the first astir else my following would have cheerfully slumbered most of the day, but on this occasion so bright was the moonlight, so noisy the town, that I proceeded to get up at two o'clock, and it was only when I looked at my travelling clock, with a view to reproaching Grant with being so long with my tea, that I discovered my error and went back to bed and a troubled rest again.
Two shillings was accepted with a smile by the good lady of the house, who was a stout, middle-aged woman with only one eye, a dark cloth about her middle, and a bright handkerchief over her head. She gave me the impression that she had never seen so much money in her life before. Possibly she had only recently gone into the rest-house business, say a year or two back, and I was her first traveller with any money to spend. We parted with mutual compliments, and I bestowed on her little grand-daughter the munificent dash of threepence.
There is a story told of a man who went out to India, and as he liked sunshine used to rise up each morning and say to his wife with emphasis, “Another fine day, my dear.”
Now, she, good woman, had been torn from her happy home in England, and loved the cool grey skies, so at last much aggravated she lost her temper, and asked: “What on earth else do you expect in this beastly country?”
So, along the Guinea Coast in the month of March, the hottest season, there is really nothing else to expect but still, hot weather: divine mornings, glorious evenings, but in between fierce hot sunshine. And of course it was not always possible to travel in the coolest part of the day. To sit still by the roadside in the glare of the sunshine, or even under a tree, with a large crowd looking on, was more than I could have managed. So I started as early as I could possibly induce my men to start—one determined woman can do a good deal—and then went straight on if possible without a stop to my next point. I would always, when I am by myself, rather be an hour or two late for luncheon than bother to stop to have it on the way, and if a breakfast at half-past five or six and a morning in the open air induces hunger by eleven, it is easily stayed by carrying a little fruit or biscuits or chocolate to eat by the way.
It was fiercest noonday when I came to a town called Appam, where once upon a time was an old Dutch lodge worth keeping, if only to show what a tiny place men held garrisoned in the old days. It is hardly necessary to say that the Gold Coast Government do not think so, and have handed this old-time relic over to negro Custom and post office officials; and, judging by the condition of the rest of the town, much has not been required of them, for Appam is the very filthiest town I have ever seen. The old lodge is on the top of a hill overlooking the sea, splendidly situated, but you arrive at it by a steep and narrow path winding between a mass of thatched houses, and it stands out white among the dark roofs. As a passer-by, I should say the only thing for Appam is to put a fire-stick in the place; nothing else but fire could cleanse it. Many of the young people and children were covered with an outbreak of sores that looked as if nasty-looking earth had been scattered over them and had bred and festered, and they told me the children here were reported to be suffering and dying from some disease that baffled the doctors, what doctors I do not know, for there is no white man in Appam. It seems to me it is hardly necessary to give a name to the disease. I should think it was bred of filth pure and simple, and my remedy of the fire-stick would go far towards curing it. But there is a graver side to it than merely the dying of these negro children. Appam is not very far from Accra; communication by surf boat must go on weekly, if not daily, and Appam must be an ideal breeding ground for the yellow-fever mosquito. I know nothing about matters medical, but I must say, when I heard Accra was quarantined for yellow fever, I was not surprised. I had come all along the Coast, and filthier villages it would be difficult to find anywhere, and of these filthy villages Appam, a large town, takes the palm. I left it without regret, and though I should like to see that little Dutch lodge again, I doubt if I ever shall.
My carriers were virtue itself now. The Kroo boys were giving so much trouble that they posed as angels. I must admit they were a cheery, good-tempered lot, and it was impossible to bear malice towards them. They had forgotten that I had ever been wrathful, and behaved as if they were old and much-trusted servants. Munk-wady, a Ju-ju hill on the shore between Appam and Winnebah, is steep and the highest point for many miles along the Coast, and over its flank, where there was but a pretence at a road, we had to go.
“You no fear, Ma; you no fear,” said the men cheerily, “we tote you safe”; and so they did, and took me right across the swamp that lay at the other side and right into the yard of the Basel Mission Factory at Winnebah, where a much-astonished manager made me most kindly welcome. It amused me the astonishment I created along the road. No one could imagine how I could get through, and yet it was the simplest matter. It merely resolved itself into putting one foot before the other and seeing that my following did likewise. Of course, there lay the difficulty. “Patience and perseverance,” runs the old saw, “made a Pope of his reverence”; and so a little patience and perseverance got me to Accra, though I am sometimes inclined to wonder if it wasn't blind folly that took me beyond it.