On my return to Bathurst I learned that Bakko enjoyed anything but
an enviable reputation. It appeared that its inhabitants were outcast
Mandingos, who had found it advisable to leave their native country,
and who, while thoroughly grasping the full meaning of _meum_, had but
hazy and unsatisfactory notions as to the interpretation of _tuum_,
in consequence of which their society was rather avoided, and they
were rarely seen in the haunts of civilisation, except on those few
occasions on which the intelligent police might be observed escorting
them towards a public building yclept the jail.
From Bakko I rode on over open country, adorned with herds of
short-horned cattle and solitary pie-bald sheep with long tails, and
where occasionally the wild ostrich may be seen, to Josswang, close to
Cape St. Mary. There are a few houses here, which, in the palmy days
of the colony, were the country residences of the Bathurst merchants,
but which now are affected by the universal blight which has fallen
upon the settlement and fast becoming ruinous. Ten miles from Cape
St. Mary is the Mandingo town of Sabbajee, now belonging to British
Combo, which was the scene of one of the glorious exploits of the great
advertiser Colonel Luke S. O’Connor, who commanded a force which took
the town, stockaded like all such, by assault. That individual’s mania
for self-laudatory memorials was so great that on this occasion he, as
Governor, took away two large kettledrums which had been captured by
a West India Regiment, and, after a short interval, returned them to
the regiment, embellished with two silver plates, which set forth that
he, during his administration of the government, had presented these
drums to it for gallantry in the field; and then sent in a bill for the
plates.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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