To The Gold Coast for Gold: A Personal Narrative. Vol. IBurton, Richard Francis, Sir
History
To The Gold Coast for Gold: A Personal Narrative. Vol. I
Burton, Richard Francis, Sir
Ghana -- Description and travel; Gold mines and mining -- Ghana
Aberdeen Creek abounds in sunken rocks, which do not, however, prevent a
ferry-boat crossing it. Governor Rowe began a causeway to connect it
with the next village, and about a third of the length has already been
done by convict labour. Aberdeen village is a spread of low thatched
huts, lining half-cleared roads by courtesy called streets. Murray Town
and Congo Town bring us to King Tom's Point. Here is the old Wesleyan
College, a large whitewashed bungalow with shingled roof, upper
_jalousies,_ and lower arches; the band of verdure in front being
defended from the waves by a dwarf sea-wall and a few trees still
lingering around it. The position is excellent: the committee, however,
sold it because the distance was too great for the boys to walk, and
bought a fitter place near Battery Point. Thus it became one of the many
Government stores. A deep indentation now shows Upper Town or Kru Town,
heaps of little thatched hovels divided by remnants of bush. It is,
despite its brook, one of the impurest sites in the colony: nothing can
teach a Kruman cleanliness; a Slav village is neatness itself compared
with his. This foul colony settled early in Sá Leone, and in 1816 an
ordinance was passed enabling it to buy its bit of land. The present
chief is 'King' Tom Peter, who is also a first-class police-constable
under the Colonial Grovernment; and his subjects hold themselves far
superior to their brethren in the old home down coast. 'We men work for
cash-money; you men work for waist-cloth.' Again 'pig-iron and tenpenny
nails!'
Beyond this point, at a bend of the bight, we anchor a few hundred feet
from the shore, and we command a front view of roadstead and 'city.'
St. George's Bay, the older 'Baie de France,' would be impossible but
for the Middle Ground, the Scarcies Bank, and other huge shoals of sand
pinned down by rocks which defend the roadstead from the heavy send of
the sea. It is supplied with a tide-rip by the Tagrin, Mitomba, Rokel,
or Rokelle, the Sá Leone River, which Barbot makes the ancients term Nia
(N_ia_), and which the Timni tribe call Robung Dakell, or Stream of
Scales. Hence some identify it with Pliny's 'flumen Bambotum crocodilis
et hippopotamis refertum.' Its northern bank is the low Bullom shore, a
long flat line of mud and mangrove, on which all the fevers, Tertiana,
Quartana, and Co., hold their court. The sea-facing dot is Leopard,
anciently Leopold, Island, where it is said a leopard was once seen: it
is, however, a headland connected by a sandspit with the leeward-most
point of the coast. The Bullom country takes a name after its tribe. A
score of years ago I was told they were wild as wild can be: now the
chief, Alimami (El-Imám) Sanúsi, hospitably receives white faces at his
capital, Callamondia. Moreover, a weekly post passes through Natunu to
Kaikonki _via_ Yongro, Proboh, and Bolloh.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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