To The Gold Coast for Gold: A Personal Narrative. Vol. IIBurton, Richard Francis, Sir
History
To The Gold Coast for Gold: A Personal Narrative. Vol. II
Burton, Richard Francis, Sir
Ghana -- Description and travel; Gold mines and mining -- Ghana
Beyond the Fetish-Rocks the right bank shows a cleared mound ready for
immediate planting: this concession once belonged to Dr. Ross, of Axim.
Opposite it the mining-ground has been leased for prospecting by Messieurs
Gillett and Selby. The notable feature of the river is now the
prawn-basket, a long cone closed at the blunt apex: the Ancobra is a
'Camarones,' supplying a first-rate article for curries. This is the work
of the uninteresting little villages, scatters of mere crates built in
holes worn in the bush; all disappear during the floods, and are rebuilt
in the dry season for growing rice and tapping palm-trees. Besides a few
humans they contain nothing save lean dogs and etiolated poultry; cattle,
sheep, and even pigs are wholly unknown.
In the afternoon we pushed through a wild thunderstorm of furious tropical
rain, which pitted the river-face like musket-balls. It arose in the
south; but throughout the Ancobra valley wet weather apparently comes from
all directions. Chief Apo gravely ascribed it to our taking the wrong side
of the Fetish-Rocks. I have heard, even in civilised lands, sillier
post-hoc-ergo-propter-hocs.
There were two landing-places for the large Ingotro concession, both on
the right bank. The lower leads, they say, over dry land, but the way is
long and hilly. That up stream is peculiarly foul, and to us it was made
fouler by the pelting shower. At low water, in the dry season, the little
Nanwa creek, subtending the higher ground on the north, becomes too
shallow for the smallest dug-out; and we had to wade or to be carried over
an expanse of fetid and poisonous mangrove-mud festering in the sun, and
promising a luxuriant growth of ague and fever. The first rise of sandy
yellow loam showed the normal Gold Coast metalling of iron-stone and
quartz-gravel, thinly spread with water-rounded pebbles. Then the path,
very badly laid out, merged into a second foul morass, whose depths were
crossed by the rudest of bridges, single and double trunks of felled or
fallen trees. Nothing easier than to corduroy this _mauvais pas_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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