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
Of stone-implements I was lucky enough to secure thirty-six, and made over
four of them to my friend Professor Prestwich. They are found everywhere
throughout the country, but I saw no place of manufacture except those
noted near Axim. Mr. Sam, of Tumento, promised to forward many others to
England. The native women search for and find them not only near the beds
of streams, but also about the alluvial diggings. Nearly all are shaped
like the iron axe or adze of Urua, in Central Africa, a long narrow blade
with rounded top and wedge-shaped edge. This tool is either used in the
hand like a chisel, or inserted into a conical hole burnt through a
tree-branch, and the shape of the aperture makes every blow tighten the
hold. The people mount it in two ways, either as an axe in line with, or
as an adze at a right angle to, the helve.
At Akankon I obtained from Mr. Amondsen a stone-implement of novel shape,
not seen by me elsewhere. A bit of the usual close-grained trap had been
cut into a parallelopiped seven and a half inches long with a flat head
one inch and a half in diameter and a bevel-edge of two inches and
one-third along the slope. This part had been chipped ready for grinding,
and the article was evidently unfinished; one side still wanted polishing,
and the part opposite the bevel showed signs of tapering, as if a point
instead of an edge had been intended. At Axim I split off by gads and
wedges a large slice of the grooved rocks described by Burton; it came
home with me, and is now lodged in the British Museum.
The rest of my story is told in a few words. I canoed safely down the
Ancobra River, and reached Axim on April 14. This return was made sad and
solitary by the absence of my canine friend, Nero.
A week soon passed away at the port of the Gold-region. Mr. Grant
presently returned from his excursion to the west. He showed me fine
specimens of gold collected at Newtown, the English frontier-settlement
immediately east of French Assini. I had also warned him to look out for,
and he succeeded in finding, beds of bitumen permeated with petroleum:
this material will prove valuable for fuel and for asphalting, if not for
sale. My time was wholly taken up with papering and repacking my
collection, which had now assumed formidable proportions, and time fled
the faster as the days were occupied in also fighting an impertinent
attack of ague and fever.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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