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
A single snake-slough and an eight-ribbed turtle were found. The short,
sandy neck of the eastern knob is a playground for 'parson-crows' and
scavengers (turkey-buzzards); hawks, kites, and fish-eagles, white and
black, while the adjacent reefs are frequented by gulls, terns, and small
cranes.
Above the rock-line is a selvage of low vegetation--ipom[oe]a, white and
mauve-flowered; rushes and tangle-grass, a variety of salsolaceae, and the
cyperus, whose stalk is used like the _kalam_, or reed-pen, further east.
These growths are filmed with spiders' webs, whose central shafts lead to
their nests. The highest levels, only a few feet above water, are grown
with a dense bush that wants the matchet. Here are remains of plantations,
a little knot of bananas, a single tall cocoanut, many young palms, and a
few felled trunks overgrown with oysters. Europeans have proposed to build
bungalows on Bobowusua, where they find fresh sea-air, and a little
shooting among the red-breasted ring-doves, rails, and green pigeons
affecting the vegetation. It appears to us a good place for mooring hulks.
The steamers could then run alongside of them and discharge cargo for the
coming tramway, while surf-boats carrying two or three tons could load for
the Ancobra River.
The eastern or inner continuation of Bobowusua is Poke islet, a similar
but smaller block. During spring-tides they are linked together and to the
shore by reefs that stand up high and dry. Poke is the rock where,
according to Barbot, 'the negroes put their wives and children when they
go to war.' The tradition is that the Dutch mined it for silver. The metal
is known to exist in several places on and behind the coast, at Bosumato,
upon the Ancobra River south of 'Akankon,' and even at Kumasi. Besides,
gold has not yet been found here unalloyed with silver.
I was fortunate in collecting from this part of Africa stone-implements
before unknown to Europe. My lamented friend Winwood Reade, [Footnote:
_The Story of the Ashantee Campaign_ (pp. 2-4 and 314). London, Smith and
Elder, 1874.] one of those
Peculiar people whom death _has_ made dear,
was the first to bring them home from the eastern regions, Akwapim
(Aquapim), Prahsu, and the Volta River. Arrived at Axim, I nailed to the
walls of our sitting-room a rough print showing the faces and profiles of
worked stones. The result was a fair supply from the coast both up and
down till I had secured thirteen. [Footnote: I read a paper upon these
stone-implements (July 11, 1882) before the Anthropological Society at the
house of my friend, the President, General A. Pitt-Rivers; and made over
to him my small stock. It will find a home at Oxford, with the rest of his
noble anthropological collection, lately presented to the University.] All
were of the neolithic or ground type; the palaeolithic or chipped was
wholly absent, and so were weapons proper, arrowpiles and spear-points.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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