I set out to write about the Castles on the Guinea Coast, and I have wandered to the shores of Montego Bay on the other side of the Atlantic, and yet they are not as far apart as one would think. It is a far, far cry from the days when the Portuguese, and the English, and Dutch, and Danes, and Brandenburgers, and Swedes, built with slave labour great stone castles with walls and bastions, towers, and portcullises, all along the Guinea Coast from the mouth of the Gambia River to Whydah in Dahomey. The castles are there to-day to tell the tale, and some years ago before the war I travelled along 300 miles of that coast in a hammock borne on men's heads, and again and again as we moved along, our pace regulated by that of the slowest carrier who bore my goods upon his head, there loomed up before us either on a jutting headland, or at the head of some shallow bay, the grey and massive walls of some long-forgotten Castle. Truly one may say forgotten, only a few officials remember these trading strongholds of the past, and if some care, those in authority declare they are not worth keeping up since they are but relics of an iniquitous trade that is best not remembered. But the past cannot be wiped out. I hardly understood that till I came to Jamaica, till I watched the black women in ragged frocks and dilapidated hats weeding my garden, till I saw the roads thronged with them bearing burdens on their heads. It was forced upon me more emphatically when there came into my compound in Montego Bay one of the men who helped mend the roads in the forlornest remains of what had once been a shirt and trousers, while on his arm he wore what made him look like the savage he was, a bracelet of some red composition which had doubtless by its bright colour caught his eye. These were the same people, the very same people who had been brought from the Guinea Coast, more than one hundred, more than two hundred years ago. They are the same people you see on the Guinea Coast to-day. They called the people from this coast Koromantyns, and though they were, they said, the best slaves to be had, strong and vigorous, yet the French and Spanish refused to buy them, for they were warlike and were apt to rise and tight fiercely for their liberty. Probably many of them had Ashanti blood in their veins, and the Ashantis made good fighting men. The Krobos, too, were a little more to the East, and the Krobos were savages who, even in this century, allowed no young man to marry until he had killed his man. Often these fortified castles of the different European nations were within a stone's throw of each other, often they were destroyed, often they changed hands as the power of one nation waxed or waned, but in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the trade was the great thing and these men of old held their little scraps of land, held them though the holding cost them many lives.