Annamabu is right on the sea-shore, built upon the rocks that crop out of the surrounding sand. So did the English keep watch and ward over their trade here. It is a great square grey pile, dignified in its very simplicity, and the only entrance is through a low tunnel in the great wall, narrow, and nowhere more than five feet four high. Once the dark people of the land took Annamabu, how, I cannot imagine, for those straight grim walls would seem to defy anything that a savage people could bring against them. There was a town at a little distance, built for the most part with the swish walls and thatched roofs common to the country, but here and there, shabby with the shabbiness of the tropics and the negro combined, were stone houses built on European lines that must have been miniature forts in their time. There is no need of a fort now, there is peace in the land, even the mighty pile of the Castle is delivered over to the care of the negroes, and the glory is departed. I went up the slanting path to the narrow entrance, the entrance, grim and dark and damp, and I got out of my hammock for it was too narrow to admit a hammock, and walked into the courtyard where the powers that be, represented by a medical officer some miles away along the shore, had piled up a store of boards to make certain accommodation for the town of Annamabu, which the inhabitants of the town of Annamabu, being children of nature, will never use. The sun beat down in that courtyard and took one's energy away. How, how in this languid, languishing heat were these mighty stones ever piled one upon the other? Only, surely, by slave labour, only, surely, by the aid of the whip and the goad. [Illustration: 0108] “The negro inhabitants are accounted very bold and stout fellows,” said Phillips of the _Hannibal_ who had come to enslave them, “but the most desperate, treacherous villains and great cheats upon the whole coast, for the gold here is accounted the worst and most mixed with brass of any in Guiny. The Castle, pretty strong, of about 18 guns.”