Three hundred and twenty negroes murdered on that voyage alone. No wonder “Ichabod” is written over those old castles. Koromantyn that was once the chief stronghold, head castle of the English, is no more, its guns are red with rust, its walls are crumbling to ruin, its courtyards are desolate and grass-grown, and the people from the neighbouring villages go there when they want shaped stones. Annamabu still stands a model of what these castles used to be--with the exception of Elmina, the best model and best preserved along the 300 miles of coast. Cape Coast has been used for many purposes, but no white man can live there, because no servant will stay there, they declare it is haunted. Well it might be, for the dungeons are deep and dark, and assuredly they have been used. Kommenda is a shell, and no native will go into the courtyard where the bush is beginning to grow up because there is ju-ju upon it, and the evil spirits make it their home. At Annamabu, as I sat at luncheon, there came up a quick tropical storm. The roar of the wind hushed the sound of the ceaseless surf, the coconut palms bent before it, and the rain came down in torrents. It blotted out the sea, it swept off the bastion in streams, it beat down the breakers, and like a grey mist it shut out the surrounding landscape. “You stop here, Ma,” said my head man with a satisfaction he did not conceal. Stop there? With all the ghosts of the past? Would not the mulatto girl, who was the factor's wife, come back and walk along this bastion, as she must have done more than two hundred years ago? Would she be sad? Or glad? Or proud? Would not the men and women who had been driven so unwillingly through that long-tunnelled entrance, been shut up in those dark dungeons on the ground floor, come back mourning and wailing? Would not the white man, who had looked out over the sea with longing eyes, come tramping those stones again, heedless of dark mistress or coffers slowly piling with gold, counting the days, as he had counted them so often, when in his own pleasant land again he would enjoy the fruits of his labour? Stay? No, a thousand times, no, no. And the tropical storm passed, the golden rays of the afternoon sun fell through the slanting rain drops, and then the rain stopped and a mist rose up from the wet stones, and the sea lay blue, reflecting the blue sky above, and I went down the steps and into the tunnel, and out of the courtyard and away along the sea-shore past Koromantyn, and only in Jamaica did I realise that by the merest chance, I had seen and appreciated the beginnings of the iniquitous Middle Passage, that I had come upon the place whence came all the slaves who led the insurrections in that island for close on two hundred years. I have wandered in my life, far and wide, east and west, but that remote castle on the Guinea Coast made a far deeper impression than many a more important place. CHAPTER V--THE MIDDLE PASSAGE