Last, But Not Least, There
Is The Pig - A Rich Source Of Practice To The Local Lawyer.
Cape Coast Castle and then Accra were the next places of general
interest at which we stopped.
The former looks well from the
roadstead, and as if it had very recently been white-washed. It is
surrounded by low, heavily-forested hills, which rise almost from
the seashore, and the fine mass of its old castle does not display
its dilapidation at a distance. Moreover, the three stone forts of
Victoria, William, and Macarthy, situated on separate hills
commanding the town, add to the general appearance of permanent
substantialness so different from the usual ramshackledom of West
Coast settlements. Even when you go ashore and have had time to
recover your senses, scattered by the surf experience, you find this
substantialness a true one, not a mere visual delusion produced by
painted wood as the seeming substantialness of Sierra Leone turns
out to be when you get to close quarters with it. It causes one
some mental effort to grasp the fact that Cape Coast has been in
European hands for centuries, but it requires a most unmodern power
of credence to realise this of any other settlement on the whole
western seaboard until you have the pleasure of seeing the beautiful
city of San Paul de Loanda, far away down south, past the Congo.
My experience of Cape Coast on this occasion was one of the hottest,
but one of the pleasantest I have ever been through on the Gold
Coast. The former attribute was due to the climate, the latter to
my kind friends, Mr. Batty, and Mr. and Mrs. Dennis Kemp. I was
taken round the grand stone-built houses with their high stone-
walled yards and sculpture-decorated gateways, built by the
merchants of the last century and of the century before, and through
the great rambling stone castle with its water-tanks cut in the
solid rock beneath it, and its commodious accommodation for slaves
awaiting shipment, now almost as obsolete as the guns it mounts, but
not quite so, for these cool and roomy chambers serve to house the
native constabulary and their extensive families.
This being done, I was taken up an unmitigated hill, on whose summit
stands Fort William, a pepper-pot-like structure now used as a
lighthouse. The view from the top was exceedingly lovely and
extensive. Beneath, and between us and the sea, lay the town in the
blazing sun. In among its solid stone buildings patches of native
mud-built huts huddled together as though they had been shaken down
out of a sack into the town to serve as dunnage. Then came the
snow-white surf wall, and across it the blue sea with our steamer
rolling to and fro on the long, regular swell, impatiently waiting
until Sunday should be over and she could work cargo. Round us on
all the other sides were wooded hills and valleys, and away in the
distance to the west showed the white town and castle of Elmina and
the nine-mile road thither, skirting the surf-bound seashore, only
broken on its level way by the mouth of the Sweet River.
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