Prince Buaki and the deputies left Coomassie on April 3rd, and had arrived at the village of Akankuassi when a messenger overtook them with instructions from the king to stop. What was the cause of this sudden change in the original plan decided upon by the entire nation in council? News had been brought to Coomassie that the men and stores, which had been collected at Mansu by the Colonial Government, were beginning to be moved on to Prahsu. The king, conceiving that the Government was fully determined on war, thought that the next move would be from Prahsu to the Adansi territory, perhaps to the Adansi hills; and, concluding that it would be useless to make any further overtures for peace, he stopped the embassy, so as to spare his dignity as much as possible, and prepared to exhaust all the resources of the kingdom in a struggle which he foresaw would be for very existence.
So far this was the result of the Governor’s bush expedition, and it was a result which had been very generally expected. Captain Hope in a letter to the Admiralty, dated Elmina, April 3rd, said:—“The expedition of the Governor is, in the opinion of some people, calculated to arouse their suspicion of us, as, although of course strictly within our territory, it is on the road to Coomassie, and might be looked on as an advanced guard.... Active precautionary measures have by no means ceased, in fact a general feeling of uneasiness is springing up, probably due to the protracted negociations going on.” The Home Government too were not quite easy in their minds as to what the consequences of their agent’s action might be, for in a despatch from Lord Kimberley, dated April 29th, we find these words:—“The remarks of the Chief Justice, that he had heard at Accra that the Ashantis seemed to believe that the white men intended to take Coomassie, and that great care should be taken to prevent them from being driven into war through fear of our aggression, appear to me to deserve careful attention. It would be lamentable if a collision were to arise from any misunderstanding of this kind, and I have no doubt that you will take every means to remove from the mind of the Ashanti king any apprehension which he may entertain of an aggressive movement on our part.”
At the time of writing that despatch Lord Kimberley little knew how very nearly his worst fears had been realised, and that the Governor, instead of taking every means to remove apprehension from the mind of the king, had done everything calculated to increase it.
CHAPTER XV.
A Trip to Prahsu—Mansu—A Fiendish Réveille—Bush Travelling—Prahsu—The King of Adansi—Masquerading Costumes—The Camp—Strength of the Expedition.
On April 11th Colonel Justice, Lieutenant D. M. Allen (Acting Engineer), a Commissariat officer, and myself, started from Cape Coast about 5 a.m. in hammocks for Mansu, where we had heard the Governor was. Shortly after noon we reached Accroful, 13¾ miles from Cape Coast, where the road from Effutu joins the main road; and there we found Captain Lonsdale, the late Commandant of the Lonsdale’s Horse of the Zulu war, holding a palaver with the king of Abrah, from Abracampa. His object was to obtain five hundred carriers to transport a frame-house from Elmina to Mansu for the accommodation of the Governor, and we inferred from this that the latter intended making a lengthened sojourn in the bush. We halted for an hour at the house of the local mission preacher, which was, as usual, the best in the village, and then pushed on to Dunquah, where we stayed for the night.
Next morning we were off again at daybreak, and, after a three hours’ halt at Inkrau during the hottest part of the day, reached Mansu, 35½ miles from Cape Coast, at 4·30 p.m. On our arrival we found that the Governor with all his following had gone on to Prahsu, to which place it was decided we should follow, and the village would have been entirely deserted but for an officer of the constabulary, who had arrived the day before from Elmina viâ Effutu, with some 70 Houssas, and who was waiting to rest his men. The native inhabitants had all been ejected from their dwellings, which, after a little preliminary cleaning, had been appropriated by the officers who formed the Governor’s retinue; traces of whose stay were still existing in the piles of beer and brandy bottles, and in the ridiculous and inappropriate names, such as “Rose Villa,” which were daubed on the swish-walls of the houses. In the centre of the town was a large shed, built of bamboo and palm-leaves, and open at the sides: this was called the Palaver House, and had been erected in the anticipation of the Governor here meeting the Ashanti envoys; but, as they had not arrived, it seemed that no palaver would be held here after all, and the rows of bamboo seats for the retinue, with a bamboo throne for His Excellency, flanked by more lowly seats for his immediate satellites, were doomed to waste their sweetness unused. We had the honour of occupying the gubernatorial residence, which was an ordinary swish-hut, to one side of which an appendage like a gigantic birdcage had been added, which, while it kept the vulgar herd at a respectful distance, permitted of their gazing through the bars at royalty within, in much the same manner as the British public would gaze at a new and strange beast in the gardens of the Zoological Society at Regent’s Park.
Next morning, shortly after 4 a.m., we were wakened from a sound sleep by the roll of drums and the shrieking of half-a-dozen fifes: it was the Houssa “band” playing an untimely réveille. They were supposed to be playing that old point of war which begins “Old Father Paul came from the Holy Land,” but their acquaintance with it was limited to the first two bars, which they repeated over and over again. As the sound first penetrated our half-awakened senses we tried to keep it out and go to sleep again; then, finding that that was useless, we waited in expectancy for them to go on with the rest of the tune, and after the first two bars had been played over and over again for about ten minutes we were in a very fair state of nervous excitement. Soon the effect of this began to grow irritating; we commenced saying “Tum tumti tumti, tumti tumti tum,” to ourselves time after time; then we tried to shake that off and count; but we counted the thing ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty times, and still the infernal tum tumti tum went on in the same endless monotony, while we dressed by fits and starts in the dark, hoping and praying that the Houssas would either go on to the next bar or leave off altogether. The torture rapidly grew worse and worse: it seemed to rake up all our nerves, and every repetition went through us like a galvanic shock, while we could not go and implore the Constabulary officer to put a stop to it because we knew that it was as balm and consolation to his wounded military spirit. We tried to give our minds to other subjects, but it was out of the question, and conversation was impossible; our eyes became wild, our brows haggard, and we were rapidly approaching a state of frenzy, when, after half-an-hour’s torture, we fled from the demoniacal sounds. We passed the Houssas, marching up and down outside our habitation, blowing away vigorously with their cheeks distended to their utmost capacity, with our fingers in our ears, and rushed off into the damp forest path. What a universal sigh of relief we gave when we were out of hearing, but the diabolic rhythm went on in our minds long after that, and by 10 a.m. one of our number was down with fever. If any one should think that our nerves were unduly sensitive, let him get somebody to play on the piano, for half-an-hour without a single pause,