The great sources of the world's supply of gold have been the United States, Russia, Australia, and South Africa, together with that portion of West Africa, known as Ashantee, bordering on the Gold Coast of Guinea.
There is a curious belief among the natives of the entire Gold Coast, and Ashantee as well. The Great Spirit, it is believed, created three each of white men and women, and as many black, and placed before them a large calabash and a sealed paper. To the black men he gave the first choice. They chose the calabash. This contained gold, iron, and the choicest products of the earth; but the black race remained ignorant of their use and value. The white man became possessor of the paper, which instructed him in all things, made him the favorite of the Great Spirit, and gave him superior advantages over the black man.
The great bend in the coast of Africa, which makes room for the Gulf of Guinea, is one of the singular land formations that strikes the eye and excites the fancy.
The glowing pictures of the beautiful Gold Coast and the wonders of land and sea under the equator serve to create a taste for travel and a desire to enjoy the strange and wonderful sights to be met.
An English explorer, Alvan Millson, has recently written much to give an added interest to this coast section and to call attention to one of the many freaks of nature.
A little description will be of interest. For a distance of about five hundred miles along the Bight of Benin there is an intricate chain of waterways, which lies just at the edge of the sea.
"In many places these narrow and brimming channels are separated from the onslaught of the Atlantic rollers by no more than five or six level yards of shifting sand. The spray from the ocean drifts over them, and the roar of the surf is heard by the native as he glides over their calm surface in his fragile canoe.
"There are hundreds of miles of similar lagoons bordering the Gulf of Guinea farther to the west. Many rapid rivers pour into them from uplands behind, bringing down vast quantities of sand and mud.
"At the same time, the 'Guinea Current,' which resembles our Gulf Stream, brings another endless supply of sand, worn from the headlands toward the west, and this sand, heaped up at the ocean's edge, arrests the rivers just where they are about to empty into the sea, and spreads them out into a great system of deltas.
"The resistless strength of the narrow sand barriers is attributed principally to the vast quantities of papyrus and water grass brought down in huge floating islands by the rivers, which take root and flourish in the sand. Only at rare intervals can a passageway be found through the sand. And so, on this singular coast, the ocean and the rivers unite to build up and perpetuate a barrier between them."