Alone in West Africa

by Mary Gaunt

There is very little difference in the scenery all along the shore here. The surf thunders to the right, and to the left the land goes back low and sandy, covered with coarse grass and low-growing shrubs, while here and there are fishing villages with groves of cocoa-nuts around them, only the houses instead of being built of the raffia palm are built of swish, that is mud, and as you go east dirtier and dirtier grow the villages.

It took us barely two hours and a half to reach Cape Coast, one of the oldest if not the oldest English settlement on the Coast. It was the original Capo Corso of the Portuguese, but the English have held it since early in the seventeenth century, and the natives, of course, bear English names—in Elmina they have Dutch names—and remember no other masters.

Cape Coast is a great straggling untidy town with rather an eastern look about it which comes, I think, from the fact that many of the houses have flat roofs. But it is a drab-looking town without any of the gorgeous colouring of the east. The Castle is built down on the seashore behind great walls and bastions, and here are the Customs, the Commissioner's Court, the Post Office, all the mechanism required for the Government of a people, but the old cannon are still there, piles of shot and shell and great mortars, and in the courtyards are the graves of the men and women who have gone before, the honoured dead. Here lies the lady whom the early nineteenth century reckoned a poet, L. E. L., Laetitia Landor, the wife of Captain Maclean who perished by some unexplainable misadventure while she was little more than a bride, and here lies Captain Maclean himself, the wise Governor whom the African merchants put in when England, in one of her periodic fits of thriftless economy, would have abandoned the Gold Coast, and here are other unknown names Dutch and English, and oh, curious commentary on the hygiene of the time, in the same courtyard is the well whence the little company of whites, generally surrounded by a people often hostile, must needs in time of siege or stress always draw their water.

They say Cape Coast like Elmina is haunted, and men have told me tales of unaccountable noises, of footsteps that crossed the floor, of voices in conversation, of sighs and groans and shrieks for help that were unexplained and unexplainable. One man who had been D.C. there told me he could keep no servant in the Castle at night they were so terrified, but as I only paid flying visits to take photographs I cannot say of my own knowledge whether there is anything uncanny about it. There ought to be, for there are deep dungeons underground, dark and uncanny, where in old days they possibly kept their slaves and certainly their prisoners-of-war. There was no light in them then, there is very little now, only occasionally someone has knocked away a stone from the thick walls, and you may see a round of dancing sunlight in the gloom and hear the sound of the ceaseless surf. An officer in the Gold Coast regiment told me he wanted to have a free hand to dig in the earth here, for he was sure the pirates who owned it in the old days must have buried much treasure here and forgotten all about it, but he was a hopeful young man and looked forward to the days when the Ashantis should come down and besiege Cape Coast again as they had done in the old days, and he pointed out the particular gun on the bastion that in case of such an event he should train on the Kumasi road and blow those savages into the next world. I have seen those fighting men of Ashanti since then and I do not think they are ever coming to Cape Coast, at least as enemies, which perhaps is just as well, for the gun which that gay young lieutenant slapped so affectionately and called “Old Girl” is pretty elderly and I fancy might do more damage to those loading than to those at the other end of her muzzle.

But I did not lodge at the fort. The medical officer, it was always the medical officer to the rescue, very kindly took charge and I was very comfortably lodged in the hospital. And here I had proof of the wonderful manner in which news is carried by the birds of the air in West Africa. I had thought that the Provincial Commissioner was going to put me up, and I instructed my boys to that effect.

“Ask way to Government House,” which I thought lay to the west of the town. As we passed the first houses a man sprang up.

“Dis way, Ma, I show you,” and off he went, we following, and I thought my men had asked the question. Clearly Government House was not to the west, for we went on through the town and up a hill and up to a large bungalow which I was very sure was not Government House, unless we had arrived at the back.

I got out protesting, but my boys were very sure and so was our guide.

“Dis be bungalow, Ma. Missus come.”

Then I knew they were wrong, for I knew the Commissioner had no wife. But they weren't after all, for down the steps breathing kindly welcome came the medical officer's wife, a pretty bride of a couple of months, and she smilingly explained that the Commissioner had asked her to take me in because it would be so much more comfortable for me where there was another woman. “I suppose he sent you on,” said she.