Cameron and I went ashore to hire Krumen for the Gold Coast, and herein we notably failed. We disembarked at the camber, a huge pile of masonry, whose weight upon an insecure foundation has already split the sea-wall in more than one place. The interior also is silting up so fast that it will constantly require dredging to admit boats. In fact, the colony must deeply repent not having patronised Mr. Jenkins's project of a T-headed pier, on one side of which landing would have been practicable in all weathers.
The sun, despite the mist, seemed to burn our backs, and the glare from the red clay soil roasted our eyes as we toiled up the ramp, bad as those of 'Gib.,' which leads to Water Street, the lower line subtending the shore. Here we could inspect St. George's Cathedral, built, they say, at a cost of 10,000l. to 15,000l., which would be reduced to 5,000l. in England—contracts in such 'colonies' cost more than stone and slate. The general aspect is that of its Bombay brother, and the order is called, I believe, neo-Gothic, the last insult to ecclesiastical architecture. A single rusty tower, with toy-battlements, pins down along ridge-back, evidently borrowed from a barn; the light yellow-wash is mildewed and weather-stained, and the windows show unseemly holes. Surely Bishop Cheetham could have afforded a few panes of glass when exchanging his diocese for a rectory in England. Let me here note that the Catholic bishop at Goa and elsewhere is expected to die at his post, and that there is an over-worldly look in this Protestant form of the 'nolo episcopari.' East of the cathedral, and uncompromisingly 'Oriented' to the north, stands the unfinished shell of a Wesleyan chapel, suggesting that caricature which has intruded itself into the shadow of York Minster. Some 5,000l. were spent upon this article by the locals; but the home committee wisely determined that it should not be finished, and now they propose to pull it down for building-material.
We then entered the fruit and vegetable market, a neat and well-paved bazar, surmounted by a flying roof and pierced for glass windows. The dead arches in the long walls are externally stone and internally brick. The building was full of fat middle-aged negresses, sitting at squat before their 'blyes,' or round baskets, which contained a variety and confusion of heterogeneous articles. The following is a list almost as disorderly as the collection itself.
There were pins and needles, yarn and thread, that have taken the place of the wilder thorn and fibre; all kinds of small hardware; looking-glasses in lacquered frames; beads of sorts, cowries and reels of cotton; pots of odorous pomatum and shea-butter nuts; feathers of the plantain-bird and country snuff-boxes of a chestnut-like fruit (a strychnine?) from which the powder is inhaled, more majorum, through a quill; physic-nuts (tiglium, or croton), a favourite but painful native remedy; horns of the goat and antelope, possibly intended for fetish 'medicine;' blue-stone, colcothar and other drugs. Amongst the edibles appeared huge achatinae, which make an excellent soup, equal to that of the French snail; ground-nuts; very poor rice of four varieties, large and small, red and dark; cheap ginger, of which the streets are at times redolent, and which makes good home-brewed 'pop;' the Kolá-nut, here worth a halfpenny and at Bathurst a penny each; the bitter Kolá, a very different article from the esculent; skewered rôts of ground-hog, a rodent that can climb, destroy vegetables, and bite hard if necessary; dried bats and rats, which the African as well as the Chinese loves, and fish cuits au soleil, preferred when 'high,' to use the mildest adjective. From the walls hung dry goods, red woollen nightcaps and comforters, leopards' and monkeys' skins, and the pelt of an animal which might have been a gazelle.
Upon the long counters or tables were displayed the fruits and vegetables. The former were the custard-apple or sweet-sop (Annona squamosa), the sour-sop (A. muricata), the Madeiran chirimoya, (A. cherimolia), citrons, sweet and sour limes, and oranges, sweet and bitter, grown in the mountains; bananas (M. paradisiaca), the staff of life on the Gold Coast, and plantains (M. sapientum), the horse-plantains of India; [Footnote: The West Indian plantain is apparently unknown or unused] pine-apples more than half wild; mangoes terribly turpentiney unless the trunk be gashed to let out the gum; 'monkey-plums' or 'apples' and 'governor's plums.' The common guavas are rank and harsh, but the 'strawberry guava,' as it is locally called, has a delicate, subacid flavour not easily equalled. The aguacáte, or alligator-pear (Persea gratissima), which was not 'introduced by the Basel missionaries from the West Indies,' is inferior to the Mexican. Connoisseurs compare its nutty flavour with that of the filbert, and eat it with pepper, salt, and the sauce of Worcester, whose fortune was made by the nice conduct of garlic. The papaw [Footnote: The leaves are rubbed on meat to make it tender, and a drop of milk from the young fruit acts as a vermifuge.] should be cooked as a vegetable and stuffed with forced meat; the flesh of the granadilla, which resembles it, is neglected, while the seeds and their surroundings are flavoured with sherry and sugar. There is an abundance of the Eriobotrya Japonica, in Madeira called the loquat and elsewhere the Japanese medlar: it grows wild in the Brazil, where the people distil from it. [Footnote: I cannot yet decide whether its birthplace is Japan or South America, whose plants have now invaded Western India and greatly altered the vegetation.]
The chief vegetables were the watercress, grown in private gardens; onions, large and mild as the Spanish; calavances, or beans; okras or gumbos, the bhendi of India (Hibiscus esculentus), the best thickening for soup; bengwas, or egg-plants; yams (Dioscorea bulbifera) of sorts; bitter Cassada (Jatropha manihot) and the sweet variety (Jatropha janipha); garlic; kokos (Colocasia esculenta); potatoes, which the steamers are beginning to bring from England, not from Madeira; tomatoes like musket-balls, but very sweet and wholesome; and the batata, (Convolvulus patatus, or sweet potato), which whilom made 'kissing comfits.' The edibles consisted of' fufu' (plantain-paste); of 'cankey,' a sour pudding of maize-flour; of ginger-cake; of cassava-balls finely levigated, and of sweetened 'agadi,' native bread in lumps, wrapped up in plantain-leaves. Toddy was the usual drink offered for sale.
The butchers' yard, near the market, is no longer a 'ragged and uncleanly strip of ground.' The long-horned cattle, small, mostly humpless, and resembling the brindled and dun Alderney cow, are driven in from the Pulo (Fulah) country. I have described the beef as tasting not unlike what one imagines a knacker's establishment to produce, and since that time I have found but scant improvement. It is sold on alternate days with mutton, the former costing 6d., the latter 9d. a pound. Veal, so bad in England and so good in Southern Europe, is unknown. The long, lean, hairy black-and-white sheep do not supply an excellent article. Goats and kids are plentiful, and the flesh would be good if it had any taste. Hogs abound, as in Ireland; but no one eats pork, for the best of reasons. The poultry-list comprises small tough fowls (l0d. to 2s.), partridges, ducks (2s. 6d.), geese, especially the spur-winged from Sherbro, and the Muscovy or Manilla duck—a hard-fleshed, insipid bird, whose old home was South American Paraguay—turkeys (10s. to 15s.), and the arripiada, or frizzly chicken, whose feathers stand on end. Milk is scarce and dear. Englishmen raw in the tropics object to milch-goats and often put up with milch-pigs, which are said to be here kept for the purpose. I need not tell all the old tale, 'Goat he go die; pig he go for bush,' &c. Butter (1s. 8d. in 2-lb. tins) is oily and rancid, with the general look of cartgrease, in this tropical temperature. It is curious that the Danish and Irish dairies cannot supply the West African public with a more toothsome article.
Near the meat-market is the double row of houses with shops upon the ground-floor, not unlike a Banyan's street in outer Bombay, but smaller, dirtier, meaner far. Here the stranger can buy dry goods and a few curiosities of Mandenga manufacture—grigris (teraphim or charms), bows, spears, and saddles and bridles like those of the Somal, both perfectly useless to white men. The leather, however, is excellent as the Moroccan, and the work dates from the days when the Saracens pushed southwards from the Mediterranean to the Niger-valley. Wild animals are at times offered for sale, but Darkey has heard exaggerated accounts of prices paid in England for grey parrots, palm-birds, monkeys, bush-antelopes, mongooses, ground-pigs, and other 'small deer' brought from the rivulets behind Freetown. Sundry snakes were offered for sale, the Mandenga, 4 to 5 feet long, with black marks upon a yellow ground, and the spitting serpent, between 5 and 6 feet long, with a long head, also dark above and silvery grey below. I doubted the fact of its ejecting saliva till assured by the Rev. John Milum that two missionaries at Lagos, Messieurs J. B. Wood and David, had suffered severely from inflamed eyes after the contemptuous ophine crachat. All along the coast is a cerastes (horned snake), whose armature is upon the snout and whose short fat form suggests the puff-adder. The worst is a venomous-looking cobra, or hooded viper, with flat, cordate head, broad like all the more ferocious species. It is the only thanatophid whose bite I will not undertake to cure. We carried on the A.S.S. Winnebah, for the benefit of Mr. Cross, of Liverpool, a big black ape, which the Sá Leonites called a 'black chimpanzee.' Though badly wounded she had cost 27l., and died after a few days of the cage. The young chimpanzees were valued at 61.
I looked in vain for the old inn, the only thing in the place, a dirty hovel, kept, in 1862, by a Liberian negro, inscribed 'Lunch-house' on a sign-board flanked by the Union Jack and the U.S. 'oysters and gridiron.' Nothing has succeeded to this 'American hotel,' and visitors must depend upon the hospitality of acquaintances. A Frenchman lately opened a Gasthaus, and lost no time in becoming bankrupt. There is, however, a manner of boarding-house kept by a Mrs. King.
Turning south from Water Street, we passed the Wilberforce, or rather the 'Willyfoss,' memorial, a colossal scandal noticed by every visitor at Sá Leone, a 'folly' which has cost 3,000l. Its condition is exactly what it was two decads ago—a chapel-like shell of dingy, mouldy laterite with six lancet-windows and metal pillars. Its case is a complicated concern. The ecclesiastical authorities wanted it for their purposes, and so did the secular civilians, and so did the military. At last the Sá Leonites, hopeless of obtaining a Government grant, have set on foot a subscription which reached 500l.—some say 700l. There are, therefore, certain fitful signs of activity, and bricks and fire-bricks now cumber the ground; but it is all a 'flash in the pan.' The present purpose is to make it a library, in place of the fine old collection which went to the dogs. It is also to serve as a lecture-room. But who is there in the 'African Liverpool' that can lecture? What is he to lecture about? Who will stand or sit out being lectured?