Beneath Articles Of Furniture The Cryptogams
Attained A Size More In Keeping With The Coal Period Than With The
Nineteenth Century.
The Gold Coast is one of the few places in West Africa that I have
never felt it my solemn duty to go and fish in.
I really cannot say
why. Seen from the sea it is a pleasant looking land. The long
lines of yellow, sandy beach backed by an almost continuous line of
blue hills, which in some places come close to the beach, in other
places show in the dim distance. It is hard to think that it is so
unhealthy as it is, from just seeing it as you pass by. It has high
land and has not those great masses of mangrove-swamp one usually,
at first, associates with a bad fever district, but which prove on
acquaintance to be at any rate no worse than this well-elevated
open-forested Gold Coast land. There are many things to be had here
and in Lagos which tend to make life more tolerable, that you cannot
have elsewhere until you are south of the Congo. Horses, for
example, do fairly well at Accra, though some twelve miles or so
behind the town there is a belt of tsetse fly, specimens of which I
have procured and had identified at the British Museum, and it is
certain death to a horse, I am told, to take it to Aburi.
The food-supply, although bad and dear, is superior to that you get
down south. Goats and sheep are fairly plentiful. In addition to
fresh meat and tinned you are able to get a quantity of good sea
fish, for the great West African Bank, which fringes the coast in
the Bight of Benin, abounds in fish, although the native cook very
rarely knows how to cook them. Then, too, you can get more fruit
and vegetables on the Gold Coast than at most places lower down:
the plantain, {28} not least among them and very good when allowed
to become ripe, and then cut into longitudinal strips, and properly
fried; the banana, which surpasses it when served in the same
manner, or beaten up and mixed with rice, butter, and eggs, and
baked. Eggs, by the way, according to the great mass of native
testimony, are laid in this country in a state that makes them more
fit for electioneering than culinary purposes, and I shall never
forget one tribe I was once among, who, whenever I sat down on one
of their benches, used to smash eggs round me for ju-ju. They meant
well. But I will nobly resist the temptation to tell egg stories
and industriously catalogue the sour-sop, guava, grenadilla,
aubergine or garden-egg, yam, and sweet potato.
The sweet potato should be boiled, and then buttered and browned in
an oven, or fried. When cooked in either way I am devoted to them,
but in the way I most frequently come across them I abominate them,
for they jeopardise my existence both in this world and the next.
It is this way: you are coming home from a long and dangerous
beetle-hunt in the forest; you have battled with mighty beetles the
size of pie dishes, they have flown at your head, got into your hair
and then nipped you smartly. You have been also considerably stung
and bitten by flies, ants, etc., and are most likely sopping wet
with rain, or with the wading of streams, and you are tired and your
feet go low along the ground, and it is getting, or has got, dark
with that ever-deluding tropical rapidity, and then you for your
sins get into a piece of ground which last year was a native's farm,
and, placing one foot under the tough vine of a surviving sweet
potato, concealed by rank herbage, you plant your other foot on
another portion of the same vine. Your head you then deposit
promptly in some prickly ground crop, or against a tree stump, and
then, if there is human blood in you, you say d - n!
Then there are also alligator-pears, limes, and oranges. There is
something about those oranges I should like to have explained. They
are usually green and sweetish in taste, nor have they much white
pith, but now and again you get a big bright yellow one from those
trees that have been imported, and these are very pithy and in full
possession of the flavour of verjuice. They have also got the papaw
on the Coast, the Carica papaya of botanists. It is an insipid
fruit. To the newcomer it is a dreadful nuisance, for no sooner
does an old coaster set eyes on it than he straightway says, "Paw-
paws are awfully good for the digestion, and even if you just hang a
tough fowl or a bit of goat in the tree among the leaves, it gets
tender in no time, for there is an awful lot of pepsine in a paw-
paw," - which there is not, papaine being its active principle.
After hearing this hymn of praise to the papaw some hundreds of
times, it palls, and you usually arrive at this tired feeling about
the thing by the time you reach the Gold Coast, for it is a most
common object, and the same man will say the same thing about it a
dozen times a day if he gets the chance. I got heartily sick of it
on my first voyage out, and rashly determined to check the old
coaster in this habit of his, preparatory to stamping the practice
out. It was one of my many failures. I soon met an old coaster
with a papaw fruit in sight, and before he had time to start, I
boldly got away with "The paw-paw is awfully good for the
digestion," hoping that this display of knowledge would impress him
and exempt me from hearing the rest of the formula.
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