This Question Of Transport
Is At Present Regarded As A Burning One Throughout The Continent;
And For The Well-Being Of Certain Parts Of The West Coast Railways
Are Essential, Such As At Lagos, And On The Gold Coast.
Of Lagos I
do not pretend to speak.
I have never been ashore there. Of the
Gold Coast I have seen a little, and heard a great deal more, and I
think I may safely say that railway making would not be difficult on
it, for it is good hard land, not stretches of rotten swamp. The
great difficulty in making railroads here will consist in landing
the material through the surf. This difficulty cannot be got over,
except at enormous expense, by making piers, but it might be
surmounted by sending the plant ashore on small bar boats that could
get up the Volta or Ancobra. When up the Volta it may be said, "it
would be nowhere when any one wanted it," but the cast-iron idea
that goods must go ashore at places where there are Government
headquarters like Accra and Cape Coast, places where the surf is
about at its worst, seems to me an erroneous one. The landing place
at Cape Coast might be made safe and easy by the expenditure of a
few thousands in "developing" that rock which at present gives
shelter WHEN you get round the lee side of it, but this would only
make things safer for surf-boats. No other craft could work this
bit of beach; and there is plenty of room for developing the Volta,
as it is a waterway which a vessel drawing six feet can ascend fifty
miles from July till November, and thirty miles during the rest of
the year. The worst point about the Volta is the badness of its
bar - a great semicircular sweep with heavy breakers - too bad a bar
for boats to cross; but a steamer on the Lagos bar boat plan might
manage it, as the Bull Frog reported in 1884 nineteen to twenty-one
feet on it, one hour before high water. The absence of this bar
boat, and the impossibility of sending goods out in surf-boats
across the bar, causes the goods from Adda (Riverside), the chief
town on the Volta, situated about six miles up the river from its
mouth, to be carried across the spit of land to Beach Town, and then
brought out through the shore surf - the worst bit of surf on the
whole Gold Coast. The Ancobra is a river which penetrates the
interior, through a district very rich in gold and timber and more
than suspected of containing petroleum. It is from eighty to one
hundred yards wide up as far as Akanko, and during the rains carries
three and a half to four and a half fathoms, and boats are taken up
to Tomento about forty miles from its mouth with goods to the Wassaw
gold mines. But the bar of the Ancobra is shallow, only giving six
feet, although it is firm and settled, not like that of the Volta
and Lagos; and the Portuguese, in the sixteenth century, used to get
up this river, and work the country to a better profit than we do
nowadays.
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