twenty miles up the pretty barless river, the outlet of a great lagoon; it
was abandoned during the Prusso-Gallic war. Nine Bristol barques were
lying off Three Towns, a place not upon the chart, and at Half-Jack, 205
miles from the Cape. Here we anchored and rolled heavily through the
night, a regular seesaw of head and heels. Seamen have prejudices about
ships, pronouncing some steady and others 'uncommon lively.' I find them
under most circumstances 'much of a muchness.'

The next morning carried us forty miles along the Bassam country and
villages, Little, Piccaninny, and Great, to Grand Bassam. It is a regular
lagoon-land, whose pretty rivers are the outlets of the several sweet
waters and the salt-ponds. Opposite Piccaninny Bassam heads, with its
stalk to the shore and spreading out a huge funnel eastward and westward,
the curious formation known as the 'Bottomless Pit.' The chart shows a
dot, a line, and 200 fathoms. In these days of deep-sea soundings I would
recommend it to the notice of the Hydrographic Office. We know exactly as
much about it in A.D. 1882 as in A.D. 1670, when Ogilvy wrote, 'Six miles
beyond Jak, in Jakko, [Footnote: Bosman's _Jaqui-Jaqui_] is the
_Bottomless Pit_, so called from its unfathomable deepness, for the
seamen, having Sounded with their longest Lines and Plummets, could never
reach the bottom.' It would be interesting to know whether it is an area
of subsidence or a volcanic depression. The adjacent Gold Coast suffers
from terrible earthquakes, as Accra learnt to her cost in 1862.

At 10 A.M. we made Grand Bassam, where the French have had a _Résidence_
for many years. Here the famous Marseille house of Régis Frères first made
fortune by gold-barter. The precious ore, bought by the middlemen, a
peculiar race, from the wild tribes of the far interior, appears in the
shape of dust with an occasional small nugget; the traders dislike bars
and ingots, because they are generally half copper. We have now everywhere