To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative by Verney Lovett Cameron;Sir Richard Francis Burton
page 77 of 310 (24%)
page 77 of 310 (24%)
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Next day the King made a friendly call without basket or band. His cocked hat was exchanged for a chimney-pot so 'shocking bad' that no coster would dare to don it. Such is the custom of the chiefs, and if you give them a good tile it goes at once into store. He made us promise a return-visit and set out to collect bearers. Hereabouts a week is as a day. Whilst carriage was collecting we inspected the neighbourhood of Axim. Our first visit was to Bobowusúa island, a 'fetish place for palavers,' where the natives object to guns being fired. Here it was that Admiral van Ruyter built his battery of twelve cannons and forced Fort Santo Antonio to surrender on January 19, 1642. The rock is of trap, greenstone, or whinstone, which miners call iron-stone and Cornishmen 'blue elvan:' this diorite, composed of felspar and the hardest hornblende, contains granular iron and pyrites like silver. Some specimens are beautifully banded in onyx-fashion and revetted with 'spar' (quartz) of many colours, dead-white and crystalline, red and yellow. We find the same trap on the mainland. Near the smaller Akinim or Salt-pond village there is a mass threaded with quartz-veins from north to south (1º 30'), bossed by granite dykes [Footnote: It is generally believed that these granite injections have been cooled and consolidated deep below earth's surface.] trending east-west (96º 50'), and traversed by a burnt vein striking 67º. From the surf-boat we remarked that there were no sharks; apparently they shun coming within the reefs. Our landing was not pleasant for the Krumen; the shallow bottom was strewed with rounded pebbles, and the latter are studded with sharp limpets and corallines. We climbed round the seaward bluff, fissured with deep narrow clefts, up which the tide-waves race and roar. Here the trap has a ruddy hue, the salt water bringing out the iron. Corallines, now several feet above water, clothed the boulders. This, corroborated by a host of other phenomena, argues a |
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