The story of the Ashantee campaign

Preface

As five other books on the Ashantee War have been announced or have already appeared, the preface to a work on that subject ought to be apologetic ; and my apology for writing on an over-written subject is this, that it was my fortune to see more fighting than any one else in the Expedition, excepting a few officers in the native regiments. Moreover no other writer, military or civil, witnessed either of these three events — the storming of Amoaful by the Black Watch ; the storming of Ordahsu by the Rifle Brigade ; or the taking of Coomassie by Sir Archibald Alison and

VI

PREFACE .

Col. McLeod. I witnessed all three events, and therefore venture to believe that my personal experiences ought to be recorded as a contribution to the history of the Campaign.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

L The Gold Coast ...... i

II. The Ashantees 16

Chapter I. The Gold Coast

In 1870 I was staying at Odumassie, near the Volta, with one of the Basle missionaries. My host belonged to a type not uncommon, perhaps, in Germany, but rarely to be met with elsewhere. Before he was inspired by that impulse of religion and romance which decided his career, he had exercised the calling of a baker : yet not only was he a Greek and Hebrew scholar, but he had also the manners of a man of the world, and took an ardent interest in the problems of the day. I often look back to that visit with pleasure. In the

THE GOLD COAST.

morning we breakfasted early, somewhat in the country fashion, to which, as an old African traveller, I was thoroughly accustomed. Our beverage was a kind of coffee, prepared from the pods of a seed-bearing plant, the virtues of which my excellent host had discovered. We then went to our books. After dark we used to chat over a bottle of red Rhine wine on such subjects as the future union of Germany, the conversion of Africa, or the Darwinian theory.

On the manners and customs of the natives, my friend possessed rich stores of information, which he poured forth in clear and eloquent English an hour at a time. Sometimes he spoke of his brethren who had been taken captive to Coomassie.

One morning he brought me a stone which had evidently been shaped by human hands into the image of an axe. It was so small as rather to resemble a toy or model than a real implement of work ; yet such in past ages it had been. With these miserable tools the ancestors of the white men, the yellow men, the red men, and the black men, had hewed down the oaks of Europe, the cedars of Asia, the pines of America, and the huge silk-cotton trees of Negroland. Not only are these stone implements dug up all over the world, but all over the world they are supposed by the common people to be thunderbolts. As regards West Africa this belief is easily explained. The Stone Age is there comparatively recent, and many axes are merely covered by the upper soil. After heavy storms of rain, which are usually accompanied by thunder and lightning, this upper soil being washed away, the stone implements are found lying on the ground, and so seem to have fallen from the sky. However, the stone which Mr. Zimmermann showed me had been dug up in his yard at some little depth below the surface. He informed me that he had sent specimens to the missionary museum at Basle, and I afterwards discovered that two specimens from Christiansborg (while that fort was under the Danes) had been sent to the Copenhagen collection, which is unrivalled in the world for its relics of the Age of Stone. But I was the first to bring stone implements from Western Africa to England ; and being thus

THE GOLD COAST.

put upon the scent, obtained large numbers at two other missionary stations — Akropong and Abure.

The next time I saw a stone implement was in the tent of Mr. Ktihne, at Prahsu. He had found it on an Ashantee altar, or shrine, as he was on his way from Coomassie to the camp. I asked my interpreter if he had ever seen one before ; he replied they were 4 found everywhere,’ and I made a small collection during the march through Ashantee. When the troops took a village, I always hunted for this kind of plunder. Sometimes I found the stone hanging before doorways at the end of a string, like a plummet, and often it would be daubed over with chalk. The natives regard these stones with superstitious reverence, call them God-axes , and believing that all things sacred are medicinal, grind from them a powder which they use for rheumatism and other complaints.

It may be assumed that the Africans of the Stone Age were of a low order in the human scale. Perhaps they lived on nests or platforms in the trees, dressed their bodies with dirt in the daytime, slept in

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a night-gown of warm ashes, hunted and fought with stakes, the points of which were hardened in the fire, and dined on roots, shellfish, snails, caterpillars, grasshoppers, white ants and prisoners of war. Even a knowledge of iron, and skill in its manufacture, is not incompatible with the still extant practices mentioned above. Mohammed-el-Tounsy, an intelligent Arab traveller (whose works, translated into French, should be carefully studied by ethnologists), gives some description of those forest-tribes of the equator which are hunted every year by the slave-catchers of Waday, and, as he justly observes, it is a most singular fact that these people, so savage and debased, nevertheless produce beautiful iron weapons and tools, which can only be compared with those that are made by the English. The finest specimens of native cutlery that I have seen myself, came from some low bush-tribe behind Monrovia ; the knife-blades were engraved with tasteful designs, and were purchased at a heavy price by the other native tribes as works of art. The cannibal Fans of the Gaboon, who are primitive enough in their habits, wearing only

THE GOLD COAST.

small aprons of goat-skin or bark, are exceedingly skilful as blacksmiths, and have even an iron currency. It is impossible to say where and how this art originated. The African bellows are different from the Asiatic kind, and are found all over the continent ; it is therefore not unreasonable to suppose that the Africans discovered for themselves the art of smelting iron ore, and that the art was conveyed, by means of tribal migrations and wandering guilds of blacksmiths, from one part of Negroland to another. Certain it is that wherever iron exists in Africa it is worked ; and so abundant is it on the Gold Coast, that the slugs used by the Ashantees were chiefly bits of iron stone. Now, the discovery of iron would soon be followed by the discovery of gold in countries where that metal might exist, and in such countries gold-dust, instead of iron, would become the currency. Gold-dust on the Gold Coast is the money of the land : a periguin is 46 dollars, nearly 10/.: an ounce is 3/. 12s.: an ackie is half-a-crown. But the natives are so well acquainted with the precious metal, that I have seen them buy plantains with less than a

THE GOLD COAST.

farthings worth of gold, putting one or two grains on the tip of a knife.

I have shown that the knowledge of iron does not do much by itself to raise the condition and culture of the savage : but it is very different with gold. From Cape Palmas to Accra it is all one great forest ; the physical features are everywhere identical ; and there is no reason to doubt that the natives of this forest tract had the same origin. Yet the natives to the west of Assinie (where the gold ceases) are ages behind the natives of the Gold Coast. The villages of the seaboard contribute the Kroos, a useful class of labourers, to the ships and factories. Everybody knows what uncouth savages they are when they first go to sea ; but these villagers of the beach, savage as they are, look with contempt on their brethren of the bush. I have travelled among these people (they would not let me go very far), and found them no better than the bush-tribes of Gaboon. Every village was a kingdom ; at every thirty miles another dialect was spoken — that surest sign of barbarism : prisoners of war were eaten, but not women, ‘ because they were tough ; '

THE GOLD COAST.

it was forbidden by the fetish to kill the chimpanzee, because he was ‘too near considered in fact as a man and a brother. I found that warfare was chronic, that no man travelled more than a days journey from his village, that commerce, except within such limits, did not exist, and that exploration was impossible. Even the Moslem traders who inhabit the open country beyond the forestbelt, have never penetrated into that poor and inhospitable land. But on the Gold Coast the natives are not uncivilised ; it is scarcely correct to call them savages ; one language, the Oji, is spoken over avast area ; organised kingdoms exist. In the forest of the Kroos iron is in use, but gold is unknown ; and it is doubtless the knowledge of gold which by means of commerce has raised the people of the Gold Coast from that early and rude condition in which their neighbours still remain.

We have a strange but sure proof that even in very ancient times the Gold Coast was indirectly connected with the civilised world. It is the custom in Western Africa to bury articles of value with the dead ; and

THE GOLD COAST.

certain beads or bugles are often disinterred upon the Gold Coast.

These aggry beads are of Egyptian or Phoenician manufacture, and are probably glass mosaics. The artists of Birmingham cannot imitate them with success, an attempt which has been frequently made, for they are the precious stones of the country, and sell for their weight in gold. It is a law of Ashantee that if an aggry bead is broken in a scuffle, seven slaves must be paid to the owner.1 As these beads are usually found at some distance from the sea, it may be inferred that they were brought by the overland route ; and in fact it never could have paid the Carthaginians to traffic with Guinea by sea, though undoubtedly they had sailed along its shores. With a land trade it was very different : the Egyptians and Phoenicians themselves had no occasion to cross the continent ; they sold their goods to the Berbers, who sold them to the blacks south of the Sahara, and so they were passed on from tribe to tribe. Just as English calicoes penetrate into parts of Africa which are quite in-

1 Bowdich.

IO

THE GOLD COAST.

accessible to English travellers ; so the linen of Egypt, the scarlet cloth of Carthage, and the beads manufactured in both countries, found their way to the Gold Coast ; and as a tusk of ivory obtained in the unknown land to the west of Lake Tanganyika, or behind the Fans of the Gaboon, finally arrives at Liverpool or Hamburg, so the gold of Guinea was transported across the regions watered by the Niger and the Nile, across the fiery desert, and at last, worked up into ornaments, flashed upon the brow of a Sophonisba or Rhodopis.

The aggry beads, though only to be found by accident, are yet very plentiful, which proves that in those days the trade of the Gold Coast was flourishing and active. Such a trade would destroy the spirit of non-intercourse prevailing to the present day among the bush-tribes on the west. There would be a tendency to centralise : the clans would gather into tribes, the tribes into nations : the market-places would grow into cities colonised from different regions : the language of trade would become dominant Then again, the access of wealth from commerce would pro-

THE GOLD COAST.

ii duce an important revolution. The owners of the gold-land would purchase slaves in large numbers ; thus a Patrician order would be formed, and the descendants of the slaves, becoming freedmen, would constitute the People. The wives of the former class being no longer compelled to work in the plantations, would become more refined in feature and in form, while slaves who displayed an aptitude for art would be encouraged by their masters to cultivate the talents they possessed. Those mural arabesques and crimson basements which we found in the best houses at Fomana and Coomassie, do not exist in the semi-oriental cities — Timbuctoo, Kano, Sokoto, and Kukawa. They seem to be original, and were possibly prior to that civilising movement, which must now be described.

The Egyptians did not travel beyond the limits of their valley ; the world came to them. The Greeks of Alexandria penetrated into Abyssinia, but never reached Central Africa, and Ptolemy must have obtained his materials from negro traders and captured slaves. The Carthaginians merely occupied

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Algeria ; the Romans and their successors, the Byzantine Greeks, did not invade the lands beyond the Desert. But when the Arabs conquered Egypt and Northern Africa, they not only occupied those countries and converted its natives to the Faith, they also navigated the great Dry Ocean on their camels, discovered the Niger and settled in Timbuctoo. At first they were merely missionaries : they preached the Koran, and worked miracles,1 but chiefly spread their religion by means of the school. After a time, in all the great negro cities, a Moslem quarter was established under its own Sheik ; and when the converts were numerous enough the Sheik proclaimed a Holy War. In the same manner negroes went forth to other negro lands wearing the turban and the tobe, Arabs in all but their colour and their name. In a few centuries the vast prairie plateau of the Niger was conquered or converted to the Moslem creed, and, what was of far more consequence, adopted the manners and customs of the East. The negro nations of the Niger lands dwell in walled towns, cultivate

THE GOLD COAST.

and manufacture cotton, ride on horseback, read and write their own languages, using the Arab character, and also study Arabic, which is to them what Latin was to Europe in the Middle Ages ; partly a sacred language, partly a means of intercourse between nations far apart. Thousands of negroes make every year the pilgrimage to Mecca ; negro prophets have often arisen and founded military empires. The conversion of Soudan, it is needless to say, has greatly facilitated commerce ; intercourse became more frequent and familiar among nations who worshipped the same God, and were governed by the same code of laws.

Now it is to be remarked that the Moslems have never been able to conquer except where cavalry can be used. They have scarcely entered the country lying west of the Niger (in its lower course), for there begins that vast and unknown forest which probably extends without an oasis of open land to the Great Lakes of the equator. In the same manner the marshy delta of the Niger and the bush-regions of the Guinea Coast are still in the hands of pagan chiefs.

H

THE GOLD COAST.

The natives of the Gold Coast, secure in their stronghold, the Forest, preserved their independence and their barbarism. But still they were not uninfluenced by the great revolution of Central Africa. The increase of trade augmented their wealth, and the art of cotton-weaving was introduced among them. Henceforth they discarded the apron and assumed the robe.

I apply the term Gold Coast to that forest belt which extends inland from the sea rather more than two hundred miles. Formerly those tribes which dwelt on the border of the Plain possessed a commercial advantage and were probably more civilised than the people of the seaboard. Moreover the gold mines were also situated at some days’ journey from the shore. But the sea had also its wealth. Salt is an ingredient of life : people who eat no salt sicken and die. The ‘ beachmen 9 enjoyed the monopoly of this precious mineral and boiled it in large quantities for the inland trade. They also had smoked fish to sell, and certain shells prized as ornaments. But a time was at hand when those salt-boilers and fishermen would become the merchant princes of the land.

We now reach the European period of Gold Coast history ; and here its true history begins. The pagan nations have no written chronicles, and savage traditions are fabulous or modern. As yet my only guides have been analogy and inference ; but now we step forth into the light. We open a book, composed in the fifteenth century — ‘Azurara, Chronica da Guine.’ We see before us a native village, afterwards called Elmina ; we see the caravels at anchor in the roadstead, and a boat passing through the surf, and knights in armour landing, followed by men with harquebusses on their shoulders, and natives covered with gold ornaments coming down to meet them on the sandy beach.

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. CHAPTER II.

Take up Strabo and Diodorus of Sicily, Pliny, Ptolemy, Pomponius Mela, read what they sdy about Africa, and it will clearly be perceived that they knew very little about the countries south of the Sahara. At the best they had a vague notion that there was an inhabited region beyond the Great Desert, and that it was watered by a river called the Niger, which some supposed to be a tributary of the Nile. It was almost universally believed that the equator was a torrid zone , or fiery’ belt girdling the earth, and dividing by an impassable barrier the people of the north from the people of the south. The negroes dwelt on the borders of this burning land ; and it could plainly be seen how their skin was blackened and their hair frizzled by the

THE ASHANTEES.

heat. This theory of a torrid zone was inherited by mediaeval Europe, and in the fifteenth century everyone supposed that the inhabited world came to an end at the Sahara. Yet Arabs and Spanish Moors, some of them men of culture and learning, had crossed the Sahara, and had found great negro kingdoms existing on the banks of the Niger. I bn ,

Batuta, one of the greatest travellers who ever lived, had given some chapters of his book to Negroland. But such authorities were not accessible to the Christians of Portugal and Spain ; the Peninsular Crusade had opened a gulf between the learned men of the East and of the West, and by war alone the existence of Guinea was finally revealed.

In 1415 the Portuguese took Ceuta, and a young prince who was present at the siege questioned some of the prisoners about the geography of Africa. He then learnt to his astonishment that beyond the Sahara to the south was a fertile and well-populated country-, rich in ivory and gold. It was called the Land of the Blades, and could be reached either by sea or land.

The Portuguese dwelling on the shores c i8

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of the Atlantic were excluded from that Indian trade which the merchants of Pisa, Genoa, Florence, Barcelona, Marseilles, and above all, Venice, carried on with Egypt and the Black Sea. Finding is keeping was the proverb of the day, applied to continents and oceans ; and though it was not till some time afterwards that the prince had the idea of seeking a sea-route to the Indies along the coast of Africa, he at once saw the advantage of finding a golden land which Portugal might monopolise. He was also a man of piety and zeal, by profession a military monk, Grand Master of the Order of Christ ; he believed in the dogma (since then abandoned by the Church) that no heathen could be saved ; and his heart yearned towards that unknown multitude of nations doomed to eternal torments unless they were baptised. He determined to devote his life to the discovery of Guinea.

Those who sail in the P. and O. steamers to Gibraltar may observe, if they pass it by daylight, a cape called Sagres, with a lighthouse and telegraph station. There the prince, in a lonely castle, took up his abode.

THE ASHANTEES.

No spot could be more bleak and desolate. The sea dashing furiously against the base of the cliff flung spray across the land and withered up all vegetation. Only a few junipers with rusted foliage grew upon the cape. But there the prince lived in seclusion and peace ; there ‘ the sight of the ocean continually inflamed his thoughts/ In his castle was formed a strange kind of court : Italian cosmographers, German mathematicians, knights seeking peril and adventure, weatherbeaten pilots, were those by whom he was surrounded. He built an observatory and laid the foundations of nautical science : from Lagos, the neighbouring port, he sent forth vessels with the cross of the order painted on their sails. But the priests and people protested against his enterprise ; they declared that the revenues of the order were being wasted on the dreams of a madman, and that his expeditions were fit for nothing except to make widows and orphans. The king, however, supported the views of his brother, and the discovery of Madeira was followed by that of the River Senegal, which divides the brown men of the desert from the

THE ASHANTEES .

black men of Soudan. Before the prince died his vessels had reached Sierra Leone ; a regular trade with Guinea was established ; every year new regions were added to the Crown ; a Bull had been obtained granting to the Portuguese all lands they might discover to the Indies, inclusive ; and the prince had received the gratitude of his country, with the illustrious title of Henry the Navigator .

The Portuguese had purchased some gold-dust from the Moors on the coast of the Sahara, probably brought from the mines of Bambouk, Upper Senegal. But they found no gold on the Guinea coast till they came to a village called Chamah. At another village twelve miles eastward of Chamah, the natives had so much gold that the Portuguese gave it the name of El Mina or The Mine. There they established their first settlement, and built a noble fort which yet remains. It has been consecrated by the footsteps of Columbus, who once sailed in the Portuguese service to Elmina : it was taken from the Portuguese by the famous Admiral De Ruyter ; and its recent cession to Great Britain by the Dutch was a cardinal cause of the Ashantee war.

THE ASHANTEES.

The Portuguese bought gold, with velvets, hawks’ bells, knives, and woollen cloths. They also bought slaves in the Bight of Benin and sold them at a profit to the wealthy natives of Elmina. But the discovery of India was fatal to Guinea ; and no attempt was made to conquer or colonise the country. On the other hand, the discovery of America created a demand for slave labour, and this demand was enormously increased when the northern nations invaded the monopoly of Portugal and Spain. In the semi-piratical wars of the tropics the Portuguese were driven from the Gold Coast, which then was divided between the Dutch, the English, the Danes, and the French. Even the Electorate of Brandenburgh had its African Company and Coast ■settlements. Between Assinie and the Volta the seaboard was lined with factory forts under the flags of these Powers, which thus supplied with slaves their respective American plantations. The slaves were brought down to the seaboard in coffles or chained companies : they were stored in the dungeons of the fort until a vessel arrived ; they were then brought forth and carefully examined by the surgeon of the

THE ASHANTEES.

-ship : the sound men were marked with a redhot iron which stamped the Company’s arms upon their skin ; and they were then shipped for the New World.

There was also an active commerce in gold-dust ; and the word guinea is derived from that part of Africa. As time went on, the natives became completely dependent on Europe for all luxuries, and even some necessaries of life, for the rum which they drank, the tobacco they smoked, the clothes they wore, and the weapons they used in the battle and the chase. Two hundred years ago the bow and arrow had gone out of vogue, and flintlocks alone were in use ; they also celebrated their funerals, their weddings, and all important ceremonies and events with the firing of muskets, sometimes continued for days without intermission. Gunpowder became necessary to them.

The slaves that were sold to the European forts were prisoners of war, and it will therefore be understood that a commerce so gigantic as that of the West Indies was favourable to the growth of war-making tribes. Dahomey was created by the slave-trade, and

THE ASHANTEES.

now that the slave-trade is over is rapidlyfalling to decay. The Elminas, Fantees, and Accras were merely middle-men ; the slaves were hunted, as the gold was mined, in the interior. Two great inland empires arose, Denkera and Akim. The first obtained Elmina as its port ; the second obtained Accra, and each took from its port the Note or ‘ custom ’ which the Europeans had originally paid to the owners of the soil for permission to settle and trade. But at an early date in Gold Coast history both these Powers were conquered by another military kingdom which has since gained by its ambition and audacity a European reputation.

At the close of the seventeenth century Ashantee was already a powerful state and enjoyed access to the coast. At that time the King of Denkera, according to Bosman, * sent some of his wives to compliment Zay the King of Asiante , who not only received and entertained them very civilly, but sent them back, charged with very considerable presents, to express his obliging resentment of the grateful embassy.’ Soon afterwards the King Zay (probably the Sai Tootoo of Bowdich)

THE ASHANTEES.

sent some of his wives in the same manner to compliment the King of Denkera, who fell in love with one of them and gratified his passion. On the Gold Coast women are often employed by their virtuous husbands to allure rich men into intrigues for the sake of damages, and Bowdich relates that in his time the King of Ashantee had a handsome wife whose sole conjugal duty was to inveigle the chiefs her lord desired to ruin ; it is, therefore, just possible that the lady ambassador had received her ‘ instructions ’ from the king. Be that as it may, she reported the matter on her return, and Zay at once declared war. The King of Denkera offered a large indemnity ; but Zay only waited to bring up large quantities of powder from the coast. The Denkeras obtained the alliance of Akim, and the Dutch lent them two or three pieces of cannon. But the two armies were routed, Denkera completely laid waste, and the cannon carried off to Coomassie, where Bowdich afterwards saw them adorning one of the streets of the town. A Dutch officer was sent to the Ashantee camp and was there when Bosman was writing his letter ; he there-

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fore could not mention the result ; but we learn from Ashantee sources that Denkera became tributary, and gave to Ashantee the pay-note of Elmina. From that time to the * present day the Dutch and the natives of Elmina remained faithful allies of Ashantee.

Colonel Festing’s interpreter at Dunquah, a most intelligent native, afterwards attached to Sir Garnet’s staff, informed me that the Ashantees were originally vassals of Denkera, and that being badly treated they rebelled and won their independence. As this legend is not mentioned by Bowdich, it will no doubt be disputed. It is not, however, in itself improbable, for at that time Denkera was a powerful kingdom, ‘ the object of common hatred,’ and ruling three other states, one of which was Wassaw. There is also a passage in Bosman which seems to support my informant : ‘ Thus you see the towering pride of Dinkira in ashes, they being forced to fly before those whom they not long before thought no better than their slaves, and themselves being now sold for slaves.’ Bowdich derived his history of Ashantee from the Ashantees themselves, and they perhaps were i

X * % r

THE ASHANTEES.

too proud to acknowledge that they had once been a tributary state.

The Ashantees, supplied with powder and arms from Elmina, pursued their conquests for a hundred years : war became the profession of the country : and it was made a law that no king should receive the full honours of a royal burial unless he had him* self conducted a campaign. At the beginning of the present century their power had reached its culminating point. The open country to the north had been invaded ; Gaman was subdued ; the golden stool of Buntookoo had been surrendered by the king ; Dutch, Danish, and British flags were displayed at Coomassie ; the Notes of all the forts were paid to Ashantee. From Assinie to the Volta the whole coast was in their hands. They had besieged the fort of Annamaboe, ‘ fighting up to the muzzles of the guns ;n the English Governor, Colonel Torrane, had basely purchased peace by surrendering Cheboo, a rebel chief. At a later date Cape Coast Castle had been blockaded, and the Governor, ‘ to avert imminent danger,’