Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 3.djvu/287

 from the interior and new forming a stumbling-block in the path of the unwary wayfarer.

A powerful French vassal state has been founded on the shores of Lake Assini by a chief of Ashanti origin, who resides at Kinjabo, a place of about thirty thousand inhabitants, on the left bank of the river. This bloodthirsty potentate's chief occupation seems to be the administration of justice, and under the shed where he presides at the "sessions," the heads of his victims are piled up in pyramids. So recently as the middle of the present century the foundation of every village was preceded by a human sacrifice. The victim, made drunk with palm-wine, was beheaded and disembowelled, the fetish-man predicting the destinies of the future settlement by inspecting the entrails. The king keeps a band of captives, and it was recently feared that the old custom of the "blood bath" for the royal corpse might be revived by the massacre of these wretches.

The few French factories belong nearly all to a house in Rochelle, and the only places where any French officials reside are Grand Bassam and Assini, both situated near the bars of like name, and Dabu on a creek on the north side of the Ebrié Lagoon. Dabu is a fortified outpost, which holds in awe the Burburi, a fierce and restless tribe occupying some large villages near the Jack-Jack territory. The French settlements on the Ivory Coast were formerly administered from the Gaboon. But by a recent decree they were, jointly with the factories on the Slave Coast, attached to the Senegal Government.

Nowhere else in Upper Guinea have the Europeans secured such a firm footing as in this region. The English, masters of the territory officially known as Cape Coast, from the name of its former capital, occupy a section of the seaboard 360 miles long, between the French possessions of Assini and the German factories of Togo. Inland their domain extends to a point 120 miles from the coast, and beyond these limits their political ascendancy is recognised far and wide by the conterminous populations. According to the approximate statistics. Cape Coast has a total area of 17,000 square miles, with a population of over 500,000 in the year 1886. The northern kingdom of the Ashantis, Gyaman, and the contiguous provinces have upwards of one million inhabitants, and the whole population of the Gold Coast, taken in its widest sense, is estimated at three millions.

The very name of this region accounts for the eagerness of the whites to establish factories on this coast and to explore the interior. Traders from all the European states were tempted to establish factories for the purpose of exchanging their wares for gold dust, and most of the Powers erected fortified stations to protect the trading posts of their subjects. The French, Prussians, Dutch, Danes, and Portuguese possessed such stations, but the English have become the exclusive heirs of the trade and political supremacy in this rich territory.