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Updated: June 9, 2025
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.
After an hour's paddling we sighted a few canoes and surf-boats under a raised clay-bank binding the stream on the left. The aspect of the Ancobra becomes gloomy and menacing.
I landed upon one of the rocks, sketched the Butabué, whose name none could explain, and returned down stream to the 'great central Depôt, Tumento. I can say little about the River Ancobra above the rapids, except that it resumes its course from the north-north-east and the north, apparently guided by the hills.
The notable feature of the river is now the prawn-basket, a long cone closed at the blunt apex: the Ancobra is a 'Camarones, supplying a first-rate article for curries. This is the work of the uninteresting little villages, scatters of mere crates built in holes worn in the bush; all disappear during the floods, and are rebuilt in the dry season for growing rice and tapping palm-trees.
It is interesting to us because a syndicate has been formed, and engineers are being sent out to survey the pathless 'bush' between the sea and Tumento on the Ancobra, whose site was at the time unknown. Cameron presently discovered that the Tákwá ridge is nearer Axim than Dixcove is, and that the line would pass within easy distance of Kinyanko, one of its raisons d'être.
I did not see, till long after our return from this excursion, the then unfinished map by M. Paulus Dahse, a veteran West-Coaster, who has spent years in travelling through the interior. Paris, August 1879. The Ancobra is an enlarged copy of the Yenna or Prince's River.
Wyatt's map, copied from M. Dahse, shows an island backed by a ridge running nearly east-west. I found no river-holm, and only a small broadening of the Ancobra to about double its usual breadth. The banks at the sharp angle of junction are, however, low; and, perhaps, my predecessor saw them when flooded.
By night we also passed Cape Apollonia and its four hummocks, which are faintly visible from Axim. The name has nothing to do, I need hardly say, with Apollo or his feasts, the Apolloniæ, nor has it any relationship with the admirable 'Apollinaris water. It was given by the Portuguese from the saint [Footnote: Butler's Lives gives 'S. Apollonia (not Appolonia, as the miners have it), v.m. February 9. This admirable old maid leaped into the fire prepared for her by the heathen populace of Alexandria when she refused to worship their 'execrable divinity. There are also an Apollonius (March 5), 'a zealous holy anchorite' of Egyptian Antinous; and Apollinaris, who about A.D. 376 began to 'broach his heresy, denying in Christ a human soul.] who presided over the day of discovery. In the early half of the present century the King of Apollonia ruled the coast from the Assini to the Ancobra Rivers; the English built a fort by permission at his head-quarters, and carried on a large trade in gold-dust. Meredith tells us that, when his Majesty deceased, some twenty men were sacrificed on every Saturday till the 'great customs' took place six months afterwards. The underlying idea was, doubtless, that of Dahome: the potentate must not go, like a 'small boy, alone and unattended to the shadowy realm. The 'African Cruiser' [Footnote: Journal of an African Cruiser, by an officer of the U.S. navy. Edited by Nathaniel Hawthorn. Aberdeen: Clark and Son, 1848.] speaks of the royal palace being sumptuously furnished in European style; of gold cups, pitchers, and plates, and of vast treasures in bullion. When the King died sixty victims were slain and buried with their liege lord; besides a knife, plate, and cup; swords, guns, cloths, and goods of various kinds. The corpse, smeared with oil and powdered cap-
We caught the north-east Trade a little north of Cape Palmas, and kept it till near Grand Canary. On April 13, greatly improved by the pleasant voyage and by complete repose, I rejoiced once more in landing at the fair isle Madeira. And now Cameronus loquitur. Leaving Axim on March 16, I slept at Kumprasi and remarked a great change in the bar of the Ancobra River.
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.
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