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Updated: July 19, 2025
We have now everywhere traced the trade from Gambia to the Gold Coast, and we may fairly conclude that all the metal comes from a single chain of Ghauts subtending the maritime region. Grand Bassam is included in the French Côte d'Or, but not in the English Gold Coast, which begins east of the Ivory Coast.
Like Grand Bassam it was under the station admiral, who inspected the two once a year, and who periodically sent a gunboat to support French interests. By night we passed New Town, not on the charts, but famed for owning a fine gold placer north of the town-lagoon. After my departure from the coast it was inspected by Mr. Grant, who sent home specimens of bitumen taken from the wells.
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.
Bassam, not merely to help them, but to give them the mountain: they were aware that the chiefs were on friendly terms with us, and supposed that we were in possession of fabulous sums of money, so that, by means of friendship and bribery, we might open the gates to the candidate we selected.
Soyaux says, "The works in relief which natives of Lower Guinea carve with their own knives out of ivory and hippopotamus teeth are really entitled to be called works of art, and many wooden figures of fetishes in the Ethnographical Museum of Berlin show some understanding of the proportions of the human body." Great Bassam is called by Hecquard the "Fatherland of Smiths."
The surf and the fever are the Minotaurs of the West Coast, and in the year there is not a day passes that they do not claim and receive their tribute in merchandise and human life. Said an old Coaster to me, pointing at the harbor of Grand Bassam: "I've seen just as much cargo lost overboard in that surf as I've seen shipped to Europe." One constantly wonders how the Coasters find it good enough.
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.
Because our next port of call, Grand Bassam, is the chief port of the French Ivory Coast, which is 125,000 square miles in extent, we expected quite a flourishing seaport. Instead, Grand Bassam was a bank of yellow sand, a dozen bungalows in a line, a few wind-blown cocoanut palms, an iron pier, and a French flag.
Visit from two English Trading-Captains The Invisible King of Jack-a-Jack Human Sacrifices French Fortresses at Grand Bassam, at Assinee, and other points Objections to the Locality of Liberia Encroachments on the Limits of that Colony Arrival at Axim Sketches of that Settlement Dix Cove Civilized Natives An Alligator. April 14. Under way from Cape Lahon at daylight.
Near Grand Bassam free gold in quartz-reefs near the shore has been reported. We now reach the Gold Coast proper, which amply deserves its glorious golden name. I have shown that the whole seaboard of West Africa, between it and Morocco, produces more or less gold; here, however, the precious metal comes down to the very shore and is washed upon the sands.
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