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Updated: June 29, 2025
There was no further check. The 42d and several companies of the Rifle Brigade entered Coomassie without another shot being fired in its defense. Sir Garnet Wolseley soon after arrived, and taking off his hat called for three cheers for the Queen, which was responded to with a heartiness and vigor which must have astonished the Ashantis.
This was the only contingent permitted by the Ashantis to enter Coomassie unopposed. The next was a detachment from Lagos, composed of two hundred and fifty men of that colony's Hausa force, with four British officers and a doctor, under the command of Captain Alpin.
When this was done, Colonel Willcocks collected the troops nearest to him and moved forward, at their head, along the broad road. Their delight, when they emerged into the open and saw Coomassie ahead of them, was unbounded. Keeping regular step, though each man was yearning to press forward, they advanced steadily.
Some of those related singularly resembled those said to have occurred before the capture of Rome by the Goths. An aerolite had fallen in the marketplace of Coomassie, and, still more strange, a child was born which was at once able to converse fluently. This youthful prodigy was placed in a room by itself, with guards around it to prevent anyone having converse with the supernatural visitant.
The rites and ceremonies practised by the kings at Coomassie, their capital, were of the most savage and bloodthirsty nature, rivalled in this respect only by the neighbouring kingdom of Dahomey. At coronations, funerals, or other state occasions, it was customary to immolate hundreds of victims, and in order to supply this demand constant wars were undertaken.
He would not hear of their paying either for provisions or bearers, saying that they were the king's guests, and it would be an insult to him were they to pay for anything. Ten days after starting from the Volta they entered Coomassie. This town lay on rising ground, surrounded by a deep marsh of from forty to a hundred yards wide.
Numbers of soldiers, refugees, and carriers fell out from exhaustion, and had to be left behind. Nearly all the carriers threw away their loads, and the men who carried the hammocks of the two ladies found themselves unable to support the weight. The night was spent at Terrabum, eighteen miles from Coomassie; some two thousand human beings being crowded into the village, in a deluge.
First his regulation seventy cubic feet of baggage was lowered an extraordinary amount, for no one without the aid of a slide rule and logarithms could possibly calculate it and then he himself made the perilous descent without a ducking. He would next have 240 miles of train journey to Coomassie and then a walk or rather a journey in a hammock for another 300 miles to his station.
It is not now a great centre; because of the oppression and usury which the Kings of Ashantee have inflicted on all in their power, and which have caused Coomassie mainly to attract one form of trade, viz., slaves; who were used in their constant human sacrifices, and for whom a higher price was procurable here than from the Mohammedan tribes to the north under French sway.
On his way up country he was received with great friendliness at all the villages and, when he arrived at Coomassie on the 25th, he found a large number of Ashanti kings, who turned out in state to meet him. A triumphal arch had been erected, and a gorgeous procession of kings and chiefs marched past. There was no sign of a cloud in the horizon.
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