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Updated: May 11, 2025
The return of the Krumen repeats the spectacles of Sinou, and war being here chronic, the canoe-men come off armed with guns, swords, and matchets.
They returned to Tete on the 23rd of June, and thence, after the steamer had been repaired, proceeded to the Kongone, where they received provisions from HMS "Persian," which also took on board their Krumen, as they were found useless for land journeys.
Our landing was not pleasant for the Krumen; the shallow bottom was strewed with rounded pebbles, and the latter are studded with sharp limpets and corallines. We climbed round the seaward bluff, fissured with deep narrow clefts, up which the tide-waves race and roar. Here the trap has a ruddy hue, the salt water bringing out the iron.
I do not feel so sympathetic with the Krumen or their employers in this matter as I should, for the Krumen are silly hens not to go and wipe out Liberia on shore, and the white men are silly hens not to but I had better leave that opinion unexpressed. The power of managing Kruboys is a great accomplishment for any one working the West Coast.
After a dîner d'Axim and discussing a plum-pudding especially made for our Christmas by a fair and kind friend at Trieste, he set out Ancobra-wards on March 16. He would have no Krumen; so our seven fellows, who refused to take service in the Effuenta mine, were paid off and shipped for 'we country. The thirty hands ordered in mid-January appeared in mid-March, and were made over to Mr.
The charge for landing was only threepence; en revanche the poor fellows stole every little thing they could, including my best meerschaum. Cameron and I went ashore to hire Krumen for the Gold Coast, and herein we notably failed. We disembarked at the camber, a huge pile of masonry, whose weight upon an insecure foundation has already split the sea-wall in more than one place.
There were rude ladders, but useful enough, two bamboos connected by rungs of 'tie-tie. The 'sollars' were shaky platforms of branches, but there was no sign of a winch. We set Krumen and porters to clear and lay out the southern boundary, and to open a path leading direct to the beach.
Hence the jolting, stumbling movement and the sensation of feeling every play of the porters' muscles, which make the march one long displeasure. Yet the alternative, walking, means fever for a new comer. On return we cut long bamboos and palm-fronds and made the Krumen practise carrying, Hindu-fashion, upon the shoulder.
The latest charts of Liberia show no less than twenty-six parallelograms stretching inland, at various angles with the shore, and stated to have been acquired by 'conquest or purchase' between 1822 and 1827; but the natives, especially the Krumen, complain that after allowing the foreigners to dwell, amongst them they have been despoiled of their possessions, and that, once lords of the soil, they have sunk to mere serfs.
It is impossible to go into this complicated question fully here, and I will merely ask unprejudiced people who do not agree with me, whether they do not think that as so much has been done with one African tribe, the Krumen a tribe possessing no material difference in make of mind or body from hundreds of other tribes, but which have merely been trained by white men in a different way from other tribes that there is room for great hope in the native labour supply?
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