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In Freetown alone, there are between 5000 and 6000 coloured men, all of whom are free. In the village of Kissey, three miles and a quarter from Freetown, are contained 1,100 souls, all liberated Africans. In Wellington, six miles and a quarter from Freetown, about 800, composed principally of liberated Africans, with a few disbanded soldiers from the 2nd West India regiment.
It was unsafe to walk in the streets of Freetown during the forty-eight hours that followed its capture, because the French crews, with too much of the Company's port wine in their heads to aim straight, were firing at the pigs of the poor freedmen over whom they had achieved such a questionable victory.
The assailants paddled down in larger numbers from Porto Loko, landed at Kissy, and assaulted Freetown, headed by a jumping and drumming 'witch-woman. Divided into three storming parties, they bravely attacked the gates, but they were beaten back without having killed a man. The dead savages lay so thick that the Governor, fearing pestilence, ordered the corpses to be cast into the sea.
Freetown lies upon a gentle declivity, a slope of laterite and diluvium washed down from the higher levels. The ground is good for drainage, but the soft and friable soil readily absorbs the deluging torrents of rain, and as readily returns them to the air in the shape of noxious vapours. The shape is triangular.
On the nearer slope of Signal Hill we saw the first of the destructive bush-burnings. They are like prairie-fires in these lands, and sometimes they gird Freetown with a wall of flame. Complexion is all in all to Sa Leone, and she showed for a few moments a truly beautiful prospect. The Governor has had the courage to bring out Mrs.
Freetown and its neighbourhood was full of these poor wretches, who were denominated, somewhat hypocritically, liberated Africans; but the government took good care not to liberate them, and there indeed it was right.
The French never revisited Freetown. Indeed, they had left the place in such a condition that it was not worth their while to return. The houses had been carefully burned to the ground, and the live stock killed. Except the clothes on their backs, and a little brandy and flour, the Europeans had lost everything they had in the world.
Formerly the red-tipped lantern-tower had attached to it a bungalow, where invalids resorted for fresh air; it has now fallen to pieces, and two iron seats have taken its place. Over this western end of the peninsula's northern face the play of the sea-breeze is strong and regular; and the wester and north-wester blow, as at Freetown, fifty days out of sixty.
Indeed, they gained, as they deserved, great credit for the way in which they had stuck to their vessel. All three midshipmen were treated with the greatest kindness by the residents at Freetown, so that they had a very pleasant time of it, and were in no hurry for the arrival of a vessel to carry them back to their ships.
A month later they arrived at Freetown where they chartered a small sailing vessel, the Fuwalda, which was to bear them to their final destination. And here John, Lord Greystoke, and Lady Alice, his wife, vanished from the eyes and from the knowledge of men.
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