Up the Volta—Svvanzy\'s trusting agent at Akuse—Amedika, the port of Akuse on the Volta—The trials of a trolley ride—My canoe—Paddling up-river—Rapids that raise the river thirty-four feet—Dangers of the river—Entrancingly lovely scenery—A wealthy land—The curious preventive service—Fears—Leaving the river—Labolabo—A notable black man—The British Cotton-growing Experimental Farm—The lonely white man—The fear that was catching—The lonely man\'s walk.

At Akuse I changed my plans. I had intended to come here, drop down the Volta in the little river steamers that run twice a week to Addah, and then pursue my way along the coast to Keta where there was an old Danish castle, and possibly get across the German border and see Lome, their capital. But there is this charm or drawback—which ever way you like to look at it—about Africa: no one knows anything about the country beyond his immediate district. The Provincial Commissioner had gone to Addah, and I discussed my further progress with the D.C. and his wife as we sat on the verandah that night and looked over the country bathed in the most gorgeous moonlight. The D.C.\'s wife, a pretty little woman who had only been out a couple of months, was of opinion that the vile country was killing her and her husband, that it was simply a waste of life to live here, and she could not get over her surprise that I should find anything of interest in it. The D.C. thought it wouldn\'t be half bad if only the Government brought you back to the same place, so that you might see some result for your labours, and he strongly advised me to go a day or two up the river in a canoe just to see the country.

“It is quite worth seeing,” said he, and his wife smiled. She had seen all she intended to see of the country at Akuse, and did not want to go farther in.

The next day I went into the town, the official quarters are some distance away, and called on a couple of the principal merchants.

The factor at Miller Bros, put a new idea into my head.

“Oh yes, go up the Volta,” said he; “you can get up as far as Labolabo, then cut across-country and come out at Ho in German territory. You can get to Palime from there, and that is rail-head, so you can easily make your way down to Lome.”

It sounded rather an attractive programme.

“You go and see Rowe about it,” he suggested.

So I went and called upon Swanzy\'s agent, a nice young fellow, who first laughed, then looked me up and down doubtfully, and finally said it could be done. Mr Grey, one of their principals, had come across that way the other day, but it was very rough going indeed. No one else that he knew of had ever ventured it.



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If I liked to try he would get me a canoe to go up the river in, and give me letters to their black agents, for I must not expect to meet any white men. And again he looked doubtful.

If I liked; of course I liked. I am always ready to plunge in and take any risks in the future, provided the initial steps are not too difficult, and once he found I wanted to go, Mr Rowe made the initial steps very easy indeed.

First he very nobly lent me twenty-five pounds in threepenny bits, for I had got beyond the region of banks before I realised it, and had only two pounds in hand; he engaged a canoe and six men for me; he gave me letters to all Swanzy\'s agents in the back-country; and finally, when I had said goodbye to the D.C. and his wife, he gave me luncheon and had me rolled down on a trolley by the little hand railway, if I may coin a word, that runs through the swamp and connects Akuse with its port Amedika on the Volta.

This was a new mode of progression rather pleasant than otherwise, for as it was down-hill to the river it couldn\'t have been hard on the men who were pushing. I had come from the Commissioner\'s to the town on a cart, proudly sitting on top of my gear, and drawn by half a dozen Kroo boys; now my luggage went before me on another trolley, and my way was punctuated by the number of parcels that fell off. My clothes were in a tin uniform case supposed, mistakenly, I afterwards found, to be air-tight and watertight, and I did not want this to fall off and break open, because in it I had stowed all my money—twenty-five pounds all in threepenny bits is somewhat of a care, I find. It escaped, but my bedding went, making a nice cushion for the typewriter which followed it.

The port Amedika, as may be seen from the picture, is very primitive, and though twice a week the little mail steamer comes up coaly and black as her own captain, on the occasion of my departure there were only canoes in the harbour.

My canoe was one of the most ordinary structures, with a shelter in the middle under which I had my chair put up. My gear was stowed fore and aft, and six canoe-men took charge.



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Starting always seems to be a difficulty in Africa, and when I was weary of the hot sun and the glare from the water, and was wondering why we did not start, the canoe-men, true to their kind, found they had no chop, and they had to wait till one of their number went back and got it. But it was got at last and I was fairly afloat on the Volta.

To be paddled up a river is perhaps a very slow mode of progression, but in no other way could I have seen the country so well; in no other way could I have grasped its vast wealth, its wonderful resources. It is something of an adventure to go up the Volta too, for as soon as we started its smooth, wide reaches were broken by belts of rock that made it seem well-nigh impassable. Again and again from the low seat in the canoe it looked as if a rocky barrier barred all further progress, but here and there the water rushed down the narrow chasm as in a mill-race. Wonderful it was to find that a canoe could be poled up those rocky stairways against the rushing water. The rapids before you reach Kpong are innumerable; it seems as if the going were one long struggle. But the river is wonderfully beautiful; it twists and turns, and first on the right hand and then on the left I could see a tall peak, verdure-clad to its very summit, Yogaga, the Long Woman. First the sun shone on it brilliantly, as if it would emphasise its great beauty, and then a tornado swept down, and the mist seemed to rise up and swallow it. The Senchi Rapids raise the river thirty-four feet in a furlong or two, and the water, white and foaming, boils over the brown rocks like the water churned up in the wake of a great ocean steamer. I could not believe we were going up there when we faced them, but the expert canoe-men, stripped to a loin cloth, with shout and song defying the river, poled and pulled and pushed the canoe up to another quiet reach, and when they had reached calm water flung themselves down and smoked and chattered and looked back over the way we had come. We seemed to go up in a series of spasms; either the men were working for dear life or they were idling so as to bring down upon them the wrath of Grant who, after that trip along the Coast, felt himself qualified to speak, and again and again I had to interfere and explain that if anybody was going to scold the men it must be me. But indeed they worked so hard they needed a spell.



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Many a time when the canoe was broadside on and the white water was boiling up all round her, I thought, “Well, this really looks very dangerous,” but nobody had told me it was, so I supposed it was only my ignorance, but I heard afterwards that I was right, it is dangerous. Many a bag of cotton has gone to the bottom here, and many a barrel of oil has been dashed to pieces against the rocks, and if many a white man\'s gear has not gone to the bottom too, it is only because white men on this river are few and far between. I had one great advantage, I did not realise the danger till we were right in it, and then it was pressing, it absorbed every thought till we were in smooth water again, with the men lying panting at the bottom of the canoe, so that I really had not time to be afraid till it was all over. Frankly, I don\'t think I could enter upon such a journey again so calmy, but I am glad I have gone once, for it was such a wonderful and enchanting river. Some day they dream the great waterway will be used to reach Tamale, a ten days\' journey farther north, but money must be spent before that happy end is arrived at, though I fancy that if the river were in German hands something would be attempted at once, for the country is undoubtedly very rich.

“Scratch the earth it laughs a harvest.” Cocoa and palm oil and rubber all come to the river or grow within a short distance of its banks, and all tropical fruits and native food-stuffs flourish like weeds. Beauty is perhaps hardly an asset in West Africa, but the Volta is a most beautiful river. The Gambia is interesting, the Congo grand, but the Volta is entrancingly lovely. I have heard men rave of the beauty of the Thames, and it certainly is a pleasant river, with its smooth, green lawns, its shady trees, and its picturesque houses; but to compare it to the Volta is to compare a pretty little birch-bark canoe to a magnificent sailing ship with all her snowy canvas set, heeling over to the breeze. Sometimes its great, wide, quiet reaches are like still, deep lakes, in whose clear surface is mirrored the calm, blue sky, the fleecy clouds, the verdure-clad banks, and the hills that are clothed in the densest green to their very peaks. Sometimes it is a raging torrent, fighting its way over the rocks, and beneath the vivid blue sky is the gorgeous vegetation of the Tropics, tangled, luxuriant, feathery palms, tall and shapely silk-cotton trees bound together with twining creeper and trailing vine in one impenetrable mass. A brown patch proclaims a village, and here are broad-leaved bananas, handsome mangoes, fragrant orange trees, lighter-coloured cocoa patches, and cassada that from the distance might be a patch of lucerne. Always there are hills, rising high, cutting the sky sharply, ever changing, ever reflected faithfully in the river at their feet. There is traffic, of course, men fishing from canoes, and canoes laden with barrels of oil or kernels, or cocoa going down the river, the boats returning with the gin and the cotton cloths for the factories run by the negro agents of the great trading-houses; and every three or four hours or so—distance is as yet counted by time in West Africa—are the stations of the preventive service.



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This preventive service is rather curious, because both banks of the river, in the latter part of its course, are owned by the English, and the service is between the two portions of the Colony. But east of the Volta, whither I was bound, the country is but little known, and apparently the powers that be do not feel themselves equal to cope with a very effective preventive service, so they have there the same duties, a 4 per cent, one that the Germans have in Togo land, while west of the Volta they have a 10 per cent. duty.

I hope there is not much smuggling on the Volta, for with all apologies to the white preventive officers, I doubt the likelihood of the men doing much to stop it. The stations match the river. They have been picturesquely planned—the plans carefully carried out; the houses are well kept up, and round them are some of the few gardens, in English hands, on the Gold Coast that really look like gardens. Though I did not in the course of three days\' travel come across him, I felt they marked the presence of some careful, capable white man. The credit is certainly not due to the negro preventive men. In the presence of their white officer they are smart-looking men; seen in his absence they relax their efforts and look as untidy and dirty as a railway porter after a hard day\'s struggle with a Bank Holiday crowd. After all one can hardly blame the negro for not exerting himself. Nature has given him all he absolutely requires; he has but to stretch out his hand and take it, using almost as little forethought and exertion as the great black cormorants or the little blue-and-white king-fishers that get their livelihood from the river.

And I was afraid of those men. I may have wronged them for they were quite civil, but I was afraid. Again and again they made me remember, as the ordinary peasants never did, that I was a woman alone and very very helpless. Nothing would have induced me to stay two nights at one of those stations. These men were half-civilised. They had lost all awe of a white face, and, I felt, were inclined to be presuming. What could I have done if they had forgotten their thin veneer of civilisation, and gone back to pure savagery. Nothing—I kn............