of the present century, attacked the Fantees and the remaining unconquered tribes, whom the settlers, with a selfish but mistaken regard for their own interest, left to their fate. In 1807 the Ashantees were masters of the whole country, and had even attacked and taken one of the European settlements. With the British they came once into collision, but were repulsed, and their further aggressions were averted by an engagement on the part of the authorities not to assist the Fantees. During the next few years so bitter was the yoke imposed on the conquered nations, that several of them combined and revolted against it, but without success; the Ashantees not only maintained their hold over the country, but even threatened Cape Coast, whose safety was only purchased by discreditable concessions. This state of things lasted until 1817, the unhappy Fantees continuing to suffer the greatest oppression at the hands of their conquerors, when it was thought by the authorities at Cape Coast advisable to attempt to negotiate with the Ashantees, with the view of establishing peace on a secure footing and promoting the prosecution of lawful trade. The mission which was sent was much struck, in passing through Assin and Fantee, with the traces of desolation which the Ashantees had everywhere left behind: 'Not a vestige of cultivation was to be seen, and heaps of ruined villages appeared on every side, round which the miserable natives stalked with the gaunt and sullen aspect of famine and despair.'

"The result of this mission was the conclusion of a treaty by which the Fantees, who were now reduced to the position of tributaries of Ashantee, were placed under a sort of protectorate of the British, it being stipulated that the King should not engage in hostilities against them, even in case of their aggression, without previous reference to the Governor of Cape Coast. This treaty did not produce the benefits which had been anticipated; the slave-trade progressed, to the injury of legitimate commerce, and induced a general state of lawlessness and disregard of life and property throughout the country. A fresh treaty was concluded with the Ashantees in 1819, which was disavowed by the local authorities, and in 1822 the Imperial Government, having once more assumed the control of the forts and settlements, placed them under the jurisdiction of Sierra Leone, and sent out Sir Charles MacCarthy as Governor-in-Chief.

"Sir Charles MacCarthy, on his arrival, found our relations with the Ashantees in so unsatisfactory a state that he appears to have felt that there was no way of establishing peace but by the sword. War was soon declared, and in January, 1824, Sir C. Mac Carthy and the force under his orders were destroyed by an invading army of Ashantees. Cape Coast Castle was then invested, and, but for a panic amongst the invaders, might have been captured; late in the year the whole power of the settlement, with aid from home, being brought to bear on them, the Ashantees were completely defeated and driven from the country.

"An unanimous spirit of resistance to the Ashantees was now aroused in every tribe, from the Asinee to the Volta, but several years elapsed before the efforts of the British authorities succeeded in placing matters on a satisfactory footing. In 1831, however, the exertions of the able, energetic, and resolute Mr. Maclean, then Governor of the settlements, were rewarded with success. Convinced of the hopelessness of expecting that peace could be maintained so long as the Fantees and other tribes remained subject to the exactions and oppressions of their former rulers, and yet foreseeing at the same time the dangers which must result if so large a body of natives, composed of different tribes and having different interests and views, were left to carry on their affairs without the control or guidance of any superior power; believing moreover that the influence of such a superior and civilized power would help to work valuable reforms among the most turbulent and lawless of them, he conceived the idea of compelling from the King of Ashantee an acknowledgment of their independence, and by the influence over them which our interference on their behalf had obtained for us, of inducing them to band themselves together under our guidance and control for protection against the common enemy. These important objects were at length secured by the signing of a treaty, on April 27, 1831, between the Governor, the Ashantees, and the Fantee and other tribes then in alliance with us, and during the next twelve years the results of this arrangement under the administration of Governor Maclean are detailed in the report of the Committee of 1842 There was exercised a very wholesome influence over a coast not much less than 150 miles in extent, and to a considerable distance inland, preventing within that range external slave-trade, maintaining peace and security, and exercising a useful though irregular jurisdiction along the neighbouring tribes, and much mitigating, and in some cases extinguishing, some of the most atrocious practices which prevailed among them unchecked before.""

The following curious account of this war, in which the unfortunate Governor Sir Charles MacCarthy fell, was given by a relation of the present king, detained in custody at Sierra Leone, to a correspondent of the Times, of July 29 last:

"Sai Cudjoe died at a very great age, and was succeeded by Sai Quamina, the fifth of the Ashantee kings. Sai Quamina occupied the throne but a very short time. He was dethroned by a conspiracy of his nobles, and was succeeded by his younger brother, Sai Tootoo Quamina, who commenced his reign about 1800.

"During this reign the first war with the English occurred. After some fruitless negotiations, Sir Charles MacCarthy, the then Governor of Cape Coast Castle, marched in the year 1824 with a strong force to attack the Ashantee troops. He was met at Esmacow by the Ashantee army, which had crossed the Prah to meet them. Sir Charles MacCarthy underrated the strength of the Ashantee forces, and, hearing the hum of the approaching army, ordered his band to

strike up God save the Queen,' thinking the sound of the National Anthem would terrify the enemy. He was soon undeceived. A severe battle ensued. The English troops and their native allies were utterly routed. Sir Charles MacCarthy and nearly all the European officers with him lost their lives, their heads were cut off, and while their headless trunks were left to rot on the field of battle, their skulls were carried in triumph to Commassie, where they are still kept. On high festivals the King of the Ashantees drinks from a cup fashioned from the skull of the unfortunate Sir Charles MacCarthy, which is preserved in the Bantammah at Commassie with the crown and other treasures belonging to the king.

"Sai Tootoo Quamina died about the very day that his troops gained the great victory of Esmacow, and was succeeded by his brother Sai Ockoto.

"Cape Coast was besieged by the Ashantees, and, although repulsed, they ravaged the entire country of the Fantees, and held them in complete subjection until, a force having been again collected, the battle of Doodowah was fought on the 26th of August, 1826. The Ashantees were at the beginning of the battle seized with a sudden and unaccountable panic, and fled. They suffered considerable loss and retired from the Fantees' country.

The employment of Congreve rockets for the first time, we are told, in African warfare, "struck dismay into the ranks of the enemy, and gave confidence to the allies; and in the result the Ashantee army was completely destroyed."

The Ashantees were thus finally repulsed, and our Fantee Protectorate resumed; but it was again abandoned, and practically left in the hands of a committee of merchants in London, whose agent, Mr. Maclean, already mentioned, became (says Sir Charles Adderley) "well known in West African history." He was, perhaps, the ablest and most energetic European ever employed by us in that region, but is better known to the literary world in general as the husband of the unfortunate poetess, Letitia Landon (L.E. L.), whose melancholy death at Cape Coast Castle excited at the time so much interest. In the year 1843 the Crown resumed the Gold Coast forts, and by subsequent proceedings assumed "what is called indefinitely a Protectorate" over the neighbouring tribes lying between them and the Ashantees. Under the colonial administration of Lord Grey (1847-1851) attempts were made to utilize and consolidate our vague dominion, to introduce some tincture of English law and usages chiefly through the appointment of a judicial assessor to act in conjunction with the chief of tribes, and to levy, through the instrumentality of the chief, a poll-tax for purposes of government; but it cannot be said that these well-meant efforts met with much

success.

Our schemes of government were naturally much impeded by the intervention of the scattered possessions of two powers, Denmark and Holland; those of France, abandoned in 1870, lay farther to

the eastward, intermingled with our own. Thanks to the mutual jealousy of merchants, the several stations lay close to each other, an English fort almost always flanked by a Dutch and Danish. Denmark disposed of her possessions to us, in 1850, for a trifling sum of money, but those of Holland remained, and it was out of the question for us to pursue our favourite scheme of raising a revenue along the coast by customs duties so long as the Dutch, whose notions of policy on that subject were different from ours, refused to adopt the same tariff. The impossibility of levying duties, and want of Dutch co-operation, led us, in 1847, to avail ourselves of their readiness to make such exchanges of stations as should put their more easterly forts into our possession, and our more westerly into theirs. But this arrangement was still extremely imperfect, and Mr. Winwood Reade ("African Sketch Book ") thus describes the curious intermixture of British and English forts on this coast previous to 1867-68 :

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Beginning at the west, Apollonia was English; then came Axim, which was Dutch; then Dix Cove, which was English. Bartrie, Secondee, and Chama were Dutch; but between Chama and Elmina was Commendas, which was English. Annamaboe, just beyond Cape Coast, was English; but the next fort was Dutch; and finally, at Accra half the town was English and half Dutch. Each had its own fort and its own landing-place and so within a town of moderate size were two distinct systems of custom-house regulations, and two distinct methods of governing the natives.”

It was obviously, on the face of it, and according to ordinary considerations, a great political advantage, if we were to maintain our dominion on the coast at all, to acquire from the Dutch on reasonable terms the sovereignty of those possessions and the exercise of those local protectorates which interfered thus vexatiously with our own. And when, in 1871, we concluded a treaty with Holland, whereby that power abandoned all sovereignty on the Gold Coast, and received in exchange our consent to its pursuing an independent course of policy on the coast of Sumatra, in the Indian Archipelago, no voice here, so far as we are aware, was raised against the policy of at least the first half of the bargain. And yet it has so turned out, as if in mockery of our supposed wisdom, that this transaction has produced already results of a character so injurious that any amount of ultimate success can with difficulty compensate for the loss and suffering in which it must involve us. The reason of our failure (local politics apart) has been a very simple one. We omitted to take into consideration the effects which the Dutch surrender would have on the interests and feelings of the natives of the coast, and in particular of the King and people of Ashantee.

The Dutch, who had held Elmina (the most important town, if such it may be called, on the coast, and close to our own head station at Cape Coast Castle), were the protectors of a tribe closely allied to

the Ashantees. That tribe has now the same right to our protection (under the terms of the treaty) which it had to that of Holland. So long as the Dutch held Elmina the King of Ashantee, through the means of this intervening tribe, had practically access to the coast, and could derive supplies of such articles as he wished without passing through an English custom-house. The King also received an annual stipend from the Dutch. This our Colonial Office offered to double; but it seems that his Majesty persisted in regarding the Dutch payment as a tribute, while we carefully guarded ourselves against any such supposition. It was, indeed, says the author of the article in the Edinburgh Review, "an old tradition of the country before the cession that the Dutch were friendly to the Ashantees and traded with them, whilst the English protected the Fantees, their enemies. This probably means that the Ashantees drew their supplies through the Dutch factories free of duty, while the Fantees submitted to our duties for the sake of our protection. Hence a Dutch and an English party existed all along the Gold Coast, and in one of the tribes there was a Dutch king and an English king, who one day came to fisticuffs in the presence of the British administrator. . The King of Elmina, counselled by the Ashantees, had declared he could not live under the British flag. The majority of the Elminas, however, resolved that no opposition should be offered to the transfer, and deposed their king because he had allowed himself to be persuaded to resist it by an Ashantee prince." Without taking our readers farther into the intricacies of negro politics, cause enough, we imagine, has been given to account for the outbreak of the Ashantee war. Á fierce and warlike people, headed by chiefs of similar disposition, and for more than a generation untaught to dread the superiority of British arms, and having the utmost contempt for the Fantees and other inferior and demoralized tribes along the coast, would no longer submit to the restraints imposed by a policy which-partly in fact, but much more in their apprehension-tended to sever them from their trading connexion with the world beyond the sea, as well as to deprive them of their supremacy over their neighbours. "Suddenly," says Sir Charles Adderley, in a letter to the Times, " and to the confessed surprise of all, 1873 opened with an Ashantee invasion, about the causes of which and the numbers of which everybody was in the dark. It by no means seems to have been the dénouement of a long-concealed calculation on the part of the Ashantee King, now finding our defence reduced within his compass. War was certainly always brewing, but such a calculated occasion is no more characteristic of savages than it turned out to be real in itself. There was treachery at Elmina on the part of the Dutch faction; there was a mistaken imposition of an oath of allegiance wholly incompatible with our assumed relations; there was a refusal by our merchants to resume certain old brokerage payments with the resumption of trade; there was an unlucky speech to the chiefs, of which I wish to say nothing-any or all of which circumstances