Leaving Liberia, we slipped away down the Ivory Coast and the Gold Coast, driven gently along by a scorching wind called the Harmattan.  Our charts were primitive and incomplete, the information they gave quite inadequate.  We had to steer by soundings, very cautiously.  The coast was uniformly low and green, with no distinctive signs upon it.  If we wanted to know where we were, we had to go after some canoe full of fishermen, and ask our way, hat in hand, as one does in the street.  It was a funny sight to see the great black hull of the Belle-Poule, with her white sails scarcely filled by the light breeze, hugging the land, amongst a crowd of canoes full of noisy stark naked savages, hung with necklaces, and with arrows stuck in their heads of fuzzy hair, looking like handfuls of horse-hair pulled out of a mattress and clipped into any number of different shapes.  A regular market went on alongside.  Our sailors would pass down a biscuit or some other thing in their caps, and haul them up again with pineapples, or bananas, or fish, or perhaps a gray parrot.  Thus we sailed along till we came to some great forts, whose white walls bristled with cannon—­Axim, Elmina, Cape Coast Cattle--the two first flying the Dutch, the last one, the British flag.  All along the Gold Coast and the Slave Coast we were to come upon these forts, originally constructed to ensure the humane management of the slave trade, nowadays become very burdensome stations, of no value but as marts for the barter of palm oil, oleaginous nuts, and ivory on the one part, against gunpowder, brandy, glass beads, matches, and the blue cotton cloth known as “guinea cloth” on the other.  I went from Elmina, where the Dutch officers were most friendly, to Cape Coast, by land, in a palanquin.  My companions travelled in baskets shaped like Egyptian mummies, which tall negroes carried on their heads, without putting their hands to them.  It was not safe to stir!  At Cape Coast, I found yet another mode of locomotion.  Governor Maclean took me for a long expedition along the road towards Coomassie, the Ashanti King’s capital.  We travelled in a small victoria, to which was harnessed a four-in-hand of splendid negroes, whose backs bore the marks of terrible floggings.  In spite of the sandy road, the team went gaily along full trot, urged forward by the Governor’s incessant cry of “Get on faster, boys!” Then I went back on board and steered for Accra, another group of forts.  Thence to Crevecoeur, a Dutch fort, and Christianborg, a Danish one, the governor of which, a charming young fellow, came off to see me.  Living as he did alone amongst the blacks, he was delighted to find himself amongst people of his own kind again, for a few minutes.