114 EXCURSIONS IN MADEIRA 



cultivated in the gardens as an ornamental grass ^ In Madeira 

 they sow the wheat from October, to January, taking it in in June ; 

 and it is followed by beans, or sweet potatoes (convolvulus batatas J ; 

 the latter of which are dug up at the end of six months, if planted 

 after wheat, but not until after twelve, if planted with vines : the 

 tops make excellent food for cattle ; horses, however, will not eat 

 them : they are propagated by the offsets of the tendrils. The 

 potato is growing into favour with the natives, and has greatly 

 increased the population of the interior ; they now cultivate it in 

 the European manner, but formerly planted the tops after clearing 

 away the tubercles ; seven pounds have been found to produce 



pool merchants, and from eight to ten large vessels, averaging 300 tons, are now 

 annually laden with palm oil in the Calebar River. The people of Calebar are now 

 peaceable, mannerly, and hospitable, compared to what they were in the time of the 

 slave trade; industry has worked off the moral virus of this traffic, and like the people 

 of Gaboon, whose forests of dyewood and ebony never felt the axe before the aboli- 

 tion, they are much more to be believed and respected than the negroes of the Gold 

 Coast settlements." Bowdich, 1. c. p. 11, 13. 



^ The rice from our part of the Coast of Africa, is complained of as reddish ; were 

 it white, it would sell here in considerable quantities, at forty reis (say twopence) a 

 pound, when the market was fairly stocked, and at sixty when indifferently; the 

 present supphes being irregular. Rice is to be bought in the proper season (October) 

 at Garraway's, (in the neighbourhood of Cape Palmas) at about five pounds per ton. 

 I believe it is always worth thirteen pounds a ton at Sierra Leone, and I recollect to 

 have heard, that a cargo sent from the coast to the West Indies, arriving soon after 

 the hurricanes, fetched forty pounds a ton. Rice is also grown in quantities in the 

 interior, on the banks of the Adiree or Volta, which is navigated 150 miles in-land, 

 or as far as Odentee on the confines of Dagwumba, by the salt-carriers of Adda. See 

 Boicdich's two-sheet map of Western Africa, and the accompanying Essay, p. 15. 

 The establishment of a fortified market on one of the islands, about 100 miles up the 

 Volta, would open a new and vast source of commerce, unshackled by the brokerage 

 and impositions of the people of the water-side ; and lead to a direct intercourse with 

 the commercial kingdom of Dagwumba, the grand resort of the caravans from Houssa, 

 Cassina, and Bornoo, and celebrated as an emporium, even on the banks of the 

 Mediterranean. 



