190 ON GOLD IN WESTERN AFRICA. 



extract by washing and digging. It is said that in the market-place of 

 Kumasi there are 1 ,600 ounces worth of gold — a treasure reserved for 

 State purposes. The bracelets of rock -gold, which the caboceers wear 

 on state occasions, are four pounds in weight, and often so heavy that 

 they must rest their arms upon the heads of their slave boys. 



In Gaman, the region to the north-west of the capital, the ore is 

 found in large nuggets, sometimes weighing four pounds. The pits are 

 sunk nine feet in the red granite and grey granite, and the gold is highly 

 coloured. From 8,000 to 10,000 slaves work for two months every year 

 in the bed of the Bara river. There, however, as on the Gold Coast, 

 the work is very imperfect, and in some places where the metal is sacred 

 to the Fetish, it is not worked at all. Judging from analogy, we might 

 expect to find the precious metal in the declivities inland and north- 

 wards from Cape Palmas, and in that sister formation of the East 

 African ghauts, the " Sierra del Crystal." The late Captain Lawlin, an 

 American trader, settled on an island at the mouth of the Fernan Vaz, 

 carried to his own country, about the year 1843-44, a quantity of 

 granular gold, which had been brought to him by some country people. 

 He brought back all the necessary tools and implements to the Gaboon 

 River, but the natives became alarmed, and he failed to find the spot. 

 Finally, according to the tradition of native travellers, the unexplored 

 region called Rtima,* and conjecturally placed south of the inhospitably 

 Waday, is a land of goldsmiths, the ore being found in mountainous 

 and well-watered districts. It is becoming evident that Africa will 

 some day equal half-a-dozen Californias. 



Mungo Park supplies the amplest notices of gold in the regions 

 visited by him north of the Kong Mountains. The principal places are 

 the head of the Senegal river, and its various influents ; Dindiko, where 

 the shafts are most deep, and notched, like a ladder ; Shronda, which 

 gives two grains from every pound of alluvial matter ;f Bambuk and 

 Bambarra. In Kongkadu, the " mountain land," where the hills are of 

 coarse ruddy granite, composed of red feldspar, white quartz, and black 

 shale, containing orbicular concretions, granular gold is found in the 

 quartz, which is broken with hammers ; the grains, however, are flat. 

 The diggings at present best known are those of Manding. The gold, 

 we are told, is found not in mines or veins, but scattered in sand and 

 clay. They vary from a pin's head to the size of a pea, and are re- 

 markably pure. This is called Sana Manko, or gold-powder, in contra- 

 distinction to Sana birro, or gold stones, nuggets occasionally weighing 



* This may be the " Rimga," of our maps, with whose position Ruma corre- 

 sponds. My informant wrote down the name from the mouth of a Waday man at 

 Lagos. 



f This would be -y^nj- (avoirdupois*, whereas the cascalhao, or alluvium, of 

 Brazil is t^^, and remarkably rich and pyritical ores in Europe give ^oV^. 

 Yet M. D'Aubrie estimates the gold in the bed of Father Rhine at six or seven 

 millions of pounds sterling. 



