SALE OF "LOOT."

Grey River Argus, Volume XV, Issue 1816, 1 June 1874, Page 3

SALE OF "LOOT."

The special correspondent of the Daily News, writing from Cape Coast Castle on February 27i ; says :— The centre of interest at Cape Coast during the last few .days has been the room in which the small quantity of ' Moot", brought back; from Coomassie has been 1 gathered for the purposes of inspection] and sale. I scarcely know whether to say that accident or arrangement " has' pretty evenly-divided between Cape Coast' Oastte andiLondon the golden spoil tbat ; is or was for sale! Tour readersmayperhaps remember the apcotint, which I gave* of the/material of which the portion of the, indemn^.>ent by the King to Foin-! mariah; consisted. The sale at Cape Coast did pepf iijclude any of this, but merely the Kingfajproperty which, had been found in , thft: palace 'by the prize-agents, and a certain' quantify which had- been taken from the hangers-on of the army After they had left k Qpomassie, . together with a small which, had be&n givi^n i up/ nhdex'Stt',: Garners orders; ;oy "/those^ officers ; ' i 'j i »[io;' i l»i 1 had private oppor-" tunitifls for securing a share on their own account. :. >„ 7. : • . ' , r ■ '■.. '.-. No one in England will find it hard to understand the .peremptory necessity: which induced the general to prohibit the soldiers .from touching anything in Coomassie,' even though everything was to-be 1 devoted 46 the flames. A force of per-' Baps 50ft men, in the centre of Africa, de-: pendent solely on their discipline andf the effective use of their superior weapons -|^or their' triumphant position, if not for, : ' their o y,ery safety, in the heart of akingdpin of jjariave warriors accustomed to centuries of victory, would Jiave beetf exr> posed to terrible risk had any cause whatA ever tended .to break up 'the unity and military effectiveness of their organisation. : It is -jutterly impossible to tell to what lengths of indiscipline thespirit of plunder^ if once allowed to break loose, may lead even the most perfectly disciplined of; troops. , But , it did seem a little too ab-j surd, whei^ just as we were: about to, devote the place to flames, a huge heap of costly clothes and other valuable spoil was, simply : lying untouched in the main street) of; Coomassie, taken as. it had largely been from the released Fantee prisoners, : who had occupied their time since their escape from prison in spoiling the Egyptians with a vengeance. Sir Garnet felt this; and permitted a few officers and soldiers to pick over the heap and take what they could carry away. A few things had also been collected at different stations along the line of march b;y different men. On our reaching Amoaful, however, on the return journey, an order was issued /requiring that all these private spoils should be produced before' the prize-agents, and either repurchased by their possessors at a fixed price, or handed over for sale, together with the articles that had been collected by the prize-agents during the- night before our departure from Ooomaysie, Equity, no doubt, required that' this should be done, since the soldiers ; had, for the most part, had ; xlp; opportunity of obtaining their share. -But it was not a little amusing to observe: the ;lopk :. of horror with which more: than one of those who held posses-

when an idea of indemnities is formed on a kind of mental comparison with the milliards demanded of such a country as France, even the existence within its territory of gold mines of almost incalculable natural wealth, does not render a nation, circumstanced as 1 have described the Ashantee people to be, capable of sustaining a comparison in which they shall be anywhere at all. Any notion that has been formed of the natural wealth of the goldfields of the Coast is probably not over, but vastly under, the mark. Concurrent reports of officers sent to very different portions of the country lead to the conclusion that there must be at least patches of no inconsiderable extent upon the Gold Coast which exceed in mineral wealth anything that we have known anywhere else in the world. Such was the report that was brought . after his travels among the tribes of Eastern Wassaw by Captain Thompson within the first two months of our arrival on the Coast. The story which Captain Butler has furnished of what he has seen in Ashantee country proper, to the west, during the continuance of the invasion which he conducted, is even more taking. As I have every reason to hope that Captain Butler's experiences in this, as in other respects, will be narrated by the pen which has so brilliantly described the far different regions o| the " Great Lone Land" and the {l Wild North Land " I must not spoil their interest for future readers. But I may at least whet their curiosity by say-' ing that I have heard Captain Butler ex-; press his belief that if the gold miners of the regions which he has knovvh had the conception of the nature of the veins of gold which permeate the country in which he recently was not all the fears of African climate, or of Ashantee treachery and cruelty would prevent an immigration which must ere long completely change the face of these regions, whatever terrible loss' of life occurred during the earlier period of settlement. Captain Butler has had no inconsiderable experience of some of the richest gold fields of the world, but he says that he has never seen yet any country which could have paid for the labour necessarily expended in obtaining the ore, by tho rude processes in operation in Ashantee. Whereas the ordinary system in a decently managed goldfield is to make one shaft down to the vein till it is struck, and then to work along it, in Ashantee the method adopted is to make a succession of entirely independent holes, which are dug completly through the soil to a depth in many instances of thirty or forty feet. Of course something must be allowed for the reckless expenditure of barbaric and especially of slave life, but when every deduction is made the inherent wealth of the country must be prodigious. But natural wealth is one thing, and accumulated, accesible property is quite another. The mistake which Alva made in the days of the tyranny over the Netherlands has never been yet so thoroughly exploded, but that some relics of his notion still haunt the public mind even in the nineteenth century. It is always half believed that a barbaric and despotic monarch who can lay his hand at will upon the property of any one of his subjects when he pleases, must have at any given moment enormous and tangable resources. Certainly the facts in Ashantee. at all events, are directly contrary. There' can be no question whatever that if during the last fifty years such rule and order had permitted the steady development throughout even that short period of the population and resources of the country, its wealth would have been such that L 200,000 would have been indeed a flea-bite as an indemnity. As a matter of fact, those who investigated on the spot with all possible care the probable sum which it was possible to exact from the King have assured me unanimously that the one grave doubt in their minds is whether the King could actually pay so large a sum at all. The largest sum which has ever previously been demanded from .any Ashantee King was that which the triumphant Governor Maclean, in a moment of complete victory, succeeding in exacting. It consisted of 1000 ounces of gold, to be paid over only as a security for good behaviour, under a promise, which was actually fulfilled, that it should within a limited named period be returned. It is said to be still one of the greatest puzzles of Ashantee casuistry what conceivable motive induced the English Governor ever to carry out this latter part of the arrangement. He had promised it, of course. In the name of .all fetishes what had that to do with it ?

Bion of some souvenir to which they had become attached entirely without respect to its value, learnt the price that was fixed upon it by the gold-assayer. Every little ornament in Coomassie is almost recklessly mended and patched with gold. Common pieces of crockery, which might be repaired in England by the not very elegant process of sewing in brass wire, are found quite as roughly, or eveu more roughly, repaired in Coomasaie, but with gold instead of brass. The effect ia not in the least better; the difference in price, as determined by an assayer, may be imagined. It really was a serious misfortune, in some ways, that it was imposible to pick up any little innocent articles, costing a few pence or a few shillings, which the men could carry away. The total value of everything was by no means as great as might have been expected. When the prize-agents entered the palace, they found everything, from top to bottom, packed for removal. The women — characteristically, perhaps, of their sex— had evidently put more faith than the men in the certainty of the fulfilment.of the fetish predictions which foretold the fall of Coomassie. For days, if nbt weeks ? before our arrival, they must have been engaged in getting everything that was possible removed. The consequence was that at first it was anticipated that the entire sum realised by what was found in the palace would not have exceeded L 200 0; but the Fantee prisoners and the native offscourings of Coomassie were, as it may 7 be well supposed, not to be kept from a tolerable effective- course of pilfering during the whole time we were there- The things subsequently taken from them furnished, therefore, no inconsiderable addition to the total. When brought down to Cape Coast, the desire of every one to have somo relic of the expedition caused the price to run up in a very marked degree, and it is probable that the sum realised by the sale of the prize property in all will have amounted to nearly L6OOO. The golden ornaments delivered over at Fommanah not being prize money are to be sent home to England for sale, and if the desire in London for some memorial of this weird campaign be at all as keen as it was at Cape Coast I should imagine that the 1000 ounces will probably fetch at least half as much again as their value by weight. I described in my former letter the character of the goods which will go to London. Those at Cape Coast were naturally somewhat different; perhaps the most valuable single item was a curious bronze representation apparently of an Ashantee procession or battle. It consists of a series of very elaborate figures on a bronze stand. No one at Cape Coast knew how this somewhat exceptional piece of property came into the hands of the Ashantee monarch ; but it was generally believed to be a piece of native work, perhaps carried out unler the instructions of some of the European workmen who were, a few years ago, for some time resident in Coomassie in connection with the mission established there. This will not make its appearance in England, for after a fierce competition it was knocked down to a Russian prince, whose name, though I believe it is familiar enough in. England in connection with the present expedition, I will not venture to put on paper, as indeed no one has ventured to pronounce it out here. En passant I may mention that the said prince arrived with most unlucky accuracy, * just in time to be too late.' He reached the Frah just as the news arrived that Sir Garnet was on his.return from Coomassie. For the rest there were numbers of native cloths, the exact value of which was a matter of serious dispute amongst the ladies, white and black, of Cape Coast. That is a subject upon which I shall not venture to pronounce an opinion. Some of them were certainly excessively fine in texture, and the colors appeared to my uninitiated eye to be permanent and good. But I cannot pretend to think that much taste was displayed in any of them, and I doubt if they are as typical representatives of native manufacture as many other portions of the goods for sale. There were an immense number of common Ashantee clay-pipe bowls and pipes, a few silver-worked pipes, and two pipes which had belonged to the King himself of which the bowl in each case consisted of solid worked gold of very curious pattern, while the stem was elaborately entwined with pure gold wire worked into various devices, and with a golden mouthpiece. The competition for these was, as it may well be believed, from their entirely unique character, very severe. The number of ornaments used by the ladies of Ooomassie, and especially by the King's favorite wives, was very great, chiefly in the form of golden necklaces, breast-plates, ear-rings, armlets, rings, &c, the work being almost always without addition of stones or anything for which it is employed as a setting— so far as I know, not even the richly-colored beetles of the country being used for this purpose. The most effective articles, to my mind, were those in which the simple rough ingots were used, sometimes almost by themselves, sometimes, in contrast with the more finely-wrought metal. Of course a considerable number of articles of European manufacture were on sale. A sword which had been presented by the Queen to the King of. Ashantee was perhaps the most interesting of these. There was a curious piece of old plate,, however, with the crept of some old English family almost battered out by wear and rough usage. Altogether, if a collection were made, or loan, Of the articles purchased at the sale and brought to England, and it were exhibited, together with the bullion sent over as part of the indemnity, J. think there would be considerable interest attaching to it as a display 'of native manmfacture, though the money value of the goods would probably rather disappoint expectation. It was not a little amusing to us in Ashantee land to hear of the astonismeht in England at the trifling amount of the ' indemnity demanded from the King. It is evident that the wealth of the country has been enormously over-estimated in Europe. It is no doubt difficult to realise the character of a kingdom which literally consists of forest, with a few patches of cultivated ground surrounding | the sparsley scattered villages. There is no doubt that Ashantee, tinder a proper system of cultivation, would be capable of supporting an enormous population, and the numbers in the country itself, as it at present exists cultivated; for the richness of the soil and the natnre of the climate make every little patch enormously productive, while the inhabitants-are able to exist on the very sorriest of diet. Buj.