SHIPPING MAHOGANY, AXIM.
safely say that railway making would not be difficult on it,
for it is good hard land, not stretches of totten swamp.
The great difficulty in making railroads here will consist in
landing the material through the surf. This difficulty cannot
be got over, except at enormous expense by making piers,
but it might be surmounted by sending the plant ashore
on small bar boats that could get up the Volta or Ancobra.
When up the Volta it may be said, “ it would be nowhere
when any one wanted it,” but the cast-iron idea that goods
must go ashore at places where there are government
headquarters like Accra and Cape Coast, places where the
surf is about at its worst, seems to me an erroneous one.
The landing place at Cape Coast might be made safe and easy
by the expenditure of a few thousands in “ developing ” that
rock which at present gives shelter when you get round the
lee side of it, but this would only make things safer for surf-
boats. No other craft could work this bit of beach ; and there
is plenty of room for developing the Volta, as it is a waterway
which a vessel drawing six feet can ascend fifty miles from
July till November, and thirty miles during the rest of the year.
The worst point about the Volta is the badness of its bar
—a great semicircular sweep with heavy breakers— too bad a
bar for boats to cross ; but a steamer on the Lagos bar boat
plan might manage it, as the B u ll Frog reported in 1884
nineteen to twenty-one feet on it, one hour before high water.
The absence of this bar boat, and the impossibility of sending
goods out in surf-boats across the bar, causes the goods from
Adda (Riverside), the chief town on the Volta, situated about
six miles up the river from its mouth, to be carried across the
spit of land to Beach Town, and then brought out through the
shore surf—the worst bit of surf on the whole Gold Coast.
The Ancobra is a river which penetrates the interior, through
a district very rich in gold and timber and more than suspected
of containing petroleum. It is from eighty to one
hundred yards wide up as far as Akanko, and during the rains
carries three and a half to four and a half fathoms, and boats
are taken up to Tomento about forty miles from its mouth with
goods to the Wassaw gold mines. But the bar of the Ancobra
is shallow, only giving six feet, although it is firm and settled,
not like that of the Volta and Lagos ; and the Portuguese, in
the sixteenth century, used to get up this river, and work the
country to a better profit than we do nowadays.
The other chief Gold Coast river, the Bosum Prah, that
enters the sea at Chama, is no use for navigation from the
sea, being obstructed with rock atjd rapids, and its bar only