A little abashed at the manner in which we had treated his offer, the preacher sent away the two young ladies to the back of his premises, and, beginning to have a faint idea that he had somehow not risen in our estimation, he endeavoured to retrieve his lost ground by falling back upon his more legitimate occupation, and asked that we should delay our departure in order that he might preach a sermon to the men. The hypocrisy of this proposition, coming as it did immediately after the other, was more than we could stand, and, expressing our thoughts in unequivocal terms, we paid him what we owed, went out, and got the men together ready to march off. The village pastor, however, was not going to be done out of an opportunity of showing forth before his unsophisticated flock, and, while we were preparing to start, delivered an exhortation in which “the sword of the Lord and of Gideon,” “soldiers of the Lord,” “smite with the edge of the sword,” and similar expressions, were jumbled together in a meaningless jargon; while when we moved off he strode alongside for some distance, open-mouthed, shouting in a discordant voice that highly-appropriate hymn called “Hold the Fort,” the work of those itinerant vendors of religion, Messrs. Moody and Sankey.
Whenever I meet such creatures as this local preacher I am moved to anger and restrain myself only with difficulty. Little children in England stint themselves in the luxury of sweets by giving of their scarce pence to aid the “poor missionaries,” and people who can ill afford to be charitable contribute their mite to further the promulgation of Christianity among heathen negroes; while scoundrels like this preacher batten upon the subscriptions thus raised, live in the best house in the village, acquire authority and wealth, and lead a happy life of idleness and vice. The persons who draw up those highly-coloured Mission Reports for the benefit of the gullible British public have a great deal to answer for.
We reached Anamaboe about 10 a.m., and found the fort prepared for our reception as well as could be expected under the circumstances. Of late years it had been occupied by two or three Fanti policemen with their numerous wives and dependents, and consequently was not as clean as it might have been; while no attempt had been made to make good the damage resulting from years of neglect. As a military position, the defects which were the cause of the surrender of the fort to the Ashantis in 1806 had not been remedied; the loopholes in the curtain were so made that fire could only be brought to bear on a point some forty yards from the walls, and persons beyond or within that distance could not be touched, while the embrasures yawned to such an extent that it would cost many lives to work guns so exposed to the fire of an enemy. Added to this, the native swish-houses extended on one side to within twenty yards of the walls; and on another side stood an immense house, built of stone, which actually overlooked the bastions and commanded the whole fort. As neither food nor water fit to drink were to be obtained here, these necessaries of life had to be forwarded daily from Cape Coast in surf-boats: sometimes the water, through some oversight, failed to appear, and we had to use the dysenteric liquid from the neighbouring pools, or go without; the former alternative was usually chosen, and, in spite of every precaution, such as boiling and filtering, a very large percentage of the men were constantly on the sick-list. As for the officers, three in number, we were always more or less ill. The town was in a condition of indescribable filth, and at times the stench which arose was so suffocating that, in spite of the intense heat, we were obliged to keep the doors and windows of our rooms closed. The streets, the yards, the bush--in fact the whole surface of the earth within a radius of half-a-mile from the fort--was covered with the collected refuse of half-a-century, which, under the combined influence of sun and rain, gave forth a curious variety of pestilential odours. Altogether, Anamaboe was an exceedingly salubrious and, under the circumstances, useful post.