g sickness. And so the
native, used as he is to heavy head-loads, naturally adopted this as his
first method of transport, and hundreds of the less affluent natives
arrive at the collecting centres with great weights of cacao on their
heads. "Women and children, light-hearted, chattering and cheerful, bear
their 60 lbs. head-loads with infinite patience. Heavier loads,
approaching sometimes two hundredweight, are borne by grave, silent
Hausa-men, often a distance of thirty or forty miles."

[Illustration: CROSSING THE RIVER AT NSAWAM, GOLD COAST.]

[Illustration: DRYING CACAO BEANS AT MRAMRA.
Reproduced by permission from the Imperial Institute series of Handbooks
to the Commercial Resources of the Tropics.]

One day, not so many years ago, some more ingenious native in the hills
at the back of the Coast, filled an old palm-oil barrel with cacao and
rolled it down the ways to Accra. And now to-day it is a familiar sight
to see a man trundling a huge barrel of cacao, weighing half a ton, down
to the coast. The sound of a motor horn is heard, and he wildly turns
the barrel aside to avoid a disastrous collision with the new, weird
transport animal from Europe. Motor lorries have been used with great
effect on the coast for some seven years; they have the advantage over
pack animals that they do not succumb to the bite of the dreaded tsetse
fly, but nevertheless not a few derelicts lie, or stand on their heads,
in the ditches, the victims of over-work or accident.

[Illustration: SHOOTING CACAO FROM THE ROAD TO THE BEACH, ACCRA.]

Having brought the cacao to the coast, there yet remains the
lighterage to the ocean liner, which lies anchored some two miles from
the shore, rising and falling to the great rollers from the broad
Atlantic. A long boat is used, manned by some twenty swarthy natives,
who glory--vocally--in their passage through the dangerous surf which
roars along the sloping beach. The cacao is piled high on wood racks and
covered with tarpaulins and seldom shares the fate of passengers and
crew, who are often drenched in the surf before they swing by a crane in
the primitive mammy chair, high but not dry, on board the hospitable
Elder Dempster liner.

[Illustration: ROLLING CACAO, GOLD COAST.]

SAN THOME (AND PRINCIPE).

We now turn from the Gold Coast and the success of native ownership to
another part of West Africa, a scene of singular beauty, where the
Portuguese planters have triumphed over savag