e nature.

Two lovely islands, San Thome and its little sister isle of Principe,
lie right on the Equator in the Gulf of Guinea, about two hundred miles
from the African mainland. A warm, lazy sea, the sea of the doldrums,
sapphire or turquoise, or, in deep shaded pools, a radiant green,
joyfully foams itself away against these fairy lands of tossing palm,
dense vegetation, rushing cascades, and purple, precipitous peaks. A
soil of volcanic origin is covered with a rich humus of decaying
vegetation, and this, with a soft humid atmosphere, makes an ideal home
for cacao.

The bean, introduced in 1822, was not cultivated with diligence till
fifty years ago. To-day the two islands, which together have not half
the area of Surrey, grow 32,000 metric tons of cacao a year, or about
one-tenth of the world's production.[6] The income of a single planter,
once a poor peasant, has amounted to hundreds of thousands sterling.

[6] The _Gordian's_ estimate for the amount exported in 1919
is 40,766 tons.

[Illustration: ROLLING CACAO, GOLD COAST.
Reproduced by permission of the Editor of "West Africa."]

Dotted over the islands, here nestling on a mountain side, there
overlooking some blue inlet of the sea, are more than two hundred
plantations, or _rocas_, whose buildings look like islands in a green
sea of cacao shrubs, above which rise the grey stems of such forest
trees as have been left to afford shade.

[Illustration: CARRYING CACAO TO THE RAILWAY STATION, NSAWAM, GOLD
COAST.]

Here, not only have the cultivation, fermentation and drying of cacao
been brought to the highest state of perfection, but the details of
organisation--planters' homes, hospitals, cottages, drying sheds and the
Decauville railways--are often models of their kind.

Intelligent and courteous, the planters make delightful hosts. At their
homes, five thousand miles away from Europe, the visitor, who knows what
it means to struggle with steaming, virgin forests, rank encroaching
vegetation, deadly fevers, and the physical and mental inertia
engendered by the tropics, will marvel at the courage and energy that
have triumphed over such obstacles. Calculating from various estimates,
each labourer in the islands appears to produce about 1,640 pounds of
cacao yearly, and the average yield per cultivated acre is 480 pounds,
or about 30 pounds more than that of Trinidad in 1898.

[Illustration: WAGON LOADS OF CACAO BEING TAKEN FROM MESSRS. CADB