The Ashantee War

Ir may be reasonably doubted whether, in the month of June, 1873, it would have been possible to have met in a drawing-room in London, except by the merest accident, a man who knew more about Cape Coast Castle than that it was somehow or other connected with the sad and mysterious story of L. E. L.

If any one in such a drawing-room had ventured to express his belief that, in the course of the next six months or thereabouts, that part of the world would become the centre of interest for Englishmen, hardly any one would have thought such an absurdity worth the trouble of laughing at.

Nor can it be said that any very sudden interest had been awakened in England as to the Gold Coast, and what was going on there, up to the 12th of September, the date at which Sir Garnet Wolseley sailed from Liverpool. But during the summer months a languid attention began to be attracted by the announcement

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that ever since the beginning of the year, or rather before it, a barbarian army of indefinite numbers had been engaged in an invasion of territory under our protection, that it had defeated in pitched battles all the native tribes attached to our alliance, and that it had finally settled down within the near neighbourhood of forts of which we had recently obtained possession.

The circumstances of the case, as it appeared at this period, are worth noting, because in their broad features they have been singularly apt to repeat themselves in regard to each of the many little wars in which we have, from time to time during the last half century, been engaged.

The first phenomenon which indicated that public interest was beginning to be directed towards the part of the world in which the events above alluded to had been occurring, was, that the Times was deluged with letters from old inhabitants of the Gold Coast. The second was, that the Foreign Office was deluged with schemes for the defeat of the barbarian enemy on the most economical terms with the greatest possible rapidity. Those who were sufficiently acquainted with the ins and outs of our great modern Metropolitan gossip-club to hear something of its more secret whispers, might have known that, in relation to that same Gold Coast, an amount of work was at that time being quietly done, and an amount of information quietly collected, chiefly by one man in one office in London, of which the evidence was not so apparent at the time, but was likely to become sufficiently conspicuous a few months later.

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The Ashantee War: A Popular Narrative