Frank was often filled with disgust at seeing these noble savages
lying indolently from morn till night while their wives went miles
in the forest searching for pineapples and fruits, bent down and
prematurely aged by toil and hardship. Many of the young girls
among the negroes are pretty, with their soft eyes and skin like
velvet, their merry laugh and graceful figures. But in a very few
years all this disappears, and by middle age they are bent, and
wrinkled, and old. All loads are carried by women, with the exception
only of hammocks, which are exclusively carried by men.
Thus, then, the Ashantis settled down to what appeared to Frank to
be an interminable business, and what rendered it more tantalizing
was, that the morning and evening guns at the English forts could
be plainly heard.
It was on the 7th of June that Ammon Quatia reconnoitered Elmina,
and the news came next day that a hundred and ten white men in red
coats had landed from a ship which had arrived that morning off
the coast. Frank judged from the description that these must be
marines from a ship of war. In this he was correct, as they consisted
of marines and marine artillerymen under Lieutenant Colonel Festing,
who had just arrived from England.
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