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To the Gold Coast for Gold (1); A Personal Narrative
To the Gold Coast for Gold A Personal Narrative - 1 Author:Richard Francis Burton Volume: 1 General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1883 Original Publisher: Chatto and Windus Subjects: Gold mines and mining Ghana Gold Coast Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of t... more »his book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER IV. Madeira (continued) -- Christmas -- Small Industries -- WINE -- DEPARTURE FOR TENERIFE. The Christmas of 1881 at Madeira could by no means be called gay. The foreign colony was hospitable, as usual, with dinners, dances, and Christmas trees. But amongst the people festivities seemed to consist chiefly of promenading one's best clothes about the military band and firing royal salutes, not to speak of pistols and squibs. The noise reminded me of Natal amongst the Cairene Greeks; here, as in the Brazil, if you give a boy a copper he expends it not on lollipops, but on fireworks. We wished one another boas entradas, the ' buon' principio' of Italy, and remembered the procession of seventeen years ago. The life- sized figures, coarsely carved in wood and dressed in real clothes, were St. Francis, St. Antonio de Noto, a negro (Madeiran Catholics recognise no ' aristocracy of the skin') ; a couple of married saints (for even matrimony may be sanctified), SS. Bono and Luzia, with half adozen others. The several platforms, carried by the brotherhoods in purple copes, were preceded by the clergy with banners and crosses and were followed by soldiers. The latter then consisted of a battalion of cafadores, 480 to 500 men, raised in the island and commanded by a colonel entitled ' Military Governor.' They are small, dark figures compared with the burly Portuguese artillerymen stationed at the Loo Fort and Sao Thiago Battery, and they are armed with old English sniders. Behind the Tree of Penitence and...« less