3-053-570 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The Gold Coast and Ashantee War: Cape Coast Castle, from the anchorage, 1873. 'The head British establishment on the Gold Coast is Cape Coast Castle, where the Administrator of the Gold Coast, who acts under the Governor-General resident at Sierra Leone, has his official post and seat of jurisdiction. The fort covers several acres of ground, its walls are twenty to twenty-five feet high, and it mounts above one hundred guns. It was built by the Danes, sold to the Dutch, taken by the English, under Admiral Homes, in the seventeenth century, and has continued in our hands ever since. The favourite sentimental poetess L. E. L. (Letitia Eliza Landon) is buried here; she was the wife of Mr. George Maclean, Governor of this place at the time of her death, in 1838. Our view of Cape Coast Castle, as seen from the anchorage, is copied from a sketch by Major H. A. Leveson, formerly Acting Governor of Lagos'. From "Illustrated London News", 1873.