The Fall of the Asante Empire

by Robert B. Edgerton

  When Willcocks was notified that Carter’s well-armed force of four hundred men had been driven back with nearly one hundred casualties and that Hall’s even larger force was besieged at Esumeja, he telegraphed London, asking for more soldiers, special-service officers, and supplies. While he waited for the troops and supplies to arrive, British forces in the Bekwai district continued to run into difficulties. Captain Wilson and 114 Nigerians were ordered to reinforce the survivors of Colonel Carter’s defeat. Wilson was killed in an Asante ambush, while twenty-five soldiers and sixteen carriers were wounded. Led by a British sergeant, the surviving troops fought their way through to Carter’s position only to find that he had left the village and his whereabouts were unknown. In great danger of encirclement, the small force somehow survived a thirtythree-mile march through the rain to safety. They left their wounded behind but loyally carried the dead body of Captain Wilson all the way. Six days later a Nigerian soldier crawled into camp. Despite nineteen wounds, some of which were serious, he had covered twenty miles by dragging himself through the jungle at night and hiding from Asante scouts during the day.7

  While the isolated British columns that had gone up-country before Willcocks assumed effective command did their best to avoid annihilation and to keep the king of Bekwai out of the war, the situation in Kumase was growing desperate. Water was not a problem because the Asante chivalrously allowed parties from the fort, as well as the refugees outside of it, to go to and from a nearby stream without harm (the Asante later said that thirst was not a legitimate weapon of war). But by the end of May, the supply of food had dwindled alarmingly. Major Morris’s five ponies had long since been slaughtered, and the last of the four milk cows and all but one sheep in the fort had now been eaten. All birds, cats, snakes, lizards, and rats in Kumase had been eaten as well. The twenty-nine Europeans still in the fort were on a very limited ration of tinned beef and biscuit; the Hausas were on an even more limited diet, and the native carriers received nothing but biscuit. Morris’s men boiled their leather belts and sandals for hours to produce a horrid-tasting, pallid broth. They also chewed the softened leather.

  KUMASE, 1900

  Most refugees ate nothing but leaves and grass, and many died in agony after eating poisonous roots.8 The British tried to maintain a small soup kitchen that gave children a cup of almost clear water, sometimes containing a trace of European table scraps. “Men walking along or sitting on the road outside the fort would suddenly fall forward dead, while others, wasted almost to skeletons, went mad….”9 Over a thousand refugees, including many carriers, surrendered to the Asante, preferring slavery to starvation. By early June the people outside the fort were dying at a rate of thirty to forty a day, and finding men with the strength to bury them all was not possible. Inside the fort there were endless rumors of relief columns being sighted, of cannon fire being heard, and of European troops in strength at Esumeja. All but the latter proved false. Large rewards were offered to anyone who succeeded in delivering a note (written in French to deceive the Asante) to the commander of the relief force. Several men volunteered, and one actually succeeded. But no word reached the trapped garrison.

  By the fifteenth of June, Hodgson, Morris, and the surgeons calculated that their food supplies were so low that they could not delay an escape attempt beyond June 23. Various escape routes were considered but rejected because there were too many stockades to storm and too much hostile territory to pass through. They finally selected a small road through Patasi to Inkwanta. There was only one stockade to pass on this path, and the friendly king of Inkwanta was in the fort with guides. The escape plan called for all but a handful of the fort’s occupants to break out with just enough food and ammunition to get them safely to the coast. Enough food would be left with the skeleton garrison to sustain them for about three weeks. Those left behind were Captain Bishop, Lieutenant Ralph, and Doctor Hay (all of whom had been wounded earlier), 109 Hausas with their seventy-year-old Hausa officer Hari Zenua, and twenty-five carriers. Most of these men were sick, wounded, or both. All the other Europeans, including Lady Hodgson and the wives of three Swiss missionaries, would leave along with six hundred relatively healthy Hausas and some eight hundred carriers and followers of the detained chiefs and kings. As many of the civilian refugees as were able to travel were permitted to follow along after the rear guard. It would be a pitifully vulnerable force. With most of the machine guns and cannon left behind in the fort, it would boast only two Maxims, two cannon, and six hundred rifles to protect close to three thousand people.

  The carriers were an obvious source of concern. They were so weak that their usual loads of sixty pounds or more were reduced to thirty pounds or less. Nonetheless, the European women and the wounded would also have to be carried from the start, and it was to be expected that there would be many more wounded during the attempted escape. Given the weakness of the carriers, it is remarkable that serious consideration was actually given to protecting the hammocks of the women with an inverted V-shaped cone of corrugated iron. The experiment was only shelved when it was demonstrated that bullets went through the roofing material like tissue paper. It is even more remarkable that Governor Hodgson felt obliged to take all of his personal possessions, including furniture, other household items, and clothing in addition to books and papers. In all, 106 carriers were required to carry them.10 Aside from Hodgson’s decidedly cavalier attitude toward the emaciated carriers, his decision to leave nothing of value in the fort could hardly have made those who were to remain behind feel terribly secure.

  The preparations for a breakout could not be hidden, especially when the carriers were moved into the fort for their protection. But to retain as much surprise as possible, no one was told the date of the breakout or the path to be taken except Major Morris and Governor Hodgson. Morris intentionally let word get out that the column would leave by the Cape Coast route. The Asante fell for his deception, moving forces from the northern stockades to reinforce the men stationed along this road by means of a new road encircling Kumase that they had built to allow them to move troops easily.

  At 4:30 A.M. on June 23, the escape column began to assemble outside the fort. It took longer to organize than anyone had expected, and instead of leaving at the predawn hour of five, it was nearly 7 and fully light when the rear guard of the column finally moved away. Before leaving, Governor Hodgson told the officers left behind, “Well, you have a supply of food for twenty-three days and are safe for that period, but we are going to die today.”11 One suspects a bit of disingenuousness on Hodgson’s part. If he truly believed what he said, it is odd that he would take Lady Hodgson and all of his possessions with him.

  The advance guard was led by the young captains Armitage and Leggett. Friends since the fight at Bali, they would be the first to face death. In what Armitage called a “dense, clammy, white mist,” the advance guard moved quickly toward the Patasi stockade. Half an hour later they saw the huge barrier, and the Asante behind it saw them, opening fire immediately. With the rest of the column spread out over two miles to the rear, Armitage ordered a bayonet charge, but it was driven back with Leggett shot in the stomach. Armitage then decided to flank the stockade and led twenty men through the jungle, attempting to get around its left side. Seeing movement, his own Hausas promptly fired a volley at Armitage, nearly hitting him. He rushed back, ordered his men to kindly fire elsewhere, and, probably thinking it only wise, took most of them with him into the jungle.

  In a deadly game that seems ludicrous only in retrospect, just as Armitage was creeping around the left flank of the stockade, the Asante commander was leading his men around the right, hoping to fire into the British troops from their flank. Armitage and his men got behind the stockade just before the Asante troops left it and poured a volley into their backs, sending them flying in disarray. The short exchange of fire cost four British dead and eleven wounded, including Leggett, who had to be carried back to the main body in great pain. Pushing on toward Patasi as r
apidly as they could, the advance guard was ambushed, and Captain Marshall, who had replaced Leggett, received a severe head wound. The captured war camp behind the stockade and the villages along the Patasi path were so well stocked with food that the British officers, who were almost as hungry as the men were, had to pry the famished soldiers and carriers away from the plentiful supply of plantains, bananas, and other food they found. Somehow the column kept moving, although some men stayed behind and were killed by pursuing Asante soldiers.

  Asante pursuit of the two-mile-long line of escape was delayed long enough by Captain Bishop’s gunners, who sprayed the forests and the ring road with shells, that when significant numbers of Asante troops caught up with the column, they first encountered the civilian refugees who trailed behind it. Caught between the British rear guard and the Asante, some of these pitiable people were able to shove their way past the Hausa soldiers to relative safety, but hundreds of others were caught and killed. Their headless bodies were found later all along the path and in the jungle on each side. As the panic spread, some of the carriers bolted. Among them were the men who were carrying the gray-bearded Reverend Ramseyer and his lame wife. Dumped roughly to the ground, the elderly couple sat serenely on the path, praying and awaiting their fate. It came in the form of the rear guard’s commander, Captain Aplin, who ordered other carriers to take them to the relative safety of the main column.12

  By maintaining continuous fire as it withdrew, Captain Aplin’s rear guard managed to keep the Asante from overrunning the rear of the column, while the head of the column continued to keep up a rapid pace. By early afternoon Armitage reached the fortified village of Tereboam where Major Morris hoped to have the entire column spend the night. The small village was loopholed and heavily defended, but when the Hausas of the advance guard saw huge piles of plantains and bananas stacked around the huts in full view, the famished troops wasted no time in driving the defenders out at bayonet point. Then, while waiting for the rest of the column to come in, they gorged themselves so heavily that Armitage was afraid they would be unable to march the next day.

  All along the line of march, soldiers, carriers, and refugees darted off into jungle clearings in search of food. Sometimes they found it in lush unharvested fields; sometimes they found death, instead, when groups of Asante soldiers shot them down. By mid-afternoon such heavy rain began to fall that the flintlocks of the Asante became useless, and the entire column safely crowded into Tereboam, which had no more than twenty huts for three thousand people. Although there was little danger of an Asante attack, thanks to the rain, the night was spent in dreadful discomfort. Armitage described what it was like:

  Our loads lay out in utter confusion where they had been dumped down by the carriers, who came staggering in like drunken men. The Governor and Lady Hodgson sat upon boxes waiting for the tent which never came, and finally sought shelter in the wretched hut I had kept for them. The crush was so great that two huts filled with wounded collapsed from the pressure on the walls from without, and the occupants were with difficulty rescued. Fires had been lit everywhere, and from them arose suffocating volumes of smoke, as the damp wood spluttered and cracked. The many trampling feet had churned the ground into a sea of mud over ankle deep. And upon this steaming mass of humanity the torrential rain fell silently, pitilessly, as though determined to extinguish the wretched fires around which squatted shivering groups of natives.13

  Despite the incessant rain, Asante drums thundered all night, and for all but a handful of people who managed to crowd into a hut, the night was spent standing or sitting in cold mud. Few had any sleep, and there was little food, but by 7 A.M. the wretched column moved out to the south. The rear guard again fought a running battle all day, this time doing more to protect civilian refugees; but many more were killed nonetheless—how many will never be known. That night the column camped in a small village named Moseasu. Major Morris quickly ordered that guards be stationed all around the village to prevent any of the unarmed, starving civilians from crowding into the already packed area. These wretched souls spent the night in the forest, at the mercy of any armed Asante who wanted to take their lives.

  Many of the starving carriers had thrown down their loads and staggered into the jungle or had collapsed along the path and died. Even under ordinary circumstances, carriers often collapsed. Always cold and wet during the night, most had dangerous bronchial infections, and their coughing was a constant accompaniment to camp life. They were underfed, cursed at by soldiers, shot at by the Asante, and largely ignored by the officers who recruited them and flogged them when they misbehaved. Now these starving men collapsed by the hundreds. Lady Hodgson wrote about one such man on the march out of Kumase:

  Just as we emerged from the swamp, which, fortunately for us, was not at its worst, a poor carrier, with an ammunition box on his head, fell backwards from exhaustion, gave one gasp, and went to his long home. This was the beginning of many terrible things to happen that day. I shall never forget the sight of this unfortunate man lying on his back in a bed of rushes, his hands still clutching his load which lay up-tilted against his head.14

  The pursuing Asante troops could not resist the temptation to examine the many supply boxes that now littered the path. Their inexperienced commander, Antoa Mensa, permitted them to loot, believing that his superiors would be pleased by the many valuables he dutifully returned to them. He also appears to have believed that since the British were in a great hurry to leave Kumase, there was little reason to risk heavy losses by exposing his men to their fire. His decision allowed the British to escape against all odds. His superiors rebuked him and fined him heavily.15

  The second night was more painful to endure than the first. It was still pouring rain and was quite cold. Because so many loads had been lost, there was virtually no food, and nearly three thousand people were forced to spend the night in an area so small that it was only 120 yards in circumference. Governor Hodgson spent the night sitting in a camp chair; Lady Hodgson’s devoted carrier managed to find her a camp bed, which enabled her to sleep a little. Armitage was so exhausted that he slept on the floor of one of the huts, all of which had been reserved for Europeans. The next day there was little firing by the Asante, and by early afternoon the column reached the fort of the friendly village of Inkwanta, where they were welcomed by a British flag, much cheering, and ample food. To everyone’s surprise and alarm Hodgson promptly passed out, though he soon revived. Not everyone had died, as Hodgson had prophesied, but slim, handsome Captain Leggett and balding Captain Marshall both died of their wounds. No one would ever know how many of the carriers or the hapless civilians that followed the fleeing column had been killed, but their deaths were not important to the overjoyed public in England, where church bells tolled in gratitude. Only two officers and twenty-three soldiers had been killed, with only thirty-seven wounded and thirty-nine missing. That anyone escaped was remarkable; that so many did was amazing. But the British public did not realize that the fighting had just begun.

  Not long after Captain Bishop ordered his men to fire the fort’s cannon in support of the fleeing column, he watched in disbelief as several score armed Asante walked casually toward the fort, obviously believing that it had been abandoned. Bishop waited until they were well within range before ordering his machine guns to open fire. The approaching Asante quickly scattered, leaving several dead on the ground. After that, the Asante kept their distance, and the terribly weakened garrison settled down to await the relief that Governor Hodgson had solemnly promised would arrive in five days at the latest.16 Hodgson clearly had no confidence in his prediction, and it is hardly to his credit that he said it. The first day after Hodgson’s escape, three men in the fort died. After five days passed, the feeble garrison admittedly lost heart; after ten days Bishop said that even he had given up all hope, although he continued to do what little he could to encourage the garrison.

  Bishop’s Hausas were so sick and emaciated that he ordered them to sleep
on the ramparts next to their loopholes, believing with good reason that if they were to sleep below they would be too weak to climb up to their posts should there be an attack. His soldiers were little more than skeletons covered with running sores. Each soldier received only a cup of linseed meal and a two-inch square of tinned meat as a daily ration. It is no surprise that one or two Hausas died each day. Smallpox also broke out among the starving men, and Dr. Hay had no choice but to have the infected men carried outside the fort where they were left to die. They lay next to some 150 refugees who had been too weak to join the escape column and were slowly starving to death. There began to arise a stench of death so appalling that people in the fort were quite literally nauseated by it. Too weak to dig graves, the fort’s Hausas marched out each day to drag the night’s victims into one of the abandoned trenches. This action so little alleviated the smell of death that Dr. Hay, himself ill with malaria, and Captain Bishop decided to burn all the huts and bodies around the fort. As they did their horrible work, they found only one living person, a starving woman whose dead child was still held to her flaccid breast. What became of this tragic person is not recorded.

  On June 1, Colonel Willcocks was delighted by the arrival of three hundred men of his own West African Frontier Force from Nigeria under the command of Major Charles Melliss, whose sword-wielding exploits at the head of his forces would soon make him famous. Willcocks was so pleased to see “their honest faces” and hear their welcoming salutations that he warmly shook their hands and sat down to listen to their tales of travel across what they called “the big, black sea.”17 On the fifth he led the men (figuratively, that is: his sprained knee was so painful he had to be carried) north on a seventy-one-mile march to the base camp at Prahsu. Despite terrible weather, they arrived there four days later to find the once grand camp now badly neglected and in need of repair. It was here that Willcocks learned that Captain Hall was still pinned down at Esumeja and that Colonel Carter’s force of eleven Europeans and 380 Hausas had been defeated near a scenically beautiful place called Dompoase with six killed and seven officers and eighty-six men wounded.