ELMINA  , a

town on the Gold Coast, British West Africa, in 5° 4' N., 1° 2o' W. and about 8 m . W. of Cape Coast . Pop. about 4000 . Facing the Atlantic on a rocky peninsula is Fort St George, considered the finest fort on the Guinea coast . It is built square with high walls, and has accommodation for 200 soldiers . On the land side were formerly two moats, cut in the rock on which the castle stands . The castle is the residence of the commissioner of the district and other officials . The houses in the native quarter are mostly built of stone, that material being plentiful in the vicinity . Elmina is the earliest European settlement on the Gold Coast, and was visited by the Portuguese in 1481 . Christopher Columbus is believed to have been one of the officers who took part in this voyage . The Portuguese at once began to build the castle now known as Fort St George, but it was not completed till eighty years afterwards . Another defensive work is Fort St Jago, built in 1666, which is behind the town and at some distance from the coast .

(In the latter

half of the 19th century it was converted into a prison.) Elmina was captured by the Dutch in 1637, and ceded to them by treaty in 164o . They made it the chief port for the produce of Ashanti . With the other Dutch possessions on the Guinea coast, it was transferred to Great Britain in April 1872 . The king of Ashanti, claiming to be ground landlord, objected to its transfer, and the result was the Ashanti war of 1873—1874 . For many years the greatest output of gold from this coast came from Elmina . The annual export is said to have been nearly £3,000,000 in the early years of the 18th century, but the figure is probably exaggerated . Since 1900 the bulk of the export trade in gold has been transferred to Sekondi (q.v.) . Prempeh, the ex-king of Ashanti, was detained in the castle (1896) until his removal to the Seychelles .