The natives always walk in single file, and the action of their feet, aided by that of the rain, often wears the paths into a deep V-shaped rut, two feet in depth.
Burning two or three villages by the way the column reached the coast at a spot five miles from Elmina, having marched nine miles.
As the Ashantis were known to be in force at the villages of Akimfoo and Ampene, four miles farther, a party was taken on to this point.

Akimfoo was occupied without resistance, but the Ashantis fought hard in Ampene, but were driven out of the town into the bush, from which the British force was too small to drive them, and therefore returned to Elmina, having marched twenty-two miles, a prodigious journey in such a climate for heavily armed Europeans.

The effect produced among the Ashantis by the day's fighting was immense.

All their theories that the white men could not fight in the bush were roughly upset, and they found that his superiority was as great there as it had been in the open.

His heavy bullets, even at the distance of some hundred yards, crashed through the brush wood with deadly effect, while the slugs of the Ashantis would not penetrate at a distance much exceeding fifty yards.
Ammon Quatia was profoundly depressed in spirits that evening.
"The white men who come to fight us," he said, "are not like those who come to trade.