Cape Palmas once carried a country of its own. Freed African Americans sent by the Maryland State Colonization Society landed on this rocky headland in 1834, kept clear of Liberia up the coast to hold on to their own trade, and in 1854 declared the independent Republic of Maryland, governed from Harper on the cape. Fewer than a thousand settlers held it. War with the Grebo, whose villages line the shore between Fishtown Point and the Cavalla River, broke the young state, and Liberia annexed it in 1857. The cape itself is the one hard point on a coast of sand. It is a block of ancient crystalline rock belonging to the West African shield, joined to the mainland by a narrow sandy neck and pushing out into the Atlantic, with beach running away on either side of it. Portuguese charts had named it long before, Cabo das Palmas, for the palms that still lean over the beaches.
What is left of that ambition stands roofless above the water. Plantation-style mansions with deep verandahs line Harper's old streets, and William Tubman — born here in 1895, president of Liberia for twenty-seven years — left both a clifftop house and a Masonic lodge; squatters live in one, the other is a shell, emptied by the 1980 coup and the wars that ran to 2003. Below the town the beaches run for miles: reddish-gold sand, leaning coconut palms, surf breaking white over dark rock. Fishermen shove dugouts out through those breakers at dawn and drag them back at dusk. From October to February, leatherback, green and olive ridley turtles come ashore at night to nest, and village patrollers walk the sand to keep the eggs from being dug up. Getting here is hard work, and that is why the sand stays empty: a full rough day by road from Monrovia, and flights that come only rarely.