Cape Palmas is a rocky headland at the southeastern corner of Liberia, in Maryland county, with miles of gold sand on either side and the town of Harper on its slope, whose grand houses stand roofless in the trees, the remains of a republic that lasted three years, and it is the country's far corner, reached by a day's drive on bad roads or a small plane from Monrovia. Maryland in Africa was a colony of freed American slaves founded in 1834, an independent republic from 1854 to 1857 and then a county of Liberia, and Harper was its capital, a town of clapboard mansions on the American model whose grandest, the clifftop house of President Tubman, now has trees pushing through its floors and staircases going up into nothing, wrecked in the civil wars; out at the tip of the cape the ground turns from sand to hard dark rock and the swell arrives from two directions at once, sending spray up the ledges, with the island offshore named for John Brown Russwurm, who ran the colony for fifteen years after co-founding the first Black-owned newspaper in the United States. The lighthouse stands on the point.
The beaches are the town's life. On weekends and holidays Harper empties into the shallows at Change Beach, hundreds of people wading and ducking the surf together in bright clothes, and at the working end of the fishing beach getting a loaded dugout past the surf takes a whole crew leaning on the hull, reading the sets and running the boat out hard on the gap. Leatherback, green and olive ridley turtles haul out at night to nest on the sand either side of the cape, the olive ridleys around November and the leatherbacks around January, with village patrollers guarding the nests from egg-diggers. The Grebo of this coast carve masks whose eyes stick out as plain cylinders, the masks that rearranged the faces in Picasso's painting. Cape Palmas is a headland with a lost republic on it, and the town still swims below the ruins.