To my brother, C. G. Kingsley this book is dedicated.

PREFACE

PREFACE TO THE ABRIDGED EDITION OF TRAVELS IN WEST AFRICA.

When on my return to England from my second sojourn in West Africa, I discovered, to my alarm, that I was, by a freak of fate, the sea-serpent of the season, I published, in order to escape from this reputation, a very condensed, much abridged version of my experiences in Lower Guinea; and I thought that I need never explain about myself or Lower Guinea again.  This was one of my errors.  I have been explaining ever since; and, though not reconciled to so doing, I am more or less resigned to it, because it gives me pleasure to see that English people can take an interest in that land they have neglected.  Nevertheless, it was a shock to me when the publishers said more explanation was required.  I am thankful to say the explanation they required was merely on what plan the abridgment of my first account had been made.  I can manage that explanation easily.  It has been done by removing from it certain sections whole, and leaving the rest very much as it first stood.  Of course it would have been better if I had totally reformed and rewritten the book in pellucid English; but that is beyond me, and I feel at any rate this book must be better than it was, for there is less of it; and I dimly hope critics will now see that there is a saving grace in disconnectedness, for owing to that disconnectedness whole chapters have come out without leaving holes.

INTRODUCTION.

Relateth the various causes which impelled the author to embark upon the voyage.

It was in 1893 that, for the first time in my life, I found myself in possession of five or six months which were not heavily forestalled, and feeling like a boy with a new half-crown, I lay about in my mind, as Mr. Bunyan would say, as to what to do with them.  “Go and learn your tropics,” said Science.  Where on earth am I to go? I wondered, for tropics are tropics wherever found, so I got down an atlas and saw that either South America or West Africa must be my destination, for the Malayan region was too far off and too expensive.  Then I got Wallace’s Geographical Distribution and after reading that master’s article on the Ethiopian region I hardened my heart and closed with West Africa.  I did this the more readily because while I knew nothing of the practical condition of it, I knew a good deal both by tradition and report of South East America, and remembered that Yellow Jack was endemic, and that a certain naturalist, my superior physically and mentally, had come very near getting starved to death in the depressing society of an expedition slowly perishing of want and miscellaneous fevers up the Parana.

My ignorance regarding West Africa was soon removed.  And although the vast cavity in my mind that it occupied is not even yet half filled up, there is a great deal of very curious information in its place.  I use the word curious advisedly, for I think many seemed to translate my request for practical hints and advice into an advertisement that “Rubbish may be shot here.”  This same information is in a state of great confusion still, although I have made heroic efforts to codify it.  I find, however, that it can almost all be got in under the following different headings, namely and to wit: -

The dangers of West Africa.

The disagreeables of West Africa.

The diseases of West Africa.

The things you must take to West Africa.

The things you find most handy in West Africa.

The worst possible things you can do in West Africa.

I inquired of all my friends as a beginning what they knew of West Africa.  The majority knew nothing.  A percentage said, “Oh, you can’t possibly go there; that’s where Sierra Leone is, the white mans grave, you know.”  If these were pressed further, one occasionally found that they had had relations who had gone out there after having been “sad trials,” but, on consideration of their having left not only West Africa, but this world, were now forgiven and forgotten.

I next turned my attention to cross-examining the doctors.  “Deadliest spot on earth,” they said cheerfully, and showed me maps of the geographical distribution of disease.  Now I do not say that a country looks inviting when it is coloured in Scheele’s green or a bilious yellow, but these colours may arise from lack of artistic gift in the cartographer.  There is no mistaking what he means by black, however, and black you’ll find they colour West Africa from above Sierra Leone to below the Congo.  “I wouldn’t go there if I were you,” said my medical friends, “you’ll catch something; but if you must go, and you’re as obstinate as a mule, just bring me - ” and then followed a list of commissions from here to New York, any one of which - but I only found that out afterwards.

CHAPTER I.  LIVERPOOL TO SIERRA LEONE AND THE GOLD COAST.

Setting forth how the voyager departs from England in a stout vessel and in good company, and reaches in due course the Island of the Grand Canary, and then the Port of Sierra Leone: to which is added some account of this latter place and the comeliness of its women.  Wherein also some description of Cape Coast and Accra is given, to which are added divers observations on supplies to be obtained there.

The West Coast of Africa is like the Arctic regions in one particular, and that is that when you have once visited it you want to go back there again; and, now I come to think of it, there is another particular in which it is like them, and that is that the chances you have of returning from it at all are small, for it is a Belle Dame sans merci.

I succumbed to the charm of the Coast as soon as I left Sierra Leone on my first voyage out, and I saw more than enough during that voyage to make me recognise that there was any amount of work for me worth doing down there.  So I warned the Coast I was coming back again and the Coast did not believe me; and on my return to it a second time displayed a genuine surprise, and formed an even higher opinion of my folly than it had formed on our first acquaintance, which is saying a good deal.

During this voyage in 1893, I had been to Old Calabar, and its Governor, Sir Claude MacDonald, had heard me expatiating on the absorbing interest of the Antarctic drift, and the importance of the collection of fresh-water fishes and so on.  So when Lady MacDonald heroically decided to go out to him in Calabar, they most kindly asked me if I would join her, and make my time fit hers for starting on my second journey.  This I most willingly did.  But I fear that very sweet and gracious lady suffered a great deal of apprehension at the prospect of spending a month on board ship with a person so devoted to science as to go down the West Coast in its pursuit.  During the earlier days of our voyage she would attract my attention to all sorts of marine objects overboard, so as to amuse me.  I used to look at them, and think it would be the death of me if I had to work like this, explaining meanwhile aloud that “they were very interesting, but Haeckel had done them, and I was out after fresh-water fishes from a river north of the Congo this time,” fearing all the while that she felt me unenthusiastic for not flying over into the ocean to secure the specimens.

However, my scientific qualities, whatever they may amount to, did not blind this lady long to the fact of my being after all a very ordinary individual, and she told me so - not in these crude words, indeed, but nicely and kindly - whereupon, in a burst of gratitude to her for understanding me, I appointed myself her honorary aide-de-camp on the spot, and her sincere admirer I shall remain for ever, fully recognising that her courage in going to the Coast was far greater than my own, for she had more to lose had fever claimed her, and she was in those days by no means under the spell of Africa.  But this is anticipating.

It was on the 23rd of December, 1894, that we left Liverpool in the Batanga, commanded by my old friend Captain Murray, under whose care I had made my first voyage.  On the 30th we sighted the Peak of Teneriffe early in the afternoon.  It displayed itself, as usual, as an entirely celestial phenomenon.  A great many people miss seeing it.  Suffering under the delusion that El Pico is a terrestrial affair, they look in vain somewhere about the level of their own eyes, which are striving to penetrate the dense masses of mist that usually enshroud its slopes by day, and then a friend comes along, and gaily points out to the newcomer the glittering white triangle somewhere near the zenith.  On some days the Peak stands out clear from ocean to summit, looking every inch and more of its 12,080 ft.; and this is said by the Canary fishermen to be a certain sign of rain, or fine weather, or a gale of wind; but whenever and however it may be seen, soft and dream-like in the sunshine, or melodramatic and bizarre in the moonlight, it is one of the most beautiful things the eye of man may see.

Soon after sighting Teneriffe, Lançarote showed, and then the Grand Canary.  Teneriffe is perhaps the most beautiful, but it is hard to judge between it and Grand Canary as seen from the sea.  The superb cone this afternoon stood out a deep purple against a serpent-green sky, separated from the brilliant blue ocean by a girdle of pink and gold cumulus, while Grand Canary and Lançarote looked as if they were formed from fantastic-shaped sunset cloud-banks that by some spell had been solidified.  The general colour of the mountains of Grand Canary, which rise peak after peak until they culminate in the Pico de las Nieves, some 6,000 feet high, is a yellowish red, and the air which lies among their rocky crevices and swathes their softer sides is a lovely lustrous blue.

Just before the sudden dark came down, and when the sun was taking a curve out of the horizon of sea, all the clouds gathered round the three islands, leaving the sky a pure amethyst pink, and as a good-night to them the sun outlined them with rims of shining gold, and made the snow-clad Peak of Teneriffe blaze with star-white light.  In a few minutes came the dusk, and as we neared Grand Canary, out of its cloud-bank gleamed the red flash of the lighthouse on the Isleta, and in a few more minutes, along the sea level, sparkled the five miles of irregularly distributed lights of Puerto de la Luz and the city of Las Palmas.

We reached Sierra Leone at 9 A.M. on the 7th of January, and as the place is hardly so much in touch with the general public as the Canaries are {14} I may perhaps venture to go more into details regarding it.  The harbour is formed by the long low strip of land to the north called the Bullam shore, and to the south by the peninsula terminating in Cape Sierra Leone, a sandy promontory at the end of which is situated a lighthouse of irregular habits.  Low hills covered with tropical forest growth rise from the sandy shores of the Cape, and along its face are three creeks or bays, deep inlets showing through their narrow entrances smooth beaches of yellow sand, fenced inland by the forest of cotton-woods and palms, with here and there an elephantine baobab.

The first of these bays is called Pirate Bay, the next English Bay, and the third Kru Bay.  The wooded hills of the Cape rise after passing Kru Bay, and become spurs of the mountain, 2,500 feet in height, which is the Sierra Leone itself.  There are, however, several mountains here besides the Sierra Leone, the most conspicuous of them being the peak known as Sugar Loaf, and when seen from the sea they are very lovely, for their form is noble, and a wealth of tropical vegetation covers them, which, unbroken in its continuity, but endless in its variety, seems to sweep over their sides down to the shore like a sea, breaking here and there into a surf of flowers.

It is the general opinion, indeed, of those who ought to know that Sierra Leone appears at its best when seen from the sea, particularly when you are leaving the harbour homeward bound; and that here its charms, artistic, moral, and residential, end.  But, from the experience I have gained of it, I have no hesitation in saying that it is one of the best places for getting luncheon in that I have ever happened on, and that a more pleasant and varied way of spending an afternoon than going about its capital, Free Town, with a certain Irish purser, who is as well known as he is respected among the leviathan old negro ladies, it would be hard to find.  Still it must be admitted it is rather hot.

Free Town its capital is situated on the northern base of the mountain, and extends along the sea-front with most business-like wharves, quays, and warehouses.  Viewed from the harbour, “The Liverpool of West Africa,” {15} as it is called, looks as if it were built of gray stone, which it is not.  When you get ashore, you will find that most of the stores and houses - the majority of which, it may be remarked, are in a state of acute dilapidation - are of painted wood, with corrugated iron roofs.  Here and there, though, you will see a thatched house, its thatch covered with creeping plants, and inhabited by colonies of creeping insects.

CHAPTER II.  FERNANDO PO AND THE BUBIS.

Giving some account of the occupation of this island by the whites and the manners and customs of the blacks peculiar to it.

Our outward voyage really terminated at Calabar, and it terminated gorgeously in fireworks and what not, in honour of the coming of Lady MacDonald, the whole settlement, white and black, turning out to do her honour to the best of its ability; and its ability in this direction was far greater than, from my previous knowledge of Coast conditions, I could have imagined possible.  Before Sir Claude MacDonald settled down again to local work, he and Lady MacDonald crossed to Fernando Po, still in the Batanga, and I accompanied them, thus getting an opportunity of seeing something of Spanish official circles.

I had heard sundry noble legends of Fernando Po, and seen the coast and a good deal of the island before, but although I had heard much of the Governor, I had never met him until I went up to his residence with Lady MacDonald and the Consul-General.  He was a delightful person, who, as a Spanish naval officer, some time resident in Cuba, had picked up a lot of English, with a strong American accent clinging to it.  He gave a most moving account of how, as soon as his appointment as Governor was announced, all his friends and acquaintances carefully explained to him that this appointment was equivalent to execution, only more uncomfortable in the way it worked out.  During the outward voyage this was daily confirmed by the stories told by the sailors and merchants personally acquainted with the place, who were able to support their information with dates and details of the decease of the victims to the climate.

Still he kept up a good heart, but when he arrived at the island he found his predecessor had died of fever; and he himself, the day after landing, went down with a bad attack and he was placed in a bed - the same bed, he was mournfully informed, in which the last Governor had expired.  Then he did believe, all in one awful lump, all the stories he had been told, and added to their horrors a few original conceptions of death and purgatory, and a lot of transparent semi-formed images of his own delirium.  Fortunately both prophecy and personal conviction alike miscarried, and the Governor returned from the jaws of death.  But without a moment’s delay he withdrew from the Port of Clarence and went up the mountain to Basile, which is in the neighbourhood of the highest native village, where he built himself a house, and around it a little village of homes for the most unfortunate set of human beings I have ever laid eye on.  They are the remnant of a set of Spanish colonists, who had been located at some spot in the Spanish possessions in Morocco, and finding that place unfit to support human life, petitioned the Government to remove them and let them try colonising elsewhere.

The Spanish Government just then had one of its occasional fits of interest in Fernando Po, and so shipped them here, and the Governor, a most kindly and generous man, who would have been a credit to any country, established them and their families around him at Basile, to share with him the advantages of the superior elevation; advantages he profoundly believed in, and which he has always placed at the disposal of any sick white man on the island, of whatsoever nationality or religion.  Undoubtedly the fever is not so severe at Basile as in the lowlands, but there are here the usual drawbacks to West African high land, namely an over supply of rain, and equally saturating mists, to say nothing of sudden and extreme alternations of temperature, and so the colonists still fall off, and their children die continuously from the various entozoa which abound upon the island.

When the Governor first settled upon the mountain he was very difficult to get at for business purposes, and a telephone was therefore run up to him from Clarence through the forest, and Spain at large felt proud at this dashing bit of enterprise in modern appliance.  Alas! the primæval forests of Fernando Po were also charmed with the new toy, and they talked to each other on it with their leaves and branches to such an extent that a human being could not get a word in edgeways.  So the Governor had to order the construction of a road along the course of the wire to keep the trees off it, but unfortunately the telephone is still an uncertain means of communication, because another interruption in its usefulness still afflicts it, namely the indigenous natives’ habit of stealing bits out of its wire, for they are fully persuaded that they cannot be found out in their depredations provided they take sufficient care that they are not caught in the act.  The Governor is thus liable to be cut off at any moment in the middle of a conversation with Clarence, and the amount of “Hellos”  “Are you theres?” and “Speak louder, pleases” in Spanish that must at such times be poured out and wasted in the lonely forests before the break is realised and an unfortunate man sent off as a messenger, is terrible to think of.

But nothing would persuade the Governor to come a mile down towards Clarence until the day he should go there to join the vessel that was to take him home, and I am bound to say he looked as if the method was a sound one, for he was an exceedingly healthy, cheery-looking man.

Fernando Po is said to be a comparatively modern island, and not so very long ago to have been connected with the mainland, the strait between them being only nineteen miles across, and not having any deep soundings. {37}  I fail to see what grounds there are for these ideas, for though Fernando Po’s volcanoes are not yet extinct, but merely have their fires banked, yet, on the other hand, the island has been in existence sufficiently long to get itself several peculiar species of animals and plants, and that is a thing which takes time.  I myself do not believe that this island was ever connected with the continent, but arose from the ocean as the result of a terrific upheaval in the chain of volcanic activity which runs across the Atlantic from the Cameroon Mountains in a SSW. direction to Anno Bom island, and possibly even to the Tristan da Cunha group midway between the Cape and South America.

These volcanic islands are all of extreme beauty and fertility.  They consist of Fernando Po (10,190 ft.); Principe (3000 ft.); San Thomé (6,913 ft.); and Anno Bom (1,350 ft.).  San Thomé and Principe are Portuguese possessions, Fernando Po and Anno Bom Spanish, and they are all exceedingly unhealthy.  San Thomé is still called “The Dutchman’s Church-yard,” on account of the devastation its climate wrought among the Hollanders when they once occupied it; as they seem, at one time or another, to have occupied all Portuguese possessions out here, during the long war these two powers waged with each other for supremacy in the Bights, a supremacy that neither of them attained to.  Principe is said to be the most unhealthy, and the reason of the difference in this particular between Principe and Anno Bom is said to arise from the fact that the former is on the Guinea Current - a hot current - and Anno Bom on the Equatorial, which averages 10° cooler than its neighbour.

The shores of San Thomé are washed by both currents, and the currents round Fernando Po are in a mixed and uncertain state.  It is difficult, unless you have haunted these seas, to realise the interest we take down there in currents; particularly when you are navigating small sailing boats, a pursuit I indulge in necessarily from my fishing practices.  Their effect on the climate too is very marked.  If we could only arrange for some terrific affair to take place in the bed of the Atlantic, that would send that precious Guinea current to the place it evidently comes from, and get the cool Equatorial alongside the mainland shore, West Africa would be quite another place.

Fernando Po is the most important island as regards size on the West African coast, and at the same time one of the most beautiful in the world.  It is a great volcanic mass with many craters, and culminates in the magnificent cone, Clarence Peak, called by the Spaniards, Pico de Santa Isabel, by the natives of the island O Wassa.  Seen from the sea or from the continent it looks like an immense single mountain that has floated out to sea.  It is visible during clear weather (and particularly sharply visible in the strange clearness you get after a tornado) from a hundred miles to seawards, and anything more perfect than Fernando Po when you sight it, as you occasionally do from far-away Bonny Bar, in the sunset, floating like a fairy island made of gold or of amethyst, I cannot conceive.  It is almost equally lovely at close quarters, namely from the mainland at Victoria, nineteen miles distant.  Its moods of beauty are infinite; for the most part gentle and gorgeous, but I have seen it silhouetted hard against tornado-clouds, and grandly grim from the upper regions of its great brother Mungo.  And as for Fernando Po in full moonlight - well there! you had better go and see it yourself.

The whole island is, or rather I should say was, heavily forested almost to its peak, with a grand and varied type of forest, very rich in oil palms and tree-ferns, and having an undergrowth containing an immense variety and quantity of ferns and mosses.  Sugar-cane also grows wild here, an uncommon thing in West Africa.  The last botanical collection of any importance made from these forests was that of Herr Mann, and its examination showed that Abyssinian genera and species predominated, and that many species similar to those found in the mountains of Mauritius, the Isle de Bourbon, and Madagascar, were present.  The number of European plants (forty-three genera, twenty-seven species) is strikingly large, most of the British forms being represented chiefly at the higher elevations.  What was more striking was that it showed that South African forms were extremely rare, and not one of the characteristic types of St. Helena occurred.

Cocoa, coffee, and cinchona, alas! flourish in Fernando Po, as the coffee suffers but little from the disease that harasses it on the mainland at Victoria, and this is the cause of the great destruction of the forest that is at present taking place.  San Thomé, a few years ago, was discovered by its surprised neighbours to be amassing great wealth by growing coffee, and so Fernando Po and Principe immediately started to amass great wealth too, and are now hard at work with gangs of miscellaneous natives got from all parts of the Coast save the Kru.  For to the Kruboy, “Panier,” as he calls “Spaniard,” is a name of horror worse even than Portugee, although he holds “God made white man and God made black man, but dem debil make Portugee,” and he also remembers an unfortunate affair that occurred some years ago now, in connection with coffee-growing.

A number of Krumen engaged themselves for a two years’ term of labour on the Island of San Thomé, and when they arrived there, were set to work on coffee plantations by the Portuguese.  Now agricultural work is “woman’s palaver,” but nevertheless the Krumen made shift to get through with it, vowing the while no doubt, as they hopefully notched away the moons on their tally-sticks, that they would never let the girls at home know that they had been hoeing.  But when their moons were all complete, instead of being sent home with their pay to “We country,” they were put off from time to time; and month after month went by and they were still on San Thomé, and still hoeing.  At last the home-sick men, in despair of ever getting free, started off secretly in ones and twos to try and get to “We country” across hundreds of miles of the storm-haunted Atlantic in small canoes, and with next to no provisions.  The result was a tragedy, but it might easily have been worse; for a few, a very few, were picked up alive by English vessels and taken back to their beloved “We country” to tell the tale.  But many a canoe was found with a dead Kruboy or so in it; and many a one which, floating bottom upwards, graphically spoke of madness caused by hunger, thirst, and despair having driven its occupants overboard to the sharks.

My Portuguese friends assure me that there was never thought of permanently detaining the boys, and that they were only just keeping them until other labourers arrived to take their place on the plantations.  I quite believe them, for I have seen too much of the Portuguese in Africa to believe that they would, in a wholesale way, be cruel to natives.  But I am not in the least surprised that the poor Krumen took the Portuguese logo and amanhã for Eternity itself, for I have frequently done so.

CHAPTER III.  VOYAGE DOWN COAST.

Wherein the voyager before leaving the Rivers discourses on dangers, to which is added some account of Mangrove swamps and the creatures that abide therein.

I left Calabar in May and joined the Benguela off Lagos Bar.  My voyage down coast in her was a very pleasant one and full of instruction, for Mr. Fothergill, who was her purser, had in former years resided in Congo Français as a merchant, and to Congo Français I was bound with an empty hold as regards local knowledge of the district.  He was one of that class of men, of which you most frequently find representatives among the merchants, who do not possess the power so many men along here do possess (a power that always amazes me), of living for a considerable time in a district without taking any interest in it, keeping their whole attention concentrated on the point of how long it will be before their time comes to get out of it.  Mr. Fothergill evidently had much knowledge and experience of the Fernan Vaz district and its natives.  He had, I should say, overdone his experiences with the natives, as far as personal comfort and pleasure at the time went, having been nearly killed and considerably chivied by them.  Now I do not wish a man, however much I may deplore his total lack of local knowledge, to go so far as this.  Mr. Fothergill gave his accounts of these incidents calmly, and in an undecorated way that gave them a power and convincingness verging on being unpleasant, although useful, to a person who was going into the district where they had occurred, for one felt there was no mortal reason why one should not personally get involved in similar affairs.  And I must here acknowledge the great subsequent service Mr. Fothergill’s wonderfully accurate descriptions of the peculiar characteristics of the Ogowé forests were to me when I subsequently came to deal with these forests on my own account, as every district of forest has peculiar characteristics of its own which you require to know.  I should like here to speak of West Coast dangers because I fear you may think that I am careless of, or do not believe in them, neither of which is the case.  The more you know of the West Coast of Africa, the more you realise its dangers.  For example, on your first voyage out you hardly believe the stories of fever told by the old Coasters.  That is because you do not then understand the type of man who is telling them, a man who goes to his death with a joke in his teeth.  But a short experience of your own, particularly if you happen on a place having one of its periodic epidemics, soon demonstrates that the underlying horror of the thing is there, a rotting corpse which the old Coaster has dusted over with jokes to cover it so that it hardly shows at a distance, but which, when you come yourself to live alongside, you soon become cognisant of.  Many men, when they have got ashore and settled, realise this, and let the horror get a grip on them; a state briefly and locally described as funk, and a state that usually ends fatally; and you can hardly blame them.  Why, I know of a case myself.  A young man who had never been outside an English country town before in his life, from family reverses had to take a situation as book-keeper down in the Bights.  The factory he was going to was in an isolated out-of-the-way place and not in a settlement, and when the ship called off it, he was put ashore in one of the ship’s boats with his belongings, and a case or so of goods.  There were only the firm’s beach-boys down at the surf, and as the steamer was in a hurry the officer from the ship did not go up to the factory with him, but said good-bye and left him alone with a set of naked savages as he thought, but really of good kindly Kru boys on the beach.  He could not understand what they said, nor they what he said, and so he walked up to the house and on to the verandah and tried to find the Agent he had come out to serve under.  He looked into the open-ended dining-room and shyly round the verandah, and then sat down and waited for some one to turn up.  Sundry natives turned up, and said a good deal, but no one white or comprehensible, so in desperation he made another and a bolder tour completely round the verandah and noticed a most peculiar noise in one of the rooms and an infinity of flies going into the venetian shuttered window.  Plucking up courage he went in and found what was left of the white Agent, a considerable quantity of rats, and most of the flies in West Africa.  He then presumably had fever, and he was taken off, a fortnight afterwards, by a French boat, to whom the natives signalled, and he is not coming down the Coast again.  Some men would have died right out from a shock like this.

But most of the new-comers do not get a shock of this order.  They either die themselves or get more gradually accustomed to this sort of thing, when they come to regard death and fever as soldiers, who on a battle-field sit down, and laugh and talk round a camp fire after a day’s hard battle, in which they have seen their friends and companions falling round them; all the time knowing that to-morrow the battle comes again and that to-morrow night they themselves may never see.

It is not hard-hearted callousness, it is only their way.  Michael Scott put this well in Tom Cringle’s Log, in his account of the yellow fever during the war in the West Indies.  Fever, though the chief danger, particularly to people who go out to settlements, is not the only one; but as the other dangers, except perhaps domestic poisoning, are incidental to pottering about in the forests, or on the rivers, among the unsophisticated tribes, I will not dwell on them.  They can all be avoided by any one with common sense, by keeping well out of the districts in which they occur; and so I warn the general reader that if he goes out to West Africa, it is not because I said the place was safe, or its dangers overrated.  The cemeteries of the West Coast are full of the victims of those people who have said that Coast fever is “Cork fever,” and a man’s own fault, which it is not; and that natives will never attack you unless you attack them: which they will - on occasions.

CHAPTER IV.  THE OGOWÉ.

Wherein the voyager gives extracts from the Log of the Mové and of the Éclaireur, and an account of the voyager’s first meeting with “those fearful Fans,” also an awful warning to all young persons who neglect the study of the French language.

On the 20th of May I reached Gaboon, now called Libreville - the capital of Congo Français, and, thanks to the kindness of Mr. Hudson, I was allowed a passage on a small steamer then running from Gaboon to the Ogowé River, and up it when necessary as far as navigation by steamer is possible - this steamer is, I deeply regret to say, now no more.  As experiences of this kind contain such miscellaneous masses of facts, I am forced to commit the literary crime of giving you my Ogowé set of experiences in the form of diary.

June 5th, 1895. - Off on Mové at 9.30.  Passengers, Mr. Hudson, Mr. Woods, Mr. Huyghens, Père Steinitz, and I.  There are black deck-passengers galore; I do not know their honourable names, but they are evidently very much married men, for there is quite a gorgeously coloured little crowd of ladies to see them off.  They salute me as I pass down the pier, and start inquiries.  I say hastily to them: “Farewell, I’m off up river,” for I notice Mr. Fildes bearing down on me, and I don’t want him to drop in on the subject of society interest.  I expect it is settled now, or pretty nearly.  There is a considerable amount of mild uproar among the black contingent, and the Mové firmly clears off before half the good advice and good wishes for the black husbands are aboard.  She is a fine little vessel; far finer than I expected.  The accommodation I am getting is excellent.  A long, narrow cabin, with one bunk in it and pretty nearly everything one can wish for, and a copying press thrown in.  Food is excellent, society charming, captain and engineer quite acquisitions.  The saloon is square and roomy for the size of the vessel, and most things, from rowlocks to teapots, are kept under the seats in good nautical style.  We call at the guard-ship to pass our papers, and then steam ahead out of the Gaboon estuary to the south, round Pongara Point, keeping close into the land.  About forty feet from shore there is a good free channel for vessels with a light draught which if you do not take, you have to make a big sweep seaward to avoid a reef.  Between four and five miles below Pongara, we pass Point Gombi, which is fitted with a lighthouse, a lively and conspicuous structure by day as well as night.  It is perched on a knoll, close to the extremity of the long arm of low, sandy ground, and is painted black and white, in horizontal bands, which, in conjunction with its general figure, give it a pagoda-like appearance.

Alongside it are a white-painted, red-roofed house for the lighthouse keeper, and a store for its oil.  The light is either a flashing or a revolving or a stationary one, when it is alight.  One must be accurate about these things, and my knowledge regarding it is from information received, and amounts to the above.  I cannot throw in any personal experience, because I have never passed it at night-time, and seen from Glass it seems just steady.  Most lighthouses on this Coast give up fancy tricks, like flashing or revolving, pretty soon after they are established.  Seventy-five per cent. of them are not alight half the time at all.  “It’s the climate.”  Gombi, however, you may depend on for being alight at night, and I have no hesitation in saying you can see it, when it is visible, seventeen miles out to sea, and that the knoll on which the lighthouse stands is a grass-covered sand cliff, about forty or fifty feet above sea-level.  As we pass round Gombi point, the weather becomes distinctly rough, particularly at lunch-time.  The Mové minds it less than her passengers, and stamps steadily along past the wooded shore, behind which shows a distant range of blue hills.  Silence falls upon the black passengers, who assume recumbent positions on the deck, and suffer.  All the things from under the saloon seats come out and dance together, and play puss-in-the-corner, after the fashion of loose gear when there is any sea on.  As the night comes down, the scene becomes more and more picturesque.  The moonlit sea, shimmering and breaking on the darkened shore, the black forest and the hills silhouetted against the star-powdered purple sky, and, at my feet, the engine-room stoke-hole, lit with the rose-coloured glow from its furnace, showing by the great wood fire the two nearly naked Krumen stokers, shining like polished bronze in their perspiration, as they throw in on to the fire the billets of red wood that look like freshly-cut chunks of flesh.  The white engineer hovers round the mouth of the pit, shouting down directions and ever and anon plunging down the little iron ladder to carry them out himself.  At intervals he stands on the rail with his head craned round the edge of the sun deck to listen to the captain, who is up on the little deck above, for there is no telegraph to the engines, and our gallant commander’s voice is not strong.  While the white engineer is roosting on the rail, the black engineer comes partially up the ladder and gazes hard at me; so I give him a wad of tobacco, and he plainly regards me as inspired, for of course that was what he wanted.  Remember that whenever you see a man, black or white, filled with a nameless longing, it is tobacco he requires.  Grim despair accompanied by a gusty temper indicates something wrong with his pipe, in which case offer him a straightened-out hairpin.  The black engineer having got his tobacco, goes below to the stoke-hole again and smokes a short clay as black and as strong as himself.  The captain affects an immense churchwarden.  How he gets through life, waving it about as he does, without smashing it every two minutes, I cannot make out.

At last we anchor for the night just inside Nazareth Bay, for Nazareth Bay wants daylight to deal with, being rich in low islands and sand shoals.  We crossed the Equator this afternoon.

June 6th. - Off at daybreak into Nazareth Bay.  Anxiety displayed by navigators, sounding taken on both sides of the bows with long bamboo poles painted in stripes, and we go “slow ahead” and “hard astern” successfully, until we get round a good-sized island, and there we stick until four o’clock, high water, when we come off all right, and steam triumphantly but cautiously into the Ogowé.  The shores of Nazareth Bay are fringed with mangroves, but once in the river the scenery soon changes, and the waters are walled on either side with a forest rich in bamboo, oil and wine-palms.  These forest cliffs seem to rise right up out of the mirror-like brown water.  Many of the highest trees are covered with clusters of brown-pink young shoots that look like flowers, and others are decorated by my old enemy the climbing palm, now bearing clusters of bright crimson berries.  Climbing plants of other kinds are wreathing everything, some blossoming with mauve, some with yellow, some with white flowers, and every now and then a soft sweet heavy breath of fragrance comes out to us as we pass by.  There is a native village on the north bank, embowered along its plantations with some very tall cocoa-palms rising high above them.

The river winds so that it seems to close in behind us, opening out in front fresh vistas of superb forest beauty, with the great brown river stretching away unbroken ahead like a broad road of burnished bronze.  Astern, it has a streak of frosted silver let into it by the Mové’s screw.  Just about six o’clock, we run up to the Fallaba, the Mové’s predecessor in working the Ogowé, now a hulk, used as a depot by Hatton and Cookson.  She is anchored at the entrance of a creek that runs through to the Fernan Vaz; some say it is six hours’ run, others that it is eight hours for a canoe; all agree that there are plenty of mosquitoes.

The Fallaba looks grimly picturesque, and about the last spot in which a person of a nervous disposition would care to spend the night.  One half of her deck is dedicated to fuel logs, on the other half are plank stores for the goods, and a room for the black sub-trader in charge of them.  I know that there must be scorpions which come out of those logs and stroll into the living room, and goodness only knows what one might not fancy would come up the creek or rise out of the floating grass, or the limitless-looking forest.  I am told she was a fine steamer in her day, but those who had charge of her did not make allowances for the very rapid rotting action of the Ogowé water, so her hull rusted through before her engines were a quarter worn out; and there was nothing to be done with her then, but put a lot of concrete in, and make her a depot, in which state of life she is very useful, for during the height of the dry season, the Mové cannot get through the creek to supply the firm’s Fernan Vaz factories.

Subsequently I heard much of the Fallaba, which seems to have been a celebrated, or rather notorious, vessel.  Every one declared her engines to have been of immense power, but this I believe to have been a mere local superstition; because in the same breath, the man who referred to them, as if it would have been quite unnecessary for new engines to have been made for H.M.S.  Victorious if those Fallaba engines could have been sent to Chatham dockyard, would mention that “you could not get any pace up on her”; and all who knew her sadly owned “she wouldn’t steer,” so naturally she spent the greater part of her time on the Ogowé on a sand-bank, or in the bush.  All West African steamers have a mania for bush, and the delusion that they are required to climb trees.  The Fallaba had the complaint severely, because of her defective steering powers, and the temptation the magnificent forest, and the rapid currents, and the sharp turns of the creek district, offered her; she failed, of course - they all fail - but it is not for want of practice.  I have seen many West Coast vessels up trees, but never more than fifteen feet or so.

The trade of this lower part of the Ogowé, from the mouth to Lembarene, a matter of 130 miles, is almost nil.  Above Lembarene, you are in touch with the rubber and ivory trade.

This Fallaba creek is noted for mosquitoes, and the black passengers made great and showy preparations in the evening time to receive their onslaught, by tying up their strong chintz mosquito bars to the stanchions and the cook-house.  Their arrangements being constantly interrupted by the white engineer making alarums and excursions amongst them; because when too many of them get on one side the Mové takes a list and burns her boilers.  Conversation and atmosphere are full of mosquitoes.  The decision of widely experienced sufferers amongst us is, that next to the lower Ogowé, New Orleans is the worst place for them in this world.

The day closed with a magnificent dramatic beauty.  Dead ahead of us, up through a bank of dun-coloured mist rose the moon, a great orb of crimson, spreading down the oil-like, still river, a streak of blood-red reflection.  Right astern, the sun sank down into the mist, a vaster orb of crimson, and when he had gone out of view, sent up flushes of amethyst, gold, carmine and serpent-green, before he left the moon in undisputed possession of the black purple sky.

Forest and river were absolutely silent, but there was a pleasant chatter and laughter from the black crew and passengers away forward, that made the Mové

CHAPTER V. THE RAPIDS OF THE OGOWÉ.

The Log of an Adooma canoe during a voyage undertaken to the rapids of the River Ogowé, with some account of the divers disasters that befell thereon.

Mme. Forget received me most kindly, and, thanks to her ever thoughtful hospitality, I spent a very pleasant time at Talagouga, wandering about the forest and collecting fishes from the native fishermen: and seeing the strange forms of some of these Talagouga region fishes and the marked difference between them and those of Lembarene, I set my heart on going up into the region of the Ogowé rapids.  For some time no one whom I could get hold of regarded it as a feasible scheme, but, at last, M. Gacon thought it might be managed; I said I would give a reward of 100 francs to any one who would lend me a canoe and a crew, and I would pay the working expenses, food, wages, etc.  M. Gacon had a good canoe and could spare me two English-speaking Igalwas, one of whom had been part of the way with MM. Allégret and Teisserès, when they made their journey up to Franceville and then across to Brazzaville and down the Congo two years ago.  He also thought we could get six Fans to complete the crew.  I was delighted, packed my small portmanteau with a few things, got some trade goods, wound up my watch, ascertained the date of the day of the month, and borrowed three hair-pins from Mme. Forget, then down came disappointment.  On my return from the bush that evening, Mme. Forget said M. Gacon said “it was impossible,” the Fans round Talagouga wouldn’t go at any price above Njole, because they were certain they would be killed and eaten by the up-river Fans.  Internally consigning the entire tribe to regions where they will get a rise in temperature, even on this climate, I went with Mme. Forget to M. Gacon, and we talked it over; finally, M. Gacon thought he could let me have two more Igalwas from Hatton and Cookson’s beach across the river.  Sending across there we found this could be done, so I now felt I was in for it, and screwed my courage to the sticking point - no easy matter after all the information I had got into my mind regarding the rapids of the River Ogowé.

I establish myself on my portmanteau comfortably in the canoe, my back is against the trade box, and behind that is the usual mound of pillows, sleeping mats, and mosquito-bars of the Igalwa crew; the whole surmounted by the French flag flying from an indifferent stick.

M. and Mme. Forget provide me with everything I can possibly require, and say that the blood of half my crew is half alcohol; on the whole it is patent they don’t expect to see me again, and I forgive them, because they don’t seem cheerful over it; but still it is not reassuring - nothing is about this affair, and it’s going to rain.  It does, as we go up the river to Njole, where there is another risk of the affair collapsing, by the French authorities declining to allow me to proceed.  On we paddled, M’bo the head man standing in the bows of the canoe in front of me, to steer, then I, then the baggage, then the able-bodied seamen, including the cook also standing and paddling; and at the other extremity of the canoe - it grieves me to speak of it in this unseamanlike way, but in these canoes both ends are alike, and chance alone ordains which is bow and which is stern - stands Pierre, the first officer, also steering; the paddles used are all of the long-handled, leaf-shaped Igalwa type.  We get up just past Talagouga Island and then tie up against the bank of M. Gazenget’s plantation, and make a piratical raid on its bush for poles.  A gang of his men come down to us, but only to chat.  One of them, I notice, has had something happen severely to one side of his face.  I ask M’bo what’s the matter, and he answers, with a derisive laugh, “He be fool man, he go for tief plantain and done got shot.”  M’bo does not make it clear where the sin in this affair is exactly located; I expect it is in being “fool man.”  Having got our supply of long stout poles we push off and paddle on again.  Before we reach Njole I recognise my crew have got the grumbles, and at once inquire into the reason.  M’bo sadly informs me that “they no got chop,” having been provided only with plantain, and no meat or fish to eat with it.  I promise to get them plenty at Njole, and contentment settles on the crew, and they sing.  After about three hours we reach Njole, and I proceed to interview the authorities.  Dr. Pélessier is away down river, and the two gentlemen in charge don’t understand English; but Pierre translates, and the letter which M. Forget has kindly written for me explains things and so the palaver ends satisfactorily, after a long talk.  First, the official says he does not like to take the responsibility of allowing me to endanger myself in those rapids.  I explain I will not hold any one responsible but myself, and I urge that a lady has been up before, a Mme. Quinee.  He says “Yes, that is true, but Madame had with her a husband and many men, whereas I am alone and have only eight Igalwas and not Adoomas, the proper crew for the rapids, and they are away up river now with the convoy.”  “True, oh King!” I answer, “but Madame Quinee went right up to Lestourville, whereas I only want to go sufficiently high up the rapids to get typical fish.  And these Igalwas are great men at canoe work, and can go in a canoe anywhere that any mortal man can go” - this to cheer up my Igalwa interpreter - “and as for the husband, neither the Royal Geographical Society’s list, in their ‘Hints to Travellers,’ nor Messrs.  Silver, in their elaborate lists of articles necessary for a traveller in tropical climates, make mention of husbands.”  However, the official ultimately says Yes, I may go, and parts with me as with one bent on self destruction.  This affair being settled I start off, like an old hen with a brood of chickens to provide for, to get chop for my men, and go first to Hatton and Cookson’s factory.  I find its white Agent is down river after stores, and John Holt’s Agent says he has got no beef nor fish, and is precious short of provisions for himself; so I go back to Dumas’, where I find a most amiable French gentleman, who says he will let me have as much fish or beef as I want, and to this supply he adds some delightful bread biscuits.  M’bo and the crew beam with satisfaction; mine is clouded by finding, when they have carried off the booty to the canoe, that the Frenchman will not let me pay for it.  Therefore taking the opportunity of his back being turned for a few minutes, I buy and pay for, across the store counter, some trade things, knives, cloth, etc.  Then I say goodbye to the Agent.  “Adieu, Mademoiselle,” says he in a for-ever tone of voice.  Indeed I am sure I have caught from these kind people a very pretty and becoming mournful manner, and there’s not another white station for 500 miles where I can show it off.  Away we go, still damp from the rain we have come through, but drying nicely with the day, and cheerful about the chop.

The Ogowé is broad at Njole and its banks not mountainous, as at Talagouga; but as we go on it soon narrows, the current runs more rapidly than ever, and we are soon again surrounded by the mountain range.  Great masses of black rock show among the trees on the hillsides, and under the fringe of fallen trees that hang from the steep banks.  Two hours after leaving Njole we are facing our first rapid.  Great gray-black masses of smoothed rock rise up out of the whirling water in all directions.  These rocks have a peculiar appearance which puzzle me at the time, but in subsequently getting used to it I accepted it quietly and admired.  When the sun shines on them they have a soft light blue haze round them, like a halo.  The effect produced by this, with the forested hillsides and the little beaches of glistening white sand was one of the most perfect things I have ever seen.

We kept along close to the right-hand bank, dodging out of the way of the swiftest current as much as possible.  Ever and again we were unable to force our way round projecting parts of the bank, so we then got up just as far as we could to the point in question, yelling and shouting at the tops of our voices.  M’bo said “Jump for bank, sar,” and I “up and jumped,” followed by half the crew.  Such banks! sheets, and walls, and rubbish heaps of rock, mixed up with trees fallen and standing.  One appalling corner I shall not forget, for I had to jump at a rock wall, and hang on to it in a manner more befitting an insect than an insect-hunter, and then scramble up it into a close-set forest, heavily burdened with boulders of all sizes.  I wonder whether the rocks or the trees were there first? there is evidence both ways, for in one place you will see a rock on the top of a tree, the tree creeping out from underneath it, and in another place you will see a tree on the top of a rock, clasping it with a network of roots and getting its nourishment, goodness knows how, for these are by no means tender, digestible sandstones, but uncommon hard gneiss and quartz which has no idea of breaking up into friable small stuff, and which only takes on a high polish when it is vigorously sanded and canvassed by the Ogowé.  While I was engaged in climbing across these promontories, the crew would be busy shouting and hauling the canoe round the point by means of the strong chain provided for such emergencies fixed on to the bow.  When this was done, in we got again and paddled away until we met our next affliction.

CHAPTER VI.  LEMBARENE.

In which is given some account of the episode of the Hippopotame, and of the voyager’s attempts at controlling an Ogowé canoe; and also of the Igalwa tribe.

I say good-bye to Talagouga with much regret, and go on board the Éclaireur, when she returns from Njole, with all my bottles and belongings.  On board I find no other passenger; the Captain’s English has widened out considerably; and he is as pleasant, cheery, and spoiling for a fight as ever; but he has a preoccupied manner, and a most peculiar set of new habits, which I find are shared by the Engineer.  Both of them make rapid dashes to the rail, and nervously scan the river for a minute and then return to some occupation, only to dash from it to the rail again.  During breakfast their conduct is nerve-shaking.  Hastily taking a few mouthfuls, the Captain drops his knife and fork and simply hurls his seamanlike form through the nearest door out on to the deck.  In another minute he is back again, and with just a shake of his head to the Engineer, continues his meal.  The Engineer shortly afterwards flies from his seat, and being far thinner than the Captain, goes through his nearest door with even greater rapidity; returns, and shakes his head at the Captain, and continues his meal.  Excitement of this kind is infectious, and I also wonder whether I ought not to show a sympathetic friendliness by flying from my seat and hurling myself on to the deck through my nearest door, too.  But although there are plenty of doors, as four enter the saloon from the deck, I do not see my way to doing this performance aimlessly, and what in this world they are both after I cannot think.  So I confine myself to woman’s true sphere, and assist in a humble way by catching the wine and Vichy water bottles, glasses, and plates of food, which at every performance are jeopardised by the members of the nobler sex starting off with a considerable quantity of the ample table cloth wrapped round their legs.  At last I can stand it no longer, so ask the Captain point-blank what is the matter.  “Nothing,” says he, bounding out of his chair and flying out of his doorway; but on his return he tells me he has got a bet on of two bottles of champagne with Woermann’s Agent for Njole, as to who shall reach Lembarene first, and the German agent has started off some time before the Éclaireur in his little steam launch.

During the afternoon we run smoothly along; the free pulsations of the engines telling what a very different thing coming down the Ogowé is to going up against its terrific current.  Every now and again we stop to pick up cargo, or discharge over-carried cargo, and the Captain’s mind becomes lulled by getting no news of the Woermann’s launch having passed down.  He communicates this to the Engineer; it is impossible she could have passed the Éclaireur since they started, therefore she must be some where behind at a subfactory, “N’est-ce pas?”  “Oui, oui, certainement,” says the Engineer.  The Engineer is, by these considerations, also lulled, and feels he may do something else but scan the river à la sister Ann.  What that something is puzzles me; it evidently requires secrecy, and he shrinks from detection.  First he looks down one side of the deck, no one there; then he looks down the other, no one there; good so far.  I then see he has put his head through one of the saloon portholes; no one there; he hesitates a few seconds until I begin to wonder whether his head will suddenly appear through my port; but he regards this as an unnecessary precaution, and I hear him enter his cabin which abuts on mine and there is silence for some minutes.  Writing home to his mother, think I, as I go on putting a new braid round the bottom of a worn skirt.  Almost immediately after follows the sound of a little click from the next cabin, and then apparently one of the denizens of the infernal regions has got its tail smashed in a door and the heavy hot afternoon air is reft by an inchoate howl of agony.  I drop my needlework and take to the deck; but it is after all only that shy retiring young man practising secretly on his clarionet.

The Captain is drowsily looking down the river.  But repose is not long allowed to that active spirit; he sees something in the water - what?  “Hippopotame,” he ejaculates.  Now both he and the Engineer frequently do this thing, and then fly off to their guns - bang, bang, finish; but this time he does not dash for his gun, nor does the Engineer, who flies out of his cabin at the sound of the war shout “Hippopotame.”  In vain I look across the broad river with its stretches of yellow sandbanks, where the “hippopotame” should be, but I can see nothing but four black stumps sticking up in the water away to the right.  Meanwhile the Captain and the Engineer are flying about getting off a crew of blacks into the canoe we are towing alongside.  This being done the Captain explains to me that on the voyage up “the Engineer had fired at, and hit a hippopotamus, and without doubt this was its body floating.”  We are now close enough even for me to recognise the four stumps as the deceased’s legs, and soon the canoe is alongside them and makes fast to one, and then starts to paddle back, hippo and all, to the Éclaireur.  But no such thing; let them paddle and shout as hard as they like, the hippo’s weight simply anchors them.  The Éclaireur by now has dropped down the river past them, and has to sweep round and run back.  Recognising promptly what the trouble is, the energetic Captain grabs up a broom, ties a light cord belonging to the leadline to it, and holding the broom by the end of its handle, swings it round his head and hurls it at the canoe.  The arm of a merciful Providence being interposed, the broom-tomahawk does not hit the canoe, wherein, if it had, it must infallibly have killed some one, but falls short, and goes tearing off with the current, well out of reach of the canoe.  The Captain seeing this gross dereliction of duty by a Chargeur Réunis broom, hauls it in hand over hand and talks to it.  Then he ties the other end of its line to the mooring rope, and by a better aimed shot sends the broom into the water, about ten yards above the canoe, and it drifts towards it.  Breathless excitement! surely they will get it now.  Alas, no!  Just when it is within reach of the canoe, a fearful shudder runs through the broom.  It throws up its head and sinks beneath the tide.  A sensation of stun comes over all of us.  The crew of the canoe, ready and eager to grasp the approaching aid, gaze blankly at the circling ripples round where it sank.  In a second the Captain knows what has happened.  That heavy hawser which has been paid out after it has dragged it down, so he hauls it on board again.

The Éclaireur goes now close enough to the hippo-anchored canoe for a rope to be flung to the man in her bows; he catches it and freezes on gallantly.  Saved!  No!  Oh horror!  The lower deck hums with fear that after all it will not taste that toothsome hippo chop, for the man who has caught the rope is as nearly as possible jerked flying out of the canoe when the strain of the Éclaireur contending with the hippo’s inertia flies along it, but his companion behind him grips him by the legs and is in his turn grabbed, and the crew holding on to each other with their hands, and on to their craft with their feet, save the man holding on to the rope and the whole situation; and slowly bobbing towards us comes the hippopotamus, who is shortly hauled on board by the winners in triumph.

My esteemed friends, the Captain and the Engineer, who of course have been below during this hauling, now rush on to the upper deck, each coatless, and carrying an enormous butcher’s knife.  They dash into the saloon, where a terrific sharpening of these instruments takes place on the steel belonging to the saloon carving-knife, and down stairs again.  By looking down the ladder, I can see the pink, pig-like hippo, whose colour has been soaked out by the water, lying on the lower deck and the Captain and Engineer slitting down the skin intent on gralloching operations.  Providentially, my prophetic soul induces me to leave the top of the ladder and go forward - “run to win’ard,” as Captain Murray would say - for within two minutes the Captain and Engineer are up the ladder as if they had been blown up by the boilers bursting, and go as one man for the brandy bottle; and they wanted it if ever man did; for remember that hippo had been dead and in the warm river-water for more than a week.

The Captain had had enough of it, he said, but the Engineer stuck to the job with a courage I profoundly admire, and he saw it through and then retired to his cabin; sand-and-canvassed himself first, and then soaked and saturated himself in Florida water.  The flesh gladdened the hearts of the crew and lower-deck passengers and also of the inhabitants of Lembarene, who got dashes of it on our arrival there.  Hippo flesh is not to be despised by black man or white; I have enjoyed it far more than the stringy beef or vapid goat’s flesh one gets down here.

I stayed on board the Éclaireur all night; for it was dark when we reached Lembarene, too dark to go round to Kangwe; and next morning, after taking a farewell of her - I hope not a final one, for she is a most luxurious little vessel for the Coast, and the feeding on board is excellent and the society varied and charming - I went round to Kangwe.

I remained some time in the Lembarene district and saw and learnt many things; I owe most of what I learnt to M. and Mme. Jacot, who knew a great deal about both the natives and the district, and I owe much of what I saw to having acquired the art of managing by myself a native canoe.  This “recklessness” of mine I am sure did not merit the severe criticism it has been subjected to, for my performances gave immense amusement to others (I can hear Lembarene’s shrieks of laughter now) and to myself they gave great pleasure.

My first attempt was made at Talagouga one very hot afternoon.  M. and Mme. Forget were, I thought, safe having their siestas, Oranie was with Mme. Gacon.  I knew where Mme. Gacon was for certain; she was with M. Gacon; and I knew he was up in the sawmill shed, out of sight of the river, because of the soft thump, thump, thump of the big water-wheel.  There was therefore no one to keep me out of mischief, and I was too frightened to go into the forest that afternoon, because on the previous afternoon I had been stalked as a wild beast by a cannibal savage, and I am nervous.  Besides, and above all, it is quite impossible to see other people, even if they are only black, naked savages, gliding about in canoes, without wishing to go and glide about yourself.  So I went down to where the canoes were tied by their noses to the steep bank, and finding a paddle, a broken one, I unloosed the smallest canoe.  Unfortunately this was fifteen feet or so long, but I did not know the disadvantage of having, as it were, a long-tailed canoe then - I did shortly afterwards.

The promontories running out into the river on each side of the mission beach give a little stretch of slack water between the bank and the mill-race-like current of the Ogowé, and I wisely decided to keep in the slack water, until I had found out how to steer - most important thing steering.  I got into the bow of the canoe, and shoved off from the bank all right; then I knelt down - learn how to paddle standing up by and by - good so far.  I rapidly learnt how to steer from the bow, but I could not get up any pace.  Intent on acquiring pace, I got to the edge of the slack water; and then displaying more wisdom, I turned round to avoid it, proud as a peacock, you understand, at having found out how to turn round.  At this moment, the current of “the greatest equatorial river in the world,” grabbed my canoe by its tail.  We spun round and round for a few seconds, like a teetotum, I steering the whole time for all I was worth, and then the current dragged the canoe ignominiously down river, tail foremost.

Fortunately a big tree was at that time temporarily hanging against the rock in the river, just below the sawmill beach.  Into that tree the canoe shot with a crash, and I hung on, and shipping my paddle, pulled the canoe into the slack water again, by the aid of the branches of the tree, which I was in mortal terror would come off the rock, and insist on accompanying me and the canoe, viâ Kama country, to the Atlantic Ocean; but it held, and when I had got safe against the side of the pinnacle-rock I wiped a perspiring brow, and searched in my mind for a piece of information regarding Navigation that would be applicable to the management of long-tailed Adooma canoes.  I could not think of one for some minutes.  Captain Murray has imparted to me at one time and another an enormous mass of hints as to the management of vessels, but those vessels were all pre-supposed to have steam power.  But he having been the first man to take an ocean-going steamer up to Matadi on the Congo, through the terrific currents that whirl and fly in Hell’s Cauldron, knew about currents, and I remembered he had said regarding taking vessels through them, “Keep all the headway you can on her.”  Good! that hint inverted will fit this situation like a glove, and I’ll keep all the tailway I can off her.  Feeling now as safe as only a human being can feel who is backed up by a sound principle, I was cautiously crawling to the tail-end of the canoe, intent on kneeling in it to look after it, when I heard a dreadful outcry on the bank.  Looking there I saw Mme. Forget, Mme. Gacon, M. Gacon, and their attributive crowd of mission children all in a state of frenzy.  They said lots of things in chorus.  “What?” said I.  They said some more and added gesticulations.  Seeing I was wasting their time as I could not hear, I drove the canoe from the rock and made my way, mostly by steering, to the bank close by; and then tying the canoe firmly up I walked over the mill stream and divers other things towards my anxious friends.  “You’ll be drowned,” they said.  “Gracious goodness!” said I, “I thought that half an hour ago, but it’s all right now; I can steer.”  After much conversation I lulled their fears regarding me, and having received strict orders to keep in the stern of the canoe, because that is the proper place when you are managing a canoe single-handed, I returned to my studies.  I had not however lulled my friends’ interest regarding me, and they stayed on the bank watching.

CHAPTER VII. ON THE WAY FROM KANGWE TO LAKE NCOVI.

In which the voyager goes for bush again and wanders into a new lake and a new river.

July 22nd, 1895. - Left Kangwe.  The four Ajumba {170} did not turn up early in the morning as had been arranged, but arrived about eight, in pouring rain, so decided to wait until two o’clock, which will give us time to reach their town of Arevooma before nightfall, and may perhaps give us a chance of arriving there dry.  At two we start.  We go down river on the Kangwe side of Lembarene Island, make a pause in front of the Igalwa slave town, which is on the Island and nearly opposite the Fan town of Fula on the mainland bank, our motive being to get stores of yam and plantain - and magnificent specimens of both we get - and then, when our canoe is laden with them to an extent that would get us into trouble under the Act if it ran here, off we go again.  Every canoe we meet shouts us a greeting, and asks where we are going, and we say “Rembwé” - and they say “What!  Rembwé!” - and we say “Yes, Rembwé,” and paddle on.  I lay among the luggage for about an hour, not taking much interest in the Rembwé or anything else, save my own headache; but this soon lifted, and I was able to take notice, just before we reached the Ajumba’s town, called Arevooma.  The sandbanks stretch across the river here nearly awash, so all our cargo of yams has to be thrown overboard on to the sand, from which they can be collected by being waded out to.  The canoe, thus lightened, is able to go on a little further, but we are soon hard and fast again, and the crew have to jump out and shove her off about once every five minutes, and then to look lively about jumping back into her again, as she shoots over the cliffs of the sandbanks.

When we reach Arevooma, I find it is a very prettily situated town, on the left-hand bank of the river - clean and well kept, and composed of houses built on the Igalwa and M’pongwe plan with walls of split bamboo and a palm thatch roof.  I own I did not much care for these Ajumbas on starting, but they are evidently going to be kind and pleasant companions.  One of them is a gentlemanly-looking man, who wears a gray shirt; another looks like a genial Irishman who has accidentally got black, very black; he is distinguished by wearing a singlet; another is a thin, elderly man, notably silent; and the remaining one is a strapping, big fellow, as black as a wolf’s mouth, of gigantic muscular development, and wearing quantities of fetish charms hung about him.  The two first mentioned are Christians; the other two pagans, and I will refer to them by their characteristic points, for their honourable names are awfully alike when you do hear them, and, as is usual with Africans, rarely used in conversation.

Gray Shirt places his house at my disposal, and both he and his exceedingly pretty wife do their utmost to make me comfortable.  The house lies at the west end of the town.  It is one room inside, but has, I believe, a separate cooking shed.  In the verandah in front is placed a table, an ivory bundle chair and a gourd of water, and I am also treated to a calico tablecloth, and most thoughtfully screened off from the public gaze with more calico so that I can have my tea in privacy.  After this meal, to my surprise Ndaka turns up.  Certainly he is one of the very ugliest men - black or white - I have ever seen, and I fancy one of the best.  He is now on a holiday from Kangwe, seeing to the settlement of his dead brother’s affairs.  The dead brother was a great man in Arevooma and a pagan, but Ndaka, the Christian Bible-reader, seems to get on perfectly with the family and is holding tonight a meeting outside his brother’s house and comes with a lantern to fetch me to attend it.  Of course I have to go, headache or no headache.

Most of the town was there, mainly as spectators.  Ndaka and my two Christian boatmen manage the service between them, and what with the hymns and the mosquitoes the experience is slightly awful.  We sit in a line in front of the house, which is brilliantly lit up - our own lantern on the ground before us acting as a rival entertainment to the house lamps inside for some of the best insect society in Africa, who after the manner of the insect world, insist on regarding us as responsible for their own idiocy in getting singed; and sting us in revenge, while we slap hard, as we howl hymns in the fearful Igalwa and M’pongwe way.  Next to an English picnic, the most uncomfortable thing I know is an open-air service in this part of Africa.  Service being over, Ndaka takes me over the house to show its splendours.  The great brilliancy of its illumination arises from its being lit by two hanging lamps burning paraffin oil.  The most remarkable point about the house is the floor, which is made of split, plaited bamboo.  It gives under your feet in an alarming way, being raised some three or four feet above the ground, and I am haunted by the fear that I shall go through it and give pain to myself, and great trouble to others before I could be got out.  It is a beautiful piece of workmanship, and Arevooma has every reason to be proud of it.  Having admired these things, I go, dead tired and still headachy, down the road with my host who carries the lantern, through an atmosphere that has 45 per cent. of solid matter in the shape of mosquitoes; then wishing him good-night, I shut myself in, and illuminate, humbly, with a candle.  The furniture of the house consists mainly of boxes, containing the wealth of Gray Shirt, in clothes, mirrors, etc.  One corner of the room is taken up by great calabashes full of some sort of liquor, and there is an ivory bundle chair, a hanging mirror, several rusty guns, and a considerable collection of china basins and jugs.  Evidently Gray Shirt is rich.  The most interesting article to me, however, just now is the bed hung over with a clean, substantial, chintz mosquito bar, and spread with clean calico and adorned with patchwork-covered pillows.  So I take off my boots and put on my slippers; for it never does in this country to leave off boots altogether at anytime and risk getting bitten by mosquitoes on the feet, when you are on the march; because the rub of your boot on the bite always produces a sore, and a sore when it comes in the Gorilla country, comes to stay.

No sooner have I carefully swished all the mosquitoes from under the bar and turned in, than a cat scratches and mews at the door - turn out and let her in.  She is evidently a pet, so I take her on to the bed with me.  She is a very nice cat - sandy and fat - and if I held the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild fowl, I should have no hesitation in saying she had in her the soul of Dame Juliana Berners, such a whole-souled devotion to sport does she display, dashing out through the flaps of the mosquito bar after rats which, amid squeals from the rats and curses from her, she kills amongst the china collection.  Then she comes to me, triumphant, expecting congratulations, and accompanied by mosquitoes, and purrs and kneads upon my chest until she hears another rat.

Tuesday, July 23rd. - Am aroused by violent knocking at the door in the early gray dawn - so violent that two large centipedes and a scorpion drop on to the bed.  They have evidently been tucked away among the folds of the bar all night.  Well “when ignorance is bliss ’tis folly to be wise,” particularly along here.  I get up without delay, and find myself quite well.  The cat has thrown a basin of water neatly over into my bag during her nocturnal hunts; and when my tea comes I am informed a man “done die” in the night, which explains the firing of guns I heard.  I inquire what he has died of, and am told “He just truck luck, and then he die.”  His widows are having their faces painted white by sympathetic lady friends, and are attired in their oldest, dirtiest clothes, and but very few of them; still, they seem to be taking things in a resigned spirit.  These Ajumba seem pleasant folk.  They play with their pretty brown children in a taking way.  Last night I noticed some men and women playing a game new to me, which consisted in throwing a hoop at each other.  The point was to get the hoop to fall over your adversary’s head.  It is a cheerful game.  Quantities of the common house-fly about - and, during the early part of the morning, it rains in a gentle kind of way; but soon after we are afloat in our canoe it turns into a soft white mist.

We paddle still westwards down the broad quiet waters of the O’Rembo Vongo.  I notice great quantities of birds about here - great hornbills, vividly coloured kingfishers, and for the first time the great vulture I have often heard of, and the skin of which I will take home before I mention even its approximate spread of wing.  There are also noble white cranes, and flocks of small black and white birds, new to me, with heavy razor-shaped bills, reminding one of the Devonian puffin.  The hornbill is perhaps the most striking in appearance.  It is the size of a small, or say a good-sized hen turkey.  Gray Shirt says the flocks, which are of eight or ten, always have the same quantity of cocks and hens, and that they live together “white man fashion,” i.e. each couple keeping together.  They certainly do a great deal of courting, the cock filling out his wattles on his neck like a turkey, and spreading out his tail with great pomp and ceremony, but very awkwardly.  To see hornbills on a bare sandbank is a solemn sight, but when they are dodging about in the hippo grass they sink ceremony, and roll and waddle, looking - my man said - for snakes and the little sand-fish, which are close in under the bank; and their killing way of dropping their jaws - I should say opening their bills - when they are alarmed is comic.  I think this has something to do with their hearing, for I often saw two or three of them in a line on a long branch, standing, stretched up to their full height, their great eyes opened wide, and all with their great beaks open, evidently listening for something.  Their cry is most peculiar and can only be mistaken for a native horn; and although there seems little variety in it to my ear, there must be more to theirs, for they will carry on long confabulations with each other across a river, and, I believe, sit up half the night and talk scandal.

There were plenty of plantain-eaters here, but, although their screech was as appalling as I have heard in Angola, they were not regarded, by the Ajumba at any rate, as being birds of evil omen, as they are in Angola.  Still, by no means all the birds here only screech and squark.  Several of them have very lovely notes.  There is one who always gives a series of infinitely beautiful, soft, rich-toned whistles just before the first light of the dawn shows in the sky, and one at least who has a prolonged and very lovely song.  This bird, I was told in Gaboon, is called Telephonus erythropterus.  I expect an ornithologist would enjoy himself here, but I cannot - and will not - collect birds.  I hate to have them killed any how, and particularly in the barbarous way in which these natives kill them.

CHAPTER VIII. FROM NCOVI TO ESOON.

Concerning the way in which the voyager goes from the island of M’fetta to no one knows exactly where, in doubtful and bad company, and of what this led to and giving also some accounts of the Great Forest and of those people that live therein.

I will not bore you with my diary in detail regarding our land journey, because the water-washed little volume attributive to this period is mainly full of reports of law cases, for reasons hereinafter to be stated; and at night, when passing through this bit of country, I was usually too tired to do anything more than make an entry such as: “5 S., 4 R. A., N.E Ebony. T. 1-50, etc., etc.” - entries that require amplification to explain their significance, and I will proceed to explain.

Our first day’s march was a very long one.  Path in the ordinary acceptance of the term there was none.  Hour after hour, mile after mile, we passed on, in the under-gloom of the great forest.  The pace made by the Fans, who are infinitely the most rapid Africans I have ever come across, severely tired the Ajumba, who are canoe men, and who had been as fresh as paint, after their exceedingly long day’s paddling from Arevooma to M’fetta.  Ngouta, the Igalwa interpreter, felt pumped, and said as much, very early in the day.  I regretted very much having brought him; for, from a mixture of nervous exhaustion arising from our M’fetta experiences, and a touch of chill he had almost entirely lost his voice, and I feared would fall sick.  The Fans were evidently quite at home in the forest, and strode on over fallen trees and rocks with an easy, graceful stride.  What saved us weaklings was the Fans’ appetites; every two hours they sat down, and had a snack of a pound or so of meat and aguma apiece, followed by a pipe of tobacco.  We used to come up with them at these halts.  Ngouta and the Ajumba used to sit down, and rest with them, and I also, for a few minutes, for a rest and chat, and then I would go on alone, thus getting a good start.  I got a good start, in the other meaning of the word, on the afternoon of the first day when descending into a ravine.

I saw in the bottom, wading and rolling in the mud, a herd of five elephants.  I remembered, hastily, that your one chance when charged by several elephants is to dodge them round trees, working down wind all the time, until they lose smell and sight of you, then to lie quiet for a time, and go home.  It was evident from the utter unconcern of these monsters that I was down wind now, so I had only to attend to dodging, and I promptly dodged round a tree, and lay down.  Seeing they still displayed no emotion on my account, and fascinated by the novelty of the scene, I crept forward from one tree to another, until I was close enough to have hit the nearest one with a stone, and spats of mud, which they sent flying with their stamping and wallowing came flap, flap among the bushes covering me.

One big fellow had a nice pair of 40 lb. or so tusks on him, singularly straight, and another had one big curved tusk and one broken one.  Some of them lay right down like pigs in the deeper part of the swamp, some drew up trunkfuls of water and syringed themselves and each other, and every one of them indulged in a good rub against a tree.  Presently when they had had enough of it they all strolled off up wind, through the bush in Indian file, now and then breaking off a branch, but leaving singularly little dead water for their tonnage and breadth of beam.  When they had gone I rose up, turned round to find the men, and trod on Kiva’s back then and there, full and fair, and fell sideways down the steep hillside until I fetched up among some roots.

It seems Kiva had come on, after his meal, before the others, and seeing the elephants, and being a born hunter, had crawled like me down to look at them.  He had not expected to find me there, he said.  I do not believe he gave a thought of any sort to me in the presence of these fascinating creatures, and so he got himself trodden on.  I suggested to him we should pile the baggage, and go and have an elephant hunt.  He shook his head reluctantly, saying “Kor, kor,” like a depressed rook, and explained we were not strong enough; there were only three Fans - the Ajumba, and Ngouta did not count - and moreover that we had not brought sufficient ammunition owing to the baggage having to be carried, and the ammunition that we had must be saved for other game than elephant, for we might meet war before we met the Rembwé River.

We had by now joined the rest of the party, and were all soon squattering about on our own account in the elephant bath.  It was shocking bad going - like a ploughed field exaggerated by a terrific nightmare.  It pretty nearly pulled all the legs off me, and to this hour I cannot tell you if it is best to put your foot into a footmark - a young pond, I mean - about the size of the bottom of a Madeira work arm-chair, or whether you should poise yourself on the rim of the same, and stride forward to its other bank boldly and hopefully.  The footmarks and the places where the elephants had been rolling were by now filled with water, and the mud underneath was in places hard and slippery.  In spite of my determination to preserve an awesome and unmoved calm while among these dangerous savages, I had to give way and laugh explosively; to see the portly, powerful Pagan suddenly convert himself into a quadruped, while Gray Shirt poised himself on one heel and waved his other leg in the air to advertise to the assembled nations that he was about to sit down, was irresistible.  No one made such palaver about taking a seat as Gray Shirt; I did it repeatedly without any fuss to speak of.  That lordly elephant-hunter, the Great Wiki, would, I fancy, have strode over safely and with dignity, but the man who was in front of him spun round on his own axis and flung his arms round the Fan, and they went to earth together; the heavy load on Wiki’s back drove them into the mud like a pile-driver.  However we got through in time, and after I had got up the other side of the ravine I saw the Fan let the Ajumba go on, and were busy searching themselves for something.

I followed the Ajumba, and before I joined them felt a fearful pricking irritation.  Investigation of the affected part showed a tick of terrific size with its head embedded in the flesh; pursuing this interesting subject, I found three more, and had awfully hard work to get them off and painful too for they give one not only a feeling of irritation at their holding-on place, but a streak of rheumatic-feeling pain up from it.  On completing operations I went on and came upon the Ajumba in a state more approved of by Praxiteles than by the general public nowadays.  They had found out about elephant ticks, so I went on and got an excellent start for the next stage.

By this time, shortly after noon on the first day, we had struck into a mountainous and rocky country, and also struck a track - a track you had to keep your eye on or you lost it in a minute, but still a guide as to direction.

The forest trees here were mainly ebony and great hard wood trees, {200} with no palms save my old enemy the climbing palm, calamus, as usual, going on its long excursions, up one tree and down another, bursting into a plume of fronds, and in the middle of each plume one long spike sticking straight up, which was an unopened frond, whenever it got a gleam of sunshine; running along the ground over anything it meets, rock or fallen timber, all alike, its long, dark-coloured, rope-like stem simply furred with thorns.  Immense must be the length of some of these climbing palms.  One tree I noticed that day that had hanging from its summit, a good one hundred and fifty feet above us, a long straight ropelike palm stem.

The character of the whole forest was very interesting.  Sometimes for hours we passed among thousands upon thousands of gray-white columns of uniform height (about 100-150 feet); at the top of these the boughs branched out and interlaced among each other, forming a canopy or ceiling, which dimmed the light even of the equatorial sun to such an extent that no undergrowth could thrive in the gloom.  The statement of the struggle for existence was published here in plain figures, but it was not, as in our climate, a struggle against climate mainly, but an internecine war from over population.  Now and again we passed among vast stems of buttressed trees, sometimes enormous in girth; and from their far-away summits hung great bush-ropes, some as straight as plumb lines, others coiled round, and intertwined among each other, until one could fancy one was looking on some mighty battle between armies of gigantic serpents, that had been arrested at its height by some magic spell.  All these bush-ropes were as bare of foliage as a ship’s wire rigging, but a good many had thorns.  I was very curious as to how they got up straight, and investigation showed me that many of them were carried up with a growing tree.  The only true climbers were the calamus and the rubber vine (Landolphia), both of which employ hook tackle.

Some stretches of this forest were made up of thin, spindly stemmed trees of great height, and among these stretches I always noticed the ruins of some forest giant, whose death by lightning or by his superior height having given the demoniac tornado wind an extra grip on him, had allowed sunlight to penetrate the lower regions of the forest; and then evidently the seedlings and saplings, who had for years been living a half-starved life for light, shot up.  They seemed to know that their one chance lay in getting with the greatest rapidity to the level of the top of the forest.  No time to grow fat in the stem.  No time to send out side branches, or any of those vanities.  Up, up to the light level, and he among them who reached it first won in this game of life or death; for when he gets there he spreads out his crown of upper branches, and shuts off the life-giving sunshine from his competitors, who pale off and die, or remain dragging on an attenuated existence waiting for another chance, and waiting sometimes for centuries.  There must be tens of thousands of seeds which perish before they get their chance; but the way the seeds of the hard wood African trees are packed, as it were in cases specially made durable, is very wonderful.  Indeed the ways of Providence here are wonderful in their strange dual intention to preserve and to destroy; but on the whole, as Peer Gynt truly observes, “Ein guter Wirth - nein das ist er nicht.”

We saw this influence of light on a large scale as soon as we reached the open hills and mountains of the Sierra del Cristal, and had to pass over those fearful avalanche-like timber falls on their steep sides.  The worst of these lay between Efoua and Egaja, where we struck a part of the range that was exposed to the south-east.  These falls had evidently arisen from the tornados, which from time to time have hurled down the gigantic trees whose hold on the superficial soil over the sheets of hard bed rock was insufficient, in spite of all the anchors they had out in the shape of roots and buttresses, and all their rigging in the shape of bush ropes.  Down they had come, crushing and dragging down with them those near them or bound to them by the great tough climbers.

Getting over these falls was perilous, not to say scratchy work.  One or another member of our party always went through; and precious uncomfortable going it was, I found, when I tried it in one above Egaja; ten or twelve feet of crashing creaking timber, and then flump on to a lot of rotten, wet débris, with more snakes and centipedes among it than you had any immediate use for, even though you were a collector; but there you had to stay, while Wiki, who was a most critical connoisseur, selected from the surrounding forest a bush-rope that he regarded as the correct remedy for the case, and then up you were hauled, through the sticks you had turned the wrong way on your down journey.

The Duke had a bad fall, going twenty feet or so before he found the rubbish heap; while Fika, who went through with a heavy load on his back, took us, on one occasion, half an hour to recover; and when we had just got him to the top, and able to cling on to the upper sticks, Wiki, who had been superintending operations, slipped backwards, and went through on his own account.  The bush-rope we had been hauling on was too worn with the load to use again, and we just hauled Wiki out with the first one we could drag down and cut; and Wiki, when he came up, said we were reckless, and knew nothing of bush ropes, which shows how ungrateful an African can be.  It makes the perspiration run down my nose whenever I think of it.  The sun was out that day; we were neatly situated on the Equator, and the air was semisolid, with the stinking exhalations from the swamps with which the mountain chain is fringed and intersected; and we were hot enough without these things, because of the violent exertion of getting these twelve to thirteen-stone gentlemen up among us again, and the fine varied exercise of getting over the fall on our own account.

When we got into the cool forest beyond it was delightful; particularly if it happened to be one of those lovely stretches of forest, gloomy down below, but giving hints that far away above us was a world of bloom and scent and beauty which we saw as much of as earth-worms in a flower-bed.  Here and there the ground was strewn with great cast blossoms, thick, wax-like, glorious cups of orange and crimson and pure white, each one of which was in itself a handful, and which told us that some of the trees around us were showing a glory of colour to heaven alone.  Sprinkled among them were bunches of pure stephanotis-like flowers, which said that the gaunt bush-ropes were rubber vines that had burst into flower when they had seen the sun.  These flowers we came across in nearly every type of forest all the way, for rubber abounds here.

I will weary you no longer now with the different kinds of forest and only tell you I have let you off several.  The natives have separate names for seven different kinds, and these might, I think, be easily run up to nine.

A certain sort of friendship soon arose between the Fans and me.  We each recognised that we belonged to that same section of the human race with whom it is better to drink than to fight.  We knew we would each have killed the other, if sufficient inducement were offered, and so we took a certain amount of care that the inducement should not arise.  Gray Shirt and Pagan also, their trade friends, the Fans treated with an independent sort of courtesy; but Silence, Singlet, the Passenger, and above all Ngouta, they openly did not care a row of pins for, and I have small doubt that had it not been for us other three they would have killed and eaten these very amiable gentlemen with as much compunction as an English sportsman would kill as many rabbits.  They on their part hated the Fan, and never lost an opportunity of telling me “these Fan be bad man too much.”  I must not forget to mention the other member of our party, a Fan gentleman with the manners of a duke and the habits of a dustbin.  He came with us, quite uninvited by me, and never asked for any pay; I think he only wanted to see the fun, and drop in for a fight if there was one going on, and to pick up the pieces generally.  He was evidently a man of some importance from the way the others treated him; and moreover he had a splendid gun, with a gorilla skin sheath for its lock, and ornamented all over its stock with brass nails.  His costume consisted of a small piece of dirty rag round his loins; and whenever we were going through dense undergrowth, or wading a swamp, he wore that filament tucked up scandalously short.  Whenever we were sitting down in the forest having one of our nondescript meals, he always sat next to me and appropriated the tin.  Then he would fill his pipe, and turning to me with the easy grace of aristocracy, would say what may be translated as “My dear Princess, could you favour me with a lucifer?”

I used to say, “My dear Duke, charmed, I’m sure,” and give him one ready lit.

CHAPTER IX. FROM ESOON TO AGONJO.

In which the Voyager sets forth the beauties of the way from Esoon to N’dorko, and gives some account of the local Swamps.

Our next halting place was Esoon, which received us with the usual row, but kindly enough; and endeared itself to me by knowing the Rembwé, and not just waving the arm in the air, in any direction, and saying “Far, far plenty bad people live for that side,” as the other towns had done.  Of course they stuck to the bad people part of the legend; but I was getting quite callous as to the moral character of new acquaintances, feeling sure that for good solid murderous rascality several of my old Fan acquaintances, and even my own party, would take a lot of beating; and yet, one and all, they had behaved well to me.  Esoon gave me to understand that of all the Sodoms and Gomorrahs that town of Egaja was an easy first, and it would hardly believe we had come that way.  Still Egaja had dealt with us well.  However I took less interest - except, of course, as a friend, in some details regarding the criminal career of Chief Blue-hat of Egaja - in the opinion of Esoon regarding the country we had survived, than in the information it had to impart regarding the country we had got to survive on our way to the Big River, which now no longer meant the Ogowé, but the Rembwé.  I meant to reach one of Hatton and Cookson’s sub-factories there, but - strictly between ourselves - I knew no more at what town that factory was than a Kindergarten Board School child does.  I did not mention this fact; and a casual observer might have thought that I had spent my youth in that factory, when I directed my inquiries to the finding out the very shortest route to it.  Esoon shook its head.  “Yes, it was close, but it was impossible to reach Uguma’s factory.”  “Why?”  “There was blood war on the path.”  I said it was no war of mine.  But Esoon said, such was the appalling depravity of the next town on the road, that its inhabitants lay in wait at day with loaded guns and shot on sight any one coming up the Esoon road, and that at night they tied strings with bells on across the road and shot on hearing them.  No one had been killed since the first party of Esoonians were fired on at long range, because no one had gone that way; but the next door town had been heard by people who had been out in the bush at night, blazing down the road when the bells were tinkled by wild animals.  Clearly that road was not yet really healthy.

The Duke, who as I have said before, was a fine courageous fellow, ready to engage in any undertaking, suggested I should go up the road - alone by myself - first - a mile ahead of the party - and the next town, perhaps, might not shoot at sight, if they happened to notice I was something queer; and I might explain things, and then the rest of the party would follow.  “There’s nothing like dash and courage, my dear Duke,” I said, “even if one display it by deputy, so this plan does you great credit; but as my knowledge of this charming language of yours is but small, I fear I might create a wrong impression in that town, and it might think I had kindly brought them a present of eight edible heathens - you and the remainder of my followers, you understand.”  My men saw this was a real danger, and this was the only way I saw of excusing myself.  It is at such a moment as this that the Giant’s robe gets, so to speak, between your legs and threatens to trip you up.  Going up a forbidden road, and exposing yourself as a pot shot to ambushed natives would be jam and fritters to Mr. MacTaggart, for example; but I am not up to that form yet.  So I determined to leave that road severely alone, and circumnavigate the next town by a road that leaves Esoon going W.N.W., which struck the Rembwé by N’dorko, I was told, and then follow up the bank of the river until I picked up the sub-factory.  Subsequent experience did not make one feel inclined to take out a patent for this plan, but at the time in Esoon it looked nice enough.

Some few of the more highly cultured inhabitants here could speak trade English a little, and had been to the Rembwé, and were quite intelligent about the whole affair.  They had seen white men.  A village they formerly occupied nearer the Rembwé had been burnt by them, on account of a something that had occurred to a Catholic priest who visited it.  They were, of course, none of them personally mixed up in this sad affair, so could give no details of what had befallen the priest.  They knew also “the Mové,” which was a great bond of union between us.  “Was I a wife of them Mové white man,” they inquired - “or them other white man?”  I civilly said them Mové men were my tribe, and they ought to have known it by the look of me.  They discussed my points of resemblance to “the Mové

CHAPTER X. BUSH TRADE AND FAN CUSTOMS.

Wherein the Voyager, having fallen among the black traders, discourses on these men and their manner of life; and the difficulties and dangers attending the barter they carry on with the bush savages; and on some of the reasons that makes this barter so beloved and followed by both the black trader and the savage.  To which is added an account of the manner of life of the Fan tribe; the strange form of coinage used by these people; their manner of hunting the elephant, working in iron; and such like things.

I spent a few, lazy, pleasant days at Agonjo, Mr. Glass doing all he could to make me comfortable, though he had a nasty touch of fever on him just then.  His efforts were ably seconded by his good lady, an exceedingly comely Gaboon woman, with pretty manners, and an excellent gift in cookery.  The third member of the staff was the store-keeper, a clever fellow: I fancy a Loango from his clean-cut features and spare make, but his tribe I know not for a surety.

One of these black trader factories is an exceedingly interesting place to stay at, for in these factories you are right down on the bed rock of the trade.  On the Coast, for the greater part, the white traders are dealing with black traders, middle men, who have procured their trade stuff from the bush natives, who collect and prepare it.  Here, in the black trader factory, you see the first stage of the export part of the trade: namely the barter of the collected trade stuff between the collector and the middleman.  I will not go into details regarding it.  What I saw merely confirmed my opinion that the native is not cheated; no, not even by a fellow African trader; and I will merely here pause to sing a pæan to a very unpopular class - the black middleman as he exists on the South-West Coast.  It is impossible to realise the gloom of the lives of these men in bush factories, unless you have lived in one.  It is no use saying “they know nothing better and so don’t feel it,” for they do know several things better, being very sociable men, fully appreciative of the joys of a Coast town, and their aim, object and end in life is, in almost every case, to get together a fortune that will enable them to live in one, give a dance twice a week, card parties most nights, and dress themselves up so that their fellow Coast townsmen may hate them and their townswomen love them.  From their own accounts of the dreadful state of trade; and the awful and unparalleled series of losses they have had, from the upsetting of canoes, the raids and robberies made on them and their goods by “those awful bush savages”; you would, if you were of a trustful disposition, regard the black trader with an admiring awe as the man who has at last solved the great commercial problem of how to keep a shop and live by the loss.  Nay, not only live, but build for himself an equivalent to a palatial residence, and keep up, not only it, but half a dozen wives, with a fine taste for dress every one of them.  I am not of a trustful disposition and I accept those “losses” with a heavy discount, and know most of the rest of them have come out of my friend the white trader’s pockets.  Still I can never feel the righteous indignation that I ought to feel, when I see the black trader “down in a seaport town with his Nancy,” etc., as Sir W. H. S. Gilbert classically says, because I remember those bush factories.

Mr. Glass, however, was not a trader who made a fortune by losing those of other people; for he had been many years in the employ of the firm.  He had risen certainly to the high post and position of charge of the Rembwé, but he was not down giddy-flying at Gaboon.  His accounts of his experiences when he had been many years ago away up the still little known Nguni River, in a factory in touch with the lively Bakele, then in a factory among Fans and Igalwa on the Ogowé, and now among Fans and Skekiani on the Rembwé, were fascinating, and told vividly of the joys of first starting a factory in a wild district.  The way in which your customers, for the first month or so, enjoyed themselves by trying to frighten you, the trader, out of your wits and goods, and into giving them fancy prices for things you were trading in, and for things of no earthly use to you, or any one else!  The trader’s existence during this period is marked by every unpleasantness save dulness; from that he is spared by the presence of a mob of noisy, dangerous, thieving savages all over his place all day; invading his cook-house, to put some nastiness into his food as a trade charm; helping themselves to portable property at large; and making themselves at home to the extent of sitting on his dining-table.  At night those customers proceed to sleep all over the premises, with a view to being on hand to start shopping in the morning.  Woe betide the trader if he gives in to this, and tolerates the invasion, for there is no chance of that house ever being his own again; and in addition to the local flies, etc., on the table-cloth, he will always have several big black gentlemen to share his meals.  If he raises prices, to tide over some extra row, he is a lost man; for the Africans can understand prices going up, but never prices coming down; and time being no object, they will hold back their trade.  Then the district is ruined, and the trader along with it, for he cannot raise the price he gets for the things he buys.

What that trader has got to do, is to be a “Devil man.”  They always kindly said they recognised me as one, which is a great compliment.  He must betray no weakness, but a character which I should describe as a compound of the best parts of those of Cardinal Richelieu, Brutus, Julius Caesar, Prince Metternich, and Mezzofanti, the latter to carry on the native language part of the business; and he must cast those customers out, not only from his house; but from his yard; and adhere to the “No admittance except on business” principle.  This causes a good deal of unpleasantness, and the trader’s nights are now cheered by lively war-dances outside his stockade; the accompanying songs advertising that the customers are coming over the stockade to raid the store, and cut up the trader “into bits like a fish.”  Sometimes they do come - and then - finish; but usually they don’t; and gradually settle down, and respect the trader greatly as “a Devil man”; and do business on sound lines during the day.  Over the stockade at night, by ones and twos, stealing, they will come to the end of the chapter.

Moonlight nights are fairly restful for the bush trader, but when it is inky black, or pouring with rain, he has got to be very much out and about, and particularly vigilant has he got to be on tornado nights - a most uncomfortable sort of weather to attend to business in, I assure you.

The factory at Agonjo was typical; the house is a fine specimen of the Igalwa style of architecture; mounted on poles above the ground; the space under the house being used as a store for rubber in barrels, and ebony in billets; thereby enabling the trader to hover over these precious possessions, sleeping and waking, like a sitting hen over her eggs.  Near to the house are the sleeping places for the beach hands, and the cook-house.  In front, in a position commanded by the eye from the verandah, and well withdrawn from the stockade, are great piles of billets of red bar wood.  The whole of the clean, sandy yard containing these things, and divers others, is surrounded by a stout stockade, its main face to the river frontage, the water at high tide lapping its base, and at low tide exposing in front of it a shore of black slime.  Although I cite this factory as a typical factory of a black trader, it is a specimen of the highest class, for, being in connection with Messrs. Hatton and Cookson it is well kept up and stocked.  Firms differ much in this particular.  Messrs. Hatton and Cookson, like Messrs. Miller Brothers in the Bights, take every care that lies in their power of the people who serve them, down to the Kruboys working on their beaches, giving ample and good rations and providing good houses.  But this is not so with all firms on the Coast.  I have seen factories belonging to the Swedish houses beside which this factory at Agonjo is a palace although those factories are white man factories, and the unfortunate white men in them are expected by these firms to live on native chop - an expectation the Agents by no means realise, for they usually die.  Black hands, however, do not suffer much at the hands of such firms, for the Swedish Agents are a quiet, gentlemanly set of men, in the best sense of that much misused term, and they do not employ on their beaches such a staff of black helpers as the English houses, so the two or three Kruboys on a starvation beach can fairly well fend for themselves, for there is always an adjacent village, and in that village there are always chickens, and on the shore crabs, and in the river fish, and for the rest of his diet the Kruboy flirts with the local ladies.

CHAPTER XI.  DOWN THE REMBWÉ.

Setting forth how the Voyager descends the Rembwé River, with divers excursions and alarms, in the company of a black trader, and returns safely to the Coast.

Getting away from Agonjo seemed as if it would be nearly as difficult as getting to it, but as the quarters were comfortable and the society fairly good, I was not anxious.  I own the local scenery was a little too much of the Niger Delta type for perfect beauty, just the long lines of mangrove, and the muddy river lounging almost imperceptibly to sea, and nothing else in sight.  Mr. Glass, however, did not take things so philosophically.  I was on his commercial conscience, for I had come in from the bush and there was money in me.  Therefore I was a trade product - a new trade stuff that ought to be worked up and developed; and he found himself unable to do this, for although he had secured the first parcel, as it were, and got it successfully stored, yet he could not ship it, and he felt this was a reproach to him.

Many were his lamentations that the firm had not provided him with a large sailing canoe and a suitable crew to deal with this new line of trade.  I did my best to comfort him, pointing out that the most enterprising firm could not be expected to provide expensive things like these, on the extremely remote chance of ladies arriving per bush at Agonjo - in fact not until the trade in them was well developed.  But he refused to see it in this light and harped upon the subject, wrapped up, poor man, in a great coat and a muffler, because his ague was on him.

I next tried to convince Mr. Glass that any canoe would do for me to go down in.  “No,” he said, “any canoe will not do;” and he explained that when you got down the Rembwé to ’Como Point you were in a rough, nasty bit of water, the Gaboon, which has a fine confused set of currents from the tidal wash and the streams of the Rembwé and ’Como rivers, in which it would be improbable that a river canoe could live any time worth mentioning.  Progress below ’Como Point by means of mere paddling he considered impossible.  There was nothing for it but a big sailing canoe, and there was no big sailing canoe to be had.  I think Mr. Glass got a ray of comfort out of the fact that Messrs. John Holt’s sub-agent was, equally with himself, unable to ship me.

At this point in the affair there entered a highly dramatic figure.  He came on to the scene suddenly and with much uproar, in a way that would have made his fortune in a transpontine drama.  I shall always regret I have not got that man’s portrait, for I cannot do him justice with ink.  He dashed up on to the verandah, smote the frail form of Mr. Glass between the shoulders, and flung his own massive one into a chair.  His name was Obanjo, but he liked it pronounced Captain Johnson, and his profession was a bush and river trader on his own account.  Every movement of the man was theatrical, and he used to look covertly at you every now and then to see if he had produced his impression, which was evidently intended to be that of a reckless, rollicking skipper.  There was a Hallo-my-Hearty atmosphere coming off him from the top of his hat to the soles of his feet, like the scent off a flower; but it did not require a genius in judging men to see that behind, and under this was a very different sort of man, and if I should ever want to engage in a wild and awful career up a West African river I shall start on it by engaging Captain Johnson.  He struck me as being one of those men, of whom I know five, whom I could rely on, that if one of them and I went into the utter bush together, one of us at least would come out alive and have made something substantial by the venture; which is a great deal more than I could say, for example, of Ngouta, who was still with me, as he desired to see the glories of Gaboon and buy a hanging lamp.

Captain Johnson’s attire calls for especial comment and admiration.  However disconnected the two sides of his character might be, his clothes bore the impress of both of his natures to perfection.  He wore, when first we met, a huge sombrero hat, a spotless singlet, and a suit of clean, well-got-up dungaree, and an uncommonly picturesque, powerful figure he cut in them, with his finely moulded, well-knit form and good-looking face, full of expression always, but always with the keen small eyes in it watching the effect his genial smiles and hearty laugh produced.  The eyes were the eyes of Obanjo, the rest of the face the property of Captain Johnson.  I do not mean to say that they were the eyes of a bad bold man, but you had not to look twice at them to see they belonged to a man courageous in the African manner, full of energy and resource, keenly intelligent and self-reliant, and all that sort of thing.

I left him and the refined Mr. Glass together to talk over the palaver of shipping me, and they talked it at great length.  Finally the price I was to pay Obanjo was settled and we proceeded to less important details.  It seemed Obanjo, when up the river this time, had set about constructing a new and large trading canoe at one of his homes, in which he was just thinking of taking his goods down to Gaboon.  Next morning Obanjo with his vessel turned up, and saying farewell to my kind host, Mr. Sanga Glass, I departed.

She had the makings of a fine vessel in her; though roughly hewn out of an immense hard-wood tree: her lines were good, and her type was that of the big sea-canoes of the Bight of Panavia.  Very far forward was a pole mast, roughly made, but European in intention, and carrying a long gaff.  Shrouds and stays it had not, and my impression was that it would be carried away if we dropped in for half a tornado, until I saw our sail and recognised that that would go to darning cotton instantly if it fell in with even a breeze.  It was a bed quilt that had evidently been in the family some years, and although it had been in places carefully patched with pieces of previous sets of the captain’s dungarees, in other places, where it had not, it gave “free passage to the airs of Heaven”; which I may remark does not make for speed in the boat mounting such canvas.  Partly to this sail, partly to the amount of trading affairs we attended to, do I owe the credit of having made a record trip down the Rembwé, the slowest white man time on record.

CHAPTER XII. FETISH.

In which the Voyager attempts cautiously to approach the subject of Fetish, and gives a classification of spirits, and some account of the Ibet and Orunda.

Having given some account of my personal experiences among an African tribe in its original state, i.e. in a state uninfluenced by European ideas and culture, I will make an attempt to give a rough sketch of the African form of thought and the difficulties of studying it, because the study of this thing is my chief motive for going to West Africa.  Since 1893 I have been collecting information in its native state regarding Fetish, and I use the usual terms fetish and ju-ju because they have among us a certain fixed value - a conventional value, but a useful one.  Neither “fetish” nor “ju-ju” are native words.  Fetish comes from the word the old Portuguese explorers used to designate the objects they thought the natives worshipped, and in which they were wise enough to recognise a certain similarity to their own little images and relics of Saints, “Feitiço.”  Ju-ju, on the other hand, is French, and comes from the word for a toy or doll, {286} so it is not so applicable as the Portuguese name, for the native image is not a doll or toy, and has far more affinity to the image of a saint, inasmuch as it is not venerated for itself, or treasured because of its prettiness, but only because it is the residence, or the occasional haunt, of a spirit.

Stalking the wild West African idea is one of the most charming pursuits in the world.  Quite apart from the intellectual, it has a high sporting interest; for its pursuit is as beset with difficulty and danger as grizzly bear hunting, yet the climate in which you carry on this pursuit - vile as it is - is warm, which to me is almost an essential of existence.  I beg you to understand that I make no pretension to a thorough knowledge of Fetish ideas; I am only on the threshold.  “Ich weiss nicht all doch viel ist mir bekannt,” as Faust said - and, like him after he had said it, I have got a lot to learn.

I do not intend here to weary you with more than a small portion of even my present knowledge, for I have great collections of facts that I keep only to compare with those of other hunters of the wild idea, and which in their present state are valueless to the cabinet ethnologist.  Some of these may be rank lies, some of them mere individual mind-freaks, others have underlying them some idea I am not at present in touch with.

The difficulty of gaining a true conception of the savage’s real idea is great and varied.  In places on the Coast where there is, or has been, much missionary influence the trouble is greatest, for in the first case the natives carefully conceal things they fear will bring them into derision and contempt, although they still keep them in their innermost hearts; and in the second case, you have a set of traditions which are Christian in origin, though frequently altered almost beyond recognition by being kept for years in the atmosphere of the African mind.  For example, there is this beautiful story now extant among the Cabindas.  God made at first all men black - He always does in the African story - and then He went across a great river and called men to follow Him, and the wisest and the bravest and the best plunged into the great river and crossed it; and the water washed them white, so they are the ancestors of the white men.  But the others were afraid too much, and said, “No, we are comfortable here; we have our dances, and our tom-toms, and plenty to eat - we won’t risk it, we’ll stay here”; and they remained in the old place, and from them come the black men.  But to this day the white men come to the bank, on the other side of the river, and call to the black men, saying, “Come, it is better over here.”  I fear there is little doubt that this story is a modified version of some parable preached to the Cabindas at the time the Capuchins had such influence among them, before they were driven out of the lower Congo regions more than a hundred years ago, for political reasons by the Portuguese.

In the bush - where the people have been little, or not at all, in contact with European ideas - in some ways the investigation is easier; yet another set of difficulties confronts you.  The difficulty that seems to occur most easily to people is the difficulty of the language.  The West African languages are not difficult to pick up; nevertheless, there are an awful quantity of them and they are at the best most imperfect mediums of communication.  No one who has been on the Coast can fail to recognise how inferior the native language is to the native’s mind behind it - and the prolixity and repetition he has therefore to employ to make his thoughts understood.

The great comfort is the wide diffusion of that peculiar language, “trade English”; it is not only used as a means of intercommunication between whites and blacks, but between natives using two distinct languages.  On the south-west Coast you find individuals in villages far from the sea, or a trading station, who know it, and this is because they have picked it up and employ it in their dealings with the Coast tribes and travelling traders.  It is by no means an easy language to pick up - it is not a farrago of bad words and broken phrases, but is a definite structure, has a great peculiarity in its verb forms, and employs no genders.  There is no grammar of it out yet; and one of the best ways of learning it is to listen to a seasoned second mate regulating the unloading or loading, of cargo, over the hatch of the hold.  No, my Coast friends, I have not forgotten - but though you did not mean it helpfully, this was one of the best hints you ever gave me.

Another good way is the careful study of examples which display the highest style and the most correct diction; so I append the letter given by Mr. Hutchinson as being about the best bit of trade English I know.

“To Daddy nah Tampin Office, -

Ha Daddy, do, yah, nah beg you tell dem people for me; make dem Sally-own pussin know.  Do yah.  Berrah well.

Ah lib nah Pademba Road - one bwoy lib dah oberside lakah dem two Docter lib overside you Tampin office.  Berrah well.

Dah bwoy head big too much - he say nah Militie Ban - he got one long long ting so so brass, someting lib dah go flip flap, dem call am key.  Berrah well.  Had!  Dah bwoy kin blow! - she ah! - na marin, oh! - nah sun time, oh! nah evenin, oh! - nah middle night, oh! - all same - no make pussin sleep.  Not ebry bit dat, more lib da!  One Boney bwoy lib oberside nah he like blow bugle.  When dem two woh-woh bwoy blow dem ting de nize too much too much.

When white man blow dat ting and pussin sleep he kin tap wah make dem bwoy carn do so?  Dem bwoy kin blow ebry day eben Sunday dem kin blow.  When ah yerry dem blow Sunday ah wish dah bugle kin go down na dem troat or dem kin blow them head-bone inside.

Do nah beg you yah tell all dem people ’bout dah ting wah dem two bwoy dah blow.  Till am Amtrang Boboh hab febah bad.  Till am titty carn sleep nah night.  Dah nize go kill me two pickin, oh!

           Plabba done.  Good by Daddy.                      Crashey Jane.”

Now for the elementary student we will consider this letter.  The complaint in Crashey Jane’s letter is about two boys who are torturing her morning, noon, and night, Sunday and weekday, by blowing some “long long brass ting” as well as a bugle, and the way she dwells on their staying power must bring a sympathetic pang for that black sister into the heart of many a householder in London who lives next to a ladies’ school, or a family of musical tastes.  “One touch of nature,” etc.  “Daddy” is not a term of low familiarity but one of esteem and respect, and the “Tampin Office” is a respectful appellation for the Office of the “New Era” in which this letter was once published.  “Bwoy head big too much,” means that the young man is swelled with conceit because he is connected with “Militie ban.”  “Woh woh” you will find, among all the natives in the Bights, to mean extremely bad.  I think it is native, having some connection with the root Wo - meaning power, etc.; but Mr. Hutchinson may be right, and it may mean “a capacity to bring double woe.”

“Amtrang Boboh” is not the name of some uncivilised savage, as the uninitiated may think; far from it.  It is Bob Armstrong - upside down, and slightly altered, and refers to the Hon. Robert Armstrong, stipendiary magistrate of Sierra Leone, etc.

“Berrah well” is a phrase used whenever the native thinks he has succeeded in putting his statement well.  He sort of turns round and looks at it, says “Berrah well,” in admiration of his own art, and then proceeds.

“Pickin” are children.

“Boney bwoy” is not a local living skeleton, but a native from Bonny River.

“Sally own” is Sierra Leone.

“Blow them head-bone inside” means, blow the top off their heads.

I have a collection of trade English letters and documents, for it is a language that I regard as exceedingly charming, and it really requires study, as you will see by reading Crashey Jane’s epistle without the aid of a dictionary.  It is, moreover, a language that will take you unexpectedly far in Africa, and if you do not understand it, land you in some pretty situations.  One important point that you must remember is that the African is logically right in his answer to such a question as “You have not cleaned this lamp?” - he says, “Yes, sah” - which means, “yes, I have not cleaned the lamp.”  It does not mean a denial to your accusation; he always uses this form, and it is liable to confuse you at first, as are many other of the phrases, such as “I look him, I no see him “; this means “I have been searching for the thing but have not found it”; if he really meant he had looked upon the object but had been unable to get to it, he would say: “I look him, I no catch him,” etc.

The difficulty of the language is, however, far less than the whole set of difficulties with your own mind.  Unless you can make it pliant enough to follow the African idea step by step, however much care you may take, you will not bag your game.  I heard an account the other day of a representative of Her Majesty in Africa who went out for a day’s antelope shooting.  There were plenty of antelope about, and he stalked them with great care; but always, just before he got within shot of the game, they saw something and bolted.  Knowing he and the boy behind him had been making no sound and could not have been seen, he stalked on, but always with the same result; until happening to look round, he saw the boy behind him was supporting the dignity of the Empire at large, and this representative of it in particular, by steadfastly holding aloft the consular flag.  Well, if you go hunting the African idea with the flag of your own religion or opinions floating ostentatiously over you, you will similarly get a very poor bag.

A few hints as to your mental outfit when starting on this sport may be useful.  Before starting for West Africa, burn all your notions about sun-myths and worship of the elemental forces.  My own opinion is you had better also burn the notion, although it is fashionable, that human beings got their first notion of the origin of the soul from dreams.

I went out with my mind full of the deductions of every book on Ethnology, German or English, that I had read during fifteen years - and being a good Cambridge person, I was particularly confident that from Mr. Frazer’s book, The Golden Bough, I had got a semi-universal key to the underlying idea of native custom and belief.  But I soon found this was very far from being the case.  His idea is a true key to a certain quantity of facts, but in West Africa only to a limited quantity.

I do not say, do not read Ethnology - by all means do so; and above all things read, until you know it by heart, Primitive Culture

CHAPTER XIII. FETISH - (continued).

In which the Voyager discourses on deaths and witchcraft, and, with no intentional slur on the medical profession, on medical methods and burial customs, concluding with sundry observations on twins.

It is exceedingly interesting to compare the ideas of the Negroes with those of the Bantu.  The mental condition of the lower forms of both races seems very near the other great border-line that separates man from the anthropoid apes, and I believe that if we had the material, or rather if we could understand it, we should find little or no gap existing in mental evolution in this old, undisturbed continent of Africa.

Let, however, these things be as they may, one thing about Negro and Bantu races is very certain, and that is that their lives are dominated by a profound belief in witchcraft and its effects.

Among both alike the rule is that death is regarded as a direct consequence of the witchcraft of some malevolent human being, acting by means of spirits, over which he has, by some means or another, obtained control.

To all rules there are exceptions.  Among the Calabar negroes, who are definite in their opinions, I found two classes of exceptions.  The first arises from their belief in a bush-soul.  They believe every man has four souls: a, the soul that survives death; b, the shadow on the path; c, the dream-soul; d, the bush-soul.

This bush-soul is always in the form of an animal in the forest - never of a plant.  Sometimes when a man sickens it is because his bush-soul is angry at being neglected, and a witch-doctor is called in, who, having diagnosed this as being the cause of the complaint, advises the administration of some kind of offering to the offended one.  When you wander about in the forests of the Calabar region, you will frequently see little dwarf huts with these offerings in them.  You must not confuse these huts with those of similar construction you are continually seeing in plantations, or near roads, which refer to quite other affairs.  These offerings, in the little huts in the forest, are placed where your bush-soul was last seen.  Unfortunately, you are compelled to call in a doctor, which is an expense, but you cannot see your own bush-soul, unless you are an Ebumtup, a sort of second-sighter.

But to return to the bush-soul of an ordinary person.  If the offering in the hut works well on the bush-soul, the patient recovers, but if it does not he dies.  Diseases arising from derangements in the temper of the bush-soul however, even when treated by the most eminent practitioners, are very apt to be intractable, because it never realises that by injuring you it endangers its own existence.  For when its human owner dies, the bush-soul can no longer find a good place, and goes mad, rushing to and fro - if it sees a fire it rushes into it; if it sees a lot of people it rushes among them, until it is killed, and when it is killed it is “finish” for it, as M. Pichault would say, for it is not an immortal soul.

The bush-souls of a family are usually the same for a man and for his sons, for a mother and for her daughters.  Sometimes, however, I am told all the children take the mother’s, sometimes all take the father’s.  They may be almost any kind of animal, sometimes they are leopards, sometimes fish, or tortoises, and so on.

There is another peculiarity about the bush-soul, and that is that it is on its account that old people are held in such esteem among the Calabar tribes.  For, however bad these old people’s personal record may have been, the fact of their longevity demonstrates the possession of powerful and astute bush-souls.  On the other hand, a man may be a quiet, respectable citizen, devoted to peace and a whole skin, and yet he may have a sadly flighty disreputable bush-soul which will get itself killed or damaged and cause him death or continual ill-health.

There is another way by which a man dies apart from the action of bush-souls or witchcraft; he may have had a bad illness from some cause in his previous life and, when reincarnated, part of this disease may get reincarnated with him and then he will ultimately die of it.  There is no medicine of any avail against these reincarnated diseases.

The idea of reincarnation is very strong in the Niger Delta tribes.  It exists, as far as I have been able to find out, throughout all Africa, but usually only in scattered cases, as it were; but in the Delta, most - I think I may say all - human souls of the “surviving soul” class are regarded as returning to the earth again, and undergoing a reincarnation shortly after the due burial of the soul.

These two exceptions from the rule of all deaths and sickness being caused by witchcraft are, however, of minor importance, for infinitely the larger proportion of death and sickness is held to arise from witchcraft itself, more particularly among the Bantu.

Witchcraft acts in two ways, namely, witching something out of a man, or witching something into him.  The former method is used by both Negro and Bantu, but is decidedly more common among the Negroes, where the witches are continually setting traps to catch the soul that wanders from the body when a man is sleeping; and when they have caught this soul, they tie it up over the canoe fire and its owner sickens as the soul shrivels.

This is merely a regular line of business, and not an affair of individual hate or revenge.  The witch does not care whose dream-soul gets into the trap, and will restore it on payment.  Also witch-doctors, men of unblemished professional reputation, will keep asylums for lost souls, i.e. souls who have been out wandering and found on their return to their body that their place has been filled up by a Sisa, a low class soul I will speak of later.  These doctors keep souls and administer them to patients who are short of the article.

But there are other witches, either wicked on their own account, or hired by people who are moved by some hatred to individuals, and then the trap is carefully set and baited for the soul of the particular man they wish to injure, and concealed in the bait at the bottom of the pot are knives and sharp hooks which tear and damage the soul, either killing it outright, or mauling it so that it causes its owner sickness on its return to him.  I knew the case of a Kruman who for several nights had smelt in his dreams the savoury smell of smoked crawfish seasoned with red peppers.  He became anxious, and the headman decided some witch had set a trap baited with this dainty for his dream-soul, with intent to do him grievous bodily harm, and great trouble was taken for the next few nights to prevent this soul of his from straying abroad.

The witching of things into a man is far the most frequent method among the Bantu, hence the prevalence among them of the post-mortem examination, - a practice I never found among the Negroes.

The belief in witchcraft is the cause of more African deaths than anything else.  It has killed and still kills more men and women than the slave-trade.  Its only rival is perhaps the smallpox, the Grand Kraw-Kraw, as the Krumen graphically call it.

At almost every death a suspicion of witchcraft arises.  The witch-doctor is called in, and proceeds to find out the guilty person.  Then woe to the unpopular men, the weak women, and the slaves; for on some of them will fall the accusation that means ordeal by poison, or fire, followed, if these point to guilt, as from their nature they usually do, by a terrible death: slow roasting alive - mutilation by degrees before the throat is mercifully cut - tying to stakes at low tide that the high tide may come and drown - and any other death human ingenuity and hate can devise.

The terror in which witchcraft is held is interesting in spite of all its horror.  I have seen mild, gentle men and women turned by it, in a moment, to incarnate fiends, ready to rend and destroy those who a second before were nearest and dearest to them.  Terrible is the fear that falls like a spell upon a village when a big man, or big woman is just known to be dead.  The very men catch their breaths, and grow grey round the lips, and then every one, particularly those belonging to the household of the deceased, goes in for the most demonstrative exhibition of grief.  Long, low howls creep up out of the first silence - those blood-curdling, infinitely melancholy, wailing howls - once heard, never to be forgotten.

The men tear off their clothes and wear only the most filthy rags; women, particularly the widows, take off ornaments and almost all dress; their faces are painted white with chalk, their heads are shaven, and they sit crouched on the earth in the house, in the attitude of abasement, the hands resting on the shoulders, palm downwards, not crossed across the breast, unless they are going into the street.

Meanwhile the witch-doctor has been sent for, if he is not already present, and he sets to work in different ways to find out who are the persons guilty of causing the death.

Whether the methods vary with the tribe, or with the individual witch-doctor, I cannot absolutely say, but I think largely with the latter.

Among the Benga I saw a witch-doctor going round a village ringing a small bell which was to stop ringing outside the hut of the guilty.  Among the Cabindas (Fjort) I saw, at different times, two witch-doctors trying to find witches, one by means of taking on and off the lid of a small basket while he repeated the names of all the people in the village.  When the lid refused to come off at the name of a person, that person was doomed.  The other Cabinda doctor first tried throwing nuts upon the ground, also repeating names.  That method apparently failed.  Then he resorted to another, rubbing the flattened palms of his hands against each other.  When the palms refused to meet at a name, and his hands flew about wildly, he had got his man.

CHAPTER XIV. FETISH - (continued).

In which the Voyager discourses on the legal methods of natives of this country, the ideas governing forms of burial, of their manner of mourning for their dead, and the condition of the African soul in the under-world.

Great as are the incidental miseries and dangers surrounding death to all the people in the village in which a death occurs, undoubtedly those who suffer most are the widows of a chief or free man.

The uniform custom among both Negroes and Bantus is that those who escape execution on the charge of having witched the husband to death, shall remain in a state of filth and abasement, not even removing vermin from themselves, until after the soul-burial is complete - the soul of the dead man being regarded as hanging about them and liable to be injured.  Therefore, also to the end of preventing his soul from getting damaged, they are confined to their huts; this latter restriction is not rigidly enforced, but it is held theoretically to be the correct thing.

They maintain the attitude of grief and abasement, sitting on the ground, eating but little food, and that of a coarse kind.  In Calabar their legal rights over property, such as slaves, are meanwhile considerably in abeyance, and they are put to great expense during the time the spirit is awaiting burial.  They have to keep watch, two at a time, in the hut, where the body is buried, keeping lights burning, and they have to pay out of their separate estate for the entertainment of all the friends of the deceased who come to pay him compliment; and if he has been an important man, a big man, the whole district will come, not in a squadron, but just when it suits them, exactly as if they were calling on a live friend.  Thus it often happens that even a big woman is bankrupt by the expense.  I will not go into the legal bearings of the case here, for they are intricate, and, to a great extent, only interesting to a student of Negro law.

The Bantu women occupy a far inferior position in regard to the rights of property to that held by the Negro women.

The disposal of wives after the death of the husband among the M’pongwe and Igalwa is a subject full of interest; but it is, like most of their law, very complicated.  The brothers of the deceased are supposed to take them - the younger brother may not marry the elder brother’s widows, but the elder brothers may marry those of the younger brother.  Should any of the women object to the arrangement, they may “leave the family.”

I own that the ground principle of African law practically is “the simple plan that they should take who have the power, and they should keep who can,” and this tells particularly against women and children who have not got living, powerful relations of their own.  Unless the children of a man are grown up and sufficiently powerful on their own account, they have little chance of sharing in the distribution of his estate; but in spite of this abuse of power there is among Negroes and Bantus a definite and acknowledged Law, to which an appeal can be made by persons of all classes, provided they have the wherewithal to set the machinery of it in motion.  The difficulty the children and widows have in sharing in the distribution of the estate of the father and husband arises, I fancy, in the principle of the husband’s brothers being the true heir, which has sunk into a fossilised state near the trading stations in the face of the white culture.  The reason for this inheritance of goods passing from the man to his brother by the same mother has no doubt for one of its origins the recognition of the fact that the brother by the same mother must be a near relation, whereas, in spite of the strict laws against adultery, the relationship to you of the children born of your wives is not so certain.  Nevertheless this is one of the obvious and easy explanations for things it is well to exercise great care before accepting, for you must always remember that the African’s mind does not run on identical lines with the European - what may be self-evident to you is not so to him, and vice versa.  I have frequently heard African metaphysicians complain that white men make great jumps in their thought-course, and do not follow an idea step by step.  You soon become conscious of the careful way a Negro follows his idea.  Certain customs of his you can, by the exercise of great patience, trace back in a perfectly smooth line from their source in some natural phenomenon.  Others, of course, you cannot, the traces of the intervening steps of the idea having been lost, owing partly to the veneration in which old customs are held, which causes them to regard the fact that their fathers had this fashion as reason enough for their having it, and above all to the total absence of all but oral tradition.  But so great a faith have I in the lack of inventive power in the African, that I feel sure all their customs, had we the material that has slipped down into the great swamp of time, could be traced back either, as I have said, to some natural phenomenon, or to the thing being advisable, for reasons of utility.

The uncertainty in the parentage of offspring may seem to be such a utilitarian underlying principle, but, on the other hand, it does not sufficiently explain the varied forms of the law of inheritance, for in some tribes the eldest or most influential son does succeed to his father’s wealth; in other places you have the peculiar custom of the chief slave inheriting.  I think, from these things, that the underlying idea in inheritance of property is the desire to keep the wealth of “the house,” i.e. estate, together, and if it were allowed to pass into the hands of weak people, like women and young children, this would not be done.  Another strong argument against the theory that it arises from the doubtful relationship of the son, is that certain ju-ju always go to the son of the chief wife, if he is old enough, at the time of the father’s death, even in those tribes where the wealth goes elsewhere.

Certain tribes acknowledge the right of the women and children to share in the dead man’s wealth, given that these are legally married wives, or the children of legally married wives; it is so in Cameroons, for example.  An esteemed friend of mine who helps to manage things for the Fatherland down there was trying a palaver the other day with a patience peculiar to him, and that intelligent and elaborate care I should think only a mind trained on the methods of German metaphysicians could impart into that most wearisome of proceedings, wherein every one says the same thing over fourteen different times at least, with a similar voice and gesture, the only variation being in the statements regarding the important points, and the facts of the case, these varying with each individual.  This palaver was made by a son claiming to inherit part of his father’s property; at last, to the astonishment, and, of course, the horror, of the learned judge, the defendant, the wicked uncle, pleaded through the interpreter, “This man cannot inherit his father’s property, because his parents married for love.”  There is no encouragement to foolishness of this kind in Cameroon, where legal marriage consists in purchase.

In Bonny River and in Opobo the inheritance of “the house” is settled primarily by a vote of the free men of the house; when the chief dies, their choice has to be ratified by the other chiefs of houses; but in Bonny and Opobo the white traders have had immense influence for a long time, so one cannot now find out how far this custom is purely native in idea.

CHAPTER XV. FETISH - (continued).

In which the Voyager complains of the inconveniences arising from the method of African thought, and discourses on apparitions and Deities.

However much some of the African’s mental attributes get under-rated, I am sure there are others of them for which he gets more credit than he deserves.  One of these is his imagination.  It strikes the new-comer with awe, and frequently fills him with rage, when he first meets it; but as he matures and gets used to the African, he sees the string.  For the African fancy is not the “aërial fancy flying free,” mentioned by our poets, but merely the aërial of the theatre suspended by a wire or cord.  The wire that supports the African’s fancy may be a very thin, small fact indeed, or in some cases merely his incapacity to distinguish between animate and inanimate objects, which give rise to his idea that everything is possessed of a soul.  Everything has a soul to him, and to make confusion worse confounded, he usually believes in the existence of matter apart from its soul.  But there is little he won’t believe in, if it comes to that; and I have a feeling of thankfulness that Buddhism, Theosophy, and above all Atheism, which chases its tail and proves that nothing can be proved, have not yet been given the African to believe in.

The African’s want of making it clear in his language whether he is referring to an animate or inanimate thing, has landed me in many a dilemma, and his foolishness in not having a male and female gender in his languages amounts to a nuisance.  For example, I am a most ladylike old person and yet get constantly called “Sir.”  The other day, circumstances having got beyond my control during the afternoon, I arrived in the evening in a saturated condition at a white settlement, and wishing to get accommodation for myself and my men, I made my way to the factory of a firm from whose representatives I have always received great and most courteous help.  The agent in charge was not at home, and his steward-boy said, “Massa live for Mr. B.’s house.”  “Go tell him I live for come from,” etc., said I, and “I fit for want place for my men.”  I had nothing to write on, or with, and I thought the steward-boy could carry this little message to its destination without dropping any of it, as Mr. B.’s house was close by; but I was wrong.  Off he went, and soon returned with the note I here give a copy of: -

“DEAR OLD MAN,      “You must be in a deuce of a mess after the tornado.  Just help yourself to a set of my dry things.  The shirts are in the bottom drawer, the trousers are in the box under the bed, and then come over here to the sing-song.  My leg is dickey or I’d come across. - Yours,” etc.

Had there been any smelling salts or sal volatile in this subdivision of the Ethiopian region, I should have forthwith fainted on reading this, but I well knew there was not, so I blushed until the steam from my soaking clothes (for I truly was “in a deuce of a mess”) went up in a cloud and then, just as I was, I went “across” and appeared before the author of that awful note.  When he came round, he said it had taken seven years’ growth out of him, and was intensely apologetic.  I remarked it had very nearly taken thirty years’ growth out of me, and he said the steward-boy had merely informed him that “White man live for come from X,” a place where he knew there was another factory belonging to his firm, and he naturally thought it was the agent from X who had come across.

You rarely, indeed I believe never, find an African with a gift for picturesque descriptions of scenery.  The nearest approach to it I ever got was from my cook when we were on Mungo mah Lobeh.  He proudly boasted he had been on a mountain, up Cameroon River, with a German officer, and on that mountain, “If you fall down one side you die, if you fall down other side you die.”

Graphic and vivid descriptions of incidents you often get, but it is not Art.  The effect is produced entirely by a bald brutality of statement, the African having no artistic reticence whatsoever.  One fine touch, however, which does not come in under this class was told me by my lamented friend Mr. Harris of Calabar.  Some years ago he had out a consignment of Dutch clocks with hanging weights, as is natural to the Dutch clock.  They were immensely popular among the chiefs, and were soon disposed of save one, which had seen trouble on the voyage out and lost one of its weights.  Mr. Harris, who was a man of great energy and resource, melted up some metal spoons and made a new weight and hung it on the clock.  The day he finished this a chief came in, anxious for a Dutch clock, and Mr. Harris forthwith sold him the repaired one.  About a week elapsed, and then the chief turned up at the factory again with a rueful countenance, followed by a boy carrying something swathed in a cloth.  It was the clock.

“You do me bad too much, Mr. Harris,” said the chief.  Mr. Harris denied this on the spot with the vehemence of injured innocence.  The chief shook his head and spat profusely and sorrowfully.

“You no sabe him clock you done sell me?” said he.  “When I look him clock it no be to-day, it be to morrow.”  Mr. Harris took the clock back, to see what was the cause of this strange state of affairs.  Of course it arose from his having been too liberal in the amount of spoon in the weight, and this being altered, the chief was not hurried onward to his grave at such a rattling pace; “but,” said Mr. Harris, “that clock was a flyer to the last.”

But I will not go into the subject of African languages here, but only remark of them that although they are elaborate enough to produce, for their users, nearly every shade of erroneous statement, they are not, save perhaps M’pongwe, elaborate enough to enable a native to state his exact thought.  Some of them are very dependent on gesture.  When I was with the Fans they frequently said, “We will go to the fire so that we can see what they say,” when any question had to be decided after dark, and the inhabitants of Fernando Po, the Bubis, are quite unable to converse with each other unless they have sufficient light to see the accompanying gestures of the conversation.  In all cases I feel sure the African’s intelligence is far ahead of his language.

The African is usually great at dreams, and has them very noisily; but he does not seem to me to attach immense importance to them, certainly not so much as the Red Indian does.  I doubt whether there is much real ground for supposing that from dreams came man’s first conception of the spirit world, and I think the origin of man’s religious belief lies in man’s misfortunes.

CHAPTER XVI. FETISH - (concluded).

In which the discourse on apparitions is continued, with some observations on secret societies, both tribal and murder, and the kindred subject of leopards.

Apparitions are by no means always of human soul origin.  All the Tschwi and the Ewe gods, for example, have the habit of appearing pretty regularly to their priests, and occasionally to the laity, like Sasabonsum; but it is only to priests that these appearances are harmless or beneficial.  The effect of Sasabonsum’s appearance to the layman I have cited above, and I could give many other examples of the bad effects of those of other gods, but will only now mention Tando, the Hater, the chief god of the Northern Tschwi, the Ashantees, etc.  He is terribly malicious, human in shape, and though not quite white, is decidedly lighter in complexion than the chief god of the Southern Tschwi, Bobowissi.  His hair is lank, and he carries a native sword and wears a long robe.  His well-selected messengers are those awful driver ants (Inkran) which it is not orthodox to molest in Tando’s territories.  He uses as his weapons lightning, tempest, and disease, but the last is the most favourite one.

There is absolutely no trick too mean or venomous for Tando.  For example, he has a way of appearing near a village he has a grudge against in the form of a male child, and wanders about crying bitterly, until some kind-hearted, unsuspecting villager comes and takes him in and feeds him.  Then he develops a contagious disease that clears that village out.

This form of appearance and subsequent conduct is, unhappily, not rigidly confined to Tando, but is used by many spirits as a method of collecting arrears in taxes in the way of sacrifices.  I have found traces of it among Bantu gods or spirits, and it gives rise to a general hesitation in West Africa to take care of waifs and strays of unexplained origin.

Other things beside gods and human spirits have the habit of becoming incarnate.  Once I had to sit waiting a long time at an apparently perfectly clear bush path, because in front of us a spear’s ghost used to fly across the path about that time in the afternoon, and if any one was struck by it they died.  A certain spring I know of is haunted by the ghost of a pitcher.  Many ladies when they have gone alone to fill their pitchers in the evening time at this forest spring have noticed a very fine pitcher standing there ready filled, and thinking exchange is no robbery, or at any rate they would risk it if it were, have left their own pitcher and taken the better looking one; but always as soon as they have come within sight of the village huts, the new pitcher has crumbled into dust, and the water in it been spilt on the ground; and the worst of it is, when they have returned to fetch their own discarded pitcher, they find it also shattered into pieces.

There is also another class of apparition, of which I have met with two instances, one among pure Negroes (Okÿon); the other among pure Bantu (Kangwe).  I will give the Bantu version of the affair, because at Okÿon the incident had happened a good time before the details were told me, and in the Bantu case they had happened the previous evening.  But there was very little difference in the main facts of the case, and it was an important thing because in both cases the underlying idea was sacrificial.

The woman who told me was an exceedingly intelligent, shrewd, reliable person.  She had been to the factory with some trade, and had got a good price for it, and so was in a good temper on her return home in the evening.  She got out of her canoe and leaving her slave boy to bring up the things, walked to her house, which was the ordinary house of a prosperous Igalwa native, having two distinct rooms in it, and a separate cook-house close by in a clean, sandy yard.  She trod on some nastiness in the yard, and going into the cook-house found the slave girls round a very small and inefficient fire, trying to cook the evening meal.  She blew them up for not having a proper fire; they said the wood was wet, and would not burn.  She said they lied, and she would see to them later, and she went into the chamber she used for a sleeping apartment, and trod on something more on the floor in the dark; those good-for-nothing hussies of slaves had not lit her palm-oil lamp, and mentally forming the opinion that they had been out flirting during her absence, and resolving to teach them well the iniquity of such conduct, she sat down on her bed into a lot of messy stuff of a clammy, damp nature.  Now this fairly roused her, for she is a notable housewife, who keeps her house and slaves in exceedingly good order.  So dismissing from her mind the commercial consideration she had intended to gloat over when she came into her room, she called Ingremina and others in a tone that brought those young ladies on the spot.  She asked them how they dared forget to light her lamp; they said they had not, but the lamp in the room must have gone out like the other lamps had, after burning dim and spluttering.  They further said they had not been out, but had been sitting round the fire trying to make it burn properly.  She duly whacked and pulled the ears of all within reach.  I say within reach for she is not very active, weighing, I am sure, upwards of eighteen stone.  Then she went back into her room and got out her beautiful English paraffin lamp, which she keeps in a box, and taking it into the cook-house, picked up a bit of wood from the hissing, spluttering fire, and lit it.  When she picked up the wood she noticed that it was covered with the same sticky abomination she had met before that evening, and it smelt of the same faint smell she had noticed as soon as she had reached her house, and by now the whole air seemed oppressive with it.

As soon as the lamp was alight she saw what the stuff was, namely, blood.  Blood was everywhere, the rest of the sticks in the fire had it on them, it sizzled at the burning ends, and ran off the other in rills.  There were pools of it about her clean, sandy yard.  Her own room was reeking, the bed, the stools, the floor; it trickled down the door-post; coagulated on the lintel.  She herself was smeared with it from the things she had come in contact with in the dark, and the slaves seemed to have been sitting in pools of it.  The things she picked up off the table and shelf left rims of it behind them; there was more in the skillets, and the oil in the open palm-oil lamps had a film of it floating on the oil.  Investigation showed that the whole of the rest of her house was in a similar mess.  The good lady gave a complete catalogue of the household furniture and its condition, which I need not give here.  The slave girls when the light came were terrified at what they saw, and she called in the aristocracy of the village, and asked them their opinion on the blood palaver.  They said they could make nothing of it at first, but subsequently formed the opinion that it meant something was going to happen, and suggested with the kind, helpful cheerfulness of relatives and friends, that they should not wonder if it were a prophecy of her own death.  This view irritated the already tried lady, and she sent them about their business, and started the slaves on house-cleaning.  The blood cleaned up all right when you were about it, but kept on turning up in other places, and in the one you had just cleaned as soon as you left off and went elsewhere; and the morning came and found things in much the same state until “before suntime,” say about 10 o’clock, when it faded away.

I cautiously tried to get my stately, touchy dowager duchess to explain how it was that there was such a lot of blood, and how it was it got into the house.  She just said “it had to go somewhere,” and refused to give rational explanations as Chambers’s Journal does after telling a good ghost story.  I found afterwards that it was quite decided it was a case of “blood come before,” and at Okÿon, Miss Slessor told me, in regard to the similar case there, that this was the opinion held regarding the phenomenon.  It is always held uncanny in Africa if a person dies without shedding blood.  You see, the blood is the life, and if you see it come out, you know the going of the thing, as it were.  If you do not, it is mysterious.  At Okÿon, a few days after the blood appeared, a nephew of the person whose house it came into was killed while felling a tree in the forest; a bough struck him and broke his neck, without shedding a drop of blood, and this bore out the theory, for the blood having “to go somewhere” came before.  In the Bantu case I did not hear of such a supporting incident happening.

Certain African ideas about blood puzzle me.  I was told by a Batanga friend, a resident white trader, that a short time previously a man was convicted of theft by the natives of a village close to him.  The hands and feet of the criminal were tied together, and he was flung into the river.  He got himself free, and swam to the other bank, and went for bush.  He was recaptured, and a stone tied to his neck, and in again he was thrown.  The second time he got free and ashore, and was recaptured, and the chief then, most regretfully, ordered that he was to be knocked on the head before being thrown in for a third time.  This time palaver set, but the chief knew that he would die himself, by spitting the blood he had spilt, from his own lungs, before the year was out.  I inquired about the chief when I passed this place, more than eighteen months after, and learnt from a native that the chief was dead, and that he had died in this way.  The objection thus was not to shedding blood in a general way, but to the shedding in the course of judicial execution.  There may be some idea of this kind underlying the ingenious and awful ways the negroes have of killing thieves, by tying them to stakes in the rivers, or down on to paths for the driver ants to kill and eat, but this is only conjecture; I have not had a chance yet to work this subject up; and getting reliable information about underlying ideas is very difficult in Africa.  The natives will say “Yes” to any mortal thing, if they think you want them to; and the variety of their languages is another great hindrance.  Were it not for the prevalence of Kru English or trade English, investigation would be almost impossible; but, fortunately, this quaint language is prevalent, and the natives of different tribes communicate with each other in it, and so round a fire, in the evening, if you listen to the gossip, you can pick up all sorts of strange information, and gain strange and often awful lights on your absent white friends’ characters, and your present companions’ religion.  For example, the other day I had a set of porters composed of four Bassa boys, two Wei Weis, one Dualla, and two Yorubas.  None of their languages fitted, so they talked trade English, and pretty lively talk some of it was, but of that anon.

I cannot close this brief notice of native ideas without mentioning the secret societies; but to go fully into this branch of the subject would require volumes, for every tribe has its secret society.  The Poorah of Sierra Leone, the Oru of Lagos, the Egbo of Calabar, the Isyogo of the Igalwa, the Ukuku of the Benga, the Okukwe of the M’pongwe, the Ikun of the Bakele, and the Lukuku of the Bachilangi Baluba, are some of the most powerful secret societies on the West African Coast.

CHAPTER XVII. ASCENT OF THE GREAT PEAK OF CAMEROONS.

Setting forth how the Voyager is minded to ascend the mountain called Mungo Mah Lobeh, or the Throne of Thunder, and in due course reaches Buea, situate thereon.

After returning from Corisco I remained a few weeks in Gaboon, and then left on the Niger, commanded by Captain Davies.  My regrets, I should say, arose from leaving the charms and interests of Congo Français, and had nothing whatever to do with taking passage on one of the most comfortable ships of all those which call on the Coast.

The Niger was homeward-bound when I joined her, and in due course arrived in Cameroon River, and I was once again under the dominion of Germany.  It would be a very interesting thing to compare the various forms of European government in Africa - English, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish; but to do so with any justice would occupy more space than I have at my disposal, for the subject is extremely intricate.  Each of these forms of government have their good points and their bad.  Each of them are dealing with bits of Africa differing from each other - in the nature of their inhabitants and their formation, and so on - so I will not enter into any comparison of them here.

From the deck of the Niger I found myself again confronted with my great temptation - the magnificent Mungo Mah Lobeh - the Throne of Thunder.  Now it is none of my business to go up mountains.  There’s next to no fish on them in West Africa, and precious little good rank fetish, as the population on them is sparse - the African, like myself, abhorring cool air.  Nevertheless, I feel quite sure that no white man has ever looked on the great Peak of Cameroon without a desire arising in his mind to ascend it and know in detail the highest point on the western side of the continent, and indeed one of the highest points in all Africa.

So great is the majesty and charm of this mountain that the temptation of it is as great to me to-day as it was on the first day I saw it, when I was feeling my way down the West Coast of Africa on the S.S. Lagos in 1893, and it revealed itself by good chance from its surf-washed plinth to its skyscraping summit.  Certainly it is most striking when you see it first, as I first saw it, after coasting for weeks along the low shores and mangrove-fringed rivers of the Niger Delta.  Suddenly, right up out of the sea, rises the great mountain to its 13,760 feet, while close at hand, to westward, towers the lovely island mass of Fernando Po to 10,190 feet.  But every time you pass it by its beauty grows on you with greater and greater force, though it is never twice the same.  Sometimes it is wreathed with indigo-black tornado clouds, sometimes crested with snow, sometimes softly gorgeous with gold, green, and rose-coloured vapours tinted by the setting sun, sometimes completely swathed in dense cloud so that you cannot see it at all; but when you once know it is there it is all the same, and you bow down and worship.

There are only two distinct peaks to this glorious thing that geologists brutally call the volcanic intrusive mass of the Cameroon Mountains, viz., Big Cameroon and Little Cameroon.  The latter, Mungo Mah Etindeh, has not yet been scaled, although it is only 5,820 feet.  One reason for this is doubtless that the few people in fever-stricken, over-worked West Africa who are able to go up mountains, naturally try for the adjacent Big Cameroon; the other reason is that Mungo Mah Etindeh, to which Burton refers as “the awful form of Little Cameroon,” is mostly sheer cliff, and is from foot to summit clothed in an almost impenetrable forest.  Behind these two mountains of volcanic origin, which cover an area on an isolated base of between 700 and 800 square miles in extent, there are distinctly visible from the coast two chains of mountains, or I should think one chain deflected, the so-called Rumby and Omon ranges.  These are no relations of Mungo, being of very different structure and conformation; the geological specimens I have brought from them and from the Cameroons being identified by geologists as respectively schistose grit and vesicular lava.

After spending a few pleasant days in Cameroon River in the society of Frau Plehn, my poor friend Mrs. Duggan having, I regret to say, departed for England on the death of her husband, I went round to Victoria, Ambas Bay, on the Niger, and in spite of being advised solemnly by Captain Davies to “chuck it as it was not a picnic,” I started to attempt the Peak of Cameroons as follows.

September 20th, 1895. - Left Victoria at 7.30, weather fine.  Herr von Lucke, though sadly convinced, by a series of experiments he has been carrying on ever since I landed, and I expect before, that you cannot be in three places at one time, is still trying to do so; or more properly speaking he starts an experiment series for four places, man-like, instead of getting ill as I should under the circumstances, and he kindly comes with me as far as the bridge across the lovely cascading Lukole River, and then goes back at about seven miles an hour to look after Victoria and his sick subordinates in detail.

I, with my crew, keep on up the grand new road the Government is making, which when finished is to go from Ambas Bay to Buea, 3,000 feet up on the mountain’s side.  This road is quite the most magnificent of roads, as regards breadth and general intention, that I have seen anywhere in West Africa, and it runs through a superbly beautiful country.  It is, I should say, as broad as Oxford Street; on either side of it are deep drains to carry off the surface waters, with banks of varied beautiful tropical shrubs and ferns, behind which rise, 100 to 200 feet high, walls of grand forest, the column-like tree-stems either hung with flowering, climbing plants and ferns, or showing soft red and soft grey shafts sixty to seventy feet high without an interrupting branch.  Behind this again rise the lovely foot hills of Mungo, high up against the sky, coloured the most perfect soft dark blue.

CHAPTER XVIII.  ASCENT OF THE GREAT PEAK OF CAMEROONS - (continued).

Wherein is recounted how the Voyager sets out from Buea, and goes up through the forest belt to the top of the S.E. crater of Mungo Mah Lobeh, with many dilemmas and disasters that befell on the way.

September 22nd. - Wake at 5.  Fine morning.  Fine view towards Cameroon River.  The broad stretch of forest below, and the water-eaten mangrove swamps below that, are all a glorious indigo flushed with rose colour from “the death of the night,” as Kiva used to call the dawn.  No one stirring till six, when people come out of the huts, and stretch themselves and proceed to begin the day, in the African’s usual perfunctory, listless way.

My crew are worse than the rest.  I go and hunt cook out.  He props open one eye, with difficulty, and yawns a yawn that nearly cuts his head in two.  I wake him up with a shock, by saying I mean to go on up to-day, and want my chop, and to start one time.  He goes off and announces my horrible intention to the others.  Kefalla soon arrives upon the scene full of argument, “You no sabe this be Sunday, Ma?” says he in a tone that tells he considers this settles the matter.  I “sabe” unconcernedly; Kefalla scratches his head for other argument, but he has opened with his heavy artillery; which being repulsed throws his rear lines into confusion.  Bum, the head man, then turns up, sound asleep inside, but quite ready to come.  Bum, I find, is always ready to do what he is told, but has no more original ideas in his head than there are in a chair leg.  Kefalla, however, by scratching other parts of his anatomy diligently, has now another argument ready, the two Bakwiris are sick with abdominal trouble, that requires rum and rest, and one of the other boys has hot foot.

Herr Liebert now appears upon the scene, and says I can have some of his labourers, who are now more or less idle, because he cannot get about much with his bad foot to direct them, so I give the Bakwiris and the two hot foot cases “books” to take down to Herr von Lucke who will pay them off for me, and seeing that they have each a good day’s rations of rice, beef, etc., eliminate them from the party.

In addition to the labourers, I am to have as a guide Sasu, a black sergeant, who went up the Peak with the officers of the Hyæna, and I get my breakfast, and then hang about watching my men getting ready very slowly to start.  Off we get about 8, and start with all good wishes, and grim prophecies, from Herr Liebert.

Led by Sasu, and accompanied by “To-morrow,” a man who has come to Buea from some interior unknown district, and who speaks no known language, and whose business it is to help to cut a way through the bush, we go down the path we came and cross the river again.  This river seems to separate the final mass of the mountain from the foot-hills on this side.  Immediately after crossing it we turn up into the forest on the right hand side, and “To-morrow” cuts through an over-grown track for about half-an-hour, and then leaves us.

Everything is reeking wet, and we swish through thick undergrowth and then enter a darker forest where the earth is rocky and richly decorated with ferns and moss.  For the first time in my life I see tree-ferns growing wild in luxuriant profusion.  What glorious creations they are!  Then we get out into the middle of a koko plantation.  Next to sweet-potatoes, the premier abomination to walk through, give me kokos for good all-round tryingness, particularly when they are wet, as is very much the case now.  Getting through these we meet the war hedge again, and after a conscientious struggle with various forms of vegetation in a muddled, tangled state, Sasu says, “No good, path done got stopped up,” so we turn and retrace our steps all the way, cross the river, and horrify Herr Liebert by invading his house again.  We explain the situation.  Grave headshaking between him and Sasu about the practicability of any other route, because there is no other path.  I do not like to say “so much the better,” because it would have sounded ungrateful, but I knew from my Ogowé experiences that a forest that looks from afar a dense black mat is all right underneath, and there is a short path recently cut by Herr Liebert that goes straight up towards the forest above us.  It had been made to go to a clearing, where ambitious agricultural operations were being inaugurated, when Herr Liebert hurt his foot.  Up this we go, it is semi-vertical while it lasts, and it ends in a scrubby patch that is to be a plantation; this crossed we are in the Urwald, and it is more exquisite than words can describe, but not good going, particularly at one spot where a gigantic tree has fallen down across a little rocky ravine, and has to be crawled under.  It occurs to me that this is a highly likely place for snakes and an absolutely sure find for scorpions, and when we have passed it three of these latter interesting creatures are observed on the load of blankets which is fastened on to the back of Kefalla.  We inform Kefalla of the fact on the spot.  A volcanic eruption of entreaty, advice, and admonition results, but we still hesitate.  However, the gallant cook tackles them in a sort of tip-cat way with a stick, and we proceed into a patch of long grass, beyond which there is a reach of amomums.  The winged amomum I see here in Africa for the first time.  Horrid slippery things amomum sticks to walk on, when they are lying on the ground; and there is a lot of my old enemy the calamus about.

On each side are deep forested dells and ravines, and rocks show up through the ground in every direction, and things in general are slippery, and I wonder now and again, as I assume with unnecessary violence a recumbent position, why I came to Africa; but patches of satin-leaved begonias and clumps of lovely tree-ferns reconcile me to my lot.  Cook does not feel these forest charms, and gives me notice after an hour’s experience of mountain forest-belt work; what cook would not?

As we get higher we have to edge and squeeze every few minutes through the aërial roots of some tremendous kind of tree, plentiful hereabouts.  One of them we passed through I am sure would have run any Indian banyan hard for extent of ground covered, if it were measured.  In the region where these trees are frequent, the undergrowth is less dense than it is lower down.

CHAPTER XIX.  THE GREAT PEAK OF CAMEROONS - (continued).

Setting forth how the Voyager for a second time reaches the S.E. crater, with some account of the pleasures incidental to camping out in the said crater.

September 24th. - Lovely morning, the grey-white mist in the forest makes it like a dream of Fairyland, each moss-grown tree stem heavily gemmed with dewdrops.  At 5.30 I stir the boys, for Sasu, the sergeant, says he must go back to his military duties.  The men think we are all going back with him as he is our only guide, but I send three of them down with orders to go back to Victoria - two being of the original set I started with.  They are surprised and disgusted at being sent home, but they have got “hot foot,” and something wrong in the usual seat of African internal disturbances, their “tummicks,” and I am not thinking of starting a sanatorium for abdominally-afflicted Africans in that crater plain above.  Black boy is the other boy returned, I do not want another of his attacks.

They go, and this leaves me in the forest camp with Kefalla, Xenia, and Cook, and we start expecting the water sent for by Monrovia boy yesterday forenoon.  There are an abominable lot of bees about; they do not give one a moment’s peace, getting beneath the waterproof sheets over the bed.  The ground, bestrewn with leaves and dried wood, is a mass of large flies rather like our common house-fly, but both butterflies and beetles seem scarce; and I confess I do not feel up to hunting much after yesterday’s work, and deem it advisable to rest.  My face and particularly my lips are a misery to me, having been blistered all over by yesterday’s sun, and last night I inadvertently whipped the skin all off one cheek with the blanket, and it keeps on bleeding, and, horror of horrors, there is no tea until that water comes.  I wish I had got the mountaineering spirit, for then I could say, “I’ll never come to this sort of place again, for you can get all you want in the Alps.”  I have been told this by my mountaineering friends - I have never been there - and that you can go and do all sorts of stupendous things all day, and come back in the evening to table d’hôte at an hotel; but as I have not got the mountaineering spirit, I suppose I shall come fooling into some such place as this as soon as I get the next chance.

About 8.30, to our delight, the gallant Monrovia boy comes through the bush with a demijohn of water, and I get my tea, and give the men the only half-pound of rice I have and a tin of meat, and they eat, become merry, and chat over their absent companions in a scornful, scandalous way.  Who cares for hotels now?  When one is in a delightful place like this, one must work, so off I go to the north into the forest, after giving the rest of the demijohn of water into the Monrovia boy’s charge with strict orders it is not to be opened till my return.  Quantities of beetles.

A little after two o’clock I return to camp, after having wandered about in the forest and found three very deep holes, down which I heaved rocks and in no case heard a splash.  In one I did not hear the rocks strike, owing to the great depth.  I hate holes, and especially do I hate these African ones, for I am frequently falling, more or less, into them, and they will be my end.

The other demijohns of water have not arrived yet, and we are getting anxious again because the men’s food has not come up, and they have been so exceedingly thirsty that they have drunk most of the water - not, however, since it has been in Monrovia’s charge; but at 3.15 another boy comes through the bush with another demijohn of water.  We receive him gladly, and ask him about the chop.  He knows nothing about it.  At 3.45 another boy comes through the bush with another demijohn of water; we receive him kindly; he does not know anything about the chop.  At 4.10 another boy comes through the bush with another demijohn of water, and knowing nothing about the chop, we are civil to him, and that’s all.

CHAPTER XX.  THE GREAT PEAK OF CAMEROONS - (continued).

Setting forth how the Voyager attains the summit of Mungo Mah Lobeh, and descends therefrom to Victoria, to which is added some remarks on the natural history of the West Coast porter, and the native methods of making fire.

September 26th. - The weather is undecided and so am I, for I feel doubtful about going on in this weather, but I do not like to give up the peak after going through so much for it.  The boys being dry and warm with the fires have forgotten their troubles.  However, I settle in my mind to keep on, and ask for volunteers to come with me, and Bum, the head man, and Xenia announce their willingness.  I put two tins of meat and a bottle of Herr Liebert’s beer into the little wooden box, and insist on both men taking a blanket apiece, much to their disgust, and before six o’clock we are off over the crater plain.  It is a broken bit of country with rock mounds sparsely overgrown with tufts of grass, and here and there are patches of boggy land, not real bog, but damp places where grow little clumps of rushes, and here and there among the rocks sorely-afflicted shrubs of broom, and the yellow-flowered shrub I have mentioned before, and quantities of very sticky heather, feeling when you catch hold of it as if it had been covered with syrup.  One might fancy the entire race of shrubs was dying out; for one you see partially alive there are twenty skeletons which fall to pieces as you brush past them.

It is downhill the first part of the way, that is to say, the trend of the land is downhill, for be it down or up, the details of it are rugged mounds and masses of burnt-out lava rock.  It is evil going, but perhaps not quite so evil as the lower hillocks of the great wall where the rocks are hidden beneath long slippery grass.  We wind our way in between the mounds, or clamber over them, or scramble along their sides impartially.  The general level is then flat, and then comes a rise towards the peak wall, so we steer N.N.E. until we strike the face of the peak, and then commence a stiff rough climb.

We keep as straight as we can, but get driven at an angle by the strange ribs of rock which come straight down.  These are most tiresome to deal with, getting worse the higher we go, and so rotten and weather-eaten are they that they crumble into dust and fragments under our feet.  Head man gets half a dozen falls, and when we are about three parts of the way up Xenia gives in.  The cold and the climbing are too much for him, so I make him wrap himself up in his blanket, which he is glad enough of now, and shelter in a depression under one of the many rock ridges, and Head man and I go on.  When we are some 600 feet higher the iron-grey mist comes curling and waving round the rocks above us, like some savage monster defending them from intruders, and I again debate whether I was justified in risking the men, for it is a risk for them at this low temperature, with the evil weather I know, and they do not know, is coming on.  But still we have food and blankets with us enough for them, and the camp in the plain below they can reach all right, if the worst comes to the worst; and for myself - well - that’s my own affair, and no one will be a ha’porth the worse if I am dead in an hour.  So I hitch myself on to the rocks, and take bearings, particularly bearings of Xenia’s position, who, I should say, has got a tin of meat and a flask of rum with him, and then turn and face the threatening mist.  It rises and falls, and sends out arm-like streams towards us, and then Bum, the head man, decides to fail for the third time to reach the peak, and I leave him wrapped in his blanket with the bag of provisions, and go on alone into the wild, grey, shifting, whirling mist above, and soon find myself at the head of a rock ridge in a narrowish depression, walled by massive black walls which show fitfully but firmly through the mist.

I can see three distinctly high cones before me, and then the mist, finding it cannot drive me back easily, proceeds to desperate methods, and lashes out with a burst of bitter wind, and a sheet of blinding, stinging rain.  I make my way up through it towards a peak which I soon see through a tear in the mist is not the highest, so I angle off and go up the one to the left, and after a desperate fight reach the cairn - only, alas! to find a hurricane raging and a fog in full possession, and not a ten yards’ view to be had in any direction.  Near the cairn on the ground are several bottles, some of which the energetic German officers, I suppose, had emptied in honour of their achievement, an achievement I bow down before, for their pluck and strength had taken them here in a shorter time by far than mine.  I do not meddle with anything, save to take a few specimens and to put a few more rocks on the cairn, and to put in among them my card, merely as a civility to Mungo, a civility his Majesty will soon turn into pulp.  Not that it matters - what is done is done.

The weather grows worse every minute, and no sign of any clearing shows in the indigo sky or the wind-reft mist.  The rain lashes so fiercely I cannot turn my face to it and breathe, the wind is all I can do to stand up against.

Verily I am no mountaineer, for there is in me no exultation, but only a deep disgust because the weather has robbed me of my main object in coming here, namely to get a good view and an idea of the way the unexplored mountain range behind Calabar trends.  I took my chance and it failed, so there’s nothing to complain about.

Comforting myself with these reflections, I start down to find Bum, and do so neatly, and then together we scramble down carefully among the rotten black rocks, intent on finding Xenia.  The scene is very grand.  At one minute we can see nothing save the black rocks and cinders under foot; the next the wind-torn mist separates now in one direction, now in another, showing us always the same wild scene of great black cliffs, rising in jagged peaks and walls around and above us.  I think this walled cauldron we had just left is really the highest crater on Mungo. {439}

We soon become anxious about Xenia, for this is a fearfully easy place to lose a man in such weather, but just as we get below the thickest part of the pall of mist, I observe a doll-sized figure, standing on one leg taking on or off its trousers - our lost Xenia, beyond a shadow of a doubt, and we go down direct to him.

When we reach him we halt, and I give the two men one of the tins of meat, and take another and the bottle of beer myself, and then make a hasty sketch of the great crater plain below us.  At the further edge of the plain a great white cloud is coming up from below, which argues badly for our trip down the great wall to the forest camp, which I am anxious to reach before nightfall after our experience of the accommodation afforded by our camp in the crater plain last night.

CHAPTER XXI.  TRADE AND LABOUR IN WEST AFRICA.

As I am under the impression that the trade of the West African Coast is its most important attribute, I hope I may be pardoned for entering into this subject.  My chief excuse for so doing lies in the fact that independent travellers are rare in the Bights.  The last one I remember hearing of was that unfortunate gentleman who went to the Coast for pleasure and lost a leg on Lagos Bar.  Now I have not lost any portion of my anatomy anywhere on the Coast, and therefore have no personal prejudice against the place.  I hold a brief for no party, and I beg the more experienced old coaster to remember that “a looker on sees the most of the game.”

First of all it should be remembered that Africa does not possess ready-made riches to the extent it is in many quarters regarded as possessing.  It is not an India filled with the accumulated riches of ages, waiting for the adventurer to enter and shake the pagoda tree.  The pagoda tree in Africa only grows over stores of buried ivory, and even then it is a stunted specimen to that which grew over the treasure-houses of Delhi, Seringapatam, and hundreds of others as rich as they in gems and gold.  Africa has lots of stuff in it; structurally more than any other continent in the world, but it is very much in the structure, and it requires hard work to get it out, particularly out of one of its richest regions, the West Coast, where the gold, silver, copper, lead, and petroleum lie protected against the miner by African fever in its deadliest form, and the produce prepared by the natives for the trader is equally fever-guarded, and requires white men of a particular type to work and export it successfully - men endowed with great luck, pluck, patience, and tact.

The first things to be considered are the natural resources of the country.  This subject may be divided into two sub-sections - (1) The means of working these resources as they at present stand; (2) The question of the possibility of increasing them by introducing new materials of trade-value in the shape of tea, coffee, cocoa, etc.

With regard to the first sub-division the most cheerful things that there are to say on the West Coast trade can be said; the means of transport being ahead of the trade in all districts save the Gold Coast.  I know this is heresy, so I will attempt to explain the matter.  First, as regards communication to Europe by sea, the West Coast is extremely well off, the two English lines of steamers managed by Messrs. Elder Dempster, the British African, and the Royal African, are most enterprisingly conducted, and their devotion to trade is absolutely pathetic.  Let there be but the least vague rumour (sometimes I have thought they have not waited for the rumour, but “gone in” as an experiment) of a puncheon of oil, or a log of timber waiting for shipment at an out-of-the-world, one house port, one of these vessels will bear down on that port, and have that cargo.  In addition to the English lines there is the Woermann line, equally devoted to cargo, I may almost say even more so, for it is currently reported that Woermann liners will lie off and wait for the stuff to grow.  This I will not vouch for, but I know the time allowed to a Woermann captain by his owners between Cameroons and Big Batanga just round the corner is eight days.

These English and German lines, having come to a friendly understanding regarding freights, work the Bights of Benin, Biafra, and Panavia, without any rivals, save now and again the vessels chartered by the African Association to bring out a big cargo, and the four sailing vessels belonging to the Association which give an eighteenth-century look to the Rivers, and have great adventures on the bars of Opobo and Bonny. {455}  The Bristol ships on the Half Jack Coast are not rivals, but a sort of floating factories, shipping their stuff home and getting it out by the regular lines of steamers.  The English and German liners therefore carry the bulk of the trade from the whole Coast.  Their services are complicated and frequent, but perfectly simple when you have grasped the fact that the English lines may be divided into two sub-divisions - Liverpool boats and Hamburg boats, either of which are liable when occasion demands to call at Havre.  The Liverpool line is the mail line to the more important ports, the Hamburg line being almost entirely composed of cargo vessels calling at the smaller ports as well as the larger.

There is another classification that must be grasped.  The English boats being divided into, firstly, a line having its terminus at Sierra Leone and calling at the Isles do Los; secondly, a line having its terminus at Akassa; thirdly, a line having its terminus at Old Calabar; fourthly, a line having its terminus at San Paul de Loanda, and in addition, a direct line from Antwerp to the Congo, chartered by the Congo Free State Government.  Division 4, the South-westers, are the quickest vessels as far as Lagos, for they only call at the Canaries, Sierra Leone, off the Kru Coast, at Accra, and off Lagos; then they run straight from Lagos into Cameroons, without touching the Rivers, reaching Cameroons in twenty-seven days from Liverpool.  After Cameroons they cross to Fernando Po and run into Victoria, and then work their way steadily down coast to their destination.  Thence up again, doing all they know to extract cargo, but never succeeding as they would wish, and so being hungry in the hold when they get back to the Bight of Benin, they are liable to smell cargo and go in after it, and therefore are not necessarily the quickest boats home.

Two French companies run to the French possessions, subsidised by their Government (as the German line is, and as our lines are not) - the Chargeurs Réunis and the Fraissinet.  The South-west Coast liners of these companies run to Gaboon and then to Koutonu, up near Lagos, then back to Gaboon, and down as far as Loango, calling on their way home at the other ports in Congo Français.  They are mainly carriers of import goods, because they run to time, and on the South-west Coast unless Time has an ameliorating touch of Eternity in it you cannot get export goods off.

Below the Congo the rivals of the English and German lines are the vessels of the Portuguese line, Empreza Naçional.  These run from Lisbon to the Cape Verde Islands, thence to San Thomé and Principe, then to the ports of Angola (Loanda, Benguella, Mossamedes, Ambrizette, etc.), and they carry the bulk of the Angola trade at present, because of the preferential dues on goods shipped in Portuguese bottoms.

The service of English vessels to the West Coast is weekly; to the Rivers fortnightly; to the South-west Coast monthly; and it is the chief thing in West Coast trade enterprise that England has to be proud of.

Any one of the English boats will go anywhere that mortal boat can go; and their captains’ local knowledge is a thing England at large should be proud of and the rest of the civilised world regard with awe-stricken admiration.  That they leave no room for further development of ocean carriage has been several times demonstrated by the collapse of lines that have attempted to rival them - the Prince line and more recently the General Steam Navigation.

But although the West Coast trader has at his disposal these vessels, he has by no means an easy time, or cheap methods, of getting his stuff on board, save at Sierra Leone and in the Oil Rivers.  Of the Gold Coast surf, and Lagos bar I have already spoken, and the Calemma as we call the South-west Coast surf is nearly, if not quite as bad as that on the Gold Coast.  Indeed I hold it is worse, but then I have had more experience of it, and it has frequently to be worked in native dugouts, and not in the well-made surf boats used on the Gold Coast.  But although these surf-boats are more safe they are also more expensive than canoes, as a fine £40 or £60 surf-boat’s average duration of life is only two years in the Gold Coast surf, so there is little to choose from a commercial standpoint between the two surfs when all is done.

As regards interior transport, the difficulty is greater, but in the majority of the West Coast possessions of European powers there exist great facilities for transport in the network of waterways near the coast and the great rivers running far into the interior.

These waterways are utilised by the natives, being virtually roads; in many districts practically the only roads existing for the transport of goods in bulk, or in the present state of the trade required to exist.  But there is room for more white enterprise in the matter of river navigation; and my own opinion is that if English capital were to be employed in the direction of small suitably-built river steamers, it would be found more repaying than lines of railway.  Waterways that might be developed in this manner exist in the Cross River, the Volta, and the Ancobra.  I do not say that there will be any immediate dividend on these river steamboat lines, but I do not think that there will be any dividend, immediate or remote, on railways in West Africa.  This question of transport is at present regarded as a burning one throughout the Continent; and for the well-being of certain parts of the West Coast railways are essential, such as at Lagos, and on the Gold Coast.  Of Lagos I do not pretend to speak.  I have never been ashore there.  Of the Gold Coast I have seen a little, and heard a great deal more, and I think I may safely say that railway making would not be difficult on it, for it is good hard land, not stretches of rotten swamp.  The great difficulty in making railroads here will consist in landing the material through the surf.  This difficulty cannot be got over, except at enormous expense, by making piers, but it might be surmounted by sending the plant ashore on small bar boats that could get up the Volta or Ancobra.  When up the Volta it may be said, “it would be nowhere when any one wanted it,” but the cast-iron idea that goods must go ashore at places where there are Government headquarters like Accra and Cape Coast, places where the surf is about at its worst, seems to me an erroneous one.  The landing place at Cape Coast might be made safe and easy by the expenditure of a few thousands in “developing” that rock which at present gives shelter when you get round the lee side of it, but this would only make things safer for surf-boats.  No other craft could work this bit of beach; and there is plenty of room for developing the Volta, as it is a waterway which a vessel drawing six feet can ascend fifty miles from July till November, and thirty miles during the rest of the year.  The worst point about the Volta is the badness of its bar - a great semicircular sweep with heavy breakers - too bad a bar for boats to cross; but a steamer on the Lagos bar boat plan might manage it, as the Bull Frog reported in 1884 nineteen to twenty-one feet on it, one hour before high water.  The absence of this bar boat, and the impossibility of sending goods out in surf-boats across the bar, causes the goods from Adda (Riverside), the chief town on the Volta, situated about six miles up the river from its mouth, to be carried across the spit of land to Beach Town, and then brought out through the shore surf - the worst bit of surf on the whole Gold Coast.  The Ancobra is a river which penetrates the interior, through a district very rich in gold and timber and more than suspected of containing petroleum.  It is from eighty to one hundred yards wide up as far as Akanko, and during the rains carries three and a half to four and a half fathoms, and boats are taken up to Tomento about forty miles from its mouth with goods to the Wassaw gold mines.  But the bar of the Ancobra is shallow, only giving six feet, although it is firm and settled, not like that of the Volta and Lagos; and the Portuguese, in the sixteenth century, used to get up this river, and work the country to a better profit than we do nowadays.

The other chief Gold Coast river, the Bosum Prah, that enters the sea at Chama, is no use for navigation from the sea, being obstructed with rock and rapids, and its bar only carrying two feet; but whether these rivers are used or not for the landing of railroad plant, it is certain that that plant must be landed, and the railways made, for if ever a district required them the Gold Coast does.  It is to be hoped it will soon enter into the phase of construction, for it is a return to the trade (from which it draws its entire revenue) that the local government owes, and owes heavily; and if our new acquisition of Ashantee is to be developed, it must have a railway bringing it in touch with the Coast trade, not necessarily running into Coomassie, but near enough to Coomassie to enable goods to be sold there at but a small advance on Coast prices.

It is an error, easily fallen into, to imagine that the natives in the interior are willing to give much higher prices than the sea-coast natives for goods.  Be it granted that they are compelled now to give say on an average seventy-five per cent. higher prices to the sea-coast natives who at present act as middlemen between them and the white trader, but if the white trader goes into the interior, he has to face, first, the difficulty of getting his goods there safely; secondly, the opposition of the native traders who can, and will drive him out of the market, unless he is backed by easy and cheap means of transport.  Take the case of Coomassie now.  A merchant, let us say, wants to take up from the Coast to Coomassie £3,000 worth of goods to trade with.  To transport this he has to employ 1,300 carriers at one shilling and three pence per day a head.  The time taken is eight days there, and eight days back, = sixteen days, which figures out at £1,300, without allowing for loss and damage.  In order to buy produce with these goods that will cover this, and all shipping expenses, etc., he would have to sell at a far higher figure in Coomassie than he would on the sea-coast, and the native traders would easily oust him from the market.  Moreover so long as a district is in the hands of native traders there is no advance made, and no development goes forward; and it would be a grave error to allow this to take place at Coomassie, now that we have at last done what we should have done in 1874 and taken actual possession, for Coomassie is a grand position that, if properly managed for a few years, will become a great interior market, attracting to itself the routes of interior trade.  It is not now a great centre; because of the oppression and usury which the Kings of Ashantee have inflicted on all in their power, and which have caused Coomassie mainly to attract one form of trade, viz., slaves; who were used in their constant human sacrifices, and for whom a higher price was procurable here than from the Mohammedan tribes to the north under French sway.  And as for the other trade stuffs, they have naturally for years drained into the markets of the French Soudan; instead of through such a country as Ashantee, into the markets of the English Gold Coast; and so unless we run a railroad up to encourage the white traders to go inland, and make a market that will attract these trade routes into Coomassie, we shall be a few years hence singing out “What’s the good of Ashantee?” and so forth, as is our foolish wont, never realising that the West Coast is not good unless it is made so by white effort.

The new régime on the Gold Coast is undoubtedly more active than the old - more alive to the importance of pushing inland and so forth - and a road is going to be made twenty-five feet wide all the way to Coomassie, and then beyond it, which is an excellent thing in its way.  But it will not do much for trade, because the pacification of the country, and the greater security of personal property to the native, which our rule will afford will aid him in bringing his goods to the coast, but not so greatly aid our taking our goods inland, for the carriers will require just as much for carrying goods along a road, as they do for carrying goods along a bush path, and rightly too, for it is quite as heavy work for them, and heavier, as I know from my experience of the governmental road in Cameroon.  In such a country as West Africa there can be no doubt that a soft bush path with a thick coating of moss and leaves on it, and shaded from the sun above by the interlacing branches, is far and away better going than a hard, sunny wide road.  This road will be valuable for military expeditions possibly, but military expeditions are not everyday affairs on the Gold Coast; and it cannot be of use for draught animals, because of the horse-sickness and tsetse fly which occur as soon as you get into the forest behind the littoral region: so it must not be regarded as an equivalent for steam transport, as it will only serve to bring down the little trickle of native trade, and possibly not increase that trickle much.

The question of transport of course is not confined to the Gold Coast.  Below Lagos there is the great river system, towards which the trade slowly drains through native hands to the white man’s factories on the river banks, but this trade being in the hands of native traders is not a fraction of what it would become in the hands of white men; and any mineral wealth there may be in the heavily-forested stretches of country remains unworked and unknown.  The difficulty of transport here greatly hampers the exploitation of the timber wealth, it being utterly useless for the natives to fell even a fine tree, unless it is so close to a waterway that it can be floated down to the factory.  This it is which causes the ebony, bar, and cam wood to be cut up by them into small billets which a man can carry.  The French and Germans are both now following the plan of getting as far as possible into the interior by the waterways, and then constructing railways.  The construction of these railways is fairly easy, as regards gradients, and absence of dense forest, when your waterway takes you up to the great park-like plateau lands which extend, as a general rule, behind the forest belt, and the inevitable mountain range.  The most important of these railways will be that of M. de Brazza up the Sanga valley in the direction of the Chad.  When this railway is constructed, it will be the death of the Cameroon and Oil River trade, more particularly of the latter, for in the Cameroons the Germans have broken down the monopoly of the coast tribes, which we in our possessions under the Niger Coast Protectorate have not.  The Niger Company has broken through, and taken full possession of a great interior, doing a bit of work of which every Englishman should feel proud, for it is the only thing in West Africa that places us on a level with the French and Germans in courage and enterprise in penetrating the interior, and fortunately the regions taken over by the Company are rich and not like the Senegal “made of sand and savage savages.”  Where in West Africa outside the Company will you find men worthy as explorers to be named in the same breath with de Brazza, Captain Binger, and Zintgraff?

Some day, I fear when it will be too late, we shall realise the foolishness of sticking down on the sea coast, tidying up our settlements, establishing schools, and drains, and we shall find our possessions in the Rivers and along the Gold Coast valueless, particularly in the Rivers, for the trade will surely drain towards the markets along the line of the French railroad behind them, for the middlemen tribe that we foster exact a toll of seventy-five per cent. on the trade that comes through their hands, and the English Government is showing great signs of an inclination to impose such duties on the only stuff the native cares much for - alcohol - that he will take his goods to the market where he can get his alcohol; even if he pays a toll to these markets of fifty per cent.  But of this I will speak later, and we will return to the question of transport.  Mr. Scott Elliot, {463} speaking on this subject as regarding East African regions, has given us a most interesting contribution based on his personal experience, and official figures.  As many of his observations and figures are equally applicable to the West Coast, I hope I may be forgiven for quoting him.  His criticism is in favour of the utilisation of every mile of waterway available.  He says, regarding the Victoria Nyanza, that “it is possible to place on it a steamer at the cost of £12,677.  Taking the cost of maintenance, fuel and working expenses at £1,200 a year (a large estimate) a capital expenditure of £53,000, (£13,000 for the steamer and £40,000 to yield three per cent. interest) would enable this steamer to convey, say thirty tons at the rate of five to ten miles an hour for £1,600 a year.  This makes it possible to convey a ton at the rate of a halfpenny a mile, while it would require about £53,000 to build a railway only eighteen miles long.”

The Congo Free State railway I am informed, has cost, at a rate per mile, something like eight times this.  Further on Mr. Elliot says: “In America the surplus population of Europe, and the markets in the Eastern States have made railway development profitable on the whole, but in Africa, until pioneer work has been done, and the prospects of colonisation and plantation are sufficiently definite and settled to induce colonists to go out in considerable numbers, it will be ruinous to build a long railway line.”

I do not quote these figures to discourage the West Coaster from his railway, but only to induce him to get his Government to make it in the proper direction, namely, into the interior, where further development of trade is possible.  Judging from other things in English colonies, I should expect, if left to the spirit of English (West Coast) enterprise, it would run in a line that would enable the engine drivers to keep an eye on the Atlantic Ocean instead of the direction in which it is high time our eyes should be turned.  I confess I am not an enthusiast on civilising the African.  My idea is that the French method of dealing with Africa is the best at present.  Get as much of the continent as possible down on the map as yours, make your flag wherever you go a sacred thing to the native - a thing he dare not attack.  Then, when you have done this, you may abandon the French plan, and gradually develop the trade in an English manner, but not in the English manner à la Sierra Leone.  But do your pioneer work first.  There is a very excellent substratum for English pioneer work on our Coasts in the trading community, for trade is the great key to the African’s heart, and everywhere the English trader and his goods stand high in West African esteem.  This pioneer work must be undertaken, or subsidised by the Government as it has been in the French possessions, for the West Coast does not offer those inducements to the ordinary traveller that, let us say, East Africa with its magnificent herds of big game, or the northern frontier of India, with its mountains and its interesting forms, relics, and monuments of a high culture, offer.  Travel in West Africa is very hard work, and very unhealthy.  There are many men who would not hesitate for a moment to go there, were the dangers of the native savagery the chief drawback; but they hesitate before a trip which means, in all probability, month after month of tramping through wet gloomy forests with a swamp here and there for a change, {465} and which will, the chances are 100 to 1, end in their dying ignominiously of fever in some wretched squalid village.

Reckless expenditure of money in attempts to open up the country is to be deprecated, for this hampers its future terribly, even if attended with partial success, the mortgage being too heavy for the estate, as the Congo Free State finances show; and if it is attended with failure it discourages further efforts.  What we want at present in West Africa are three or four Bingers and Zintgraffs to extend our possessions northwards, eastwards, and south-eastwards, until they command the interior trade routes.  And there is no reason that these men should enter from the West Coast, getting themselves killed, or half killed, with fever, before they reach their work.  Uganda, if half one hears of it is true, would be a very suitable base for them to start from, and then travelling west they might come down to the present limit of our West Coast possessions.  This belt of territory across the continent would give us control of, and place us in touch with, the whole of the interior trade.  A belt from north to south in Africa - thanks to our supineness and folly - we can now never have.

I will now briefly deal with the second sub-division I spoke of some pages back - the possibility of introducing new trade exports by means of cultivating plantations.  The soil of West Africa is extremely rich in places, but by no means so in all, for vast tracts of it are mangrove swamps, and other vast tracts of it are miserably poor, sour, sandy clay.  It is impossible in the space at my disposal to enter into a full description of the localities where these unprofitable districts occur, but you will find them here and there all along the Coast after leaving Sierra Leone.  The sour clay seems to be new soil recently promoted into the mainland from dried-up mangrove swamps, and a good rough rule is, do not start a plantation on soil that is not growing hard-wood forest.  Considerable areas on the Gold Coast, even though the soil is good, are now useless for cultivation, on account of their having been deforested by the natives’ wasteful way of making their farms, coupled with the harmattan and the long dry season.

The regions of richest soil are not in our possessions, but in those of Germany, France, Spain, and Portugal, namely, the Cameroons and its volcanic island series, Fernando Po, Principe, and San Thomé.

The rich volcanic earths of these places will enable them to compete in the matter of plantations with any part of the known world.  Cameroons is undoubtedly the best of these, because of its superior river supply, and although not in the region of the double seasons it is just on the northern limit of them, and the height of the Peak - 13,760 feet - condenses the water-laden air from its surrounding swamps and the Atlantic, so that rain is pretty frequent throughout the year.  When within the region of the double seasons just south of Cameroons you have a rainfall no heavier than that of the Rivers, yet better distributed, an essential point for the prosperity of such plantations as those of tea and tobacco, which require showers once a month.  To the north of Cameroons there is no prospect of either of these well-paying articles being produced in a quantity, or quality, that would compete with South America, India, or the Malayan regions, and they will have to depend in the matter of plantations on coffee and cacao.  Below Cameroons, Congo Français possesses the richest soil and an excellently arranged climate.  The lower Congo soil is bad and poor close to the river.  Kacongo, the bit of Portuguese territory to the north of the Congo banks, and that part of Angola as far as the River Bingo, are pretty much the same make of country as Congo Français, only less heavily forested.  The whole of Angola is an immensely rich region, save just round Loanda where the land is sand-logged for about fifty square miles, and those regions to the extreme south and south-east, which are in the Kalahari desert regions.

CHAPTER XXII.  DISEASE IN WEST AFRICA.

Great as is the delay and difficulty placed in the way of the development of the immense natural resources of West Africa by the labour problem, there is another cause of delay to this development greater and more terrible by far - namely, the deadliness of the climate.  “Nothing hinders a man, Miss Kingsley, half so much as dying,” a friend said to me the other day, after nearly putting his opinion to a practical test.  Other parts of the world have more sensational outbreaks of death from epidemics of yellow fever and cholera, but there is no other region in the world that can match West Africa for the steady kill, kill, kill that its malaria works on the white men who come under its influence.

Malaria you will hear glibly talked of; but what malaria means and consists of you will find few men ready to attempt to tell you, and these few by no means of a tale.  It is very strange that this terrible form of disease has not attracted more scientific investigators, considering the enormous mortality it causes throughout the tropics and sub-tropics.  A few years since, when the peculiar microbes of everything from measles to miracles were being “isolated,” several bacteriologists isolated the malarial microbe, only unfortunately they did not all isolate the same one.  A résumé of the various claims of these microbes is impossible here, and whether one of them was the true cause, or whether they all have an equal claim to this position, is not yet clear; for malaria, as far as I have seen or read of it seems to be not so much one distinct form of fever as a group of fevers - a genus, not a species.  Many things point to this being the case; particularly the different forms so called malarial poisoning takes in different localities.  This subject may be also subdivided and complicated by going into the controversy as to whether yellow fever is endemic on the West Coast or not.  That it has occurred there from time to time there can be no question: at Fernando Po in 1862 and 1866, in Senegal pretty frequently; and at least one epidemic at Bonny was true yellow fever.  But in the case of each of these outbreaks it is said to have been imported from South America, into Fernando Po, by ships from Havana, and into Bonny by a ship which had on her previous run been down the South American ports with a cargo of mules.  The litter belonging to this mule cargo was not cleared out of her until she got into Bonny, when it was thrown overside into the river, and then the yellow fever broke out.  But, on the other hand, South America taxes West Africa - the Guinea Coast - with having first sent out yellow fever in the cargoes of slaves.  This certainly is a strange statement, because the African native rarely has malarial fever severely - he has it, and you are often informed So-and-so has got yellow fever, but he does not often die of it, merely is truly wretched and sick for a day or so, and then recovers. {516}

Regarding the hæmaturia there is also controversy.  A very experienced and excellent authority doubts whether this is entirely a malarial fever, or whether it is not, in some cases at any rate, brought on by over-doses of quinine, and Dr. Plehn asserts, and his assertions are heavily backed up by his great success in treating this fever, that quinine has a very bad influence when the characteristic symptoms have declared themselves, and that it should not be given.  I hesitate to advise this, because I fear to induce any one to abandon quinine, which is the great weapon against malaria, and not from any want of faith in Dr. Plehn, for he has studied malarial fevers in Cameroon with the greatest energy and devotion, bringing to bear on the subject a sound German mind trained in a German way, and than this, for such subjects, no better thing exists.  His brother, also a doctor, was stationed in Cameroon before him, and is now in the German East African possessions, similarly working hard, and when these two shall publish the result of their conjoint investigations, we shall have the most important contribution to our knowledge of malaria that has ever appeared.  It is impossible to over-rate the importance of such work as this to West Africa, for the man who will make West Africa pay will be the scientific man who gives us something more powerful against malaria than quinine.  It is too much to hope that medical men out at work on the Coast, doctoring day and night, and not only obliged to doctor, but to nurse their white patients, with the balance of their time taken up by giving bills of health to steamers, wrestling with the varied and awful sanitary problems presented by the native town, etc., can have sufficient time or life left in them to carry on series of experiments and of cultures; but they can and do supply to the man in the laboratory at home grand material for him to carry the thing through; meanwhile we wait for that man and do the best we can.

The net results of laboratory investigation, according to the French doctors, is that the mycetozoic malarial bacillus, the microbe of paludism, is amœboid in its movements, acting on the red corpuscles, leaving nothing of them but the dark pigment found in the skin and organs of malarial subjects. {517}  The German doctors make a practice of making microscopic examinations of the blood of a patient, saying that the microbes appear at the commencement of an attack of fever, increase in quantity as the fever increases, and decrease as it decreases, and from these investigations they are able to judge fairly accurately how many remissions may be expected; in fact to judge of the severity of the case which, taken with the knowledge that quinine only affects malarial microbes at a certain stage of their existence, is helpful in treatment.

APPENDIX.  THE INVENTION OF THE CLOTH LOOM.

This story is taken down from an Eboe, but practically the same story can be found among all the cloth-making tribes in West Africa.

In the old times there was a man who was a great hunter; but he had a bad wife, and when he made medicine to put on his spear, she made medicine against his spear, but he knew nothing of this thing and went out after bush cow.

NOTES.

{14} Sierra Leone has been known since the voyage of Hanno of Carthage in the sixth century B.C., but it has not got into general literature to any great extent since Pliny.  The only later classic who has noticed it is Milton, who in a very suitable portion of Paradise Lost says of Notus and Afer, “black with thunderous clouds from Sierra Lona.”  Our occupation of it dates from 1787.

{15} Lagos also likes to bear this flattering appellation, and has now-a-days more right to the title.

{28} Along the Coast, and in other parts of Africa, the coarser, flat-sided kinds of banana are usually called plantains, the name banana being reserved for the finer sorts, such as the little “silver banana.”

{37} From Point Limbok, the seaward extremity of Cameroons Mountain, to Cape Horatio, the most eastern extremity of Fernando Po, the soundings are, from the continent, 13, 17, 20, 23, 27, 29, 30, 34 fathoms; close on to the island, 35 and 29 fathoms.

{44} I am informed that the allowance made to these priests exceeds by some pounds the revenues Spain obtains from the Island.  In Spanish possessions alone is a supporting allowance made to missionaries though in all the other colonies they obtain a government grant.

{47} Ten Years’ Wanderings among the Ethiopians, T. J. Hutchinson.

{48a} There is difference of opinion among authorities as to whether Fernando Po was discovered by Fernando Po or by Lopez Gonsalves.

{48b} From April 1777 till the end of 1782, 370 men out of the 547 died of fever.

{51} Porto is the Bubi name for black men who are not Bubis, these were in old days Portuguese slaves, “Porto” being evidently a corruption of “Portuguese,” but it is used alike by the Bubi to designate Sierra Leonian and Accras, in fact, all the outer barbarian blacks.  The name for white men, Mandara, used by the Bubis, has a sort of resemblance to the Effik name for whites, Makara, i.e., the ruling one, but I do not know whether these two words have any connection.

{55} I am glad to find that my own observations on the drink question entirely agree with those of Dr. Oscar Baumann, because he is an unprejudiced scientific observer, who has had great experience both in the Congo and Cameroon regions before he came to Fernando Po.  In support of my statement I may quote his own words: - “Die Bube trinken nämlich sehr gerne Rum; Gin verschmähen sie vollständig, aber ausser Tabak und Salz gehört Rum zu den gesuchtesten europäischen Artikeln für sie.  Wie bekannt hat sich in Europa ein heftiges Geschrei gegen die Vergiftung der Neger durch Alcohol erhoben.  Wenn dasselbe schon für die meisten Stämme Westafrikas der Berechtigung fast vollständig entbehrt und in die Categorie verweisen worden muss die man mit dem nicht sehr schönen aber treffenden Ausdrücke ‘Humanitätsduselei’ bezeichnet, so ist es den Bube gegenüber wohl mehr als zwecklos.  Es mag ja vorkommen dass ein Bube wenn er sein Palmöl verkauft hat, sich ein oder zweimal im Jahre mit Rum ein Räuschlein antrinkt.  Deshalb aber gleich von Alkohol-Vergiftung zu sprechen wäre mindestens lächerlich.  Ich bin überzeugt dass mancher jener Herren die in Wort und Schrift so heftig gegen die Alkolismus der Neger zetern in ihren Studenten-jahren allein mehr geistige Getränke genossen haben als zehn Bube während ihres ganzen Lebens.  Der Handelsrum welcher wie ich mich öfters überzeugt zwar recht verwässert aber keineswegs abstossend schlecht schmeckt, ist den Bube gewöhnlich nur eine Delikatesse welche mit Andacht schluckweise genossen wird.  Wenn ein Arbeiter bei uns einen Schluck Branntwein oder ein Glas Bier geniesst um sich zu stärken, so findet das Jeder in der Ordnung; der Bube jedoch, welcher splitternackt tagelang in feuchten Bergwäldern umher klettern muss, soll beliebe nichts als Wasser trinken!”  Eine Africanische Tropen. insel Fernando Póo, Dr. Oscar Baumann, Edward Hölzer, Wien, 1888.

{56} “Beiträge zur Kenntniss der Bubisprache auf Fernando Póo,” O. Baumann, Zeitschrift für afrikanische Sprachen.  Berlin, 1888.

{61} Ten Years’ Wanderings among the Ethiopians.  T. J. Hutchinson.

{80}