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Travels in West Africa: Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons

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Title: Travels in West Africa: Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons

Author: Mary Henrietta Kingsley


        
Release date: June 1, 2004 [eBook #5891]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TRAVELS IN WEST AFRICA: CONGO FRANÇAIS, CORISCO AND CAMEROONS ***
Travels in West Africa (Congo Francais, Corisco and Cameroons)
by Mary H. Kingsley.




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




CONTENTS

PREFACE.
PREFACE TO THE ABRIDGED EDITION OF TRAVELS IN WEST AFRICA.
INTRODUCTION.
CHAPTER I.     LIVERPOOL TO SIERRA LEONE AND THE GOLD COAST.
CHAPTER II.    FERNANDO PO AND THE BUBIS.
CHAPTER III.   VOYAGE DOWN COAST.
CHAPTER IV.    THE OGOWE.
CHAPTER V.     THE RAPIDS OF THE OGOWE.
CHAPTER VI.    LEMBARENE.
CHAPTER VII.   ON THE WAY FROM KANGWE TO LAKE NCOVI.
CHAPTER VIII.  FROM NCOVI TO ESOON.
CHAPTER IX.    FROM ESOON TO AGONJO.
CHAPTER X.     BUSH TRADE AND FAN CUSTOMS.
CHAPTER XI.    DOWN THE REMBWE.
CHAPTER XII.   FETISH.
CHAPTER XIII.  FETISH--(Continued).
CHAPTER XIV.   FETISH--(Continued).
CHAPTER XV.    FETISH--(Continued).
CHAPTER XVI.   FETISH--(Concluded).
CHAPTER XVII.  ASCENT OF THE GREAT PEAK OF CAMEROONS.
CHAPTER XVIII. THE GREAT PEAK OF CAMEROONS--(Continued).
CHAPTER XIX.   THE GREAT PEAK OF CAMEROONS--(Continued).
CHAPTER XX.    THE GREAT PEAK OF CAMEROONS--(Concluded).
CHAPTER XXI.   TRADE AND LABOUR IN WEST AFRICA.
CHAPTER XXII.  DISEASE IN WEST AFRICA.
APPENDIX.      THE INVENTION OF THE CLOTH LOOM.



PREFACE



TO THE READER.--What this book wants is not a simple Preface but an
apology, and a very brilliant and convincing one at that.
Recognising this fully, and feeling quite incompetent to write such
a masterpiece, I have asked several literary friends to write one
for me, but they have kindly but firmly declined, stating that it is
impossible satisfactorily to apologise for my liberties with Lindley
Murray and the Queen's English.  I am therefore left to make a
feeble apology for this book myself, and all I can personally say is
that it would have been much worse than it is had it not been for
Dr. Henry Guillemard, who has not edited it, or of course the whole
affair would have been better, but who has most kindly gone through
the proof sheets, lassoing prepositions which were straying outside
their sentence stockade, taking my eye off the water cask and fixing
it on the scenery where I meant it to be, saying firmly in pencil on
margins "No you don't," when I was committing some more than usually
heinous literary crime, and so on.  In cases where his activities in
these things may seem to the reader to have been wanting, I beg to
state that they really were not.  It is I who have declined to
ascend to a higher level of lucidity and correctness of diction than
I am fitted for.  I cannot forbear from mentioning my gratitude to
Mr. George Macmillan for his patience and kindness with me,--a mere
jungle of information on West Africa.  Whether you my reader will
share my gratitude is, I fear, doubtful, for if it had not been for
him I should never have attempted to write a book at all, and in
order to excuse his having induced me to try I beg to state that I
have written only on things that I know from personal experience and
very careful observation.  I have never accepted an explanation of a
native custom from one person alone, nor have I set down things as
being prevalent customs from having seen a single instance.  I have
endeavoured to give you an honest account of the general state and
manner of life in Lower Guinea and some description of the various
types of country there.  In reading this section you must make
allowances for my love of this sort of country, with its great
forests and rivers and its animistic-minded inhabitants, and for my
ability to be more comfortable there than in England.  Your superior
culture-instincts may militate against your enjoying West Africa,
but if you go there you will find things as I have said.

January, 1897.



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.

As for the part that is left in, I have already apologised for its
form, and I cannot help it, for Lower Guinea is like what I have
said it is.  No one who knows it has sent home contradictions of my
description of it, or its natives, or their manners or customs, and
they have had by now ample time and opportunity.  The only
complaints I have had regarding my account from my fellow West
Coasters have been that I might have said more.  I trust my
forbearance will send a thrill of gratitude through readers of the
736-page edition.

There is, however, one section that I reprint, regarding which I
must say a few words.  It is that on the trade and labour problem in
West Africa, particularly the opinion therein expressed regarding
the liquor traffic.  This part has brought down on me much criticism
from the Missionary Societies and their friends; and I beg
gratefully to acknowledge the honourable fairness with which the
controversy has been carried on by the great Wesleyan Methodist
Mission to the Gold Coast and the Baptist Mission to the Congo.  It
has not ended in our agreement on this point, but it has raised my
esteem of Missionary Societies considerably; and anyone interested
in this matter I beg to refer to the Baptist Magazine for October,
1897.  Therein will be found my answer, and the comments on it by a
competent missionary authority; for the rest of this matter I beg
all readers of this book to bear in mind that I confine myself to
speaking only of the bit of Africa I know--West Africa.  During this
past summer I attended a meeting at which Sir George Taubman Goldie
spoke, and was much struck with the truth of what he said on the
difference of different African regions.  He divided Africa into
three zones:  firstly, that region where white races could colonise
in the true sense of the word, and form a great native-born white
population, namely, the region of the Cape; secondly, a region where
the white race could colonise, but to a less extent--an extent
analogous to that in India--namely, the highlands of Central East
Africa and parts of Northern Africa; thirdly, a region where the
white races cannot colonise in a true sense of the word, namely, the
West African region, and in those regions he pointed out one of the
main elements of prosperity and advance is the native African
population.  I am quoting his words from memory, possibly
imperfectly; but there is very little reliable printed matter to go
on when dealing with Sir George Taubman Goldie, which is regrettable
because he himself is an experienced and reliable authority.  I am
however quite convinced that these aforesaid distinct regions are
regions that the practical politician dealing with Africa must
recognise, and keep constantly in mind when attempting to solve the
many difficulties that that great continent presents, and sincerely
hope every reader of this work will remember that I am speaking of
that last zone, the zone wherein white races cannot colonise in a
true sense of the word, but which is nevertheless a vitally
important region to a great manufacturing country like England, for
therein are vast undeveloped markets wherein she can sell her
manufactured goods and purchase raw material for her manufactures at
a reasonable rate.

Having a rooted, natural, feminine hatred for politics I have no
inclination to become diffuse on them, as I have on the errors of
other people's cooking or ideas on decoration.  I know I am held to
be too partial to France in West Africa; too fond of pointing out
her brilliant achievements there, too fond of saying the native is
as happy, and possibly happier, under her rule than under ours; and
also that I am given to a great admiration for Germans; but this is
just like any common-sense Englishwoman.  Of course I am devoted to
my own John; but still Monsieur is brave, bright, and fascinating;
Mein Herr is possessed of courage and commercial ability in the
highest degree, and, besides, he takes such a lot of trouble to know
the real truth about things, and tells them to you so calmly and
carefully--and our own John--well, of course, he is everything
that's good and great, but he makes a shocking fool of himself at
times, particularly in West Africa.

I should enjoy holding what one of my justly irritated expurgators
used to call one of my little thanksgiving services here, but I will
not; for, after all, it would be impossible for me to satisfactorily
thank those people who, since my publication of this book, have
given me help and information on the subject of West Africa.  Chief
amongst them have been Mr. A. L. Jones, Sir. R. B. N. Walker, Mr.
Irvine, and Mr. John Holt.  I have not added to this book any
information I have received since I wrote it, as it does not seem to
me fair to do so.  My only regret regarding it is that I have not
dwelt sufficiently on the charm of West Africa; it is so difficult
to explain such things; but I am sure there are amongst my readers
people who know by experience the charm some countries exercise over
men--countries very different from each other and from West Africa.
The charm of West Africa is a painful one:  it gives you pleasure
when you are out there, but when you are back here it gives you pain
by calling you.  It sends up before your eyes a vision of a wall of
dancing white, rainbow-gemmed surf playing on a shore of yellow sand
before an audience of stately coco palms; or of a great mangrove-
watered bronze river; or of a vast aisle in some forest cathedral:
and you hear, nearer to you than the voices of the people round,
nearer than the roar of the city traffic, the sound of the surf that
is breaking on the shore down there, and the sound of the wind
talking on the hard palm leaves and the thump of the natives' tom-
toms; or the cry of the parrots passing over the mangrove swamps in
the evening time; or the sweet, long, mellow whistle of the plantain
warblers calling up the dawn; and everything that is round you grows
poor and thin in the face of the vision, and you want to go back to
the Coast that is calling you, saying, as the African says to the
departing soul of his dying friend, "Come back, come back, this is
your home."

                                     M. H. KINGSLEY.
October, 1897.



[NOTE.--The following chapters of the first edition are not included
in this edition: --Chap. ii., The Gold Coast; Chap. iv., Lagos Bar;
Chap. v., Voyage down Coast; Chap. vi., Libreville and Glass; Chap.
viii., Talagouga; Chap. xvi., Congo Francais; Chap. xvii., The Log
of the Lafayette; Chap. xviii., From Corisco to Gaboon; Chap.
xxviii., The Islands in the Bay of Amboises; Appendix ii., Disease
in West Africa; Appendix iii., Dr. A. Gunther on Reptiles and
Fishes; Appendix iv., Orthoptera, Hymenoptera, and Hemiptera.]



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.

All my informants referred me to the missionaries.  "There were,"
they said, in an airy way, "lots of them down there, and had been
for many years."  So to missionary literature I addressed myself
with great ardour; alas! only to find that these good people wrote
their reports not to tell you how the country they resided in was,
but how it was getting on towards being what it ought to be, and how
necessary it was that their readers should subscribe more freely,
and not get any foolishness into their heads about obtaining an
inadequate supply of souls for their money.  I also found fearful
confirmation of my medical friends' statements about its
unhealthiness, and various details of the distribution of cotton
shirts over which I did not linger.

From the missionaries it was, however, that I got my first idea
about the social condition of West Africa.  I gathered that there
existed there, firstly the native human beings--the raw material, as
it were--and that these were led either to good or bad respectively
by the missionary and the trader.  There were also the Government
representatives, whose chief business it was to strengthen and
consolidate the missionary's work, a function they carried on but
indifferently well.  But as for those traders! well, I put them down
under the dangers of West Africa at once.  Subsequently I came
across the good old Coast yarn of how, when a trader from that
region went thence, it goes without saying where, the Fallen Angel
without a moment's hesitation vacated the infernal throne (Milton)
in his favour.  This, I beg to note, is the marine form of the
legend.  When it occurs terrestrially the trader becomes a Liverpool
mate.  But of course no one need believe it either way--it is not a
missionary's story.

Naturally, while my higher intelligence was taken up with attending
to these statements, my mind got set on going, and I had to go.
Fortunately I could number among my acquaintances one individual who
had lived on the Coast for seven years.  Not, it is true, on that
part of it which I was bound for.  Still his advice was pre-
eminently worth attention, because, in spite of his long residence
in the deadliest spot of the region, he was still in fair going
order.  I told him I intended going to West Africa, and he said,
"When you have made up your mind to go to West Africa the very best
thing you can do is to get it unmade again and go to Scotland
instead; but if your intelligence is not strong enough to do so,
abstain from exposing yourself to the direct rays of the sun, take 4
grains of quinine every day for a fortnight before you reach the
Rivers, and get some introductions to the Wesleyans; they are the
only people on the Coast who have got a hearse with feathers."

My attention was next turned to getting ready things to take with
me.  Having opened upon myself the sluice gates of advice, I rapidly
became distracted.  My friends and their friends alike seemed to
labour under the delusion that I intended to charter a steamer and
was a person of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice.  This not being
the case, the only thing to do was to gratefully listen and let
things drift.

Not only do the things you have got to take, but the things you have
got to take them in, present a fine series of problems to the young
traveller.  Crowds of witnesses testified to the forms of baggage
holders they had found invaluable, and these, it is unnecessary to
say, were all different in form and material.

With all this embarras de choix I was too distracted to buy anything
new in the way of baggage except a long waterproof sack neatly
closed at the top with a bar and handle.  Into this I put blankets,
boots, books, in fact anything that would not go into my portmanteau
or black bag.  From the first I was haunted by a conviction that its
bottom would come out, but it never did, and in spite of the fact
that it had ideas of its own about the arrangement of its contents,
it served me well throughout my voyage.

It was the beginning of August '93 when I first left England for
"the Coast."  Preparations of quinine with postage partially paid
arrived up to the last moment, and a friend hastily sent two
newspaper clippings, one entitled "A Week in a Palm-oil Tub," which
was supposed to describe the sort of accommodation, companions, and
fauna likely to be met with on a steamer going to West Africa, and
on which I was to spend seven to The Graphic contributor's one; the
other from The Daily Telegraph, reviewing a French book of "Phrases
in common use" in Dahomey.  The opening sentence in the latter was,
"Help, I am drowning."  Then came the inquiry, "If a man is not a
thief?" and then another cry, "The boat is upset."  "Get up, you
lazy scamps," is the next exclamation, followed almost immediately
by the question, "Why has not this man been buried?"  "It is fetish
that has killed him, and he must lie here exposed with nothing on
him until only the bones remain," is the cheerful answer.  This
sounded discouraging to a person whose occupation would necessitate
going about considerably in boats, and whose fixed desire was to
study fetish.  So with a feeling of foreboding gloom I left London
for Liverpool--none the more cheerful for the matter-of-fact manner
in which the steamboat agents had informed me that they did not
issue return tickets by the West African lines of steamers.  I will
not go into the details of that voyage here, much as I am given to
discursiveness.  They are more amusing than instructive, for on my
first voyage out I did not know the Coast, and the Coast did not
know me and we mutually terrified each other.  I fully expected to
get killed by the local nobility and gentry; they thought I was
connected with the World's Women's Temperance Association, and
collecting shocking details for subsequent magic-lantern lectures on
the liquor traffic; so fearful misunderstandings arose, but we
gradually educated each other, and I had the best of the affair; for
all I had got to teach them was that I was only a beetle and fetish
hunter, and so forth, while they had to teach me a new world, and a
very fascinating course of study I found it.  And whatever the Coast
may have to say against me--for my continual desire for hair-pins,
and other pins, my intolerable habit of getting into water, the
abominations full of ants, that I brought into their houses, or
things emitting at unexpectedly short notice vivid and awful
stenches--they cannot but say that I was a diligent pupil, who
honestly tried to learn the lessons they taught me so kindly, though
some of those lessons were hard to a person who had never previously
been even in a tame bit of tropics, and whose life for many years
had been an entirely domestic one in a University town.

One by one I took my old ideas derived from books and thoughts based
on imperfect knowledge and weighed them against the real life around
me, and found them either worthless or wanting.  The greatest
recantation I had to make I made humbly before I had been three
months on the Coast in 1893.  It was of my idea of the traders.
What I had expected to find them was a very different thing to what
I did find them; and of their kindness to me I can never
sufficiently speak, for on that voyage I was utterly out of touch
with the governmental circles, and utterly dependent on the traders,
and the most useful lesson of all the lessons I learnt on the West
Coast in 1893 was that I could trust them.  Had I not learnt this
very thoroughly I could never have gone out again and carried out
the voyage I give you a sketch of in this book.

Thanks to "the Agent," I have visited places I could never otherwise
have seen; and to the respect and affection in which he is held by
the native, I owe it that I have done so in safety.  When I have
arrived off his factory in a steamer or canoe unexpected,
unintroduced, or turned up equally unheralded out of the bush in a
dilapidated state, he has always received me with that gracious
hospitality which must have given him, under Coast conditions, very
real trouble and inconvenience--things he could have so readily
found logical excuses against entailing upon himself for the sake of
an individual whom he had never seen before--whom he most likely
would never see again--and whom it was no earthly profit to him to
see then.  He has bestowed himself--Allah only knows where--on his
small trading vessels so that I might have his one cabin.  He has
fished me out of sea and fresh water with boat-hooks; he has
continually given me good advice, which if I had only followed would
have enabled me to keep out of water and any other sort of
affliction; and although he holds the meanest opinion of my
intellect for going to such a place as West Africa for beetles,
fishes and fetish, he has given me the greatest assistance in my
work.  The value of that work I pray you withhold judgment on, until
I lay it before you in some ten volumes or so mostly in Latin.  All
I know that is true regarding West African facts, I owe to the
traders; the errors are my own.

To Dr. Gunther, of the British Museum, I am deeply grateful for the
kindness and interest he has always shown regarding all the
specimens of natural history that I have been able to lay before
him; the majority of which must have had very old tales to tell him.
Yet his courtesy and attention gave me the thing a worker in any
work most wants--the sense that the work was worth doing--and sent
me back to work again with the knowledge that if these things
interested a man like him, it was a more than sufficient reason for
me to go on collecting them.  To Mr. W. H. F. Kirby I am much
indebted for his working out my small collection of certain Orders
of insects; and to Mr. Thomas S. Forshaw, for the great help he has
afforded me in revising my notes.

It is impossible for me even to catalogue my debts of gratitude
still outstanding to the West Coast.  Chiefly am I indebted to Mr.
C. G. Hudson, whose kindness and influence enabled me to go up the
Ogowe and to see as much of Congo Francais as I have seen, and his
efforts to take care of me were most ably seconded by Mr. Fildes.
The French officials in "Congo Francais" never hindered me, and
always treated me with the greatest kindness.  You may say there was
no reason why they should not, for there is nothing in this fine
colony of France that they need be ashamed of any one seeing; but I
find it is customary for travellers to say the French officials
throw obstacles in the way of any one visiting their possessions, so
I merely beg to state this was decidedly not my experience; although
my deplorable ignorance of French prevented me from explaining my
humble intentions to them.

The Rev. Dr. Nassau and Mr. R. E. Dennett have enabled me, by
placing at my disposal the rich funds of their knowledge of native
life and idea, to amplify any deductions from my own observation.
Mr. Dennett's work I have not dealt with in this work because it
refers to tribes I was not amongst on this journey, but to a tribe I
made the acquaintance with in my '93 voyage--the Fjort.  Dr.
Nassau's observations I have referred to.  Herr von Lucke, Vice-
governor of Cameroon, I am indebted to for not only allowing me, but
for assisting me by every means in his power, to go up Cameroons
Peak, and to the Governor of Cameroon, Herr von Puttkamer, for his
constant help and kindness.  Indeed so great has been the
willingness to help me of all these gentlemen, that it is a wonder
to me, when I think of it, that their efforts did not project me
right across the continent and out at Zanzibar.  That this brilliant
affair did not come off is owing to my own lack of enterprise; for I
did not want to go across the continent, and I do not hanker after
Zanzibar, but only to go puddling about obscure districts in West
Africa after raw fetish and fresh-water fishes.

I owe my ability to have profited by the kindness of these gentlemen
on land, to a gentleman of the sea--Captain Murray.  He was captain
of the vessel I went out on in 1893, and he saw then that my mind
was full of errors that must be eradicated if I was going to deal
with the Coast successfully; and so he eradicated those errors and
replaced them with sound knowledge from his own stores collected
during an acquaintance with the West Coast of over thirty years.
The education he has given me has been of the greatest value to me,
and I sincerely hope to make many more voyages under him, for I well
know he has still much to teach and I to learn.

Last, but not least, I must chronicle my debts to the ladies.  First
to those two courteous Portuguese ladies, Donna Anna de Sousa
Coutinho e Chichorro and her sister Donna Maria de Sousa Coutinho,
who did so much for me in Kacongo in 1893, and have remained, I am
proud to say, my firm friends ever since.  Lady MacDonald and Miss
Mary Slessor I speak of in this book, but only faintly sketch the
pleasure and help they have afforded me; nor have I fully expressed
my gratitude for the kindness of Madame Jacot of Lembarene, or
Madame Forget of Talagouga.  Then there are a whole list of nuns
belonging to the Roman Catholic Missions on the South West Coast,
ever cheery and charming companions; and Frau Plehn, whom it was a
continual pleasure to see in Cameroons, and discourse with once
again on things that seemed so far off then--art, science, and
literature; and Mrs. H. Duggan, of Cameroons too, who used, whenever
I came into that port to rescue me from fearful states of starvation
for toilet necessaries, and lend a sympathetic and intelligent ear
to the "awful sufferings" I had gone through, until Cameroons became
to me a thing to look forward to.

When in the Canaries in 1892, I used to smile, I regretfully own, at
the conversation of a gentleman from the Gold Coast who was up there
recruiting after a bad fever.  His conversation consisted largely of
anecdotes of friends of his, and nine times in ten he used to say,
"He's dead now."  Alas! my own conversation may be smiled at now for
the same cause.  Many of my friends mentioned even in this very
recent account of the Coast "are dead now."  Most of those I learnt
to know in 1893; chief among these is my old friend Captain Boler,
of Bonny, from whom I first learnt a certain power of comprehending
the African and his form of thought.

I have great reason to be grateful to the Africans themselves--to
cultured men and women among them like Charles Owoo, Mbo, Sanga
Glass, Jane Harrington and her sister at Gaboon, and to the bush
natives; but of my experience with them I give further details, so I
need not dwell on them here.

I apologise to the general reader for giving so much detail on
matters that really only affect myself, and I know that the
indebtedness which all African travellers have to the white
residents in Africa is a matter usually very lightly touched on.  No
doubt my voyage would seem a grander thing if I omitted mention of
the help I received, but--well, there was a German gentleman once
who evolved a camel out of his inner consciousness.  It was a
wonderful thing; still, you know, it was not a good camel, only a
thing which people personally unacquainted with camels could believe
in.  Now I am ambitious to make a picture, if I make one at all,
that people who do know the original can believe in--even if they
criticise its points--and so I give you details a more showy artist
would omit.



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, Lancarote 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 Lancarote 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.

Some of the stores and churches are, it is true, built of stone, but
this does not look like stone at a distance, being red in colour--
unhewn blocks of the red stone of the locality.  In the crannies of
these buildings trailing plants covered with pretty mauve or yellow
flowers take root, and everywhere, along the tops of the walls, and
in the cracks of the houses, are ferns and flowering plants.  They
must get a good deal of their nourishment from the rich, thick air,
which seems composed of 85 per cent. of warm water, and the
remainder of the odours of Frangipani, orange flowers, magnolias,
oleanders, and roses, combined with others that demonstrate that the
inhabitants do not regard sanitary matters with the smallest degree
of interest.

There is one central street, and the others are neatly planned out
at right angles to it.  None of them are in any way paved or
metalled.  They are covered in much prettier fashion, and in a way
more suitable for naked feet, by green Bahama grass, save and except
those which are so nearly perpendicular that they have got every bit
of earth and grass cleared off them down to the red bed-rock, by the
heavy rain of the wet season.

In every direction natives are walking at a brisk pace, their naked
feet making no sound on the springy turf of the streets, carrying on
their heads huge burdens which are usually crowned by the hat of the
bearer, a large limpet-shaped affair made of palm leaves.  While
some carry these enormous bundles, others bear logs or planks of
wood, blocks of building stone, vessels containing palm-oil, baskets
of vegetables, or tin tea-trays on which are folded shawls.  As the
great majority of the native inhabitants of Sierra Leone pay no
attention whatever to where they are going, either in this world or
the next, the confusion and noise are out of all proportion to the
size of the town; and when, as frequently happens, a section of
actively perambulating burden-bearers charge recklessly into a
sedentary section, the members of which have dismounted their loads
and squatted themselves down beside them, right in the middle of the
fair way, to have a friendly yell with some acquaintances, the row
becomes terrific.

In among these crowds of country people walk stately Mohammedans,
Mandingoes, Akers, and Fulahs of the Arabised tribes of the Western
Soudan.  These are lithe, well-made men, and walk with a peculiarly
fine, elastic carriage.  Their graceful garb consists of a long
white loose-sleeved shirt, over which they wear either a long black
mohair or silk gown, or a deep bright blue affair, not altogether
unlike a University gown, only with more stuff in it and more folds.
They are undoubtedly the gentlemen of the Sierra Leone native
population, and they are becoming an increasing faction in the town,
by no means to the pleasure of the Christians.

But to the casual visitor at Sierra Leone the Mohammedan is a mere
passing sensation.  You neither feel a burning desire to laugh with,
or at him, as in the case of the country folks, nor do you wish to
punch his head, and split his coat up his back--things you yearn to
do to that perfect flower of Sierra Leone culture, who yells your
bald name across the street at you, condescendingly informs you that
you can go and get letters that are waiting for you, while he smokes
his cigar and lolls in the shade, or in some similar way displays
his second-hand rubbishy white culture--a culture far lower and less
dignified than that of either the stately Mandingo or the bush
chief.  I do not think that the Sierra Leone dandy really means half
as much insolence as he shows; but the truth is he feels too
insecure of his own real position, in spite of all the "side" he
puts on, and so he dare not be courteous like the Mandingo or the
bush Fan.

It is the costume of the people in Free Town and its harbour that
will first attract the attention of the newcomer, notwithstanding
the fact that the noise, the smell, and the heat are simultaneously
making desperate bids for that favour.  The ordinary man in the
street wears anything he may have been able to acquire, anyhow, and
he does not fasten it on securely.  I fancy it must be capillary
attraction, or some other partially-understood force, that takes
part in the matter.  It is certainly neither braces nor buttons.
There are, of course, some articles which from their very structure
are fairly secure, such as an umbrella with the stick and ribs
removed, or a shirt.  This last-mentioned treasure, which usually
becomes the property of the ordinary man from a female relative or
admirer taking in white men's washing, is always worn flowing free,
and has such a charm in itself that the happy possessor cares little
what he continues his costume with--trousers, loin cloth, red
flannel petticoat, or rice-bag drawers, being, as he would put it,
"all same for one" to him.

The ladies are divided into three classes; the young girl you
address as "tee-tee"; the young person as "seester"; the more mature
charmer as "mammy"; but I do not advise you to employ these terms
when you are on your first visit, because you might get
misunderstood.  For, you see, by addressing a mammy as seester, she
might think either that you were unconscious of her dignity as a
married lady--a matter she would soon put you right on--or that you
were flirting, which of course was totally foreign to your
intention, and would make you uncomfortable.  My advice is that you
rigidly stick to missus or mammy.  I have seen this done most
successfully.

The ladies are almost as varied in their costume as the gentlemen,
but always neater and cleaner; and mighty picturesque they are too,
and occasionally very pretty.  A market-woman with her jolly brown
face and laughing brown eyes--eyes all the softer for a touch of
antimony--her ample form clothed in a lively print overall, made
with a yoke at the shoulders, and a full long flounce which is
gathered on to the yoke under the arms and falls fully to the feet;
with her head done up in a yellow or red handkerchief, and her snowy
white teeth gleaming through her vast smiles, is a mighty pleasant
thing to see, and to talk to.  But, Allah! the circumference of
them!

The stone-built, white-washed market buildings of Free Town have a
creditably clean and tidy appearance considering the climate, and
the quantity and variety of things exposed for sale--things one
wants the pen of a Rabelais to catalogue.  Here are all manner of
fruits, some which are familiar to you in England; others that soon
become so to you in Africa.  You take them as a matter of course if
you are outward bound, but on your call homeward (if you make it)
you will look on them as a blessing and a curiosity.  For lower
down, particularly in "the Rivers," these things are rarely to be
had, and never in such perfection as here; and to see again
lettuces, yellow oranges, and tomatoes bigger than marbles is a
sensation and a joy.

One of the chief features of Free Town are the jack crows.  Some
writers say they are peculiar to Sierra Leone, others that they are
not, but both unite in calling them Picathartes gymnocephalus.  To
the white people who live in daily contact with them they are turkey
buzzards; to the natives, Yubu.  Anyhow they are evil-looking fowl,
and no ornament to the roof-ridges they choose to sit on.  The
native Christians ought to put a row of spikes along the top of
their cathedral to keep them off; the beauty of that edifice is very
far from great, and it cannot carry off the effect produced by the
row of these noisome birds as they sit along its summit, with their
wings arranged at all manner of different angles in an "all gone"
way.  One bird perhaps will have one straight out in front, and the
other casually disposed at right-angles, another both straight out
in front, and others again with both hanging hopelessly down, but
none with them neatly and tidily folded up, as decent birds' wings
should be.  They all give the impression of having been extremely
drunk the previous evening, and of having subsequently fallen into
some sticky abomination--into blood for choice.  Being the
scavengers of Free Town, however, they are respected by the local
authorities and preserved; and the natives tell me you never see
either a young or a dead one.  The latter is a thing you would not
expect, for half of them look as if they could not live through the
afternoon.  They also told me that when you got close to them, they
had a "'trong, 'trong 'niff; 'niff too much."  I did not try, but I
am quite willing to believe this statement.

The other animals most in evidence in the streets are, first and
foremost, goats and sheep.  I have to lump them together, for it is
exceedingly difficult to tell one from the other.  All along the
Coast the empirical rule is that sheep carry their tails down, and
goats carry their tails up; fortunately you need not worry much
anyway, for they both "taste rather like the nothing that the world
was made of," as Frau Buchholtz says, and own in addition a fibrous
texture, and a certain twang.  Small cinnamon-coloured cattle are to
be got here, but horses there are practically none.  Now and again
some one who does not see why a horse should not live here as well
as at Accra or Lagos imports one, but it always shortly dies.  Some
say it is because the natives who get their living by hammock-
carrying poison them, others say the tsetse fly finishes them off;
and others, and these I believe are right, say that entozoa are the
cause.  Small, lean, lank yellow dogs with very erect ears lead an
awful existence, afflicted by many things, but beyond all others by
the goats, who, rearing their families in the grassy streets, choose
to think the dogs intend attacking them.  Last, but not least, there
is the pig--a rich source of practice to the local lawyer.

Cape Coast Castle and then Accra were the next places of general
interest at which we stopped.  The former looks well from the
roadstead, and as if it had very recently been white-washed.  It is
surrounded by low, heavily-forested hills, which rise almost from
the seashore, and the fine mass of its old castle does not display
its dilapidation at a distance.  Moreover, the three stone forts of
Victoria, William, and Macarthy, situated on separate hills
commanding the town, add to the general appearance of permanent
substantialness so different from the usual ramshackledom of West
Coast settlements.  Even when you go ashore and have had time to
recover your senses, scattered by the surf experience, you find this
substantialness a true one, not a mere visual delusion produced by
painted wood as the seeming substantialness of Sierra Leone turns
out to be when you get to close quarters with it.  It causes one
some mental effort to grasp the fact that Cape Coast has been in
European hands for centuries, but it requires a most unmodern power
of credence to realise this of any other settlement on the whole
western seaboard until you have the pleasure of seeing the beautiful
city of San Paul de Loanda, far away down south, past the Congo.

My experience of Cape Coast on this occasion was one of the hottest,
but one of the pleasantest I have ever been through on the Gold
Coast.  The former attribute was due to the climate, the latter to
my kind friends, Mr. Batty, and Mr. and Mrs. Dennis Kemp.  I was
taken round the grand stone-built houses with their high stone-
walled yards and sculpture-decorated gateways, built by the
merchants of the last century and of the century before, and through
the great rambling stone castle with its water-tanks cut in the
solid rock beneath it, and its commodious accommodation for slaves
awaiting shipment, now almost as obsolete as the guns it mounts, but
not quite so, for these cool and roomy chambers serve to house the
native constabulary and their extensive families.

This being done, I was taken up an unmitigated hill, on whose summit
stands Fort William, a pepper-pot-like structure now used as a
lighthouse.  The view from the top was exceedingly lovely and
extensive.  Beneath, and between us and the sea, lay the town in the
blazing sun.  In among its solid stone buildings patches of native
mud-built huts huddled together as though they had been shaken down
out of a sack into the town to serve as dunnage.  Then came the
snow-white surf wall, and across it the blue sea with our steamer
rolling to and fro on the long, regular swell, impatiently waiting
until Sunday should be over and she could work cargo.  Round us on
all the other sides were wooded hills and valleys, and away in the
distance to the west showed the white town and castle of Elmina and
the nine-mile road thither, skirting the surf-bound seashore, only
broken on its level way by the mouth of the Sweet River.  Over all
was the brooding silence of the noonday heat, broken only by the
dulled thunder of the surf.

After seeing these things we started down stairs, and on reaching
ground descended yet lower into a sort of stone-walled dry moat, out
of which opened clean, cool, cellar-like chambers tunnelled into the
earth.  These, I was informed, had also been constructed to keep
slaves in when they were the staple export of the Gold Coast.  They
were so refreshingly cool that I lingered looking at them and their
massive doors, ere being marched up to ground level again, and down
the hill through some singularly awful stenches, mostly arising from
rubber, into the big Wesleyan church in the middle of the town.  It
is a building in the terrible Africo-Gothic style, but it compares
most favourably with the cathedral at Sierra Leone, particularly
internally, wherein, indeed, it far surpasses that structure.  And
then we returned to the Mission House and spent a very pleasant
evening, save for the knowledge (which amounted in me to remorse)
that, had it not been for my edification, not one of my friends
would have spent the day toiling about the town they know only too
well.  The Wesleyan Mission on the Gold Coast, of which Mr. Dennis
Kemp was at that time chairman, is the largest and most influential
Protestant mission on the West Coast of Africa, and it is now, I am
glad to say, adding a technical department to its scholastic and
religious one.  The Basel Mission has done a great deal of good work
in giving technical instruction to the natives, and practically
started this most important branch of their education.  There is
still an almost infinite amount of this work to be done, the African
being so strangely deficient in mechanical culture; infinitely more
so, indeed, in this than in any other particular.

After leaving Cape Coast our next port was Accra which is one of the
five West Coast towns that look well from the sea.  The others don't
look well from anywhere.  First in order of beauty comes San Paul de
Loanda; then Cape Coast with its satellite Elmina, then Gaboon, then
Accra with its satellite Christiansborg, and lastly, Sierra Leone.

What there is of beauty in Accra is oriental in type.  Seen from the
sea, Fort St. James on the left and Christiansborg Castle on the
right, both almost on shore level, give, with an outcrop of sandy
dwarf cliffs, a certain air of balance and strength to the town,
though but for these and the two old castles, Accra would be but a
poor place and a flimsy, for the rest of it is a mass of rubbishy
mud and palm-leaf huts, and corrugated iron dwellings for the
Europeans.

Corrugated iron is my abomination.  I quite understand it has
points, and I do not attack from an aesthetic standpoint.  It really
looks well enough when it is painted white.  There is, close to
Christiansborg Castle, a patch of bungalows and offices for
officialdom and wife that from a distance in the hard bright
sunshine looks like an encampment of snow-white tents among the coco
palms, and pretty enough withal.  I am also aware that the
corrugated-iron roof is an advantage in enabling you to collect and
store rain-water, which is the safest kind of water you can get on
the Coast, always supposing you have not painted the aforesaid roof
with red oxide an hour or two before so collecting, as a friend of
mine did once.  But the heat inside those iron houses is far greater
than inside mud-walled, brick, or wooden ones, and the alternations
of temperature more sudden:  mornings and evenings they are cold and
clammy; draughty they are always, thereby giving you chill which
means fever, and fever in West Africa means more than it does in
most places.

Going on shore at Accra with Lady MacDonald gave me opportunities
and advantages I should not otherwise have enjoyed, such as the
hospitality of the Governor, luxurious transport from the landing
place to Christiansborg Castle, a thorough inspection of the
cathedral in course of erection, and the strange and highly
interesting function of going to a tea-party at a police station to
meet a king,--a real reigning king,--who kindly attended with his
suite and displayed an intelligent interest in photographs.  Tackie
(that is His Majesty's name) is an old, spare man, with a subdued
manner.  His sovereign rights are acknowledged by the Government so
far as to hold him more or less responsible for any iniquity
committed by his people; and as the Government do not allow him to
execute or flagellate the said people, earthly pomp is rather a
hollow thing to Tackie.

On landing I was taken in charge by an Assistant Inspector of
Police, and after a scrimmage for my chief's baggage and my own,
which reminded me of a long ago landing on the distant island of
Guernsey, the inspector and I got into a 'rickshaw, locally called a
go-cart.  It was pulled in front by two government negroes and
pushed behind by another pair, all neatly attired in white jackets
and knee breeches, and crimson cummerbunds yards long, bound round
their middles.  Now it is an ingrained characteristic of the
uneducated negro, that he cannot keep on a neat and complete garment
of any kind.  It does not matter what that garment may be; so long
as it is whole, off it comes.  But as soon as that garment becomes a
series of holes, held together by filaments of rag, he keeps it upon
him in a manner that is marvellous, and you need have no further
anxiety on its behalf.  Therefore it was but natural that the
governmental cummerbunds, being new, should come off their wearers
several times in the course of our two mile trip, and as they wound
riskily round the legs of their running wearers, we had to make
halts while one end of the cummerbund was affixed to a tree-trunk
and the other end to the man, who rapidly wound himself up in it
again with a skill that spoke of constant practice.

The road to Christiansborg from Accra, which runs parallel to the
sea and is broad and well-kept, is in places pleasantly shaded with
pepper trees, eucalyptus, and palms.  The first part of it, which
forms the main street of Accra, is remarkable.  The untidy, poverty-
stricken native houses or huts are no credit to their owners, and a
constant source of anxiety to a conscientious sanitary inspector.
Almost every one of them is a shop, but this does not give rise to
the animated commercial life one might imagine, owing, I presume, to
the fact that every native inhabitant of Accra who has any money to
get rid of is able recklessly to spend it in his own emporium.  For
these shops are of the store nature, each after his kind, and seem
homogeneously stocked with tin pans, loud-patterned basins, iron
pots, a few rolls of cloth and bottles of American rum.  After
passing these there are the Haussa lines, a few European houses, and
the cathedral; and when nearly into Christiansborg, a cemetery on
either side of the road.  That to the right is the old cemetery, now
closed, and when I was there, in a disgracefully neglected state:  a
mere jungle of grass infested with snakes.  Opposite to it is the
cemetery now in use, and I remember well my first visit to it under
the guidance of a gloomy Government official, who said he always
walked there every afternoon, "so as to get used to the place before
staying permanently in it,"--a rank waste of time and energy, by the
way, as subsequent events proved, for he is now safe off the Gold
Coast for good and all.

He took me across the well-kept grass to two newly dug graves, each
covered with wooden hoods in a most business-like way.  Evidently
those hoods were regular parts of the cemetery's outfit.  He said
nothing, but waved his hand with a "take-your-choice,-they-are-both-
quite-ready" style.  "Why?" I queried laconically.  "Oh! we always
keep two graves ready dug for Europeans.  We have to bury very
quickly here, you know," he answered.  I turned at bay.  I had had
already a very heavy dose of details of this sort that afternoon and
was disinclined to believe another thing.  So I said, "It's
exceedingly wrong to do a thing like that, you only frighten people
to death.  You can't want new-dug graves daily.  There are not
enough white men in the whole place to keep the institution up."
"We do," he replied, "at any rate at this season.  Why, the other
day we had two white men to bury before twelve o'clock, and at four,
another dropped in on a steamer."

"At 4.30," said a companion, an exceedingly accurate member of the
staff.  "How you fellows DO exaggerate!"  Subsequent knowledge of
the Gold Coast has convinced me fully that the extra funeral being
placed half-an-hour sooner than it occurred is the usual percentage
of exaggeration you will be able to find in stories relating to the
local mortality.  And at Accra, after I left it, and all along the
Gold Coast, came one of those dreadful epidemic outbursts sweeping
away more than half the white population in a few weeks.

But to return to our state journey along the Christiansborg road.
We soon reached the castle, an exceedingly roomy and solid edifice
built by the Danes, and far better fitted for the climate than our
modern dwellings, in spite of our supposed advance in tropical
hygiene.  We entered by the sentry-guarded great gate into the
courtyard; on the right hand were the rest of the guard; most of
them asleep on their mats, but a few busy saying Dhikr, etc.,
towards Mecca, like the good Mohammedans these Haussas are, others
winding themselves into their cummerbunds.  On the left hand was Sir
Brandford Griffiths' hobby--a choice and select little garden, of
lovely eucharis lilies mostly in tubs, and rare and beautiful
flowers brought by him from his Barbadian home; while shading it and
the courtyard was a fine specimen of that superb thing of beauty--a
flamboyant tree--glorious with its delicate-green acacia-like leaves
and vermilion and yellow flowers, and astonishing with its vast
beans.  A flight of stone stairs leads from the courtyard to the
upper part of the castle where the living rooms are, over the
extensive series of cool tunnel-like slave barracoons, now used as
store chambers.  The upper rooms are high and large, and full of a
soft pleasant light and the thunder of the everlasting surf breaking
on the rocky spit on which the castle is built.

From the day the castle was built, now more than a hundred years
ago, the surf spray has been swept by the on-shore evening breeze
into every chink and cranny of the whole building, and hence the
place is mouldy--mouldy to an extent I, with all my experience in
that paradise for mould, West Africa, have never elsewhere seen.
The matting on the floors took an impression of your foot as a light
snowfall would.  Beneath articles of furniture the cryptogams
attained a size more in keeping with the coal period than with the
nineteenth century.

The Gold Coast is one of the few places in West Africa that I have
never felt it my solemn duty to go and fish in.  I really cannot say
why.  Seen from the sea it is a pleasant looking land.  The long
lines of yellow, sandy beach backed by an almost continuous line of
blue hills, which in some places come close to the beach, in other
places show in the dim distance.  It is hard to think that it is so
unhealthy as it is, from just seeing it as you pass by.  It has high
land and has not those great masses of mangrove-swamp one usually,
at first, associates with a bad fever district, but which prove on
acquaintance to be at any rate no worse than this well-elevated
open-forested Gold Coast land.  There are many things to be had here
and in Lagos which tend to make life more tolerable, that you cannot
have elsewhere until you are south of the Congo.  Horses, for
example, do fairly well at Accra, though some twelve miles or so
behind the town there is a belt of tsetse fly, specimens of which I
have procured and had identified at the British Museum, and it is
certain death to a horse, I am told, to take it to Aburi.

The food-supply, although bad and dear, is superior to that you get
down south.  Goats and sheep are fairly plentiful.  In addition to
fresh meat and tinned you are able to get a quantity of good sea
fish, for the great West African Bank, which fringes the coast in
the Bight of Benin, abounds in fish, although the native cook very
rarely knows how to cook them.  Then, too, you can get more fruit
and vegetables on the Gold Coast than at most places lower down:
the plantain, {28} not least among them and very good when allowed
to become ripe, and then cut into longitudinal strips, and properly
fried; the banana, which surpasses it when served in the same
manner, or beaten up and mixed with rice, butter, and eggs, and
baked.  Eggs, by the way, according to the great mass of native
testimony, are laid in this country in a state that makes them more
fit for electioneering than culinary purposes, and I shall never
forget one tribe I was once among, who, whenever I sat down on one
of their benches, used to smash eggs round me for ju-ju.  They meant
well.  But I will nobly resist the temptation to tell egg stories
and industriously catalogue the sour-sop, guava, grenadilla,
aubergine or garden-egg, yam, and sweet potato.

The sweet potato should be boiled, and then buttered and browned in
an oven, or fried.  When cooked in either way I am devoted to them,
but in the way I most frequently come across them I abominate them,
for they jeopardise my existence both in this world and the next.
It is this way:  you are coming home from a long and dangerous
beetle-hunt in the forest; you have battled with mighty beetles the
size of pie dishes, they have flown at your head, got into your hair
and then nipped you smartly.  You have been also considerably stung
and bitten by flies, ants, etc., and are most likely sopping wet
with rain, or with the wading of streams, and you are tired and your
feet go low along the ground, and it is getting, or has got, dark
with that ever-deluding tropical rapidity, and then you for your
sins get into a piece of ground which last year was a native's farm,
and, placing one foot under the tough vine of a surviving sweet
potato, concealed by rank herbage, you plant your other foot on
another portion of the same vine.  Your head you then deposit
promptly in some prickly ground crop, or against a tree stump, and
then, if there is human blood in you, you say d--n!

Then there are also alligator-pears, limes, and oranges.  There is
something about those oranges I should like to have explained.  They
are usually green and sweetish in taste, nor have they much white
pith, but now and again you get a big bright yellow one from those
trees that have been imported, and these are very pithy and in full
possession of the flavour of verjuice.  They have also got the papaw
on the Coast, the Carica papaya of botanists.  It is an insipid
fruit.  To the newcomer it is a dreadful nuisance, for no sooner
does an old coaster set eyes on it than he straightway says, "Paw-
paws are awfully good for the digestion, and even if you just hang a
tough fowl or a bit of goat in the tree among the leaves, it gets
tender in no time, for there is an awful lot of pepsine in a paw-
paw,"--which there is not, papaine being its active principle.
After hearing this hymn of praise to the papaw some hundreds of
times, it palls, and you usually arrive at this tired feeling about
the thing by the time you reach the Gold Coast, for it is a most
common object, and the same man will say the same thing about it a
dozen times a day if he gets the chance.  I got heartily sick of it
on my first voyage out, and rashly determined to check the old
coaster in this habit of his, preparatory to stamping the practice
out.  It was one of my many failures.  I soon met an old coaster
with a papaw fruit in sight, and before he had time to start, I
boldly got away with "The paw-paw is awfully good for the
digestion," hoping that this display of knowledge would impress him
and exempt me from hearing the rest of the formula.  But no.  "Right
you are," said he solemnly.  "It's a powerful thing is the paw-paw.
Why, the other day we had a sad case along here.  You know what a
nuisance young assistants are, bothering about their chop, and
scorpions in their beds and boots, and what not and a half, and
then, when you have pulled them through these, and often enough
before, pegging out with fever, or going on the fly in the native
town.  Did you know poor B---?  Well! he's dead now, had fever and
went off like a babe in eight hours though he'd been out fourteen
years for A--- and D---.  They sent him out a new book-keeper, a
tender young thing with a dairymaid complexion and the notion that
he'd got the indigestion.  He fidgeted about it something awful.
One night there was a big paw-paw on the table for evening chop, and
so B---, who was an awfully good chap, told him about how good it
was for the digestion.  The book-keeper said his trouble always came
on two hours after eating, and asked if he might take a bit of the
thing to his room.  'Certainly,' says B---, and as the paw-paw
wasn't cut at that meal the book-keeper quietly took it off whole
with him.

"In the morning time he did not turn up.  B---, just before
breakfast, went to his room and he wasn't there, but he noticed the
paw-paw was on the bed and that was all, so he thought the book-
keeper must have gone for a walk, being, as it were, a bit too
tender to have gone on the fly as yet.  So he just told the store
clerk to tell the people to return him to the firm when they found
him straying around lost, and thought no more about it, being, as it
was, mail-day, and him busy.

"Well!  Fortunately the steward boy put that paw-paw on the table
again for twelve o'clock chop.  If it hadn't been for that, not a
living soul would have known the going of the book-keeper.  For when
B--- cut it open, there, right inside it, were nine steel trouser-
buttons, a Waterbury watch, and the poor young fellow's keys.  For
you see, instead of his digesting his dinner with that paw-paw, the
paw-paw took charge and digested him, dinner and all, and when B---
interrupted it, it was just getting a grip on the steel things.
There's an awful lot of pepsine in a paw-paw, and if you hang, etc.,
etc."

I collapsed, feebly murmuring that it was very interesting, but sad
for the poor young fellow's friends.

"Not necessarily," said the old coaster.  So he had the last word,
and never again will I attempt to alter the ways of the genuine old
coaster.  What you have got to do with him is to be very thankful
you have had the honour of knowing him.

Still I think we do over-estimate the value of the papaw, although I
certainly did once myself hang the leg of a goat no mortal man could
have got tooth into, on to a papaw tree with a bit of string for the
night.  In the morning it was clean gone, string and all; but
whether it was the pepsine, the papaine, or a purloining pagan that
was the cause of its departure there was no evidence to show.  Yet I
am myself, as Hans Breitmann says, "still skebdigal" as to the
papaw, and I dare say you are too.

But I must forthwith stop writing about the Gold Coast, or I shall
go on telling you stories and wasting your time, not to mention the
danger of letting out those which would damage the nerves of the
cultured of temperate climes, such as those relating to the youth
who taught himself French from a six months' method book; of the man
who wore brass buttons; the moving story of three leeches and two
gentlemen; the doctor up a creek; and the reason why you should not
eat pork along here because all the natives have either got the
guinea-worm, or kraw-kraw or ulcers; and then the pigs go and--dear
me! it was a near thing that time.  I'll leave off at once.



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 primaeval 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
Thome (6,913 ft.); and Anno Bom (1,350 ft.).  San Thome and Principe
are Portuguese possessions, Fernando Po and Anno Bom Spanish, and
they are all exceedingly unhealthy.  San Thome 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 degree cooler than its neighbour.

The shores of San Thome 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 Thome, 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 Thome, 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 Thome, 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 amanha for Eternity itself,
for I have frequently done so.

The greatest length of the island lies N.E. and S.W., and amounts to
thirty-three miles; the mean breadth is seventeen miles.  The port,
Clarence Cove, now called Santa Isabel by the Spaniards--who have
been giving Spanish names to all the English-named places without
any one taking much notice of them--is a very remarkable place, and
except perhaps Gaboon the finest harbour on the West Coast.  The
point that brings Gaboon anchorage up in line with Clarence Cove is
its superior healthiness; for Clarence is a section of a circle, and
its shores are steep rocky cliffs from 100 to 200 feet high, and the
place, to put it very mildly, exceedingly hot and stuffy.  The cove
is evidently a partly submerged crater, the submerged rim of the
crater is almost a perfect semi-circle seawards--having on it 4, 5,
7, 8, and 10 fathoms of water save almost in the centre of the arc
where there is a passage with 12 to 14 fathoms.  Inside, in the
crater, there is deeper water, running in places from 30 to 45
fathoms, and outside the submerged rim there is deeper water again,
but rocky shoals abound.  On the top of the shore cliffs stands the
dilapidated little town of Clarence, on a plateau that falls away
slightly towards the mountain for about a mile, when the ground
commences to rise into the slopes of the Cordillera.  On the narrow
beach, tucked close against the cliffs, are a few stores belonging
to the merchants, where goods are placed on landing, and there is a
little pier too, but as it is usually having something done to its
head, or else is closed by the authorities because they intend doing
something by and by, the chances are against its being available for
use.  Hence it usually comes about that you have to land on the
beach, and when you have done this you make your way up a very steep
path, cut in the cliffside, to the town.  When you get there you
find yourself in the very dullest town I know on the Coast.  I
remember when I first landed in Clarence I found its society in a
flutter of expectation and alarm not untinged with horror.
Clarence, nay, the whole of Fernando Po, was about to become so
rackety and dissipated as to put Paris and Monte Carlo to the blush.
Clarence was going to have a cafe; and what was going to go on in
that cafe I shrink from reciting.

I have little hesitation now in saying this alarm was a false one.
When I next arrived in Clarence it was just as sound asleep and its
streets as weed-grown as ever, although the cafe was open.  My idea
is that the sleepiness of the place infected the cafe and took all
the go out of it.  But again it may have been that the inhabitants
were too well guarded against its evil influence, for there are on
the island fifty-two white laymen, and fifty-four priests to take
charge of them {44}--the extra two being, I presume, to look after
the Governor's conduct, although this worthy man made a most
spirited protest against this view when I suggested it to him; and
in addition to the priests there are several missionaries of the
Methodist mission, and also a white gentleman who has invented a new
religion.  Anyhow, the cafe smoulders like a damp squib.

When you spend the day on shore and when, having exhausted the
charms of the town,--a thing that usually takes from between ten
minutes to a quarter of an hour,--you apply to an inhabitant for
advice as to the disposal of the rest of your shore leave, you are
told to "go and see the coals."  You say you have not come to
tropical islands to see a coal heap, and applying elsewhere for
advice you probably get the same.  So, as you were told to "go and
see the coals" when you left your ship, you do as you are bid.
These coals, the remnant of the store that was kept here for the
English men-of-war, were left here when the naval station was
removed.  The Spaniards at first thought of using them, and ran a
tram-way from Clarence to them.  But when the tramway was finished,
their activity had run out too, and to this day there the coals
remain.  Now and again some one has the idea that they are quite
good, and can be used for a steamer, and some people who have tried
them say they are all right, and others say they are all wrong.  And
so the end of it will be that some few thousand years hence there
will be a serious quarrel among geologists on the strange pocket of
coal on Fernando Po, and they will run up continents, and raise and
lower oceans to explain them, and they will doubtless get more
excitement and pleasure out of them than you can nowadays.

The history of the English occupation of Fernando Po seems often
misunderstood, and now and then one hears our Government reviled for
handing it over to the Spaniards.  But this was unavoidable, for we
had it as a loan from Spain in 1827 as a naval station for our
ships, at that time energetically commencing to suppress the slave
trade in the Bights; the idea being that this island would afford a
more healthy and convenient spot for a naval depot than any port on
the coast itself.

More convenient Fernando Po certainly was, but not more healthy, and
ever since 1827 it has been accumulating for itself an evil
reputation for unhealthiness which is only languishing just at
present because there is an interval between its epidemics--fever in
Fernando Po, even more than on the mainland, having periodic
outbursts of a more serious type than the normal intermittent and
remittent of the Coast.  Moreover, Fernando Po shares with Senegal
the undoubted yet doubtful honour of having had regular yellow
fever.  In 1862 and 1866 this disease was imported by a ship that
had come from Havana.  Since then it has not appeared in the
definite South American form, and therefore does not seem to have
obtained the foothold it has in Senegal, where a few years ago all
the money voted for the keeping of the Fete Nationale was in one
district devoted by public consent to the purchase of coffins,
required by an overwhelming outbreak of Yellow Jack.

In 1858 the Spanish Government thinking, presumably, that the slave
trade was suppressed enough, or at any rate to a sufficiently
inconvenient extent, re-claimed Fernando Po, to the horror of the
Baptist missionaries who had settled in Clarence apparently under
the erroneous idea that the island had been definitely taken over by
the English.  This mission had received from the West African
Company a large grant of land, and had collected round it a
gathering of Sierra Leonians and other artisan and trading Africans
who were attracted to Clarence by the work made by the naval
station; and these people, with the English traders who also settled
here for a like reason, were the founders of Clarence Town.  The
declaration of the Spanish Government stating that only Roman
Catholic missions would be countenanced caused the Baptists to
abandon their possessions and withdraw to the mainland in Ambas Bay,
where they have since remained, and nowadays Protestantism is
represented by a Methodist Mission which has a sub-branch on the
mainland on the Akwayafe River and one on the Qua Ibo.

The Spaniards, on resuming possession of the island, had one of
their attacks of activity regarding it, and sent out with Don Carlos
Chacon, who was to take over the command, four Jesuit priests, a
secretary, a commissariat officer, a custom-house clerk, and a
transport, the Santa Maria, with a number of emigrant families.
This attempt to colonise Fernando Po should have at least done the
good of preventing such experiments ever being tried again with
women and children, for of these unfortunate creatures--for whom, in
spite of its being the wet season, no houses had been provided--more
than 20 per cent. died in the space of five months.  Mr. Hutchinson,
who was English Consul at the time, tells us that "In a very short
time gaunt figures of men, women, and children might be seen
crawling through the streets, with scarcely an evidence of life in
their faces, save the expression of a sort of torpid carelessness as
to how soon it might be their turn to drop off and die.  The
Portino, a steamer, carried back fifty of them to Cadiz, who looked
when they embarked more like living skeletons of skin and bone than
animated human beings." {47}  I quote this not to cast reproach on
the Spanish Government, but merely to give a fact, a case in point,
of the deadly failure of endeavours to colonise on the West Coast, a
thing which is even now occasionally attempted, always with the same
sad results, though in most cases these attempts are now made by
religious but misinformed people under Bishop Taylor's mission.

The Spaniards did not entirely confine their attention to planting
colonists in a ready-made state on the island.  As soon as they had
settled themselves and built their barracks and Government House,
they set to work and cleared away the bush for an area of from four
to six miles round the town.  The ground soon became overgrown
again, but this clearing is still perceptible in the different type
of forest on it, and has enabled the gardens and little plantations
round Clarence to be made more easily.  My Spanish friends assure me
that the Portuguese, who discovered the island in 1471, {48a} and
who exchanged it and Anno Bom in 1778 to the Spaniards for the
little island of Catalina and the colony of Sacramento in South
America, did not do anything to develop it.  When they, the
Spaniards, first entered into possession they at once set to work to
colonise and clear.  Then the colonisation scheme went to the bad,
the natives poisoned the wells, it is said, and the attention of the
Spaniards was in those days turned, for some inscrutable reason, to
the eastern shores of the island--a district now quite abandoned by
whites, on account of its unhealthiness--and they lost in addition
to the colonists a terrible quantity of their sailors, in Concepcion
Bay. {48b}  A lull then followed, and the Spaniards willingly lent
the place to the English as aforesaid.  They say we did nothing
except establish Clarence as a headquarters, which they consider to
have been a most excellent enterprise, and import the Baptist
Mission, which they hold as a less estimable undertaking; but there!
that's nothing to what the Baptist Mission hold regarding the
Spaniards.  For my own part, I wish the Spaniards better luck this
time in their activity, for in directing it to plantations they are
on a truer and safer road to wealth than they have been with their
previous importations of Cuban political prisoners and ready-made
families of colonists, and I hope they will send home those
unfortunate wretches they have there now, and commence, in their
expected two years, to reap the profits of the coffee and cocoa.
Certainly the chances are that they may, for the soil of Fernando Po
is of exceeding fertility; Mr. Hutchinson says he has known Indian
corn planted here on a Monday evening make its appearance four
inches above ground on the following Wednesday morning, within a
period, he carefully says, of thirty-six hours.  I have seen this
sort of thing over in Victoria, but I like to get a grown, strong
man, and a Consul of Her Britannic Majesty, to say it for me.

Having discoursed at large on the various incomers to Fernando Po we
may next turn to the natives, properly so-called, the Bubis.  These
people, although presenting a series of interesting problems to the
ethnologist, both from their insular position, and their
differentiation from any of the mainland peoples, are still but
little known.  To a great extent this has arisen from their
exclusiveness, and their total lack of enthusiasm in trade matters,
a thing that differentiates them more than any other characteristic
from the mainlanders, who, young and old, men and women, regard
trade as the great affair of life, take to it as soon as they can
toddle, and don't even leave it off at death, according to their own
accounts of the way the spirits of distinguished traders still
dabble and interfere in market matters.  But it is otherwise with
the Bubi.  A little rum, a few beads, and finish--then he will turn
the rest of his attention to catching porcupines, or the beautiful
little gazelles, gray on the back, and white underneath, with which
the island abounds.  And what time he may have on hand after this,
he spends in building houses and making himself hats.  It is only
his utterly spare moments that he employs in making just sufficient
palm oil from the rich supply of nuts at his command to get that rum
and those beads of his.  Cloth he does not want; he utterly fails to
see what good the stuff is, for he abhors clothes.  The Spanish
authorities insist that the natives who come into the town should
have something on, and so they array themselves in a bit of cotton
cloth, which before they are out of sight of the town on their
homeward way, they strip off and stuff into their baskets, showing
in this, as well as in all other particulars, how uninfluencible by
white culture they are.  For the Spaniards, like the Portuguese, are
great sticklers for clothes and insist on their natives wearing
them--usually with only too much success.  I shall never forget the
yards and yards of cotton the ladies of Loanda wore; and not content
with making cocoons of their bodies, they wore over their heads, as
a mantilla, some dozen yards or so of black cloth into the bargain.
Moreover this insistence on drapery for the figure is not merely for
towns; a German officer told me the other day that when, a week or
so before, his ship had called at Anno Bom, they were simply
besieged for "clo', clo', clo';" the Anno Bomians explaining that
they were all anxious to go across to Principe and get employment on
coffee plantations, but that the Portuguese planters would not
engage them in an unclothed state.

You must not, however, imagine that the Bubi is neglectful of his
personal appearance.  In his way he is quite a dandy.  But his idea
of decoration goes in the direction of a plaster of "tola" pomatum
over his body, and above all a hat.  This hat may be an antique
European one, or a bound-round handkerchief, but it is more
frequently a confection of native manufacture, and great taste and
variety are displayed in its make.  They are of plaited palm leaf--
that's all you can safely generalise regarding them--for sometimes
they have broad brims, sometimes narrow, sometimes no brims at all.
So, too, with the crown.  Sometimes it is thick and domed, sometimes
non-existent, the wearer's hair aglow with red-tail parrots'
feathers sticking up where the crown should be.  As a general rule
these hats are much adorned with oddments of birds' plumes, and one
chief I knew had quite a Regent-street Dolly Varden creation which
he used to affix to his wool in a most intelligent way with bonnet-
pins made of wood.  These hats are also a peculiarity of the Bubi,
for none of the mainlanders care a row of pins for hats, except "for
dandy," to wear occasionally, whereas the Bubi wears his
perpetually, although he has by no means the same amount of sun to
guard against owing to the glorious forests of his island.

For earrings the Bubi wears pieces of wood stuck through the lobe of
the ear, and although this is not a decorative habit still it is
less undecorative than that of certain mainland friends of mine in
this region, who wear large and necessarily dripping lumps of fat in
their ears and in their hair.  His neck is hung round with jujus on
strings--bits of the backbones of pythons, teeth, feathers, and
antelope horns, and occasionally a bit of fat in a bag.  Round his
upper arm are bracelets, preferably made of ivory got from the
mainland, for celluloid bracelets carefully imported for his benefit
he refuses to look at.  Often these bracelets are made of beads, or
a circlet of leaves, and when on the war-path an armlet of twisted
grass is always worn by the men.  Men and women alike wear armlets,
and in the case of the women they seem to be put on when young, for
you see puffs of flesh growing out from between them.  They are not
entirely for decoration, serving also as pockets, for under them men
stick a knife, and women a tobacco pipe, a well-coloured clay.
Leglets of similar construction are worn just under the knee on the
right leg, while around the body you see belts of tshibbu, small
pieces cut from Achatectonia shells, which form the native currency
of the island.  These shells are also made into veils worn by the
women at their wedding.

This native coinage-equivalent is very interesting, for such things
are exceedingly rare in West Africa.  The only other instance I
personally know of a tribe in this part of the world using a native-
made coin is that of the Fans, who use little bundles of imitation
axe-heads.  Dr. Oscar Baumann, who knows more than any one else
about these Bubis, thinks, I believe, that these bits of
Achatectonia shells may have been introduced by the runaway Angola
slaves in the old days, who used to fly from their Portuguese owners
on San Thome to the Spaniards on Fernando Po.  The villages of the
Bubis are in the forest in the interior of the island, and they are
fairly wide apart.  They are not a sea-beach folk, although each
village has its beach, which merely means the place to which it
brings its trade, these beaches being usually the dwelling places of
the so-called Portos, {51} negroes, who act as middle-men between
the Bubis and the whites.

You will often be told that the Bubis are singularly bad house-
builders, indeed that they make no definite houses at all, but only
rough shelters of branches.  This is, however, a mistake.  Shelters
of this kind that you come across are merely the rough huts put up
by hunters, not true houses.  The village is usually fairly well
built, and surrounded with a living hedge of stakes.  The houses
inside this are four-cornered, the walls made of logs of wood stuck
in edgeways, and surmounted by a roof of thatch pitched at an
extremely stiff angle, and the whole is usually surrounded with a
dug-out drain to carry off surface water.  These houses, as usual on
the West Coast, are divisible into two classes--houses of assembly,
and private living houses.  The first are much the larger.  The
latter are very low, and sometimes ridiculously small, but still
they are houses and better than those awful Loango grass affairs you
get on the Congo.

Herr Baumann says that the houses high up on the mountain have
double walls between which there is a free space; an arrangement
which may serve to minimise the extreme draughtiness of an ordinary
Bubi house--a very necessary thing in these relatively chilly upper
regions.  I may remark on my own account that the Bubi villages do
not often lie right on the path, but, like those you have to deal
with up the Calabar, some little way off it.  This is no doubt for
the purpose of concealing their whereabouts from strangers, and it
does it successfully too, for many a merry hour have I spent dodging
up and down a path trying to make out at what particular point it
was advisable to dive into the forest thicket to reach a village.
But this cultivates habits of observation, and a short course of
this work makes you recognise which tree is which along miles of a
bush path as easily as you would shops in your own street at home.

The main interest of the Bubi's life lies in hunting, for he is more
of a sportsman than the majority of mainlanders.  He has not any big
game to deal with, unless we except pythons--which attain a great
size on the island--and crocodiles.  Elephants, though plentiful on
the adjacent mainland, are quite absent from Fernando Po, as are
also hippos and the great anthropoid apes; but of the little
gazelles, small monkeys, porcupines, and squirrels he has a large
supply, and in the rivers a very pretty otter (Lutra poensis) with
yellow brown fur often quite golden underneath; a creature which is,
I believe, identical with the Angola otter.

The Bubis use in their hunting flint-lock guns, but chiefly traps
and nets, and, I am told, slings.  The advantage of these latter
methods are, I expect, the same as on the mainland, where a
distinguished sportsman once told me:  "You go shoot thing with gun.
Berrah well--but you no get him thing for sure.  No, sah.  Dem gun
make nize.  Berrah well.  You fren hear dem nize and come look him,
and you hab to go share what you done kill.  Or bad man hear him
nize, and he come look him, and you no fit to get share--you fit to
get kill yusself.  Chii! chii! traps be best."  I urged that the
traps might also be robbed.  "No, sah," says he, "them bian (charm)
he look after them traps, he fit to make man who go tief swell up
and bust."

The Bubis also fish, mostly by basket traps, but they are not
experts either in this or in canoe management.  Their chief sea-
shore sport is hunting for the eggs of the turtles who lay in the
sand from August to October.  These eggs--about 200 in each nest--
are about the size of a billiard-ball, with a leathery envelope, and
are much valued for food, as are also the grubs of certain beetles
got from the stems of the palm-trees, and the honey of the wild bees
which abound here.

Their domestic animals are the usual African list; cats, dogs,
sheep, goats, and poultry.  Pigs there are too, very domestic in
Clarence and in a wild state in the forest.  These pigs are the
descendants of those imported by the Spaniards, and not long ago
became such an awful nuisance in Clarence that the Government issued
instructions that all pigs without rings in their noses--i.e. all in
a condition to grub up back gardens--should be forthwith shot if
found abroad.  This proclamation was issued by the governmental
bellman thus: --"I say--I say--I say--I say.  Suppose pig walk--iron
no live for him nose!  Gun shoot.  Kill him one time.  Hear re! hear
re!"

However a good many pigs with no iron living in their noses got
adrift and escaped into the interior, and have flourished like the
green bay-tree, destroying the Bubi's plantation and eating his
yams, while the Bubi retaliating kills and eats them.  So it's a
drawn battle, for the Bubi enjoys the pig and the pig enjoys the
yams, which are of singular excellence in this island and celebrated
throughout the Bight.  Now, I am told, the Government are firmly
discouraging the export of these yams, which used to be quite a
little branch of Fernando Po trade, in the hope that this will
induce the native to turn his attention to working in the coffee and
cacao plantations.  Hope springs eternal in the human breast, for
the Bubi has shown continually since the 16th century that he takes
no interest in these things whatsoever.  Now and again a man or
woman will come voluntarily and take service in Clarence, submit to
clothes, and rapidly pick up the ways of a house or store.  And just
when their owner thinks he owns a treasure, and begins to boast that
he has got an exception to all Bubidom, or else that he knows how to
manage them better than other men, then a hole in that man's
domestic arrangements suddenly appears.  The Bubi has gone, without
giving a moment's warning, and without stealing his master's
property, but just softly and silently vanished away.  And if hunted
up the treasure will be found in his or her particular village--
clothes-less, comfortable, utterly unconcerned, and unaware that he
or she has lost anything by leaving Clarence and Civilisation.  It
is this conduct that gains for the Bubi the reputation of being a
bigger idiot than he really is.

For West Africans their agriculture is of a fairly high description-
-the noteworthy point about it, however, is the absence of manioc.
Manioc is grown on Fernando Po, but only by the Portos.  The Bubi
cultivated plants are yams (Dioscorea alata), koko (Colocasia
esculenta--the taro of the South Seas,) and plantains.  Their farms
are well kept, particularly those in the grass districts by San
Carlos Bay.  The yams of the Cordillera districts are the best
flavoured, but those of the east coast the largest.  Palm-oil is
used for domestic purposes in the usual ways, and palm wine both
fresh and fermented is the ordinary native drink.  Rum is held in
high esteem, but used in a general way in moderation as a cordial
and a treat, for the Bubi is, like the rest of the West African
natives, by no means an habitual drunkard.  Gin he dislikes. {55}

And I may remark you will find the same opinion in regard to the
Dualla in Cameroons river--on the undeniable authority of Dr.
Buchner, and my own extensive experience of the West Coast bears it
out.

Physically the Bubis are a fairly well-formed race of medium height;
they are decidedly inferior to the Benga or the Krus, but quite on a
level with the Effiks.  The women indeed are very comely:  their
colour is bronze and their skin the skin of the Bantu.  Beards are
not uncommon among the men, and these give their faces possibly more
than anything else, a different look to the faces of the Effiks or
the Duallas.  Indeed the people physically most like the Bubis that
I have ever seen, are undoubtedly the Bakwiri of Cameroons Mountain,
who are also liable to be bearded, or possibly I should say more
liable to wear beards, for a good deal of the African hairlessness
you hear commented on--in the West African at any rate--arises from
his deliberately pulling his hair out--his beard, moustache,
whiskers, and, occasionally, as among the Fans, his eyebrows.

Dr. Baumann, the great authority on the Bubi language says it is a
Bantu stock. {56}  I know nothing of it myself save that it is harsh
in sound.  Their method of counting is usually by fives but they are
notably weak in arithmetical ability, differing in this particular
from the mainlanders, and especially from their Negro neighbours,
who are very good at figures, surpassing the Bantu in this, as
indeed they do in most branches of intellectual activity.

But the most remarkable instance of inferiority the Bubis display is
their ignorance regarding methods of working iron.  I do not know
that iron in a native state is found on Fernando Po, but scrap-iron
they have been in touch with for some hundreds of years.  The
mainlanders are all cognisant of native methods of working iron,
although many tribes of them now depend entirely on European trade
for their supply of knives, etc., and this difference between them
and the Bubis would seem to indicate that the migration of the
latter to the island must have taken place at a fairly remote
period, a period before the iron-working tribes came down to the
coast.  Of course, if you take the Bubi's usual explanation of his
origin, namely that he came out of the crater on the top of Clarence
Peak, this argument falls through; but he has also another legend,
one moreover which is likewise to be found upon the mainland, which
says he was driven from the district north of the Gaboon estuary by
the coming of the M'pongwe to the coast, and as this legend is the
more likely of the two I think we may accept it as true, or nearly
so.  But what adds another difficulty to the matter is that the Bubi
is not only unlearned in iron lore, but he was learned in stone, and
up to the time of the youth of many Porto-negroes on Fernando Po, he
was making and using stone implements, and none of the tribes within
the memory of man have done this on the mainland.  It is true that
up the Niger and about Benin and Axim you get polished stone celts,
but these are regarded as weird affairs,--thunderbolts--and suitable
only for grinding up and making into medicine; there is no trace in
the traditions of these places, as far as I have been able to find,
of any time at which stone implements were in common use, and
certainly the M'pongwe have not been a very long time on the coast,
for their coming is still remembered in their traditions.  The Bubi
stone implements I have seen twice, but on neither occasion could I
secure one, and although I have been long promised specimens from
Fernando Po, I have not yet received them.  They are difficult to
procure, because none of the present towns are on really old sites,
the Bubi, like most Bantus, moving pretty frequently, either because
the ground is witched, demonstrated by outbreaks of sickness, or
because another village-full of his fellow creatures, or a horrid
white man plantation-making, has come too close to him.  A Roman
Catholic priest in Ka Congo once told me a legend he laughed much
over, of how a fellow priest had enterprisingly settled himself one
night in the middle of a Bubi village with intent to devote the
remainder of his life to quietly but thoroughly converting it.  Next
morning, when he rose up, he found himself alone, the people having
taken all their portable possessions and vanished to build another
village elsewhere.  The worthy Father spent some time chivying his
flock about the forest, but in vain, and he returned home disgusted,
deciding that the Creator, for some wise purpose, had dedicated the
Bubis to the Devil.

The spears used by this interesting people are even to this day made
entirely of wood, and have such a Polynesian look about them that I
intend some time or other to bring some home and experiment on that
learned Polynesian-culture-expert, Baron von Hugel, with them: --
intellectually experiment, not physically, pray understand.

The pottery has a very early-man look about it, but in this it does
not differ much from that of the mainland, which is quite as poor,
and similarly made without a wheel, and sun-baked.  Those pots of
the Bubis I have seen have, however, not had the pattern (any sort
of pattern does, and it need not be carefully done) that runs round
mainland pots to "keep their souls in"--i.e. to prevent their
breaking up on their own account.

The basket-work of the Bubis is of a superior order:  the baskets
they make to hold the palm oil are excellent, and will hold water
like a basin, but I am in doubt whether this art is original, or
imported by the Portuguese runaway slaves, for they put me very much
in mind of those made by my old friends the Kabinders, from whom a
good many of those slaves were recruited.  I think there is little
doubt that several of the musical instruments own this origin,
particularly their best beloved one, the elibo.  This may be
described as a wooden bell having inside it for clappers several
(usually five) pieces of stick threaded on a bit of wood jammed into
the dome of the bell and striking the rim, beyond which the clappers
just protrude.  These bells are very like those you meet with in
Angola, but I have not seen on the island, nor does Dr. Baumann cite
having seen, the peculiar double bell of Angola--the engongui.  The
Bubi bell is made out of one piece of wood and worked--or played--
with both hands.  Dr. Baumann says it is customary on bright
moonlight nights for two lines of men to sit facing each other and
to clap--one can hardly call it ring--these bells vigorously, but in
good time, accompanying this performance with a monotonous song,
while the delighted women and children dance round.  The learned
doctor evidently sees the picturesqueness of this practice, but
notes that the words of the songs are not "tiefsinnige" (profound),
as he has heard men for hours singing "The shark bites the Bubi's
hand," only that over and over again and nothing more.  This agrees
with my own observations of all Bantu native songs.  I have always
found that the words of these songs were either the repetition of
some such phrase as this, or a set of words referring to the recent
adventures or experiences of the singer or the present company's
little peculiarities; with a very frequent chorus, old and
conventional.

The native tunes used with these songs are far superior, and I
expect many of them are very old.  They are often full of variety
and beauty, particularly those of the M'pongwe and Igalwa, of which
I will speak later.

The dances I have no personal knowledge of, but there is nothing in
Baumann's description to make one think they are distinct in
themselves from the mainland dances.  I once saw a dance at Fernando
Po, but that was among Portos, and it was my old friend the Batuco
in all its beauty.  But there is a distinct peculiarity about the
places the dances are held on, every village having a kept piece of
ground outside it which is the dancing place for the village--the
ball-room as it were; and exceedingly picturesque these dances must
be, for they are mostly held during the nights of full moon.  These
kept grounds remind one very much of the similar looking patches of
kept grass one sees in villages in Ka Congo, but there is no
similarity in their use, for the Ka Congo lawns are of fetish, not
frivolous, import.

The Bubis have an instrument I have never seen in an identical form
on the mainland.  It is made like a bow, with a tense string of
fibre.  One end of the bow is placed against the mouth, and the
string is then struck by the right hand with a small round stick,
while with the left it is scraped with a piece of shell or a knife-
blade.  This excruciating instrument, I warn any one who may think
of living among the Bubis, is very popular.  The drums used are both
the Dualla form--all wood--and the ordinary skin-covered drum, and I
think if I catalogue fifes made of wood, I shall have nearly
finished the Bubi orchestra.  I have doubts on this point because I
rather question whether I may be allowed to refer to a very old
bullock hide--unmounted--as a musical instrument without bringing
down the wrath of musicians on my head.  These stiff, dry pelts are
much thought of, and played by the artistes by being shaken as
accompaniments to other instruments--they make a noise, and that is
after all the soul of most African instrumental music.  These
instruments are all that is left of certain bullocks which many
years ago the Spaniards introduced, hoping to improve the food
supply.  They seemed as if they would have flourished well on the
island, on the stretches of grass land in the Cordillera and the
East, but the Bubis, being great sportsmen, killed them all off.

The festivities of the Bubis--dances, weddings, feasts, etc.,--at
which this miscellaneous collection of instruments are used in
concert, usually take place in November, the dry season; but the
Bubi is liable to pour forth his soul in the bosom of his family at
any time of the day or night, from June to January, and when he
pours it forth on that bow affair it makes the lonely European long
for home.

Divisions of time the Bubi can hardly be said to have, but this is a
point upon which all West Africans are rather weak, particularly the
Bantu.  He has, however, a definite name for November, December, and
January--the dry season months--calling them Lobos.

The Fetish of these people, although agreeing on broad lines with
the Bantu Fetish, has many interesting points, as even my small
knowledge of it showed me, and it is a subject that would repay
further investigation; and as by fetish I always mean the governing
but underlying ideas of a man's life, we will commence with the
child.  Nothing, as far as I have been able to make out, happens to
him, for fetish reasons, when he first appears on the scene.  He
receives at birth, as is usual, a name which is changed for another
on his initiation into the secret society, this secret society
having also, as usual, a secret language.  About the age of three or
five years the boy is decorated, under the auspices of the witch
doctor, with certain scars on the face.  These scars run from the
root of the nose across the cheeks, and are sometimes carried up in
a curve on to the forehead.

Tattooing, in the true sense of the word, they do not use much, but
they paint themselves, as the mainlanders do, with a red paint made
by burning some herb and mixing the ash with clay or oil, and they
occasionally--whether for ju-ju reasons or for mere decoration I do
not know--paint a band of yellow clay round the chest; but of the
Bubi secret society I know little, nor have I been able to find any
one who knows much more.  Hutchinson, {61} in his exceedingly
amusing description of a wedding he was once present at among these
people, would lead one to think the period of seclusion of the
women's society was twelve months.

The chief god or spirit, O Wassa, resides in the crater of the
highest peak, and by his name the peak is known to the native.
Another very important spirit, to whom goats and sheep are offered,
is Lobe, resident in a crater lake on the northern slope of the
Cordilleras, and the grass you sometimes see a Bubi wearing is said
to come from this lake and be a ju-ju of Lobe's.  Dr. Baumann says
that the lake at Riabba from which the spirit Uapa rises is more
holy, and that he is small, and resides in a chasm in a rock whose
declivity can only be passed by means of bush ropes, and in the wet
season he is not get-at-able at all.  He will, if given suitable
offerings, reveal the future to Bubis, but Bubis only.  His priest
is the King of all the Bubis, upon whom it is never permitted to a
white man, or a Porto, to gaze.  Baumann also gives the residence of
another important spirit as being the grotto at Banni.  This is a
sea-cave, only accessible at low water in calm weather.  I have
heard many legends of this cave, but have never had an opportunity
of seeing it, or any one who has seen it first hand.

The charms used by these people are similar in form to those of the
mainland Bantu, but the methods of treating paths and gateways are
somewhat peculiar.  The gateways to the towns are sometimes covered
by freshly cut banana leaves, and during the religious feast in
November, the paths to the villages are barred across with a hedge
of grass which no stranger must pass through.

The government is a peculiar one for West Africa.  Every village has
its chief, but the whole tribe obey one great chief or king who
lives in the crater-ravine at Riabba.  This individual is called
Moka, but whether he is now the same man referred to by Rogoszinsky,
Mr. Holland, and the Rev. Hugh Brown, who attempted to interview him
in the seventies, I do not feel sure, for the Bubis are just the
sort of people to keep a big king going with a variety of
individuals.  Even the indefatigable Dr. Baumann failed to see Moka,
though he evidently found out a great deal about the methods of his
administration and formed a very high opinion of his ability, for he
says that to this one chief the people owe their present unity and
orderliness; that before his time the whole island was in a state of
internecine war:  murder was frequent, and property unsafe.  Now
their social condition, according to the Doctor's account, is a
model to Europe, let alone Africa.  Civil wars have been abolished,
disputes between villages being referred to arbitration, and murder
is swiftly and surely punished.  If the criminal has bolted into the
forest and cannot be found, his village is made responsible, and has
to pay a fine in goats, sheep and tobacco to the value of 16 pounds.
Theft is extremely rare and offences against the moral code also,
the Bubis having an extremely high standard in this matter, even the
little children having each a separate sleeping hut.  In old days
adultery was punished by cutting off the offender's hand.  I have
myself seen women in Fernando Po who have had a hand cut off at the
wrist, but I believe those were slave women who had suffered for
theft.  Slaves the Bubis do have, but their condition is the mild,
poor relation or retainer form of slavery you find in Calabar, and
differs from the Dualla form, for the slaves live in the same
villages as their masters, while among the Duallas, as among most
Bantu slave-holding tribes, the slaves are excluded from the
master's village and have separate villages of their own.  For
marriage ceremonies I refer you to Mr. Hutchinson.  Burial customs
are exceedingly quaint in the southern and eastern districts, where
the bodies are buried in the forest with their heads just sticking
out of the ground.  In other districts the body is also buried in
the forest, but is completely covered and an erection of stones put
up to mark the place.

Little is known of all West African fetish, still less of that of
these strange people.  Dr. Oscar Baumann brought to bear on them his
careful unemotional German methods of observation, thereby giving us
more valuable information about them and their island than we
otherwise should possess.  Mr. Hutchinson resided many years on
Fernando Po, in the capacity of H. B. M.'s Consul, with his hands
full of the affairs of the Oil Rivers and in touch with the Portos
of Clarence, but he nevertheless made very interesting observations
on the natives and their customs.  The Polish exile and his
courageous wife who ascended Clarence Peak, Mr. Rogoszinsky, and
another Polish exile, Mr. Janikowski, about complete our series of
authorities on the island.  Dr. Baumann thinks they got their
information from Porto sources--sources the learned Doctor evidently
regards as more full of imagination than solid fact, but, as you
know, all African travellers are occasionally in the habit of pooh-
poohing each other, and I own that I myself have been chiefly in
touch with Portos, and that my knowledge of the Bubi language runs
to the conventional greeting form: --"Ipori?"  "Porto."  "Ke Soko?'"
"Hatsi soko": --"Who are you?"  "Porto."  "What's the news?"  "No
news."

Although these Portos are less interesting to the ethnologist than
the philanthropist, they being by-products of his efforts, I must
not leave Fernando Po without mentioning them, for on them the trade
of the island depends.  They are the middlemen between the Bubi and
the white trader.  The former regards them with little, if any, more
trust than he regards the white men, and his view of the position of
the Spanish Governor is that he is chief over the Portos.  That he
has any headship over Bubis or over the Bubi land--Itschulla as he
calls Fernando Po--he does not imagine possible.  Baumann says he
was once told by a Bubi:  "White men are fish, not men.  They are
able to stay a little while on land, but at last they mount their
ships again and vanish over the horizon into the ocean.  How can a
fish possess land?"  If the coffee and cacao thrive on Fernando Po
to the same extent that they have already thriven on San Thome there
is but little doubt that the Bubis will become extinct; for work on
plantations, either for other people, or themselves, they will not,
and then the Portos will become the most important class, for they
will go in for plantations.  Their little factories are studded all
round the shores of the coast in suitable coves and bays, and here
in fairly neat houses they live, collecting palm-oil from the Bubis,
and making themselves little cacao plantations, and bringing these
products into Clarence every now and then to the white trader's
factory.  Then, after spending some time and most of their money in
the giddy whirl of that capital, they return to their homes and
recover.  There is a class of them permanently resident in Clarence,
the city men of Fernando Po, and these are very like the Sierra
Leonians of Free Town, but preferable.  Their origin is practically
the same as that of the Free Towners.  They are the descendants of
liberated slaves set free during the time of our occupation of the
island as a naval depot for suppressing the slave trade, and of
Sierra Leonians and Accras who have arrived and settled since then.
They have some of the same "Black gennellum, Sar" style about them,
but not developed to the same ridiculous extent as in the Sierra
Leonians, for they have not been under our institutions.  The "Nanny
Po" ladies are celebrated for their beauty all along the West Coast,
and very justly.  They are not however, as they themselves think,
the most beautiful women in this part of the world.  Not at least to
my way of thinking.  I prefer an Elmina, or an Igalwa, or a
M'pongwe, or--but I had better stop and own that my affections have
got very scattered among the black ladies on the West Coast, and I
no sooner remember one lovely creature whose soft eyes, perfect form
and winning, pretty ways have captivated me than I think of another.
The Nanny Po ladies have often a certain amount of Spanish blood in
them, which gives a decidedly greater delicacy to their features--
delicate little nostrils, mouths not too heavily lipped, a certain
gloss on the hair, and a light in the eye.  But it does not improve
their colour, and I am assured that it has an awful effect on their
tempers, so I think I will remain, for the present, the faithful
admirer of my sable Ingramina, the Igalwa, with the little red
blossoms stuck in her night-black hair, and a sweet soft look and
word for every one, but particularly for her ugly husband Isaac the
"Jack Wash."



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 Francais as a merchant, and to Congo Francais
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 Ogowe 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.

My main aim in going to Congo Francais was to get up above the tide
line of the Ogowe River and there collect fishes; for my object on
this voyage was to collect fish from a river north of the Congo.  I
had hoped this river would have been the Niger, for Sir George
Goldie had placed at my disposal great facilities for carrying on
work there in comfort; but for certain private reasons I was
disinclined to go from the Royal Niger Protectorate into the Royal
Niger Company's territory; and the Calabar, where Sir Claude
MacDonald did everything he possibly could to assist me, I did not
find a good river for me to collect fishes in.  These two rivers
failing me, from no fault of either of their own presiding genii, my
only hope of doing anything now lay on the South West Coast river,
the Ogowe, and everything there depended on Mr. Hudson's attitude
towards scientific research in the domain of ichthyology.
Fortunately for me that gentleman elected to take a favourable view
of this affair, and in every way in his power assisted me during my
entire stay in Congo Francais.  But before I enter into a detailed
description of this wonderful bit of West Africa, I must give you a
brief notice of the manners, habits and customs of West Coast rivers
in general, to make the thing more intelligible.

There is an uniformity in the habits of West Coast rivers, from the
Volta to the Coanza, which is, when you get used to it, very taking.
Excepting the Congo, the really great river comes out to sea with as
much mystery as possible; lounging lazily along among its mangrove
swamps in a what's-it-matter-when-one-comes-out and where's-the-
hurry style, through quantities of channels inter-communicating with
each other.  Each channel, at first sight as like the other as peas
in a pod, is bordered on either side by green-black walls of
mangroves, which Captain Lugard graphically described as seeming "as
if they had lost all count of the vegetable proprieties, and were
standing on stilts with their branches tucked up out of the wet,
leaving their gaunt roots exposed in midair."  High-tide or low-
tide, there is little difference in the water; the river, be it
broad or narrow, deep or shallow, looks like a pathway of polished
metal; for it is as heavy weighted with stinking mud as water e'er
can be, ebb or flow, year out and year in.  But the difference in
the banks, though an unending alternation between two appearances,
is weird.

At high-water you do not see the mangroves displaying their ankles
in the way that shocked Captain Lugard.  They look most respectable,
their foliage rising densely in a wall irregularly striped here and
there by the white line of an aerial root, coming straight down into
the water from some upper branch as straight as a plummet, in the
strange, knowing way an aerial root of a mangrove does, keeping the
hard straight line until it gets some two feet above water-level,
and then spreading out into blunt fingers with which to dip into the
water and grasp the mud.  Banks indeed at high water can hardly be
said to exist, the water stretching away into the mangrove swamps
for miles and miles, and you can then go, in a suitable small canoe,
away among these swamps as far as you please.

This is a fascinating pursuit.  But it is a pleasure to be indulged
in with caution; for one thing, you are certain to come across
crocodiles.  Now a crocodile drifting down in deep water, or lying
asleep with its jaws open on a sand-bank in the sun, is a
picturesque adornment to the landscape when you are on the deck of a
steamer, and you can write home about it and frighten your relations
on your behalf; but when you are away among the swamps in a small
dug-out canoe, and that crocodile and his relations are awake--a
thing he makes a point of being at flood tide because of fish coming
along--and when he has got his foot upon his native heath--that is
to say, his tail within holding reach of his native mud--he is
highly interesting, and you may not be able to write home about him-
-and you get frightened on your own behalf; for crocodiles can, and
often do, in such places, grab at people in small canoes.  I have
known of several natives losing their lives in this way; some native
villages are approachable from the main river by a short cut, as it
were, through the mangrove swamps, and the inhabitants of such
villages will now and then go across this way with small canoes
instead of by the constant channel to the village, which is almost
always winding.  In addition to this unpleasantness you are liable--
until you realise the danger from experience, or have native advice
on the point--to get tide-trapped away in the swamps, the water
falling round you when you are away in some deep pool or lagoon, and
you find you cannot get back to the main river.  Of course if you
really want a truly safe investment in Fame, and really care about
Posterity, and Posterity's Science, you will jump over into the
black batter-like, stinking slime, cheered by the thought of the
terrific sensation you will produce 20,000 years hence, and the care
you will be taken of then by your fellow-creatures, in a museum.
But if you are a mere ordinary person of a retiring nature, like me,
you stop in your lagoon until the tide rises again; most of your
attention is directed to dealing with an "at home" to crocodiles and
mangrove flies, and with the fearful stench of the slime round you.
What little time you have over you will employ in wondering why you
came to West Africa, and why, after having reached this point of
folly, you need have gone and painted the lily and adorned the rose,
by being such a colossal ass as to come fooling about in mangrove
swamps.

Still, even if your own peculiar tastes and avocations do not take
you in small dug-out canoes into the heart of the swamps, you can
observe the difference in the local scenery made by the flowing of
the tide when you are on a vessel stuck on a sand-bank, in the Rio
del Rey for example.  Moreover, as you will have little else to
attend to, save mosquitoes and mangrove flies, when in such a
situation, you may as well pursue the study.  At the ebb gradually
the foliage of the lower branches of the mangroves grows wet and
muddy, until there is a great black band about three feet deep above
the surface of the water in all directions; gradually a network of
gray-white roots rises up, and below this again, gradually, a slope
of smooth and lead-grey slime.  The effect is not in the least as if
the water had fallen, but as if the mangroves had, with one accord,
risen up out of it, and into it again they seem silently to sink
when the flood comes.  But by this more safe, if still unpleasant,
method of observing mangrove-swamps, you miss seeing in full the
make of them, for away in their fastnesses the mangroves raise their
branches far above the reach of tide line, and the great gray roots
of the older trees are always sticking up in mid-air.  But, fringing
the rivers, there is always a hedge of younger mangroves whose lower
branches get immersed.

At corners here and there from the river face you can see the land
being made from the waters.  A mud-bank forms off it, a mangrove
seed lights on it, and the thing's done.  Well! not done, perhaps,
but begun; for if the bank is high enough to get exposed at low
water, this pioneer mangrove grows.  He has a wretched existence
though.  You have only got to look at his dwarfed attenuated form to
see this.  He gets joined by a few more bold spirits and they
struggle on together, their network of roots stopping abundance of
mud, and by good chance now and then a consignment of miscellaneous
debris of palm leaves, or a floating tree-trunk, but they always die
before they attain any considerable height.  Still even in death
they collect.  Their bare white stems remaining like a net gripped
in the mud, so that these pioneer mangrove heroes may be said to
have laid down their lives to make that mud-bank fit for
colonisation, for the time gradually comes when other mangroves can
and do colonise on it, and flourish, extending their territory
steadily; and the mud-bank joins up with, and becomes a part of,
Africa.

Right away on the inland fringe of the swamp--you may go some
hundreds of miles before you get there--you can see the rest of the
process.  The mangroves there have risen up, and dried the mud to an
extent that is more than good for themselves, have over civilised
that mud in fact, and so the brackish waters of the tide--which,
although their enemy when too deep or too strong in salt, is
essential to their existence--cannot get to their roots.  They have
done this gradually, as a mangrove does all things, but they have
done it, and down on to that mud come a whole set of palms from the
old mainland, who in their early colonisation days go through
similarly trying experiences.  First the screw-pines come and live
among them; then the wine-palm and various creepers, and then the
oil-palm; and the debris of these plants being greater and making
better soil than dead mangroves, they work quicker and the mangrove
is doomed.  Soon the salt waters are shut right out, the mangrove
dies, and that bit of Africa is made.  It is very interesting to get
into these regions; you see along the river-bank a rich, thick,
lovely wall of soft-wooded plants, and behind this you find great
stretches of death;--miles and miles sometimes of gaunt white
mangrove skeletons standing on gray stuff that is not yet earth and
is no longer slime, and through the crust of which you can sink into
rotting putrefaction.  Yet, long after you are dead, buried, and
forgotten, this will become a forest of soft-wooded plants and
palms; and finally of hard-wooded trees.  Districts of this
description you will find in great sweeps of Kama country for
example, and in the rich low regions up to the base of the Sierra
del Cristal and the Rumby range.

You often hear the utter lifelessness of mangrove-swamps commented
on; why I do not know, for they are fairly heavily stocked with
fauna, though the species are comparatively few.  There are the
crocodiles, more of them than any one wants; there are quantities of
flies, particularly the big silent mangrove-fly which lays an egg in
you under the skin; the egg becomes a maggot and stays there until
it feels fit to enter into external life.  Then there are "slimy
things that crawl with legs upon a slimy sea," and any quantity of
hopping mud-fish, and crabs, and a certain mollusc, and in the water
various kinds of cat-fish.  Birdless they are save for the flocks of
gray parrots that pass over them at evening, hoarsely squarking; and
save for this squarking of the parrots the swamps are silent all the
day, at least during the dry season; in the wet season there is no
silence night or day in West Africa, but that roar of the descending
deluge of rain that is more monotonous and more gloomy than any
silence can be.  In the morning you do not hear the long, low,
mellow whistle of the plantain-eaters calling up the dawn, nor in
the evening the clock-bird nor the Handel-Festival-sized choruses of
frogs, or the crickets, that carry on their vesper controversy of
"she did"--"she didn't" so fiercely on hard land.

But the mangrove-swamp follows the general rule for West Africa, and
night in it is noisier than the day.  After dark it is full of
noises; grunts from I know not what, splashes from jumping fish, the
peculiar whirr of rushing crabs, and quaint creaking and groaning
sounds from the trees; and--above all in eeriness--the strange whine
and sighing cough of crocodiles.

Great regions of mangrove-swamps are a characteristic feature of the
West African Coast.  The first of these lies north of Sierra Leone;
then they occur, but of smaller dimensions--just fringes of river-
outfalls--until you get to Lagos, when you strike the greatest of
them all: --the swamps of the Niger outfalls (about twenty-three
rivers in all) and of the Sombreiro, New Calabar, Bonny, San
Antonio, Opobo (false and true), Kwoibo, Old Calabar (with the Cross
Akwayafe Qwa Rivers) and Rio del Rey Rivers.  The whole of this
great stretch of coast is a mangrove-swamp, each river silently
rolling down its great mass of mud-laden waters and constituting
each in itself a very pretty problem to the navigator by its network
of intercommunicating creeks, and the sand and mud bar which it
forms off its entrance by dropping its heaviest mud; its lighter mud
is carried out beyond its bar and makes the nasty-smelling brown
soup of the South Atlantic Ocean, with froth floating in lines and
patches on it, for miles to seaward.

In this great region of swamps every mile appears like every other
mile until you get well used to it, and are able to distinguish the
little local peculiarities at the entrance of the rivers and in the
winding of the creeks, a thing difficult even for the most
experienced navigator to do during those thick wool-like mists
called smokes, which hang about the whole Bight from November till
May (the dry season), sometimes lasting all day, sometimes clearing
off three hours after sunrise.

The upper or north-westerly part of the swamp is round the mouths of
the Niger, and it successfully concealed this fact from geographers
down to 1830, when the series of heroic journeys made by Mungo Park,
Clapperton, and the two Landers finally solved the problem--a
problem that was as great and which cost more men's lives than even
the discovery of the sources of the Nile.

That this should have been so may seem very strange to us who now
have been told the answer to the riddle; for the upper waters of
this great river were known of before Christ and spoken of by
Herodotus, Pliny and Ptolemy, and its mouths navigated continuously
along by the seaboard by trading vessels since the fifteenth
century, but they were not recognised as belonging to the Niger.
Some geographers held that the Senegal or the Gambia was its
outfall; others that it was the Zaire (Congo); others that it did
not come out on the West Coast at all, but got mixed up with the
Nile in the middle of the continent, and so on.  Yet when you come
to know the swamps this is not so strange.  You find on going up
what looks like a big river--say Forcados, two and a half miles wide
at the entrance and a real bit of the Niger.  Before you are up it
far great, broad, business-like-looking river entrances open on
either side, showing wide rivers mangrove-walled, but two-thirds of
them are utter frauds which will ground you within half an hour of
your entering them.  Some few of them do communicate with other main
channels to the great upper river, and others are main channels
themselves; but most of them intercommunicate with each other and
lead nowhere in particular, and you can't even get there because of
their shallowness.  It is small wonder that the earlier navigators
did not get far up them in sailing ships, and that the problem had
to be solved by men descending the main stream of the Niger before
it commences to what we in Devonshire should call "squander itself
about" in all these channels.  And in addition it must be remembered
that the natives with whom these trading vessels dealt, first for
slaves, afterwards for palm-oil, were not, and are not now, members
of the Lo family of savages.  Far from it:  they do not go in for
"gentle smiles," but for murdering any unprotected boat's crew they
happen to come across, not only for a love of sport but to keep
white traders from penetrating to the trade-producing interior, and
spoiling prices.  And the region is practically foodless.

The rivers of the great mangrove-swamp from the Sombreiro to the Rio
del Rey are now known pretty surely not to be branches of the Niger,
but the upper regions of this part of the Bight are much neglected
by English explorers.  I believe the great swamp region of the Bight
of Biafra is the greatest in the world, and that in its immensity
and gloom it has a grandeur equal to that of the Himalayas.

Take any man, educated or not, and place him on Bonny or Forcados
River in the wet season on a Sunday--Bonny for choice.  Forcados is
good.  You'll keep Forcados scenery "indelibly limned on the tablets
of your mind when a yesterday has faded from its page," after you
have spent even a week waiting for the Lagos branch-boat on its inky
waters.  But Bonny!  Well, come inside the bar and anchor off the
factories:  seaward there is the foam of the bar gleaming and wicked
white against a leaden sky and what there is left of Breaker Island.
In every other direction you will see the apparently endless walls
of mangrove, unvarying in colour, unvarying in form, unvarying in
height, save from perspective.  Beneath and between you and them lie
the rotting mud waters of Bonny River, and away up and down river,
miles of rotting mud waters fringed with walls of rotting mud
mangrove-swamp.  The only break in them--one can hardly call it a
relief to the scenery--are the gaunt black ribs of the old hulks,
once used as trading stations, which lie exposed at low water near
the shore, protruding like the skeletons of great unclean beasts who
have died because Bonny water was too strong even for them.

Raised on piles from the mud shore you will see the white-painted
factories and their great store-houses for oil; each factory likely
enough with its flag at half-mast, which does not enliven the
scenery either, for you know it is because somebody is "dead again."
Throughout and over all is the torrential downpour of the wet-season
rain, coming down night and day with its dull roar.  I have known it
rain six mortal weeks in Bonny River, just for all the world as if
it were done by machinery, and the interval that came then was only
a few wet days, where-after it settled itself down to work again in
the good West Coast waterspout pour for more weeks.

While your eyes are drinking in the characteristics of Bonny scenery
you notice a peculiar smell--an intensification of that smell you
noticed when nearing Bonny, in the evening, out at sea.  That's the
breath of the malarial mud, laden with fever, and the chances are
you will be down to-morrow.  If it is near evening time now, you can
watch it becoming incarnate, creeping and crawling and gliding out
from the side creeks and between the mangrove-roots, laying itself
upon the river, stretching and rolling in a kind of grim play, and
finally crawling up the side of the ship to come on board and leave
its cloak of moisture that grows green mildew in a few hours over
all.  Noise you will not be much troubled with:  there is only that
rain, a sound I have known make men who are sick with fever well-
nigh mad, and now and again the depressing cry of the curlews which
abound here.  This combination is such that after six or eight hours
of it you will be thankful to hear your shipmates start to work the
winch.  I take it you are hard up when you relish a winch.  And you
will say--let your previous experience of the world be what it may--
Good Heavens, what a place!

Five times have I been now in Bonny River and I like it.  You always
do get to like it if you live long enough to allow the strange
fascination of the place to get a hold on you; but when I first
entered it, on a ship commanded by Captain Murray in '93, in the wet
season, i.e. in August, in spite of the confidence I had by this
time acquired in his skill and knowledge of the West Coast, a sense
of horror seized on me as I gazed upon the scene, and I said to the
old Coaster who then had charge of my education, "Good Heavens! what
an awful accident.  We've gone and picked up the Styx."  He was
evidently hurt and said, "Bonny was a nice place when you got used
to it," and went on to discourse on the last epidemic here, when
nine men out of the resident eleven died in about ten days from
yellow fever.  Next to the scenery of "a River," commend me for
cheerfulness to the local conversation of its mangrove-swamp region;
and every truly important West African river has its mangrove-swamp
belt, which extends inland as far as the tide waters make it
brackish, and which has a depth and extent from the banks depending
on the configuration of the country.  Above this belt comes
uniformly a region of high forest, having towards the river frontage
clay cliffs, sometimes high, as in the case of the Old Calabar at
Adiabo, more frequently dwarf cliffs, as in the Forcados up at
Warree, and in the Ogowe,--for a long stretch through Kama country.
After the clay cliffs region you come to a region of rapids, caused
by the river cutting its way through a mountain range; such ranges
are the Pallaballa, causing the Livingstone rapids of the Congo; the
Sierra del Cristal, those of the Ogowe, and many lesser rivers; the
Rumby and Omon ranges, those of the Old Calabar and Cross Rivers.

Naturally in different parts these separate regions vary in size.
The mangrove-swamp may be only a fringe at the mouth of the river,
or it may cover hundreds of square miles.  The clay cliffs may
extend for only a mile or so along the bank, or they may, as on the
Ogowe, extend for 130.  And so it is also with the rapids:  in some
rivers, for instance the Cameroons, there are only a few miles of
them, in others there are many miles; in the Ogowe there are as many
as 500; and these rapids may be close to the river mouth, as in most
of the Gold Coast rivers, save the Ancobra and the Volta; or they
may be far in the interior, as in the Cross River, where they
commence at about 200 miles; and on the Ogowe, where they commence
at about 208 miles from the sea coast; this depends on the nearness
or remoteness from the coast line of the mountain ranges which run
down the west side of the continent; ranges (apparently of very
different geological formations), which have no end of different
names, but about which little is known in detail. {80}

And now we will leave generalisations on West African rivers and go
into particulars regarding one little known in England, and called
by its owners, the French, the greatest strictly equatorial river in
the world--the Ogowe.



CHAPTER IV.  THE OGOWE.



Wherein the voyager gives extracts from the Log of the Move and of
the Eclaireur, 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 Francais, and, thanks to the kindness of Mr.
Hudson, I was allowed a passage on a small steamer then running from
Gaboon to the Ogowe 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 Ogowe set of experiences in the form of
diary.

June 5th, 1895.--Off on Move at 9.30.  Passengers, Mr. Hudson, Mr.
Woods, Mr. Huyghens, Pere 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 Move 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
Move 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 Ogowe.  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 Move's screw.  Just about six o'clock, we run up to the Fallaba,
the Move's predecessor in working the Ogowe, 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
Ogowe 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 Move 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 Ogowe 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 Ogowe, 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 Move 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 Ogowe,
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 Move seem an island of life in a land of
death.  I retired into my cabin, so as to get under the mosquito
curtains to write; and one by one I heard my companions come into
the saloon adjacent, and say to the watchman:  "You sabe six
o'clock?  When them long arm catch them place, and them short arm
catch them place, you call me in the morning time."  Exit from
saloon--silence--then:  "You sabe five o'clock?  When them long arm
catch them place, and them short arm catch them place, you call me
in the morning time."  Exit--silence--then:  "You sabe half-past
five o'clock?  When them long arm--"  Oh, if I were a watchman!
Anyhow, that five o'clocker will have the whole ship's company
roused in the morning time.

June 7th.--Every one called in the morning time by the reflex row
from the rousing of the five o'clocker.  Glorious morning.  The
scene the reversal of that of last night.  The forest to the east
shows a deep blue-purple, mounted on a background that changes as
you watch it from daffodil and amethyst to rose-pink, as the sun
comes up through the night mists.  The moon sinks down among them,
her pale face flushing crimson as she goes; and the yellow-gold
sunshine comes, glorifying the forest and gilding the great sweep of
tufted papyrus growing alongside the bank; and the mist vanishes,
little white flecks of it lingering among the water reeds and lying
in the dark shadows of the forest stems.  The air is full of the
long, soft, rich notes of the plantain warblers, and the uproar
consequent upon the Move taking on fuel wood, which comes alongside
in canoe loads from the Fallaba.

Pere Steinitz and Mr. Woods are busy preparing their respective
canoes for their run to Fernan Vaz through the creek.  Their canoes
are very fine ones, with a remarkably clean run aft.  The Pere's is
quite the travelling canoe, with a little stage of bamboo aft,
covered with a hood of palm thatch, under which you can make
yourself quite comfortable, and keep yourself and your possessions
dry, unless something desperate comes on in the way of rain.

By 10.25 we have got all our wood aboard, and run off up river full
speed.  The river seems broader above the Fallaba, but this is
mainly on account of its being temporarily unencumbered with
islands.  A good deal of the bank we have passed by since leaving
Nazareth Bay on the south side has been island shore, with a channel
between the islands and the true south bank.

The day soon grew dull, and looked threatening, after the delusive
manner of the dry season.  The climbing plants are finer here than I
have ever before seen them.  They form great veils and curtains
between and over the trees, often hanging so straight and flat, in
stretches of twenty to forty feet or so wide, and thirty to sixty or
seventy feet high, that it seems incredible that no human hand has
trained or clipped them into their perfect forms.  Sometimes these
curtains are decorated with large bell-shaped, bright-coloured
flowers, sometimes with delicate sprays of white blossoms.  This
forest is beyond all my expectations of tropical luxuriance and
beauty, and it is a thing of another world to the forest of the
Upper Calabar, which, beautiful as it is, is a sad dowdy to this.
There you certainly get a great sense of grimness and vastness; here
you have an equal grimness and vastness with the addition of superb
colour.  This forest is a Cleopatra to which Calabar is but a
Quaker.  Not only does this forest depend on flowers for its
illumination, for there are many kinds of trees having their young
shoots, crimson, brown-pink, and creamy yellow:  added to this there
is also the relieving aspect of the prevailing fashion among West
African trees, of wearing the trunk white with here and there upon
it splashes of pale pink lichen, and vermilion-red fungus, which
alone is sufficient to prevent the great mass of vegetation from
being a monotony in green.

All day long we steam past ever-varying scenes of loveliness whose
component parts are ever the same, yet the effect ever different.
Doubtless it is wrong to call it a symphony, yet I know no other
word to describe the scenery of the Ogowe.  It is as full of life
and beauty and passion as any symphony Beethoven ever wrote:  the
parts changing, interweaving, and returning.  There are leit motifs
here in it, too.  See the papyrus ahead; and you know when you get
abreast of it you will find the great forest sweeping away in a bay-
like curve behind it against the dull gray sky, the splendid columns
of its cotton and red woods looking like a facade of some limitless
inchoate temple.  Then again there is that stretch of sword-grass,
looking as if it grew firmly on to the bottom, so steady does it
stand; but as the Move goes by, her wash sets it undulating in waves
across its broad acres of extent, showing it is only riding at
anchor; and you know after a grass patch you will soon see a red
dwarf clay cliff, with a village perched on its top, and the
inhabitants thereof in their blue and red cloths standing by to
shout and wave to the Move, or legging it like lamp-lighters from
the back streets and the plantation to the river frontage, to be in
time to do so, and through all these changing phases there is always
the strain of the vast wild forest, and the swift, deep, silent
river.

At almost every village that we pass--and they are frequent after
the Fallaba--there is an ostentatious display of firewood deposited
either on the bank, or on piles driven into the mud in front of it,
mutely saying in their uncivilised way, "Try our noted chunks:  best
value for money"--(that is to say, tobacco, etc.), to the Move or
any other little steamer that may happen to come along hungry for
fuel.

We stayed a few minutes this afternoon at Ashchyouka, where there
came off to us in a canoe an enterprising young Frenchman who has
planted and tended a coffee plantation in this out-of-the-way
region, and which is now, I am glad to hear, just coming into
bearing.  After leaving Ashchyouka, high land showed to the N.E.,
and at 5.15, without evident cause to the uninitiated, the Move took
to whistling like a liner.  A few minutes later a factory shows up
on the hilly north bank, which is Woermann's; then just beyond and
behind it we see the Government Post; then Hatton and Cookson's
factory, all in a line.  Opposite Hatton and Cookson's there was a
pretty little stern-wheel steamer nestling against the steep clay
bank of Lembarene Island when we come in sight, but she instantly
swept out from it in a perfect curve, which lay behind her marked in
frosted silver on the water as she dropt down river.  I hear now she
was the Eclaireur, the stern-wheeler which runs up and down the
Ogowe in connection with the Chargeurs Reunis Company, subsidised by
the Government, and when the Move whistled, she was just completing
taking on 3,000 billets of wood for fuel.  She comes up from the
Cape (Lopez) stoking half wood and half coal as far as Njole and
back to Lembarene; from Lembarene to the sea downwards she does on
wood.  In a few minutes we have taken her berth close to the bank,
and tied up to a tree.  The white engineer yells to the black
engineer "Tom-Tom:  Haul out some of them fire and open them drains
one time," and the stokers, with hooks, pull out the glowing logs on
to the iron deck in front of the furnace door, and throw water over
them, and the Move sends a cloud of oil-laden steam against the
bank, coming perilously near scalding some of her black admirers
assembled there.  I dare say she felt vicious because they had been
admiring the Eclaireur.

After a few minutes, I am escorted on to the broad verandah of
Hatton and Cookson's factory, and I sit down under a lamp, prepared
to contemplate, until dinner time, the wild beauty of the scene.
This idea does not get carried out; in the twinkling of an eye I am
stung all round the neck, and recognise there are lots too many
mosquitoes and sandflies in the scenery to permit of contemplation
of any kind.  Never have I seen sandflies and mosquitoes in such
appalling quantities.  With a wild ping of joy the latter made for
me, and I retired promptly into a dark corner of the verandah,
swearing horribly, but internally, and fought them.  Mr. Hudson,
Agent-general, and Mr. Cockshut, Agent for the Ogowe, walk up and
down the beach in front, doubtless talking cargo, apparently
unconscious of mosquitoes; but by and by, while we are having
dinner, they get their share.  I behave exquisitely, and am quite
lost in admiration of my own conduct, and busily deciding in my own
mind whether I shall wear one of those plain ring haloes, or a solid
plate one, a la Cimabue, when Mr. Hudson says in a voice full of
reproach to Mr. Cockshut, "You have got mosquitoes here, Mr.
Cockshut."  Poor Mr. Cockshut doesn't deny it; he has got four on
his forehead and his hands are sprinkled with them, but he says:
"There are none at Njole," which we all feel is an absurdly lame
excuse, for Njole is some ninety miles above Lembarene, where we now
are.  Mr. Hudson says this to him, tersely, and feeling he has
utterly crushed Mr. Cockshut, turns on me, and utterly failing to
recognise me as a suffering saint, says point blank and savagely,
"You don't seem to feel these things, Miss Kingsley."  Not feel
them, indeed!  Why, I could cry over them.  Well! that's all the
thanks one gets for trying not to be a nuisance in this world.

After dinner I go back on to the Move for the night, for it is too
late to go round to Kangwe and ask Mme. Jacot, of the Mission
Evangelique, if she will take me in.  The air is stiff with
mosquitoes, and saying a few suitable words to them, I dash under
the mosquito bar and sleep, lulled by their shrill yells of baffled
rage.

June 8th.--In the morning, up at five.  Great activity on beach.
Move synchronously taking on wood fuel and discharging cargo.  A
very active young French pastor from the Kangwe mission station is
round after the mission's cargo.  Mr. Hudson kindly makes inquiries
as to whether I may go round to Kangwe and stay with Mme. Jacot.  He
says:  "Oh, yes," but as I find he is not M. Jacot, I do not feel
justified in accepting this statement without its having personal
confirmation from Mme. Jacot, and so, leaving my luggage with the
Move, I get them to allow me to go round with him and his cargo to
Kangwe, about three-quarters of an hour's paddle round the upper
part of Lembarene Island, and down the broad channel on the other
side of it.  Kangwe is beautifully situated on a hill, as its name
denotes, on the mainland and north bank of the river.  Mme. Jacot
most kindly says I may come, though I know I shall be a fearful
nuisance, for there is no room for me save M. Jacot's beautifully
neat, clean, tidy study.  I go back in the canoe and fetch my
luggage from the Move; and say good-bye to Mr. Hudson, who gave me
an immense amount of valuable advice about things, which was
subsequently of great use to me, and a lot of equally good warnings
which, if I had attended to, would have enabled me to avoid many, if
not all, my misadventures in Congo Francais.

I camped out that night in M. Jacot's study, wondering how he would
like it when he came home and found me there; for he was now away on
one of his usual evangelising tours.  Providentially Mme. Jacot let
me have the room that the girls belonging to the mission school
usually slept in, to my great relief, before M. Jacot came home.

I will not weary you with my diary during my first stay at Kangwe.
It is a catalogue of the collection of fish, etc., that I made, and
a record of the continuous, never-failing kindness and help that I
received from M. and Mme. Jacot, and of my attempts to learn from
them the peculiarities of the region, the natives, and their
language and customs, which they both know so well and manage so
admirably.  I daily saw there what it is possible to do, even in the
wildest and most remote regions of West Africa, and recognised that
there is still one heroic form of human being whose praise has never
adequately been sung, namely, the missionary's wife.

Wishing to get higher up the Ogowe, I took the opportunity of the
river boat of the Chargeurs Reunis going up to the Njole on one of
her trips, and joined her.

June 22nd.--Eclaireur, charming little stern wheel steamer,
exquisitely kept.  She has an upper and a lower deck.  The lower
deck for business, the upper deck for white passengers only.  On the
upper deck there is a fine long deck-house, running almost her whole
length.  In this are the officers' cabins, the saloon and the
passengers' cabins (two), both large and beautifully fitted up.
Captain Verdier exceedingly pleasant and constantly saying "N'est-ce
pas?"  A quiet and singularly clean engineer completes the white
staff.

The passengers consist of Mr. Cockshut, going up river to see after
the sub-factories; a French official bound for Franceville, which it
will take him thirty-six days, go as quick as he can, in a canoe
after Njole; a tremendously lively person who has had black water
fever four times, while away in the bush with nothing to live on but
manioc, a diet it would be far easier to die on under the
circumstances.  He is excellent company; though I do not know a word
he says, he is perpetually giving lively and dramatic descriptions
of things which I cannot but recognise.  M. S---, with his pince-
nez, the Doctor, and, above all, the rapids of the Ogowe, rolling
his hands round and round each other and clashing them forward with
a descriptive ejaculation of "Whish, flash, bum, bum, bump," and
then comes what evidently represents a terrific fight for life
against terrific odds.  Wish to goodness I knew French, for wishing
to see these rapids, I cannot help feeling anxious and worried at
not fully understanding this dramatic entertainment regarding them.
There is another passenger, said to be the engineer's brother, a
quiet, gentlemanly man.  Captain argues violently with every one;
with Mr. Cockshut on the subject of the wicked waste of money in
keeping the Move and not shipping all goods by the Eclaireur,
"N'est-ce pas?" and with the French official on goodness knows what,
but I fancy it will be pistols for two and coffee for one in the
morning time.  When the captain feels himself being worsted in
argument, he shouts for support to the engineer and his brother.
"N'est-ce pas?" he says, turning furiously to them.  "Oui, oui,
certainement," they say dutifully and calmly, and then he, refreshed
by their support, dashes back to his controversial fray.  He even
tries to get up a row with me on the subject of the English
merchants at Calabar, whom he asserts have sworn a kind of blood
oath to ship by none but British and African Company's steamers.  I
cannot stand this, for I know my esteemed and honoured friends the
Calabar traders would ship by the Flying Dutchman or the Devil
himself if either of them would take the stuff at 15 shillings the
ton.  We have, however, to leave off this row for want of language,
to our mutual regret, for it would have been a love of a fight.

Soon after leaving Lembarene Island, we pass the mouth of the chief
southern affluent of the Ogowe, the Ngunie; it flows in
unostentatiously from the E.S.E., a broad, quiet river here with low
banks and two islands (Walker's Islands) showing just off its
entrance.  Higher up, it flows through a mountainous country, and at
Samba, its furthest navigable point, there is a wonderfully
beautiful waterfall, the whole river coming down over a low cliff,
surrounded by an amphitheatre of mountains.  It takes the Eclaireur
two days steaming from the mouth of the Ngunie to Samba, when she
can get up; but now, in the height of the long dry season neither
she nor the Move can go because of the sandbanks; so Samba is cut
off until next October.  Hatton and Cookson have factories up at
Samba, for it is an outlet for the trade of Achango land in rubber
and ivory, a trade worked by the Akele tribe, a powerful, savage and
difficult lot to deal with, and just in the same condition, as far
as I can learn, as they were when Du Chaillu made his wonderful
journeys among them.  While I was at Lembarene, waiting for the
Eclaireur, a notorious chief descended on a Ngunie sub-factory, and
looted it.  The wife of the black trading agent made a gallant
resistance, her husband was away on a trading expedition, but the
chief had her seized and beaten, and thrown into the river.  An
appeal was made to the Doctor then Administrator of the Ogowe, a
powerful and helpful official, and he soon came up with the little
canoniere, taking Mr. Cockshut with him and fully vindicated the
honour of the French flag, under which all factories here are.

The banks of the Ogowe just above Lembarene Island are low; with the
forest only broken by village clearings and seeming to press in on
those, ready to absorb them should the inhabitants cease their war
against it.  The blue Ntyankala mountains of Achango land show away
to the E.S.E. in a range.  Behind us, gradually sinking in the
distance, is the high land on Lembarene Island.

Soon we run up alongside a big street of a village with four high
houses rising a story above the rest, which are strictly ground
floor; it has also five or six little low open thatched huts along
the street in front. {96}  These may be fetish huts, or, as the
captain of the Sparrow would say, "again they mayn't."  For I have
seen similar huts in the villages round Libreville, which were store
places for roof mats, of which the natives carefully keep a store
dry and ready for emergencies in the way of tornadoes, or to sell.
We stop abreast of this village.  Inhabitants in scores rush out and
form an excited row along the vertical bank edge, several of the
more excited individuals falling over it into the water.

Yells from our passengers on the lower deck.  Yells from inhabitants
on shore.  Yells of vite, vite from the Captain.  Dogs bark, horns
bray, some exhilarated individual thumps the village drum, canoes
fly out from the bank towards us.  Fearful scrimmage heard going on
all the time on the deck below.  As soon as the canoes are
alongside, our passengers from the lower deck, with their bundles
and their dogs, pour over the side into them.  Canoes rock wildly
and wobble off rapidly towards the bank, frightening the passengers
because they have got their best clothes on, and fear that the
Eclaireur will start and upset them altogether with her wash.

On reaching the bank, the new arrivals disappear into brown clouds
of wives and relations, and the dogs into fighting clusters of
resident dogs.  Happy, happy day!  For those men who have gone
ashore have been away on hire to the government and factories for a
year, and are safe home in the bosoms of their families again, and
not only they themselves, but all the goods they have got in pay.
The remaining passengers below still yell to their departed friends;
I know not what they say, but I expect it's the Fan equivalent for
"Mind you write.  Take care of yourself.  Yes, I'll come and see you
soon," etc., etc.  While all this is going on, the Eclaireur quietly
slides down river, with the current, broadside on as if she smelt
her stable at Lembarene.  This I find is her constant habit whenever
the captain, the engineer, and the man at the wheel are all busy in
a row along the rail, shouting overside, which occurs whenever we
have passengers to land.  Her iniquity being detected when the last
canoe load has left for the shore, she is spun round and sent up
river again at full speed.

We go on up stream; now and again stopping at little villages to
land passengers or at little sub-factories to discharge cargo, until
evening closes in, when we anchor and tie up at O'Saomokita, where
there is a sub-factory of Messrs. Woermann's, in charge of which is
a white man, the only white man between Lembarene and Njole.  He
comes on board and looks only a boy, but is really aged twenty.  He
is a Frenchman, and was at Hatton and Cookson's first, then he
joined Woermann's, who have put him in charge of this place.  The
isolation for a white man must be terrible; sometimes two months
will go by without his seeing another white face but that in his
looking-glass, and when he does see another, it is only by a
fleeting visit such as we now pay him, and to make the most of this,
he stays on board to dinner.

June 23rd.--Start off steaming up river early in the morning time.
Land ahead showing mountainous.  Rather suddenly the banks grow
higher.  Here and there in the forest are patches which look like
regular hand-made plantations, which they are not, but only patches
of egombie-gombie trees, showing that at this place was once a
native town.  Whenever land is cleared along here, this tree springs
up all over the ground.  It grows very rapidly, and has great leaves
something like a sycamore leaf, only much larger.  These leaves
growing in a cluster at the top of the straight stem give an
umbrella-like appearance to the affair; so the natives call them and
an umbrella by the same name, but whether they think the umbrella is
like the tree or the tree is like the umbrella, I can't make out.  I
am always getting myself mixed over this kind of thing in my
attempts "to contemplate phenomena from a scientific standpoint," as
Cambridge ordered me to do.  I'll give the habit up.  "You can't do
that sort of thing out here--It's the climate," and I will content
myself with stating the fact, that when a native comes into a store
and wants an umbrella, he asks for an egombie-gombie.

The uniformity of the height of the individual trees in one of these
patches is striking, and it arises from their all starting fair.  I
cannot make out other things about them to my satisfaction, for you
very rarely see one of them in the wild bush, and then it does not
bear a fruit that the natives collect and use, and then chuck away
the stones round their domicile.  Anyhow, there they are all one
height, and all one colour, and apparently allowing no other
vegetation to make any headway among them.  But I found when I
carefully investigated egombie-gombie patches that there were a few
of the great, slower-growing forest trees coming up amongst them,
and in time when these attain a sufficient height, their shade kills
off the egombie-gombie, and the patch goes back into the great
forest from which it came.  The frequency of these patches arises
from the nomadic habits of the chief tribe in these regions, the
Fans.  They rarely occupy one site for a village for any
considerable time on account--firstly, of their wasteful method of
collecting rubber by cutting down the vine, which soon stamps it out
of a district; and, secondly, from their quarrelsome ways.  So when
a village of Fans has cleared all the rubber out of its district, or
has made the said district too hot to hold it by rows with other
villages, or has got itself very properly shelled out and burnt for
some attack on traders or the French flag in any form, its
inhabitants clear off into another district, and build another
village; for bark and palm thatch are cheap, and house removing just
nothing; when you are an unsophisticated cannibal Fan you don't
require a pantechnicon van to stow away your one or two mushroom-
shaped stools, knives, and cooking-pots, and a calabash or so.  If
you are rich, maybe you will have a box with clothes in as well, but
as a general rule all your clothes are on your back.  So your wives
just pick up the stools and the knives and the cooking-pots, and the
box, and the children toddle off with the calabashes.  You have, of
course, the gun to carry, for sleeping or waking a Fan never parts
with his gun, and so there you are "finish," as M. Pichault would
say, and before your new bark house is up, there grows the egombie-
gombie, where your house once stood.  Now and again, for lack of
immediate neighbouring villages to quarrel with, one end of a
village will quarrel with the other end.  The weaker end then goes
off and builds itself another village, keeping an eye lifting for
any member of the stronger end who may come conveniently into its
neighbourhood to be killed and eaten.  Meanwhile, the egombie-gombie
grows over the houses of the empty end, pretending it's a plantation
belonging to the remaining half.  I once heard a new-comer hold
forth eloquently as to how those Fans were maligned.  "They say,"
said he, with a fine wave of his arm towards such a patch, "that
these people do not till the soil--that they are not industrious--
that the few plantations they do make are ill-kept--that they are
only a set of wandering hunters and cannibals.  Look there at those
magnificent plantations!"  I did look, but I did not alter my
opinion of the Fans, for I know my old friend egombie-gombie when I
see him.

This morning the French official seems sad and melancholy.  I fancy
he has got a Monday head (Kipling), but he revives as the day goes
on.  As we go on, the banks become hills and the broad river, which
has been showing sheets of sandbanks in all directions, now narrows
and shows only neat little beaches of white sand in shallow places
along the bank.  The current is terrific.  The Eclaireur breathes
hard, and has all she can do to fight her way up against it.  Masses
of black weathered rock in great boulders show along the exposed
parts of both banks, left dry by the falling waters.  Each bank is
steep, and quantities of great trees, naked and bare, are hanging
down from them, held by their roots and bush-rope entanglement from
being swept away with the rushing current, and they make a great
white fringe to the banks.  The hills become higher and higher, and
more and more abrupt, and the river runs between them in a gloomy
ravine, winding to and fro; we catch sight of a patch of white sand
ahead, which I mistake for a white painted house, but immediately
after doubling round a bend we see the houses of the Talagouga
Mission Station.  The Eclaireur forthwith has an hysteric fit on her
whistle, so as to frighten M. Forget and get him to dash off in his
canoe to her at once.  Apparently he knows her, and does not hurry,
but comes on board quietly.  I find there will be no place for me to
stay at at Njole, so I decide to go on in the Eclaireur and use her
as an hotel while there, and then return and stay with Mme. Forget
if she will have me.  I consult M. Forget on this point.  He says,
"Oh, yes," but seems to have lost something of great value recently,
and not to be quite clear where.  Only manner, I suppose.  When M.
Forget has got his mails he goes, and the Eclaireur goes on; indeed,
she has never really stopped, for the water is too deep to anchor in
here, and the terrific current would promptly whisk the steamer down
out of Talagouga gorge were she to leave off fighting it.  We run on
up past Talagouga Island, where the river broadens out again a
little, but not much, and reach Njole by nightfall, and tie up to a
tree by Dumas' factory beach.  Usual uproar, but as Mr. Cockshut
says, no mosquitoes.  The mosquito belt ends abruptly at
O'Soamokita.

Next morning I go ashore and start on a walk.  Lovely road, bright
yellow clay, as hard as paving stone.  On each side it is most
neatly hedged with pine-apples; behind these, carefully tended,
acres of coffee bushes planted in long rows.  Certainly coffee is
one of the most lovely of crops.  Its grandly shaped leaves are like
those of our medlar tree, only darker and richer green, the berries
set close to the stem, those that are ripe, a rich crimson; these
trees, I think, are about three years old, and just coming into
bearing; for they are covered with full-sized berries, and there has
been a flush of bloom on them this morning, and the delicious
fragrance of their stephanotis-shaped and scented flowers lingers in
the air.  The country spreads before me a lovely valley encompassed
by purple-blue mountains.  Mount Talagouga looks splendid in a soft,
infinitely deep blue, although it is quite close, just the other
side of the river.  The road goes on into the valley, as pleasantly
as ever and more so.  How pleasant it would be now, if our
government along the Coast had the enterprise and public spirit of
the French, and made such roads just on the remote chance of stray
travellers dropping in on a steamer once in ten years or so and
wanting a walk.  Observe extremely neatly Igalwa built huts, people
sitting on the bright clean ground outside them, making mats and
baskets.  "Mboloani," say I.  "Ai! Mbolo," say they, and knock off
work to stare.  Observe large wired-in enclosures on left-hand side
of road--investigate--find they are tenanted by animals--goats,
sheep, chickens, etc.  Clearly this is a jardin d'acclimatation.  No
wonder the colony does not pay, if it goes in for this sort of
thing, 206 miles inland, with simply no public to pay gate-money.
While contemplating these things, hear awful hiss.  Serpents!  No,
geese.  Awful fight.  Grand things, good, old-fashioned, long skirts
are for Africa!  Get through geese and advance in good order, but
somewhat rapidly down road, turn sharply round corner of native
houses.  Turkey cock--terrific turn up.  Flight on my part forwards
down road, which is still going strong, now in a northerly
direction, apparently indefinitely.  Hope to goodness there will be
a turning that I can go down and get back by, without returning
through this ferocious farmyard.  Intent on picking up such an
outlet, I go thirty yards or so down the road.  Hear shouts coming
from a clump of bananas on my left.  Know they are directed at me,
but it does not d

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