0160
The people were very courteous. It seems to me that the farther you get from civilisation the more courteous the population. Village children eager to see the lions in a circus could not have been more keen than the people of this lake village to see the white woman, but they did not even come and look till our linguist went forth and announced that the white people had had their chop, and were ready to receive the headman. He came, bringing his little daughter—a rough-looking, bearded old man, who squatted down in front of me and rammed the tail of his cloth into his mouth; and immediately there followed in his train, I should think, the entire village, men, women, and children, and ranged themselves in rows on the bamboo flooring, and looked their fill. Rows of eyes staring at one are embarrassing; I don't care whether they be those of a cultured people or of savages clad in scanty garments. If you stand up before an audience in a civilised land you know what you are there for, and you either succeed or fail, so the thing marches and comes to an end. But sitting before a subdued crowd clad in Manchester cotton or simply a smile, with all eyes centred on you, I at least feel that my rôle is somewhat more difficult. What on earth am I to do? If I move they chatter; if I single one out to be touched, he moves away, and substitutes a neighbour, who is equally anxious to substitute someone else, and the production of a camera causes a stampede. Looking back, I cannot consider that my behaviour at the lake village reflected any particular credit upon me. I felt I ought really to have produced more impression upon a people who had, many of them, never in their lives set eyes on a white woman before. They tell me, those who know, that for these people, whose lives move on in the same groove from the cradle to the grave, the coming of the Forestry officer and the white woman was a great event, and that all things will bear date from the day when the white missus and the white master had chop on the Chief's verandah.
Before we left Beyin, I promised to take the Omahin's photograph. Early in the morning, when we had sent on our carriers, we wended our way to his house, where an eager crowd awaited us. They kept us waiting, of course; I do not suppose it would be consistent with an African chief's dignity to show himself in any hurry. When I grew tired of waiting and was turning away, the linguist came out to know if I would promise a picture when it was taken. I agreed. Certainly. More waiting, and then out came the linguist with a dirty scrap of paper and a lead pencil in his hand, and demanded of the Forestry officer his name and address.
“Why?” asked the astonished young man.
“So we can write to you when pictures no come.” It was lucky I was pretty sure of my own powers, but it was a little rough to make the Forestry officer responsible for any accident that might happen. It was a great relief to my mind when there came back to me from Messrs Sinclair a perfect picture of the Omahin and his following and his little son. I sent them the picture enlarged, but I never heard from that respectable linguist what they thought of it.
0164
Very heavy going—-Half Assinie—The preventive service station—The energetic officer—Dislike of Africa—The Tano River—The enterprising crocodiles—The mahogany logs—Wicked waste—Gentlemen adventurers—A primitive dinner-party—Forced labour—The lost carrier—“Make die and chopped”—A negro Good Samaritan—A matrimonial squabble—The wife who would earn her own living—Dissatisfied carriers.
We were bound to Half Assinie and the French border and the way was all along the shore, which is a narrow strip of land between the roaring surf and a mangrove-fringed lagoon, and on this strip are the palm-built fishing villages and the cocoa-nut groves that are so typical of the Coast. The last day out from Half Assinie the way was very heavy going indeed. We had our midday meal in the street of a village with the eyes of the villagers upon us, and by the afternoon the “sea was too full,” the sun was scorching, and the loose sand was cruel heavy going for the carriers and the hammock-boys. The sun went down, the cool of the evening came, but the bearers were staggering like drunken men before a shout went up. We had reached Half Assinie, the last important town in the Gold Coast Colony.
Half Assinie is just like any other Western Province Gold Coast town, built close down to the roaring, almost impassable surf, because the people draw much of their livelihood from the sea, and built of raffia-palm bamboo, because there is nothing else to build it of. Only there is this difference, that here is a preventive station, with a white man in command. There is a great cleared square, which is all sand and cocoa-nut palms, men in neat dark-blue uniforms pass to and fro, and bugle calls are heard the livelong day. We arrived long before the rest of our following, and we marched straight up to the preventive officer's house only to find that he was down with fever. But he was hospitable. All white men are in West Africa. The house was ours. It consisted of a square of sun-dried, white-washed mud, divided into three rooms with square openings for windows, mud floor and no ceiling, but high above the walls the palm-thatched roof is raised and carried far out beyond them to form a verandah where we could sit and eat and entertain visitors. It was big enough, never less than twelve and often quite eighteen feet wide, and could be made quite a comfortable living-room were a woman there, but Englishmen and the English Government do not encourage wives. The rooms assigned to the guests were of necessity empty, for men cannot carry furniture about in West Africa, and our host being sick and our gear not yet arrived, the Forestry officer and I, comforted with whisky-and-soda, took two chairs and sat out in the compound under the stars and watched for the coming of our carriers. The going had been so hard they straggled in one by one, bath and bed and chairs and tables and boxes, and it was nine o'clock before we were washed and dressed and in our right minds, and waiting “chop” at a table on the big verandah that the faithful Kwesi, who had been properly instructed, had decorated with yellow cannas from the garden.
There is something about Half Assinie that gives the impression of being at the end of the world. Of course I have been in places much farther from civilisation, but nowhere has the tragedy of the Englishman's life in West Africa so struck me as it did here, and again I must say I think it is the conditions of the life and not the climate that is responsible for that tragedy. The young man who ran that preventive station was cheerful enough; he got up from his bed of fever when he could hardly stagger across the room to entertain his visitors. When he could barely crawl, he was organising a game of cricket between some white men who had unexpectedly landed and the “scholars” among the black inhabitants; and he was energetic and good-tempered and proud of his men, but he hated the country and had no hesitation in saying so. He had no use for West Africa; he counted the days till he should go home. He would not have dreamt of bringing his wife out even if she had wished to come. He was, in fact, a perfect specimen of the nice, pleasant Englishman who is going the way that allows France and Germany to beat us in colonising all along the line. It was his strong convictions, many of them unspoken, that impressed me, his realisation of his own discontent and discomfort and hopelessness that have tinged my recollections of the place.
It should be a place of great importance, for it is but a short distance from the Tano River, and down the Tano River, far from the interior, come the great mahogany logs that rival the logs of Honduras and Belize and all Central America in value. They are cut far away in the forests of the interior; they are floated down the Tano River, paying toll to the natives who guide them over the falls and rapids; they come between tall, silk-cotton trees and fan palms and raffia palms, where the chimpanzee hides himself and the dog-faced monkeys whimper and cry, the crocodile suns himself on the mud-banks, and great, bell-shaped, yellow flowers lighten the greenery. They come past the French preventive station, that the natives call France, a station thriftily decorated with a tiny flag that might have come out of a cracker, past the English station built of raffia palm like the lake village, for this ground is flooded in the rains, through a saving canal, for the Tano River enters the sea in French territory, into a lagoon behind Half Assinie. The lagoon is surrounded by swamp, and the crocodiles, they say, abound, and are so fierce and fearless they have been known to take the paddler's arm as he stoops to his stroke. I did not know of their evil reputation as I sat on a box in the frail canoe, that seemed to place me in the midst of a waste of waters, rising up to the greenery in the far distance, and the blue-white sky above shut down on us like a lid. I was even inclined to be vexed with the men's reluctance to jump out and push when we ran ashore on a sand-bank. They should be able to grow rice in these swamps at the mouth of the Tano River and behind Beyin, and so raise up a new industry that shall save Half Assinie when the mahogany trade is a thing of the past.
0170
From the lagoon to Half Assinie, a couple of miles away, the logs are brought on a tramway line, and where they land the men are squaring them, cutting off the butts where the journey down the river has split and marred them, and making them ready to be moved down to the beach by the toilsome application of many hands. It reminded me of the way they must have built the pyramids as I watched the half-naked men toil and sweat and push and shriek, and apparently accomplish so little. Yet all in good time the beach is strewn with the logs, great square-cut baulks of red timber with their owners' marks upon their butts and covered generally with a thatch of cocoa-nut palm fronds to keep them from the all-powerful sun. The steamer will call for them some day, but it is no easy thing to get them through the surf, and steamer after steamer calls, whistles, decides that the surf is too heavy to embark such timber, and passes on. And where they have been cut and trimmed, the mammies come with baskets to gather pieces of the priceless wood to build their fires. It seems to me that the trimming is done wastefully. The average savage and the ignorant white is always wasteful where there is plenty, and it is nothing to them that the mahogany tree does not come to maturity for something like two hundred and fifty years, and that the cutters have denuded the country far, far beyond the sea coast.
There are other phases of life in Half Assinie. Usually there is but one white man there, the preventive officer, but when I visited it actually ten white people sat down one night to dinner. For there had landed some white people bound on some errand which, as has been the custom from time immemorial in Africa, was veiled in mystery. They were seeking gold; they hoped to find diamonds; their ultimate aim was to trade with the natives, and cut out every other trading-house along the Coast. Frankly, I do not know what they had landed for—their leader talked of his wealth and how he grew bananas and pines and coffee, and created a tropical paradise in Devonshire, and meanwhile in Africa conferred the inimitable benefits of innumerable gramophones and plenty of work upon the guileless savage—but I only gathered he was there for the purpose of filling his pockets, how, I have not the faintest idea. His dinner suggested Africa in the primitive days of the first adventurers and rough plenty. Soup in a large bowl, from which we helped ourselves, a dozen tins of sardines flung on a plate, a huge tongue from a Gargantuan ox, and dishes piled with slices of pine-apple. The table decorations consisted of beer bottles, distributed at intervals down the table between the kerosene lamps; the boys who waited yelled and shrieked and shouted, like the untamed savages they were, and some of the white men were unshaven and in their shirt sleeves, and the shirts, to put it mildly, needed washing.
“Gentlemen adventurers,” said I to my companion under my breath, thinking of the days of old and the men who had landed on these shores.
“Would you say gentlemen?” said he.
And I decided that one epithet would be sufficient.
How the bugles called. Every hour almost a man clad in the dark-blue preventive service uniform stood out in the square with his bugle and called to the surf and the sky and the sand and the cocoa-nut palms and the natives beyond, saying to them that here was the representative of His Britannic Majesty, here was the white man powerful above all others who kept the Borders, who was come as the forerunner of law and cleanliness and order. For these things do not come naturally to the native. He clears the land when he needs it and then he leaves it to itself and the quickly encroaching bush. The mosquito troubles him not. Dirt and filth and evil smells are not worth counting weighed in the balance against a comfortable afternoon's sleep, and so it came that when I commented on the neatness of Half Assinie, the preventive officer laughed.
0174
“Forced labour,” said he. “The place was in a frightful state a month ago and I couldn't get anybody to do anything, so I just turned out my men, put a cordon round, and forced everyone to do an hour's labour, men, mammies, and half-grown children, till we got the place clear. It wasn't hard on anyone, and you see.” He was right. Sometimes in Africa, nay, as a rule, the powers of a dictator are needed by the white man. If he is a wise and clever dictator so much the better, but one thing is certain, he must not be a man who splits hairs. Justice, yes, rough crude justice he must give—must have the sort of mind that sees black and white and does not trouble about the varying shades in between.
We came back from the Border by the road that we had gone, the road that is the King's Highway, and an incident happened that shows how very, very easily a wrong impression of a people may be gathered.
When we were in Beyin on our way out, the two headmen who were eternally at war with each other suddenly appeared in accord leading between them a man by the hands.
“This man be very sick.”
This man certainly was very sick, and it seemed to the Forestry officer that the simplest thing would be to leave him behind at Beyin and pick him up on our return journey. He thought his decision would be received with gratitude. Not at all. The sick carrier protested that all he wanted was to be relieved of his load and allowed to go on. The men of Beyin were bad people; if he stayed they would kill him and chop him. The Forestry officer was inclined to laugh. Murder of an unoffending stranger and cannibalism on a coast that had been in touch with civilisation for the last four hundred years; the idea was not to be thought of. But the frightened sick man stuck to his point and his brother flung down his load and declared if he were left behind he should stay with him. There was nothing for it then but to agree to their wishes. He was relieved of his load and he started, and he and his brother arrived at Half Assinie long after all the other carriers had got in. The gentlemen adventurers numbered among them a doctor, and he was called in and prescribed for the sick man. After the little rest there he was better, and started back for Axim, his brother, who was carrying the Forestry officer's bath, in close attendance. By and by we passed the bath abandoned on the beach, and its owner perforce put another man on to carry it.
That night there were no signs of the missing men, but next morning the brother, the man who ought to have carried the bath, turned up. His face was sodden with crying. A negro is intensely emotional, but this man had some cause for his grief. He had missed his brother, abandoned the bath, and gone right back to Half Assinie to look for him. The way was by the seashore, there is no way to wander from it; on one side is the roaring surf that no man alone may dare, and on the other, just beyond the line of cocoa-nut palms, a mangrove-fringed lagoon, and beyond that a bush, containing perhaps a few native farms to be reached by narrow tracks, but a bush that no stranger would lightly dare. But no trace of his brother could this man find. What had become of the sick carrier? That was the question we asked ourselves, and to that no answer could we find except the sinister verdict pronounced by his fellows, “Make die and chopped.” And that I believed for many months, till just before I left the Coast the Forestry officer and I met again and he told me the end of the story. He had made every inquiry, telegraphed up and down the Coast, and given the man up for lost, and then after four or five weeks a miserable skeleton came crawling into Axim. The lost carrier. He had felt faint by the wayside, crawled into the shade of a bush and become insensible, and there had been found by some man, a native of the country and a total stranger to him. And this Good Samaritan instead of falling upon him and making him die as he fully expected, took him to his own house, fed and succoured him, and when he was well enough set him on his way. So he and I and all his fellows had wronged these men of the shore. Greater kindness he could not have found in a Christian land, and in all probability he might easily have found much less.
But Beyin too furnished another lesson for me, not quite so pleasant. All my carriers had come from here, and on our way back they struck. In plain words they wanted to see the colour of my money. Said the Forestry officer, “Don't pay them, else they'll all run away and you will have no one to carry your things into Axim.” That was a contingency not to be thought of, so the ultimatum went forth—no pay until they had completed their contract. That night I regret to state there was a row in the house, a matrimonial quarrel carried on in the approved matrimonial style all the world over, with the mother-in-law for chorus and general backer-up. There was a tremendous racket and the principal people concerned seemed to be one of my women-carriers and the Omahin's registrar in whose house we were lodged. Then because Fanti is one of the Twi languages, and an Ashanti can understand it quite well, Kwesi interpreted for me. This woman, it appeared, was one of the registrar's wives, and he disapproved of her going on the road as a common carrier. It was not consistent with his dignity as an official of the court, he said at the top of his voice; he had given her a good home and she had no need to demean herself. She shrilly declared he had done no such thing, and if he had, had shamefully neglected her for that last hussy he had married, and her mother backed her and several other female friends joined in, and whether they settled the dispute or not to their own satisfaction I do not know, but the gentleman cuffed the lady and the lady had the extreme satisfaction of scattering several handfuls of his wool to the winds.
Next morning none of my carriers turned up; there lay the loads under a tree in front of the house with the orderly looking at them with his sardonic grin, but never a carrier. It was cool with the coolness of early morning. We had our breakfast in the great room, we discussed the disturbance of the night before, the things were all washed up, still no carriers; at last, just as it was getting hot and our tempers were giving out, came a message. The carriers would not go unless they were paid.
“And it's a foregone conclusion they won't go if they are paid,” sighed the Forestry officer as he set off to interview the Omahin and tell him our decision. If the carriers did not come in at once, it ran, we would leave all the loads, making him, the Omahin, responsible for their safety, and we would push on with the Mendi and Kroo-boy carriers in the Forestry officer's employ. Those left behind not having carried out their contract of course would then get no pay at all, and this would happen unless they returned to work within a quarter of an hour. The effect was marvellous. The Omahin, of course, did not grasp how exceedingly uncomfortable it would have been for us to leave our gear behind us, and as we had sixteen Kroo boys and Mendi boys the feat was quite feasible, and promptly those Beyin people returned to work and were as eager to get their loads as they had before been to leave them. So I learned another lesson in the management of carriers, and we made our way without further incident back to Axim.
Cinderella—A troubled Commissioner—Few people along the Coast—No hotels—Nursing Sister to the rescue—Sekondi—A little log-rolling—A harassed hedge—Carriers—Difficulties of the way—A funeral palaver—No dinner and no ligjit—First night alone—Unruly carriers—No breakfast—Crossing the Prah—A drink from a marmalade pot—“We no be fit, Ma”—The evolution of Grant—Along the Coast in the dark—Elmina at last—A sympathetic medical officer—“I have kicked your policeman.”
West Africa is Cinderella among the colonies. No one goes there for pleasure, and of those who gain their livelihood from the country three-fourths regard themselves as martyrs and heroes, counting the days till the steamer shall take them home again for that long leave that makes a position there so desirable. The other quarter perhaps, some I know for certain, find much good in the country, many possibilities, but as yet their voice is not heard by the general public above that chorus that drowns its protest. That any man should come to the Gold Coast for pleasure would be surprising; that a woman should come when she had no husband there, and that she should want to go overland all along the sea-board, passed belief. “Why? why?” asked everyone. “A tourist on the Coast,” a surprised ship's captain called me, and I disclaimed it promptly. My publisher had commissioned a book and I was there to write it. And then they could not make up their minds whether I or my publisher were the greater fool, for but very few among that little company saw anything to write about in the country.
In Axim the troubled Commissioner set his foot down. I had been to Half Assinie and he felt that ought to satisfy the most exacting woman; but since I was anxious to do more he stretched a point and took me as far as Prince's, an abandoned Branden-burgher fort that is tumbling into ruins, with a native farm in the courtyard, but no farther could I go. Carriers he could not get me, and for the first time I saw a smile on his face, a real relieved smile, when he saw me into the boat that took me to the steamer bound for Sekondi.
No one goes along the Coast except an occasional Public Works Department man or a School Inspector; nobody wants to, and it is not easy of accomplishment.
Even in the towns it is difficult for the stranger. I do not know what would happen if that stranger had not friends and letters of introduction, for though there are one or two hotels, as yet no one who is not absolutely driven to it by stern necessity stays in a West-African hotel. In Sekondi it is almost impossible, for at this town is the Coast terminus of the railway that runs to the mines at Tarkwa and Kumasi, and the miner both coming and returning seems to require so much liquid refreshment that he is anything but a desirable fellow-housemate, wherefore was I deeply grateful when Miss Oram, the nursing Sister at the Sekondi Hospital, asked me to stay in her quarters.
Sekondi straggles up and down many hills, and by and by if some definite plan of beautifying be followed may be made rather a pretty place. Even now at night, from some of the bungalows on the hillsides when the darkness gently veils the ugly scars that man's handiwork leaves behind, with its great sweep of beach, its sloping hillsides dotted with lights, the stars above and the lights in the craft on the water that lie just outside the surf, it has a wonderful charm and beauty that there is no denying. And yet there is no doubt Sekondi should not be there. Who is responsible for it I do not know, but there must have been some atrocious piece of log-rolling before Elmina and Cape Coast were deprived of the benefit of the railway to the north. At Sekondi is no harbour. It is but an open roadstead where in days gone past both the Dutch and English held small forts for the benefit of their trade. At Sekondi was no town. At the end of the last century the two little fishing villages marked the Dutch and English forts. Now the English fort is gone, Fort Orange is used as a prison, and a town has sprung into existence that has taken the trade from Cape Coast and Elmina. It is a town that looks like all the English towns, as if no one cared for it and as if everyone lives there because perforce he must. In the European town the roads are made, and down their sides are huge gutters to carry off the storm waters; the Englishman, let it be counted to him for grace, is great on making great cemented gutters that look like young rivers when it rains, and one enterprising Commissioner planted an avenue or two of trees which promise well, only here and there someone has seen fit to cut a tree or two down, and the gap has never been replaced. Some of the bungalows are fairly comfortable, but though purple bougainvillia, flame-coloured flamboyant trees, and dainty pink corrallitis will grow like weeds, decent gardens are few and far between. Instead of giving an impression of tropical verdure as it easily might, Sekondi looks somewhat hot and barren. This, it is only fair to say, I did not notice so much till I had visited German territory and seen what really could be done with the most unpromising material in a tropical climate. But German territory is the beloved child, planned and cared for and thought much of; English territory is the foster-child, received into the household because of the profit it will bring, and most of the towns of the Gold Coast shore bear these marks plain for everyone to read. They suffer, and suffer severely from the iniquitous system that is for ever changing those in authority over them in almost every department.
Sekondi Hospital for instance is rather a nice-looking building but it is horribly bare-looking and lacks sadly a garden and greenery. There is, of course, a large reserve all round it where are the houses of the medical officers and nursing Sisters, and in this reserve many things are growing, but the general impression is of something just beginning. This I hardly understood, since the place has been in existence for the last ten years, till I found out that in the last eight months there had been four different doctors head of that hospital, and each of those doctors had had different views as to how the grounds should be laid out. So round the medical officer's bungalow the hedge had been three times planted and three times dug up. Just as I left, the fourth unfortunate hedge was being put in. That, as I write, is nearly six weeks ago, so in all probability they are now considering some new plan. If only someone with knowledge would take in hand the beautifying of these West-African towns and insist on the plans being adhered to! In one of the principal streets of Sekondi is a tamarind tree standing alone, a pleasant green spot in the general glare and heat, a reminder of how well the old Dutch did, a reproach that we who are a great people do not do better. It seems to me it would want so little to make these towns beautiful places, the moral effect would be so great if they were.
But I had come to go along the Coast, and the question was carriers; I appealed to the transport. My friend, Mr Migeod, the head of the transport, was on leave, and his second in command shook his head doubtfully. The troops in the north were out on manoeuvres and they had taken almost very carrier he could lay his hands on; but he would see what he could do. How few could I do with? Seventeen, I decided, with two servants, was the very fewest I could move with, and he said he would do his best. I wanted to start on the following Monday, and I chose the hour of ten; also because this was my first essay entirely alone I decided I would not go farther than Chama, nine miles along the Coast to the east.
So, on a Monday morning early in March, behold me with all my goods and chattels, neatly done up into loads not weighing over 60 lbs., laid out in a row in the Sister's compound, and waiting for the carriers. I had begged a policeman for dignity, or protection, I hardly know which, and he came first and ensconced himself under the house, and I sat on the verandah and waited. Presently the carriers came and began gingerly turning over the loads and looking at me doubtfully. They were Mendis and Timinis, not the regular Government carriers, but a scratch lot picked up to fill up gaps in the ranks. I didn't like the looks of them much, but there was nothing else to be done so I prepared to accept them. But it always takes two to make a bargain, and apparently those carriers liked me less than I liked them, for presently they one and all departed, and I began a somewhat heated discussion across the telephone with the head of the transport. Looking back, I don't see what he could have done more than he did. It is impossible to evolve carriers out of nothing, but then I didn't see it quite in that light. I wanted carriers; I was looking to him to produce them, and I hadn't got them. He gave me to understand he thought I was unreasonable, and we weren't quite as nice to each other as we might have been. The men, he said, were frightened, and I thought that was unreasonable, for there was nothing really terrifying about me.
At three o'clock another gang arrived with a note from the transport officer. They were subsisted for sixteen days, and I might start there and then for Accra.
I should have preferred to have subsisted my men myself; that is, given them each threepence daily, as I had on the way to the French border, seeing that they were not regular Government men; but as the thing was done there was nothing for it but to make the best of it, and I went down, hunted up my policeman, and saw the loads on to the men's heads. I saw them start out in a long string, and then the thing that always happens in Africa happened. Both my servants were missing.
Zacco, a boy with a scarred face from the north, did not much matter, but Grant knew my ways and I could trust him. Clearly, out in the wilds by myself with strange carriers and without even a servant, I should be very badly off, and I hesitated. Not for long though. If I were going to let little things connected with personal comfort stand in my way I knew I should never get to Accra, so I decided to start; my servants might catch me up, and if they did not, I would rely on the ministrations of the hammock-boys. If the worst came to the worst, I supposed I could put my dignity in my pocket and cook myself something, or live on tinned meat and biscuits; and so, leaving directions with my hostess that those boys were to be severely reprimanded when they turned up, I got into my hammock and started.
The road to Accra from Sekondi is along the seashore, and so, to be very Irish, there is no road. Of a truth, very few people there are who choose to go by land, as it is so much easier to go by steamer, and the way, generally speaking, is along the sand. Just outside Sekondi the beach is broken by huge rocks that run out into the sea, apparently barring the way effectually, and those rocks had to be negotiated. My hammock-boys stopped, and I got out and watched my men with the loads scrambling over the rocks, and one thing I was sure of, on my own feet I could not go that way. I mentioned that to my demurring men, and insisted that over those rocks they had to get me somehow, if it took the eight hammock-boys to do it. And over those rocks I was got without setting foot out of my hammock, and I fairly purred with pride, most unjustly setting it down to my own prowess and feeling it marked a distinct stage on my journey eastwards. We were, all of us, pleased as we went on again in all the glare of a tropical afternoon, and I mentally sniffed at the men who had hinted I was not able to manage carriers. There was not a more uplifted woman in all Africa than I was for about the space of half an hour. It is trite to say pride goes before a fall. We have all heard it from our cradles and I ought to have remembered it, but I didn't. Presently we came to a village, or rather two villages, with a stream dividing them, and there was a tremendous tom-toming going on, and the monotonous sound of natives chanting. The place was surrounded by thick greenery, only there was a broad way between the houses, a brown road with great waterways and holes in it, and the occasional shade-tree, under which the village rests in the heat of the day, and holds its little markets and its little councils and even does a stray job of cooking. The tom-toming went on, and men appeared blowing horns. They were evidently very excited, and I remember still, with a shudder, the staring, bloodshot eyes of two who passed my hammock braying on horns. Most of my men could speak a little English, so I asked not without some little anxiety, “What is the matter?”
“It be funeral palaver, Ma.”
Oh, well, a funeral palaver was no great matter, surely. I had never heard of these Coast natives doing anything more than drink palm wine to celebrate the occasion. Some of those we passed had evidently drunk copiously already, and I was thankful we were passing. We came to the little river, we crossed the ford, and then we stopped.
“We go drink water, Ma,” said my men.
I ought to have said “No,” but it was a very hot afternoon, and the request was not unreasonable. They had had to work hard carrying me over those rocks so I got out and let them go. And then, as I might have known, I waited. I grew cross, but it is no good losing your temper when there is no one to be made uneasy by it, and then I grew frightened; but, if it is foolish to lose one's temper, it is the height of folly to be afraid when there is no help possible. I was standing on the bank of the little river that we had just forded, my hammock was at my feet, all around was greenery, tropical greenery of palm and creeper, not very dense compared to other bush I have seen, but dense enough to prevent one's stepping off the road; before me was the village, with its mud walls and its thatched roofs, and behind me were the groves of trees on the other side of the water that hid the village, from which came the sound of savage revelry. Never have I felt more alone, and yet Sekondi was a bare five miles away. I comforted myself with the reflection that nothing would be likely to happen, but the thought of those half-naked men with the bloodshot, staring eyes was most unpleasantly prominent in my mind. Some little naked boys came and bathed and stared at me; I didn't know whether to welcome them as companions or not. They understood no English, and when asked where were my men only stared the harder. I tried to take a photograph, but the policeman, who carried my stand, was also absent at the funeral, and I fear my hand shook, for I have never seen that picture. Then, at last, when I was absolutely despairing, a hammock-boy turned up. He was a most ragged ruffian, with a printed cloth by way of trousers, a very openwork singlet, all torn away at one arm, a billycock hat in the last stages of dilapidation, and a large red woollen comforter with a border of black, blue, and yellow. That comforter fascinated me, and I looked at it as I talked to him, and wondered where it had been made. It had been knitted, and many of the stitches had been dropped, and I pictured to myself the sewing-party sitting round the fire doing useful work, while someone read aloud one of Father Benson's books. My hammock-boy looked at me as if he wondered how I was taking it, and wiped his mouth with the tail of the comforter, where they had used up the odd bits of wool. He flung it across his shoulder and a long, dropped red stitch caught over his ear.
“Where be the men?” I was very angry indeed, which was very rough on the only one of the crowd who had turned up. He was very humble, and I suggested he should go and look for them, and tell them that if “they no come quick, they get no pay.” He departed on his errand, and I waited with a sinking heart. Even if there was no danger, and I was by no means sure of that, with that tom-toming and that chant in my ears, I could not afford to go back and announce that I had failed. All my outlay had been for nothing. Another long wait, and more little boys to look at me. The evening was coming; here in the hollow, down among the trees, the gloom was already gathering, and I began to think that neither Chama nor Sekondi would see me that night. I wondered what it would be like to spend the night under the trees, and whether there were any beasts that might molest me.
“Toom, toom, toom,” went the village drum, as if to remind me there might be worse things than spending the night under the trees, and then my friend with the comforter appeared, leading two of the other hammock-boys; one wore a crocheted, red tam-o'-shanter that fell over his face—probably made at the same sewing-party. It was the same wool.
I talked to those three men. Considering they were the best behaved of the lot, it comes back to me now that I was rather hard on them. I pointed out the dire pains and penalties that befell hammock-boys who did not pay proper attention to their duties, and I trusted that the fact that I was utterly incapable of inflicting those penalties was not as patent to them as it was to me, and then I decreed that my friend with the comforter should go back and try and retrieve a fourth man while the other two stayed with me. After another long wait he got that fourth man and we started off, I dignifiedly wrathful—at least I hope I was dignified; there was no doubt about the wrath—and they bearing evident marks of having consumed a certain quantity of the funeral palm wine.
It was dark when we reached Chama, at least as dark as it ever is on a bright, starlight night in the Tropics, and we came out of the gloom of the trees to find a dark bungalow raised high on stilts on a cement platform, looming up against the star-spangled sky, and then another surprise, a comforting surprise, awaited me: on that cement platform were two white spots, and those white spots rose up to greet me, shamefaced, humble, contrite, my servants. They had evidently slunk past me without being seen, and I was immensely relieved. But naturally I did not say so. I mentioned that I was very angry with them, and that it would take a long course of faithful service to make up for so serious a lapse, and they received my reproof very humbly, and apparently never realised that I was just about as lonely a woman as there was in the world at that moment, and would gladly have bartered all my wild aspirations after fame and fortune for the comfortable certainty that I was going to spend a safe night. It certainly does not jump with my firm faith in thought transference that none of those men apparently ever discovered I was afraid. I should have thought it was written all over me, but also, afraid as I was, it never occurred to me to turn back; so, if the one thought impressed them, perhaps the other did too.
Then I waited on that dark verandah. There was some scanty Government furniture in the rest-house, and my repentant servant fetched me out a chair, and I sat and waited. I looked out; there was the clearing round the house, the gloom of the dense greenery that grew up between the house and the seashore, while east ran the road to the town of Chama, about a ten minutes' walk distant, and on the west a narrow track hardly discernible in the gloom came out of the greenery. Up that I had come and up that I expected my men. And it seemed I might expect them. No one was going to deny me that privilege. Still, I began to feel distinctly better. At least I had arrived at Chama, and four hammock-boys and two servants were very humbly at my service. I wasn't going to spend the night in the open at the mercy of the trees and the unknown beasts, and I laughed at the idea of being afraid of the trees, though to my mind African trees have a distinct personality of their own. Well, there was nothing to be done but wait, and I waited in the dark, for as no carriers had come in there was no possibility of a light, or of dinner either for that matter. Grant was extremely sympathetic and most properly shocked at the behaviour of the carriers. No punishment could be too great for men who could treat his missus in such an outrageous manner. In the excitement and bustle of getting off I had eaten very little that day, so I was very hungry now; it added to my woes and decreased my fear. Nothing surely could be going to happen to a woman who was so very commonplacely hungry. At last, about ten o'clock, I saw my loads come straggling out of the gloom of the trees on to the little path up to the platform, and then, before I quite realised what was happening, the verandah was full of carriers, drunk and hilarious, and not at all inclined to recognise the enormity of their crime. Something had to be done, I knew. It would be the very worst of policies to allow my verandah to be turned into pandemonium. The headman had lighted a lantern, that I made Grant take, and by its flickering light I singled out my policeman, cheerfully happy, but still, thank goodness, holding on to the sticks of my camera. Him I tackled angrily. How dared he allow drunken carriers on my verandah, or anywhere near me? Everyone, on putting down his load, was to go downstairs immediately. How we cleared that verandah I'm sure I don't know. The four virtuous haminock-boys and Grant and Zacco, I suppose, all took a hand, backed by their stern missus, and presently I and my servants had it to ourselves with a humble and repentant policeman sitting on the top of the steps, and Grant set about getting my dinner. It was too late, I decided, to cook anything beyond a little coffee, so I had tinned tongues and tinned apricots this my first night alone in Africa. Then came the question of going to bed. There were several rooms in the rest-house, but the verandah seemed to me a pleasanter place where to sleep on a hot night. Of course, I was alone, and would it be safer inside? The doors and windows were frail enough, besides it would be impossible to sleep with them shut, so I, to my boy's intense astonishment, decided for the verandah, and there I set up my bed, just an ordinary camp-bed, with mosquito curtains over it, and I went to bed and wondered if I could sleep.
First I found myself listening, listening intently, and I heard a thousand noises, the night birds calling, the skirl of the untiring insects, a faint tom-toming and sounds of revelry from the village, which gave things an unpleasant air of savagery, the crash of the ceaseless surf on the beach. I decided I was too frightened to sleep and I heartily wished myself back in England, writing mystery stories for a livelihood, and then I began to think that I was most desperately tired, that the mosquito curtains were a great protection, and before I realised I was sleepy was sound asleep and remembered no more till I awakened wondering where I was, and saw the first streaks of light in the east. Before the first faint streaks of light and sunrise is but a short time in the Tropics, and now I knew that everything depended upon me, so I flew out of bed and dressed with great promptitude, and there was Grant with early-morning tea and then breakfast. But no carriers; and I had given orders we were to start at half-past five. It was long past that; six o'clock, no carriers, half-past. I sent Zacco for the headman and he like the raven from the ark was no more seen. I sent Grant and he returned, not with an olive branch but with the policeman.
“Where are the carriers?” I demanded.
“They chop,” said he nonchalantly, as if it were no affair of his.
“Chop! At this hour in the morning?” It was close on seven.
He signified that they did.
“Bring the headman.” And I was a very angry white missus indeed. Since I had got through the night all right I felt I was bound to do somthing today and I was not nearly so afraid as I had been.
The headman wept palm-wine tears. “They chop,” he said and he sobbed and gulped and wiped his face with the back of his hand like a discomfited Somersetshire laburer. His condition immensely improved my courage. I was the white woman all over dealing with the inferior race, and I had not a doubt as to what should be done.
“Policeman, you follow me.”
He did not like it much, my little Fanti policeman, because he feared these Mendis and Timinis who could have eaten him alive, but he followed me however reluctantly. I wanted him as representing law and order. The thinking I intended to do myself.
We walked down to the village and there in the middle of the road were my carriers in two parties, each seated round a large enamelled-iron basin full of fish and rice. They did chop. They looked up at me with a grin, but I had quite made up my mind.
“Policeman,” I said, “no man chops so late. Throw away the chop.”
He hesitated. He could not make up his mind which he was most afraid of, me or the men. Finally he decided that I was the most terrifying person and he gingerly picked up one of those basins and carefully put it down under a shrub.
“Policeman,” I said, and I was emphatic, “that's not the way to throw away chop. Scatter it round,” and with one glance at me to see if I meant what I said, he scattered it on the ground. What surprised me was that the men let him. Certainly those round the second dish seized it and fled up towards the rest-house, and we came after them. When we arrived the men were still eating, but there was still some rice in the dish, and I made the policeman seize it and fling it away, and then every one of those men came back meekly to work, picked up their loads or waited round the hammock for me.
I saw the loads off with the headman, and told him to get across the Prah River if he could and on to Kommenda, where I proposed to have my luncheon, and then I stayed behind to take some photographs of the old fort. It took me some time to take my pictures. The heat was intense, and beyond the fort, which is quaintly old-world, there is not much to see. The town is the usual Coast village built of clay, which they call swish, with thatched roofs; the streets between the houses are hot and dry and bare, and little naked children disport themselves there with the goats, sheep, pigs, and chickens. There are the holes from which the earth has been taken to make the swish—man-traps in the night, mosquitobreeding places at all times—and there are men and women standing gossiping in the street, wondering at the unusual sight of a white woman, just for all the world as they might do in a remote Cornish village if a particularly smart motor passed by. They are fishing villages, these villages along the Coast, living by the fishing, and growing just a little maize and plantains and yams for their own immediate needs; and it is a curious thing to say, but they give one the same sleepy, out-of-the-world feeling that a small village in Cornwall does. There is not in them the go and the promise there is in an Ashanti village, the dormant wealth waiting to be awakened one feels there is along the Volta. No, these places were exploited hundreds of years ago by the men who built the fort that frowns over them still, and they are content to live on from day to day with just enough to keep them going, with the certain knowledge that no man can die of starvation, and when a young man wants distraction I suppose he goes to the bigger towns. So I found nothing of particular interest in Chama, and I went on till I reached the Prah River, just where it breaks out across the sands and rushes to meet the ocean.
I wondered in that journey to Accra many times whether my face was set hard, whether my lips were not one firm, stern line that could never unbend and look kindly again. My small camp mirror that I consulted was exceedingly unflattering, but if I had not before been certain that no half-measures were of any use I should have been certain of it when I reached the river. There lay my loads, and sitting down solemnly watching them like so many crows, rather dissipated crows, were my men. They rose up as my hammock came into view.
“Missus, men want drink water. It be hot.”
It was hot, very hot, and the river it seemed was salt; moreover, the only house in sight, and that was a good way off, was the hut apparently belonging to the ferryman. I looked at them, and my spirits rose; it was borne in on me that I had them well in hand, for there was no reason why they should not have gone off in a body to get that much-needed water.
But I gave the order, “One man go fetch water.”
Why they obeyed me I don't know now, and why they didn't take the bucket I don't know now. I ought to have sent one man with a bucket; but experience always has to be bought, and I only realised that I was master of the situation, and must not spoil it by undue haste. So I solemnly stood there under my sun umbrella and watched those men have a drink one by one out of an empty marmalade pot. Whenever, in the future, I see one of those golden tins, it will call up to my memory a blazing hot day, a waste of sand and coarse grass, a wide river flowing through it, and a row of loads with a ragged company of black men sitting solemnly beside them waiting while one of their number brought them a drink. That drink was a tremendous piece of business, but we were through with it at last, and though I was rather weary and very hot I was inclined to be triumphant. I felt I had the men fairly well in hand.
Still, they weren't all that I could have desired. The road was very, very bad indeed, sometimes it was down on the heavy sand, sometimes the rocks were too rough—the hammock had to be engineered up and down the bank by devious and uncomfortable ways, sometimes we stopped to buy fruit in a village, and sometimes the men stopped and declared: “Missus, oder hammock-boy, he no come.”
Then I was hard. I knew it was no good being anything else.
“If hammock-boy no come you go on. I no stop.”
And they went, very slowly and reluctantly, but they went. It seemed cruel, but I soon grasped the fact that if I once allowed them to wait for the relief men who lingered there always would be lingerers, and we should crawl to Accra at the rate of five miles a day.
They sang songs as they went, and this my first day out the song took a most personal turn.
“If man no get chop,” they intoned in monotonous recitative, “he go die. Missus frow away our chop——-”
The deduction was obvious and I answered it at once. “All right, you go die. I no care. If men no come to work they may die.”
But they went very badly indeed, and it was after two o'clock in the afternoon before we arrived at Kommenda on the seashore, where there is a village and a couple of old forts falling into decay. Here, inside the courtyard of one of them, which is Ju-ju, I had my table and chair put out and my luncheon served. The feeling of triumph was still upon me. Already I was nearer Elmina than Sekondi and I felt in all probability, bad as they were, the men would go on. But, before I had finished my luncheon, my serenity received another shock. Of course no one dared disturb so terrible a person at her chop, but, after I had finished, while I was endeavouring to instruct Zacco in the way in which a kettle might be induced to boil without letting all the smoke go down the spout—I wanted some coffee—Grant came up with a perturbed countenance and said the headman wanted to speak to me. I sent for him.
“Missus,” he began propitiatingly, “man be tired too much. You stop here to-night; we take you Cape Coast to-morrow.”