POSTSCRIPT
FOR THE EDITION OF 1907.
FOR THE EDITION OF 1907.
I havebeen asked to write a few new words for this old book, and it is not easy to do it. Most of the men and all the dogs of that wild time in the North are dead. I have never been able to understand why dogs should have short lives, and so many other things, such as tortoises, elephants, carp, and even men, should have long lives.
A few months ago I saw at St. Helena two tortoises which were said to have been at Plantation House for more than one hundred years. During a visit which I made to St. Helena in 1864 I became the owner of a picture of Plantation House, dated 1840. Two tortoises are shown in that picture on the lawn in front of the house, much smaller in size than the two now there. So it is probable that the legend of the hundred years on the Island is correct.
Strange! Napoleon, Bertrand, Montholon,Las Cases, Gourgaud, Hudson Lowe, O’Meara, all gone long ago—the two tortoises still there!
At the end of the Preface of 1873 I said that I was then about to proceed to Africa—a continent which appeared at the moment “to be offering adventure with a liberal hand.” That is thirty-four years ago; and, had Africa continued in her liberal mood, it might have been easier to write this Postscript to-day. Unfortunately the mood did not last. Africa proffered her adventures to me with a very conservative hand—so much so, indeed, that a great blank or void has arisen in my mind between these old days of the snow-shoe, the dog-sled, the buffalo, and the prairie of the Wild North Land and the present time. Over and above the lapse of years, Africa has intervened with rather more than a full share of her by-products—fever, ineffectual labour, and that eventual frustration of human effort which seems to have been the inevitable outcome of African adventure from the time of Hannibal the Carthaginian to Moneyball, the London Latitudinarian.
If you look at a map of the world you will see that what is, in a topographical sense, thickestand longest in Africa is thinnest and shortest in the rest of the globe. Africa, measured along the 10th degree of North latitude, gives about 4000 miles of land-line. The same latitude in all the other continents combined will give about 400 miles. We call the equator an imaginary line, but it is the only real live line that has lasting significance in relation to man’s life on earth.
The equator may be said to be the chest and heart of Africa. Elsewhere over the globe it is as a finger-tip or a toe-nail. That fact holds an immense human problem.
When the Great Divider of earth and ocean scooped out the central portion of the two Americas, forming the vast water receptacle now filled by the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, He laid the line of a good deal of man’s destiny in the world.
Run the eye from this great sea gap in America across the Atlantic to the west coast of Africa, and in the same latitudes you find a corresponding land protuberance, sufficient (if we could tow it across the ocean) to fill the opposite land vacuum in Central America. And it is strange to note that it was from this African protuberancethat the vast majority of the negroes were taken in the days of the slave trade, and carried over the Atlantic to work as slaves among the islands and on the coasts of this same Mexican Gulf and Carib Sea. Were the slave-traders of Bristol and Liverpool, unconsciously, in this hideous traffic, reversing the after idea of Canning by calling the old world into American slavery in order to redress the balance of colour in the new? For what seems probable is that had these, say twenty degrees, of solid Equatorial Africa originally filled up that Central American sea space, the greater part of the entire continent would to-day have belonged to the negro race.
The Aztec has gone, the Indian is going, but the imported African black man is going ahead.
At the end of the Civil War less than three million negroes were in the United States. There are now, I am told, ten millions. In spite of old slavery and modern race-exclusion and outrage, the African is making his way in the new world. Emigration from Europe throws nearly a million virile whites annually into America. Africa sends no fresh blood to replenish theold slave stock; nevertheless, the ratio of black increase exceeds that of the white.
Herein a strange contrariety presents itself in the two colours. The white man fails to live and propagate himself in Equatorial Africa, but the black man thrives and multiplies in America. And meanwhile what about the Wild North Land? That, like the men and dogs, is also dead.
One of the old friends of that time still survives—the gentleman of the Hudson’s Bay Company who was my companion from Fort Carlton to Lake Athabasca in the winter of ’72–73. His letters still breathe the same unconquerable energy that characterised him in the far North. He tells me in a letter written from Winnipeg at Christmas last that my little village at Fort Garry is now a great city, “which will one day,” he writes, “be the greatest, and in short the Chicago of Canada.” He tells me also of booms and bridges and expansions, and he sends me newspapers with pictures of hotels, grain-elevators, and universities, all of approved American design, and of entirely up-to-date ugliness. He says that even “a more progressivecity government is expected from a new mayor who has recently been elected by nearly double the largest majority ever obtained by any previous mayor.”
All this is no doubt quite as it should be; but it goes to prove, all the same, that the Wild North Land is dead and buried. I do not want to see its grave—I prefer to remember it as I saw it more than a generation ago; and I believe that one Chicago is amply sufficient for any one world.
Indeed, I can never be grateful enough that it was given me to see the old things of North America before the deluge. Prairies pure and unspotted; great herds of buffaloes moving; the sun setting over a silent wilderness.
W. F. B.
January 1907.