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I denied a connection with Kew, and in order to give an air of definiteness to my intentions, remembering I had been instructed that “one of the worst things you can do in West Africa is to be indefinite,” I said I was interested in the South Antarctic Drift—I was in those days.
They promptly fell into the pit of error that this was a gold mine speculation, and said they had “never heard of such a mine.” I attempted to extricate them from this idea, and succeeded, except with a deaf gentleman who kept on sweeping into the conversation with yarns and opinions on gold mines in West Africa and the awful mortality among people who attended to such things, which naturally led to a prolonged discussion ending in a general resolution that people who had anything to do with gold mines generally died rather quicker even than men from Kew. Indeed, it took me days to get myself explained, and when it was accomplished I found I had nearly got myself regarded as a lunatic to go to West Africa for such reasons. But fortunately for me, and for many others who have ventured into this kingdom, the West African merchants are good-hearted, hospitable English gentlemen, who seem to feel it their duty that no harm they can prevent should happen to any one; and my first friends, among them my fellow passengers on the ——, failing in inducingme to return from Sierra Leone, which they strongly advised, did their best to save me by means of education. The things they thought I “really ought to know” would make wild reading if published in extenso. Led by the kindest and most helpful of captains, they poured in information, and I acquired a taste for “facts”—any sort of facts about anything—a taste when applied to West African facts, that I fancy ranks with that for collecting venomous serpents; but to my listening to everything that was told me by my first instructors, and believing in it, undoubtedly I have often owed my life, and countless times have been enabled to steer neatly through shoaly circumstances ashore.
Our captain was not a man who would deliberately alarm a new comer, or shock any one, particularly a lady; indeed, he deliberately attempted to avoid so doing. He held it wrong to dwell on the dark side of Coast life, he said, “because youngsters going out were frequently so frightened on board the boats that they died as soon as they got on shore of the first cold they got in the head, thinking it was Yellow Jack”; so he always started conversation at meal times with anecdotes of his early years on an ancestral ranch in America. One great charm about “facts” is that you never know but what they may come in useful; so I eagerly got up a quantity of very strange information on the conduct of the American cow. He would then wander away among the China Seas or the Indian Ocean, and I could pass an examination on the social habits of captains of sailing vessels that ran to Bombay in old days. Sometimes the discourse visited the South American ports, and I took on information that will come in very handy should I ever find myself wandering about the streets of Callao after dark, searching for a tavern. But the turn that serious conversation always drifted into was the one that interested me most, that relating to the Coast. Particularly interesting were those tales of the old times and the men who first established the palm oil trade. They were, many of them, men who had been engaged in the slave trade, and on the suppression thereof they turned their attention to palm oil, to which end their knowledge of the locality and of the native chiefs and their commercial methods was of the greatest help. Their ideas were possibly not those at present in fashion, but the courage and enterprise those men displayed under the most depressing and deadly conditions made me proud of being a woman of the nation that turned out the “Palm oil ruffians”—Drake, Hawkins, the two Roberts, Frobisher, and Hudson—it is as good as being born a foreign gentleman.
There was one of these old coasters of the palm oil ruffian type who especially interested me. He is dead now. For the matter of that he died at a mature age the year I was born, and I am in hopes of collecting facts sufficient to enable me to publish his complete biography. He lived up a creek, threw boots at leopards, and “had really swell spittoons, you know, shaped like puncheons, and bound with brass.” I am sure it is unnecessary for me to mention his name.
Two of the old Coasters never spoke unless they had something useful and improving to say. They were Scotch; indeed, most of us were that trip, and I often used to wonder if the South Atlantic Ocean were broad enough for the accent of the “a,” or whether strange sounds would ever worry and alarm Central America and the Brazils.For general social purposes these silent ones used coughs, and the one whose seat was always next to mine at table kept me in a state of much anxiety, for I used to turn round, after having been riveted to the captain’s conversation for minutes, and find him holding some dish for me to help myself from; he never took the least notice of my apologies, and I felt he had made up his mind that, if I did it again, he should take me by the scruff of my neck some night and drop me overboard. He was an alarmingly powerfully built man, and I quite understood the local African tribe wishing to have him for a specimen. Some short time before he had left for home last trip, they had attempted to acquire his head for their local ju ju house, from mixed æsthetic and religious reasons. In a way, it was creditable of them, I suppose, for it would have caused them grave domestic inconvenience to have removed thereby at one fell swoop, their complete set of tradesmen; and as a fellow collector of specimens I am bound to admit the soundness of their methods of collecting! Wishing for this gentleman’s head they shot him in the legs. I have never gone in for collecting specimens of hominidae but still a recital of the incident did not fire me with a desire to repeat their performance; indeed, so discouraged was I by their failure that I hesitated about asking him for his skeleton when he had quite done with it, though it was gall and wormwood to think of a really fine thing like that falling into the hands of another collector.
The run from Canary to Sierra Leone takes about a week. That part of it which lies in the track of the N.E. Trade Winds,i.e., from Canary to Cape Verde, makes you believe Mr. Kipling when he sang—
“There are many ways to takeOf the eagle and the snake,And the way of a man with a maid;But the sweetest way for meIs a ship upon the seaOn the track of the North-East trade.”
“There are many ways to takeOf the eagle and the snake,And the way of a man with a maid;But the sweetest way for meIs a ship upon the seaOn the track of the North-East trade.”
was displaying, gracefully, a sensible choice of things; but you only feel this outward bound to the West Coast. When you come up from the Coast, fever stricken, homeward bound, you think otherwise. I do not mean to say that owing to a disintegrating moral effect of West Africa you wish to pursue the other ways mentioned in the stanza, but you do wish the Powers above would send that wind to the Powers below and get it warmed. Alas! it is in this Trade Wind zone that most men die, coming up from the Coast sick with fever, and it is to the blame of the Trade Wind that you see obituary notices—“of fever after leaving Sierra Leone.” Nevertheless, outward bound the thing is delightful, and dreadfully you feel its loss when you have run through it as you close in to the African land by Cape Verde. At any rate I did; and I began to believe every bad thing I had ever heard of West Africa, and straightway said to myself, what every man has said to himself who has gone there since Hanno of Carthage, “Why was I such a fool as to come to such an awful place?” It is the first meeting with the hot breath of the Bights that tries one; it is the breath of Death himself to many. You feel when first you meet it you have done with all else; not alone is it hot, but it smells—smells like nothing else. It does not smell all it can then; by and by, down in the Rivers, you get its perfection, but off Cape Verde you have to ask yourself, “Can I live in this or no?” andyou have to leave it, like all other such questions, to Allah, and go on.
We passed close in to Cape Verde, which consists of rounded hills having steep bases to the sea. From these bases runs out a low, long strip of sandy soil, which is the true cape. Beyond, under water, runs out the dangerous Almadia reef, on which were still, in ’93, to be seen the remains of thePort Douglas, who was wrecked there on her way to Australia in ’92. Her passengers were got ashore and most kindly treated by the French officers of Senegal; and finally, to the great joy and relief of their rescuers the said passengers were fetched away by an English vessel, and taken to what England said was their destination and home, Australia, but what France regarded as merely a stage on their journey to hell, to which port they had plainly been consigned.
It was just south of Cape Verde that I met my first tornado. The weather had been wet in violent showers all the morning and afternoon. Our old Coasters took but little notice of it, resigning themselves to saturation without a struggle, previous experience having taught them it was the best thing to do, dryness being an unattainable state during the wet season, and “worrying one’s self about anything one of the worst things you can do in West Africa.” So they sat on deck calmly smoking, their new flannel suits, which were donned after leaving the trade winds, shrinking, and their colours running on to the other deck, uncriticised even by the First officer. He was charging about shouting directions and generally making that afternoon such a wild, hurrying fuss about “getting in awnings,” “tricing up all loose gear,” such as deck chairs, and so on, to permanent parts of the ——, that, as nothing beyondshowers had happened, and there was no wind, I began to feel most anxious about his mental state. But I soon saw that this activity was the working of a practical prophetic spirit in the man, and these alarms and excursions of his arose from a knowledge of what that low arch of black cloud coming off the land meant.
We were surrounded by a wild, strange sky. Indeed, there seemed to be two skies, one upper, and one lower; for parts of it were showing evidences of terrific activity, others of a sublime, utterly indifferent calm. At one part of our horizon were great columns of black cloud, expanding and coalescing at their capitals. These were mounted on a background of most exquisite pale green. Away to leeward was a gigantic black cloud-mountain, across whose vast face were bands and wreaths of delicate white and silver clouds, and from whose grim depths every few seconds flashed palpitating, fitful, livid lightnings. Striding towards us came across the sea the tornado, lashing it into spray mist with the tremendous artillery of its rain, and shaking the air with its own thunder-growls. Away to windward leisurely boomed and grumbled a third thunderstorm, apparently not addressing the tornado but the cloud-mountain, while in between these phenomena wandered strange, wild winds, made out of lost souls frightened and wailing to be let back into Hell, or taken care of somehow by some one. This sort of thing naturally excited the sea, and all together excited the ——, who, not being built so much for the open and deep sea as for the shoal bars of West African rivers, made the most of it.
In a few seconds the wind of the tornado struck us, screaming through the rigging, eager for awnings or any loose gear, but foiled of its prey by the First officer, whostood triumphantly on a heap of them, like a defiant hen guarding her chickens.
Some one really ought to write a monograph on the natural history of mariners. They are valuable beings, and their habits are exceedingly interesting. I myself, being already engaged in the study of other organisms, cannot undertake the work; however, I place my observations at the disposal of any fellow naturalist who may have more time, and certainly will have more ability.
The sailor officer (Nauta pelagius vel officinalis) is metamorphic. The stage at which the specimen you may be observing has arrived is easily determined by the band of galoon round his coat cuff; in the English form the number of gold stripes increasing in direct ratio with rank. The galoon markings of the foreign species are frequently merely decorative, and in many foreign varieties only conditioned by the extent of surface available to display them and the ability of the individual to acquire the galoon wherewith to decorate himself.
The English third officer, you will find, has one stripe, the second two, the first three, and theimago, or captain, four, the upper one having a triumphant twist at the top.
You may observe, perhaps, about the ship sub-varieties, having a red velvet, or a white or blue velvet band on the coat cuff; these are respectively the Doctor, Purser, and Chief engineer; but with these sub-varieties I will not deal now, they are not essentially marine organisms, but akin to the amphibia.
The metamorphosis is as clearly marked in the individual as in the physical characteristics. A third officer is a hard-working individual who has to do anything that the other officers do not feel inclined to, and therefore rarely has time to wash. He in course of time becomes second officer, and the slave of the hatch. During this period of his metamorphosis he feels no compunction whatever in hauling out and dumping on the deck burst bacon barrels or leaking lime casks, actions which, when he reaches the next stage of development, he will regard as undistinguishable in a moral point of view from a compound commission of the seven deadly sins. For the deck, be it known, is to the First officer the most important thing in the cosmogony, and there is probably nothing he would not sacrifice to its complexion. One that I had the pleasure of knowing once lamented to me that he was not allowed by his then owners to spread a layer of ripe pineapples upon his precious idol, and let them be well trampled in and then lie a few hours, for this he assured me gave a most satisfactory bloom to a deck’s complexion. Yet when this same man becomes a captain and grows another stripe round his cuffs, he no longer takes an active part in the ship’s household affairs, that is his First officer’s business, the ship’s husband’s affair; and should he have an inefficient First the captain expects Men and Nations to sympathise with him, just as a lady expects to be sympathised with over a bad housemaid.
There are, however, two habits which are constant to all the species through each stage of transformation from roustabout to captain. One is a love of painting. I have never known an officer or captain who could pass a paint-pot, with the brush sticking temptingly out, without emotion. While, as for Jack, the happiest hours he knows seemingly are those he spends sitting on a slung plank over the side of his ocean home, with his bare feet dangling a few feet abovethe water as tempting bait for sharks, and the tropical sun blazing down on him and reflected back at him from the iron ship’s side and from the oily ocean beneath. Then he carols forth his amorous lay, and shouts, “Bill, pass that paint-pot” in his jolliest tones. It is very rarely that a black seaman is treated to a paint-pot; all they are allowed to do is to knock off the old stuff, which they do in the nerveless way the African does most handicraft. The greatest dissipation of the black hands department consists in being allowed to knock the old stuff off the steam-pipe covers, donkey, and funnel. This is a delicious occupation, because, firstly, you can usually sit while doing it, and secondly, you can make a deafening din and sing to it.
The other habit and the more widely known is the animistic view your seaman takes of Nature. Every article that is to a landsman an article and nothing more, is to him an individual with a will and mind of his own. I myself believe there is something in it. I feel sure that a certain hawser on board the —— had a weird influence on the minds of all men who associated with it. It was used at Liverpool coming out of dock, but owing to the absence of harbours on the Coast it was not required again until it tied our ocean liner up to a tree stump at Boma, on the Congo. Nevertheless it didn’t suit that hawser’s views to be down below in the run and see nothing of life. It insisted on remaining on deck, and the officers gave in to it and said “Well, perhaps it was better so, it would rot if it went down below,” so some days it abode on the quarter-deck, some days on the main, and now and again it would condescend to lie on the fo’castle, head in the sun. It had too its varying moods of tidiness, now neat anddandy coiled, now dishevelled and slummocky after association with the Kru boys.
It is almost unnecessary to remark that the relationship between the First officer and the Chief engineer is rarely amicable. I certainly did once hear a First officer pray especially for a Chief engineer all to himself under his breath at a Sunday service; but I do not feel certain that this was a display of true affection. I am bound to admit that “the engineer is messy,” which is magnanimous of me, because I had almost always a row of some kind on with the First officer, owing to other people upsetting my ink on his deck, whereas I have never fallen out with an engineer—on the contrary, two Chief engineers are amongst the most valued friends I possess.
The worst of it is that no amount of experience will drive it into the head of the First officer that the engineer will want coal—particularly and exactly when the ship has just been thoroughly scrubbed and painted to go into port. I have not been at sea so long as many officers, yet I know that you might as well try and get a confirmed dipsomaniac past a grog shop as the engineer past, say the Canary Coaling Company; indeed he seems to smell the Dakar coal, and hankers after it when passing it miles out to sea. Then, again, if the engineer is allowed to have a coal deposit in the forehold it is a fresh blow and grief to the First officer to find he likes to take them as Mrs. Gamp did her stimulant, when she “feels dispoged,” whether the deck has just been washed down or no.
The cook, although he always has a blood feud on with the engineer concerning coals for the galley fire, which should endear him to the First officer, is morally a greater trial to the First than he is to his other victims. Yousee the cook has a grease tub, and what that means to the deck in a high sea is too painful to describe. So I leave the First officer with his pathetic and powerful appeals to the immortal gods to be told why it is his fate to be condemned to this “dog’s life on a floating Hanwell lunatic asylum,” commending him to the sympathetic consideration of all good housewives, for only they can understand what that dear good man goes through.
After we passed Cape Verde we ran into the West African wet season rain sheet. There ought to be some other word than rain for that sort of thing. We have to stiffen this poor substantive up with adjectives, even for use with our own thunderstorms, and as is the morning dew to our heaviest thunder “torrential downpour of rain,” so is that to the rain of the wet season in West Africa. For weeks it came down on us that voyage in one swishing, rushing cataract of water. The interspaces between the pipes of water—for it did not go into details with drops—were filled with gray mist, and as this rain struck the sea it kicked up such a water dust that you saw not the surface of the sea round you, but only a mist sea gliding by. It seemed as though we had left the clear cut world and entered into a mist universe. Sky, air, and sea were all the same, as our vessel swept on in one plane, just because she capriciously preferred it. Many days we could not see twenty yards from the ship. Once or twice another vessel would come out of the mist ahead, slogging past us into the mist behind, visible in our little water world for a few minutes only as a misty thing, and then we leisurely tramped on alone “o’er the viewless, hueless deep,” with our horizon alongside.
If you cleared your mind of all prejudice the thing wasreally not uncomfortable, and it seemed restful to the mind. As I used to be sitting on deck every one who came across me would say, “Wet, isn’t it? Well, you see this is the wet season on the Coast”—or, “Damp, isn’t it? Well, you see this is the wet season on the Coast”—and then they went away, and, I believe slept for hours exhausted by their educational efforts. After this they would come on deck and sit in their respective chairs, smoking, save that irrepressible deaf gentleman, who spent his time squirrel like between vivid activity and complete quiescence. You might pass the smoking room door and observe the soles of his shoes sticking out off the end of the settee with an air of perfect restful calm hovering over them, as if the owner were hibernating for the next six months. Within two minutes after this an uproar on the poop would inform the experienced ear that he was up and about again, and had found some one asleep on a chair and attacked him.
It was during one of these days, furnishing reminiscences of Noah’s flood, that conversation turned suddenly on Driver ants. One of the silent men, who had been sitting for an hour or so, with a countenance indicative of a contemplative acceptance of the penitential psalms, roused by one of the deaf man’s rows, observed, “Paraffin is good for Driver ants.” “Oh,” said the deaf gentleman as he sat suddenly down on my ink-pot, which, for my convenience, was on a chair, “you wait till you get them up your legs, or sit down among them, as I saw Smith, when he was tired clearing bush. They took the tire out of him, he live for scratch one time. Smith was a pocket circus. You should have seen him get clear of his divided skirt. Oh lor! what price paraffin?”
The conversation on the Driver ant now became general.As far as I remember, Mr. Burnand, who inHappy ThoughtsandMy Health, gave much information, curious and interesting, on earwigs and wasps, omitted this interesting insect. So, perhaps, aprécisof the information I obtained may be interesting. I learnt that the only thing to do when you have got them on you is to adopt the course of action pursued by Brer Fox on that occasion when he was left to himself enough to go and buy ointment from Brer Rabbit, namely, make “a burst for the creek,” water being the quickest thing to make them leave go. Unfortunately, the first time I had occasion to apply this short and easy method with the ant was when I was strolling about by Bell-Town with a white gentleman and his wife, and we strolled into Drivers. There were only two water-barrels in the vicinity, and my companions, being more active than myself, occupied them.
While in West Africa you should always keep an eye lifting for Drivers. You can start doing it as soon as you land, which will postpone the catastrophe, not avoid it; for the song of the West Coaster to his enemy is truly, “Some day, some day, some day I shall meet you; Love, I know not when nor how.” Perhaps, therefore, this being so, and watchfulness a strain when done deliberately, and worrying one of the worst things you can do in West Africa, it may be just as well for you to let things slide down the time-stream until Fate sends a column of the wretches up your legs. This experience will remain “indelibly limned on the tablets of your mind when a yesterday has faded from its page,” or, as the modern school of psychologists would have it, “The affair will be brought to the notice of your sublimated consciousness, and that part of your mind will watch for Drivers withoutworrying you, and an automatic habit will be induced that will cause you never to let more than one eye roam spell-bound over the beauties of the African landscape; the other will keep fixed, turned to the soil at your feet.”
The Driver is of the speciesPonera, and is generally referred to the speciesanomma arcens. The females and workers of these ants are provided with stings as well as well-developed jaws. They work both for all they are worth, driving the latter into your flesh, enthusiastically up to the hilt; they then remain therein, keeping up irritation when you have hastily torn their owner off in response to a sensation that is like that of red hot pinchers. The full-grown worker is about half an inch long, and without ocelli even. Yet one of the most remarkable among his many crimes is that he will always first attack the eyes of any victim. These creatures seem to have no settled home; no man has seen the beginning or end, as far as I know, of one of their long trains. As you are watching the ground you see a ribbon of glistening black, one portion of it lost in one clump of vegetation, the other in another, and on looking closer you see that it is anacies institutaof Driver ants. If you stir the column up with a stick they make a peculiar fizzing noise, and open out in all directions in search of the enemy, which you take care they don’t find.
These ants are sometimes also called “visiting ants,” from their habit of calling in quantities at inconvenient hours on humanity. They are fond of marching at night, and drop in on your house usually after you have gone to bed. I fancy, however, they are about in the daytime as well, even in the brightest weather; but it is certain that it is in dull, wet weather, and after dusk, that you comeacross them most on paths and open spaces. At other times and hours they make their way among the tangled ground vegetation.
Their migrations are infinite, and they create some of the most brilliant sensations that occur in West Africa, replacing to the English exile there his lost burst water pipes of winter, and such like things, while they enforce healthy and brisk exercise upon the African.
I will not enter into particulars about the customary white man’s method of receiving a visit of Drivers, those methods being alike ineffective and accompanied by dreadful language. Barricading the house with a rim of red hot ashes, or a river of burning paraffin, merely adds to the inconvenience and endangers the establishment.
The native method with the Driver ant is different: one minute there will be peace in the simple African home, the heavy-scented hot night air broken only by the rhythmic snores and automatic side slaps of the family, accompanied outside by a chorus of cicadas and bull frogs. Enter the Driver—the next moment that night is thick with hurrying black forms, little and big, for the family, accompanied by rats, cockroaches, snakes, scorpions, centipedes, and huge spiders animated by the one desire to get out of the visitors’ way, fall helter skelter into the street, where they are joined by the rest of the inhabitants of the village, for the ants when they once start on a village usually make a regular house-to-house visitation. I mixed myself up once in a delightful knockabout farce near Kabinda, and possibly made the biggest fool of myself I ever did. I was in a little village, and out of a hut came the owner and his family and all the household parasites pell mell, leaving the Drivers in possession; but the mother and father of thefamily, when they recovered from this unwonted burst of activity, showed such a lively concern, and such unmistakable signs of anguish at having left something behind them in the hut, that I thought it must be the baby. Although not a family man myself, the idea of that innocent infant perishing in such an appalling manner roused me to action, and I joined the frenzied group, crying, “Where him live?” “In him far corner for floor!” shrieked the distracted parents, and into that hut I charged. Too true! There in the corner lay the poor little thing, a mere inert black mass, with hundreds of cruel Drivers already swarming upon it. To seize it and give it to the distracted mother was, as the reporter would say, “the work of an instant.” She gave a cry of joy and dropped it instantly into a water barrel, where her husband held it down with a hoe, chuckling contentedly. Shiver not, my friend, at the callousness of the Ethiopian; that there thing wasn’t an infant—it was a ham!
These ants clear a house completely of all its owner’s afflictions in the way of vermin, killing and eating all they can get hold of. They will also make short work of any meat they come across, but don’t care about flour or biscuits. Like their patron Mephistopheles, however, they do not care for carrion, nor do they destroy furniture or stuffs. Indeed they are typically West African, namely, good and bad mixed. In a few hours they leave the house again on their march through the Ewigkeit, which they enliven with criminal proceedings. Yet in spite of the advantage they confer on humanity, I believe if the matter were put to the human vote, Africa would decide to do without the Driver ant. Mankind has never been sufficiently grateful to its charwomen, like these insect equivalents, whodo their tidying up at supremely inconvenient times. I remember an incident at one place in the Lower Congo where I had been informed that “cork fever” was epidemic in a severe form among the white population. I was returning to quarters from a beetle hunt, in pouring rain; it was as it often is, “the wet season,” &c., when I saw a European gentleman about twenty yards from his comfortable-looking house seated on a chair, clad in a white cotton suit, umbrellaless, and with the water running off him as if he was in a douche bath. I had never seen a case of cork fever, but I had heard such marvellous and quaint tales of its symptoms that I thought—well, perhaps, anyhow, I would not open up conversation. To my remorse he said, as I passed him, “Drivers.” Inwardly apologising, I outwardly commiserated him, and we discoursed. It was on this occasion that I saw a mantis, who is by way of being a very pretty pirate on his own account, surrounded by a mob of the blind hurrying Drivers who, I may remark, always attack like Red Indians in open order. That mantis perfectly well knew his danger, but was as cool as a cucumber, keeping quite quiet and lifting his legs out of the way of the blind enemies around him. But the chances of keeping six legs going clear, for long, among such brutes without any of them happening on one, were small, even though he only kept three on the ground at one time. So, being a devotee of personal courage, I rescued him—whereupon he bit me for my pains. Why didn’t he fly? How can you fly, I should like to know, unless you have a jumping off place?
Drivers are indeed dreadful. I was at one place where there had been a white gentleman and a birthday party in the evening; he stumbled on his way home and wentto sleep by the path side, and in the morning there was only a white gentleman’s skeleton and clothes.
However, I will dwell no more on them now. Wretches that they are, they have even in spirit pursued me to England, causing a critic to observe thatbrevi spatio interjectois my only Latin, whereas the matter is this. I was once in distinguished society in West Africa that included other ladies. We had a distinguished native gentleman, who had had an European education, come to tea with us. The conversation turned on Drivers, for one of the ladies had the previous evening had her house invaded by them at midnight. She snatched up a blanket, wrapped herself round with it, unfortunately allowed one corner thereof to trail, whereby it swept up Drivers, and awful scenes followed. Then our visitor gave us many reminiscences of his own, winding up with one wherein he observed “brevi spatio interjecto, ladies; off came my breeches.” After this we ladies all naturally used this phrase to describe rapid action.
There is another ant, which is commonly called the red Driver, but it is quite distinct from the above-mentioned black species. It is an unwholesome-looking, watery-red thing with long legs, and it abides among trees and bushes. An easy way of obtaining specimens of this ant is to go under a mango or other fruit tree and throw your cap at the fruit. You promptly get as many of these insects as the most ardent naturalist could desire, its bite being every bit as bad as that of the black Driver.
These red ones build nests with the leaves of the tree they reside on. The leaves are stuck together with what looks like spiders’ webs. I have seen these nests the size of an apple, and sent a large one to the British Museum,but I have been told of many larger nests than I have seen. These ants, unfortunately for me who share the taste, are particularly devoted to the fruit of the rubber vine, and also to that of a poisonous small-leaved creeping plant that bears the most disproportionately-sized spiny, viscid, yellow fruit. It is very difficult to come across specimens of either of these fruits that have not been eaten away by the red Driver.
It is a very fascinating thing to see the strange devices employed by many kinds of young seedlings and saplings to keep off these evidently unpopular tenants. They chiefly consist in having a sheath of exceedingly slippery surface round the lower part of the stem, which the ants slide off when they attempt to climb. I used to spend hours watching these affairs. You would see an ant dash for one of these protected stems as if he were a City man and his morning train on the point of starting from the top of the plant stem. He would get up half an inch or so because of the dust round the bottom helping him a bit, then, getting no holding-ground, off he would slip, and falling on his back, desperately kick himself right side up, and go at it again as if he had heard the bell go, only to meet with a similar rebuff. The plants are most forbearing teachers, and their behaviour in every way a credit to them. I hope that they may in time have a moral and educational effect on this overrated insect, enabling him to realise how wrong it is for him to force himself where he is not welcome; but a few more thousand years, I fear, will elapse before the ant is anything but a chuckleheaded, obstinate wretch. Nothing nowadays but his happening to fall off with his head in the direction of some other vegetable frees the slippery plant from his attempts. Tothis other something off he rushes, and if it happens to be a plant that does not mind him up he goes, and I have no doubt congratulates himself on having carried out his original intentions, understanding the world, not being the man to put up with nonsense and all that sort of thing, whereas it is the plant that manages him. Some plants don’t mind ants knocking about among the grown-up leaves, but will not have them with the infants, and so cover their young stuff with a fur or down wherewith the ant can do nothing. Others, again, keep him and feed him with sweetstuff so that he should keep off other enemies from its fruit, &c. But I have not space to sing in full the high intelligence of West African vegetation, and I am no botanist; yet one cannot avoid being struck by it, it is so manifold and masterly.
Before closing these observations I must just mention that tiny, sandy-coloured abominationMyriaica molesta. In South West Africa it swarms, giving a quaint touch to domestic arrangements. No reckless putting down of basin, tin, or jam-pot there, least of all of the sugar-basin, unless the said sugar-basin is one of those commonly used in those parts, of rough, violet-coloured glass, with a similar lid. Since I left South West Africa I have read some interesting observations of Sir John Lubbock’s on the dislike of ants to violet colour. I wonder if the Portuguese of Angola observed it long ago and adopted violet glass for basins, or was it merely accidental and empirical. I suspect the latter, or they would use violet glass for other articles. As it is, everything eatable in a house there is completely insulated in water—moats of water with a dash of vinegar in it—to guard it from the ants from below; to guard from the ants from above, the samebreed and not a bit better. Eatables are kept in swinging safes at the end of coir rope recently tarred. But when, in spite of these precautions, or from the neglect of them, you find, say your sugar, a brown, busy mass, just stand it in the full glare of the sun. Sun is a thing no ant likes, I believe, and it is particularly distasteful to ants with pale complexions; and so you can see them tear themselves away from their beloved sugar and clear off into a Hyde Park meeting smitten by a thunderstorm.
This kind of ant, or a nearly allied species, is found in houses in England, where it is supposed they have been imported from the Brazils or West Indies in 1828. Possibly the Brazils got it from South West Africa, with which they have had a trade since the sixteenth century, most of the Brazil slaves coming out of Congo. It is unlikely that the importation was the other way about; for exotic things, whether plants or animals, do not catch on in Western Africa as they do in Australia. In the former land everything of the kind requires constant care to keep it going at all, and protect it from the terrific local circumstances. It is no use saying to animal or vegetable, “there is room for all in Africa”—for Africa, that is Africa properly so called—Equatorial West Africa, is full up with its own stuff now, crowded and fighting an internecine battle with the most marvellous adaptations to its environment.
Concerning the perils that beset the navigator in the Baixos of St. Ann, with some description of the country between the Sierra Leone and Cape Palmas and the reasons wherefrom it came to be called the Pepper, Grain, or Meleguetta Coast.
It was late evening-time when the —— reached that part of the South Atlantic Ocean where previous experience and dead reckoning led our captain to believe that Sierra Leone existed. The weather was too thick to see ten yards from the ship, so he, remembering certain captains who, under similar circumstances, failing to pick up the light on Cape Sierra Leone, had picked up the Carpenter Rock with their keels instead, let go his anchor, and kept us rolling about outside until the morning came. Slipperty slop, crash! slipperty slop, crash! went all loose gear on board all the night long; and those of the passengers who went in for that sort of thing were ill from the change of motion. The mist, our world, went gently into grey, and then black, growing into a dense darkness filled with palpable, woolly, wet air, thicker far than it had been before. This, my instructors informed me, was caused by the admixture of the “solid malaria coming off the land.”
However, morning came at last, and even I was on deck as it dawned, and was rewarded for my unwonted activity by a vision of beautiful, definite earth-form dramatically unveiled. No longer was the —— our only material world. The mist lifted itself gently off, as it seemed, out of the ocean, and then separated before the morning breeze; one great mass rolling away before us upwards, over the land, where portions of it caught amongst the forests of the mountains and stayed there all day, while another mass went leisurely away to the low Bullam shore, from whence it came again after sunset to join the mountain and the ocean mists as they drew down and in from the sea, helping them to wrap up Freetown, Sierra Leone and its lovely harbour for the night.
It was with a thrill of joy that I looked on Freetown harbour for the first time in my life. I knew the place so well. Yes; there were all the bays, Kru, English and Pirate; and the mountains, whose thunder rumbling caused Pedro do Centra to call the place Sierra Leona when he discovered it in 1462. And had not my old friend, Charles Johnson, writing in 1724, given me all manner of information about it during those delicious hours rescued from school books and dedicated to a most contentious study ofA General History of Robberies and Murders of the most Notorious Pyrates? That those bays away now on my right hand “were safe and convenient for cleaning and watering;” and so on and there rose up before my eyes a vision of the society ashore here in 1724 that lived “very friendly with the natives—being thirty Englishmen in all; men who in some part of their lives had been either privateering, buccaneering, or pirating, and still retain and have the riots and humours common to that sort of life.” Hard by, too, was Bence Island, where, according to Johnson, “there lives an old fellow namedCrackers(his true name he thinks fit to conceal), and who was formerly a noted buccaneer; hekeeps the best house in the place, has two or three guns before his door with which he salutes his friends the pyrates when they put in, and lives a jovial life with them all the while they are there.” Alas! no use to me was the careful list old Johnson had given me of the residents. They were all dead now, and I could not go ashore and hunt up “Peter Brown” or “John Jones,” who had “one long boat and an Irish young man.” Social things were changed in Freetown, Sierra Leone; but only socially, for the old description of it is, as far as scenery goes, correct to-day, barring the town. Whether or no everything has changed for the better is not my business to discuss here, nor will I detain you with any description of the town, as I have already published one after several visits, with a better knowledge than I had on my first call there.
On one of my subsequent visits I fell in with Sierra Leone receiving a shock. We were sitting, after a warm and interesting morning spent going about the town talking trade, in the low long pleasant room belonging to the Coaling Company whose windows looked out over an eventful warehouse yard; for therein abode a large dog-faced baboon, who shied stones and sticks at boys and any one who displeased him, pretty nearly as well as a Flintshire man. Also in the yard were a large consignment of kola nuts packed as usual in native-made baskets, called bilys, lined inside with the large leaves of a Ficus and our host was explaining to my mariner companions their crimes towards this cargo while they defended themselves with spirit. It seemed that this precious product if not kept on deck made a point of heating and then going mildewed; while, if you did keep it on deck, either the First officer’s minions went fooling about it with the hose, whichmade it swell up and burst and ruined it, or left it in unmitigated sun, which shrivelled it—and so on. This led, naturally, to a general conversation on cargo between the mariners and the merchants, during which some dreadful things were said about the way matches arrived, in West Africa and other things, shipped at shipper’s own risk, let alone the way trade suffered by stowing hams next the boilers. Of course the other side was a complete denial of these accusations, but the affair was too vital for any of us to attend to a notorious member of the party who kept bothering us “to get up and look at something queer over King Tom.”
Now it was market day in Freetown; and market day there has got more noise to the square inch in it than most things. You feel when you first meet it that if it were increased a little more it would pass beyond the grasp of human ear, like the screech of that whistle they show off at the Royal Society’s Conversazione. However, on this occasion the market place sent up an entire compound yell, still audible, and we rose as one man as the portly housekeeper, followed by the small, but able steward, burst into the room, announcing in excited tones, “Oh! the town be took by locusts!The town be took by locusts!”(D.C. fortissimo). And we attended to the incident; ousting the reporter of “the queer thing over King Tom” from the window, and ignoring his “I told you so,” because he hadn’t.
This was the first cloud of locusts that had come right into the town in the memory of the oldest inhabitant, though they occasionally raid the country away to the North. I am informed that when the chiefs of the Western Soudan do not give sufficient gifts to the man who is locust king and has charge of them—keeping them in holes in thedesert of Sahara—he lets them out in revenge. Certainly that year he let them out with a vengeance, for when I was next time down Coast in the Oil Rivers I was presented with specimens that had been caught in Old Calabar and kept as big curios.
This Freetown swarm came up over the wooded hills to the South-West in a brown cloud of singular structure, denser in some parts than others, continually changing its points of greatest density, like one of Thompson’s diagrams of the ultimate structure of gases, for you could see the component atoms as they swept by. They were swirling round and round upwards-downwards like the eddying snowflakes in a winter’s storm, and the whole air rustled with the beat of the locusts’ wings. They hailed against the steep iron roofs of the store-houses, slid down it, many falling feet through the air before they recovered the use of their wings—the gutters were soon full of them—the ducks in the yard below were gobbling and squabbling over the layer now covering the ground, and the baboon chattered as he seized handfuls and pulled them to pieces.
Everybody took them with excitement, save the jack crows, who on their arrival were sitting sleeping on the roof ridge. They were horribly bored and bothered by the affair. Twice they flopped down and tried them. There they were lying about in gutters with a tempting garbagey look, but evidently the jack crows found them absolutely mawkish; so they went back to the roof ridge in a fuming rage, because the locusts battered against them and prevented them from sleeping.
We left Sierra Leone on the —— late in the afternoon, and ran out again into the same misty wet weather. Thenext morning the balance of our passengers were neither up early, nor lively when they were up; but to my surprise after what I had heard, no one had the much-prognosticated attack of fever. All day long we steamed onwards, passing the Banana Isles and Sherboro Island and the sound usually called Sherboro River.[2]We being a South-West Coast boat, did not call at the trading settlements here, but kept on past Cape St. Ann for the Kru coast.
All day long the rain came down as if thousands of energetic—well, let us say—angels were hurriedly baling the waters above the firmament out into the ocean. Everything on board was reeking wet.
You could sweep the moisture off the cabin panelling with your hand, and our clothes were clammy and musty, and the towels too damp on their own account to dry you. Why none of us started specialising branchiae I do not know, but feel that would have been the proper sort of breathing apparatus for such an atmosphere.
The passengers were all at the tail end of their spirits, for Sierra Leone is the definite beginning of the Coast to the out-goer. You are down there when you leave it outward bound; it is indeed, the complement of Canary. Those going up out of West Africa begin to get excited at Sierra Leone; those going down into West Africa, particularly when it is the wet season, begin to get depressed. It did not, however, operate in this manner on me. I had survived Sierra Leone, I had enjoyed it; why, therefore, not survive other places, and enjoy them? Moreover, my scientific training, combined with close study of the proper method of carrying on the local conversation, had by now enabled me tounderstand its true spirit,—never contradict, and, if you can, help it onward. When going on deck about 6 o’clock that evening, I was alarmed to see our gallant captain in red velvet slippers. A few minutes later the chief officer burst on my affrighted gaze in red velvet slippers too. On my way hurriedly to the saloon I encountered the third officer similarly shod. When I recovered from these successive shocks, I carried out my mission of alarming the rest of the passengers, who were in the saloon enjoying themselves peacefully, and reported what I had seen. The old coasters, even including the silent ones, agreed with me that we were as good as lost so far as this world went; and the deaf gentleman went hurriedly on deck, we think “to take the sun,”—it was a way he had at any time of day, because “he had been studying about how to fix points for the Government—and wished to keep himself in practice.”
My fellow new-comers were perplexed; and one of them, a man who always made a point of resisting education, and who thought nothing of calling some of our instructor’s best information “Tommy Rot!” said, “I don’t see what can happen; we’re right out at sea, and it’s as calm as a millpond.”
“Don’t you, my young friend? don’t you?” sadly said an old Coaster. “Well, I’ll just tell you there’s precious little that can’t happen, for we’re among the shoals of St. Ann.”
The new-comers went on deck “just to look round;” and as there was nothing to be seen but a superb specimen of damp darkness, they returned to the saloon, one of them bearing an old chart sheet which he had borrowed from the authorities. Now that chart was not reassuring; the thinglooked like an exhibition pattern of a prize shot gun, with the quantity of rocks marked down on it.
“Look here,” said an anxious inquirer; “why are some of these rocks named after the Company’s ships?”
“Think,” said the calm old Coaster.
“Oh, I say! hang it all, you don’t mean to say they’ve been wrecked here? Anyhow, if they have they got off all right. How is it the ‘Yoruba Rock’ and the ‘Gambia Rock?’ The ‘Yoruba’ and the ‘Gambia’ are running now.”
“Those,” explains the old Coaster kindly, “were the old ‘Yoruba’ and ‘Gambia.’ The ‘Bonny’ that runs now isn’t the old ‘Bonny.’ It’s the way with most of them, isn’t it?” he says, turning to a fellow old Coaster. “Naturally,” says his friend. “But this is the old original, you know, and it’s just about time she wrote up her name on one of these tombstones.” “You don’t save ships,” he continues, for the instruction of the new-comers, attentive enough now; “that go on the Kru coast, and if you get ashore you don’t save the things you stand up in—the natives strip you.”
“Cannibals!” I suggest.
“Oh, of course they are cannibals; they are all cannibals, are natives down here when they get the chance. But, that does not matter; you see what I object to is being brought on board the next steamer that happens to call crowded with all sorts of people you know, and with a lady missionary or so among them, just with nothing on one but a flyaway native cloth.You remember D——?”“Well,” says his friend. Strengthened by this support, he takes his turn at instructing the young critic, saying soothingly, “there, don’t you worry; have a good dinner.” (It was just being laid.) “For if you do get ashore the food issomething beastly. But, after all, what with the sharks and the surf and the cannibals, you know the chances are a thousand to one that the worst will come to the worst and you live to miss your trousers.”
After dinner we new-comers went on deck to keep an eye on Providence, and I was called on to explain how the alarm had been given me by the footgear of the officers. I said, like all great discoveries, “it was founded on observation made in a scientific spirit.” I had noticed that whenever a particularly difficult bit of navigation had to be done on our boat, red velvet slippers were always worn, as for instance, when running through the heavy weather we had met south of the Bay, on going in at Puerto de la Luz, and on rounding the Almadia reefs, and on entering Freetown harbour in fog. But never before had I seen more than one officer wearing them at a time, while tonight they were blazing like danger signals at the shore ends of all three.
My opinion as to the importance of these articles to navigation became further strengthened by subsequent observations in the Bights of Biafra and Benin. We picked up rivers in them, always wore them when crossing bars, and did these things on the whole successfully. But once I was on a vessel that was rash enough to go into a difficult river—Rio del Rey—without their aid. That vessel got stuck fast on a bank, and, as likely as not, would be sticking there now with her crew and passengers mere mosquito-eaten skeletons, had not our First officer rushed to his cabin, put on red velvet slippers and gone out in a boat, energetically sounding around with a hand lead. Whereupon we got off, for clearly it was not by his sounding; it never amounted to more than two fathoms, while we required a good three-and-a-half. Yet that First officer, a truthful man, always,said nobody did a stroke of work on board that vessel bar himself; so I must leave the reader to escape if he can from believing it was the red velvet slippers that saved us, merely remarking that these invaluable nautical instruments were to be purchased at Hamburg, and were possibly only met with on boats that run to Hamburg and used by veterans of that fleet.
If you will look on the map, not mine, but one visible to the naked eye, you will see that the Coast from Sierra Leone to Cape Palmas is the lower bend of the hump of Africa and the turning point into the Bights of Benin, Biafra and Panavia.
Its appearance gives the voyager his first sample of those stupendous sweeps of monotonous landscapes so characteristic of Africa. From Sherboro River to Cape Mount, viewed from the sea, every mile looks as like the next as peas in a pod, and should a cruel fate condemn you to live ashore here in a factory you get so used to the eternal sameness that you automatically believe that nothing else but this sort of world, past, present, or future, can ever have existed: and that cities and mountains are but the memories of dreams. A more horrible life than a life in such a region for a man who never takes to it, it is impossible to conceive; for a man who does take to it, it is a kind of dream life, I am judging from the few men I have met who have been stationed here in the few isolated little factories that are established. Some of them look like haunted men, who, when they are among white men again, cling to their society: others are lazy, dreamy men, rather bored by it.
The kind of country that produces this effect must be exceedingly simple in make: it is not the mere isolation from fellow white men that does it—for example, thehandful of men who are on the Ogowé do not get like this though many of them are equally lone men, yet they are bright and lively enough. Anyhow, exceedingly simple in make as is this region of Africa from Sherboro to Cape Mount, it consists of four different things in four long lines—lines that go away into eternity for as far as eye can see. There is the band of yellow sand on which your little factory is built. This band is walled to landwards by a wall of dark forest, mounted against the sky to seaward by a wall of white surf; beyond that there is the horizon-bounded ocean. Neither the forest wall nor surf wall changes enough to give any lively variety; they just run up and down a gamut of the same set of variations. In the light of brightest noon the forest wall stands dark against the dull blue sky, in the depth of the darkest night you can see it stand darker still, against the stars; on moonlight nights and on tornado nights, when you see the forest wall by the lightning light, it looks as if it had been done over with a coat of tar. The surf wall is equally consistent, it may be bad, or good as surf, but it’s generally the former, which merely means it is a higher, broader wall, and more noisy, but it’s the same sort of wall making the same sort of noise all the time. It is always white; in the sunlight, snowy white, suffused with a white mist wherein are little broken, quivering bits of rainbows. In the moonlight, it gleams with a whiteness there is in nothing else on earth. If you can imagine a non-transparent diamond wall, I think you will get some near idea to it, and even on the darkest of dark nights you can still see the surf wall clearly enough, for it shows like the ghost of its daylight self, seeming to have in it a light of its own, and you love or hate it. Night and day and season changes passover these things, like reflections in a mirror, without altering the mirror frame; but nothing comes that ever stills for one-half second the thunder of the surf-wall or makes it darker, or makes the forest-wall brighter than the rest of your world. Mind you, it is intensely beautiful, intensely soothing, intensely interesting if you can read it and you like it, but life for a man who cannot and does not is a living death.
But if you are seafaring there is no chance for a brooding melancholy to seize on you hereabouts, for you soon run along this bit of coast and see the sudden, beautiful headland of Cape Mount, which springs aloft in several rounded hills a thousand and odd feet above the sea and looking like an island. After passing it, the land rapidly sinks again to the old level, for a stretch of another 46 miles or so when Cape Mesurado,[3]rising about 200 feet, seems from seaward to be another island.
The capital of the Liberian Republic, Monrovia, is situated on the southern side of the river Mesurado, and right under the high land of the Cape, but it is not visible from the roadstead, and then again comes the low coast, unrolling its ribbon of sandy beach, walled as before with forest wall and surf, but with the difference that between the sand beach and the forest are long stretches of lagooned waters. Evil looking, mud-fringed things, when I once saw them at the end of a hard, dry season, but when the wet season’s rains come they are transformed into beautiful lakes; communicating with each other and overflowing by shallowchannels which they cut here and there through the sand-beach ramparts into the sea.
The identification of places from aboard ship along such a coast as this is very difficult. Even good sized rivers doubling on themselves sneak out between sand banks, and make no obvious break in surf or forest wall. The old sailing direction that gave as a landmark the “Tree with two crows on it” is as helpful as any one could get of many places here, and when either the smoke season or the wet season is on of course you cannot get as good as that. But don’t imagine that unless the navigator wants to call on business, he can “just put up his heels and blissfully think o’ nowt,” for this bit of the West Coast of Africa is one of the most trying in the world to work. Monotonous as it is ashore, it is exciting enough out to sea in the way of the rocks and shoals, and an added danger exists at the beginning and end of the wet, and the beginning of the dry, in the shape of tornadoes.[4]These are sudden storms coming up usually with terrific violence; customarily from the S.E. and E., but sometimes towards the end of the season straight from S. More slave ships than enough have been lost along this bit of coast in their time, let alone decent Bristol Guineamen into the bargain, owing to “a delusion that occasionally seized inexperienced commanders that it was well to heave-to for a tornado, whereas a sailing ship’s best chance lay in her heels.” It was a good chance too, for owing to the short duration of this breed of hurricane and their terrific rain, there accompanies them no heavy sea,the tornado-rain ironing the ocean down; so if, according to one of my eighteenth century friends, you see that well-known tornado-cloud arch coming, and you are on a Guineaman, for your sins, “a dray of a vessel with an Epping Forest of sea growth on her keel, and two-thirds of the crew down with fever or dead of it, as likely they will be after a spell on this coast,” the sooner you get her ready to run the better, and with as little on her as you can do with. If, however, there be a white cloud inside the cloud-arch you must strip her quick and clean, for that tornado is going to be the worst tornado you were ever in.
Nevertheless, tornadoes are nothing to the rocks round here. At the worst, there are but two tornadoes a day, always at tide turn, only at certain seasons of the year, and you can always see them coming; but it is not that way with the rocks. There is at least one to each quarter hour in the entire twenty-four. They are there all the year round, and more than one time in forty you can’t see them coming. In case you think I am overstating the case, I beg to lay before you the statement concerning rocks given me by an old captain, who was used to these seas and never lost a ship. I had said something flippant about rocks, and he said, “I’ll write them down for you, missy.” This is just his statement for the chief rocks between Junk River and Baffu; not a day’s steamer run. “Two and three quarters miles and six cables N.W. by W. from Junk River there is ‘Hooper’s Patch,’ irregular in shape, about a mile long and carrying in some places only 2½ fathoms of water. There is another bad patch about a mile and a-half from Hooper’s, so if you have to go dodging your way into Marshall, a Liberian settlement, great caution and good luck is useful. In Waterhouse Bay there’s a cluster of pinnaclerocks all under water, with a will-o’-the wisp kind of buoy, that may be there or not to advertise them. One rock at Tobokanni has the civility to show its head above water, and a chum of his, that lies about a mile W. by S. from Tobokanni Point, has the seas constantly breaking on it.
The coast there is practically reefed for the next eight miles, with a boat channel near the shore. But there is a gap in this reef at Young Sesters, through which, if you handle her neatly, you can run a ship in. In some places this reef of rock is three-quarters of a mile out to sea. Trade Town is the next place where you may now call for cargo. Its particular rock lies a mile out and shows well with the sea breaking on it. After Trade Town the rocks are more scattered, and the bit of coast by Kurrau River rises in cliffs 40 to 60 feet high. The sand at their base is strewn with fallen blocks on which the surf breaks with great force, sending the spray up in columns; and until you come to Sestos River the rocks are innumerable, but not far out to sea, so you can keep outside them unless you want to run in to the little factory at Tembo. Just beyond Sestos River, three-quarters of a mile S.S.W. of Fen River, there are those Fen rocks on which the sea breaks, but between these and the Manna rocks, which are a little more than a mile from shore N.W. by N. from Sestos River, there are any quantity of rocks marked and not marked on the chart. These Manna rocks are a jolly bad lot, black, and only a few breaking, and there is a shoal bank to the S.E. of these for half a mile, then for the next four miles, there are not more than 70 hull openers to the acre. Most of them are not down on the chart, so there’s plenty of opportunity now about for you to do a little African discovery until you come to Sestos reef, off a point of the same name, projecting half a mile to westwardswith a lot of foul ground round it. Spence rock which breaks, is W. two-thirds S., distant 1¼ miles from Sestos Point; within 5 miles of it is the rock whichThe Coriscodiscovered in 1885. It is not down on the chart yet, all these set of rocks round Sestos are sharp too, so the lead gives you no warning, and you are safer right-away from them. Then there’s a very nasty one called Diabolitos, I expect those old Portuguese found it out, it’s got a lot of little ones which extend 2 miles and more to seaward. There is another devil rock off Bruni, called by the natives Ba Ya. It stands 60 feet above sea-level, and has a towering crown of trees on it. It is a bad one is this, for in thick weather, as it is a mile off shore and isolated, it is easily mistaken, and so acts as a sort of decoy for the lot of sunken devil rocks which are round it. Further along towards Baffu there are four more rocks a mile out, and forest ground on the way.”
I just give you this bit of information as an example, because I happen to have this rough rock list of it; but a little to the east the rocks and dangers of the Kru Coast are quite as bad, both in quantity and quality, indeed, more so, for there is more need for vessels to call. I often think of this bit of coast when I see people unacquainted with the little local peculiarities of dear West Africa looking at a map thereof and wondering why such and such a Bay is not utilised as a harbour, or such and such a river not navigated, or this, that and the other bit of Coast so little known of and traded with. Such undeveloped regions have generally excellent local reasons, reasons that cast no blame on white man’s enterprise or black man’s savagery. They are rock-reefed coast or barred rivers, and therefore not worth the expense to the trader ofworking them, and you must always remember that unless the trader opens up bits of West Africa no one else will. It may seem strange to the landsman that the navigator should hug such a coast as the shoals (theBainosas the old Portuguese have it) of St. Ann—but they do. If you ask a modern steamboat captain he will usually tell you it is to save time, a statement that the majority of the passengers on a West Coast boat will receive with open derision and contempt, holding him to be a spendthrift thereof; but I myself fancy that hugging this coast is a vestigial idea. In the old sailing-ship days, if you ran out to sea far from these shoals you lost your wind, and maybe it would take you five mortal weeks to go from Sierra Leone to Cape Mount orWash Congo, as the natives called it in the 17th century.
Off the Kru Coast, both West Coast and South-West Coast steamers and men-o’-war on this station, call to ship or unship Krumen. The character of the rocks, of which I have spoken,—their being submerged for the most part, and pinnacles—increases the danger considerably, for a ship may tear a wound in herself that will make short work of her, yet unless she remains impaled on the rock, making, as it were, a buoy of herself, that rock might not be found again for years.
This sort of thing has happened many times, and the surveying vessels, who have been instructed to localise the danger and get it down on the chart, have failed to do so in spite of their most elaborate efforts; whereby the more uncharitable of the surveying officers are led in their wrath to hold that the mercantile marine officers who reported that rock and gave its bearings did so under the influence of drink, while the more charitable and scientifically inclined have suggested that elevation and subsidence are energetically and continually at work along the Bight of Benin, hoisting up shoals to within a few feet of the surface in some places and withdrawing them in others to a greater depth.
The people ashore here are commonly spoken of as Liberians and Kruboys. The Liberians are colonists in the country, having acquired settlements on this coast by purchase from the chiefs of the native tribes. The idea of restoring the Africans carried off by the slave trade to Africa occurred to America before it did to England, for it was warmly advocated by the Rev. Samuel Hoskins, of Newport, Rhode Island, in 1770, but it was 1816 before America commenced to act on it, and the first emigrants embarked from New York for Liberia in 1820. On the other hand, though England did not get the idea until 1787, she took action at once, buying from King Tom, through the St George’s Bay Company, the land at Sierra Leone between the Rochelle and Kitu River. This was done on the recommendation of Mr. Smeatham. The same year was shipped off to this new colony the first consignment of 460 free negro servants and 60 whites; out of those 400 arrived and survived their first fortnight, and set themselves to build a town called Granville, after Mr. Granville Sharpe, whose exertions had resulted in Lord Mansfield’s epoch-making decision in the case of Somersetv.Mr. J. G. Stewart, his master,i.e., that no slave could be held on English soil.
The Liberians were differently situated from their neighbours at Sierra Leone in many ways; in some of these they have been given a better chance than the Africans sent to Sierra Leone—in other ways not so good a chance. Neither of the colonies has been completely successful.
I hold the opinion that if those American and English philanthropists could not have managed the affair better than they did, they had better have confined their attention to talking, a thing they were naturally great on, and left the so-called restoration of the African to his native soil alone. For they made a direful mess of the affair from a practical standpoint, and thereby inflicted an enormous amount of suffering and a terrible mortality on the Africans they shipped from England, Canada, and America; the tradition whereof still clings to the colonies of Liberia and Sierra Leone, and gravely hinders their development by the emigration of educated, or at any rate civilised, Africans now living in the West Indies and the Southern States of America.
I am aware that there are many who advocate the return to Africa of the Africans who were exported from the West Coast during the slavery days. But I cannot regard this as a good or even necessary policy, for two reasons. One is that those Africans were not wanted in West Africa. The local supply of African is sufficient to develop the country in every way. There are in West Africa now, Africans thoroughly well educated, as far as European education goes, and who are quite conversant with the nature of their own country and with the language of their fellow-countrymen. There are also any quantity of Africans there who, though not well educated, are yet past-masters in the particular culture which West Africa has produced on its inhabitants.
The second reason is that the descendants of the exported Africans have seemingly lost their power of resistance to the malarial West Coast climate. This a most interesting subject, which some scientific gentlemanought to attend to, for there is a sufficient quantity of evidence ready for his investigation. The mortality among the Africans sent to Sierra Leone and Liberia has been excessive, and so also has been that amongst the West Indians who went to Congo Belge, while the original intention of the United Presbyterian Mission to Calabar had to be abandoned from the same cause. In fact it looks as if the second and third generation of deported Africans had no greater power of resistance to West Africa than the pure white races; and, such being the case, it seems to me a pity they should go there. They would do better to bring their energies to bear on developing the tropical regions of America and leave the undisturbed stock of Africa to develop its own.
However, we will not go into that now. I beg to refer you to Bishop Ingram’sSierra Leone after a Hundred Years, for the history of England’s philanthropic efforts. I may some day, perhaps, in the remote future, write myself a book on America’s effort, but I cannot write it now, because I have in my possession only printed matter—a wilderness of opinion and a mass of abuse on Liberia as it is. No sane student of West Africa would proceed to form an opinion on any part of it with such stuff and without a careful personal study of the thing as it is.