She was not the regular Portuguese mail. She was an ancient seven-knot
tramp, which had come across from Brazil to Loando, and had been lucky
enough to pick up half a cargo of coffee there for Lisbon. She called in
at Banana, the station on the mangrove-spit at the mouth of the Congo,
where the river pilots live (and on occasion die), and where the Dutch
factory used to bring trade till the Free State killed it with duties;
and at Banana she had further fortune. There were two hundred and thirty
negroes there, Accra men and Kroo-boys mostly, a gang that had made
their fifteen or twenty pounds apiece on the railway, and were waiting
to go home.
The passenger-boys had collected their chattels, and were gathering in a
howling chattering mob by the surf-boats ready to go on board, when the
first notion came to me of joining her. It was the Danish harbour-master
who gave it. He came up, under his old white umbrella with the green
lining, to the house where I was staying, and told me that the tramp was
going to call in at San Thome and the Bonny River.
"Now, we don't hanker to get rid of you here, Mr. Calvert," he said,
"but if you want to climb that mountain in Fernando Po, you're not
likely to get so good a chance for the next three months to come. Your
place is on the road between San Thome and Bonny, though of course
you'll have to make it worth the skipper's while to stop. But that's
your palaver."
"Can you put a figure on it?" I asked.
"I should take it," said the harbour-master, "that you could hustle the
man into Fernando Po for ten sovereigns. He's only a Portugee. Come
aboard now in my gig and see him."
The tramp's interior was not inviting. We went into the chart-house and
drank the inevitable sweet champagne with the captain; and whilst the
bargain was being made, a thousand cockroaches crawled thoughtfully over
the yellow-white paint.
"I tell you straight," said the harbour-master in English, "she's a
dirty ship, and the chop'll be bad enough to poison a spotted dog. But
if you will go to these Portugee and Spanish places to sweat up
mountains, that's part of the palaver."
"Oh, if the grub's good enough for them, it won't kill me."
"Then if you will go, I'll send my boy off in the boat for your boxes
one-time, because the Old Man's in a hurry to be off. He's got a bishop
on board below, very sick with fever, and he wants to be out of this
stew and get to sea again as quick as it can be done. Thinks it'll give
the ship bad luck, I suppose, if the bishop pegs out."
The harbour-master's boy was speedy, and the harbour-master himself
piloted us out into the wide gulf of the river's mouth. The
beer-coloured stream gave up its scent of crushed marigolds strongly
enough to pierce through the smells of the ship and the smells of the
crowded chattering negroes on the fore-deck, and the old steamer began
to groan and creak as she lifted to the South Atlantic swell. The sun
went down, and night followed like the turning out of a lamp. The
lighthouse flickered out on the Portuguese shore away on the port bow,
and above it hung the Southern Cross, a pale faint thing, shaped like an
ill-made kite.
[Footnote 1: Copyrighted in the U.S.A. by Cutcliffe Hyne, 1898.]
[Illustration: "CAME DOWN OFF THE UPPER BRIDGE."]
The bumping engines stopped, and the Dane came down off the upper
bridge. He stood with me for a minute on the brown, greasy deck planks,
and then went down the ladder into his boat.
"Oscar-strasse, tretten, Kjobnhavn!" he shouted, as the gig dropped
astern. "Mind you come. I shall be home in another nine months."
"Wanderers' Club, London; don't forget; sorry I haven't a card left," I
hailed back, and wondered in my mind whether in any of the world's
turnings I should ever meet that good fellow again. But the steamer was
once more under way, mumbling and complaining, and the store-keeper at
that moment was beginning to open the case of dried fish--baccalhao, as
they call it on the coast--to which we traced back the hideous plague
which in the next few days swept away her people like the fire from a
battery of guns.
There were only two other passengers beside the bishop and myself--a
pair of yellow-faced, yellow-fingered Portuguese from down the coast,
traders both, with livers like Strasbourg geese. The Skipper was a
decent, weak little chap from Lisbon, who might have been good-looking
if he had sometimes washed; the Chief Engineer was a Swede, who spoke
English and quoted Ibsen; and the other officers I never came specially
across. There was only one of my own countrymen on board, a fireman from
Hull, one of the strongest men I ever met, and certainly the most
truculent ruffian. His name was Tordoff on the ship's books, but that
was a "purser's name." He spoke pure English when he forgot himself, and
certainly had once been a gentleman.
[Illustration: "LIFTED THE BODY AS THOUGH IT HAD BEEN RED-HOT."]
It was baking hot down below, and the place was alive with rats and
cockroaches. I rigged a wind-scoop through the port in my room, got
into pyjamas, and lay down on the top of the bunk. But I can't say I did
much business with sleep; the menagerie held cheerful meetings all
round, and the perspiration tickled as it ran off my body in little
streams; and these things keep a man awake. My room was to starboard,
and when through the porthole I saw day blaze up from behind the low
line of African hills, I turned out, rolled a cigarette, and went on
deck. I was just in time to see the first funeral.
Four very frightened-looking men and a profane mate were fitting a
couple of biscuit sacks over a twisted figure which lay on the grimy
greasy deck planks. They pulled one over the head and another over the
heels, and then with a palm and needle made them fast about the figure's
middle. Afterwards they lashed a fire-bar along the shins, and then,
with faces screwed up and turned away, they lifted the body as though it
had been red-hot, and toppled it over the rail.
The dead man dived through the swell alongside almost without a splash;
but, as though his coming had been a signal, a dozen streaks of foam
started up from various points, each with a black triangular fin in the
middle of it; and I did not feel any the happier from knowing precisely
what that convoy meant.
However, the sharks and the body drifted away into the wake astern, and
I rolled another cigarette and got a chair and sat on the break of the
bridge deck. From there I saw the mate and his four hands fetch one by
one five other bodies out of the forecastle, and prepare them for
burial. Three they covered with canvas; and then the supply of biscuit
sacks seemed to run out, because the last two they put over the side
with the fire-bar attachment only.
The fifth man had to be content with four participators in his funeral.
The remaining sailor held strangely aloof; his face turning through a
prism of curious colours; his body swaying in uncouth jerks. As the
fifth corpse toppled over the rail, this fellow threw himself down on
the hatch cover, and lay there writhing and screaming in a torment of
cramps.
At that moment a man in a white serge cassock, which reached to his
heels, came out of one of the forecastle doors and walked rapidly across
to the new victim. He was a long lean man with a hawk's nose, and bright
large eyes. The skin of his face was like baggy yellow leather, and it
was dry with fever. As he knelt beside the writhing sailor, I saw the
metal crucifix nearly fall from his thin hands through sheer weakness.
He was the Portuguese bishop from down-coast of course, and when I
remembered that he had just been through black-water fever (which is own
brother to yellow jack) I judged that from a human point of view he was
behaving with exquisite foolishness in meddling with first-crop cholera
patients. But I respected him a good deal for all that, and went and got
opium and acetate of lead and gave the man on the hatch a swingeing
dose. It was a useless thing to do, because the chap had got to die, and
one incurred one's own risks by going near him; but if that bishop was a
fool, I had got to be a fool too, and there was an end of it.
[Illustration: "HE KNELT BESIDE THE WRITHING SAILOR."]
Mark you, I wasn't feeling a bit frightened then. I'd been through
cholera-cramp in India, and knew what my chances were, and was ready to
face them without whimpering; though of course I'd freely have given
every farthing I was worth to have been snugly back in the Congo again.
But the thing had got to be seen through, and I intended to keep my end
up somehow. I couldn't afford to die like a rat in a squalid hole like
that.
I had breakfast all to myself that morning, because no one else turned
up; and afterwards the captain did me the honour to call me into
consultation. My Portuguese is off colour, but I speak enough to get
along with.
"You English know so much about these things," he said.
[Illustration: "'WE NO FIT FOR STOKE, SAR. WE GENTLEMEN WID MONEY,
SAR.'"]
"We keep clean ships," I answered, "and when anything goes wrong on them
we do not lose our heads. Also we try to trace our way back to the root
of evils. How did this plague start?"
"You must have brought it on board at Banana. We had not in the ship
before you came."
"We did not bring it. There is no cholera in the Congo now. And,
moreover, your passenger-boys are none of them sick. We must try back
further."
We did that together laboriously; and at last traced the mischief to
that fatal case of baccalhao which had been shipped at Bahia, an
infected port; and had this essence of pest promptly thrown to the
sharks. Next we went into the question of hands.
"I have not enough firemen and trimmers left to man a single watch,"
said the captain. "The cholera hit the stoke-hold first. The fellows who
are working there now have stood three watches on end, and they are
hardly making enough steam to give her steerage way."
"If you let your old beast of a tramp stop and drift about here like a
potato-chip in a frying-pan it won't improve matters. Those of us who
don't peg out with cholera will start murdering one another. The niggers
will begin."
"Yes, I know. I wanted some of them to serve as firemen for good pay.
But they will not listen to me. I do not think they understood. Will you
come and translate?"
We took revolvers, holding them ostentatiously in our pockets. I crossed
the dizzy sunshine of the lower main deck. The negroes on the forecastle
head were chattering together like a fair of monkeys, but they ceased
when we came up, and stared at us with faces working with excitement.
"Which be head-man?" I asked.