CHAPTER II. FERNANDO PO AND THE BUBIS.
CHAPTER III. VOYAGE DOWN COAST.
CHAPTER IV. THE OGOWE.
CHAPTER V. THE RAPIDS OF THE OGOWE.
CHAPTER VI. LEMBARENE.
CHAPTER VII. ON THE WAY FROM KANGWE TO LAKE NCOVI.
CHAPTER VIII. FROM NCOVI TO ESOON.
CHAPTER IX. FROM ESOON TO AGONJO.
CHAPTER X. BUSH TRADE AND FAN CUSTOMS.
CHAPTER XI. DOWN THE REMBWE.
CHAPTER XII. FETISH.
CHAPTER XIII. FETISH--(Continued).
CHAPTER XIV. FETISH--(Continued).
CHAPTER XV. FETISH--(Continued).
CHAPTER XVI. FETISH--(Concluded).
CHAPTER XVII. ASCENT OF THE GREAT PEAK OF CAMEROONS.
CHAPTER XVIII. THE GREAT PEAK OF CAMEROONS--(Continued).
CHAPTER XIX. THE GREAT PEAK OF CAMEROONS--(Continued).
CHAPTER XX. THE GREAT PEAK OF CAMEROONS--(Concluded).
CHAPTER XXI. TRADE AND LABOUR IN WEST AFRICA.
CHAPTER XXII. DISEASE IN WEST AFRICA.
APPENDIX. THE INVENTION OF THE CLOTH LOOM.
PREFACE
TO THE READER.--What this book wants is not a simple Preface but an
apology, and a very brilliant and convincing one at that.
Recognising this fully, and feeling quite incompetent to write such
a masterpiece, I have asked several literary friends to write one
for me, but they have kindly but firmly declined, stating that it is
impossible satisfactorily to apologise for my liberties with Lindley
Murray and the Queen's English. I am therefore left to make a
feeble apology for this book myself, and all I can personally say is
that it would have been much worse than it is had it not been for
Dr. Henry Guillemard, who has not edited it, or of course the whole
affair would have been better, but who has most kindly gone through
the proof sheets, lassoing prepositions which were straying outside
their sentence stockade, taking my eye off the water cask and fixing
it on the scenery where I meant it to be, saying firmly in pencil on
margins "No you don't," when I was committing some more than usually
heinous literary crime, and so on. In cases where his activities in
these things may seem to the reader to have been wanting, I beg to
state that they really were not. It is I who have declined to
ascend to a higher level of lucidity and correctness of diction than
I am fitted for. I cannot forbear from mentioning my gratitude to
Mr. George Macmillan for his patience and kindness with me,--a mere
jungle of information on West Africa. Whether you my reader will
share my gratitude is, I fear, doubtful, for if it had not been for
him I should never have attempted to write a book at all, and in
order to excuse his having induced me to try I beg to state that I
have written only on things that I know from personal experience and
very careful observation. I have never accepted an explanation of a
native custom from one person alone, nor have I set down things as
being prevalent customs from having seen a single instance. I have
endeavoured to give you an honest account of the general state and
manner of life in Lower Guinea and some description of the various
types of country there. In reading this section you must make
allowances for my love of this sort of country, with its great
forests and rivers and its animistic-minded inhabitants, and for my
ability to be more comfortable there than in England. Your superior
culture-instincts may militate against your enjoying West Africa,
but if you go there you will find things as I have said.
January, 1897.
PREFACE TO THE ABRIDGED EDITION OF TRAVELS IN WEST AFRICA.
When on my return to England from my second sojourn in West Africa,
I discovered, to my alarm, that I was, by a freak of fate, the sea-
serpent of the season, I published, in order to escape from this
reputation, a very condensed, much abridged version of my
experiences in Lower Guinea; and I thought that I need never explain
about myself or Lower Guinea again. This was one of my errors. I
have been explaining ever since; and, though not reconciled to so
doing, I am more or less resigned to it, because it gives me
pleasure to see that English people can take an interest in that
land they have neglected. Nevertheless, it was a shock to me when
the publishers said more explanation was required. I am thankful to
say the explanation they required was merely on what plan the
abridgment of my first account had been made. I can manage that
explanation easily. It has been done by removing from it certain
sections whole, and leaving the rest very much as it first stood.
Of course it would have been better if I had totally reformed and
rewritten the book in pellucid English; but that is beyond me, and I
feel at any rate this book must be better than it was, for there is
less of it; and I dimly hope critics will now see that there is a
saving grace in disconnectedness, for owing to that disconnectedness
whole chapters have come out without leaving holes.
As for the part that is left in, I have already apologised for its
form, and I cannot help it, for Lower Guinea is like what I have
said it is. No one who knows it has sent home contradictions of my
description of it, or its natives, or their manners or customs, and
they have had by now ample time and opportunity. The only
complaints I have had regarding my account from my fellow West
Coasters have been that I might have said more. I trust my
forbearance will send a thrill of gratitude through readers of the
736-page edition.
There is, however, one section that I reprint, regarding which I
must say a few words. It is that on the trade and labour problem in
West Africa, particularly the opinion therein expressed regarding
the liquor traffic. This part has brought down on me much criticism
from the Missionary Societies and their friends; and I beg
gratefully to acknowledge the honourable fairness with which the
controversy has been carried on by the great Wesleyan Methodist
Mission to the Gold Coast and the Baptist Mission to the Congo. It
has not ended in our agreement on this point, but it has raised my
esteem of Missionary Societies considerably; and anyone interested
in this matter I beg to refer to the Baptist Magazine for October,
1897. Therein will be found my answer, and the comments on it by a
competent missionary authority; for the rest of this matter I beg
all readers of this book to bear in mind that I confine myself to
speaking only of the bit of Africa I know--West Africa. During this
past summer I attended a meeting at which Sir George Taubman Goldie
spoke, and was much struck with the truth of what he said on the
difference of different African regions. He divided Africa into
three zones: firstly, that region where white races could colonise
in the true sense of the word, and form a great native-born white
population, namely, the region of the Cape; secondly, a region where
the white race could colonise, but to a less extent--an extent
analogous to that in India--namely, the highlands of Central East
Africa and parts of Northern Africa; thirdly, a region where the
white races cannot colonise in a true sense of the word, namely, the
West African region, and in those regions he pointed out one of the
main elements of prosperity and advance is the native African
population. I am quoting his words from memory, possibly
imperfectly; but there is very little reliable printed matter to go
on when dealing with Sir George Taubman Goldie, which is regrettable
because he himself is an experienced and reliable authority. I am
however quite convinced that these aforesaid distinct regions are
regions that the practical politician dealing with Africa must
recognise, and keep constantly in mind when attempting to solve the
many difficulties that that great continent presents, and sincerely
hope every reader of this work will remember that I am speaking of
that last zone, the zone wherein white races cannot colonise in a
true sense of the word, but which is nevertheless a vitally
important region to a great manufacturing country like England, for
therein are vast undeveloped markets wherein she can sell her
manufactured goods and purchase raw material for her manufactures at
a reasonable rate.
Having a rooted, natural, feminine hatred for politics I have no
inclination to become diffuse on them, as I have on the errors of
other people's cooking or ideas on decoration. I know I am held to
be too partial to France in West Africa; too fond of pointing out
her brilliant achievements there, too fond of saying the native is
as happy, and possibly happier, under her rule than under ours; and
also that I am given to a great admiration for Germans; but this is
just like any common-sense Englishwoman. Of course I am devoted to
my own John; but still Monsieur is brave, bright, and fascinating;
Mein Herr is possessed of courage and commercial ability in the
highest degree, and, besides, he takes such a lot of trouble to know
the real truth about things, and tells them to you so calmly and
carefully--and our own John--well, of course, he is everything
that's good and great, but he makes a shocking fool of himself at
times, particularly in West Africa.
I should enjoy holding what one of my justly irritated expurgators
used to call one of my little thanksgiving services here, but I will
not; for, after all, it would be impossible for me to satisfactorily
thank those people who, since my publication of this book, have
given me help and information on the subject of West Africa. Chief
amongst them have been Mr. A. L. Jones, Sir. R. B. N. Walker, Mr.
Irvine, and Mr. John Holt. I have not added to this book any
information I have received since I wrote it, as it does not seem to
me fair to do so. My only regret regarding it is that I have not
dwelt sufficiently on the charm of West Africa; it is so difficult
to explain such things; but I am sure there are amongst my readers
people who know by experience the charm some countries exercise over
men--countries very different from each other and from West Africa.
The charm of West Africa is a painful one: it gives you pleasure
when you are out there, but when you are back here it gives you pain
by calling you. It sends up before your eyes a vision of a wall of
dancing white, rainbow-gemmed surf playing on a shore of yellow sand
before an audience of stately coco palms; or of a great mangrove-
watered bronze river; or of a vast aisle in some forest cathedral:
and you hear, nearer to you than the voices of the people round,
nearer than the roar of the city traffic, the sound of the surf that
is breaking on the shore down there, and the sound of the wind
talking on the hard palm leaves and the thump of the natives' tom-
toms; or the cry of the parrots passing over the mangrove swamps in
the evening time; or the sweet, long, mellow whistle of the plantain
warblers calling up the dawn; and everything that is round you grows
poor and thin in the face of the vision, and you want to go back to
the Coast that is calling you, saying, as the African says to the
departing soul of his dying friend, "Come back, come back, this is
your home."
M. H. KINGSLEY.
October, 1897.
[NOTE.--The following chapters of the first edition are not included
in this edition: --Chap. ii., The Gold Coast; Chap. iv., Lagos Bar;
Chap. v., Voyage down Coast; Chap. vi., Libreville and Glass; Chap.
viii., Talagouga; Chap. xvi., Congo Francais; Chap. xvii., The Log
of the Lafayette; Chap. xviii., From Corisco to Gaboon; Chap.
xxviii., The Islands in the Bay of Amboises; Appendix ii., Disease
in West Africa; Appendix iii., Dr. A. Gunther on Reptiles and
Fishes; Appendix iv., Orthoptera, Hymenoptera, and Hemiptera.]
INTRODUCTION.
Relateth the various causes which impelled the author to embark upon
the voyage.
It was in 1893 that, for the first time in my life, I found myself
in possession of five or six months which were not heavily
forestalled, and feeling like a boy with a new half-crown, I lay
about in my mind, as Mr. Bunyan would say, as to what to do with
them. "Go and learn your tropics," said Science. Where on earth am
I to go? I wondered, for tropics are tropics wherever found, so I
got down an atlas and saw that either South America or West Africa
must be my destination, for the Malayan region was too far off and
too expensive. Then I got Wallace's Geographical Distribution and
after reading that master's article on the Ethiopian region I
hardened my heart and closed with West Africa. I did this the more
readily because while I knew nothing of the practical condition of
it, I knew a good deal both by tradition and report of South East
America, and remembered that Yellow Jack was endemic, and that a
certain naturalist, my superior physically and mentally, had come
very near getting starved to death in the depressing society of an
expedition slowly perishing of want and miscellaneous fevers up the
Parana.
My ignorance regarding West Africa was soon removed. And although
the vast cavity in my mind that it occupied is not even yet half
filled up, there is a great deal of very curious information in its
place. I use the word curious advisedly, for I think many seemed to
translate my request for practical hints and advice into an
advertisement that "Rubbish may be shot here." This same
information is in a state of great confusion still, although I have
made heroic efforts to codify it. I find, however, that it can
almost all be got in under the following different headings, namely
and to wit: -
The dangers of West Africa.
The disagreeables of West Africa.
The diseases of West Africa.
The things you must take to West Africa.
The things you find most handy in West Africa.
The worst possible things you can do in West Africa.
I inquired of all my friends as a beginning what they knew of West
Africa. The majority knew nothing. A percentage said, "Oh, you
can't possibly go there; that's where Sierra Leone is, the white
mans grave, you know." If these were pressed further, one
occasionally found that they had had relations who had gone out
there after having been "sad trials," but, on consideration of their
having left not only West Africa, but this world, were now forgiven
and forgotten.
I next turned my attention to cross-examining the doctors.
"Deadliest spot on earth," they said cheerfully, and showed me maps
of the geographical distribution of disease. Now I do not say that
a country looks inviting when it is coloured in Scheele's green or a
bilious yellow, but these colours may arise from lack of artistic
gift in the cartographer. There is no mistaking what he means by
black, however, and black you'll find they colour West Africa from
above Sierra Leone to below the Congo. "I wouldn't go there if I
were you," said my medical friends, "you'll catch something; but if
you must go, and you're as obstinate as a mule, just bring me--" and
then followed a list of commissions from here to New York, any one
of which--but I only found that out afterwards.
All my informants referred me to the missionaries. "There were,"
they said, in an airy way, "lots of them down there, and had been
for many years." So to missionary literature I addressed myself
with great ardour; alas! only to find that these good people wrote
their reports not to tell you how the country they resided in was,
but how it was getting on towards being what it ought to be, and how
necessary it was that their readers should subscribe more freely,
and not get any foolishness into their heads about obtaining an
inadequate supply of souls for their money. I also found fearful
confirmation of my medical friends' statements about its
unhealthiness, and various details of the distribution of cotton
shirts over which I did not linger.
From the missionaries it was, however, that I got my first idea
about the social condition of West Africa. I gathered that there
existed there, firstly the native human beings--the raw material, as
it were--and that these were led either to good or bad respectively
by the missionary and the trader. There were also the Government
representatives, whose chief business it was to strengthen and
consolidate the missionary's work, a function they carried on but
indifferently well. But as for those traders! well, I put them down
under the dangers of West Africa at once. Subsequently I came
across the good old Coast yarn of how, when a trader from that
region went thence, it goes without saying where, the Fallen Angel
without a moment's hesitation vacated the infernal throne (Milton)
in his favour. This, I beg to note, is the marine form of the
legend. When it occurs terrestrially the trader becomes a Liverpool
mate. But of course no one need believe it either way--it is not a
missionary's story.
Naturally, while my higher intelligence was taken up with attending
to these statements, my mind got set on going, and I had to go.
Fortunately I could number among my acquaintances one individual who
had lived on the Coast for seven years. Not, it is true, on that
part of it which I was bound for. Still his advice was pre-
eminently worth attention, because, in spite of his long residence
in the deadliest spot of the region, he was still in fair going
order. I told him I intended going to West Africa, and he said,
"When you have made up your mind to go to West Africa the very best
thing you can do is to get it unmade again and go to Scotland
instead; but if your intelligence is not strong enough to do so,
abstain from exposing yourself to the direct rays of the sun, take 4
grains of quinine every day for a fortnight before you reach the
Rivers, and get some introductions to the Wesleyans; they are the
only people on the Coast who have got a hearse with feathers."
My attention was next turned to getting ready things to take with
me. Having opened upon myself the sluice gates of advice, I rapidly
became distracted. My friends and their friends alike seemed to
labour under the delusion that I intended to charter a steamer and
was a person of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. This not being
the case, the only thing to do was to gratefully listen and let
things drift.
Not only do the things you have got to take, but the things you have
got to take them in, present a fine series of problems to the young
traveller. Crowds of witnesses testified to the forms of baggage
holders they had found invaluable, and these, it is unnecessary to
say, were all different in form and material.
With all this embarras de choix I was too distracted to buy anything
new in the way of baggage except a long waterproof sack neatly
closed at the top with a bar and handle. Into this I put blankets,
boots, books, in fact anything that would not go into my portmanteau
or black bag. From the first I was haunted by a conviction that its
bottom would come out, but it never did, and in spite of the fact
that it had ideas of its own about the arrangement of its contents,
it served me well throughout my voyage.
It was the beginning of August '93 when I first left England for
"the Coast." Preparations of quinine with postage partially paid
arrived up to the last moment, and a friend hastily sent two
newspaper clippings, one entitled "A Week in a Palm-oil Tub," which
was supposed to describe the sort of accommodation, companions, and
fauna likely to be met with on a steamer going to West Africa, and
on which I was to spend seven to The Graphic contributor's one; the
other from The Daily Telegraph, reviewing a French book of "Phrases
in common use" in Dahomey. The opening sentence in the latter was,
"Help, I am drowning." Then came the inquiry, "If a man is not a
thief?" and then another cry, "The boat is upset." "Get up, you
lazy scamps," is the next exclamation, followed almost immediately
by the question, "Why has not this man been buried?" "It is fetish
that has killed him, and he must lie here exposed with nothing on
him until only the bones remain," is the cheerful answer. This
sounded discouraging to a person whose occupation would necessitate
going about considerably in boats, and whose fixed desire was to
study fetish. So with a feeling of foreboding gloom I left London
for Liverpool--none the more cheerful for the matter-of-fact manner
in which the steamboat agents had informed me that they did not
issue return tickets by the West African lines of steamers. I will
not go into the details of that voyage here, much as I am given to
discursiveness. They are more amusing than instructive, for on my
first voyage out I did not know the Coast, and the Coast did not
know me and we mutually terrified each other. I fully expected to
get killed by the local nobility and gentry; they thought I was
connected with the World's Women's Temperance Association, and
collecting shocking details for subsequent magic-lantern lectures on
the liquor traffic; so fearful misunderstandings arose, but we
gradually educated each other, and I had the best of the affair; for
all I had got to teach them was that I was only a beetle and fetish
hunter, and so forth, while they had to teach me a new world, and a
very fascinating course of study I found it. And whatever the Coast
may have to say against me--for my continual desire for hair-pins,
and other pins, my intolerable habit of getting into water, the
abominations full of ants, that I brought into their houses, or
things emitting at unexpectedly short notice vivid and awful
stenches--they cannot but say that I was a diligent pupil, who
honestly tried to learn the lessons they taught me so kindly, though
some of those lessons were hard to a person who had never previously
been even in a tame bit of tropics, and whose life for many years
had been an entirely domestic one in a University town.
One by one I took my old ideas derived from books and thoughts based
on imperfect knowledge and weighed them against the real life around
me, and found them either worthless or wanting. The greatest
recantation I had to make I made humbly before I had been three
months on the Coast in 1893. It was of my idea of the traders.
What I had expected to find them was a very different thing to what
I did find them; and of their kindness to me I can never
sufficiently speak, for on that voyage I was utterly out of touch
with the governmental circles, and utterly dependent on the traders,
and the most useful lesson of all the lessons I learnt on the West
Coast in 1893 was that I could trust them. Had I not learnt this
very thoroughly I could never have gone out again and carried out
the voyage I give you a sketch of in this book.
Thanks to "the Agent," I have visited places I could never otherwise
have seen; and to the respect and affection in which he is held by
the native, I owe it that I have done so in safety. When I have
arrived off his factory in a steamer or canoe unexpected,
unintroduced, or turned up equally unheralded out of the bush in a
dilapidated state, he has always received me with that gracious
hospitality which must have given him, under Coast conditions, very
real trouble and inconvenience--things he could have so readily
found logical excuses against entailing upon himself for the sake of
an individual whom he had never seen before--whom he most likely
would never see again--and whom it was no earthly profit to him to
see then. He has bestowed himself--Allah only knows where--on his
small trading vessels so that I might have his one cabin. He has
fished me out of sea and fresh water with boat-hooks; he has
continually given me good advice, which if I had only followed would
have enabled me to keep out of water and any other sort of
affliction; and although he holds the meanest opinion of my
intellect for going to such a place as West Africa for beetles,
fishes and fetish, he has given me the greatest assistance in my
work. The value of that work I pray you withhold judgment on, until
I lay it before you in some ten volumes or so mostly in Latin. All
I know that is true regarding West African facts, I owe to the
traders; the errors are my own.
To Dr. Gunther, of the British Museum, I am deeply grateful for the
kindness and interest he has always shown regarding all the
specimens of natural history that I have been able to lay before
him; the majority of which must have had very old tales to tell him.
Yet his courtesy and attention gave me the thing a worker in any
work most wants--the sense that the work was worth doing--and sent
me back to work again with the knowledge that if these things
interested a man like him, it was a more than sufficient reason for
me to go on collecting them. To Mr. W. H. F. Kirby I am much
indebted for his working out my small collection of certain Orders
of insects; and to Mr. Thomas S. Forshaw, for the great help he has
afforded me in revising my notes.
It is impossible for me even to catalogue my debts of gratitude
still outstanding to the West Coast. Chiefly am I indebted to Mr.
C. G. Hudson, whose kindness and influence enabled me to go up the
Ogowe and to see as much of Congo Francais as I have seen, and his
efforts to take care of me were most ably seconded by Mr. Fildes.
The French officials in "Congo Francais" never hindered me, and
always treated me with the greatest kindness. You may say there was
no reason why they should not, for there is nothing in this fine
colony of France that they need be ashamed of any one seeing; but I
find it is customary for travellers to say the French officials
throw obstacles in the way of any one visiting their possessions, so
I merely beg to state this was decidedly not my experience; although
my deplorable ignorance of French prevented me from explaining my
humble intentions to them.
The Rev. Dr. Nassau and Mr. R. E. Dennett have enabled me, by
placing at my disposal the rich funds of their knowledge of native
life and idea, to amplify any deductions from my own observation.
Mr. Dennett's work I have not dealt with in this work because it
refers to tribes I was not amongst on this journey, but to a tribe I
made the acquaintance with in my '93 voyage--the Fjort. Dr.
Nassau's observations I have referred to. Herr von Lucke, Vice-
governor of Cameroon, I am indebted to for not only allowing me, but
for assisting me by every means in his power, to go up Cameroons
Peak, and to the Governor of Cameroon, Herr von Puttkamer, for his
constant help and kindness. Indeed so great has been the
willingness to help me of all these gentlemen, that it is a wonder
to me, when I think of it, that their efforts did not project me
right across the continent and out at Zanzibar. That this brilliant
affair did not come off is owing to my own lack of enterprise; for I
did not want to go across the continent, and I do not hanker after
Zanzibar, but only to go puddling about obscure districts in West
Africa after raw fetish and fresh-water fishes.
I owe my ability to have profited by the kindness of these gentlemen
on land, to a gentleman of the sea--Captain Murray. He was captain
of the vessel I went out on in 1893, and he saw then that my mind
was full of errors that must be eradicated if I was going to deal
with the Coast successfully; and so he eradicated those errors and
replaced them with sound knowledge from his own stores collected
during an acquaintance with the West Coast of over thirty years.
The education he has given me has been of the greatest value to me,
and I sincerely hope to make many more voyages under him, for I well
know he has still much to teach and I to learn.
Last, but not least, I must chronicle my debts to the ladies. First
to those two courteous Portuguese ladies, Donna Anna de Sousa
Coutinho e Chichorro and her sister Donna Maria de Sousa Coutinho,
who did so much for me in Kacongo in 1893, and have remained, I am
proud to say, my firm friends ever since. Lady MacDonald and Miss
Mary Slessor I speak of in this book, but only faintly sketch the
pleasure and help they have afforded me; nor have I fully expressed
my gratitude for the kindness of Madame Jacot of Lembarene, or
Madame Forget of Talagouga. Then there are a whole list of nuns
belonging to the Roman Catholic Missions on the South West Coast,
ever cheery and charming companions; and Frau Plehn, whom it was a
continual pleasure to see in Cameroons, and discourse with once
again on things that seemed so far off then--art, science, and
literature; and Mrs. H. Duggan, of Cameroons too, who used, whenever
I came into that port to rescue me from fearful states of starvation
for toilet necessaries, and lend a sympathetic and intelligent ear
to the "awful sufferings" I had gone through, until Cameroons became
to me a thing to look forward to.
When in the Canaries in 1892, I used to smile, I regretfully own, at
the conversation of a gentleman from the Gold Coast who was up there
recruiting after a bad fever. His conversation consisted largely of
anecdotes of friends of his, and nine times in ten he used to say,
"He's dead now." Alas! my own conversation may be smiled at now for
the same cause. Many of my friends mentioned even in this very
recent account of the Coast "are dead now." Most of those I learnt
to know in 1893; chief among these is my old friend Captain Boler,
of Bonny, from whom I first learnt a certain power of comprehending
the African and his form of thought.
I have great reason to be grateful to the Africans themselves--to
cultured men and women among them like Charles Owoo, Mbo, Sanga
Glass, Jane Harrington and her sister at Gaboon, and to the bush
natives; but of my experience with them I give further details, so I
need not dwell on them here.
I apologise to the general reader for giving so much detail on
matters that really only affect myself, and I know that the
indebtedness which all African travellers have to the white
residents in Africa is a matter usually very lightly touched on. No
doubt my voyage would seem a grander thing if I omitted mention of
the help I received, but--well, there was a German gentleman once
who evolved a camel out of his inner consciousness. It was a
wonderful thing; still, you know, it was not a good camel, only a
thing which people personally unacquainted with camels could believe
in. Now I am ambitious to make a picture, if I make one at all,
that people who do know the original can believe in--even if they
criticise its points--and so I give you details a more showy artist
would omit.
CHAPTER I. LIVERPOOL TO SIERRA LEONE AND THE GOLD COAST.
Setting forth how the voyager departs from England in a stout vessel
and in good company, and reaches in due course the Island of the
Grand Canary, and then the Port of Sierra Leone: to which is added
some account of this latter place and the comeliness of its women.
Wherein also some description of Cape Coast and Accra is given, to
which are added divers observations on supplies to be obtained
there.
The West Coast of Africa is like the Arctic regions in one
particular, and that is that when you have once visited it you want
to go back there again; and, now I come to think of it, there is
another particular in which it is like them, and that is that the
chances you have of returning from it at all are small, for it is a
Belle Dame sans merci.
I succumbed to the charm of the Coast as soon as I left Sierra Leone
on my first voyage out, and I saw more than enough during that
voyage to make me recognise that there was any amount of work for me
worth doing down there. So I warned the Coast I was coming back
again and the Coast did not believe me; and on my return to it a
second time displayed a genuine surprise, and formed an even higher
opinion of my folly than it had formed on our first acquaintance,
which is saying a good deal.
During this voyage in 1893, I had been to Old Calabar, and its
Governor, Sir Claude MacDonald, had heard me expatiating on the
absorbing interest of the Antarctic drift, and the importance of the
collection of fresh-water fishes and so on. So when Lady MacDonald
heroically decided to go out to him in Calabar, they most kindly
asked me if I would join her, and make my time fit hers for starting
on my second journey. This I most willingly did. But I fear that
very sweet and gracious lady suffered a great deal of apprehension
at the prospect of spending a month on board ship with a person so
devoted to science as to go down the West Coast in its pursuit.
During the earlier days of our voyage she would attract my attention
to all sorts of marine objects overboard, so as to amuse me. I used
to look at them, and think it would be the death of me if I had to
work like this, explaining meanwhile aloud that "they were very
interesting, but Haeckel had done them, and I was out after fresh-
water fishes from a river north of the Congo this time," fearing all
the while that she felt me unenthusiastic for not flying over into
the ocean to secure the specimens.
However, my scientific qualities, whatever they may amount to, did
not blind this lady long to the fact of my being after all a very
ordinary individual, and she told me so--not in these crude words,
indeed, but nicely and kindly--whereupon, in a burst of gratitude to
her for understanding me, I appointed myself her honorary aide-de-
camp on the spot, and her sincere admirer I shall remain for ever,
fully recognising that her courage in going to the Coast was far
greater than my own, for she had more to lose had fever claimed her,
and she was in those days by no means under the spell of Africa.
But this is anticipating.
It was on the 23rd of December, 1894, that we left Liverpool in the
Batanga, commanded by my old friend Captain Murray, under whose care
I had made my first voyage. On the 30th we sighted the Peak of
Teneriffe early in the afternoon. It displayed itself, as usual, as
an entirely celestial phenomenon. A great many people miss seeing
it. Suffering under the delusion that El Pico is a terrestrial
affair, they look in vain somewhere about the level of their own
eyes, which are striving to penetrate the dense masses of mist that
usually enshroud its slopes by day, and then a friend comes along,
and gaily points out to the newcomer the glittering white triangle
somewhere near the zenith. On some days the Peak stands out clear
from ocean to summit, looking every inch and more of its 12,080 ft.;
and this is said by the Canary fishermen to be a certain sign of
rain, or fine weather, or a gale of wind; but whenever and however
it may be seen, soft and dream-like in the sunshine, or melodramatic
and bizarre in the moonlight, it is one of the most beautiful things
the eye of man may see.
Soon after sighting Teneriffe, Lancarote showed, and then the Grand
Canary. Teneriffe is perhaps the most beautiful, but it is hard to
judge between it and Grand Canary as seen from the sea. The superb
cone this afternoon stood out a deep purple against a serpent-green
sky, separated from the brilliant blue ocean by a girdle of pink and
gold cumulus, while Grand Canary and Lancarote looked as if they
were formed from fantastic-shaped sunset cloud-banks that by some
spell had been solidified. The general colour of the mountains of
Grand Canary, which rise peak after peak until they culminate in the
Pico de las Nieves, some 6,000 feet high, is a yellowish red, and
the air which lies among their rocky crevices and swathes their
softer sides is a lovely lustrous blue.
Just before the sudden dark came down, and when the sun was taking a
curve out of the horizon of sea, all the clouds gathered round the
three islands, leaving the sky a pure amethyst pink, and as a good-
night to them the sun outlined them with rims of shining gold, and
made the snow-clad Peak of Teneriffe blaze with star-white light.
In a few minutes came the dusk, and as we neared Grand Canary, out
of its cloud-bank gleamed the red flash of the lighthouse on the
Isleta, and in a few more minutes, along the sea level, sparkled the
five miles of irregularly distributed lights of Puerto de la Luz and
the city of Las Palmas.
We reached Sierra Leone at 9 A.M. on the 7th of January, and as the
place is hardly so much in touch with the general public as the
Canaries are {14} I may perhaps venture to go more into details
regarding it. The harbour is formed by the long low strip of land
to the north called the Bullam shore, and to the south by the
peninsula terminating in Cape Sierra Leone, a sandy promontory at
the end of which is situated a lighthouse of irregular habits. Low
hills covered with tropical forest growth rise from the sandy shores
of the Cape, and along its face are three creeks or bays, deep
inlets showing through their narrow entrances smooth beaches of
yellow sand, fenced inland by the forest of cotton-woods and palms,
with here and there an elephantine baobab.
The first of these bays is called Pirate Bay, the next English Bay,
and the third Kru Bay. The wooded hills of the Cape rise after
passing Kru Bay, and become spurs of the mountain, 2,500 feet in
height, which is the Sierra Leone itself. There are, however,
several mountains here besides the Sierra Leone, the most
conspicuous of them being the peak known as Sugar Loaf, and when
seen from the sea they are very lovely, for their form is noble, and
a wealth of tropical vegetation covers them, which, unbroken in its
continuity, but endless in its variety, seems to sweep over their
sides down to the shore like a sea, breaking here and there into a
surf of flowers.
It is the general opinion, indeed, of those who ought to know that
Sierra Leone appears at its best when seen from the sea,
particularly when you are leaving the harbour homeward bound; and
that here its charms, artistic, moral, and residential, end. But,
from the experience I have gained of it, I have no hesitation in
saying that it is one of the best places for getting luncheon in
that I have ever happened on, and that a more pleasant and varied
way of spending an afternoon than going about its capital, Free
Town, with a certain Irish purser, who is as well known as he is
respected among the leviathan old negro ladies, it would be hard to
find. Still it must be admitted it IS rather hot.
Free Town its capital is situated on the northern base of the
mountain, and extends along the sea-front with most business-like
wharves, quays, and warehouses. Viewed from the harbour, "The
Liverpool of West Africa," {15} as it is called, looks as if it were
built of gray stone, which it is not. When you get ashore, you will
find that most of the stores and houses--the majority of which, it
may be remarked, are in a state of acute dilapidation--are of
painted wood, with corrugated iron roofs. Here and there, though,
you will see a thatched house, its thatch covered with creeping
plants, and inhabited by colonies of creeping insects.
Some of the stores and churches are, it is true, built of stone, but
this does not look like stone at a distance, being red in colour--
unhewn blocks of the red stone of the locality. In the crannies of
these buildings trailing plants covered with pretty mauve or yellow
flowers take root, and everywhere, along the tops of the walls, and
in the cracks of the houses, are ferns and flowering plants. They
must get a good deal of their nourishment from the rich, thick air,
which seems composed of 85 per cent. of warm water, and the
remainder of the odours of Frangipani, orange flowers, magnolias,
oleanders, and roses, combined with others that demonstrate that the
inhabitants do not regard sanitary matters with the smallest degree
of interest.
There is one central street, and the others are neatly planned out
at right angles to it. None of them are in any way paved or
metalled. They are covered in much prettier fashion, and in a way
more suitable for naked feet, by green Bahama grass, save and except
those which are so nearly perpendicular that they have got every bit
of earth and grass cleared off them down to the red bed-rock, by the
heavy rain of the wet season.
In every direction natives are walking at a brisk pace, their naked
feet making no sound on the springy turf of the streets, carrying on
their heads huge burdens which are usually crowned by the hat of the
bearer, a large limpet-shaped affair made of palm leaves. While
some carry these enormous bundles, others bear logs or planks of
wood, blocks of building stone, vessels containing palm-oil, baskets
of vegetables, or tin tea-trays on which are folded shawls. As the
great majority of the native inhabitants of Sierra Leone pay no
attention whatever to where they are going, either in this world or
the next, the confusion and noise are out of all proportion to the
size of the town; and when, as frequently happens, a section of
actively perambulating burden-bearers charge recklessly into a
sedentary section, the members of which have dismounted their loads
and squatted themselves down beside them, right in the middle of the
fair way, to have a friendly yell with some acquaintances, the row
becomes terrific.
In among these crowds of country people walk stately Mohammedans,
Mandingoes, Akers, and Fulahs of the Arabised tribes of the Western
Soudan. These are lithe, well-made men, and walk with a peculiarly
fine, elastic carriage. Their graceful garb consists of a long
white loose-sleeved shirt, over which they wear either a long black
mohair or silk gown, or a deep bright blue affair, not altogether
unlike a University gown, only with more stuff in it and more folds.
They are undoubtedly the gentlemen of the Sierra Leone native
population, and they are becoming an increasing faction in the town,
by no means to the pleasure of the Christians.
But to the casual visitor at Sierra Leone the Mohammedan is a mere
passing sensation. You neither feel a burning desire to laugh with,
or at him, as in the case of the country folks, nor do you wish to
punch his head, and split his coat up his back--things you yearn to
do to that perfect flower of Sierra Leone culture, who yells your
bald name across the street at you, condescendingly informs you that
you can go and get letters that are waiting for you, while he smokes
his cigar and lolls in the shade, or in some similar way displays
his second-hand rubbishy white culture--a culture far lower and less
dignified than that of either the stately Mandingo or the bush
chief. I do not think that the Sierra Leone dandy really means half
as much insolence as he shows; but the truth is he feels too
insecure of his own real position, in spite of all the "side" he
puts on, and so he dare not be courteous like the Mandingo or the
bush Fan.
It is the costume of the people in Free Town and its harbour that
will first attract the attention of the newcomer, notwithstanding
the fact that the noise, the smell, and the heat are simultaneously
making desperate bids for that favour. The ordinary man in the
street wears anything he may have been able to acquire, anyhow, and
he does not fasten it on securely. I fancy it must be capillary
attraction, or some other partially-understood force, that takes
part in the matter. It is certainly neither braces nor buttons.
There are, of course, some articles which from their very structure
are fairly secure, such as an umbrella with the stick and ribs
removed, or a shirt. This last-mentioned treasure, which usually
becomes the property of the ordinary man from a female relative or
admirer taking in white men's washing, is always worn flowing free,
and has such a charm in itself that the happy possessor cares little
what he continues his costume with--trousers, loin cloth, red
flannel petticoat, or rice-bag drawers, being, as he would put it,
"all same for one" to him.
The ladies are divided into three classes; the young girl you
address as "tee-tee"; the young person as "seester"; the more mature
charmer as "mammy"; but I do not advise you to employ these terms
when you are on your first visit, because you might get
misunderstood. For, you see, by addressing a mammy as seester, she
might think either that you were unconscious of her dignity as a
married lady--a matter she would soon put you right on--or that you
were flirting, which of course was totally foreign to your
intention, and would make you uncomfortable. My advice is that you
rigidly stick to missus or mammy. I have seen this done most
successfully.
The ladies are almost as varied in their costume as the gentlemen,
but always neater and cleaner; and mighty picturesque they are too,
and occasionally very pretty. A market-woman with her jolly brown
face and laughing brown eyes--eyes all the softer for a touch of
antimony--her ample form clothed in a lively print overall, made
with a yoke at the shoulders, and a full long flounce which is
gathered on to the yoke under the arms and falls fully to the feet;
with her head done up in a yellow or red handkerchief, and her snowy
white teeth gleaming through her vast smiles, is a mighty pleasant
thing to see, and to talk to. But, Allah! the circumference of
them!
The stone-built, white-washed market buildings of Free Town have a
creditably clean and tidy appearance considering the climate, and
the quantity and variety of things exposed for sale--things one
wants the pen of a Rabelais to catalogue. Here are all manner of
fruits, some which are familiar to you in England; others that soon
become so to you in Africa. You take them as a matter of course if
you are outward bound, but on your call homeward (if you make it)
you will look on them as a blessing and a curiosity. For lower
down, particularly in "the Rivers," these things are rarely to be
had, and never in such perfection as here; and to see again
lettuces, yellow oranges, and tomatoes bigger than marbles is a
sensation and a joy.
One of the chief features of Free Town are the jack crows. Some
writers say they are peculiar to Sierra Leone, others that they are
not, but both unite in calling them Picathartes gymnocephalus. To
the white people who live in daily contact with them they are turkey
buzzards; to the natives, Yubu. Anyhow they are evil-looking fowl,
and no ornament to the roof-ridges they choose to sit on. The
native Christians ought to put a row of spikes along the top of
their cathedral to keep them off; the beauty of that edifice is very
far from great, and it cannot carry off the effect produced by the
row of these noisome birds as they sit along its summit, with their
wings arranged at all manner of different angles in an "all gone"
way. One bird perhaps will have one straight out in front, and the
other casually disposed at right-angles, another both straight out
in front, and others again with both hanging hopelessly down, but
none with them neatly and tidily folded up, as decent birds' wings
should be. They all give the impression of having been extremely
drunk the previous evening, and of having subsequently fallen into
some sticky abomination--into blood for choice. Being the
scavengers of Free Town, however, they are respected by the local
authorities and preserved; and the natives tell me you never see
either a young or a dead one. The latter is a thing you would not
expect, for half of them look as if they could not live through the
afternoon. They also told me that when you got close to them, they
had a "'trong, 'trong 'niff; 'niff too much." I did not try, but I
am quite willing to believe this statement.
The other animals most in evidence in the streets are, first and
foremost, goats and sheep. I have to lump them together, for it is
exceedingly difficult to tell one from the other. All along the
Coast the empirical rule is that sheep carry their tails down, and
goats carry their tails up; fortunately you need not worry much
anyway, for they both "taste rather like the nothing that the world
was made of," as Frau Buchholtz says, and own in addition a fibrous
texture, and a certain twang. Small cinnamon-coloured cattle are to
be got here, but horses there are practically none. Now and again
some one who does not see why a horse should not live here as well
as at Accra or Lagos imports one, but it always shortly dies. Some
say it is because the natives who get their living by hammock-
carrying poison them, others say the tsetse fly finishes them off;
and others, and these I believe are right, say that entozoa are the
cause. Small, lean, lank yellow dogs with very erect ears lead an
awful existence, afflicted by many things, but beyond all others by
the goats, who, rearing their families in the grassy streets, choose
to think the dogs intend attacking them. Last, but not least, there
is the pig--a rich source of practice to the local lawyer.
Cape Coast Castle and then Accra were the next places of general
interest at which we stopped. The former looks well from the
roadstead, and as if it had very recently been white-washed. It is
surrounded by low, heavily-forested hills, which rise almost from
the seashore, and the fine mass of its old castle does not display
its dilapidation at a distance. Moreover, the three stone forts of
Victoria, William, and Macarthy, situated on separate hills
commanding the town, add to the general appearance of permanent
substantialness so different from the usual ramshackledom of West
Coast settlements. Even when you go ashore and have had time to
recover your senses, scattered by the surf experience, you find this
substantialness a true one, not a mere visual delusion produced by
painted wood as the seeming substantialness of Sierra Leone turns
out to be when you get to close quarters with it. It causes one
some mental effort to grasp the fact that Cape Coast has been in
European hands for centuries, but it requires a most unmodern power
of credence to realise this of any other settlement on the whole
western seaboard until you have the pleasure of seeing the beautiful
city of San Paul de Loanda, far away down south, past the Congo.
My experience of Cape Coast on this occasion was one of the hottest,
but one of the pleasantest I have ever been through on the Gold
Coast. The former attribute was due to the climate, the latter to
my kind friends, Mr. Batty, and Mr. and Mrs. Dennis Kemp. I was
taken round the grand stone-built houses with their high stone-
walled yards and sculpture-decorated gateways, built by the
merchants of the last century and of the century before, and through
the great rambling stone castle with its water-tanks cut in the
solid rock beneath it, and its commodious accommodation for slaves
awaiting shipment, now almost as obsolete as the guns it mounts, but
not quite so, for these cool and roomy chambers serve to house the
native constabulary and their extensive families.
This being done, I was taken up an unmitigated hill, on whose summit
stands Fort William, a pepper-pot-like structure now used as a
lighthouse. The view from the top was exceedingly lovely and
extensive. Beneath, and between us and the sea, lay the town in the
blazing sun. In among its solid stone buildings patches of native
mud-built huts huddled together as though they had been shaken down
out of a sack into the town to serve as dunnage. Then came the
snow-white surf wall, and across it the blue sea with our steamer
rolling to and fro on the long, regular swell, impatiently waiting
until Sunday should be over and she could work cargo. Round us on
all the other sides were wooded hills and valleys, and away in the
distance to the west showed the white town and castle of Elmina and
the nine-mile road thither, skirting the surf-bound seashore, only
broken on its level way by the mouth of the Sweet River. Over all
was the brooding silence of the noonday heat, broken only by the
dulled thunder of the surf.
After seeing these things we started down stairs, and on reaching
ground descended yet lower into a sort of stone-walled dry moat, out
of which opened clean, cool, cellar-like chambers tunnelled into the
earth. These, I was informed, had also been constructed to keep
slaves in when they were the staple export of the Gold Coast. They
were so refreshingly cool that I lingered looking at them and their
massive doors, ere being marched up to ground level again, and down
the hill through some singularly awful stenches, mostly arising from
rubber, into the big Wesleyan church in the middle of the town. It
is a building in the terrible Africo-Gothic style, but it compares
most favourably with the cathedral at Sierra Leone, particularly
internally, wherein, indeed, it far surpasses that structure. And
then we returned to the Mission House and spent a very pleasant
evening, save for the knowledge (which amounted in me to remorse)
that, had it not been for my edification, not one of my friends
would have spent the day toiling about the town they know only too
well. The Wesleyan Mission on the Gold Coast, of which Mr. Dennis
Kemp was at that time chairman, is the largest and most influential
Protestant mission on the West Coast of Africa, and it is now, I am
glad to say, adding a technical department to its scholastic and
religious one. The Basel Mission has done a great deal of good work
in giving technical instruction to the natives, and practically
started this most important branch of their education. There is
still an almost infinite amount of this work to be done, the African
being so strangely deficient in mechanical culture; infinitely more
so, indeed, in this than in any other particular.
After leaving Cape Coast our next port was Accra which is one of the
five West Coast towns that look well from the sea. The others don't
look well from anywhere. First in order of beauty comes San Paul de
Loanda; then Cape Coast with its satellite Elmina, then Gaboon, then
Accra with its satellite Christiansborg, and lastly, Sierra Leone.
What there is of beauty in Accra is oriental in type. Seen from the
sea, Fort St. James on the left and Christiansborg Castle on the
right, both almost on shore level, give, with an outcrop of sandy
dwarf cliffs, a certain air of balance and strength to the town,
though but for these and the two old castles, Accra would be but a
poor place and a flimsy, for the rest of it is a mass of rubbishy
mud and palm-leaf huts, and corrugated iron dwellings for the
Europeans.
Corrugated iron is my abomination. I quite understand it has
points, and I do not attack from an aesthetic standpoint. It really
looks well enough when it is painted white. There is, close to
Christiansborg Castle, a patch of bungalows and offices for
officialdom and wife that from a distance in the hard bright
sunshine looks like an encampment of snow-white tents among the coco
palms, and pretty enough withal. I am also aware that the
corrugated-iron roof is an advantage in enabling you to collect and
store rain-water, which is the safest kind of water you can get on
the Coast, always supposing you have not painted the aforesaid roof
with red oxide an hour or two before so collecting, as a friend of
mine did once. But the heat inside those iron houses is far greater
than inside mud-walled, brick, or wooden ones, and the alternations
of temperature more sudden: mornings and evenings they are cold and
clammy; draughty they are always, thereby giving you chill which
means fever, and fever in West Africa means more than it does in
most places.
Going on shore at Accra with Lady MacDonald gave me opportunities
and advantages I should not otherwise have enjoyed, such as the
hospitality of the Governor, luxurious transport from the landing
place to Christiansborg Castle, a thorough inspection of the
cathedral in course of erection, and the strange and highly
interesting function of going to a tea-party at a police station to
meet a king,--a real reigning king,--who kindly attended with his
suite and displayed an intelligent interest in photographs. Tackie
(that is His Majesty's name) is an old, spare man, with a subdued
manner. His sovereign rights are acknowledged by the Government so
far as to hold him more or less responsible for any iniquity
committed by his people; and as the Government do not allow him to
execute or flagellate the said people, earthly pomp is rather a
hollow thing to Tackie.
On landing I was taken in charge by an Assistant Inspector of
Police, and after a scrimmage for my chief's baggage and my own,
which reminded me of a long ago landing on the distant island of
Guernsey, the inspector and I got into a 'rickshaw, locally called a
go-cart. It was pulled in front by two government negroes and
pushed behind by another pair, all neatly attired in white jackets
and knee breeches, and crimson cummerbunds yards long, bound round
their middles. Now it is an ingrained characteristic of the
uneducated negro, that he cannot keep on a neat and complete garment
of any kind. It does not matter what that garment may be; so long
as it is whole, off it comes. But as soon as that garment becomes a
series of holes, held together by filaments of rag, he keeps it upon
him in a manner that is marvellous, and you need have no further
anxiety on its behalf. Therefore it was but natural that the
governmental cummerbunds, being new, should come off their wearers
several times in the course of our two mile trip, and as they wound
riskily round the legs of their running wearers, we had to make
halts while one end of the cummerbund was affixed to a tree-trunk
and the other end to the man, who rapidly wound himself up in it
again with a skill that spoke of constant practice.
The road to Christiansborg from Accra, which runs parallel to the
sea and is broad and well-kept, is in places pleasantly shaded with
pepper trees, eucalyptus, and palms. The first part of it, which
forms the main street of Accra, is remarkable. The untidy, poverty-
stricken native houses or huts are no credit to their owners, and a
constant source of anxiety to a conscientious sanitary inspector.
Almost every one of them is a shop, but this does not give rise to
the animated commercial life one might imagine, owing, I presume, to
the fact that every native inhabitant of Accra who has any money to
get rid of is able recklessly to spend it in his own emporium. For
these shops are of the store nature, each after his kind, and seem
homogeneously stocked with tin pans, loud-patterned basins, iron
pots, a few rolls of cloth and bottles of American rum. After
passing these there are the Haussa lines, a few European houses, and
the cathedral; and when nearly into Christiansborg, a cemetery on
either side of the road. That to the right is the old cemetery, now
closed, and when I was there, in a disgracefully neglected state: a
mere jungle of grass infested with snakes. Opposite to it is the
cemetery now in use, and I remember well my first visit to it under
the guidance of a gloomy Government official, who said he always
walked there every afternoon, "so as to get used to the place before
staying permanently in it,"--a rank waste of time and energy, by the
way, as subsequent events proved, for he is now safe off the Gold
Coast for good and all.
He took me across the well-kept grass to two newly dug graves, each
covered with wooden hoods in a most business-like way. Evidently
those hoods were regular parts of the cemetery's outfit. He said
nothing, but waved his hand with a "take-your-choice,-they-are-both-
quite-ready" style. "Why?" I queried laconically. "Oh! we always
keep two graves ready dug for Europeans. We have to bury very
quickly here, you know," he answered. I turned at bay. I had had
already a very heavy dose of details of this sort that afternoon and
was disinclined to believe another thing. So I said, "It's
exceedingly wrong to do a thing like that, you only frighten people
to death. You can't want new-dug graves daily. There are not
enough white men in the whole place to keep the institution up."
"We do," he replied, "at any rate at this season. Why, the other
day we had two white men to bury before twelve o'clock, and at four,
another dropped in on a steamer."
"At 4.30," said a companion, an exceedingly accurate member of the
staff. "How you fellows DO exaggerate!" Subsequent knowledge of
the Gold Coast has convinced me fully that the extra funeral being
placed half-an-hour sooner than it occurred is the usual percentage
of exaggeration you will be able to find in stories relating to the
local mortality. And at Accra, after I left it, and all along the
Gold Coast, came one of those dreadful epidemic outbursts sweeping
away more than half the white population in a few weeks.
But to return to our state journey along the Christiansborg road.
We soon reached the castle, an exceedingly roomy and solid edifice
built by the Danes, and far better fitted for the climate than our
modern dwellings, in spite of our supposed advance in tropical
hygiene. We entered by the sentry-guarded great gate into the
courtyard; on the right hand were the rest of the guard; most of
them asleep on their mats, but a few busy saying Dhikr, etc.,
towards Mecca, like the good Mohammedans these Haussas are, others
winding themselves into their cummerbunds. On the left hand was Sir
Brandford Griffiths' hobby--a choice and select little garden, of
lovely eucharis lilies mostly in tubs, and rare and beautiful
flowers brought by him from his Barbadian home; while shading it and
the courtyard was a fine specimen of that superb thing of beauty--a
flamboyant tree--glorious with its delicate-green acacia-like leaves
and vermilion and yellow flowers, and astonishing with its vast
beans. A flight of stone stairs leads from the courtyard to the
upper part of the castle where the living rooms are, over the
extensive series of cool tunnel-like slave barracoons, now used as
store chambers. The upper rooms are high and large, and full of a
soft pleasant light and the thunder of the everlasting surf breaking
on the rocky spit on which the castle is built.
From the day the castle was built, now more than a hundred years
ago, the surf spray has been swept by the on-shore evening breeze
into every chink and cranny of the whole building, and hence the
place is mouldy--mouldy to an extent I, with all my experience in
that paradise for mould, West Africa, have never elsewhere seen.
The matting on the floors took an impression of your foot as a light
snowfall would. Beneath articles of furniture the cryptogams
attained a size more in keeping with the coal period than with the
nineteenth century.
The Gold Coast is one of the few places in West Africa that I have
never felt it my solemn duty to go and fish in. I really cannot say
why. Seen from the sea it is a pleasant looking land. The long
lines of yellow, sandy beach backed by an almost continuous line of
blue hills, which in some places come close to the beach, in other
places show in the dim distance. It is hard to think that it is so
unhealthy as it is, from just seeing it as you pass by. It has high
land and has not those great masses of mangrove-swamp one usually,
at first, associates with a bad fever district, but which prove on
acquaintance to be at any rate no worse than this well-elevated
open-forested Gold Coast land. There are many things to be had here
and in Lagos which tend to make life more tolerable, that you cannot
have elsewhere until you are south of the Congo. Horses, for
example, do fairly well at Accra, though some twelve miles or so
behind the town there is a belt of tsetse fly, specimens of which I
have procured and had identified at the British Museum, and it is
certain death to a horse, I am told, to take it to Aburi.
The food-supply, although bad and dear, is superior to that you get
down south. Goats and sheep are fairly plentiful. In addition to
fresh meat and tinned you are able to get a quantity of good sea
fish, for the great West African Bank, which fringes the coast in
the Bight of Benin, abounds in fish, although the native cook very
rarely knows how to cook them. Then, too, you can get more fruit
and vegetables on the Gold Coast than at most places lower down:
the plantain, {28} not least among them and very good when allowed
to become ripe, and then cut into longitudinal strips, and properly
fried; the banana, which surpasses it when served in the same
manner, or beaten up and mixed with rice, butter, and eggs, and
baked. Eggs, by the way, according to the great mass of native
testimony, are laid in this country in a state that makes them more
fit for electioneering than culinary purposes, and I shall never
forget one tribe I was once among, who, whenever I sat down on one
of their benches, used to smash eggs round me for ju-ju. They meant
well. But I will nobly resist the temptation to tell egg stories
and industriously catalogue the sour-sop, guava, grenadilla,
aubergine or garden-egg, yam, and sweet potato.
The sweet potato should be boiled, and then buttered and browned in
an oven, or fried. When cooked in either way I am devoted to them,
but in the way I most frequently come across them I abominate them,
for they jeopardise my existence both in this world and the next.
It is this way: you are coming home from a long and dangerous
beetle-hunt in the forest; you have battled with mighty beetles the
size of pie dishes, they have flown at your head, got into your hair
and then nipped you smartly. You have been also considerably stung
and bitten by flies, ants, etc., and are most likely sopping wet
with rain, or with the wading of streams, and you are tired and your
feet go low along the ground, and it is getting, or has got, dark
with that ever-deluding tropical rapidity, and then you for your
sins get into a piece of ground which last year was a native's farm,
and, placing one foot under the tough vine of a surviving sweet
potato, concealed by rank herbage, you plant your other foot on
another portion of the same vine. Your head you then deposit
promptly in some prickly ground crop, or against a tree stump, and
then, if there is human blood in you, you say d--n!
Then there are also alligator-pears, limes, and oranges. There is
something about those oranges I should like to have explained. They
are usually green and sweetish in taste, nor have they much white
pith, but now and again you get a big bright yellow one from those
trees that have been imported, and these are very pithy and in full
possession of the flavour of verjuice. They have also got the papaw
on the Coast, the Carica papaya of botanists. It is an insipid
fruit. To the newcomer it is a dreadful nuisance, for no sooner
does an old coaster set eyes on it than he straightway says, "Paw-
paws are awfully good for the digestion, and even if you just hang a
tough fowl or a bit of goat in the tree among the leaves, it gets
tender in no time, for there is an awful lot of pepsine in a paw-
paw,"--which there is not, papaine being its active principle.
After hearing this hymn of praise to the papaw some hundreds of
times, it palls, and you usually arrive at this tired feeling about
the thing by the time you reach the Gold Coast, for it is a most
common object, and the same man will say the same thing about it a
dozen times a day if he gets the chance. I got heartily sick of it
on my first voyage out, and rashly determined to check the old
coaster in this habit of his, preparatory to stamping the practice
out. It was one of my many failures. I soon met an old coaster
with a papaw fruit in sight, and before he had time to start, I
boldly got away with "The paw-paw is awfully good for the
digestion," hoping that this display of knowledge would impress him
and exempt me from hearing the rest of the formula. But no. "Right
you are," said he solemnly. "It's a powerful thing is the paw-paw.
Why, the other day we had a sad case along here. You know what a
nuisance young assistants are, bothering about their chop, and
scorpions in their beds and boots, and what not and a half, and
then, when you have pulled them through these, and often enough
before, pegging out with fever, or going on the fly in the native
town. Did you know poor B---? Well! he's dead now, had fever and
went off like a babe in eight hours though he'd been out fourteen
years for A--- and D---. They sent him out a new book-keeper, a
tender young thing with a dairymaid complexion and the notion that
he'd got the indigestion. He fidgeted about it something awful.
One night there was a big paw-paw on the table for evening chop, and
so B---, who was an awfully good chap, told him about how good it
was for the digestion. The book-keeper said his trouble always came
on two hours after eating, and asked if he might take a bit of the
thing to his room. 'Certainly,' says B---, and as the paw-paw
wasn't cut at that meal the book-keeper quietly took it off whole
with him.
"In the morning time he did not turn up. B---, just before
breakfast, went to his room and he wasn't there, but he noticed the
paw-paw was on the bed and that was all, so he thought the book-
keeper must have gone for a walk, being, as it were, a bit too
tender to have gone on the fly as yet. So he just told the store
clerk to tell the people to return him to the firm when they found
him straying around lost, and thought no more about it, being, as it
was, mail-day, and him busy.
"Well! Fortunately the steward boy put that paw-paw on the table
again for twelve o'clock chop. If it hadn't been for that, not a
living soul would have known the going of the book-keeper. For when
B--- cut it open, there, right inside it, were nine steel trouser-
buttons, a Waterbury watch, and the poor young fellow's keys. For
you see, instead of his digesting his dinner with that paw-paw, the
paw-paw took charge and digested him, dinner and all, and when B---
interrupted it, it was just getting a grip on the steel things.
There's an awful lot of pepsine in a paw-paw, and if you hang, etc.,
etc."
I collapsed, feebly murmuring that it was very interesting, but sad
for the poor young fellow's friends.
"Not necessarily," said the old coaster. So he had the last word,
and never again will I attempt to alter the ways of the genuine old
coaster. What you have got to do with him is to be very thankful
you have had the honour of knowing him.
Still I think we do over-estimate the value of the papaw, although I
certainly did once myself hang the leg of a goat no mortal man could
have got tooth into, on to a papaw tree with a bit of string for the
night. In the morning it was clean gone, string and all; but
whether it was the pepsine, the papaine, or a purloining pagan that
was the cause of its departure there was no evidence to show. Yet I
am myself, as Hans Breitmann says, "still skebdigal" as to the
papaw, and I dare say you are too.
But I must forthwith stop writing about the Gold Coast, or I shall
go on telling you stories and wasting your time, not to mention the
danger of letting out those which would damage the nerves of the
cultured of temperate climes, such as those relating to the youth
who taught himself French from a six months' method book; of the man
who wore brass buttons; the moving story of three leeches and two
gentlemen; the doctor up a creek; and the reason why you should not
eat pork along here because all the natives have either got the
guinea-worm, or kraw-kraw or ulcers; and then the pigs go and--dear
me! it was a near thing that time. I'll leave off at once.