Giving some account of the occupation of this island by the whites
and the manners and customs of the blacks peculiar to it.
Our outward voyage really terminated at Calabar, and it terminated
gorgeously in fireworks and what not, in honour of the coming of
Lady MacDonald, the whole settlement, white and black, turning out
to do her honour to the best of its ability; and its ability in this
direction was far greater than, from my previous knowledge of Coast
conditions, I could have imagined possible. Before Sir Claude
MacDonald settled down again to local work, he and Lady MacDonald
crossed to Fernando Po, still in the Batanga, and I accompanied
them, thus getting an opportunity of seeing something of Spanish
official circles.
I had heard sundry noble legends of Fernando Po, and seen the coast
and a good deal of the island before, but although I had heard much
of the Governor, I had never met him until I went up to his
residence with Lady MacDonald and the Consul-General. He was a
delightful person, who, as a Spanish naval officer, some time
resident in Cuba, had picked up a lot of English, with a strong
American accent clinging to it. He gave a most moving account of
how, as soon as his appointment as Governor was announced, all his
friends and acquaintances carefully explained to him that this
appointment was equivalent to execution, only more uncomfortable in
the way it worked out. During the outward voyage this was daily
confirmed by the stories told by the sailors and merchants
personally acquainted with the place, who were able to support their
information with dates and details of the decease of the victims to
the climate.
Still he kept up a good heart, but when he arrived at the island he
found his predecessor had died of fever; and he himself, the day
after landing, went down with a bad attack and he was placed in a
bed--the same bed, he was mournfully informed, in which the last
Governor had expired. Then he did believe, all in one awful lump,
all the stories he had been told, and added to their horrors a few
original conceptions of death and purgatory, and a lot of
transparent semi-formed images of his own delirium. Fortunately
both prophecy and personal conviction alike miscarried, and the
Governor returned from the jaws of death. But without a moment's
delay he withdrew from the Port of Clarence and went up the mountain
to Basile, which is in the neighbourhood of the highest native
village, where he built himself a house, and around it a little
village of homes for the most unfortunate set of human beings I have
ever laid eye on. They are the remnant of a set of Spanish
colonists, who had been located at some spot in the Spanish
possessions in Morocco, and finding that place unfit to support
human life, petitioned the Government to remove them and let them
try colonising elsewhere.
The Spanish Government just then had one of its occasional fits of
interest in Fernando Po, and so shipped them here, and the Governor,
a most kindly and generous man, who would have been a credit to any
country, established them and their families around him at Basile,
to share with him the advantages of the superior elevation;
advantages he profoundly believed in, and which he has always placed
at the disposal of any sick white man on the island, of whatsoever
nationality or religion. Undoubtedly the fever is not so severe at
Basile as in the lowlands, but there are here the usual drawbacks to
West African high land, namely an over supply of rain, and equally
saturating mists, to say nothing of sudden and extreme alternations
of temperature, and so the colonists still fall off, and their
children die continuously from the various entozoa which abound upon
the island.
When the Governor first settled upon the mountain he was very
difficult to get at for business purposes, and a telephone was
therefore run up to him from Clarence through the forest, and Spain
at large felt proud at this dashing bit of enterprise in modern
appliance. Alas! the primaeval forests of Fernando Po were also
charmed with the new toy, and they talked to each other on it with
their leaves and branches to such an extent that a human being could
not get a word in edgeways. So the Governor had to order the
construction of a road along the course of the wire to keep the
trees off it, but unfortunately the telephone is still an uncertain
means of communication, because another interruption in its
usefulness still afflicts it, namely the indigenous natives' habit
of stealing bits out of its wire, for they are fully persuaded that
they cannot be found out in their depredations provided they take
sufficient care that they are not caught in the act. The Governor
is thus liable to be cut off at any moment in the middle of a
conversation with Clarence, and the amount of "Hellos" "Are you
theres?" and "Speak louder, pleases" in Spanish that must at such
times be poured out and wasted in the lonely forests before the
break is realised and an unfortunate man sent off as a messenger, is
terrible to think of.
But nothing would persuade the Governor to come a mile down towards
Clarence until the day he should go there to join the vessel that
was to take him home, and I am bound to say he looked as if the
method was a sound one, for he was an exceedingly healthy, cheery-
looking man.
Fernando Po is said to be a comparatively modern island, and not so
very long ago to have been connected with the mainland, the strait
between them being only nineteen miles across, and not having any
deep soundings. {37} I fail to see what grounds there are for these
ideas, for though Fernando Po's volcanoes are not yet extinct, but
merely have their fires banked, yet, on the other hand, the island
has been in existence sufficiently long to get itself several
peculiar species of animals and plants, and that is a thing which
takes time. I myself do not believe that this island was ever
connected with the continent, but arose from the ocean as the result
of a terrific upheaval in the chain of volcanic activity which runs
across the Atlantic from the Cameroon Mountains in a SSW. direction
to Anno Bom island, and possibly even to the Tristan da Cunha group
midway between the Cape and South America.
These volcanic islands are all of extreme beauty and fertility.
They consist of Fernando Po (10,190 ft.); Principe (3000 ft.); San
Thome (6,913 ft.); and Anno Bom (1,350 ft.). San Thome and Principe
are Portuguese possessions, Fernando Po and Anno Bom Spanish, and
they are all exceedingly unhealthy. San Thome is still called "The
Dutchman's Church-yard," on account of the devastation its climate
wrought among the Hollanders when they once occupied it; as they
seem, at one time or another, to have occupied all Portuguese
possessions out here, during the long war these two powers waged
with each other for supremacy in the Bights, a supremacy that
neither of them attained to. Principe is said to be the most
unhealthy, and the reason of the difference in this particular
between Principe and Anno Bom is said to arise from the fact that
the former is on the Guinea Current--a hot current--and Anno Bom on
the Equatorial, which averages 10 degree cooler than its neighbour.
The shores of San Thome are washed by both currents, and the
currents round Fernando Po are in a mixed and uncertain state. It
is difficult, unless you have haunted these seas, to realise the
interest we take down there in currents; particularly when you are
navigating small sailing boats, a pursuit I indulge in necessarily
from my fishing practices. Their effect on the climate too is very
marked. If we could only arrange for some terrific affair to take
place in the bed of the Atlantic, that would send that precious
Guinea current to the place it evidently comes from, and get the
cool Equatorial alongside the mainland shore, West Africa would be
quite another place.
Fernando Po is the most important island as regards size on the West
African coast, and at the same time one of the most beautiful in the
world. It is a great volcanic mass with many craters, and
culminates in the magnificent cone, Clarence Peak, called by the
Spaniards, Pico de Santa Isabel, by the natives of the island O
Wassa. Seen from the sea or from the continent it looks like an
immense single mountain that has floated out to sea. It is visible
during clear weather (and particularly sharply visible in the
strange clearness you get after a tornado) from a hundred miles to
seawards, and anything more perfect than Fernando Po when you sight
it, as you occasionally do from far-away Bonny Bar, in the sunset,
floating like a fairy island made of gold or of amethyst, I cannot
conceive. It is almost equally lovely at close quarters, namely
from the mainland at Victoria, nineteen miles distant. Its moods of
beauty are infinite; for the most part gentle and gorgeous, but I
have seen it silhouetted hard against tornado-clouds, and grandly
grim from the upper regions of its great brother Mungo. And as for
Fernando Po in full moonlight--well there! you had better go and see
it yourself.
The whole island is, or rather I should say was, heavily forested
almost to its peak, with a grand and varied type of forest, very
rich in oil palms and tree-ferns, and having an undergrowth
containing an immense variety and quantity of ferns and mosses.
Sugar-cane also grows wild here, an uncommon thing in West Africa.
The last botanical collection of any importance made from these
forests was that of Herr Mann, and its examination showed that
Abyssinian genera and species predominated, and that many species
similar to those found in the mountains of Mauritius, the Isle de
Bourbon, and Madagascar, were present. The number of European
plants (forty-three genera, twenty-seven species) is strikingly
large, most of the British forms being represented chiefly at the
higher elevations. What was more striking was that it showed that
South African forms were extremely rare, and not one of the
characteristic types of St. Helena occurred.
Cocoa, coffee, and cinchona, alas! flourish in Fernando Po, as the
coffee suffers but little from the disease that harasses it on the
mainland at Victoria, and this is the cause of the great destruction
of the forest that is at present taking place. San Thome, a few
years ago, was discovered by its surprised neighbours to be amassing
great wealth by growing coffee, and so Fernando Po and Principe
immediately started to amass great wealth too, and are now hard at
work with gangs of miscellaneous natives got from all parts of the
Coast save the Kru. For to the Kruboy, "Panier," as he calls
"Spaniard," is a name of horror worse even than Portugee, although
he holds "God made white man and God made black man, but dem debil
make Portugee," and he also remembers an unfortunate affair that
occurred some years ago now, in connection with coffee-growing.
A number of Krumen engaged themselves for a two years' term of
labour on the Island of San Thome, and when they arrived there, were
set to work on coffee plantations by the Portuguese. Now
agricultural work is "woman's palaver," but nevertheless the Krumen
made shift to get through with it, vowing the while no doubt, as
they hopefully notched away the moons on their tally-sticks, that
they would never let the girls at home know that they had been
hoeing. But when their moons were all complete, instead of being
sent home with their pay to "We country," they were put off from
time to time; and month after month went by and they were still on
San Thome, and still hoeing. At last the home-sick men, in despair
of ever getting free, started off secretly in ones and twos to try
and get to "We country" across hundreds of miles of the storm-
haunted Atlantic in small canoes, and with next to no provisions.
The result was a tragedy, but it might easily have been worse; for a
few, a very few, were picked up alive by English vessels and taken
back to their beloved "We country" to tell the tale. But many a
canoe was found with a dead Kruboy or so in it; and many a one
which, floating bottom upwards, graphically spoke of madness caused
by hunger, thirst, and despair having driven its occupants overboard
to the sharks.
My Portuguese friends assure me that there was never thought of
permanently detaining the boys, and that they were only just keeping
them until other labourers arrived to take their place on the
plantations. I quite believe them, for I have seen too much of the
Portuguese in Africa to believe that they would, in a wholesale way,
be cruel to natives. But I am not in the least surprised that the
poor Krumen took the Portuguese logo and amanha for Eternity itself,
for I have frequently done so.
The greatest length of the island lies N.E. and S.W., and amounts to
thirty-three miles; the mean breadth is seventeen miles. The port,
Clarence Cove, now called Santa Isabel by the Spaniards--who have
been giving Spanish names to all the English-named places without
any one taking much notice of them--is a very remarkable place, and
except perhaps Gaboon the finest harbour on the West Coast. The
point that brings Gaboon anchorage up in line with Clarence Cove is
its superior healthiness; for Clarence is a section of a circle, and
its shores are steep rocky cliffs from 100 to 200 feet high, and the
place, to put it very mildly, exceedingly hot and stuffy. The cove
is evidently a partly submerged crater, the submerged rim of the
crater is almost a perfect semi-circle seawards--having on it 4, 5,
7, 8, and 10 fathoms of water save almost in the centre of the arc
where there is a passage with 12 to 14 fathoms. Inside, in the
crater, there is deeper water, running in places from 30 to 45
fathoms, and outside the submerged rim there is deeper water again,
but rocky shoals abound. On the top of the shore cliffs stands the
dilapidated little town of Clarence, on a plateau that falls away
slightly towards the mountain for about a mile, when the ground
commences to rise into the slopes of the Cordillera. On the narrow
beach, tucked close against the cliffs, are a few stores belonging
to the merchants, where goods are placed on landing, and there is a
little pier too, but as it is usually having something done to its
head, or else is closed by the authorities because they intend doing
something by and by, the chances are against its being available for
use. Hence it usually comes about that you have to land on the
beach, and when you have done this you make your way up a very steep
path, cut in the cliffside, to the town. When you get there you
find yourself in the very dullest town I know on the Coast. I
remember when I first landed in Clarence I found its society in a
flutter of expectation and alarm not untinged with horror.
Clarence, nay, the whole of Fernando Po, was about to become so
rackety and dissipated as to put Paris and Monte Carlo to the blush.
Clarence was going to have a cafe; and what was going to go on in
that cafe I shrink from reciting.
I have little hesitation now in saying this alarm was a false one.
When I next arrived in Clarence it was just as sound asleep and its
streets as weed-grown as ever, although the cafe was open. My idea
is that the sleepiness of the place infected the cafe and took all
the go out of it. But again it may have been that the inhabitants
were too well guarded against its evil influence, for there are on
the island fifty-two white laymen, and fifty-four priests to take
charge of them {44}--the extra two being, I presume, to look after
the Governor's conduct, although this worthy man made a most
spirited protest against this view when I suggested it to him; and
in addition to the priests there are several missionaries of the
Methodist mission, and also a white gentleman who has invented a new
religion. Anyhow, the cafe smoulders like a damp squib.
When you spend the day on shore and when, having exhausted the
charms of the town,--a thing that usually takes from between ten
minutes to a quarter of an hour,--you apply to an inhabitant for
advice as to the disposal of the rest of your shore leave, you are
told to "go and see the coals." You say you have not come to
tropical islands to see a coal heap, and applying elsewhere for
advice you probably get the same. So, as you were told to "go and
see the coals" when you left your ship, you do as you are bid.
These coals, the remnant of the store that was kept here for the
English men-of-war, were left here when the naval station was
removed. The Spaniards at first thought of using them, and ran a
tram-way from Clarence to them. But when the tramway was finished,
their activity had run out too, and to this day there the coals
remain. Now and again some one has the idea that they are quite
good, and can be used for a steamer, and some people who have tried
them say they are all right, and others say they are all wrong. And
so the end of it will be that some few thousand years hence there
will be a serious quarrel among geologists on the strange pocket of
coal on Fernando Po, and they will run up continents, and raise and
lower oceans to explain them, and they will doubtless get more
excitement and pleasure out of them than you can nowadays.
The history of the English occupation of Fernando Po seems often
misunderstood, and now and then one hears our Government reviled for
handing it over to the Spaniards. But this was unavoidable, for we
had it as a loan from Spain in 1827 as a naval station for our
ships, at that time energetically commencing to suppress the slave
trade in the Bights; the idea being that this island would afford a
more healthy and convenient spot for a naval depot than any port on
the coast itself.
More convenient Fernando Po certainly was, but not more healthy, and
ever since 1827 it has been accumulating for itself an evil
reputation for unhealthiness which is only languishing just at
present because there is an interval between its epidemics--fever in
Fernando Po, even more than on the mainland, having periodic
outbursts of a more serious type than the normal intermittent and
remittent of the Coast. Moreover, Fernando Po shares with Senegal
the undoubted yet doubtful honour of having had regular yellow
fever. In 1862 and 1866 this disease was imported by a ship that
had come from Havana. Since then it has not appeared in the
definite South American form, and therefore does not seem to have
obtained the foothold it has in Senegal, where a few years ago all
the money voted for the keeping of the Fete Nationale was in one
district devoted by public consent to the purchase of coffins,
required by an overwhelming outbreak of Yellow Jack.
In 1858 the Spanish Government thinking, presumably, that the slave
trade was suppressed enough, or at any rate to a sufficiently
inconvenient extent, re-claimed Fernando Po, to the horror of the
Baptist missionaries who had settled in Clarence apparently under
the erroneous idea that the island had been definitely taken over by
the English. This mission had received from the West African
Company a large grant of land, and had collected round it a
gathering of Sierra Leonians and other artisan and trading Africans
who were attracted to Clarence by the work made by the naval
station; and these people, with the English traders who also settled
here for a like reason, were the founders of Clarence Town. The
declaration of the Spanish Government stating that only Roman
Catholic missions would be countenanced caused the Baptists to
abandon their possessions and withdraw to the mainland in Ambas Bay,
where they have since remained, and nowadays Protestantism is
represented by a Methodist Mission which has a sub-branch on the
mainland on the Akwayafe River and one on the Qua Ibo.
The Spaniards, on resuming possession of the island, had one of
their attacks of activity regarding it, and sent out with Don Carlos
Chacon, who was to take over the command, four Jesuit priests, a
secretary, a commissariat officer, a custom-house clerk, and a
transport, the Santa Maria, with a number of emigrant families.
This attempt to colonise Fernando Po should have at least done the
good of preventing such experiments ever being tried again with
women and children, for of these unfortunate creatures--for whom, in
spite of its being the wet season, no houses had been provided--more
than 20 per cent. died in the space of five months. Mr. Hutchinson,
who was English Consul at the time, tells us that "In a very short
time gaunt figures of men, women, and children might be seen
crawling through the streets, with scarcely an evidence of life in
their faces, save the expression of a sort of torpid carelessness as
to how soon it might be their turn to drop off and die. The
Portino, a steamer, carried back fifty of them to Cadiz, who looked
when they embarked more like living skeletons of skin and bone than
animated human beings." {47} I quote this not to cast reproach on
the Spanish Government, but merely to give a fact, a case in point,
of the deadly failure of endeavours to colonise on the West Coast, a
thing which is even now occasionally attempted, always with the same
sad results, though in most cases these attempts are now made by
religious but misinformed people under Bishop Taylor's mission.
The Spaniards did not entirely confine their attention to planting
colonists in a ready-made state on the island. As soon as they had
settled themselves and built their barracks and Government House,
they set to work and cleared away the bush for an area of from four
to six miles round the town. The ground soon became overgrown
again, but this clearing is still perceptible in the different type
of forest on it, and has enabled the gardens and little plantations
round Clarence to be made more easily. My Spanish friends assure me
that the Portuguese, who discovered the island in 1471, {48a} and
who exchanged it and Anno Bom in 1778 to the Spaniards for the
little island of Catalina and the colony of Sacramento in South
America, did not do anything to develop it. When they, the
Spaniards, first entered into possession they at once set to work to
colonise and clear. Then the colonisation scheme went to the bad,
the natives poisoned the wells, it is said, and the attention of the
Spaniards was in those days turned, for some inscrutable reason, to
the eastern shores of the island--a district now quite abandoned by
whites, on account of its unhealthiness--and they lost in addition
to the colonists a terrible quantity of their sailors, in Concepcion
Bay. {48b} A lull then followed, and the Spaniards willingly lent
the place to the English as aforesaid. They say we did nothing
except establish Clarence as a headquarters, which they consider to
have been a most excellent enterprise, and import the Baptist
Mission, which they hold as a less estimable undertaking; but there!
that's nothing to what the Baptist Mission hold regarding the
Spaniards. For my own part, I wish the Spaniards better luck this
time in their activity, for in directing it to plantations they are
on a truer and safer road to wealth than they have been with their
previous importations of Cuban political prisoners and ready-made
families of colonists, and I hope they will send home those
unfortunate wretches they have there now, and commence, in their
expected two years, to reap the profits of the coffee and cocoa.
Certainly the chances are that they may, for the soil of Fernando Po
is of exceeding fertility; Mr. Hutchinson says he has known Indian
corn planted here on a Monday evening make its appearance four
inches above ground on the following Wednesday morning, within a
period, he carefully says, of thirty-six hours. I have seen this
sort of thing over in Victoria, but I like to get a grown, strong
man, and a Consul of Her Britannic Majesty, to say it for me.
Having discoursed at large on the various incomers to Fernando Po we
may next turn to the natives, properly so-called, the Bubis. These
people, although presenting a series of interesting problems to the
ethnologist, both from their insular position, and their
differentiation from any of the mainland peoples, are still but
little known. To a great extent this has arisen from their
exclusiveness, and their total lack of enthusiasm in trade matters,
a thing that differentiates them more than any other characteristic
from the mainlanders, who, young and old, men and women, regard
trade as the great affair of life, take to it as soon as they can
toddle, and don't even leave it off at death, according to their own
accounts of the way the spirits of distinguished traders still
dabble and interfere in market matters. But it is otherwise with
the Bubi. A little rum, a few beads, and finish--then he will turn
the rest of his attention to catching porcupines, or the beautiful
little gazelles, gray on the back, and white underneath, with which
the island abounds. And what time he may have on hand after this,
he spends in building houses and making himself hats. It is only
his utterly spare moments that he employs in making just sufficient
palm oil from the rich supply of nuts at his command to get that rum
and those beads of his. Cloth he does not want; he utterly fails to
see what good the stuff is, for he abhors clothes. The Spanish
authorities insist that the natives who come into the town should
have something on, and so they array themselves in a bit of cotton
cloth, which before they are out of sight of the town on their
homeward way, they strip off and stuff into their baskets, showing
in this, as well as in all other particulars, how uninfluencible by
white culture they are. For the Spaniards, like the Portuguese, are
great sticklers for clothes and insist on their natives wearing
them--usually with only too much success. I shall never forget the
yards and yards of cotton the ladies of Loanda wore; and not content
with making cocoons of their bodies, they wore over their heads, as
a mantilla, some dozen yards or so of black cloth into the bargain.
Moreover this insistence on drapery for the figure is not merely for
towns; a German officer told me the other day that when, a week or
so before, his ship had called at Anno Bom, they were simply
besieged for "clo', clo', clo';" the Anno Bomians explaining that
they were all anxious to go across to Principe and get employment on
coffee plantations, but that the Portuguese planters would not
engage them in an unclothed state.
You must not, however, imagine that the Bubi is neglectful of his
personal appearance. In his way he is quite a dandy. But his idea
of decoration goes in the direction of a plaster of "tola" pomatum
over his body, and above all a hat. This hat may be an antique
European one, or a bound-round handkerchief, but it is more
frequently a confection of native manufacture, and great taste and
variety are displayed in its make. They are of plaited palm leaf--
that's all you can safely generalise regarding them--for sometimes
they have broad brims, sometimes narrow, sometimes no brims at all.
So, too, with the crown. Sometimes it is thick and domed, sometimes
non-existent, the wearer's hair aglow with red-tail parrots'
feathers sticking up where the crown should be. As a general rule
these hats are much adorned with oddments of birds' plumes, and one
chief I knew had quite a Regent-street Dolly Varden creation which
he used to affix to his wool in a most intelligent way with bonnet-
pins made of wood. These hats are also a peculiarity of the Bubi,
for none of the mainlanders care a row of pins for hats, except "for
dandy," to wear occasionally, whereas the Bubi wears his
perpetually, although he has by no means the same amount of sun to
guard against owing to the glorious forests of his island.
For earrings the Bubi wears pieces of wood stuck through the lobe of
the ear, and although this is not a decorative habit still it is
less undecorative than that of certain mainland friends of mine in
this region, who wear large and necessarily dripping lumps of fat in
their ears and in their hair. His neck is hung round with jujus on
strings--bits of the backbones of pythons, teeth, feathers, and
antelope horns, and occasionally a bit of fat in a bag. Round his
upper arm are bracelets, preferably made of ivory got from the
mainland, for celluloid bracelets carefully imported for his benefit
he refuses to look at. Often these bracelets are made of beads, or
a circlet of leaves, and when on the war-path an armlet of twisted
grass is always worn by the men. Men and women alike wear armlets,
and in the case of the women they seem to be put on when young, for
you see puffs of flesh growing out from between them. They are not
entirely for decoration, serving also as pockets, for under them men
stick a knife, and women a tobacco pipe, a well-coloured clay.
Leglets of similar construction are worn just under the knee on the
right leg, while around the body you see belts of tshibbu, small
pieces cut from Achatectonia shells, which form the native currency
of the island. These shells are also made into veils worn by the
women at their wedding.
This native coinage-equivalent is very interesting, for such things
are exceedingly rare in West Africa. The only other instance I
personally know of a tribe in this part of the world using a native-
made coin is that of the Fans, who use little bundles of imitation
axe-heads. Dr. Oscar Baumann, who knows more than any one else
about these Bubis, thinks, I believe, that these bits of
Achatectonia shells may have been introduced by the runaway Angola
slaves in the old days, who used to fly from their Portuguese owners
on San Thome to the Spaniards on Fernando Po. The villages of the
Bubis are in the forest in the interior of the island, and they are
fairly wide apart. They are not a sea-beach folk, although each
village has its beach, which merely means the place to which it
brings its trade, these beaches being usually the dwelling places of
the so-called Portos, {51} negroes, who act as middle-men between
the Bubis and the whites.
You will often be told that the Bubis are singularly bad house-
builders, indeed that they make no definite houses at all, but only
rough shelters of branches. This is, however, a mistake. Shelters
of this kind that you come across are merely the rough huts put up
by hunters, not true houses. The village is usually fairly well
built, and surrounded with a living hedge of stakes. The houses
inside this are four-cornered, the walls made of logs of wood stuck
in edgeways, and surmounted by a roof of thatch pitched at an
extremely stiff angle, and the whole is usually surrounded with a
dug-out drain to carry off surface water. These houses, as usual on
the West Coast, are divisible into two classes--houses of assembly,
and private living houses. The first are much the larger. The
latter are very low, and sometimes ridiculously small, but still
they are houses and better than those awful Loango grass affairs you
get on the Congo.
Herr Baumann says that the houses high up on the mountain have
double walls between which there is a free space; an arrangement
which may serve to minimise the extreme draughtiness of an ordinary
Bubi house--a very necessary thing in these relatively chilly upper
regions. I may remark on my own account that the Bubi villages do
not often lie right on the path, but, like those you have to deal
with up the Calabar, some little way off it. This is no doubt for
the purpose of concealing their whereabouts from strangers, and it
does it successfully too, for many a merry hour have I spent dodging
up and down a path trying to make out at what particular point it
was advisable to dive into the forest thicket to reach a village.
But this cultivates habits of observation, and a short course of
this work makes you recognise which tree is which along miles of a
bush path as easily as you would shops in your own street at home.
The main interest of the Bubi's life lies in hunting, for he is more
of a sportsman than the majority of mainlanders. He has not any big
game to deal with, unless we except pythons--which attain a great
size on the island--and crocodiles. Elephants, though plentiful on
the adjacent mainland, are quite absent from Fernando Po, as are
also hippos and the great anthropoid apes; but of the little
gazelles, small monkeys, porcupines, and squirrels he has a large
supply, and in the rivers a very pretty otter (Lutra poensis) with
yellow brown fur often quite golden underneath; a creature which is,
I believe, identical with the Angola otter.
The Bubis use in their hunting flint-lock guns, but chiefly traps
and nets, and, I am told, slings. The advantage of these latter
methods are, I expect, the same as on the mainland, where a
distinguished sportsman once told me: "You go shoot thing with gun.
Berrah well--but you no get him thing for sure. No, sah. Dem gun
make nize. Berrah well. You fren hear dem nize and come look him,
and you hab to go share what you done kill. Or bad man hear him
nize, and he come look him, and you no fit to get share--you fit to
get kill yusself. Chii! chii! traps be best." I urged that the
traps might also be robbed. "No, sah," says he, "them bian (charm)
he look after them traps, he fit to make man who go tief swell up
and bust."
The Bubis also fish, mostly by basket traps, but they are not
experts either in this or in canoe management. Their chief sea-
shore sport is hunting for the eggs of the turtles who lay in the
sand from August to October. These eggs--about 200 in each nest--
are about the size of a billiard-ball, with a leathery envelope, and
are much valued for food, as are also the grubs of certain beetles
got from the stems of the palm-trees, and the honey of the wild bees
which abound here.
Their domestic animals are the usual African list; cats, dogs,
sheep, goats, and poultry. Pigs there are too, very domestic in
Clarence and in a wild state in the forest. These pigs are the
descendants of those imported by the Spaniards, and not long ago
became such an awful nuisance in Clarence that the Government issued
instructions that all pigs without rings in their noses--i.e. all in
a condition to grub up back gardens--should be forthwith shot if
found abroad. This proclamation was issued by the governmental
bellman thus: --"I say--I say--I say--I say. Suppose pig walk--iron
no live for him nose! Gun shoot. Kill him one time. Hear re! hear
re!"
However a good many pigs with no iron living in their noses got
adrift and escaped into the interior, and have flourished like the
green bay-tree, destroying the Bubi's plantation and eating his
yams, while the Bubi retaliating kills and eats them. So it's a
drawn battle, for the Bubi enjoys the pig and the pig enjoys the
yams, which are of singular excellence in this island and celebrated
throughout the Bight. Now, I am told, the Government are firmly
discouraging the export of these yams, which used to be quite a
little branch of Fernando Po trade, in the hope that this will
induce the native to turn his attention to working in the coffee and
cacao plantations. Hope springs eternal in the human breast, for
the Bubi has shown continually since the 16th century that he takes
no interest in these things whatsoever. Now and again a man or
woman will come voluntarily and take service in Clarence, submit to
clothes, and rapidly pick up the ways of a house or store. And just
when their owner thinks he owns a treasure, and begins to boast that
he has got an exception to all Bubidom, or else that he knows how to
manage them better than other men, then a hole in that man's
domestic arrangements suddenly appears. The Bubi has gone, without
giving a moment's warning, and without stealing his master's
property, but just softly and silently vanished away. And if hunted
up the treasure will be found in his or her particular village--
clothes-less, comfortable, utterly unconcerned, and unaware that he
or she has lost anything by leaving Clarence and Civilisation. It
is this conduct that gains for the Bubi the reputation of being a
bigger idiot than he really is.
For West Africans their agriculture is of a fairly high description-
-the noteworthy point about it, however, is the absence of manioc.
Manioc is grown on Fernando Po, but only by the Portos. The Bubi
cultivated plants are yams (Dioscorea alata), koko (Colocasia
esculenta--the taro of the South Seas,) and plantains. Their farms
are well kept, particularly those in the grass districts by San
Carlos Bay. The yams of the Cordillera districts are the best
flavoured, but those of the east coast the largest. Palm-oil is
used for domestic purposes in the usual ways, and palm wine both
fresh and fermented is the ordinary native drink. Rum is held in
high esteem, but used in a general way in moderation as a cordial
and a treat, for the Bubi is, like the rest of the West African
natives, by no means an habitual drunkard. Gin he dislikes. {55}
And I may remark you will find the same opinion in regard to the
Dualla in Cameroons river--on the undeniable authority of Dr.
Buchner, and my own extensive experience of the West Coast bears it
out.
Physically the Bubis are a fairly well-formed race of medium height;
they are decidedly inferior to the Benga or the Krus, but quite on a
level with the Effiks. The women indeed are very comely: their
colour is bronze and their skin the skin of the Bantu. Beards are
not uncommon among the men, and these give their faces possibly more
than anything else, a different look to the faces of the Effiks or
the Duallas. Indeed the people physically most like the Bubis that
I have ever seen, are undoubtedly the Bakwiri of Cameroons Mountain,
who are also liable to be bearded, or possibly I should say more
liable to wear beards, for a good deal of the African hairlessness
you hear commented on--in the West African at any rate--arises from
his deliberately pulling his hair out--his beard, moustache,
whiskers, and, occasionally, as among the Fans, his eyebrows.
Dr. Baumann, the great authority on the Bubi language says it is a
Bantu stock. {56} I know nothing of it myself save that it is harsh
in sound. Their method of counting is usually by fives but they are
notably weak in arithmetical ability, differing in this particular
from the mainlanders, and especially from their Negro neighbours,
who are very good at figures, surpassing the Bantu in this, as
indeed they do in most branches of intellectual activity.
But the most remarkable instance of inferiority the Bubis display is
their ignorance regarding methods of working iron. I do not know
that iron in a native state is found on Fernando Po, but scrap-iron
they have been in touch with for some hundreds of years. The
mainlanders are all cognisant of native methods of working iron,
although many tribes of them now depend entirely on European trade
for their supply of knives, etc., and this difference between them
and the Bubis would seem to indicate that the migration of the
latter to the island must have taken place at a fairly remote
period, a period before the iron-working tribes came down to the
coast. Of course, if you take the Bubi's usual explanation of his
origin, namely that he came out of the crater on the top of Clarence
Peak, this argument falls through; but he has also another legend,
one moreover which is likewise to be found upon the mainland, which
says he was driven from the district north of the Gaboon estuary by
the coming of the M'pongwe to the coast, and as this legend is the
more likely of the two I think we may accept it as true, or nearly
so. But what adds another difficulty to the matter is that the Bubi
is not only unlearned in iron lore, but he was learned in stone, and
up to the time of the youth of many Porto-negroes on Fernando Po, he
was making and using stone implements, and none of the tribes within
the memory of man have done this on the mainland. It is true that
up the Niger and about Benin and Axim you get polished stone celts,
but these are regarded as weird affairs,--thunderbolts--and suitable
only for grinding up and making into medicine; there is no trace in
the traditions of these places, as far as I have been able to find,
of any time at which stone implements were in common use, and
certainly the M'pongwe have not been a very long time on the coast,
for their coming is still remembered in their traditions. The Bubi
stone implements I have seen twice, but on neither occasion could I
secure one, and although I have been long promised specimens from
Fernando Po, I have not yet received them. They are difficult to
procure, because none of the present towns are on really old sites,
the Bubi, like most Bantus, moving pretty frequently, either because
the ground is witched, demonstrated by outbreaks of sickness, or
because another village-full of his fellow creatures, or a horrid
white man plantation-making, has come too close to him. A Roman
Catholic priest in Ka Congo once told me a legend he laughed much
over, of how a fellow priest had enterprisingly settled himself one
night in the middle of a Bubi village with intent to devote the
remainder of his life to quietly but thoroughly converting it. Next
morning, when he rose up, he found himself alone, the people having
taken all their portable possessions and vanished to build another
village elsewhere. The worthy Father spent some time chivying his
flock about the forest, but in vain, and he returned home disgusted,
deciding that the Creator, for some wise purpose, had dedicated the
Bubis to the Devil.
The spears used by this interesting people are even to this day made
entirely of wood, and have such a Polynesian look about them that I
intend some time or other to bring some home and experiment on that
learned Polynesian-culture-expert, Baron von Hugel, with them: --
intellectually experiment, not physically, pray understand.
The pottery has a very early-man look about it, but in this it does
not differ much from that of the mainland, which is quite as poor,
and similarly made without a wheel, and sun-baked. Those pots of
the Bubis I have seen have, however, not had the pattern (any sort
of pattern does, and it need not be carefully done) that runs round
mainland pots to "keep their souls in"--i.e. to prevent their
breaking up on their own account.
The basket-work of the Bubis is of a superior order: the baskets
they make to hold the palm oil are excellent, and will hold water
like a basin, but I am in doubt whether this art is original, or
imported by the Portuguese runaway slaves, for they put me very much
in mind of those made by my old friends the Kabinders, from whom a
good many of those slaves were recruited. I think there is little
doubt that several of the musical instruments own this origin,
particularly their best beloved one, the elibo. This may be
described as a wooden bell having inside it for clappers several
(usually five) pieces of stick threaded on a bit of wood jammed into
the dome of the bell and striking the rim, beyond which the clappers
just protrude. These bells are very like those you meet with in
Angola, but I have not seen on the island, nor does Dr. Baumann cite
having seen, the peculiar double bell of Angola--the engongui. The
Bubi bell is made out of one piece of wood and worked--or played--
with both hands. Dr. Baumann says it is customary on bright
moonlight nights for two lines of men to sit facing each other and
to clap--one can hardly call it ring--these bells vigorously, but in
good time, accompanying this performance with a monotonous song,
while the delighted women and children dance round. The learned
doctor evidently sees the picturesqueness of this practice, but
notes that the words of the songs are not "tiefsinnige" (profound),
as he has heard men for hours singing "The shark bites the Bubi's
hand," only that over and over again and nothing more. This agrees
with my own observations of all Bantu native songs. I have always
found that the words of these songs were either the repetition of
some such phrase as this, or a set of words referring to the recent
adventures or experiences of the singer or the present company's
little peculiarities; with a very frequent chorus, old and
conventional.
The native tunes used with these songs are far superior, and I
expect many of them are very old. They are often full of variety
and beauty, particularly those of the M'pongwe and Igalwa, of which
I will speak later.
The dances I have no personal knowledge of, but there is nothing in
Baumann's description to make one think they are distinct in
themselves from the mainland dances. I once saw a dance at Fernando
Po, but that was among Portos, and it was my old friend the Batuco
in all its beauty. But there is a distinct peculiarity about the
places the dances are held on, every village having a kept piece of
ground outside it which is the dancing place for the village--the
ball-room as it were; and exceedingly picturesque these dances must
be, for they are mostly held during the nights of full moon. These
kept grounds remind one very much of the similar looking patches of
kept grass one sees in villages in Ka Congo, but there is no
similarity in their use, for the Ka Congo lawns are of fetish, not
frivolous, import.
The Bubis have an instrument I have never seen in an identical form
on the mainland. It is made like a bow, with a tense string of
fibre. One end of the bow is placed against the mouth, and the
string is then struck by the right hand with a small round stick,
while with the left it is scraped with a piece of shell or a knife-
blade. This excruciating instrument, I warn any one who may think
of living among the Bubis, is very popular. The drums used are both
the Dualla form--all wood--and the ordinary skin-covered drum, and I
think if I catalogue fifes made of wood, I shall have nearly
finished the Bubi orchestra. I have doubts on this point because I
rather question whether I may be allowed to refer to a very old
bullock hide--unmounted--as a musical instrument without bringing
down the wrath of musicians on my head. These stiff, dry pelts are
much thought of, and played by the artistes by being shaken as
accompaniments to other instruments--they make a noise, and that is
after all the soul of most African instrumental music. These
instruments are all that is left of certain bullocks which many
years ago the Spaniards introduced, hoping to improve the food
supply. They seemed as if they would have flourished well on the
island, on the stretches of grass land in the Cordillera and the
East, but the Bubis, being great sportsmen, killed them all off.
The festivities of the Bubis--dances, weddings, feasts, etc.,--at
which this miscellaneous collection of instruments are used in
concert, usually take place in November, the dry season; but the
Bubi is liable to pour forth his soul in the bosom of his family at
any time of the day or night, from June to January, and when he
pours it forth on that bow affair it makes the lonely European long
for home.
Divisions of time the Bubi can hardly be said to have, but this is a
point upon which all West Africans are rather weak, particularly the
Bantu. He has, however, a definite name for November, December, and
January--the dry season months--calling them Lobos.
The Fetish of these people, although agreeing on broad lines with
the Bantu Fetish, has many interesting points, as even my small
knowledge of it showed me, and it is a subject that would repay
further investigation; and as by fetish I always mean the governing
but underlying ideas of a man's life, we will commence with the
child. Nothing, as far as I have been able to make out, happens to
him, for fetish reasons, when he first appears on the scene. He
receives at birth, as is usual, a name which is changed for another
on his initiation into the secret society, this secret society
having also, as usual, a secret language. About the age of three or
five years the boy is decorated, under the auspices of the witch
doctor, with certain scars on the face. These scars run from the
root of the nose across the cheeks, and are sometimes carried up in
a curve on to the forehead.
Tattooing, in the true sense of the word, they do not use much, but
they paint themselves, as the mainlanders do, with a red paint made
by burning some herb and mixing the ash with clay or oil, and they
occasionally--whether for ju-ju reasons or for mere decoration I do
not know--paint a band of yellow clay round the chest; but of the
Bubi secret society I know little, nor have I been able to find any
one who knows much more. Hutchinson, {61} in his exceedingly
amusing description of a wedding he was once present at among these
people, would lead one to think the period of seclusion of the
women's society was twelve months.
The chief god or spirit, O Wassa, resides in the crater of the
highest peak, and by his name the peak is known to the native.
Another very important spirit, to whom goats and sheep are offered,
is Lobe, resident in a crater lake on the northern slope of the
Cordilleras, and the grass you sometimes see a Bubi wearing is said
to come from this lake and be a ju-ju of Lobe's. Dr. Baumann says
that the lake at Riabba from which the spirit Uapa rises is more
holy, and that he is small, and resides in a chasm in a rock whose
declivity can only be passed by means of bush ropes, and in the wet
season he is not get-at-able at all. He will, if given suitable
offerings, reveal the future to Bubis, but Bubis only. His priest
is the King of all the Bubis, upon whom it is never permitted to a
white man, or a Porto, to gaze. Baumann also gives the residence of
another important spirit as being the grotto at Banni. This is a
sea-cave, only accessible at low water in calm weather. I have
heard many legends of this cave, but have never had an opportunity
of seeing it, or any one who has seen it first hand.
The charms used by these people are similar in form to those of the
mainland Bantu, but the methods of treating paths and gateways are
somewhat peculiar. The gateways to the towns are sometimes covered
by freshly cut banana leaves, and during the religious feast in
November, the paths to the villages are barred across with a hedge
of grass which no stranger must pass through.
The government is a peculiar one for West Africa. Every village has
its chief, but the whole tribe obey one great chief or king who
lives in the crater-ravine at Riabba. This individual is called
Moka, but whether he is now the same man referred to by Rogoszinsky,
Mr. Holland, and the Rev. Hugh Brown, who attempted to interview him
in the seventies, I do not feel sure, for the Bubis are just the
sort of people to keep a big king going with a variety of
individuals. Even the indefatigable Dr. Baumann failed to see Moka,
though he evidently found out a great deal about the methods of his
administration and formed a very high opinion of his ability, for he
says that to this one chief the people owe their present unity and
orderliness; that before his time the whole island was in a state of
internecine war: murder was frequent, and property unsafe. Now
their social condition, according to the Doctor's account, is a
model to Europe, let alone Africa. Civil wars have been abolished,
disputes between villages being referred to arbitration, and murder
is swiftly and surely punished. If the criminal has bolted into the
forest and cannot be found, his village is made responsible, and has
to pay a fine in goats, sheep and tobacco to the value of 16 pounds.
Theft is extremely rare and offences against the moral code also,
the Bubis having an extremely high standard in this matter, even the
little children having each a separate sleeping hut. In old days
adultery was punished by cutting off the offender's hand. I have
myself seen women in Fernando Po who have had a hand cut off at the
wrist, but I believe those were slave women who had suffered for
theft. Slaves the Bubis do have, but their condition is the mild,
poor relation or retainer form of slavery you find in Calabar, and
differs from the Dualla form, for the slaves live in the same
villages as their masters, while among the Duallas, as among most
Bantu slave-holding tribes, the slaves are excluded from the
master's village and have separate villages of their own. For
marriage ceremonies I refer you to Mr. Hutchinson. Burial customs
are exceedingly quaint in the southern and eastern districts, where
the bodies are buried in the forest with their heads just sticking
out of the ground. In other districts the body is also buried in
the forest, but is completely covered and an erection of stones put
up to mark the place.
Little is known of all West African fetish, still less of that of
these strange people. Dr. Oscar Baumann brought to bear on them his
careful unemotional German methods of observation, thereby giving us
more valuable information about them and their island than we
otherwise should possess. Mr. Hutchinson resided many years on
Fernando Po, in the capacity of H. B. M.'s Consul, with his hands
full of the affairs of the Oil Rivers and in touch with the Portos
of Clarence, but he nevertheless made very interesting observations
on the natives and their customs. The Polish exile and his
courageous wife who ascended Clarence Peak, Mr. Rogoszinsky, and
another Polish exile, Mr. Janikowski, about complete our series of
authorities on the island. Dr. Baumann thinks they got their
information from Porto sources--sources the learned Doctor evidently
regards as more full of imagination than solid fact, but, as you
know, all African travellers are occasionally in the habit of pooh-
poohing each other, and I own that I myself have been chiefly in
touch with Portos, and that my knowledge of the Bubi language runs
to the conventional greeting form: --"Ipori?" "Porto." "Ke Soko?'"
"Hatsi soko": --"Who are you?" "Porto." "What's the news?" "No
news."
Although these Portos are less interesting to the ethnologist than
the philanthropist, they being by-products of his efforts, I must
not leave Fernando Po without mentioning them, for on them the trade
of the island depends. They are the middlemen between the Bubi and
the white trader. The former regards them with little, if any, more
trust than he regards the white men, and his view of the position of
the Spanish Governor is that he is chief over the Portos. That he
has any headship over Bubis or over the Bubi land--Itschulla as he
calls Fernando Po--he does not imagine possible. Baumann says he
was once told by a Bubi: "White men are fish, not men. They are
able to stay a little while on land, but at last they mount their
ships again and vanish over the horizon into the ocean. How can a
fish possess land?" If the coffee and cacao thrive on Fernando Po
to the same extent that they have already thriven on San Thome there
is but little doubt that the Bubis will become extinct; for work on
plantations, either for other people, or themselves, they will not,
and then the Portos will become the most important class, for they
will go in for plantations. Their little factories are studded all
round the shores of the coast in suitable coves and bays, and here
in fairly neat houses they live, collecting palm-oil from the Bubis,
and making themselves little cacao plantations, and bringing these
products into Clarence every now and then to the white trader's
factory. Then, after spending some time and most of their money in
the giddy whirl of that capital, they return to their homes and
recover. There is a class of them permanently resident in Clarence,
the city men of Fernando Po, and these are very like the Sierra
Leonians of Free Town, but preferable. Their origin is practically
the same as that of the Free Towners. They are the descendants of
liberated slaves set free during the time of our occupation of the
island as a naval depot for suppressing the slave trade, and of
Sierra Leonians and Accras who have arrived and settled since then.
They have some of the same "Black gennellum, Sar" style about them,
but not developed to the same ridiculous extent as in the Sierra
Leonians, for they have not been under our institutions. The "Nanny
Po" ladies are celebrated for their beauty all along the West Coast,
and very justly. They are not however, as they themselves think,
the most beautiful women in this part of the world. Not at least to
my way of thinking. I prefer an Elmina, or an Igalwa, or a
M'pongwe, or--but I had better stop and own that my affections have
got very scattered among the black ladies on the West Coast, and I
no sooner remember one lovely creature whose soft eyes, perfect form
and winning, pretty ways have captivated me than I think of another.
The Nanny Po ladies have often a certain amount of Spanish blood in
them, which gives a decidedly greater delicacy to their features--
delicate little nostrils, mouths not too heavily lipped, a certain
gloss on the hair, and a light in the eye. But it does not improve
their colour, and I am assured that it has an awful effect on their
tempers, so I think I will remain, for the present, the faithful
admirer of my sable Ingramina, the Igalwa, with the little red
blossoms stuck in her night-black hair, and a sweet soft look and
word for every one, but particularly for her ugly husband Isaac the
"Jack Wash."