Wherein the voyager before leaving the Rivers discourses on dangers,
to which is added some account of Mangrove swamps and the creatures
that abide therein.
I left Calabar in May and joined the Benguela off Lagos Bar. My
voyage down coast in her was a very pleasant one and full of
instruction, for Mr. Fothergill, who was her purser, had in former
years resided in Congo Francais as a merchant, and to Congo Francais
I was bound with an empty hold as regards local knowledge of the
district. He was one of that class of men, of which you most
frequently find representatives among the merchants, who do not
possess the power so many men along here do possess (a power that
always amazes me), of living for a considerable time in a district
without taking any interest in it, keeping their whole attention
concentrated on the point of how long it will be before their time
comes to get out of it. Mr. Fothergill evidently had much knowledge
and experience of the Fernan Vaz district and its natives. He had,
I should say, overdone his experiences with the natives, as far as
personal comfort and pleasure at the time went, having been nearly
killed and considerably chivied by them. Now I do not wish a man,
however much I may deplore his total lack of local knowledge, to go
so far as this. Mr. Fothergill gave his accounts of these incidents
calmly, and in an undecorated way that gave them a power and
convincingness verging on being unpleasant, although useful, to a
person who was going into the district where they had occurred, for
one felt there was no mortal reason why one should not personally
get involved in similar affairs. And I must here acknowledge the
great subsequent service Mr. Fothergill's wonderfully accurate
descriptions of the peculiar characteristics of the Ogowe forests
were to me when I subsequently came to deal with these forests on my
own account, as every district of forest has peculiar
characteristics of its own which you require to know. I should like
here to speak of West Coast dangers because I fear you may think
that I am careless of, or do not believe in them, neither of which
is the case. The more you know of the West Coast of Africa, the
more you realise its dangers. For example, on your first voyage out
you hardly believe the stories of fever told by the old Coasters.
That is because you do not then understand the type of man who is
telling them, a man who goes to his death with a joke in his teeth.
But a short experience of your own, particularly if you happen on a
place having one of its periodic epidemics, soon demonstrates that
the underlying horror of the thing is there, a rotting corpse which
the old Coaster has dusted over with jokes to cover it so that it
hardly shows at a distance, but which, when you come yourself to
live alongside, you soon become cognisant of. Many men, when they
have got ashore and settled, realise this, and let the horror get a
grip on them; a state briefly and locally described as funk, and a
state that usually ends fatally; and you can hardly blame them.
Why, I know of a case myself. A young man who had never been
outside an English country town before in his life, from family
reverses had to take a situation as book-keeper down in the Bights.
The factory he was going to was in an isolated out-of-the-way place
and not in a settlement, and when the ship called off it, he was put
ashore in one of the ship's boats with his belongings, and a case or
so of goods. There were only the firm's beach-boys down at the
surf, and as the steamer was in a hurry the officer from the ship
did not go up to the factory with him, but said good-bye and left
him alone with a set of naked savages as he thought, but really of
good kindly Kru boys on the beach. He could not understand what
they said, nor they what he said, and so he walked up to the house
and on to the verandah and tried to find the Agent he had come out
to serve under. He looked into the open-ended dining-room and shyly
round the verandah, and then sat down and waited for some one to
turn up. Sundry natives turned up, and said a good deal, but no one
white or comprehensible, so in desperation he made another and a
bolder tour completely round the verandah and noticed a most
peculiar noise in one of the rooms and an infinity of flies going
into the venetian shuttered window. Plucking up courage he went in
and found what was left of the white Agent, a considerable quantity
of rats, and most of the flies in West Africa. He then presumably
had fever, and he was taken off, a fortnight afterwards, by a French
boat, to whom the natives signalled, and he is not coming down the
Coast again. Some men would have died right out from a shock like
this.
But most of the new-comers do not get a shock of this order. They
either die themselves or get more gradually accustomed to this sort
of thing, when they come to regard death and fever as soldiers, who
on a battle-field sit down, and laugh and talk round a camp fire
after a day's hard battle, in which they have seen their friends and
companions falling round them; all the time knowing that to-morrow
the battle comes again and that to-morrow night they themselves may
never see.
It is not hard-hearted callousness, it is only their way. Michael
Scott put this well in Tom Cringle's Log, in his account of the
yellow fever during the war in the West Indies. Fever, though the
chief danger, particularly to people who go out to settlements, is
not the only one; but as the other dangers, except perhaps domestic
poisoning, are incidental to pottering about in the forests, or on
the rivers, among the unsophisticated tribes, I will not dwell on
them. They can all be avoided by any one with common sense, by
keeping well out of the districts in which they occur; and so I warn
the general reader that if he goes out to West Africa, it is not
because I said the place was safe, or its dangers overrated. The
cemeteries of the West Coast are full of the victims of those people
who have said that Coast fever is "Cork fever," and a man's own
fault, which it is not; and that natives will never attack you
unless you attack them: which they will--on occasions.
My main aim in going to Congo Francais was to get up above the tide
line of the Ogowe River and there collect fishes; for my object on
this voyage was to collect fish from a river north of the Congo. I
had hoped this river would have been the Niger, for Sir George
Goldie had placed at my disposal great facilities for carrying on
work there in comfort; but for certain private reasons I was
disinclined to go from the Royal Niger Protectorate into the Royal
Niger Company's territory; and the Calabar, where Sir Claude
MacDonald did everything he possibly could to assist me, I did not
find a good river for me to collect fishes in. These two rivers
failing me, from no fault of either of their own presiding genii, my
only hope of doing anything now lay on the South West Coast river,
the Ogowe, and everything there depended on Mr. Hudson's attitude
towards scientific research in the domain of ichthyology.
Fortunately for me that gentleman elected to take a favourable view
of this affair, and in every way in his power assisted me during my
entire stay in Congo Francais. But before I enter into a detailed
description of this wonderful bit of West Africa, I must give you a
brief notice of the manners, habits and customs of West Coast rivers
in general, to make the thing more intelligible.
There is an uniformity in the habits of West Coast rivers, from the
Volta to the Coanza, which is, when you get used to it, very taking.
Excepting the Congo, the really great river comes out to sea with as
much mystery as possible; lounging lazily along among its mangrove
swamps in a what's-it-matter-when-one-comes-out and where's-the-
hurry style, through quantities of channels inter-communicating with
each other. Each channel, at first sight as like the other as peas
in a pod, is bordered on either side by green-black walls of
mangroves, which Captain Lugard graphically described as seeming "as
if they had lost all count of the vegetable proprieties, and were
standing on stilts with their branches tucked up out of the wet,
leaving their gaunt roots exposed in midair." High-tide or low-
tide, there is little difference in the water; the river, be it
broad or narrow, deep or shallow, looks like a pathway of polished
metal; for it is as heavy weighted with stinking mud as water e'er
can be, ebb or flow, year out and year in. But the difference in
the banks, though an unending alternation between two appearances,
is weird.
At high-water you do not see the mangroves displaying their ankles
in the way that shocked Captain Lugard. They look most respectable,
their foliage rising densely in a wall irregularly striped here and
there by the white line of an aerial root, coming straight down into
the water from some upper branch as straight as a plummet, in the
strange, knowing way an aerial root of a mangrove does, keeping the
hard straight line until it gets some two feet above water-level,
and then spreading out into blunt fingers with which to dip into the
water and grasp the mud. Banks indeed at high water can hardly be
said to exist, the water stretching away into the mangrove swamps
for miles and miles, and you can then go, in a suitable small canoe,
away among these swamps as far as you please.
This is a fascinating pursuit. But it is a pleasure to be indulged
in with caution; for one thing, you are certain to come across
crocodiles. Now a crocodile drifting down in deep water, or lying
asleep with its jaws open on a sand-bank in the sun, is a
picturesque adornment to the landscape when you are on the deck of a
steamer, and you can write home about it and frighten your relations
on your behalf; but when you are away among the swamps in a small
dug-out canoe, and that crocodile and his relations are awake--a
thing he makes a point of being at flood tide because of fish coming
along--and when he has got his foot upon his native heath--that is
to say, his tail within holding reach of his native mud--he is
highly interesting, and you may not be able to write home about him-
-and you get frightened on your own behalf; for crocodiles can, and
often do, in such places, grab at people in small canoes. I have
known of several natives losing their lives in this way; some native
villages are approachable from the main river by a short cut, as it
were, through the mangrove swamps, and the inhabitants of such
villages will now and then go across this way with small canoes
instead of by the constant channel to the village, which is almost
always winding. In addition to this unpleasantness you are liable--
until you realise the danger from experience, or have native advice
on the point--to get tide-trapped away in the swamps, the water
falling round you when you are away in some deep pool or lagoon, and
you find you cannot get back to the main river. Of course if you
really want a truly safe investment in Fame, and really care about
Posterity, and Posterity's Science, you will jump over into the
black batter-like, stinking slime, cheered by the thought of the
terrific sensation you will produce 20,000 years hence, and the care
you will be taken of then by your fellow-creatures, in a museum.
But if you are a mere ordinary person of a retiring nature, like me,
you stop in your lagoon until the tide rises again; most of your
attention is directed to dealing with an "at home" to crocodiles and
mangrove flies, and with the fearful stench of the slime round you.
What little time you have over you will employ in wondering why you
came to West Africa, and why, after having reached this point of
folly, you need have gone and painted the lily and adorned the rose,
by being such a colossal ass as to come fooling about in mangrove
swamps.
Still, even if your own peculiar tastes and avocations do not take
you in small dug-out canoes into the heart of the swamps, you can
observe the difference in the local scenery made by the flowing of
the tide when you are on a vessel stuck on a sand-bank, in the Rio
del Rey for example. Moreover, as you will have little else to
attend to, save mosquitoes and mangrove flies, when in such a
situation, you may as well pursue the study. At the ebb gradually
the foliage of the lower branches of the mangroves grows wet and
muddy, until there is a great black band about three feet deep above
the surface of the water in all directions; gradually a network of
gray-white roots rises up, and below this again, gradually, a slope
of smooth and lead-grey slime. The effect is not in the least as if
the water had fallen, but as if the mangroves had, with one accord,
risen up out of it, and into it again they seem silently to sink
when the flood comes. But by this more safe, if still unpleasant,
method of observing mangrove-swamps, you miss seeing in full the
make of them, for away in their fastnesses the mangroves raise their
branches far above the reach of tide line, and the great gray roots
of the older trees are always sticking up in mid-air. But, fringing
the rivers, there is always a hedge of younger mangroves whose lower
branches get immersed.
At corners here and there from the river face you can see the land
being made from the waters. A mud-bank forms off it, a mangrove
seed lights on it, and the thing's done. Well! not done, perhaps,
but begun; for if the bank is high enough to get exposed at low
water, this pioneer mangrove grows. He has a wretched existence
though. You have only got to look at his dwarfed attenuated form to
see this. He gets joined by a few more bold spirits and they
struggle on together, their network of roots stopping abundance of
mud, and by good chance now and then a consignment of miscellaneous
debris of palm leaves, or a floating tree-trunk, but they always die
before they attain any considerable height. Still even in death
they collect. Their bare white stems remaining like a net gripped
in the mud, so that these pioneer mangrove heroes may be said to
have laid down their lives to make that mud-bank fit for
colonisation, for the time gradually comes when other mangroves can
and do colonise on it, and flourish, extending their territory
steadily; and the mud-bank joins up with, and becomes a part of,
Africa.
Right away on the inland fringe of the swamp--you may go some
hundreds of miles before you get there--you can see the rest of the
process. The mangroves there have risen up, and dried the mud to an
extent that is more than good for themselves, have over civilised
that mud in fact, and so the brackish waters of the tide--which,
although their enemy when too deep or too strong in salt, is
essential to their existence--cannot get to their roots. They have
done this gradually, as a mangrove does all things, but they have
done it, and down on to that mud come a whole set of palms from the
old mainland, who in their early colonisation days go through
similarly trying experiences. First the screw-pines come and live
among them; then the wine-palm and various creepers, and then the
oil-palm; and the debris of these plants being greater and making
better soil than dead mangroves, they work quicker and the mangrove
is doomed. Soon the salt waters are shut right out, the mangrove
dies, and that bit of Africa is made. It is very interesting to get
into these regions; you see along the river-bank a rich, thick,
lovely wall of soft-wooded plants, and behind this you find great
stretches of death;--miles and miles sometimes of gaunt white
mangrove skeletons standing on gray stuff that is not yet earth and
is no longer slime, and through the crust of which you can sink into
rotting putrefaction. Yet, long after you are dead, buried, and
forgotten, this will become a forest of soft-wooded plants and
palms; and finally of hard-wooded trees. Districts of this
description you will find in great sweeps of Kama country for
example, and in the rich low regions up to the base of the Sierra
del Cristal and the Rumby range.
You often hear the utter lifelessness of mangrove-swamps commented
on; why I do not know, for they are fairly heavily stocked with
fauna, though the species are comparatively few. There are the
crocodiles, more of them than any one wants; there are quantities of
flies, particularly the big silent mangrove-fly which lays an egg in
you under the skin; the egg becomes a maggot and stays there until
it feels fit to enter into external life. Then there are "slimy
things that crawl with legs upon a slimy sea," and any quantity of
hopping mud-fish, and crabs, and a certain mollusc, and in the water
various kinds of cat-fish. Birdless they are save for the flocks of
gray parrots that pass over them at evening, hoarsely squarking; and
save for this squarking of the parrots the swamps are silent all the
day, at least during the dry season; in the wet season there is no
silence night or day in West Africa, but that roar of the descending
deluge of rain that is more monotonous and more gloomy than any
silence can be. In the morning you do not hear the long, low,
mellow whistle of the plantain-eaters calling up the dawn, nor in
the evening the clock-bird nor the Handel-Festival-sized choruses of
frogs, or the crickets, that carry on their vesper controversy of
"she did"--"she didn't" so fiercely on hard land.
But the mangrove-swamp follows the general rule for West Africa, and
night in it is noisier than the day. After dark it is full of
noises; grunts from I know not what, splashes from jumping fish, the
peculiar whirr of rushing crabs, and quaint creaking and groaning
sounds from the trees; and--above all in eeriness--the strange whine
and sighing cough of crocodiles.
Great regions of mangrove-swamps are a characteristic feature of the
West African Coast. The first of these lies north of Sierra Leone;
then they occur, but of smaller dimensions--just fringes of river-
outfalls--until you get to Lagos, when you strike the greatest of
them all: --the swamps of the Niger outfalls (about twenty-three
rivers in all) and of the Sombreiro, New Calabar, Bonny, San
Antonio, Opobo (false and true), Kwoibo, Old Calabar (with the Cross
Akwayafe Qwa Rivers) and Rio del Rey Rivers. The whole of this
great stretch of coast is a mangrove-swamp, each river silently
rolling down its great mass of mud-laden waters and constituting
each in itself a very pretty problem to the navigator by its network
of intercommunicating creeks, and the sand and mud bar which it
forms off its entrance by dropping its heaviest mud; its lighter mud
is carried out beyond its bar and makes the nasty-smelling brown
soup of the South Atlantic Ocean, with froth floating in lines and
patches on it, for miles to seaward.
In this great region of swamps every mile appears like every other
mile until you get well used to it, and are able to distinguish the
little local peculiarities at the entrance of the rivers and in the
winding of the creeks, a thing difficult even for the most
experienced navigator to do during those thick wool-like mists
called smokes, which hang about the whole Bight from November till
May (the dry season), sometimes lasting all day, sometimes clearing
off three hours after sunrise.
The upper or north-westerly part of the swamp is round the mouths of
the Niger, and it successfully concealed this fact from geographers
down to 1830, when the series of heroic journeys made by Mungo Park,
Clapperton, and the two Landers finally solved the problem--a
problem that was as great and which cost more men's lives than even
the discovery of the sources of the Nile.
That this should have been so may seem very strange to us who now
have been told the answer to the riddle; for the upper waters of
this great river were known of before Christ and spoken of by
Herodotus, Pliny and Ptolemy, and its mouths navigated continuously
along by the seaboard by trading vessels since the fifteenth
century, but they were not recognised as belonging to the Niger.
Some geographers held that the Senegal or the Gambia was its
outfall; others that it was the Zaire (Congo); others that it did
not come out on the West Coast at all, but got mixed up with the
Nile in the middle of the continent, and so on. Yet when you come
to know the swamps this is not so strange. You find on going up
what looks like a big river--say Forcados, two and a half miles wide
at the entrance and a real bit of the Niger. Before you are up it
far great, broad, business-like-looking river entrances open on
either side, showing wide rivers mangrove-walled, but two-thirds of
them are utter frauds which will ground you within half an hour of
your entering them. Some few of them do communicate with other main
channels to the great upper river, and others are main channels
themselves; but most of them intercommunicate with each other and
lead nowhere in particular, and you can't even get there because of
their shallowness. It is small wonder that the earlier navigators
did not get far up them in sailing ships, and that the problem had
to be solved by men descending the main stream of the Niger before
it commences to what we in Devonshire should call "squander itself
about" in all these channels. And in addition it must be remembered
that the natives with whom these trading vessels dealt, first for
slaves, afterwards for palm-oil, were not, and are not now, members
of the Lo family of savages. Far from it: they do not go in for
"gentle smiles," but for murdering any unprotected boat's crew they
happen to come across, not only for a love of sport but to keep
white traders from penetrating to the trade-producing interior, and
spoiling prices. And the region is practically foodless.
The rivers of the great mangrove-swamp from the Sombreiro to the Rio
del Rey are now known pretty surely not to be branches of the Niger,
but the upper regions of this part of the Bight are much neglected
by English explorers. I believe the great swamp region of the Bight
of Biafra is the greatest in the world, and that in its immensity
and gloom it has a grandeur equal to that of the Himalayas.
Take any man, educated or not, and place him on Bonny or Forcados
River in the wet season on a Sunday--Bonny for choice. Forcados is
good. You'll keep Forcados scenery "indelibly limned on the tablets
of your mind when a yesterday has faded from its page," after you
have spent even a week waiting for the Lagos branch-boat on its inky
waters. But Bonny! Well, come inside the bar and anchor off the
factories: seaward there is the foam of the bar gleaming and wicked
white against a leaden sky and what there is left of Breaker Island.
In every other direction you will see the apparently endless walls
of mangrove, unvarying in colour, unvarying in form, unvarying in
height, save from perspective. Beneath and between you and them lie
the rotting mud waters of Bonny River, and away up and down river,
miles of rotting mud waters fringed with walls of rotting mud
mangrove-swamp. The only break in them--one can hardly call it a
relief to the scenery--are the gaunt black ribs of the old hulks,
once used as trading stations, which lie exposed at low water near
the shore, protruding like the skeletons of great unclean beasts who
have died because Bonny water was too strong even for them.
Raised on piles from the mud shore you will see the white-painted
factories and their great store-houses for oil; each factory likely
enough with its flag at half-mast, which does not enliven the
scenery either, for you know it is because somebody is "dead again."
Throughout and over all is the torrential downpour of the wet-season
rain, coming down night and day with its dull roar. I have known it
rain six mortal weeks in Bonny River, just for all the world as if
it were done by machinery, and the interval that came then was only
a few wet days, where-after it settled itself down to work again in
the good West Coast waterspout pour for more weeks.
While your eyes are drinking in the characteristics of Bonny scenery
you notice a peculiar smell--an intensification of that smell you
noticed when nearing Bonny, in the evening, out at sea. That's the
breath of the malarial mud, laden with fever, and the chances are
you will be down to-morrow. If it is near evening time now, you can
watch it becoming incarnate, creeping and crawling and gliding out
from the side creeks and between the mangrove-roots, laying itself
upon the river, stretching and rolling in a kind of grim play, and
finally crawling up the side of the ship to come on board and leave
its cloak of moisture that grows green mildew in a few hours over
all. Noise you will not be much troubled with: there is only that
rain, a sound I have known make men who are sick with fever well-
nigh mad, and now and again the depressing cry of the curlews which
abound here. This combination is such that after six or eight hours
of it you will be thankful to hear your shipmates start to work the
winch. I take it you are hard up when you relish a winch. And you
will say--let your previous experience of the world be what it may--
Good Heavens, what a place!
Five times have I been now in Bonny River and I like it. You always
do get to like it if you live long enough to allow the strange
fascination of the place to get a hold on you; but when I first
entered it, on a ship commanded by Captain Murray in '93, in the wet
season, i.e. in August, in spite of the confidence I had by this
time acquired in his skill and knowledge of the West Coast, a sense
of horror seized on me as I gazed upon the scene, and I said to the
old Coaster who then had charge of my education, "Good Heavens! what
an awful accident. We've gone and picked up the Styx." He was
evidently hurt and said, "Bonny was a nice place when you got used
to it," and went on to discourse on the last epidemic here, when
nine men out of the resident eleven died in about ten days from
yellow fever. Next to the scenery of "a River," commend me for
cheerfulness to the local conversation of its mangrove-swamp region;
and every truly important West African river has its mangrove-swamp
belt, which extends inland as far as the tide waters make it
brackish, and which has a depth and extent from the banks depending
on the configuration of the country. Above this belt comes
uniformly a region of high forest, having towards the river frontage
clay cliffs, sometimes high, as in the case of the Old Calabar at
Adiabo, more frequently dwarf cliffs, as in the Forcados up at
Warree, and in the Ogowe,--for a long stretch through Kama country.
After the clay cliffs region you come to a region of rapids, caused
by the river cutting its way through a mountain range; such ranges
are the Pallaballa, causing the Livingstone rapids of the Congo; the
Sierra del Cristal, those of the Ogowe, and many lesser rivers; the
Rumby and Omon ranges, those of the Old Calabar and Cross Rivers.
Naturally in different parts these separate regions vary in size.
The mangrove-swamp may be only a fringe at the mouth of the river,
or it may cover hundreds of square miles. The clay cliffs may
extend for only a mile or so along the bank, or they may, as on the
Ogowe, extend for 130. And so it is also with the rapids: in some
rivers, for instance the Cameroons, there are only a few miles of
them, in others there are many miles; in the Ogowe there are as many
as 500; and these rapids may be close to the river mouth, as in most
of the Gold Coast rivers, save the Ancobra and the Volta; or they
may be far in the interior, as in the Cross River, where they
commence at about 200 miles; and on the Ogowe, where they commence
at about 208 miles from the sea coast; this depends on the nearness
or remoteness from the coast line of the mountain ranges which run
down the west side of the continent; ranges (apparently of very
different geological formations), which have no end of different
names, but about which little is known in detail. {80}
And now we will leave generalisations on West African rivers and go
into particulars regarding one little known in England, and called
by its owners, the French, the greatest strictly equatorial river in
the world--the Ogowe.