Wherein the voyager gives extracts from the Log of the Move and of
the Eclaireur, and an account of the voyager's first meeting with
"those fearful Fans," also an awful warning to all young persons who
neglect the study of the French language.
On the 20th of May I reached Gaboon, now called Libreville--the
capital of Congo Francais, and, thanks to the kindness of Mr.
Hudson, I was allowed a passage on a small steamer then running from
Gaboon to the Ogowe River, and up it when necessary as far as
navigation by steamer is possible--this steamer is, I deeply regret
to say, now no more. As experiences of this kind contain such
miscellaneous masses of facts, I am forced to commit the literary
crime of giving you my Ogowe set of experiences in the form of
diary.
June 5th, 1895.--Off on Move at 9.30. Passengers, Mr. Hudson, Mr.
Woods, Mr. Huyghens, Pere Steinitz, and I. There are black deck-
passengers galore; I do not know their honourable names, but they
are evidently very much married men, for there is quite a gorgeously
coloured little crowd of ladies to see them off. They salute me as
I pass down the pier, and start inquiries. I say hastily to them:
"Farewell, I'm off up river," for I notice Mr. Fildes bearing down
on me, and I don't want him to drop in on the subject of society
interest. I expect it is settled now, or pretty nearly. There is a
considerable amount of mild uproar among the black contingent, and
the Move firmly clears off before half the good advice and good
wishes for the black husbands are aboard. She is a fine little
vessel; far finer than I expected. The accommodation I am getting
is excellent. A long, narrow cabin, with one bunk in it and pretty
nearly everything one can wish for, and a copying press thrown in.
Food is excellent, society charming, captain and engineer quite
acquisitions. The saloon is square and roomy for the size of the
vessel, and most things, from rowlocks to teapots, are kept under
the seats in good nautical style. We call at the guard-ship to pass
our papers, and then steam ahead out of the Gaboon estuary to the
south, round Pongara Point, keeping close into the land. About
forty feet from shore there is a good free channel for vessels with
a light draught which if you do not take, you have to make a big
sweep seaward to avoid a reef. Between four and five miles below
Pongara, we pass Point Gombi, which is fitted with a lighthouse, a
lively and conspicuous structure by day as well as night. It is
perched on a knoll, close to the extremity of the long arm of low,
sandy ground, and is painted black and white, in horizontal bands,
which, in conjunction with its general figure, give it a pagoda-like
appearance.
Alongside it are a white-painted, red-roofed house for the
lighthouse keeper, and a store for its oil. The light is either a
flashing or a revolving or a stationary one, when it is alight. One
must be accurate about these things, and my knowledge regarding it
is from information received, and amounts to the above. I cannot
throw in any personal experience, because I have never passed it at
night-time, and seen from Glass it seems just steady. Most
lighthouses on this Coast give up fancy tricks, like flashing or
revolving, pretty soon after they are established. Seventy-five per
cent. of them are not alight half the time at all. "It's the
climate." Gombi, however, you may depend on for being alight at
night, and I have no hesitation in saying you can see it, when it is
visible, seventeen miles out to sea, and that the knoll on which the
lighthouse stands is a grass-covered sand cliff, about forty or
fifty feet above sea-level. As we pass round Gombi point, the
weather becomes distinctly rough, particularly at lunch-time. The
Move minds it less than her passengers, and stamps steadily along
past the wooded shore, behind which shows a distant range of blue
hills. Silence falls upon the black passengers, who assume
recumbent positions on the deck, and suffer. All the things from
under the saloon seats come out and dance together, and play puss-
in-the-corner, after the fashion of loose gear when there is any sea
on. As the night comes down, the scene becomes more and more
picturesque. The moonlit sea, shimmering and breaking on the
darkened shore, the black forest and the hills silhouetted against
the star-powdered purple sky, and, at my feet, the engine-room
stoke-hole, lit with the rose-coloured glow from its furnace,
showing by the great wood fire the two nearly naked Krumen stokers,
shining like polished bronze in their perspiration, as they throw in
on to the fire the billets of red wood that look like freshly-cut
chunks of flesh. The white engineer hovers round the mouth of the
pit, shouting down directions and ever and anon plunging down the
little iron ladder to carry them out himself. At intervals he
stands on the rail with his head craned round the edge of the sun
deck to listen to the captain, who is up on the little deck above,
for there is no telegraph to the engines, and our gallant
commander's voice is not strong. While the white engineer is
roosting on the rail, the black engineer comes partially up the
ladder and gazes hard at me; so I give him a wad of tobacco, and he
plainly regards me as inspired, for of course that was what he
wanted. Remember that whenever you see a man, black or white,
filled with a nameless longing, it is tobacco he requires. Grim
despair accompanied by a gusty temper indicates something wrong with
his pipe, in which case offer him a straightened-out hairpin. The
black engineer having got his tobacco, goes below to the stoke-hole
again and smokes a short clay as black and as strong as himself.
The captain affects an immense churchwarden. How he gets through
life, waving it about as he does, without smashing it every two
minutes, I cannot make out.
At last we anchor for the night just inside Nazareth Bay, for
Nazareth Bay wants daylight to deal with, being rich in low islands
and sand shoals. We crossed the Equator this afternoon.
June 6th.--Off at daybreak into Nazareth Bay. Anxiety displayed by
navigators, sounding taken on both sides of the bows with long
bamboo poles painted in stripes, and we go "slow ahead" and "hard
astern" successfully, until we get round a good-sized island, and
there we stick until four o'clock, high water, when we come off all
right, and steam triumphantly but cautiously into the Ogowe. The
shores of Nazareth Bay are fringed with mangroves, but once in the
river the scenery soon changes, and the waters are walled on either
side with a forest rich in bamboo, oil and wine-palms. These forest
cliffs seem to rise right up out of the mirror-like brown water.
Many of the highest trees are covered with clusters of brown-pink
young shoots that look like flowers, and others are decorated by my
old enemy the climbing palm, now bearing clusters of bright crimson
berries. Climbing plants of other kinds are wreathing everything,
some blossoming with mauve, some with yellow, some with white
flowers, and every now and then a soft sweet heavy breath of
fragrance comes out to us as we pass by. There is a native village
on the north bank, embowered along its plantations with some very
tall cocoa-palms rising high above them.
The river winds so that it seems to close in behind us, opening out
in front fresh vistas of superb forest beauty, with the great brown
river stretching away unbroken ahead like a broad road of burnished
bronze. Astern, it has a streak of frosted silver let into it by
the Move's screw. Just about six o'clock, we run up to the Fallaba,
the Move's predecessor in working the Ogowe, now a hulk, used as a
depot by Hatton and Cookson. She is anchored at the entrance of a
creek that runs through to the Fernan Vaz; some say it is six hours'
run, others that it is eight hours for a canoe; all agree that there
are plenty of mosquitoes.
The Fallaba looks grimly picturesque, and about the last spot in
which a person of a nervous disposition would care to spend the
night. One half of her deck is dedicated to fuel logs, on the other
half are plank stores for the goods, and a room for the black sub-
trader in charge of them. I know that there must be scorpions which
come out of those logs and stroll into the living room, and goodness
only knows what one might not fancy would come up the creek or rise
out of the floating grass, or the limitless-looking forest. I am
told she was a fine steamer in her day, but those who had charge of
her did not make allowances for the very rapid rotting action of the
Ogowe water, so her hull rusted through before her engines were a
quarter worn out; and there was nothing to be done with her then,
but put a lot of concrete in, and make her a depot, in which state
of life she is very useful, for during the height of the dry season,
the Move cannot get through the creek to supply the firm's Fernan
Vaz factories.
Subsequently I heard much of the Fallaba, which seems to have been a
celebrated, or rather notorious, vessel. Every one declared her
engines to have been of immense power, but this I believe to have
been a mere local superstition; because in the same breath, the man
who referred to them, as if it would have been quite unnecessary for
new engines to have been made for H.M.S. Victorious if those
Fallaba engines could have been sent to Chatham dockyard, would
mention that "you could not get any pace up on her"; and all who
knew her sadly owned "she wouldn't steer," so naturally she spent
the greater part of her time on the Ogowe on a sand-bank, or in the
bush. All West African steamers have a mania for bush, and the
delusion that they are required to climb trees. The Fallaba had the
complaint severely, because of her defective steering powers, and
the temptation the magnificent forest, and the rapid currents, and
the sharp turns of the creek district, offered her; she failed, of
course--they all fail--but it is not for want of practice. I have
seen many West Coast vessels up trees, but never more than fifteen
feet or so.
The trade of this lower part of the Ogowe, from the mouth to
Lembarene, a matter of 130 miles, is almost nil. Above Lembarene,
you are in touch with the rubber and ivory trade.
This Fallaba creek is noted for mosquitoes, and the black passengers
made great and showy preparations in the evening time to receive
their onslaught, by tying up their strong chintz mosquito bars to
the stanchions and the cook-house. Their arrangements being
constantly interrupted by the white engineer making alarums and
excursions amongst them; because when too many of them get on one
side the Move takes a list and burns her boilers. Conversation and
atmosphere are full of mosquitoes. The decision of widely
experienced sufferers amongst us is, that next to the lower Ogowe,
New Orleans is the worst place for them in this world.
The day closed with a magnificent dramatic beauty. Dead ahead of
us, up through a bank of dun-coloured mist rose the moon, a great
orb of crimson, spreading down the oil-like, still river, a streak
of blood-red reflection. Right astern, the sun sank down into the
mist, a vaster orb of crimson, and when he had gone out of view,
sent up flushes of amethyst, gold, carmine and serpent-green, before
he left the moon in undisputed possession of the black purple sky.
Forest and river were absolutely silent, but there was a pleasant
chatter and laughter from the black crew and passengers away
forward, that made the Move seem an island of life in a land of
death. I retired into my cabin, so as to get under the mosquito
curtains to write; and one by one I heard my companions come into
the saloon adjacent, and say to the watchman: "You sabe six
o'clock? When them long arm catch them place, and them short arm
catch them place, you call me in the morning time." Exit from
saloon--silence--then: "You sabe five o'clock? When them long arm
catch them place, and them short arm catch them place, you call me
in the morning time." Exit--silence--then: "You sabe half-past
five o'clock? When them long arm--" Oh, if I were a watchman!
Anyhow, that five o'clocker will have the whole ship's company
roused in the morning time.
June 7th.--Every one called in the morning time by the reflex row
from the rousing of the five o'clocker. Glorious morning. The
scene the reversal of that of last night. The forest to the east
shows a deep blue-purple, mounted on a background that changes as
you watch it from daffodil and amethyst to rose-pink, as the sun
comes up through the night mists. The moon sinks down among them,
her pale face flushing crimson as she goes; and the yellow-gold
sunshine comes, glorifying the forest and gilding the great sweep of
tufted papyrus growing alongside the bank; and the mist vanishes,
little white flecks of it lingering among the water reeds and lying
in the dark shadows of the forest stems. The air is full of the
long, soft, rich notes of the plantain warblers, and the uproar
consequent upon the Move taking on fuel wood, which comes alongside
in canoe loads from the Fallaba.
Pere Steinitz and Mr. Woods are busy preparing their respective
canoes for their run to Fernan Vaz through the creek. Their canoes
are very fine ones, with a remarkably clean run aft. The Pere's is
quite the travelling canoe, with a little stage of bamboo aft,
covered with a hood of palm thatch, under which you can make
yourself quite comfortable, and keep yourself and your possessions
dry, unless something desperate comes on in the way of rain.
By 10.25 we have got all our wood aboard, and run off up river full
speed. The river seems broader above the Fallaba, but this is
mainly on account of its being temporarily unencumbered with
islands. A good deal of the bank we have passed by since leaving
Nazareth Bay on the south side has been island shore, with a channel
between the islands and the true south bank.
The day soon grew dull, and looked threatening, after the delusive
manner of the dry season. The climbing plants are finer here than I
have ever before seen them. They form great veils and curtains
between and over the trees, often hanging so straight and flat, in
stretches of twenty to forty feet or so wide, and thirty to sixty or
seventy feet high, that it seems incredible that no human hand has
trained or clipped them into their perfect forms. Sometimes these
curtains are decorated with large bell-shaped, bright-coloured
flowers, sometimes with delicate sprays of white blossoms. This
forest is beyond all my expectations of tropical luxuriance and
beauty, and it is a thing of another world to the forest of the
Upper Calabar, which, beautiful as it is, is a sad dowdy to this.
There you certainly get a great sense of grimness and vastness; here
you have an equal grimness and vastness with the addition of superb
colour. This forest is a Cleopatra to which Calabar is but a
Quaker. Not only does this forest depend on flowers for its
illumination, for there are many kinds of trees having their young
shoots, crimson, brown-pink, and creamy yellow: added to this there
is also the relieving aspect of the prevailing fashion among West
African trees, of wearing the trunk white with here and there upon
it splashes of pale pink lichen, and vermilion-red fungus, which
alone is sufficient to prevent the great mass of vegetation from
being a monotony in green.
All day long we steam past ever-varying scenes of loveliness whose
component parts are ever the same, yet the effect ever different.
Doubtless it is wrong to call it a symphony, yet I know no other
word to describe the scenery of the Ogowe. It is as full of life
and beauty and passion as any symphony Beethoven ever wrote: the
parts changing, interweaving, and returning. There are leit motifs
here in it, too. See the papyrus ahead; and you know when you get
abreast of it you will find the great forest sweeping away in a bay-
like curve behind it against the dull gray sky, the splendid columns
of its cotton and red woods looking like a facade of some limitless
inchoate temple. Then again there is that stretch of sword-grass,
looking as if it grew firmly on to the bottom, so steady does it
stand; but as the Move goes by, her wash sets it undulating in waves
across its broad acres of extent, showing it is only riding at
anchor; and you know after a grass patch you will soon see a red
dwarf clay cliff, with a village perched on its top, and the
inhabitants thereof in their blue and red cloths standing by to
shout and wave to the Move, or legging it like lamp-lighters from
the back streets and the plantation to the river frontage, to be in
time to do so, and through all these changing phases there is always
the strain of the vast wild forest, and the swift, deep, silent
river.
At almost every village that we pass--and they are frequent after
the Fallaba--there is an ostentatious display of firewood deposited
either on the bank, or on piles driven into the mud in front of it,
mutely saying in their uncivilised way, "Try our noted chunks: best
value for money"--(that is to say, tobacco, etc.), to the Move or
any other little steamer that may happen to come along hungry for
fuel.
We stayed a few minutes this afternoon at Ashchyouka, where there
came off to us in a canoe an enterprising young Frenchman who has
planted and tended a coffee plantation in this out-of-the-way
region, and which is now, I am glad to hear, just coming into
bearing. After leaving Ashchyouka, high land showed to the N.E.,
and at 5.15, without evident cause to the uninitiated, the Move took
to whistling like a liner. A few minutes later a factory shows up
on the hilly north bank, which is Woermann's; then just beyond and
behind it we see the Government Post; then Hatton and Cookson's
factory, all in a line. Opposite Hatton and Cookson's there was a
pretty little stern-wheel steamer nestling against the steep clay
bank of Lembarene Island when we come in sight, but she instantly
swept out from it in a perfect curve, which lay behind her marked in
frosted silver on the water as she dropt down river. I hear now she
was the Eclaireur, the stern-wheeler which runs up and down the
Ogowe in connection with the Chargeurs Reunis Company, subsidised by
the Government, and when the Move whistled, she was just completing
taking on 3,000 billets of wood for fuel. She comes up from the
Cape (Lopez) stoking half wood and half coal as far as Njole and
back to Lembarene; from Lembarene to the sea downwards she does on
wood. In a few minutes we have taken her berth close to the bank,
and tied up to a tree. The white engineer yells to the black
engineer "Tom-Tom: Haul out some of them fire and open them drains
one time," and the stokers, with hooks, pull out the glowing logs on
to the iron deck in front of the furnace door, and throw water over
them, and the Move sends a cloud of oil-laden steam against the
bank, coming perilously near scalding some of her black admirers
assembled there. I dare say she felt vicious because they had been
admiring the Eclaireur.
After a few minutes, I am escorted on to the broad verandah of
Hatton and Cookson's factory, and I sit down under a lamp, prepared
to contemplate, until dinner time, the wild beauty of the scene.
This idea does not get carried out; in the twinkling of an eye I am
stung all round the neck, and recognise there are lots too many
mosquitoes and sandflies in the scenery to permit of contemplation
of any kind. Never have I seen sandflies and mosquitoes in such
appalling quantities. With a wild ping of joy the latter made for
me, and I retired promptly into a dark corner of the verandah,
swearing horribly, but internally, and fought them. Mr. Hudson,
Agent-general, and Mr. Cockshut, Agent for the Ogowe, walk up and
down the beach in front, doubtless talking cargo, apparently
unconscious of mosquitoes; but by and by, while we are having
dinner, they get their share. I behave exquisitely, and am quite
lost in admiration of my own conduct, and busily deciding in my own
mind whether I shall wear one of those plain ring haloes, or a solid
plate one, a la Cimabue, when Mr. Hudson says in a voice full of
reproach to Mr. Cockshut, "You have got mosquitoes here, Mr.
Cockshut." Poor Mr. Cockshut doesn't deny it; he has got four on
his forehead and his hands are sprinkled with them, but he says:
"There are none at Njole," which we all feel is an absurdly lame
excuse, for Njole is some ninety miles above Lembarene, where we now
are. Mr. Hudson says this to him, tersely, and feeling he has
utterly crushed Mr. Cockshut, turns on me, and utterly failing to
recognise me as a suffering saint, says point blank and savagely,
"You don't seem to feel these things, Miss Kingsley." Not feel
them, indeed! Why, I could cry over them. Well! that's all the
thanks one gets for trying not to be a nuisance in this world.
After dinner I go back on to the Move for the night, for it is too
late to go round to Kangwe and ask Mme. Jacot, of the Mission
Evangelique, if she will take me in. The air is stiff with
mosquitoes, and saying a few suitable words to them, I dash under
the mosquito bar and sleep, lulled by their shrill yells of baffled
rage.
June 8th.--In the morning, up at five. Great activity on beach.
Move synchronously taking on wood fuel and discharging cargo. A
very active young French pastor from the Kangwe mission station is
round after the mission's cargo. Mr. Hudson kindly makes inquiries
as to whether I may go round to Kangwe and stay with Mme. Jacot. He
says: "Oh, yes," but as I find he is not M. Jacot, I do not feel
justified in accepting this statement without its having personal
confirmation from Mme. Jacot, and so, leaving my luggage with the
Move, I get them to allow me to go round with him and his cargo to
Kangwe, about three-quarters of an hour's paddle round the upper
part of Lembarene Island, and down the broad channel on the other
side of it. Kangwe is beautifully situated on a hill, as its name
denotes, on the mainland and north bank of the river. Mme. Jacot
most kindly says I may come, though I know I shall be a fearful
nuisance, for there is no room for me save M. Jacot's beautifully
neat, clean, tidy study. I go back in the canoe and fetch my
luggage from the Move; and say good-bye to Mr. Hudson, who gave me
an immense amount of valuable advice about things, which was
subsequently of great use to me, and a lot of equally good warnings
which, if I had attended to, would have enabled me to avoid many, if
not all, my misadventures in Congo Francais.
I camped out that night in M. Jacot's study, wondering how he would
like it when he came home and found me there; for he was now away on
one of his usual evangelising tours. Providentially Mme. Jacot let
me have the room that the girls belonging to the mission school
usually slept in, to my great relief, before M. Jacot came home.
I will not weary you with my diary during my first stay at Kangwe.
It is a catalogue of the collection of fish, etc., that I made, and
a record of the continuous, never-failing kindness and help that I
received from M. and Mme. Jacot, and of my attempts to learn from
them the peculiarities of the region, the natives, and their
language and customs, which they both know so well and manage so
admirably. I daily saw there what it is possible to do, even in the
wildest and most remote regions of West Africa, and recognised that
there is still one heroic form of human being whose praise has never
adequately been sung, namely, the missionary's wife.
Wishing to get higher up the Ogowe, I took the opportunity of the
river boat of the Chargeurs Reunis going up to the Njole on one of
her trips, and joined her.
June 22nd.--Eclaireur, charming little stern wheel steamer,
exquisitely kept. She has an upper and a lower deck. The lower
deck for business, the upper deck for white passengers only. On the
upper deck there is a fine long deck-house, running almost her whole
length. In this are the officers' cabins, the saloon and the
passengers' cabins (two), both large and beautifully fitted up.
Captain Verdier exceedingly pleasant and constantly saying "N'est-ce
pas?" A quiet and singularly clean engineer completes the white
staff.
The passengers consist of Mr. Cockshut, going up river to see after
the sub-factories; a French official bound for Franceville, which it
will take him thirty-six days, go as quick as he can, in a canoe
after Njole; a tremendously lively person who has had black water
fever four times, while away in the bush with nothing to live on but
manioc, a diet it would be far easier to die on under the
circumstances. He is excellent company; though I do not know a word
he says, he is perpetually giving lively and dramatic descriptions
of things which I cannot but recognise. M. S---, with his pince-
nez, the Doctor, and, above all, the rapids of the Ogowe, rolling
his hands round and round each other and clashing them forward with
a descriptive ejaculation of "Whish, flash, bum, bum, bump," and
then comes what evidently represents a terrific fight for life
against terrific odds. Wish to goodness I knew French, for wishing
to see these rapids, I cannot help feeling anxious and worried at
not fully understanding this dramatic entertainment regarding them.
There is another passenger, said to be the engineer's brother, a
quiet, gentlemanly man. Captain argues violently with every one;
with Mr. Cockshut on the subject of the wicked waste of money in
keeping the Move and not shipping all goods by the Eclaireur,
"N'est-ce pas?" and with the French official on goodness knows what,
but I fancy it will be pistols for two and coffee for one in the
morning time. When the captain feels himself being worsted in
argument, he shouts for support to the engineer and his brother.
"N'est-ce pas?" he says, turning furiously to them. "Oui, oui,
certainement," they say dutifully and calmly, and then he, refreshed
by their support, dashes back to his controversial fray. He even
tries to get up a row with me on the subject of the English
merchants at Calabar, whom he asserts have sworn a kind of blood
oath to ship by none but British and African Company's steamers. I
cannot stand this, for I know my esteemed and honoured friends the
Calabar traders would ship by the Flying Dutchman or the Devil
himself if either of them would take the stuff at 15 shillings the
ton. We have, however, to leave off this row for want of language,
to our mutual regret, for it would have been a love of a fight.
Soon after leaving Lembarene Island, we pass the mouth of the chief
southern affluent of the Ogowe, the Ngunie; it flows in
unostentatiously from the E.S.E., a broad, quiet river here with low
banks and two islands (Walker's Islands) showing just off its
entrance. Higher up, it flows through a mountainous country, and at
Samba, its furthest navigable point, there is a wonderfully
beautiful waterfall, the whole river coming down over a low cliff,
surrounded by an amphitheatre of mountains. It takes the Eclaireur
two days steaming from the mouth of the Ngunie to Samba, when she
can get up; but now, in the height of the long dry season neither
she nor the Move can go because of the sandbanks; so Samba is cut
off until next October. Hatton and Cookson have factories up at
Samba, for it is an outlet for the trade of Achango land in rubber
and ivory, a trade worked by the Akele tribe, a powerful, savage and
difficult lot to deal with, and just in the same condition, as far
as I can learn, as they were when Du Chaillu made his wonderful
journeys among them. While I was at Lembarene, waiting for the
Eclaireur, a notorious chief descended on a Ngunie sub-factory, and
looted it. The wife of the black trading agent made a gallant
resistance, her husband was away on a trading expedition, but the
chief had her seized and beaten, and thrown into the river. An
appeal was made to the Doctor then Administrator of the Ogowe, a
powerful and helpful official, and he soon came up with the little
canoniere, taking Mr. Cockshut with him and fully vindicated the
honour of the French flag, under which all factories here are.
The banks of the Ogowe just above Lembarene Island are low; with the
forest only broken by village clearings and seeming to press in on
those, ready to absorb them should the inhabitants cease their war
against it. The blue Ntyankala mountains of Achango land show away
to the E.S.E. in a range. Behind us, gradually sinking in the
distance, is the high land on Lembarene Island.
Soon we run up alongside a big street of a village with four high
houses rising a story above the rest, which are strictly ground
floor; it has also five or six little low open thatched huts along
the street in front. {96} These may be fetish huts, or, as the
captain of the Sparrow would say, "again they mayn't." For I have
seen similar huts in the villages round Libreville, which were store
places for roof mats, of which the natives carefully keep a store
dry and ready for emergencies in the way of tornadoes, or to sell.
We stop abreast of this village. Inhabitants in scores rush out and
form an excited row along the vertical bank edge, several of the
more excited individuals falling over it into the water.
Yells from our passengers on the lower deck. Yells from inhabitants
on shore. Yells of vite, vite from the Captain. Dogs bark, horns
bray, some exhilarated individual thumps the village drum, canoes
fly out from the bank towards us. Fearful scrimmage heard going on
all the time on the deck below. As soon as the canoes are
alongside, our passengers from the lower deck, with their bundles
and their dogs, pour over the side into them. Canoes rock wildly
and wobble off rapidly towards the bank, frightening the passengers
because they have got their best clothes on, and fear that the
Eclaireur will start and upset them altogether with her wash.
On reaching the bank, the new arrivals disappear into brown clouds
of wives and relations, and the dogs into fighting clusters of
resident dogs. Happy, happy day! For those men who have gone
ashore have been away on hire to the government and factories for a
year, and are safe home in the bosoms of their families again, and
not only they themselves, but all the goods they have got in pay.
The remaining passengers below still yell to their departed friends;
I know not what they say, but I expect it's the Fan equivalent for
"Mind you write. Take care of yourself. Yes, I'll come and see you
soon," etc., etc. While all this is going on, the Eclaireur quietly
slides down river, with the current, broadside on as if she smelt
her stable at Lembarene. This I find is her constant habit whenever
the captain, the engineer, and the man at the wheel are all busy in
a row along the rail, shouting overside, which occurs whenever we
have passengers to land. Her iniquity being detected when the last
canoe load has left for the shore, she is spun round and sent up
river again at full speed.
We go on up stream; now and again stopping at little villages to
land passengers or at little sub-factories to discharge cargo, until
evening closes in, when we anchor and tie up at O'Saomokita, where
there is a sub-factory of Messrs. Woermann's, in charge of which is
a white man, the only white man between Lembarene and Njole. He
comes on board and looks only a boy, but is really aged twenty. He
is a Frenchman, and was at Hatton and Cookson's first, then he
joined Woermann's, who have put him in charge of this place. The
isolation for a white man must be terrible; sometimes two months
will go by without his seeing another white face but that in his
looking-glass, and when he does see another, it is only by a
fleeting visit such as we now pay him, and to make the most of this,
he stays on board to dinner.
June 23rd.--Start off steaming up river early in the morning time.
Land ahead showing mountainous. Rather suddenly the banks grow
higher. Here and there in the forest are patches which look like
regular hand-made plantations, which they are not, but only patches
of egombie-gombie trees, showing that at this place was once a
native town. Whenever land is cleared along here, this tree springs
up all over the ground. It grows very rapidly, and has great leaves
something like a sycamore leaf, only much larger. These leaves
growing in a cluster at the top of the straight stem give an
umbrella-like appearance to the affair; so the natives call them and
an umbrella by the same name, but whether they think the umbrella is
like the tree or the tree is like the umbrella, I can't make out. I
am always getting myself mixed over this kind of thing in my
attempts "to contemplate phenomena from a scientific standpoint," as
Cambridge ordered me to do. I'll give the habit up. "You can't do
that sort of thing out here--It's the climate," and I will content
myself with stating the fact, that when a native comes into a store
and wants an umbrella, he asks for an egombie-gombie.
The uniformity of the height of the individual trees in one of these
patches is striking, and it arises from their all starting fair. I
cannot make out other things about them to my satisfaction, for you
very rarely see one of them in the wild bush, and then it does not
bear a fruit that the natives collect and use, and then chuck away
the stones round their domicile. Anyhow, there they are all one
height, and all one colour, and apparently allowing no other
vegetation to make any headway among them. But I found when I
carefully investigated egombie-gombie patches that there were a few
of the great, slower-growing forest trees coming up amongst them,
and in time when these attain a sufficient height, their shade kills
off the egombie-gombie, and the patch goes back into the great
forest from which it came. The frequency of these patches arises
from the nomadic habits of the chief tribe in these regions, the
Fans. They rarely occupy one site for a village for any
considerable time on account--firstly, of their wasteful method of
collecting rubber by cutting down the vine, which soon stamps it out
of a district; and, secondly, from their quarrelsome ways. So when
a village of Fans has cleared all the rubber out of its district, or
has made the said district too hot to hold it by rows with other
villages, or has got itself very properly shelled out and burnt for
some attack on traders or the French flag in any form, its
inhabitants clear off into another district, and build another
village; for bark and palm thatch are cheap, and house removing just
nothing; when you are an unsophisticated cannibal Fan you don't
require a pantechnicon van to stow away your one or two mushroom-
shaped stools, knives, and cooking-pots, and a calabash or so. If
you are rich, maybe you will have a box with clothes in as well, but
as a general rule all your clothes are on your back. So your wives
just pick up the stools and the knives and the cooking-pots, and the
box, and the children toddle off with the calabashes. You have, of
course, the gun to carry, for sleeping or waking a Fan never parts
with his gun, and so there you are "finish," as M. Pichault would
say, and before your new bark house is up, there grows the egombie-
gombie, where your house once stood. Now and again, for lack of
immediate neighbouring villages to quarrel with, one end of a
village will quarrel with the other end. The weaker end then goes
off and builds itself another village, keeping an eye lifting for
any member of the stronger end who may come conveniently into its
neighbourhood to be killed and eaten. Meanwhile, the egombie-gombie
grows over the houses of the empty end, pretending it's a plantation
belonging to the remaining half. I once heard a new-comer hold
forth eloquently as to how those Fans were maligned. "They say,"
said he, with a fine wave of his arm towards such a patch, "that
these people do not till the soil--that they are not industrious--
that the few plantations they do make are ill-kept--that they are
only a set of wandering hunters and cannibals. Look there at those
magnificent plantations!" I did look, but I did not alter my
opinion of the Fans, for I know my old friend egombie-gombie when I
see him.
This morning the French official seems sad and melancholy. I fancy
he has got a Monday head (Kipling), but he revives as the day goes
on. As we go on, the banks become hills and the broad river, which
has been showing sheets of sandbanks in all directions, now narrows
and shows only neat little beaches of white sand in shallow places
along the bank. The current is terrific. The Eclaireur breathes
hard, and has all she can do to fight her way up against it. Masses
of black weathered rock in great boulders show along the exposed
parts of both banks, left dry by the falling waters. Each bank is
steep, and quantities of great trees, naked and bare, are hanging
down from them, held by their roots and bush-rope entanglement from
being swept away with the rushing current, and they make a great
white fringe to the banks. The hills become higher and higher, and
more and more abrupt, and the river runs between them in a gloomy
ravine, winding to and fro; we catch sight of a patch of white sand
ahead, which I mistake for a white painted house, but immediately
after doubling round a bend we see the houses of the Talagouga
Mission Station. The Eclaireur forthwith has an hysteric fit on her
whistle, so as to frighten M. Forget and get him to dash off in his
canoe to her at once. Apparently he knows her, and does not hurry,
but comes on board quietly. I find there will be no place for me to
stay at at Njole, so I decide to go on in the Eclaireur and use her
as an hotel while there, and then return and stay with Mme. Forget
if she will have me. I consult M. Forget on this point. He says,
"Oh, yes," but seems to have lost something of great value recently,
and not to be quite clear where. Only manner, I suppose. When M.
Forget has got his mails he goes, and the Eclaireur goes on; indeed,
she has never really stopped, for the water is too deep to anchor in
here, and the terrific current would promptly whisk the steamer down
out of Talagouga gorge were she to leave off fighting it. We run on
up past Talagouga Island, where the river broadens out again a
little, but not much, and reach Njole by nightfall, and tie up to a
tree by Dumas' factory beach. Usual uproar, but as Mr. Cockshut
says, no mosquitoes. The mosquito belt ends abruptly at
O'Soamokita.
Next morning I go ashore and start on a walk. Lovely road, bright
yellow clay, as hard as paving stone. On each side it is most
neatly hedged with pine-apples; behind these, carefully tended,
acres of coffee bushes planted in long rows. Certainly coffee is
one of the most lovely of crops. Its grandly shaped leaves are like
those of our medlar tree, only darker and richer green, the berries
set close to the stem, those that are ripe, a rich crimson; these
trees, I think, are about three years old, and just coming into
bearing; for they are covered with full-sized berries, and there has
been a flush of bloom on them this morning, and the delicious
fragrance of their stephanotis-shaped and scented flowers lingers in
the air. The country spreads before me a lovely valley encompassed
by purple-blue mountains. Mount Talagouga looks splendid in a soft,
infinitely deep blue, although it is quite close, just the other
side of the river. The road goes on into the valley, as pleasantly
as ever and more so. How pleasant it would be now, if our
government along the Coast had the enterprise and public spirit of
the French, and made such roads just on the remote chance of stray
travellers dropping in on a steamer once in ten years or so and
wanting a walk. Observe extremely neatly Igalwa built huts, people
sitting on the bright clean ground outside them, making mats and
baskets. "Mboloani," say I. "Ai! Mbolo," say they, and knock off
work to stare. Observe large wired-in enclosures on left-hand side
of road--investigate--find they are tenanted by animals--goats,
sheep, chickens, etc. Clearly this is a jardin d'acclimatation. No
wonder the colony does not pay, if it goes in for this sort of
thing, 206 miles inland, with simply no public to pay gate-money.
While contemplating these things, hear awful hiss. Serpents! No,
geese. Awful fight. Grand things, good, old-fashioned, long skirts
are for Africa! Get through geese and advance in good order, but
somewhat rapidly down road, turn sharply round corner of native
houses. Turkey cock--terrific turn up. Flight on my part forwards
down road, which is still going strong, now in a northerly
direction, apparently indefinitely. Hope to goodness there will be
a turning that I can go down and get back by, without returning
through this ferocious farmyard. Intent on picking up such an
outlet, I go thirty yards or so down the road. Hear shouts coming
from a clump of bananas on my left. Know they are directed at me,
but it does not do to attend to shouts always. Expect it is only
some native with an awful knowledge of English, anxious to get up my
family history--therefore accelerate pace. More shouts, and louder,
of "Madame Gacon! Madame Gacon!" and out of the banana clump comes
a big, plump, pleasant-looking gentleman, clad in a singlet and a
divided skirt. White people must be attended to, so advance
carefully towards him through a plantation of young coffee,
apologising humbly for intruding on his domain. He smiles and bows
beautifully, but--horror!--he knows no English, I no French.
Situation tres inexplicable et tres interessante, as I subsequently
heard him remark; and the worst of it is he is evidently bursting to
know who I am, and what I am doing in the middle of his coffee
plantation, for his it clearly is, as appears from his obsequious
bodyguard of blacks, highly interested in me also. We gaze at each
other, and smile some more, but stiffly, and he stands bareheaded in
the sun in an awful way. It's murder I'm committing, hard all! He,
as is fitting for his superior sex, displays intelligence first and
says, "Interpreter," waving his hand to the south. I say "Yes," in
my best Fan, an enthusiastic, intelligent grunt which any one must
understand. He leads the way back towards those geese--perhaps, by
the by, that is why he wears those divided skirts--and we enter a
beautifully neatly built bamboo house, and sit down opposite to each
other at a table and wait for the interpreter who is being fetched.
The house is low on the ground and of native construction, but most
beautifully kept, and arranged with an air of artistic feeling quite
as unexpected as the rest of my surroundings. I notice upon the
walls sets of pictures of terrific incidents in Algerian campaigns,
and a copy of that superb head of M. de Brazza in Arab headgear.
Soon the black minions who have been sent to find one of the
plantation hands who is supposed to know French and English, return
with the "interpreter." That young man is a fraud. He does not
know English--not even coast English--and all he has got under his
precious wool is an abysmal ignorance darkened by terror; and so,
after one or two futile attempts and some frantic scratching at both
those regions which an African seems to regard as the seats of
intellectual inspiration, he bolts out of the door. Situation
terrible! My host and I smile wildly at each other, and both wonder
in our respective languages what, in the words of Mr. Squeers as
mentioned in the classics--we "shall do in this 'ere most awful go."
We are both going mad with the strain of the situation, when in
walks the engineer's brother from the Eclaireur. He seems intensely
surprised to find me sitting in his friend the planter's parlour
after my grim and retiring conduct on the Eclaireur on my voyage up.
But the planter tells him all, sousing him in torrents of words,
full of the violence of an outbreak of pent-up emotion. I do not
understand what he says, but I catch "tres inexplicable" and things
like that. The calm brother of the engineer sits down at the table,
and I am sure tells the planter something like this: "Calm
yourself, my friend, we picked up this curiosity at Lembarene. It
seems quite harmless." And then the planter calmed, and mopped a
perspiring brow, and so did I, and we smiled more freely, feeling
the mental atmosphere had become less tense and cooler. We both
simply beamed on our deliverer, and the planter gave him lots of
things to drink. I had nothing about me except a head of tobacco in
my pocket, which I did not feel was a suitable offering. Now the
engineer's brother, although he would not own to it, knew English,
so I told him how the beauty of the road had lured me on, and how I
was interested in coffee-planting, and how much I admired the
magnificence of this plantation, and all the enterprise and energy
it represented.
"Oui, oui, certainement," said he, and translated. My friend the
planter seemed charmed; it was the first sign of anything
approaching reason he had seen in me. He wanted me to have eau
sucree more kindly than ever, and when I rose, intending to bow
myself off and go, geese or no geese, back to the Eclaireur, he
would not let me go. I must see the plantation, toute la
plantation. So presently all three of us go out and thoroughly do
the plantation, the most well-ordered, well-cultivated plantation I
have ever seen, and a very noble monument to the knowledge and
industry of the planter. For two hot hours these two perfect
gentlemen showed me over it. I also behaved well, for petticoats,
great as they are, do not prevent insects and catawumpuses of sorts
walking up one's ankles and feeding on one as one stands on the long
grass which has been most wisely cut and laid round the young trees
for mulching. This plantation is of great extent on the hill-sides
and in the valley bottom, portions of it are just coming into
bearing. The whole is kept as perfectly as a garden, amazing as the
work of one white man with only a staff of unskilled native
labourers--at present only eighty of them. The coffee planted is of
three kinds, the Elephant berry, the Arabian, and the San Thome.
During our inspection, we only had one serious misunderstanding,
which arose from my seeing for the first time in my life tree-ferns
growing in the Ogowe. There were three of them, evidently carefully
taken care of, among some coffee plants. It was highly exciting,
and I tried to find out about them. It seemed, even in this centre
of enterprise, unlikely that they had been brought just "for dandy"
from the Australasian region, and I had never yet come across them
in my wanderings save on Fernando Po. Unfortunately, my friends
thought I wanted them to keep, and shouted for men to bring things
and dig them up; so I had a brisk little engagement with the men,
driving them from their prey with the point of my umbrella,
ejaculating Kor Kor, like an agitated crow. When at last they
understood that my interest in the ferns was scientific, not
piratical, they called the men off and explained that the ferns had
been found among the bush, when it was being cleared for the
plantation.
Ultimately, with many bows and most sincere thanks from me, we
parted, providentially beyond the geese, and I returned down the
road to Njole, where I find Mr. Cockshut waiting outside his
factory. He insists on taking me to the Post to see the
Administrator, and from there he says I can go on to the Eclaireur
from the Post beach, as she will be up there from Dumas'. Off we go
up the road which skirts the river bank, a dwarf clay cliff,
overgrown with vegetation, save where it is cleared for beaches.
The road is short, but exceedingly pretty; on the other side from
the river is a steep bank on which is growing a plantation of cacao.
Lying out in the centre of the river you see Njole Island, a low,
sandy one, timbered not only with bush, but with orange and other
fruit trees; for formerly the Post and factories used to be situated
on the island--now only their trees remain for various reasons, one
being that in the wet season it is a good deal under water.
Everything is now situated on the mainland north bank, in a
straggling but picturesque line; first comes Woermann's factory,
then Hatton and Cookson's, and John Holt's, close together with a
beach in common in a sweetly amicable style for factories, who as a
rule firmly stockade themselves off from their next door neighbours.
Then Dumas' beach, a little native village, the cacao patch and the
Post at the up river end of things European, an end of things
European, I am told, for a matter of 500 miles. Immediately beyond
the Post is a little river falling into the Ogowe, and on its
further bank a small village belonging to a chief, who, hearing of
the glories of the Government, came down like the Queen of Sheba--in
intention, I mean, not personal appearance--to see it, and so
charmed has he been that here he stays to gaze on it.
Although Mr. Cockshut hunted the Administrator of the Ogowe out of
his bath, that gentleman is exceedingly amiable and charming, all
the more so to me for speaking good English. Personally, he is big,
handsome, exuberant, and energetic. He shows me round with a
gracious enthusiasm, all manner of things--big gorilla teeth and
heads, native spears and brass-nail-ornamented guns; and explains,
while we are in his study, that the little model canoe full of Kola
nuts is the supply of Kola to enable him to sit up all night and
work. Then he takes us outside to see the new hospital which he, in
his capacity as Administrator, during the absence of the
professional Administrator on leave in France, has granted to
himself in his capacity as Doctor; and he shows us the captive chief
and headmen from Samba busily quarrying a clay cliff behind it so as
to enlarge the governmental plateau, and the ex-ministers of the ex-
King of Dahomey, who are deported to Njole, and apparently
comfortable and employed in various non-menial occupations. Then we
go down the little avenue of cacao trees in full bearing, and away
to the left to where there is now an encampment of Adoomas, who have
come down as a convoy from Franceville, and are going back with
another under the command of our vivacious fellow passenger, who, I
grieve to see, will have a rough time of it in the way of
accommodation in those narrow, shallow canoes which are lying with
their noses tied to the bank, and no other white man to talk to.
What a blessing he will be conversationally to Franceville when he
gets in. The Adooma encampment is very picturesque, for they have
got their bright-coloured chintz mosquito-bars erected as tents.
Dr. Pelessier then insists on banging down monkey bread-fruit with a
stick, to show me their inside. Of course they burst over his
beautiful white clothes. I said they would, but men will be men.
Then we go and stand under the two lovely odeaka trees that make a
triumphal-arch-like gateway to the Post's beach from the river, and
the Doctor discourses in a most interesting way on all sorts of
subjects. We go on waiting for the Eclaireur, who, although it is
past four o'clock, is still down at Dumas' beach. I feel nearly
frantic at detaining the Doctor, but neither he nor Mr. Cockshut
seem in the least hurry. But at last I can stand it no longer. The
vision of the Administrator of the Ogowe, worn out, but chewing Kola
nut to keep himself awake all night while he finishes his papers to
go down on the Eclaireur to-morrow morning, is too painful; so I say
I will walk back to Dumas' and go on the Eclaireur there, and try to
liberate the Administrator from his present engagements, so that he
may go back and work. No good! He will come down to Dumas' with
Mr. Cockshut and me. Off we go, and just exactly as we are getting
on to Dumas' beach, off starts the Eclaireur with a shriek for the
Post beach. So I say good-bye to Mr. Cockshut, and go back to the
Post with Dr. Pelessier, and he sees me on board, and to my immense
relief he stays on board a good hour and a half, talking to other
people, so it is not on my head if he is up all night.
June 25th.--Eclaireur has to wait for the Administrator until ten,
because he has not done his mails. At ten he comes on board like an
amiable tornado, for he himself is going to Cape Lopez. I am
grieved to see them carrying on board, too, a French official very
ill with fever. He is the engineer of the canoniere and they are
taking him down to Cape Lopez, where they hope to get a ship to take
him up to Gaboon, and to the hospital on the Minerve. I heard
subsequently that the poor fellow died about forty hours after
leaving Njole at Achyouka in Kama country.
We get away at last, and run rapidly down river, helped by the
terrific current. The Eclaireur has to call at Talagouga for planks
from M. Gacon's sawmill. As soon as we are past the tail of
Talagouga Island, the Eclaireur ties her whistle string to a
stanchion, and goes off into a series of screaming fits, as only she
can. What she wants is to get M. Forget or M. Gacon, or better
still both, out in their canoes with the wood waiting for her,
because "she cannot anchor in the depth," "nor can she turn round,"
and "backing plays the mischief with any ship's engines," and "she
can't hold her own against the current," and--then Captain Verdier
says things I won't repeat, and throws his weight passionately on
the whistle string, for we are in sight of the narrow gorge of
Talagouga, with the Mission Station apparently slumbering in the
sun. This puts the Eclaireur in an awful temper. She goes down
towards it as near as she dare, and then frisks round again, and
runs up river a little way and drops down again, in violent
hysterics the whole time. Soon M. Gacon comes along among the trees
on the bank, and laughs at her. A rope is thrown to him, and the
panting Eclaireur tied up to a tree close in to the bank, for the
water is deep enough here to moor a liner in, only there are a good
many rocks. In a few minutes M. Forget and several canoe loads of
beautiful red-brown mahogany planks are on board, and things being
finished, I say good-bye to the captain, and go off with M. Forget
in a canoe, to the shore.