Belgium to make a partner of the man who has wrung his money from
wretched slaves, who were beaten, starved, and driven in chains.
This concession cannot make them rich. It can only make them richer.
And not richer in fact, for all the money they may whip out of the
Congo could not give them one thing that they cannot now command,
not an extra taste to the lips, not a fresh sensation, not one added
power for good. To them it can mean only a figure in ink on a page
of a bank-book. But what suffering, what misery it may mean to the
slaves who put it there! Why should men as rich as these elect to go
into partnership with one who sweats his dollars out of the naked
black? How really fine, how really wonderful it would be if these
same men, working together, decided to set free these twenty million
people--if, instead of joining hands with Leopold, they would
overthrow him and march into the Congo free men, without his chain
around their ankles, and open it to the trade of the world, and give
justice and a right to live and to work and to sell and buy to
millions of miserable human beings. These Americans working together
could do it. They could do it from Washington. Or five hundred men
with two Maxim guns could do it. The "kingdom" of the Congo is only
a house of cards. Five hundred filibusters could take Boma, proclaim
the Congo open to the traders of the world, as the Act of Berlin
declares it to be, and in a day make of Leopold the jest of Europe.
They would only be taking possession of what has always belonged to
them.
Down in the Congo I talked to many young officers of Leopold's army.
They had been driven to serve him by the whips of failure, poverty,
or crime. I do not know that the American concessionaires are driven
by any such scourge. These younger men, who saw the depths of their
degradation, who tasted the dirty work they were doing, were daily
risking life by fever, through lack of food, by poisoned arrows,
and for three hundred dollars a year. Their necessity was great.
They had the courage of their failure. They were men one could pity.
One of them picked at the band of blue and gold braid around the
wrist of his tunic, and said: "Look, it is our badge of shame."
To me those foreign soldiers of fortune, who, sooner than starve at
home or go to jail, serve Leopold in the jungle, seem more like men
and brothers than these truly rich, who, of their own free will,
safe in their downtown offices, become partners with this blackguard
King.
What will be the outcome of the American advance into the Congo?
Will it prove the salvation of the Congo? Will it be, if that were
possible, a greater evil?
E.R. Morel, who is the leader in England of the movement for the
improvement of the Congo, has written: "It is a little difficult to
imagine that the trust magnates are moulded upon the unique model of
Leopold II, and are prepared for the asking to become associates in
slave-driving. The trouble is that they probably know nothing about
African conditions, that they have been primed by the King with his
detestable theories, and are starting their enterprises on the basis
that the natives of Central Africa must be regarded as mere
'laborers' for the white man's benefit, possessing no rights in land
nor in the produce of the soil. If Mr. Ryan and his colleagues are
going to acquire their rubber over four thousand square miles, by
'commercial methods,' we welcome their advent. But we would point
out to them that, in such a case, they had better at once abandon
all idea of three or four hundred per cent dividends with which the
wily autocrat at Brussels has doubtless primed them. No such
monstrous profits are to be acquired in tropical Africa under a
trade system. If, on the other hand, the methods they are prepared
to adopt are the methods King Leopold and his other concessionaires
have adopted for the past thirteen years, devastation and
destruction, and the raising of more large bodies of soldiers, are
their essential accompaniments; and the widening of the area of the
Congo hell is assured."
The two things in the American invasion of the Congo that promise
good to that unhappy country are that our country is represented at
Boma by a most intelligent, honest, and fearless young man in the
person of James A. Smith, our Consul-General, and that the actual
work of operating the mines and rubber is in the hands of the
Guggenheims. They are well known as men upright in affairs, and as
philanthropists and humanitarians of the common-sense type. Like
other rich men of their race, they have given largely to charity and
to assist those less fortunate than themselves.
For thirteen years in mines in Mexico, in China, and Alaska, they
have had to deal with the problem of labor, and they have met it
successfully. Workmen of three nationalities they have treated with
fairness.
"Why should you suppose," Mr. Daniel Guggenheim asked me, "that in
the Congo we will treat the negroes harshly? In Mexico we found the
natives ill-paid and ill-fed. We fed them and paid them well. Not
from any humanitarian idea, but because it was good business. It is
not good business to cut off a workman's hands or head. We are not
ashamed of the way we have always treated our workmen, and in the
Congo we are not going to spoil our record."
I suggested that in Mexico he did not have as his partner Leopold,
tempting him with slave labor, and that the distance from Broadway
to his concessions in the Congo was so great that as to what his
agents might do there he could not possibly know. To this Mr.
Guggenheim answered that "Neither Leopold nor anyone else can
dictate how we shall treat the native labor," that if his agents
were cruel they would be instantly dismissed, and that for what
occurred in the Congo on the land occupied by the American Congo
Company his brothers and himself alone were responsible, and that
they accepted that responsibility.
But already on his salary list he has men who are sure to get him
into trouble, men of whose _dossiers_ he is quite ignorant.
From Belgium, Leopold has unloaded on the American companies several
of his "valets du roi," press agents, and tools, men who for years
have been defenders of his dirty work in the Congo; and of the
Americans, one, who is prominently exploited by the Belgians, had
to leave Africa for theft.
That Mr. Guggenheim wishes and intends to give to the black in the
Congo fair treatment there is no possible doubt. But that on
Broadway, removed from the scene of operations in time some four to
six months, and in actual distance eight thousand miles, he can
control the acts of his agents and his partners, remains to be
proved. He is attacking a problem much more momentous than the
handling of Mexican _peons_ or Chinese coolies, and every step of
the working out of this problem will be watched by the people of
this country.
And should they find that the example of the Belgian concessionaires
in their treatment of the natives is being imitated by even one of
the American Congo Company the people of this country will know it,
and may the Lord have mercy on his soul!
V
HUNTING THE HIPPO
Except once or twice in the Zoo, I never had seen a hippopotamus,
and I was most anxious, before I left the Congo, to meet one. I
wanted to look at him when he was free, and his own master, without
iron bars or keepers; when he believed he was quite alone, and was
enjoying his bath in peace and confidence. I also wanted to shoot
him, and to hang in my ancestral halls his enormous head with the
great jaws open and the inside of them painted pink and the small
tusks hungrily protruding. I had this desire, in spite of the fact
that for every hippo except the particular one whose head I coveted,
I entertained the utmost good feeling.
As a lad, among other beasts the hippopotamus had appealed to my
imagination. Collectively, I had always looked upon them as most
charming people. They come of an ancient family. Two thousand four
hundred years ago they were mentioned by Herodotus. And Herodotus to
the animal kingdom is what Domesday Book is to the landed gentry. To
exist beautifully for twenty-four hundred years without a single
mésalliance, without having once stooped to trade, is certainly a
strong title to nobility. Other animals by contact with man have
become degraded. The lion, the "King of Beasts," now rides a
bicycle, and growls, as previously rehearsed, at the young woman in
spangles, of whom he is secretly afraid. And the elephant, the
monarch of the jungle, and of a family as ancient and noble as that
of the hippopotamus, the monarch of the river, has become a beast of
burden and works for his living. You can see him in Phoenix Park
dragging a road-roller, in Siam and India carrying logs, and at
Coney Island he bends the knee to little girls from Brooklyn. The
royal proboscis, that once uprooted trees, now begs for peanuts.
But, you never see a hippopotamus chained to a road-roller, or
riding a bicycle. He is still the gentleman, the man of elegant
leisure, the aristocrat of aristocrats, harming no one, and, in his
ancestral river, living the simple life.
And yet, I sought to kill him. At least, one of him, but only one.
And, that I did not kill even one, while a bitter disappointment, is
still a source of satisfaction.
In the Congo River we saw only two hippos, and both of them were
dead. They had been shot from a steamer. If the hippo is killed in
the water, it is impossible to recover the body at once. It sinks
and does not rise, some say, for an hour, others say for seven
hours. As in an hour the current may have carried the body four
miles below where it sank, the steamer does not wait, and the
destruction of the big beast is simple murder. There should be a law
in the Congo to prevent their destruction, and, no doubt, if the
State thought it could make a few francs out of protecting the
hippo, as it makes many million francs by preserving the elephant,
which it does for the ivory, such a law would exist. We soon saw
many hippos, but although we could not persuade the only other
passenger not to fire at them, there are a few hippos still alive in
the Congo. For, the only time the Captain and I were positive he
hit anything, was when he fired over our heads and blew off the roof
of the bridge.
When first we saw the two dead hippos, one of them was turning and
twisting so violently that we thought he was alive. But, as we drew
near, we saw the strange convulsions were due to two enormous and
ugly crocodiles, who were fiercely pulling at the body. Crocodiles
being man-eaters, we had no feelings about shooting them, either in
the water or up a tree; and I hope we hit them. In any event, after
we fired the body drifted on in peace.
On my return trip, going with the stream, when the boat covers about
four times the distance she makes when steaming against it, I saw
many hippos. In one day I counted sixty-nine. But on our way up the
Congo, until we turned into the Kasai River, we saw none.
So, on the first night we camped in the Kasai I had begun to think I
never would see one, and I went ashore both skeptical and
discouraged. We had stopped, not at a wood post, but at a place on
the river's bank previously untouched by man, where there was a
stretch of beach, and then a higher level with trees and tall
grasses. Driven deep in this beach were the footprints of a large
elephant. They looked as though some one had amused himself by
sinking a bucket in the mud, and then pulling it out. For sixty
yards I followed the holes and finally lost them in a confusion of
other tracks. The place had been so trampled upon that it was beaten
into a basin. It looked as though every animal in the Kasai had met
there to hold a dance. There were the deep imprints of the hippos
and the round foot of the elephant, with the marks of the big toes
showing as clearly as though they had been scooped out of the mud
with a trowel, the hoofs of buffalo as large as the shoe of a cart
horse, and the arrow-like marks of the antelope, some in dainty
little Vs, others measuring three inches across, and three inches
from the base to the point. They came from every direction, down the
bank and out of the river; and crossed and recrossed, and beneath
the fresh prints that had been made that morning at sunrise, were
those of days before rising up sharply out of the sun-dried clay,
like bas-reliefs in stucco. I had gone ashore in a state of mind so
skeptical that I was as surprised as Crusoe at the sight of
footprints. It was as though the boy who did not believe in fairies
suddenly stumbled upon them sliding down the moonbeams. One felt
distinctly apologetic--as though uninvited he had pushed himself
into a family gathering. At the same time there was the excitement
of meeting in their own homes the strange peoples I had seen only in
the springtime, when the circus comes to New York, in the basement
of Madison Square Garden, where they are our pitiful prisoners,
bruising their shoulders against bars. Here they were monarchs of
all they surveyed. I was the intruder; and, looking down at the
marks of the great paws and delicate hoofs, I felt as much out of
place as would a grizzly bear in a Fifth Avenue club. And I behaved
much as would the grizzly bear. I rushed back for my rifle intent on
killing something.
The sun had just set; the moon was shining faintly: it was the
moment the beasts of the jungle came to the river to drink. Anfossi,
although he had spent three years in the Congo and had three years'
contract still to work out, was as determined to kill something as
was the tenderfoot from New York.
Sixty yards from the stern of the _Deliverance_ was the basin I had
discovered; at an equal distance from her bow, a stream plunged into
the river. Anfossi argued the hippos would prefer to drink the clear
water of the stream, to the muddy water of the basin, and elected to
watch at the stream. I carried a deck chair to the edge of my basin
and placed it in the shadow of the trees. Anfossi went into our
cabin for his rifle. At that exact moment a hippopotamus climbed
leisurely out of the river and plunged into the stream. One of the
soldiers on shore saw him and rushed for the boat. Anfossi sent my
boy on the jump for me and, like a gentleman, waited until I had
raced the sixty yards. But when we reached the stream there was
nothing visible but the trampled grass and great holes in the mud
and near us in the misty moonlight river something that puffed and
blew slowly and luxuriously, as would any fat gentleman who had been
forced to run for it. Had I followed Anfossi's judgment and gone
along the bank sixty yards ahead, instead of sixty yards astern of
the _Deliverance_, at the exact moment at which I sank into my deck
chair, the hippo would have emerged at my feet. It is even betting
as to which of us would have been the more scared.
The next day, and for days after, we saw nothing but hippos. We saw
them floating singly and in family groups, with generally four or
five cows to one bull, and sometimes in front a baby hippo no larger
than a calf, which the mother with her great bulk would push against
the swift current, as you see a tugboat in the lee of a great liner.
Once, what I thought was a spit of rocks suddenly tumbled apart and
became twenty hippos, piled more or less on top of each other.
During that one day, as they floated with the current, enjoying
their afternoon's nap, we saw thirty-four. They impressed me as the
most idle, and, therefore, the most aristocratic of animals. They
toil not, neither do they spin; they had nothing to do but float in
the warm water and the bright sunshine; their only effort was to
open their enormous jaws and yawn luxuriously, in the pure content
of living, in absolute boredom. They reminded you only of fat gouty
old gentlemen, puffing and blowing in the pool at the Warm Springs.
The next chance we had at one of them on shore came on our first
evening in the Kasai just before sunset. Captain Jensen was steering
for a flat island of sand and grass where he meant to tie up for the
night. About fifty yards from the spot for which we were making, was
the only tree on the island, and under it with his back to us, and
leisurely eating the leaves of the lower branches, exactly as though
he were waiting for us by appointment, was a big gray hippo. His
back being toward us, we could not aim at his head, and he could not
see us. But the _Deliverance_ is not noiseless, and, hearing the
paddle-wheel, the hippo turned, saw us, and bolted for the river.
The hippopotamus is as much at home in the water as the seal. To get
to the water, if he is surprised out of it, and to get under it, if
he is alarmed while in it, is instinct. If he does venture ashore,
he goes only a few rods from the bank and then only to forage. His
home is the river, and he rushes to bury himself in it as naturally
as the squirrel makes for a tree. This particular hippo ran for the
river as fast as a horse coming at a slow trot. He was a very badly
scared hippo. His head was high in the air, his fat sides were
shaking, and the one little eye turned toward us was filled with
concern. Behind him the yellow sun was setting into the lagoons. On
the flat stretch of sand he was the only object, and against the
horizon loomed as large as a freight car. That must be why we both
missed him. I tried to explain that the reason I missed him was
that, never before having seen so large an animal running for his
life, I could not watch him do it and look at the gun sights. No one
believed that was why I missed him. I did not believe it myself. In
any event neither of us hit his head, and he plunged down the bank
to freedom, carrying most of the bank with him. But, while we still
were violently blaming each other, at about two hundred yards below
the boat, he again waddled out of the river and waded knee deep up
the little stream. Keeping the bunches of grass between us, I ran up
the beach, aimed at his eye and this time hit him fairly enough.
With a snort he rose high in the air, and so, for an instant,
balanced his enormous bulk. The action was like that of a horse
that rears on his hind legs, when he is whipped over the nose. And
apparently my bullet hurt him no more than the whip the horse, for
he dropped heavily to all fours, and again disappeared into the
muddy river. Our disappointment and chagrin were intense, and at
once Anfossi and I organized a hunt for that evening. To encourage
us, while we were sitting on the bridge making a hasty dinner,
another hippopotamus had the impertinence to rise, blowing like a
whale, not ten feet from where we sat. We could have thrown our tin
cups and hit him; but he was in the water, and now we were seeking
only those on land.
[Illustration: Mr. Davis and Native "Boy," on the Kasai River.]
Two years ago when the atrocities along the Kasai made the natives
fear the white man and the white man fear the natives, each of the
river boats was furnished with a stand of Albini rifles. Three of
the black soldiers, who were keen sportsmen, were served with these
muskets, and as soon as the moon rose, the soldiers and Anfossi, my
black boy, with an extra gun, and I set forth to clear the island of
hippos. To the stranger it was a most curious hunt. The island was
perfectly flat and bare, and the river had eaten into it and
overflowed it with tiny rivulets and deep, swift-running streams.
Into these rivulets and streams the soldiers plunged, one in front,
feeling the depth of the water with a sounding rod, and as he led we
followed. The black men made a splendid picture. They were naked but
for breech-cloths, and the moonlight flashed on their wet skins and
upon the polished barrels of the muskets. But, as a sporting
proposition, as far as I could see, we had taken on the hippopotamus
at his own game. We were supposed to be on an island, but the water
was up to our belts and running at five miles an hour. I could not
understand why we had not openly and aboveboard walked into the
river. Wading waist high in the water with a salmon rod I could
understand, but not swimming around in a river with a gun. The force
of the shallowest stream was the force of the great river behind it,
and wherever you put your foot, the current, on its race to the sea,
annoyed at the impediment, washed the sand from under the sole of
your foot and tugged at your knees and ankles. To add to the
interest the three soldiers held their muskets at full cock, and as
they staggered for a footing each pointed his gun at me. There also
was a strange fish about the size of an English sole that sprang out
of the water and hurled himself through space. Each had a white
belly, and as they skimmed past us in the moonlight it was as though
some one was throwing dinner plates. After we had swum the length of
the English Channel, we returned to the boat. As to that midnight
hunt I am still uncertain as to whether we were hunting the hippos
or the hippos were hunting us.
The next morning we had our third and last chance at a hippo.
It is distinctly a hard-luck story. We had just gone on the bridge
for breakfast when we saw him walking slowly from us along an island
of white sand as flat as your hand, and on which he loomed large as
a haystack. Captain Jensen was a true sportsman. He jerked the bell
to the engine-room, and at full speed the _Deliverance_ raced for
the shore. The hippo heard us, and, like a baseball player caught
off base, tried to get back to the river. Captain Jensen danced on
the deck plates:
"Schoot it! schoot it!" he yelled, "Gotfurdamn! schoot it!" When
Anfossi and I fired, the _Deliverance_ was a hundred yards from the
hippo, and the hippo was not five feet from the bank. In another
instant, he would have been over it and safe. But when we fired, he
went down as suddenly as though a safe had dropped on him. Except
that he raised his head, and rolled it from side to side, he
remained perfectly still. From his actions, or lack of actions, it
looked as though one of the bullets had broken his back; and when
the blacks saw he could not move they leaped and danced and
shrieked. To them the death of the big beast promised much chop.
But Captain Jensen was not so confident. "Schoot it," he continued
to shout, "we lose him yet! Gotfurdamn! schoot it!"
My gun was an American magazine rifle, holding five cartridges. We
now were very near the hippo, and I shot him in the head twice, and,
once, when he opened them, in the jaws. At each shot his head would
jerk with a quick toss of pain, and at the sight the blacks screamed
with delight that was primitively savage. After the last shot, when
Captain Jensen had brought the _Deliverance_ broadside to the bank,
the hippo ceased to move. The boat had not reached the shore before
the boys with the steel hawser were in the water; the gangplank was
run out, and the black soldiers and wood boys, with their knives,
were dancing about the hippo and hacking at his tail. Their idea was
to make him the more quickly bleed to death. I ran to the cabin for
more cartridges. It seemed an absurd precaution. I was as sure I had
the head of that hippo as I was sure that my own was still on my
neck. My only difficulty was whether to hang the head in the front
hall or in the dining-room. It might be rather too large for the
dining-room. That was all that troubled me. After three minutes,
when I was back on deck, the hippo still lay immovable. Certainly
twenty men were standing about him; three were sawing off his tail,
and the women were chanting triumphantly a song they used to sing in
the days when the men were allowed to hunt, and had returned
successful with food.
On the bridge was Anfossi with his camera. Before the men had
surrounded the hippo he had had time to snap one picture of it. I
had just started after my camera, when from the blacks there was a
yell of alarm, of rage, and amazement. The hippo had opened his
eyes and raised his head. I shoved the boys out of the way, and,
putting the gun close to his head, fired pointblank. I wanted to put
him out of pain. I need not have distressed myself. The bullet
affected him no more than a quinine pill. What seemed chiefly to
concern him, what apparently had brought him back to life, was the
hacking at his tail. That was an indignity he could not brook.