When I was first there, the deaths from fever were averaging fifteen
a day, and men who dined at the club one evening were buried
hurriedly before midnight, and when I returned in the winter months,
the fever had abated, but on the night we arrived twenty men were
robbed. The fact that we complained to the police about one of the
twenty robberies struck the commandant as an act of surprising and
unusual interest. We gathered from his manner that the citizens of
Lorenço Marquez look upon being robbed as a matter too personal and
selfish with which to trouble the police. It was perhaps credulous
of us, as our hotel was liberally labelled with notices warning its
patrons that "Owing to numerous robberies in this hotel, our guests
will please lock their doors." This was one of three hotels owned by
the same man. One of the others had been described to us as the
"tough" hotel, and at the other, a few weeks previous, a friend had
found a puff-adder barring his bedroom door. The choice was somewhat
difficult.
On her way from Lorenço Marquez to Beira our ship, the _Kanzlar_,
kept close to the shore, and showed us low-lying banks of yellow
sand and coarse green bushes. There was none of the majesty of
outline which reaches from Table Bay to Durban, none of the blue
mountains of the Colony, nor the deeply wooded table-lands and great
inlets of Kaffraria. The rocks which stretch along the southern
coast and against which the waves break with a report like the
bursting of a lyddite shell, had disappeared, and along Gazaland and
the Portuguese territory only swamps and barren sand-hills
accompanied us in a monotonous yellow line. From the bay we saw
Beira as a long crescent of red-roofed houses, many of them of four
stories with verandas running around each story, like those of the
summer hotels along the Jersey coast. It is a town built upon the
sands, with a low stone breakwater, but without a pier or jetty, the
lack of which gives it a temporary, casual air as though it were
more a summer resort than the one port of entry for all Rhodesia. It
suggested Coney Island to one, and to others Asbury Park and the
board-walk at Atlantic City. When we found that in spite of her
Portuguese flags and naked blacks, Beira reminded us of nothing
except an American summer-resort, we set to discovering why this
should be, and decided it was because, after the red dust of the
Colony and the Transvaal, we saw again stretches of white sand, and
instead of corrugated zinc, flimsy houses of wood, which you felt
were only opened for the summer season and which for the rest of
the year remained boarded up against driven sands and equinoctial
gales. Beira need only to have added to her "Sea-View" and "Beach"
hotels, a few bathing-suits drying on a clothes-line, a tin-type
artist, and a merry-go-round, to make us feel perfectly at home.
Beira being the port on the Indian Ocean which feeds Mashonaland and
Matabeleland and the English settlers in and around Buluwayo and
Salisbury, English influence has proclaimed itself there in many
ways. When we touched, which was when the British soldiers were
moving up to Rhodesia, the place, in comparison with Lorenço
Marquez, was brisk, busy, and clean. Although both are ostensibly
Portuguese, Beira is to Lorenço Marquez what the cleanest street of
Greenwich Village, of New York City, is to "Hell's Kitchen" and the
Chinese Quarter. The houses were well swept and cool, the shops were
alluring, the streets were of clean shifting white sand, and the
sidewalks, of gray cement, were as well kept as a Philadelphia
doorstep. The most curious feature of Beira is her private tram-car
system. These cars run on tiny tracks which rise out of the sand
and extend from one end of the town to the other, with branch lines
running into the yards of shops and private houses. The motive power
for these cars is supplied by black boys who run behind and push
them. Their trucks are about half as large as those on the hand-cars
we see flying along our railroad tracks at home, worked by gangs of
Italian laborers. On some of the trucks there is only a bench,
others are shaded by awnings, and a few have carriage-lamps and
cushioned seats and carpets. Each of them is a private conveyance;
there is not one which can be hired by the public. When a merchant
wishes to go down town to the port, his black boys carry his private
tram-car from his garden and settle it on the rails, the merchant
seats himself, and the boys push him and his baby-carriage to
whatever part of the city he wishes to go. When his wife is out
shopping and stops at a store the boys lift her car into the sand in
order to make a clear track for any other car which may be coming
behind them. One would naturally suppose that with the tracks and
switch-boards and sidings already laid, the next step would be to
place cars upon them for the convenience of the public, but this is
not the case, and the tracks through the city are jealously reserved
for the individuals who tax themselves five pounds a year to extend
them and to keep them in repair. After the sleds on the island of
Madeira these private street-cars of Beira struck me as being the
most curious form of conveyance I had ever seen.
[Illustration: Going Visiting in Her Private Tram-car at Beira.]
Beira was occupied by the Companhia de Mozambique with the idea of
feeding Salisbury and Buluwayo from the north, and drawing away some
of the trade which at that time was monopolized by the merchants of
Cape Town and Durban. But the tse-tse fly belt lay between Beira on
the coast and the boundary of the Chartered Company's possessions,
and as neither oxen nor mules could live to cross this, it was
necessary, in order to compete with the Cape-Buluwayo line, to build
a railroad through the swamp and jungle. This road is now in
operation. It is two hundred and twenty miles in length, and in the
brief period of two months, during the long course of its progress
through the marshes, two hundred of the men working on it died of
fever. Some years ago, during a boundary dispute between the
Portuguese and the Chartered Company, there was a clash between the
Portuguese soldiers and the British South African police. How this
was settled and the honor of the Portuguese officials satisfied,
Kipling has told us in the delightful tale of "Judson and the
Empire." It was off Beira that Judson fished up a buoy and anchored
it over a sand-bar upon which he enticed the Portuguese gunboat. A
week before we touched at Beira, the Portuguese had rearranged all
the harbor buoys, but, after the casual habits of their race, had
made no mention of the fact. The result was that the _Kanzlar_ was
hung up for twenty-four hours. We tried to comfort ourselves by
thinking that we were undoubtedly occupying the same mud-bank which
had been used by the strategic Judson to further the course of
empire.
The _Kanzlar_ could not cross the bar to go to Chinde, so the
_Adjutant_, which belongs to the same line and which was created for
these shallow waters, came to the _Kanzlar_, bringing Chinde with
her. She brought every white man in the port, and those who could
not come on board our ship remained contentedly on the _Adjutant_,
clinging to her rail as she alternately sank below, or was tossed
high above us. For three hours they smiled with satisfaction as
though they felt that to have escaped from Chinde, for even that
brief time, was sufficient recompense for a thorough ducking and the
pains of sea-sickness. On the bridge of the _Adjutant_, in white
duck and pith helmets, were the only respectable members of Chinde
society. We knew that they were the only respectable members of
Chinde society, because they told us so themselves. On her lower
deck she brought two French explorers, fully dressed for the part as
Tartarin of Tarascon might have dressed it in white havelocks and
gaiters buckled up to the thighs, and clasping express rifles in new
leather cases. From her engine-room came stokers from Egypt, and
from her forward deck Malays in fresh white linen, Mohammedans in
fez and turban, Portuguese officials, chiefly in decorations, Indian
coolies and Zanzibari boys, very black and very beautiful, who wound
and unwound long blue strips of cotton about their shoulders, or
ears, or thighs as the heat, or the nature of the work of unloading
required. Among these strange peoples were goats, as delicately
colored as a meerschaum pipe, and with the horns of our red deer,
strange white oxen with humps behind the shoulders, those that are
exhibited in cages at home as "sacred buffalo," but which here are
only patient beasts of burden, and gray monkeys, wildcats, snakes
and crocodiles in cages addressed to "Hagenbeck, Hamburg." The
freight was no less curious; assegais in bundles, horns stretching
for three feet from point to point, or rising straight, like
poignards; skins, ground-nuts, rubber, and heavy blocks of bees-wax
wrapped in coarse brown sacking, and which in time will burn before
the altars of Roman Catholic churches in Italy, Spain, and France.
People of the "Bromide" class who run across a friend from their own
city in Paris will say, "Well, to think of meeting _you_ here. How
small the world is after all!" If they wish a better proof of how
really small it is, how closely it is knit together, how the
existence of one canning-house in Chicago supports twenty stores in
Durban, they must follow, not the missionary or the explorers, not
the punitive expeditions, but the man who wishes to buy, and the man
who brings something to sell. Trade is what has brought the
latitudes together and made the world the small department store it
is, and forced one part of it to know and to depend upon the other.
The explorer tells you, "I was the first man to climb Kilamajaro."
"I was the first to cut a path from the shores of Lake Nyassa into
the Congo Basin." He even lectures about it, in front of a wet sheet
in the light of a stereopticon, and because he has added some miles
of territory to the known world, people buy his books and learned
societies place initials after his distinguished name. But before
his grandfather was born and long before he ever disturbed the
waters of Nyassa the Phoenicians and Arabs and Portuguese and men
of his own time and race had been there before him to buy ivory,
both white and black, to exchange beads and brass bars and
shaving-mirrors for the tusks of elephants, raw gold, copra, rubber,
and the feathers of the ostrich. Statesmen will modestly say that a
study of the map showed them how the course of empire must take its
way into this or that undiscovered wilderness, and that in
consequence, at their direction, armies marched to open these tracts
which but for their prescience would have remained a desert. But
that was not the real reason. A woman wanted three feathers to wear
at Buckingham Palace, and to oblige her a few unimaginative traders,
backed by a man who owned a tramp steamer, opened up the East Coast
of Africa; another wanted a sealskin sacque, and fleets of ships
faced floating ice under the Northern Lights. The bees of the Shire
Riverway help to illuminate the cathedrals of St. Peters and Notre
Dame, and back of Mozambique thousands of rubber-trees are being
planted to-day, because, at the other end of the globe, people want
tires for their automobiles; and because the fashionable ornament of
the natives of Swaziland is, for no reason, no longer blue-glass
beads, manufacturers of beads in Switzerland and Italy find
themselves out of pocket by some thousands and thousands of pounds.
The traders who were making the world smaller by bringing cotton
prints to Chinde to cover her black nakedness, her British Majesty's
consul at that port, and the boy lieutenant of the paddle-wheeled
gunboat which patrols the Zambesi River, were the gentlemen who
informed me that they were the only respectable members of Chinde
society. They came over the side with the gratitude of sailors whom
the _Kanzlar_ might have picked up from a desert island, where they
had been marooned and left to rot. They observed the gilded glory of
the _Kanzlar_ smoking-room, its mirrors and marble-topped tables,
with the satisfaction and awe of the California miner, who found all
the elegance of civilization in the red plush of a Broadway omnibus.
The boy-commander of the gunboat gazed at white women in the saloon
with fascinated admiration.
"I have never," he declared, breathlessly, "I have never seen so
many beautiful women in one place at the same time! I'd forgotten
that there were so many white people in the world."
"If I stay on board this ship another minute I shall go home," said
Her Majesty's consul, firmly. "You will have to hold me. It's coming
over me--I feel it coming. I shall never have the strength to go
back." He appealed to the sympathetic lieutenant. "Let's desert
together," he begged.
[Illustration: One-half of the Street Cleaning Department of
Mozambique.]
In the swamps of the East Coast the white exiles lay aside the
cloaks and masks of crowded cities. They do not try to conceal their
feelings, their vices, or their longings. They talk to the first
white stranger they meet of things which in the great cities a man
conceals even from his room-mate, and men they would not care to
know, and whom they would never meet in the fixed social pathways of
civilization, they take to their hearts as friends. They are too few
to be particular, they have no choice, and they ask no questions. It
is enough that the white man, like themselves, is condemned to
exile. They do not try to find solace in the thought that they are
the "foretrekkers" of civilization, or take credit to themselves
because they are the path-finders and the pioneers who bear the heat
and burden of the day. They are sorry for themselves, because they
know, more keenly than any outsider can know, how good is the life
they have given up, and how hard is the one they follow, but they do
not ask anyone else to be sorry. They would be very much surprised
if they thought you saw in their struggle against native and
Portuguese barbarism, fever, and savage tribes, a life of great good
and value, full of self-renunciation, heroism, and self-sacrifice.
On the day they boarded the _Kanzlar_ the pains of nostalgia were
sweeping over the respectable members of Chinde society like waves
of nausea, and tearing them. With a grim appreciation of their own
condition, they smiled mockingly at the ladies on the quarter-deck,
as you have seen prisoners grin through the bars; they were even
boisterous and gay, but their gayety was that of children at recess,
who know that when the bell rings they are going back to the desk.
A little English boy ran through the smoking-room, and they fell
upon him, and quarrelled for the privilege of holding him on their
knees. He was a shy, coquettish little English boy, and the
boisterous, noisy men did not appeal to him. To them he meant home
and family and the old nursery, papered with colored pictures from
the Christmas _Graphic_. His stout, bare legs and tangled curls and
sailor's hat, with "H.M.S. Mars" across it, meant all that was clean
and sweet-smelling in their past lives.
"I'll arrest you for a deserter," said the lieutenant of the
gunboat. "I'll make the consul send you back to the _Mars_." He held
the boy on his knee fearfully, handling him as though he were some
delicate and precious treasure that might break if he dropped it.
The agent of the Oceanic Development Company, Limited, whose
business in life is to drive savage Angonis out of the jungle, where
he hopes in time to see the busy haunts of trade, begged for the boy
with eloquent pleading.
"You've had the kiddie long enough now," he urged. "Let me have him.
Come here, Mr. Mars, and sit beside me, and I'll give you fizzy
water--like lemon-squash, only nicer." He held out a wet bottle of
champagne alluringly.
"No, he is coming to his consul," that youth declared. "He's coming
to his consul for protection. You are not fit characters to
associate with an innocent child. Come to me, little boy, and do not
listen to those degraded persons." So the "innocent child" seated
himself between the consul and the chartered trader, and they patted
his fat calves and red curls and took his minute hands in their
tanned fists, eying him hungrily, like two cannibals. But the little
boy was quite unconscious and inconsiderate of their hunger, and,
with the cruelty of children, pulled himself free and ran away.
"He was such a nice little kiddie," they said, apologetically, as
though they felt they had been caught in some act of weakness.
"I haven't got a card with me; I haven't needed one for two years,"
said the lieutenant, genially. "But fancy your knowing Sparks! He
has the next station to mine; I'm at one end of the Shire River and
he's at the other; he patrols from Fort Johnson up to the top of the
lake. I suppose you've heard him play the banjo, haven't you? That's
where we hit it off--we're both terribly keen about the banjo. I
suppose if it wasn't for my banjo, I'd go quite off my head down
here. I know Sparks would. You see, I have these chaps at Chinde to
talk to, and up at Tete there's the Portuguese governor, but Sparks
has only six white men scattered along Nyassa for three hundred
miles."
I had heard of Sparks and the six white men. They grew so lonely
that they agreed to meet once a month at some central station and
spend the night together, and they invited Sparks to attend the
second meeting. But when he arrived he found that they had organized
a morphine club, and the only six white men on Lake Nyassa were
sitting around a table with their sleeves rolled up, giving
themselves injections. Sparks told them it was a "disgusting
practice," and put back to his gunboat. I recalled the story to the
lieutenant, and he laughed mournfully.
"Yes," he said; "and what's worse is that we're here for two years
more, with all this fighting going on at the Cape and in China.
Still, we have our banjos, and the papers are only six weeks old,
and the steamer stops once every month."
[Illustration: Custom House, Zanzibar.]
Fortunately there were many bags of bees-wax to come over the side,
so we had time in which to give the exiles the news of the outside
world, and they told us of their present and past lives: of how one
as an American filibuster had furnished coal to the Chinese Navy;
how another had sold "ready to wear" clothes in a New York
department store, and another had been attaché at Madrid, and
another in charge of the forward guns of a great battle-ship. We
exchanged addresses and agreed upon the restaurant where we would
meet two years hence to celebrate their freedom, and we emptied many
bottles of iced-beer, and the fact that it was iced seemed to affect
the exiles more than the fact that it was beer.
But at last the ship's whistle blew with raucous persistence. It was
final and heartless. It rang down the curtain on the mirage which
once a month comes to mock Chinde with memories of English villages,
of well-kept lawns melting into the Thames, of London asphalt and
flashing hansoms. With a jangling of bells in the engine-room the
mirage disappeared, and in five minutes to the exiles of Chinde the
_Kanzlar_ became a gray tub with a pennant of smoke on the horizon
line.
I have known some men for many years, smoked and talked with them
until improper hours of the morning, known them well enough to
borrow their money, even their razors, and parted from them with
never a pang. But when our ship abandoned those boys to the unclean
land behind them, I could see them only in a blurred and misty
group. We raised our hats to them and tried to cheer, but it was
more of a salute than a cheer. I had never seen them before, I shall
never meet them again--we had just burned signals as our ships
passed in the night--and yet, I must always consider among the
friends I have lost, those white-clad youths who are making the ways
straight for others through the dripping jungles of the Zambesi,
"the only respectable members of Chinde Society."[A]
[Footnote A: NOTE--I did not lose the white-clad youths. The
lieutenant now is the commander of a cruiser, and the consul, a
consul-general; and they write me that the editor of the Chinde
newspaper, on his editorial page, has complained that he, also,
should be included among the respectable members of Chinde Society.
He claims his absence at Tete, at the time of the visit of the
_Kanzlar_, alone prevented his social position being publicly
recognized. That justice may be done, he, now, is officially, though
tardily, created a member of Chinde's respectable society. R.H.D.]
The profession of the slave-trader, unless it be that of his
contemporary, the pirate preying under his black flag, is the one
which holds you with the most grewsome and fascinating interest. Its
inhumanity, its legends of predatory expeditions into unknown
jungles of Africa, the long return marches to the Coast, the
captured blacks who fall dead in the trail, the dead pulling down
with their chains those who still live, the stifling holds of the
slave-ships, the swift flights before pursuing ships-of-war, the
casting away, when too closely chased, of the ship's cargo, and the
sharks that followed, all of these come back to one as he walks the
shore-wall of Mozambique. From there he sees the slave-dhows in the
harbor, the jungles on the mainland through which the slaves came by
the thousands, and still come one by one, and the ancient palaces of
the Portuguese governors, dead now some hundreds of years, to whom
this trade in human agony brought great wealth, and no loss of
honor.
[Illustration: Chain-gangs of Petty Offenders Outside of Zanzibar.]
Mozambique in the days of her glory was, with Zanzibar, the great
slave-market of East Africa, and the Portuguese and the Arabs who
fattened on this traffic built themselves great houses there, and a
fortress capable, in the event of a siege, of holding the garrison
and all the inhabitants as well. To-day the slave-trade brings to
those who follow it more of adventure than of financial profit, but
the houses and the official palaces and the fortress still remain,
and they are, in color, indescribably beautiful. Blue and pink and
red and light yellow are spread over their high walls, and have been
so washed and chastened by the rain and sun, that the whole city has
taken on the faint, soft tints of a once brilliant water-color. The
streets themselves are unpeopled, empty and strangely silent. Their
silence is as impressive as their beauty. In the heat of the day,
which is from sunrise to past sunset, you see no one, you hear no
footfall, no voices, no rumble of wheels or stamp of horses' hoofs.
The bare feet of the native, who is the only human being who dares
to move abroad, makes no sound, and in Mozambique there are no
carriages and no horses. Two bullock-carts, which collect scraps and
refuse from the white staring streets, are the only carts in the
city, and with the exception of a dozen 'rikshas are the only
wheeled vehicles the inhabitants have seen.