THE FORGOTTEN ISLES
There can be no doubt about it: real cannibal kings are getting
scarce. Ever since, as a youngster, I read of Du Chaillu's adventures
among the man-eating natives of Equatoria, I had hankered to see a
real live cannibal in the flesh. But when, in later years, I made
inquiries about them from missionaries and traders and officials in
Senegal and Uganda and Nyasaland, I invariably received the reply:
“Oh, that's all over now; except among a few of the West Coast tribes,
cannibalism is a thing of the past.” So when the captain of the little
German cargo boat on which I was loitering up and down Africa's Indian
seaboard remarked at breakfast one morning that he had decided to put
in to Mahé, in the Seychelle group, and that I might care to pass the
time while he was taking on cargo by visiting the colony of cannibal
royalties who were in exile there, I felt that one of my boyhood
dreams was to be realised at last.
Do you happen, by any chance, to have been to Mahé, in the Seychelles?
No? Of course not. Then you must picture an emerald island dropped
down in a turquoise sea. Peacock-coloured waves ripple on a silver
strand, and this loses itself almost immediately in a dense forest
of giant palms, which, mounting leisurely, dwindles and straggles
and runs out in a peak of bare blue rock, which disappears, in turn,
behind a great, low-hanging, purple heat cloud. To reach these
delectable isles one must have time and patience a-plenty, for they
lie far from the ocean highways and are visited by scarcely a dozen
vessels, all told, each year. Draw a line straight across the Indian
Ocean from Colombo to Zanzibar, and where that line intersects the
equator are the Seychelles, mere specks in that expanse of ocean.
Mahé, the largest of the group, is everything that a tropical island
should be, according to the story-books, even to its inaccessibility,
for, barring the French mail steamer which touches there every other
month on its way to Madagascar, and an occasional German freighter or
British tramp which drops in on its way from Goa to Kilindini, on the
chance of picking up a cargo of copra, it is as completely cut off
from the outside world as though it were in Mars.
I rather imagine that they are the loneliest people in the world,
those score of men and women—English, French, and German—who
constitute the entire white population of the islands. That is why
they are so pathetically eager to welcome the rare visitors who come
their way. Indeed, until I went to Mahé I never knew what hospitality
really meant. When our anchor rumbled down under the shadow of the
Morne Seychellois, and the police boat—its crew of negroes, with their
flashing teeth and big, good-humoured faces, their trim, blue sailor
suits and broad-brimmed straw wide-awakes, looking like overgrown
children—had taken me ashore, I promptly found myself surrounded by
the entire European population.
“I am the wife of the legal adviser to the Crown,” said a sweet-faced
little Irishwoman. “My husband and I would be so pleased if you would
come up to our bungalow for dinner. You can have no idea how good it
seems to see a white face again.”
“Oh, I say, then you must promise to breakfast with me,” urged a tall
young Englishman in immaculate white linen, who, it proved, was the
superior judge of the colony. “You won't disappoint me, will you,
old chap? I'm dying to hear what's going on in the world. And if you
_should_ have any magazines or newspapers that you could spare——”
But the government chaplain, wasting no time in words, fairly hustled
me into a diminutive dog-cart and, amid the reproaches of his
fellow-exiles, off we rattled behind the only horse on the island. The
padre was not to monopolise me for long, however, for the little group
of homesick exiles pursued us to his bungalow, where they settled me
in a long cane chair, thrust upon me cheroots and whiskey-and-sodas,
and listened breathlessly to the bits of world gossip for which I
ransacked the pigeon-holes of my memory for their benefit. The newest
songs, the most recent plays, the latest fashions, all the gossip of
Broadway and Oxford Street and the Avenue de l'Opéra—they hung on my
words with an eagerness that was pathetic.
“I hope you'll pardon us,” apologised my host, “but it's so seldom
that we see a pukka white man out here that we quite forget the few
manners we have left in our eagerness to learn what is going on at
home—the little things, you know, that are not important enough to put
in the cables and that they never think to put in the letters. Until
you have lived in such a place as this, my friend, you don't know the
meaning of that word 'home.'”
It is hot in the Seychelles; hot with a damp, sticky, humid,
enervating heat which is unknown away from the Line. They tell a
story in Mahé of an English resident who died from fever and went to
the lower regions. A few days later his friends received a message
from the departed. It said, “Please send down my blankets.” There are
days in an American midsummer when indoors becomes oppressive; it is
_always_ oppressive in the Seychelles, in January as in August, at
midnight as at noon. During the “hot season” it is overpoweringly so,
for you live for six months at a stretch in a bath of perspiration
and wonder whether you will ever know what it is to be cool again.
“There are six hundred minutes in every hour of the hot weather,”
the governor's wife remarked to me, “and not one of them bearable.
Although,” she added, “after the mercury in your bedroom thermometer
has climbed above one hundred and thirty, a few more degrees don't
much matter.” In her bungalow, for the greater part of the day, the
white woman in the Seychelles is as much a prisoner by reason of the
heat as is a Turkish woman in a harem from custom. Having neither
shopping, domestic duties, nor callers to occupy her, the only break
in the day's terrible monotony comes at sunset, when every one meets
every one else at the little club on the water-front which, with its
breeze-swept verandas and its green croquet lawns and tennis courts,
is the universal gathering-place between the hours of six and eight.
An afternoon nap is universal—if the flies will allow it. Flies by
day and mosquitoes by night are as wearing on European nerves as
the climate, the beds being from necessity so smothered in mosquito
netting that the air that gets within is as unsatisfactory as strained
milk. In the hot weather a punkah is kept going all night—this huge,
swinging fan, pulled by a coolie who squats in the veranda outside,
and who can go to sleep without ceasing his pulling, being as
necessary for comfort as a pillow—while, during the hottest nights, it
is customary to sleep unclad and uncovered, save for a sheet, which
the punkah-coolie, slipping in every hour, sprinkles with water.
The white woman in this part of the world is an early riser. A cup of
tea is always served her when she is awakened, and as soon as she is
dressed comes _chota hazri_, or the little breakfast, consisting of
tea, toast, eggs, and fruit. The most is made of the cool hours of
the morning, for in the hot weather it is customary to “shut up the
bungalow” at about seven A. M., when the temperature is moderately low
compared with what it will rise to a few hours later. Every door and
window is closed and thereafter the greatest care is taken to make
entrances and exits as quickly as possible, for a door left open for
any length of time quickly raises the temperature. If kept carefully
closed, however, it is remarkable how cool the room keeps as compared
with the stifling heat without.
Though a Seychellian bungalow is generally barn-like without and
barren within, its European mistress usually contrives to make its
rooms pretty and inviting, it being astonishing what marvels of
transformation can be accomplished by means of native mattings, Indian
printed curtains, and furniture of Chinese wicker, all effective and
ridiculously cheap. The kitchen is a detached building, erected as far
away from the bungalow as possible, and the white woman who knows when
she is well off seldom enters it. Once a month, however, she inspects
her cooking pots and pans, because, being made of copper, they have to
be periodically tinned or they become poisonous, almost as many lives
being lost in the tropics by the neglect of this simple precaution as
by failure to have every drop of drinking water boiled. As there is
no ice-making plant in the Seychelles, water is cooled for drinking
by being placed in a porous earthenware vessel and swung to and fro
in the heated atmosphere until, though still far from cool, it is a
little less tepid and nauseous.
But the European residents are not the only exiles in the Seychelles,
nor, to my way of thinking, the ones most to be pitied, for of recent
years these islands, presumably because of their very remoteness, have
been turned into a political prison for those deposed cannibal kings
whose kingdoms have, on one excuse and another, been added to the
dominions of the British Crown. At present there are three political
prisoners of note on the island of Mahé—King Kabanga of Uganda, King
Assibi of the Gold Coast, and King Prempeh of Ashantee. Though all of
these ebony royalties were enthusiastic patrons of the cooking-pot,
King Prempeh is by far the most notorious and the most interesting
personality of the three, for it was his palace at Kumasi that was
built of the skulls and surrounded by a neat picket fence made from
the leg and arm bones of the people he and his tribesmen had eaten.
Hard by the palace was the ghastly “crucifixion grove” where the
victims were slaughtered and their bodies hung until sufficiently
gamy to suit the royal palate. Owing to an error of judgment in
selecting a British commissioner as the _pièce de résistance_ for
one of his feasts, an expedition was sent to Ashantee, the country
annexed to the British empire, and its ruler forced to exchange his
skull-walled palace in Kumasi for a four-roomed, tin-roofed cottage
in the outskirts of Victoria, the capital of the Seychelles, where,
surrounded by the huts of the chieftains who accompanied him into
exile, he lives on the meagre pension granted him by the British
Government.
Clad in the flaming cotton robe of red and yellow which is the West
African equivalent of royal ermine, worn over a pair of very soiled
pajamas, his Majesty received me on the veranda of his little dwelling
in the presence of the constable who guards him and who acts as
interpreter when the King's scanty store of English gives out. Now
I am not an entire stranger to the ways of the Lord's Anointed, but
this audience with Prempeh of Ashantee was one of the most memorable
experiences that I can recall. In the first place, the mercury had
crept up and up and up until it hovered in the neighbourhood of one
hundred and thirty degrees in the shade of the house; in the second
place, the sons of the King (he told me that he had forty-two in all)
had crowded into the tiny room until the place fairly reeked with the
smell of perspiration; in the third place, I was at a loss what to
talk to his Majesty about. The questions which one would like to ask a
cannibal king are obvious—whether he takes his meat rare or well done,
whether he prefers the tenderloin or the sirloin, whether he likes
white meat better than black—but Prempeh of Ashantee is not at all the
sort of person with whom one would feel inclined to take liberties,
and I was very far from being sure whether he would consider such
questions as liberties or not. After an awkward pause, during which
the King shuffled his feet uneasily and I wiped away rivulets of
perspiration, he said something in Ashantee—at least I suppose it was
Ashantee—to one of his attendants, who shortly returned with a tin
tray holding a bottle of whiskey, a siphon of lukewarm seltzer, and
a couple of very dirty glasses. After another long and uncomfortable
pause, the King asked me if I wouldn't have something to drink. Taking
it for granted that Prempeh's capacity for drink would be as _outré_
as his choice of food, I poured his beer glass full to the brim with
whiskey, giving to myself the drink sanctioned by civilised custom.
“In my country,” said the King, leaning forward and speaking in the
broken English which he had acquired from the government chaplain,
“bad men sometimes try to poison king, so king turn drinks other way
round,” and, suiting the action to the words, he turned the tray so
as to place before _me_ the beer-glassful of whiskey. I have never
been quite certain whether there was a twinkle in the eye of that
simple-hearted cannibal when he literally turned the table on me or
not.
At the time of my visit to Prempeh he was in the throes of marital
unhappiness, the details of which he confided to me. It seems that for
several years past he had been endeavouring to gain admission to the
Church-of-England fold, arguing, plausibly enough, that such a proof
of his complete regeneration might result in inducing the British
Government to send him back to his home in Ashantee. Working on that
assumption, he had, not long before, asked the government chaplain
to confirm him, to which request that gratified but still somewhat
sceptical clergyman had replied: “I am sorry to say that what your
Majesty asks is at present impossible, as your Majesty's marital
affairs are not pleasing to the church.”
So Prempeh, who had brought only twelve of his wives with him into
exile, thinking that the church held such a number to be incompatible
with his dignity,—for the workings of the West African mind are
peculiar, remember,—sent a message to the governor of the Seychelles
asking permission to take a maiden of Mahé for his thirteenth spouse,
and it was not until the indignant chaplain remonstrated with him
for his fall from grace that he grasped the fact that Christianity
demands of its converts the minimum instead of the maximum number of
wives.
“So me ship three wives back Africa,” Prempeh explained to me in his
quaint West Coast English. “Now me have only nine. Nine wives not
many for great king. But if chappy [chaplain] not let me in church
with nine wives, then me ship them back Africa too, for me very much
homesick to see Ashantee.”
Poor, deposed, exiled, homesick king, he will never again see that
African home for which he longs, I fear, for he cost England far too
much in lives and money. He came out on the veranda of his little
house to say good-by, and as I looked back, as my 'rickshaw boy drew
me swiftly down the road, he was still standing there waving to me—a
real, dyed-in-the-wool cannibal king, who has killed and eaten more
human beings, I suppose, than almost any man that ever lived.
* * * * *
Two days' steam southward from the Seychelles, and midway between the
island of Mahé and Diégo-Suarez, on the north coast of Madagascar,
lies the islet of Saint Pierre, whence comes much of the guano with
which we fertilise our flower-beds and gardens, and those giant
sea-turtles whose shells supply our women-folk with fans, combs, and
brooches. Here, on this half a square mile of sun-baked rock in the
middle of the Indian Ocean, the Scotch manager of the syndicate which
works the guano deposits lives the whole year round, during half of
which time he sees no human face, during the other half having the
company of a few score blacks who are brought over from Mahé under
contract to gather the rich deposits of guano. His only shelter a
wooden shack, his only companions the clouds of clamorous sea-fowl,
his only fresh food turtles and fish, his only communication with
the world two times a year when the workers come and go, I expected
to find him unshaven and slovenly, the most exiled of all exiles,
the loneliest of the lonely. I made up a bundle of two-months-old
newspapers and pictured the pleasure it would give him to learn the
news of that big, busy, teeming world which lay over there beyond the
rim of the Indian Ocean. I imagined that he would cling to my arm and
beg piteously for news from home, and I thought it quite possible that
he might weep on my shoulder. But when a crew of blacks had taken me
through the booming surf in a tiny native dugout, and I and my bundle
of newspapers had been hauled up an overhanging cliff at the end of
a rope, I found the poor exile whose lonely lot I had come to cheer
immaculate in white linen and pipe-clayed shoes and wholly contented
with the shade of a green palm, the murmur of a turquoise sea, a book
of Robert Burns's verses, and the contents of a large black bottle.
* * * * *
When De Lesseps, that lean Frenchman with the vision of a prophet
and the energy of a Parisian, drove his spade through the sands of
Suez and thereby shortened the sea-road from Europe to the East by
five thousand miles, he gave France her revenge on Saint Helena.
Ever since Clive won England her Indian empire, this obscure rock in
the South Atlantic had been a prosperous half-way house on the road
to the Farther East, its lonely islanders driving a roaring trade
with the winged fleets of war and commerce that stopped there long
enough to replenish their larders and refill their casks. But when the
completion of the Canal altered the trade routes of the world, the
tedious Cape journey was abandoned, the South Atlantic was deserted,
and Saint Helena was ruined. By the genius of one of her sons, France
had settled her score with that grim island, whose name still leaves a
bitter taste in the mouths of Frenchmen.
He who would see the prison place of the great Emperor for himself
must be rich in time and patience, for the vessels that earn their
government subsidy by grudgingly dropping anchor for a few hours
in Jamestown's open roadstead are only indifferently good and very
far between. Scarcely larger than the island of Nantucket—or Staten
Island, if that conveys more meaning; almost midway between the
fever-haunted coasts of Angola and Brazil; sixteen days' steam from
Southampton Water and seven from Table Bay; its rockbound coasts as
precipitous and forbidding as the walls of the Grand Canyon; and with
a population less than that of many of New York's down-town office
buildings, Saint Helena possesses one attraction, nevertheless, which
more than repaid me for the long and arduous journey. That attraction
is a mean and lonely cottage, set on a bleak and barren hill. To stand
within the walls of that wretched dwelling and to stare out across
the wastes of ocean from that wind-swept hilltop, I travelled twenty
thousand miles, for on that distant stage was played the last act of
the mightiest tragedy of modern times.
Loitering up and down the seven seas, I have seen many islands, but
none, that I can recall, that turns toward the seafarer a face at
once so gloomy and so forbidding. It needs no vivid imagination, no
knowledge of its history, to transform the perpendicular cliffs of
Saint Helena into the grim walls of a sea-surrounded prison. It is a
place so stern, so solemn, and so awesome that it makes you shiver in
spite of yourself. As I leaned over the rail of a Castle steamer, with
sunrise still an hour away and the Cross flaming overhead, and watched
the island's threatening profile loom up out of the night, I shuddered
in sympathy with that stern, cold man who came as a prisoner to these
same shores close on a century ago.
From the view-points of safety and severity, the captors of the fallen
Emperor could not have chosen better. For the safe-keeping of a man
whose ambitions had decimated, bankrupted, and exhausted the people
of a continent, it was imperative that a prison should be found
whence escape or rescue would be out of the question by reason of its
very isolation and remoteness. Twelve hundred miles from the nearest
continental land, and that a savage and fever-infested wilderness;
with but a single harbour, and that so poor that landing there is
perilous except in the very best of weather; its great natural
strength increased by impregnable forts; its towering rocks commanding
a sea view of sixty miles in every direction, thus obviating the
possibility of a surprise attack, Saint Helena admirably fulfilled
the requirements for a prison demanded by a harassed, weakened, and
frightened Europe.
Though those travellers who take passage by the slow and infrequent
“intermediate” steamers to the Cape are usually afforded an
opportunity of setting foot on Saint Helena's soil, the brief stay
which is made there permits of their doing little else. As the house
occupied by Napoleon stands in the very heart of the island and on
its highest point, and as the road which leads to it is so rough and
precipitous that those who hire one of the few available vehicles
generally walk most of the way out of pity for the horses, there is
rarely time for the traveller who intends proceeding by the same boat
to set eyes on the spot which gives the island its fame. I heard,
indeed, of scores of travellers who had chosen the discomforts of this
roundabout and tedious route for the express purpose of visiting the
house where Napoleon died, and who found, on arriving at Saint Helena,
that they would have time for nothing more than a hurried promenade in
the town. Nor are any efforts made by the indolent islanders to induce
travellers to stay over a steamer, for there are neither hotels nor
boarding-houses, and a visitor would have to depend for his bed and
board on the hospitality of some private family.
The South Atlantic, her bosom rising and falling lazily under the
languorous influence of the tropic morning, had exchanged her sombre
night robe for a shimmering, sparkling garment of sun-flecked blue
before the sleepy-eyed quarantine officer had laboriously climbed
the port ladder; and the yellow flag at our masthead, fluttering
down, had signalled to the clamorous crews of negroes waiting eagerly
alongside that they could take us ashore. In the pitiless light of the
early morning the island looked even more forbidding than when the
harshness of its features was veiled by night. Naked slope and ridge
rose everywhere, and everywhere they were cut and cross-cut by equally
bare valleys and ravines, but not a house, not a tree, not a sign of
life, vegetable or animal, could we detect as we drew near. Even the
sea-birds seemed afraid to alight on those grim cliffs, darting in on
outspread wings as though to settle on them, only to wheel away with
frightened, discordant cries, the while an everlasting surf hurled
itself angrily against the smooth black rocks, voicing its impotence
in a sullen, booming roar.
Approaching the shore, we were amazed to see that what had appeared
from the ship's deck to be a solid, perpendicular wall of rock was
split in the middle, as though by a mighty chisel, and in the cleft
thus formed nestled Jamestown, the island's capital, flanked on either
side by towering, fort-crowned cliffs which effectually conceal
it from the sea. Landing at the same stone water-stairs where the
captive Emperor had come ashore nearly a century before, we followed a
stone-paved causeway, bordered on the land side by a deep but empty
moat, over a creaking drawbridge, through an ancient portcullised
gateway, and so into a spacious square, shaded by many patriarchal
trees and dotted here and there with groups of antiquated cannon.
Bordering the square are the post-office, which does a thriving
business in the sale of the rare surcharged stamps of the islands when
the steamers come in; the custom-house, the law courts, the yellow
church of Saint James, and the castle, a picturesque and straggling
structure, begun by the first English governor in 1659, which is
used by the governor for his “town” residence, though his “country”
place is barely a mile away. The town itself is simply a mean and
straggling street, lined on either side by whitewashed, red-roofed,
green-shuttered houses which become less and less pretentious and more
and more scattered as you make your way up the ever narrowing valley
until it loses itself in the hills. If there is a more dead-and-alive
place than Jamestown I have yet to see it. A New Hampshire hamlet on a
Sunday morning is positively boisterous in comparison. Once a month,
however, when the British mail comes in, the town arouses itself long
enough to go down to the post-office and get the letters and the
papers—especially the illustrated weeklies—from that far-off place
which every islander, even though he was born and raised on Saint
Helena, refers to as “home.”
From the very edge of the village square the cliff known as Ladder
Hill rises sheer, its great bulk throwing an ominous shadow over the
little town. It takes its name from the Jacob's ladder whose seven
hundred wooden steps will bring you, panting and perspiring, to the
fort and the wireless station which occupy the top. I suppose there
is no other such ladder in the world, it being, so I was proudly
assured by the islanders, nine hundred and ninety-three feet long and
six hundred and two feet high. Nor can I conceive of any other place
wanting such an accommodation, for those who use it are constantly in
danger of bursting their lungs going up or of breaking their necks
coming down.
A biscuit's throw from the foot of the ladder, and facing the public
gardens, stands the sedate, old-fashioned house where Napoleon spent
the first few nights after his arrival on the island. It is a prim,
two-story residence, the sombreness of its snuff-coloured plaster
relieved by white stone trimmings and window-sills—just such a place,
in fact, as the British colonists built by the hundreds in our own New
England towns. By one of the most remarkable coincidences of which I
have ever heard, Napoleon was given the same bedroom which had been
occupied by the Duke of Wellington—then Sir Arthur Wellesley—on his
homeward voyage from India only a few years before.
Leaving Jamestown in its gloomy, rock-walled ravine, we followed the
incredibly rough high-road which bumps and jolts and twists and turns
and climbs back and up onto the table-land which forms, as it were,
the roof of the island. The deeper we penetrated into the interior
the more luxuriant the vegetation became. The dry, barren, soilless,
lichen-coated rocks of the coast zone gave way to grassy valleys
abloom with English gorse and broom and dotted with the bright green
of willows and the dark green of firs, and these merged, in turn, into
a land of bamboos and bananas, of oranges and lemons and date-palms,
where the vegetation was so luxuriant and tropical as to give it
almost the appearance of a botanic garden. I know, indeed, of no other
place in the world where one can pass through three distinct zones
of vegetation in the course of an hour's drive, the first few miles
into the interior of Saint Helena being, so far as the scenery is
concerned, like a journey from the rocky, desolate shores of Labrador,
through the pine forests and fertile farm-lands of New England and New
York, and so southward into the essentially tropical vegetation of
lower Florida.
The road wound on and on, uncovering new beauties at every turn.
Cheerful, low-roofed bungalows peeped out at us from gardens ablaze
with camelias, fuchsias, and roses; through the vistas formed by fig,
pear, and guava orchards we caught glimpses of prosperous-looking
stone farm-houses whose thick walls and high gables showed that they
dated from the Dutch occupation; passing above a tiny sylvan valley,
our driver pointed out the rambling Balcombe place, where the Emperor
lived for some weeks while Longwood was being prepared for his
occupancy, and in the box-bordered gardens of which he made quiet love
to his host's pretty daughter. In the same valley, not a pistol-shot
away, are the whitewashed, broad-verandaed quarters of the Eastern
Telegraph Company's force of operators—tennis-courts, cricket-fields,
and a swimming-pool set in a lawn of emerald velvet serving to make
the enforced exile of these young Englishmen, who relay the news of
the world between Europe and the Cape, a not unpleasant one.
Steeper and steeper became the road; scantier and less luxuriant
the vegetation, until at last we emerged upon a barren, wind-swept
table-land. A farm-yard gate barred our road, but at the impatient
crack of the driver's whip a small brown maiden hastened from a
near-by lodge to open it, curtseying to us prettily as we rattled
through. Three minutes' drive across a desolate, gorse-covered moor,
and our driver pulled up sharply at a gate in a scraggy privet hedge
surrounding just such a ramshackle, weather-beaten farm-house as you
find by the hundreds scattered along the coast of Maine. “Longwood,”
he remarked laconically, pointing with his whip. Convinced that I
could not have heard aright, I asked him over again, for, despite
all the accounts I had read of the mean surroundings amid which the
Emperor ended his days, I could not bring myself to believe that this
miserable cottage, with its sunken roof and lichen-coated walls, could
have sheltered for more than half a decade the conqueror of Europe,
the master of the Tuileries and Fontainebleau and Versailles, the
man whose troopers had stabled their horses in every capital of the
Continent.
Longwood House is an old-fashioned, rambling cottage, only one story
high, unless you count the quarters improvised for the members of the
Emperor's suite in the garret, which were lighted by means of small
windows cut in the shingle roof. The house is built in the form of a
T, the entrance, which is reached by four or five stone steps and a
tiny latticed veranda, being represented by the bottom of the letter,
while the dining-room, kitchens, and offices are represented by the
top. Originally the dwelling of a peasant farmer, at the time Napoleon
reached the island it was being used as a sort of shooting-box by the
lieutenant-governor, the present front of the house being hastily
added to form a reception-room for the Emperor. In addition to this
_salle de réception_, where you are asked to sign the visitor' book
by the old French soldier who is the official guardian of the place,
there is a drawing-room, a dining-room, the Emperor's study, his
bedroom, bath, and dressing-room—all small, ill-lighted, damp, and
cheerless. Practically the entire lower floor of the house was used
by Napoleon, the members of his _entourage_—marshals, ministers, and
courtiers, remember, who were accustomed to the life of the most
brilliant court in Europe—being accommodated in tiny, unventilated
cubby-holes directly under the eaves. With the exception of two
or three small pier-glasses, the house is now quite destitute of
furniture, though in other respects it is kept religiously as it
was in Napoleon's time, even the faded blue wall-paper, sprinkled
with golden stars, having been carefully preserved. On the walls
of the various rooms are notices in French and English indicating
the purposes to which they were put during the imperial occupancy.
Between two windows of the reception-room, where the Emperor's bed
was removed from his bedroom a few days before his death because
of the better light, stands a marble bust made from the cast taken
immediately after his death, which, barring the one made by Canova
during his life, is the only likeness of Napoleon admittedly correct.
Without the house is the small and unkept garden in which the Emperor
walked and sometimes worked, the arbour under which he spent so
many hours, and the cement-lined fish-pond which he built with his
own hands. Inside or out, there is not one suggestion of colour, of
comfort, or of cheer: it is a prison-house and nothing more.
Near the bottom of the brown and windy hill on which Longwood stands
is Geranium Valley, which contains the tomb, or rather the cenotaph,
of the Emperor. It was by Napoleon's own wish that his body was buried
in this exquisite spot, close beside the spring at which he so often
used to drink and amid the wild geraniums of which he was so fond. The
famous willow-tree still overshadows the little grave-space, which is
enclosed by a high iron railing and a carefully trimmed hedge of box,
while masses of flowers give brightness to a spot hallowed by many
memories, for it was in this shady glen that the Emperor passed the
most peaceful hours of his exile and it was here that he rested for
twenty years until France brought him back in triumph to his final
resting-place under the great gilt dome of Les Invalides.
[Illustration: Longwood House. “This miserable cottage, with its
sunken roof and lichen-coated walls, sheltered for more than half a
decade the conqueror of Europe.”
Illustration: Looking northward across the Atlantic from Longwood.
“To stare out across the wastes of ocean from that wind-swept hilltop
I travelled twenty thousand miles.”
THE PRISON PLACE OF A GREAT EMPEROR.]
Both Longwood and the grave occupy the peculiar position of being
French territory in the heart of a British colony, for half a
century ago Queen Victoria presented the property to the French
nation, an official appointed by the French Government residing on and
caring for the place and showing it with mingled pride and sadness to
the few visitors who make their way to this one of the world's far
corners. It was an interesting but gloomy experience, that pilgrimage
to the prison place of the great Emperor, for it visualised for me, as
nothing else ever could do, the sordidness, the humiliations, and the
mental tortures which marked the last years of Napoleon. As my vessel
steamed steadily northward across the Atlantic, with the boulevards of
Paris not three weeks away, I leaned over the taffrail and, staring
back at the receding cliffs of that grim island, I seemed to see
the short, stoop-shouldered, gray-coated, cock-hatted figure of the
Emperor staring wistfully out across those leagues of ocean toward
France.
* * * * *
To locate the next of these “Forgotten Isles,” and the most completely
forgotten of all of them, you had better get out the family atlas and,
with a ruler and a pencil, do a little Morris-chair exploring. Draw
a line due south from Cape Verde, which is the westernmost point of
Africa, and another line due east from Cape San Roque, which is the
easternmost point in South America, and where those two lines meet,
out in the wastes of the South Atlantic, you will find a barren rock
which resembles, as, indeed, it is, an extinct and partially submerged
volcano. This rock, which is considerably smaller than its sister
island of Saint Helena, seven hundred miles away, is officially
designated by the British Government as H.M.S. “Ascension.” Entirely
under the control and jurisdiction of the Lords Commissioners of the
Admiralty, it is unique in that it is the only island in the world
which has the rating of a man-o'-war, being garrisoned, or rather
manned, by a detachment of sailors and marines, and being administered
in every respect as though it were a unit of the British navy. With
the exception of a dozen acres of vegetable garden, there is not a
single green thing on the island—grass, shrub, or tree. The island of
Saint Pierre, of which I made mention earlier in this chapter, is bad
enough, goodness knows, but it at least has a palm-tree. Ascension
hasn't even that. How they get men to go there is altogether beyond
my comprehension. If I had to take my choice between being sentenced
to exile on Ascension (which Heaven forbid!) or confinement in Sing
Sing, I rather think I should choose the prison. There are people on
Ascension, nevertheless, the population, which consists of officers,
seamen, and marines, together with a handful of cable operators and
a score of Kroo boys from Sierra Leone, numbering in all about one
hundred and thirty. There were also four women—relatives of the
officers—on the island when I was there. They had been there only
six months, I was told, yet when our vessel arrived not one of them
was on speaking terms with the others. Ascension, is, however, one
of the most flourishing “match factories” in the British empire, it
being safe to say that any unattached female, no matter what her
disqualifications, can get a husband in a week's stay on the island.
A young Englishman and his bride boarded our boat at Ascension. She
had been born and had spent all of her life on Saint Helena (which
is not exactly a roaring metropolis itself), and had married one of
the cable operators stationed at Ascension, who was taking her on
her first visit to the outside world. She told me that the event of
her life, her marriage excepted, had been going out to a vessel to
see a motor-car which was being transported to Cape Town. Here was
an educated and intelligent English girl who had come to womanhood
without ever having seen a railway train, a street-car, a building
over two stories high, or a crowd of more than five hundred people.
When we reached Teneriffe, in the Canaries, which is about as
somnolent a place as any I know, her husband took her ashore to see
the sights with keen anticipation. She rode on an electric car, she
took tea in a four-story hotel, she attended a moving-picture show—and
was brought back to the steamer suffering from violent hysterics.
A week later we reached Southampton, where she was so completely
prostrated by the roar and bustle of her first city that she had to go
to bed under medical attention.
To those British officials and soldiers who are performing the
manifold duties of empire along Africa's fever-stricken West Coast,
the island of Ascension is a godsend, for an excellent sanatorium has
been built by the government on its highest point, and to it come
wasted, sunken-cheeked, fever-racked skeletons from all parts of
that coast of death to build up their strength before going back to
their work again. Not only is Ascension a coaling, cable, and health
station of considerable importance, but it is also the chief habitat
of the sea-turtle, which comes there in thousands between January
and May, to lay its eggs in the sand. After having seen the enormous
size these creatures attain, it is almost possible to believe some of
those fantastic yarns about his trained turtles with which Baron de
Rougemont set Europe gasping a few years back. During the year that I
visited Ascension more than two hundred turtles were captured, ranging
in weight from five hundred to eight hundred pounds apiece. Four of
the monsters, each weighing close to half a ton, were put aboard our
vessel, being sent by the officers of the garrison as a gift to his
Majesty the King. They must have had turtle soup at Buckingham Palace
for several days in succession after those turtles arrived.
* * * * *
It could not have been long after daybreak when a frousy-headed Greek
steward awoke me with an intimation that we were off Canea. The
evil-smelling mixture which was called coffee only by courtesy, and
which was really chicory in disguise, held no attraction for me, for,
through the port-holes of the dining-saloon I could see, rising from
a sapphire sea, the green-clad, snow-capped mountains of Crete, the
island of mythology and massacre.
Our little steamer forged ahead at half-speed and the white town kept
coming nearer and nearer, until we could distinguish the caiques in
the harbour, and the queer, narrow houses with their latticed harem
windows which encircled it, and the white mosque with a palm-tree
silhouetted against its slender minaret, and even the crowd of ebony,
tan, and coffee-coloured humanity that fought for posts of vantage at
the water-stairs. It was a picture of sunshine and animation, of vivid
colours and strange peoples, such as one seldom sees except in some
gorgeously staged comic opera, and as I surveyed it sleepily from the
steamer's deck I had a momentary feeling that I was only an onlooker
at a play and that the curtain would go down presently and I should
have to go out into the drab, prosaic, humdrum world again.
But even as this was in my mind a gun boomed out from a crumbling
bastion and five little balls ran up five flagstaffs which I had
already noticed standing all in a row on the uppermost ramparts
and had mistaken, naturally enough, for some new form of Marconi
apparatus. The five little balls broke out into five flags and the
morning breeze caught up their folds and held them straight out as
though for our benefit, so that we could make them out quite plainly.
Four of them were old friends that I had known on many seas—the Union
Jack and the Tricolour and the Saint Andrew's cross of Russia and
the red-white-and-green banner of Italy—but the fifth flag, which
flew somewhat higher than the others, was of unfamiliar design; but
the blood-red square of bunting, traversed by the Greek cross and
bearing in its upper corner the star of Bethlehem, told its own story
and I knew it for the flag of Crete. And I knew that there was deep
significance in the design of that unknown flag and in the position
of the four familiar ones that flew below it, for they signalled to
the world that the Turk had been driven out, never to return; that
Christianity had triumphed over Mohammedanism, and that the cross had,
indeed, replaced the crescent; that the centuries of massacre were now
but memories; that peace, in the guise of foreign soldiery, had, for a
time at least, found an abiding-place in Crete; and, most significant
of all, that the new flag with its single star would be upheld, if
necessary, by the mightiest array of bayonets and battle-ships in
Christendom.
The island of Crete, which is about the size of Porto Rico, not
only occupies a very important strategical position, being nearly
equidistant from the coasts of Europe, Asia, and Africa, commanding
every line of communication in the eastern Mediterranean, and
being within easy striking distance of the Strait of Gibraltar,
the Dardanelles, and the Canal, but it is also one of the richest
agricultural regions in the world, or would be if the warring elements
among its population would permit the rattle of the harvester to
replace the rattle of the machine-gun. Ever since the Turks wrested
the island from the Venetians, close on two and a half centuries ago,
its history has been one of corruption, cruelty, and massacre. Almost
annually, for more than seventy years, the island Christians rose in
rebellion against their Turkish masters, and just as regularly the
Turks suppressed those rebellions with a severity which turned the
towns of the island into shambles and its fertile farm-lands into a
deserted wilderness. The cruelty which coupled the name of Turk with
execration in Armenia and Macedonia assumed such atrocious forms in
Crete that finally the great powers were aroused to action, and in
1898 the fleets of England, France, Italy, and Russia dropped anchor
in Suda Bay, the Turkish officials were forcibly deported, and a board
of admirals assumed control of the affairs of the unhappy island.
After a few months of martial government, during which the admirals
squabbled continuously among themselves, the intervening powers
proclaimed the island an autonomous state, subject to the Porte, but
paying no tribute, and ruled by a high commissioner to be appointed
by the King of the Hellenes. Though theoretically independent, it was
provided that all questions concerning the foreign relations of Crete
should be determined by the representatives of the powers, who would
also maintain in the island, for a time at least, an international
army of occupation. Recent events in the Balkans having resulted
in bringing about an agitation in Crete for annexation to Greece,
where a propaganda has long been vigorously carried on with that end
in view, the protecting powers have definitely announced that the
administration of the island will be continued by the “constituted
authorities” (this should read “_self_-constituted”) until the
question can be settled with the consent of Turkey. As things stand
at present, the withdrawal of the international troops from Crete
is about as distant as the withdrawal of the British garrisons from
Egypt. To tell the truth, each of the protecting powers is exceedingly
anxious to get the island for itself—England because it forms an
admirable half-way house between Gibraltar and the Canal; France
because its occupation would carry French influence into the eastern
end of the Mediterranean; Italy because it would serve as a connecting
link between the peninsula and Tripolitania; and Russia because it
would give her the command of the entrance to the Dardanelles—and
hence, though they will certainly never restore it to Turkey, they are
far from anxious to hand it over to Greece, to whom, after all, it
belongs historically, geographically, and ethnologically. As a result,
the Cretan question will probably disturb the chancelleries of Europe
for some years to come.
As I strained my eyes across the sparkling waters in vain search for
signs of a hotel and breakfast, a boat flying the port-captain's flag
and manned by gendarmes—splendid, muscular fellows with high boots and
bare knees and baggy Turkish trousers, their keen brown faces peering
out from under their fluttering cap-covers—came racing out from shore.
As it came alongside the crew tossed oars with all the smartness of
man-o'-war's-men; the white-clad officer in the stern, who was very
stout and very stiffly starched, climbed the stairs gingerly, as
though fearful of injuring the faultless crease in his linen trousers,
and, after the exchange of ceremonious bows and laboured compliments
in French, informed me that the High Commissioner had placed the boat
at my disposal. There is always something peculiarly satisfying to the
soul about going ashore under official auspices, not only because of
the envious glances of your fellow-passengers who line the rail, but
because of the powerlessness of the customs officials to annoy you.
Canea, which is the seat of government, is the most picturesquely
cosmopolitan place west of Suez. It has a mild and equable climate;
living is cheap and reasonably good; there is a large garrison of
foreign soldiery; there are no extradition treaties in force; and
trouble of one kind or another is always brewing. Like a magnet,
therefore, Canea has attracted the scum and offscourings of all the
Levant—needy soldiers of fortune, professional revolution-makers,
smooth-spoken gamblers and confidence men, rouged and powdered women
of easy virtue from east and west, Egyptian donkey-boys, out-at-elbows
dragomans who speak a score of tongues and hail from goodness knows
where—all that rabble of the needy, the adventurous, and the desperate
which follow the armies of occupation and are always to be found on
the fringe of civilisation.
The foreign troops are quartered for the most part on the massive
Venetian ramparts which still surround the town, but all business
centres along the narrow, stone-paved quay bordering the harbour, and
in a straggling thoroughfare which, leaving the water-front through
a fine old gate still bearing the carven lion of Saint Mark, serves
as the vertebra for an amazing tangle of dim alleys and deafening
bazaars, in which all the products of the Levant are bought and sold
amid indescribable confusion.
Canea is at its best at sunset, for it is not until then that the
town awakens to life. As the sun begins to sink behind the Aspra
Vouna, the streets, hitherto deserted, become thronged as though by
magic; the spaces before the cafés are packed with coffee-drinking,
nargileh-smoking humanity of all shades and of all religions; the
soldiers begin to appear in groups of twos and threes and fours; the
clerks in the shipping-offices put on white drill jackets, and sit
in chairs tipped back against their doors, and drink from tall, thin
glasses with ice tinkling in them, and the muezzin, brazen-throated,
appears on the balcony of his minaret, reminding one for all the world
of a Swiss cuckoo-clock as he pops out to chant his interminable call
to prayer: “Allahu il Allahu! Allahu Akbar! God is most great! Come to
prayer! There is no God but Allah! He giveth life and dieth not! Your
sins are great; greater is Allah's mercy! I extol his perfections!
Allahu il Allahu! Allahu Akbar!”
It is such a scene as one marks with the white milestone of
remembrance that he may go back to it in memory in after years.
Picture, if you can, a stone-paved promenade bordering a U-shaped
harbour. In the harbour are many craft—all small ones, for it is too
shallow for the great steamers to enter. There are caiques with sails
of orange, of scarlet, and of yellow; schooners, grain-laden, from
Egypt and Turkey and Greece; fishing-boats with rakish lateen-sails
and great goggle eyes painted at their bows to ward off the evil eye,
and, so the sailors will tell you, to detect the fish. And along
the quayside, where the human stream wanders restlessly, there are
Greeks in tufted shoes and snowy fustanellas that make them look like
ballet-dancers; swarthy Turks in scarlet sashes and scarlet fezes,
wearing the unsightly trousers peculiar to their race; bare-kneed
Cretan highlanders, descendants in form and feature of the ancient
Greeks, swaggering along with insolent grace in their braided,
sleeveless jackets and high boots of yellow, untanned leather;
Algerians in graceful flowing burnooses and Egyptians with tarbooshes
and Arabs with turbans—now and then a mollah with scornful, intolerant
eyes and the green turban which marks the wearer as a descendant of
the Prophet—and brawny, coal-black negroes from Tripoli, from Nubia,
and from the Sudan.
And then there are the soldiers: British Tommies, smart even in khaki,
boots shining, buckles shining, faces shining, swaggering along this
Cretan street and flourishing their absurd little canes precisely
as their fellows are doing all over the globe; French colonials,
swathed in blue puttees from ankle to knee and in red cummerbunds
from hip to chest, their misery completed by mushroom helmets so
large that nothing can be seen of the wearer but his chin; chattering
Italian _bersaglieri_, who strut about in cocks' feathers and crimson
facings when at home in the Corso or the Toledo or the Via Vittorio
Emmanuele, but out here must needs content their vanity with white
linen uniforms and green hackle in their helmets; sad-faced Russians,
uniformed as they would be in summer in Saint Petersburg or Moscow,
flat white caps, belted white smocks, trousers tucked in boots,
their good-humoured, ignorant faces stamped with all the signs of
homesickness, for their thoughts are far away in some squalid tenement
in the poor quarter of Warsaw perhaps, or in a peasant's cabin beside
the head-waters of the Volga.
Though Canea is the seat of government, Candia—or Heraklian, the
classic name by which the Greeks prefer to call it—is the largest and
most important town on the island. Disregarding the advice of friends,
I went from Canea to Candia on a Greek coasting steamer. No one ever
takes a first-class passage on a Greek boat, for the second and third
class passengers invariably come aft and stay there, despite the
commands and entreaties of the purser, so a third-class ticket answers
quite as well as a first. Fortunately—or unfortunately, as you choose
to regard it—I had as fellow voyagers a company of British infantry,
which was being transferred to Candia after three years' service
in the western end of the island. The soldiers, who had managed to
smuggle aboard a considerable quantity of rum, quickly got beyond
the control of the boy lieutenant, just out of Sandhurst, who was in
command, and who, appreciating that discretion is the better part of
valour, especially where a hundred drunken soldiers are concerned,
wisely left them to their own boisterous devices and retreated with me
to the captain's quarters on the bridge, where we remained until we
sighted Candia's harbour lights and our anchor rumbled down inside the
breakwater.
Were it not for the massive Venetian walls which surround it, Candia
would have almost the appearance of an Indian town, the similarity
being increased by its dark-faced, gaily dressed inhabitants and
by the British soldiers who throng its streets. A single broad,
stone-paved thoroughfare, lined in places with shade-trees and
surprisingly clean, winds like a snake from the harbour up the
hill, past rows of blackened ruins—grim reminders of the latest
insurrection—past square after square of white-walled, red-tiled
houses; through noisy bazaars where the turbaned shopkeepers squat
patiently in their doorways; past unkept marble fountains whose
stained carvings would make many a museum director envious; past
mosques with slender, graceful minarets and groups of filthy beggars
grovelling on their steps for alms; past the ornate, twin-domed Greek
cathedral, and so on to the ramparts where the British garrison is
quartered in yellow barracks that overlook the sea.
But the real Crete is no more to be judged from glimpses of Canea
and Candia than America could be judged by visiting New York and
Chicago. It is in the picturesque mountain villages of the Sphakiote
range that the genuine, untamed, unmixed fighting Cretan is to be
found, for these dwellers on the slopes of Mount Ida, alone of all the
scattered branches of the great Hellenic family, have preserved in
form and feature the splendid physical characteristics of the ancient
Greeks. With the Governor of Candia for my guide, the mountain village
of Archanais as our destination, and with an escort of gendarmerie
clattering at our heels, we set out from Candia one morning before
the sun was over the walls, for we had forty miles of hard riding
between us and dinner, and roads in the Sphakiote country often
consist of nothing more than dried-up water-courses. For the first few
miles the road was crowded with peasantry bringing their produce to
market—droves of donkeys, wine-skin-laden; long strings of the sturdy,
shaggy native ponies tethered head to tail and tail to head, their
panniers filled with purple figs or new-dug potatoes; sullen-eyed
Turks driving rude native carts, their women-folk veiled to the eyes
and hiding even them in the presence of the _giaours_; chattering
Greeks with homespun rugs or bundles of the heavy native lace; now
and then a prosperous farmer, striding along with a peculiar rolling
walk, due to the round-soled boots affected by the islanders, carrying
a measure of potatoes or perhaps a pair of fowls in the baggy seat of
his enormous trousers. We passed a grass-grown Turkish cemetery where
the gilded tombstones, capped by carven fezes or turbans in the case
of men, and shells in that of women, blazed in the morning sunlight,
while, a little farther on, we halted for a few moments before the
tomb of a revered sheikh, almost hidden by the bits of cloth which the
passing faithful had torn from their garments and tied to it.
Some half a dozen miles inland from Candia lie the ruins of Knossos,
the one-time palace of King Minos, a powerful monarch of the Mycenæan
age who is supposed to have ruled in Crete during that hazy era when
mythology ended and history began. The audience chamber and the royal
throne, which were old when the Pyramids were built, are still in
a perfect state of preservation, though these amazing evidences of
prehistoric grandeur are no more interesting than the marvellous
network of cellars and subterranean passages which underlie the
palace, many of them still lined, just as they were five thousand
years ago, with row upon row of mammoth earthen jars for the storage
of grain, of olives, and of wine in time of famine or siege. Many
eminent archæologists, by the way, maintain that it was from this
bewildering maze of corridors and passage-ways that the legend of the
Minotaur and the labyrinth, the scene of which was laid in Crete,
arose. Were Crete as easy of access as Egypt, these ruins of Knossos
would long since have taken rank with those which dot the banks of the
Upper Nile.
Half a dozen hours of riding over an open, sun-baked country and later
through gloomy pine woods and mountain defiles, with an occasional
halt at a wayside _xenodocheion_ that the troopers of our escort might
refresh themselves with that nauseous-tasting fermentation of rice
known as _arrack_, which is the national drink of Greece, brought
us at last, hot, saddle-worn, and weary, into the village square
of Archanais. The demarch of the town, with a dozen or so of the
insurrectionist chieftains from the surrounding mountains, awaited our
coming beneath a hoary plane-tree that shaded half the village square.
Seats were placed for us beneath its grateful shade, and, with the
ceremony of which the Greeks are so fond, we were served with small
cups of Turkish coffee and with the inevitable _loukoum_, which is
a candy resembling “Turkish delight.” This formal welcome, which no
Cretan ever neglects, completed, we were escorted to the house of
the demarch, with whom we were to dine. It was a long, low-roofed,
homelike dwelling, red tiles above and white plaster beneath, and
surrounding it a garden ablaze with flowers. Met at the door by a
servant with a pitcher of chased brass, we proceeded to wash in the
open air, the domestic pouring the water over our hands in a steady
stream, according to the Cretan fashion.
The dinner was beyond description. From a Cretan standpoint it was
doubtless a feast for the gods. I, being ravenous with hunger, asked
not the names of the strange dishes, but enjoyed everything that was
set before me as only a hungry man can. The meal began with ripe
olives and spiced meat chopped up with wheat grains and wrapped in
mulberry leaves; it passed on through a course that resembled fried
egg-plant but wasn't; through duck, stuffed with rice and olives
and cooked in oil, and a pudding that tasted as though it had been
flavoured with _eau de cologne_, concluding with small native melons,
which I have never seen equalled for flavour except in Turkestan, and,
of course, coffee and cigarettes. The meal lasted something over three
hours, and then, sitting cross-legged on the divan which ran entirely
around the room, the whole party dropped one by one to sleep. The one
recollection of Archanais which will always remain with me is that
of a roomful of swarthy-faced, black-moustached, baggy-trousered,
armed-to-the-teeth, overfed men, notorious revolutionists every one,
all sound asleep and all snoring like steam-engines.
That night we rode down the mountains in the moonlight, the
snow-capped peaks looming luridly against the purple sky. The
moonbeams lighted up the ruined farmsteads which we passed and played
fitfully among the gnarled branches of the ancient olive-trees, giving
to the silent land an aspect of unutterable peace. The whole world
seemed sleeping and the hoofs of our horses rang loudly against the
stones. The road which had been white with dust in the morning was a
ribbon of silver now; the stately palm-trees stirred ever so gently
in the night breeze; the ruins of ancient Knossos grew larger in the
moonlight until all its ancient glory seemed restored; the crosses
on the Greek cathedral and the crescents on the slender minarets
seemed to raise themselves in harmony like fingers pointing toward
heaven; the great guns that frowned from the ramparts were hidden in
the shadows—all was silence, beauty, infinite peace, until, as we
walked our tired horses slowly across the creaking drawbridge into the
city, a helmeted figure stepped from the shadow of the walls, a rifle
flashed in the moonlight, and a harsh voice challenged:
“Halt! Who goes there?”
INDEX
Abbas Hilmi II, 112.
Abyssinia, 10.
Africanders, 226.
Agriculture in: French Africa, 24;
German Africa, 181;
Morocco, 32;
Rhodesia, 214;
South Africa, 234;
the Sudan, 128;
Tripolitania, 85-86.
Ahaggar (Sahara), 24.
Alexandria, bombardment of, 111.
Algeria, 3, 9, 14, 16.
Algerian hinterland, 57.
Algiers, 10.
Americans in: Rhodesia, 217-8;
the Transvaal, 237.
Anglo-German secret treaty, 178-9.
Angola, 177-8.
Antanarivo, 9.
Arab: justice, 75;
resistance to Italian rule, 98;
weddings, 78;
women, 77.
Arabi Pasha, 110.
Arabi's rebellion, 111.
Archanais (Crete), 283.
Artesian wells in the Sahara, 22.
Ascension Island, 269.
Ashantee, 254.
Assuan dam, 123.
Atlas Mountains, 31.
Aujila oases, 88.
Bagirmi, 100.
Barbary Coast, 8.
Barka (Tripolitania), 87.
Barnato, Barney, 243.
Barotseland, 196.
Beira (Port. East Africa), 206 _et seq._
Beit, Alfred, 193.
Belgian Congo, 176-7;
communications in, 187;
reversion of, 177.
Benghazi (Tripolitania), 84, 87.
Berbers, 36.
Bey of Tunis, 64.
Big game in Rhodesia, 196.
Biskra (Algeria), 60.
“Blue tongue,” 232.
Boers, 226.
Bornu, 100.
Botha, General Louis, 233 _et seq._
Bridge over the Zambezi, 194.
British in: Egypt, 111 _et seq._;
South Africa, 223 _et seq._
British South Africa Company, 212.
Broken Hill (Rhodesia), 194.
Bulawayo (Rhodesia), 190.
Bwana M'kubwa (Rhodesia), 194.
Candia (Crete), 280 _et seq._
Canea (Crete), 272 _et seq._
Cannibalism, 253.
“Cape-to-Cairo” Railway, 190 _et seq._
Cape Town, 203, 227.
Capitulations, privileges conferred by Ottoman, 113.
Caravans, 17, 19, 91.
Ceuta (Morocco), 47.
Chartered companies, 212.
Colomb-Bechar (Morocco), 8.
Colour problem in South Africa, 226-8.
Consuls, powers of, in Egypt, 114 _et seq._
Cost of living in Rhodesia, 217.
Cotton culture in: Egypt, 124;
the Sudan, 142.
Country clubs, beneficial effects of, in Rhodesia, 216.
Crete, 272 _et seq._;
administration of, 275;
foreign troops in, 279-280;
hospitality in, 283-4;
insurrections in, 274.
Crime in South Africa, 229.
Crispi, 92.
Cromer, Lord, 117.
Cullinan, “The Great,” diamond, 239.
Cyrenaica, 87.
Dahomey, 4, 9, 25.
Dakar (Senegal), 11, 53.
Dam at Assuan, 202.
Dancing girls, 58 _et seq._
Dar-es-Salam (German East Africa), 185.
DeBeers syndicate, formation of, 243.
Delta of the Nile, 124.
Derna, capture of, by Americans, 83.
Desert: reclamation, 21;
transportation, 23.
Diamond: fields at Kimberley, 242;
mining, 234 _et seq._
Dining-cars on “Cape-to-Cairo” Ry., 219.
Diré-Dawah (Abyssinia), 10.
Divorce: court in Tunis, 71;
in Algeria, 70.
Djibouti (French Somali Coast), 9.
Drainage project in Egypt, 124.
Dutch in South Africa, 224.
Eaton's, Gen. William, capture of Derna, 83.
Education in French Africa, 6.
Egypt, 108 _et seq._;
army, 118;
education, 120;
future of, 141;
government, 111 _et seq._;
irrigation, 122;
justice, 113, 116;
Khedive, 112, 116, 117, 124;
land values in, 121.
Egyptian Debt Commission, 112.
El Araish (Morocco), 48.
England's desire for railway zone in German Africa, 198.
Execution in Tunis, 65.
_Fantasias_, 16.
Fashoda: see _Kodok_.
Fevers in East Africa, 152.
Fez (Morocco), 9.
Fezzan (Tripolitania), 84, 86.
Flowers in Morocco, 33.
Foreign Legion, 15.
France's African army, 12-14.
Franco-Spanish treaty, 46.
French: Africa, 1 _et seq._;
colonial expansion, 1 _et seq._;
Congo (see _French Equatorial Africa_);
Equatorial Africa, 4;
Guinea, 4, 9;
Sahara, 5;
Somali Coast, 5;
sphere of influence, 2 _et seq._;
steamers, 11;
treatment of natives, 16, 42, 75.
German Africa, 165 _et seq._;
climate of, 180;
railways in, 179.
German colonial expansion, 166;
desire for the Congo, 176 _et seq._;
desire for Zanzibar, 164;
East Africa, 175, 185-6;
trade of, 186;
interests in Morocco, 172.
German militarism in Africa, 182, 186;
overseas banks, 168-170;
treatment of the natives, 182-4;
Southwest Africa, 175.
Germany's foreign policy, 171-2;
oversea interests, 170.
Golf in Zanzibar, 149.
Gordon, General Charles George, 203.
Gordon Memorial College at Khartoum, 140.
Great Bend of the Niger, 9.
“_Groote Schuur_,” the home of Cecil Rhodes, 223.
Guano islands, 257.
Harbours: in French West Africa, 10;
in German Southwest Africa, 188.
Harems, life in, 69 _et seq._
Hay's, Sir John Drummond, speech to Sultan of Morocco, 44.
Heraklian. (See _Candia_.)
Hicks-Beach, Sir Michael, and Cecil Rhodes, 192.
Illicit diamond buying, 244.
Irrigation in: Egypt, 122;
French North Africa, 21;
South Africa, 233;
Sudan, 21, 128.
Ismail Pasha, 108 _et seq._
Italy in Africa, 80 _et seq._
Ivory Coast, 4, 9.
Ivory: market in Zanzibar, 153;
trade, 153 _et seq._
Jamestown (Saint Helena), 262-4.
Jimini (Ivory Coast), 9.
Jof (Sahara), 99 _et seq._
Johannesburg, 203, 235 _et seq._
Kabyle marriage customs, 68.
Kabyles, the, 65 _et seq._;
sale of their daughters by, 66.
Kabylia (Algeria), 65.
Kamerun, 173-6.
Kamerun, New, 173-6.
Kanem (French Sudan), 5, 9, 100.
_Kangas_, 154.
Karroo, the, 233.
Katanga District (Belgian Congo), 195-6.
Keetmanshoop (German Southwest Africa), 188.
Khalifa, the, 20, 197.
Khartoum, 138 _et seq._
King Assibi of the Gold Coast, 254.
King Kabanga of Uganda, 254.
King Minos of Crete, 282.
King Prempeh of Ashantee, 254 _et seq._
Kitchener, Lord, of Khartoum, 112, 118.
Knossos, ruins of, 282.
Kodok (Anglo-Egyptian Sudan), 20.
Kosti (Anglo-Egyptian Sudan), 198.
Kourassa (French Guinea), 9.
Krüger, President Paul, 238.
Kufra Oases, 88, 99.
Kumasi (Ashantee), 254.
Labor, demand for, in Rhodesia, 218.
Lake No, 137.
Lake Tanganyika, 187.
Lake Tchad, 9.
Language problem in South Africa, 224.
Laraiche. (See _El Araish_.)
Liberia, 3.
Libya, 80 _et seq._
Livingstone, David, finding of, by Stanley, 151.
Livingstone's discovery of Victoria Falls, 210.
Lobenguela, 211.
Lobito Bay Railway, 179, 201.
“Longwood,” residence of Napoleon, 266.
Lualaba River, 187.
Lüderitz Bay (German Southwest Africa), 188.
Madagascar, 5, 9, 12.
Mahé (Seychelles), 248 _et seq._
Majunga (Madagascar), 9.
Mannesmann Brothers in Morocco, 173.
Marchand, Major, and the Fashoda incident, 20.
Marrakesh (Morocco), 30.
Mashonaland, 209.
Matabeleland, 190.
Mauresque women, 67-69.
Mauritania, 4.
Méharistes, 18.
Melilla (Morocco), 47.
Meroe, Island of (Anglo-Egyptian Sudan), 138.
Mineral resources of South Africa, 234.
Mohammedanism, spread of, in Africa, 95 _et seq._
Moorish character, 38.
Moors, the, 36.
Morals of Europeans in East Africa, 157.
Morocco, 27 _et seq._;
agriculture, 32;
climate, 33;
flowers, 33;
future of, 41, 54;
natural resources, 34;
railways projected in, 52;
slavery in, 51;
travel in, difficulties of, 35.
Morocco City. (See _Marrakesh_.)
Morocco-Equatoria Convention, 165.
Mount Ida (Crete), 281.
Mozambique, 178.
Mulai-abd-el-Hafid, ex-Sultan of Morocco, 28.
Mulai Youssef, Sultan of Morocco, 41.
Napoleon's exile on Saint Helena, 259 _et seq._
Natal, 234.
Native: labor in South African mines, 243;
troops in French Africa, 13.
Natives: treatment of Rhodesian, 218;
treatment of South African, 229.
New Kamerun, 5, 173-6.
Nikki (Dahomey), 9.
Nile, the, 122;
as agent of prosperity, 21;
plan to divert the, 20.
Oases, Saharan, 24.
Oasis of: Kaouer, 24;
Kufra, 88, 99;
Jof, 99 _et seq._;
Tuat, 52.
Omdurman (Anglo-Egyptian Sudan), 126.
Orange River Free State, 224.
Otavi District (German Southwest Africa), 188.
Ouled-Naïls, 56 _et seq._
Papal assistance to Italy in taking of Tripolitania, 92.
Parliament of Union of South Africa, 227.
Port Florence (British East Africa), 200.
Portugal in Africa, 177.
Portuguese East Africa, 178.
Premier Diamond Mine, 239.
Pretoria (Transvaal), 238.
Race problem in South Africa, 225.
Railway: “Afro,” 52, 179;
“Cape-to-Cairo,” 190 _et seq._;
Lobito Bay, 179, 201;
Otavi, 188;
Uganda, 200.
Railways in: Abyssinia, 10;
Algeria, 8;
Central Africa, 190;
French Africa, 8;
German Africa, 179;
Morocco, 52;
Rhodesia, 219;
the Sahara, 8;
the Sudan, 131-3;
West Africa, 9.
Rand, the, 235.
Rejaf (Uganda), 137.
Réunion, 12.
Rhodes, Cecil John, 190 _et seq._, 211, 212.
Rhodes Memorial near Cape Town, 203.
Rhodesia, 205 _et seq._;
agriculture, 214;
climate, 209, 213-4;
cost of living in, 217;
country clubs in, 216;
future of, 222;
government, 212;
labour, demand for skilled, 217;
law and order in, 214;
natives, 218;
railways, 219;
resources, 214.
Riff, the (Morocco), 46-48.
Rinderpest, 232.
Rogers, American adventurer, 151.
Sahara, 18, 21.
Saint Helena, 258 _et seq._
Saint Pierre Island, 257.
Salisbury, Lord, 192.
Salisbury (Rhodesia), 213.
Sand storms, 132.
Sea turtles, 272.
Sebu River (Morocco), 32.
Senegal, 4.
Senegambia, 25.
Senussi, the sheikh, 99 _et seq._
Senussiyeh, Brotherhood of, 98 _et seq._
Seychelles, 248 _et seq._;
climate of, 251;
housekeeping in, 252-3.
Sharef River (Morocco), 32.
Sherifian dynasty, 42.
Slavery in North Africa, 73.
Sleeping-sickness, 213.
Sobat River, 20.
Sokoto (Nigeria), 100.
South Africa, Union of, 223 _et seq._;
agriculture, 234;
colour problem in, 226-8;
diamond-mining, 234 _et seq._;
future of, 246;
language problem in, 224;
mineral resources of, 234;
need of irrigation in, 233;
race problem in, 225;
treatment of natives in, 228-231.
Spanish sphere of influence in Morocco, 46.
Sphakiote Mountains (Crete), 281.
Stanley, Henry M., 151, 211.
Sudan, the Anglo-Egyptian, 126 _et seq._;
agriculture, 128;
future of, 141;
government, 127;
railways, 131-3.
Sudd, the, 137.
Suez Canal, 141.
Sultan of Morocco, 41.
Sultan of Turkey, 96.
Sultan of Zanzibar, 160 _et seq._
Sus, the (Morocco), 46, 49.
Swahili: language, 156;
race, 154.
Swakopmund (German Southwest Africa), 188, 200.
Table Mountain (Cape of Good Hope), 203.
Tamatave (Madagascar), 9.
Tangier (Morocco), 10, 43, 54.
Teneriffe (Canary Islands), 271.
Tewfik Pasha, 110.
Tibesti (Sahara), 24.
Timbuktu (Upper Senegal-Niger Territories), 8, 9, 53.
Tippoo Tib, 151.
Tobruk (Tripolitania), 87.
Togoland, 175.
Tortoise shell from Saint Pierre, 257.
Transvaal, 235.
Treatment of women in North Africa, 74-79.
Tripoli (Tripolitania), 84-89.
Tripolitania, 80 _et seq._;
future of, 88, 105;
trade of, 91.
Tsetse-fly, 208, 213.
Tuaregs, 99.
Tuat (Sahara), 52.
Tunisia, 3.
Tunisian justice, 64.
Tunisian perfumery, 67.
Turkish Sultan's influence in Africa, 96.
Uganda Railway, 200.
Ujda (Morocco), 9.
Ujiji (German East Africa), 187.
Umtali (Mashonaland), 209.
United States in Africa, 82 _et seq._
Upper Senegal-Niger Territories, 4.
Vasco da Gama, 143.
Victoria (Seychelles), 254.
Victoria Falls, 194, 210, 220 _et seq._
Victoria Nyanza, 198, 203.
Wadai, 5, 9, 100.
Wady Haifa (Anglo-Egyptian Sudan), 137.
Walfish Bay (German Southwest Africa), 188.
Women of North Africa, 56 _et seq._
“World's View” (Cape of Good Hope), 203.
Zambezi River, 221.
Zanzibar, 143 _et seq._;
climate, 146;
future of, 163;
German desire for, 164;
hotel accommodation in, 146-7;
ivory market in, 153;
natives of, 154;
Sultan of, 160 _et seq._;
tropical diseases in, 152.
Ziban, the (Algerian Sahara), 57.
Zulus, 229.
[Illustration: MAP OF AFRICA, SHOWING RAILWAYS AND SPHERES OF
INFLUENCE.]
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