THE KNIGHT OF THE SLAVE GIRLS
_George Grenfell_
(Dates, b. 1849, d. 1906)
_The Building of the Steamship_
When David Livingstone lay dying in his hastily-built hut, in the
heart of Africa, with his black companions Susi and Chumah attending
him, almost his last words were, "How far away is the Luapula?"
He knew that the river to which the Africans gave that name was only
a short distance away and that it flowed northward. He thought that it
might be the upper reaches of the Nile, which had been sought by men
through thousands of years, but which none had ever explored.
Livingstone died in that hut (1873) and never knew what Stanley,
following in his footsteps, discovered later (1876-7), viz., that the
Luapula was really the upper stretch of the Congo, the second largest
river in the world (3000 miles long), flowing into the Atlantic. The
basin of the Congo would cover the whole of Europe from the Black Sea
to the English Channel.
In the year when Livingstone died, and before Stanley started to
explore the Congo, a young man, who had been thrilled by reading the
travels of Livingstone, sailed to the West Coast of Africa to the
Kameruns.
His name was George Grenfell, a Cornish boy (born at Sancreed, four
miles from Penzance, in England), who was brought up in Birmingham.
He was apprenticed at fifteen to a firm of hardware and machinery
dealers. Here he picked up, as a lad, some knowledge of machinery that
helped him later on the Congo. He had been thrilled to meet at Bristol
College, where he was trained for his missionary work, a thin, worn,
heroic man of tried steel, Alfred Saker, the great Kamerun missionary,
and Grenfell leapt for joy to go out to the dangerous West Coast of
Africa, where he worked hard, teaching the Africans to make tables and
bricks and to print and read, healing them and preaching to them.
When Stanley came down the Congo to the sea and electrified the world
by the story of the great river, Grenfell and the Baptist Missionary
Society which he served conceived the daring and splendid plan of
starting a chain of mission stations right from the mouth of the
Congo eastward across Africa. In 1878 Grenfell was on his way up the
river--travelling along narrow paths flanked by grass often fifteen
feet high, and crossing swamps and rivers, till after thirteen
attempts and in eighteen months he reached Stanley Pool, February
1881. A thousand miles of river lay between Stanley Pool and Stanley
Falls, and even above Stanley Falls lay thirteen hundred miles of
navigable river. Canoes were perilous. Hippopotami upset them, and men
were dragged down and eaten by crocodiles. They must have a steamer
right up there beyond the Falls in the very heart of Africa.
Grenfell went home to England, and the steamer _Peace_ was built on
the Thames, Grenfell watching everything being made from the crank
to the funnel. She was built, launched, and tried on the Thames; then
taken to pieces and packed in 800 packages, weighing 65 lbs. each,
and taken to the mouth of the Congo. On the heads and shoulders of
a thousand men the whole ship and the food of the party were carried
past the rapids, over a thousand miles along narrow paths, in peril of
snakes and leopards and enemy savages, over streams crossed by bridges
of vine-creepers, through swamps, across ravines.
Grenfell's engineer, who was to have put the ship together, died. At
last they reached Stanley Pool. Grenfell with eight negroes started
to try to build the ship. It was a tremendous task. Grenfell said
the _Peace_ was "prayed together." It was prayer and hard work and
gumption. At last the ship was launched, steam was up, the _Peace_
began to move. "She lives, master, she lives!" shouted the excited
Africans.
A thousand thrilling adventures came to him as he steamed up and
down the river, teaching and preaching, often in the face of
poisoned arrows and spears. We are now going to hear the story of one
adventure.
_The Steamer's Journey_
The crocodiles drowsily dosing in the slime of the Congo river bank
stirred uneasily as a strange sound broke the silence of the blazing
African morning. They lifted their heavy jaws and swung their heads
down stream. Their beady eyes caught sight of a Thing mightier than a
thousand crocodiles. It was pushing its way slowly up stream.
The sound was the throb of the screw of the steamer from whose funnel
a light ribbon of smoke floated across the river. An awning shaded the
whole deck from bow to stern. On the top of the awning, under a little
square canopy, stood a tall young negro; the muscles in his sturdy
arms and his broad shoulders rippled under his dark skin as the wheel
swung round in his swift, strong hands.
The steamer drove up stream while the crocodiles, startled by the wash
of the boat, slid sullenly down the bank and dived.
A short, bearded man, dressed in white duck, stood on deck at the
bows, where the steamer's name, _Peace_, was painted. He was George
Grenfell. His keen eyes gleamed through the spectacles that rested on
his strong, arched nose. By his side stood his wife, looking out up
the river. They were searching for the landing-place and the hut-roofs
of some friendly river-side town.
At last as the bows swung round the next bend in the river they saw
a village. The Africans rushed to the bank and hurriedly pushed out
their tree-trunk canoes. Grenfell shouted an order. A bell rang. The
screw stopped and the steamer lay-to while he climbed down into the
ship's canoe and was paddled ashore. The wondering people pushed and
jostled around them to see this strange man with his white face.
_The Slave Girls_
As they walked up among the huts, speaking with the men of the town,
Grenfell came to an open space. As his quick eyes looked about he saw
two little girls standing bound with cords. They were tethered
like goats to a stake. Their little faces and round eyes looked all
forlorn. Even the wonder of the strange bearded white man hardly kept
back the tears that filled their eyes.
"What are these?" he asked, turning to the chief.
The African pointed up the river. Grenfell's heart burned in him,
as the chief told how he and his men had swept up the river in their
canoes armed with their spears and bows and arrows and had raided
another tribe.
"And these," said the chief, pointing to the girls, who began
to wonder what was going to happen, "these are two girls that we
captured. They are some of our booty. They are slaves. They are tied
there till someone will come and buy them."
Grenfell could not resist the silent call of their woeful faces.
Quickly he gave beads and cloth to the chief, and took the little
girls back with him down to the river bank. As they jumped into the
canoe to go aboard the S.S. _Peace_, the two girls wondered what this
strange new master would do with them. Would he be cruel? Yet his eyes
looked kind through those funny, round, shining things balanced on his
nose.
The girls at once forgot all their sorrows when they jumped on board
this wonderful river monster. They felt it shiver and throb and begin
to move. The bank went farther and farther away. The _Peace_ had again
started up stream.
The girls stood in wonder and gazed with open eyes as the banks slid
past. They saw the birds all green and red flashing along the surface
of the water, and the huge hippopotami sullenly plunging into the
river like the floating islands of earth that sail down the Congo.
Their quick eyes noted the quaint iguana, like giant lizards, sunning
themselves on the branches of the trees over the stream and then
dropping like stones into the stream as the steamer passed.
_The Slave Girl's Brother_
Then, suddenly, as they came round a bend in the river, all was
changed. There ahead Grenfell saw a river town. The canoes were being
manned rapidly by warriors. The bank bristled with spears in the hands
of ferocious savages, whose faces were made horrible by gashes and
loathsome tattooing. In each canoe men stood with bows in their hands
and arrows drawn to the head. The throb of the engines ceased. The
ship slowed up. But the canoes came on.
The men of this Congo town only knew one thing. Enemies had, only a
few weeks earlier, come from down-river, had raided their town,
burned their huts, killed many of their braves, and carried away their
children. Here were men who had also come from down the river. They
must, therefore, be enemies.
Their chief shouted an order. In an instant a score of spears hurtled
at the ship and rattled on the steel screens around the deck. The yell
of the battle-cry of the tribe echoed and re-echoed down the river.
Grenfell was standing by the little girls. Suddenly one of them with
dancing eyes shouted and waved her arms.
"What is it?" cried Grenfell to her.
"See--see!" she cried, pointing to a warrior in a canoe who was just
poising a spear, "that is my brother! That is my brother! This is my
town!"
"Call to him," said Grenfell.
Her thin childish voice rang out. But no one heard it among the
warriors. Again she cried out to her brother. The only answer was a
hail of spears and arrows.
Grenfell turned rapidly and shouted an order to the engineer.
Instantly a shriek, more wild and piercing than the combined yells
of the whole tribe, rent the air. Again the shriek went up. The
warriors stood transfixed with spear and arrow in hand like statues
in ebony. There was a moment's intense and awful silence. They had
never before heard the whistle of a steamer!
"Shout again--quickly," whispered Grenfell to the little African
girl.
In a second the child's shrill voice rang out in the silence across
the water, crying first her brother's name, and then her own.
The astonished warrior dropped his spear, caught up his paddle
and--in a few swift strokes--drove his canoe towards the steamer. His
astonishment at seeing his sister aboard overcame all his dread of
this shrieking, floating island that moved without sails or paddles.
Quickly she told her story of how the strange white man in the great
canoe that smoked had found her in the village of their enemies, had
saved her from slavery, and--now, had brought her safely home again.
The story passed from lip to lip. Every spear and bow and arrow was
dropped.
The girls were quickly put ashore, and as Grenfell walked up the
village street every warrior who had but a few moments before been
seeking his blood was now gazing at this strange friend who had
brought back to the tribe the daughters whom they thought they had
lost for ever.
Grenfell went on with his work in face of fever, inter-tribal
fighting, slave-raiders, the horrors of wife and slave-slaughter
at funerals, witch-killing--and in some ways worse still, the
horrible cruelties of the Belgian rubber-traders--for over a
quarter of a century.
In June 1906, accompanied by his negro companions, he lay at
Yalemba, sick with fever. Two of the Africans wrote a letter for
help to other missionaries:
"We are very sorrow," they wrote, "because out Master is very
sick. So now we beging you one of you let him come to help Mr
Grenfell please. We think now is near to die, but we don't know
how to do with him. Yours,
DISASI MAKULO,
MASCOO LUVUSU."
To-day all up the fifteen hundred miles of Congo waterway the
power of the work done by Grenfell and the men who came with him
and after him has changed all the life. Gone are the slave-raiders,
the inter-tribal wars, the cruelties of the white men, along that
line. There stand instead negroes who cap make bricks, build
houses, turn a lathe; engineers, printers, bookbinders,
blacksmiths, carpenters, worshipping in churches built with their
own hands. But beyond, and among the myriad tributaries and the
vast forests millions of men have never yet even heard of the love
of God in Jesus Christ, and still work their hideous cruelties.
So Grenfell, like Livingstone, opened a door. It stands open.