SIERRA LEONE AND ITS SURROUNDINGS
Concerning the perils that beset the navigator in the Baixos of St.
Ann, with some description of the country between the Sierra Leone
and Cape Palmas and the reasons wherefrom it came to be called the
Pepper, Grain, or Meleguetta Coast.
It was late evening-time when the ---- reached that part of the South
Atlantic Ocean where previous experience and dead reckoning led our
captain to believe that Sierra Leone existed. The weather was too thick
to see ten yards from the ship, so he, remembering certain captains who,
under similar circumstances, failing to pick up the light on Cape Sierra
Leone, had picked up the Carpenter Rock with their keels instead, let go
his anchor, and kept us rolling about outside until the morning came.
Slipperty slop, crash! slipperty slop, crash! went all loose gear on
board all the night long; and those of the passengers who went in for
that sort of thing were ill from the change of motion. The mist, our
world, went gently into grey, and then black, growing into a dense
darkness filled with palpable, woolly, wet air, thicker far than it had
been before. This, my instructors informed me, was caused by the
admixture of the "solid malaria coming off the land."
However, morning came at last, and even I was on deck as it dawned, and
was rewarded for my unwonted activity by a vision of beautiful, definite
earth-form dramatically unveiled. No longer was the ---- our only
material world. The mist lifted itself gently off, as it seemed, out of
the ocean, and then separated before the morning breeze; one great mass
rolling away before us upwards, over the land, where portions of it
caught amongst the forests of the mountains and stayed there all day,
while another mass went leisurely away to the low Bullam shore, from
whence it came again after sunset to join the mountain and the ocean
mists as they drew down and in from the sea, helping them to wrap up
Freetown, Sierra Leone and its lovely harbour for the night.
It was with a thrill of joy that I looked on Freetown harbour for the
first time in my life. I knew the place so well. Yes; there were all the
bays, Kru, English and Pirate; and the mountains, whose thunder rumbling
caused Pedro do Centra to call the place Sierra Leona when he discovered
it in 1462. And had not my old friend, Charles Johnson, writing in 1724,
given me all manner of information about it during those delicious hours
rescued from school books and dedicated to a most contentious study of
_A General History of Robberies and Murders of the most Notorious
Pyrates_? That those bays away now on my right hand "were safe and
convenient for cleaning and watering;" and so on and there rose up
before my eyes a vision of the society ashore here in 1724 that lived
"very friendly with the natives--being thirty Englishmen in all; men who
in some part of their lives had been either privateering, buccaneering,
or pirating, and still retain and have the riots and humours common to
that sort of life." Hard by, too, was Bence Island, where, according to
Johnson, "there lives an old fellow named _Crackers_ (his true name he
thinks fit to conceal), and who was formerly a noted buccaneer; he
keeps the best house in the place, has two or three guns before his door
with which he salutes his friends the pyrates when they put in, and
lives a jovial life with them all the while they are there." Alas! no
use to me was the careful list old Johnson had given me of the
residents. They were all dead now, and I could not go ashore and hunt up
"Peter Brown" or "John Jones," who had "one long boat and an Irish young
man." Social things were changed in Freetown, Sierra Leone; but only
socially, for the old description of it is, as far as scenery goes,
correct to-day, barring the town. Whether or no everything has changed
for the better is not my business to discuss here, nor will I detain you
with any description of the town, as I have already published one after
several visits, with a better knowledge than I had on my first call
there.
On one of my subsequent visits I fell in with Sierra Leone receiving a
shock. We were sitting, after a warm and interesting morning spent going
about the town talking trade, in the low long pleasant room belonging to
the Coaling Company whose windows looked out over an eventful warehouse
yard; for therein abode a large dog-faced baboon, who shied stones and
sticks at boys and any one who displeased him, pretty nearly as well as
a Flintshire man. Also in the yard were a large consignment of kola nuts
packed as usual in native-made baskets, called bilys, lined inside with
the large leaves of a Ficus and our host was explaining to my mariner
companions their crimes towards this cargo while they defended
themselves with spirit. It seemed that this precious product if not kept
on deck made a point of heating and then going mildewed; while, if you
did keep it on deck, either the First officer's minions went fooling
about it with the hose, which made it swell up and burst and ruined it,
or left it in unmitigated sun, which shrivelled it--and so on. This led,
naturally, to a general conversation on cargo between the mariners and
the merchants, during which some dreadful things were said about the way
matches arrived, in West Africa and other things, shipped at shipper's
own risk, let alone the way trade suffered by stowing hams next the
boilers. Of course the other side was a complete denial of these
accusations, but the affair was too vital for any of us to attend to a
notorious member of the party who kept bothering us "to get up and look
at something queer over King Tom."
Now it was market day in Freetown; and market day there has got more
noise to the square inch in it than most things. You feel when you first
meet it that if it were increased a little more it would pass beyond the
grasp of human ear, like the screech of that whistle they show off at
the Royal Society's Conversazione. However, on this occasion the market
place sent up an entire compound yell, still audible, and we rose as one
man as the portly housekeeper, followed by the small, but able steward,
burst into the room, announcing in excited tones, "Oh! the town be took
by locusts! The town be took by locusts!" (_D.C. fortissimo_). And we
attended to the incident; ousting the reporter of "the queer thing over
King Tom" from the window, and ignoring his "I told you so," because he
hadn't.
This was the first cloud of locusts that had come right into the town in
the memory of the oldest inhabitant, though they occasionally raid the
country away to the North. I am informed that when the chiefs of the
Western Soudan do not give sufficient gifts to the man who is locust
king and has charge of them--keeping them in holes in the desert of
Sahara--he lets them out in revenge. Certainly that year he let them out
with a vengeance, for when I was next time down Coast in the Oil Rivers
I was presented with specimens that had been caught in Old Calabar and
kept as big curios.
This Freetown swarm came up over the wooded hills to the South-West in a
brown cloud of singular structure, denser in some parts than others,
continually changing its points of greatest density, like one of
Thompson's diagrams of the ultimate structure of gases, for you could
see the component atoms as they swept by. They were swirling round and
round upwards-downwards like the eddying snowflakes in a winter's storm,
and the whole air rustled with the beat of the locusts' wings. They
hailed against the steep iron roofs of the store-houses, slid down it,
many falling feet through the air before they recovered the use of their
wings--the gutters were soon full of them--the ducks in the yard below
were gobbling and squabbling over the layer now covering the ground, and
the baboon chattered as he seized handfuls and pulled them to pieces.
Everybody took them with excitement, save the jack crows, who on their
arrival were sitting sleeping on the roof ridge. They were horribly
bored and bothered by the affair. Twice they flopped down and tried
them. There they were lying about in gutters with a tempting garbagey
look, but evidently the jack crows found them absolutely mawkish; so
they went back to the roof ridge in a fuming rage, because the locusts
battered against them and prevented them from sleeping.
We left Sierra Leone on the ---- late in the afternoon, and ran out
again into the same misty wet weather. The next morning the balance
of our passengers were neither up early, nor lively when they were
up; but to my surprise after what I had heard, no one had the
much-prognosticated attack of fever. All day long we steamed onwards,
passing the Banana Isles and Sherboro Island and the sound usually
called Sherboro River.[2] We being a South-West Coast boat, did not call
at the trading settlements here, but kept on past Cape St. Ann for the
Kru coast.
All day long the rain came down as if thousands of energetic--well, let
us say--angels were hurriedly baling the waters above the firmament out
into the ocean. Everything on board was reeking wet.
You could sweep the moisture off the cabin panelling with your hand, and
our clothes were clammy and musty, and the towels too damp on their own
account to dry you. Why none of us started specialising branchiae I do
not know, but feel that would have been the proper sort of breathing
apparatus for such an atmosphere.
The passengers were all at the tail end of their spirits, for Sierra
Leone is the definite beginning of the Coast to the out-goer. You are
down there when you leave it outward bound; it is indeed, the complement
of Canary. Those going up out of West Africa begin to get excited at
Sierra Leone; those going down into West Africa, particularly when it is
the wet season, begin to get depressed. It did not, however, operate in
this manner on me. I had survived Sierra Leone, I had enjoyed it; why,
therefore, not survive other places, and enjoy them? Moreover, my
scientific training, combined with close study of the proper method of
carrying on the local conversation, had by now enabled me to understand
its true spirit,--never contradict, and, if you can, help it onward.
When going on deck about 6 o'clock that evening, I was alarmed to see
our gallant captain in red velvet slippers. A few minutes later the
chief officer burst on my affrighted gaze in red velvet slippers too. On
my way hurriedly to the saloon I encountered the third officer similarly
shod. When I recovered from these successive shocks, I carried out my
mission of alarming the rest of the passengers, who were in the saloon
enjoying themselves peacefully, and reported what I had seen. The old
coasters, even including the silent ones, agreed with me that we were as
good as lost so far as this world went; and the deaf gentleman went
hurriedly on deck, we think "to take the sun,"--it was a way he had at
any time of day, because "he had been studying about how to fix points
for the Government--and wished to keep himself in practice."
My fellow new-comers were perplexed; and one of them, a man who always
made a point of resisting education, and who thought nothing of calling
some of our instructor's best information "Tommy Rot!" said, "I don't
see what can happen; we're right out at sea, and it's as calm as a
millpond."
"Don't you, my young friend? don't you?" sadly said an old Coaster.
"Well, I'll just tell you there's precious little that can't happen, for
we're among the shoals of St. Ann."
The new-comers went on deck "just to look round;" and as there was
nothing to be seen but a superb specimen of damp darkness, they returned
to the saloon, one of them bearing an old chart sheet which he had
borrowed from the authorities. Now that chart was not reassuring; the
thing looked like an exhibition pattern of a prize shot gun, with the
quantity of rocks marked down on it.
"Look here," said an anxious inquirer; "why are some of these rocks
named after the Company's ships?"
"Think," said the calm old Coaster.
"Oh, I say! hang it all, you don't mean to say they've been wrecked
here? Anyhow, if they have they got off all right. How is it the 'Yoruba
Rock' and the 'Gambia Rock?' The 'Yoruba' and the 'Gambia' are running
now."
"Those," explains the old Coaster kindly, "were the old 'Yoruba' and
'Gambia.' The 'Bonny' that runs now isn't the old 'Bonny.' It's the way
with most of them, isn't it?" he says, turning to a fellow old Coaster.
"Naturally," says his friend. "But this is the old original, you know,
and it's just about time she wrote up her name on one of these
tombstones." "You don't save ships," he continues, for the instruction
of the new-comers, attentive enough now; "that go on the Kru coast, and
if you get ashore you don't save the things you stand up in--the natives
strip you."
"Cannibals!" I suggest.
"Oh, of course they are cannibals; they are all cannibals, are natives
down here when they get the chance. But, that does not matter; you see
what I object to is being brought on board the next steamer that happens
to call crowded with all sorts of people you know, and with a lady
missionary or so among them, just with nothing on one but a flyaway
native cloth. You remember D----?" "Well," says his friend. Strengthened
by this support, he takes his turn at instructing the young critic,
saying soothingly, "there, don't you worry; have a good dinner." (It was
just being laid.) "For if you do get ashore the food is something
beastly. But, after all, what with the sharks and the surf and the
cannibals, you know the chances are a thousand to one that the worst
will come to the worst and you live to miss your trousers."
After dinner we new-comers went on deck to keep an eye on Providence,
and I was called on to explain how the alarm had been given me by the
footgear of the officers. I said, like all great discoveries, "it was
founded on observation made in a scientific spirit." I had noticed that
whenever a particularly difficult bit of navigation had to be done on
our boat, red velvet slippers were always worn, as for instance, when
running through the heavy weather we had met south of the Bay, on going
in at Puerto de la Luz, and on rounding the Almadia reefs, and on
entering Freetown harbour in fog. But never before had I seen more than
one officer wearing them at a time, while tonight they were blazing like
danger signals at the shore ends of all three.
My opinion as to the importance of these articles to navigation became
further strengthened by subsequent observations in the Bights of Biafra
and Benin. We picked up rivers in them, always wore them when crossing
bars, and did these things on the whole successfully. But once I was on
a vessel that was rash enough to go into a difficult river--Rio del
Rey--without their aid. That vessel got stuck fast on a bank, and, as
likely as not, would be sticking there now with her crew and passengers
mere mosquito-eaten skeletons, had not our First officer rushed to his
cabin, put on red velvet slippers and gone out in a boat, energetically
sounding around with a hand lead. Whereupon we got off, for clearly it
was not by his sounding; it never amounted to more than two fathoms,
while we required a good three-and-a-half. Yet that First officer, a
truthful man, always, said nobody did a stroke of work on board that
vessel bar himself; so I must leave the reader to escape if he can from
believing it was the red velvet slippers that saved us, merely remarking
that these invaluable nautical instruments were to be purchased at
Hamburg, and were possibly only met with on boats that run to Hamburg
and used by veterans of that fleet.
If you will look on the map, not mine, but one visible to the naked eye,
you will see that the Coast from Sierra Leone to Cape Palmas is the
lower bend of the hump of Africa and the turning point into the Bights
of Benin, Biafra and Panavia.
Its appearance gives the voyager his first sample of those stupendous
sweeps of monotonous landscapes so characteristic of Africa. From
Sherboro River to Cape Mount, viewed from the sea, every mile looks as
like the next as peas in a pod, and should a cruel fate condemn you to
live ashore here in a factory you get so used to the eternal sameness
that you automatically believe that nothing else but this sort of world,
past, present, or future, can ever have existed: and that cities and
mountains are but the memories of dreams. A more horrible life than a
life in such a region for a man who never takes to it, it is impossible
to conceive; for a man who does take to it, it is a kind of dream life,
I am judging from the few men I have met who have been stationed here in
the few isolated little factories that are established. Some of them
look like haunted men, who, when they are among white men again, cling
to their society: others are lazy, dreamy men, rather bored by it.
The kind of country that produces this effect must be exceedingly simple
in make: it is not the mere isolation from fellow white men that does
it--for example, the handful of men who are on the Ogowe do not get
like this though many of them are equally lone men, yet they are bright
and lively enough. Anyhow, exceedingly simple in make as is this region
of Africa from Sherboro to Cape Mount, it consists of four different
things in four long lines--lines that go away into eternity for as far
as eye can see. There is the band of yellow sand on which your little
factory is built. This band is walled to landwards by a wall of dark
forest, mounted against the sky to seaward by a wall of white surf;
beyond that there is the horizon-bounded ocean. Neither the forest wall
nor surf wall changes enough to give any lively variety; they just run
up and down a gamut of the same set of variations. In the light of
brightest noon the forest wall stands dark against the dull blue sky, in
the depth of the darkest night you can see it stand darker still,
against the stars; on moonlight nights and on tornado nights, when you
see the forest wall by the lightning light, it looks as if it had been
done over with a coat of tar. The surf wall is equally consistent, it
may be bad, or good as surf, but it's generally the former, which merely
means it is a higher, broader wall, and more noisy, but it's the same
sort of wall making the same sort of noise all the time. It is always
white; in the sunlight, snowy white, suffused with a white mist wherein
are little broken, quivering bits of rainbows. In the moonlight, it
gleams with a whiteness there is in nothing else on earth. If you can
imagine a non-transparent diamond wall, I think you will get some near
idea to it, and even on the darkest of dark nights you can still see the
surf wall clearly enough, for it shows like the ghost of its daylight
self, seeming to have in it a light of its own, and you love or hate it.
Night and day and season changes pass over these things, like
reflections in a mirror, without altering the mirror frame; but nothing
comes that ever stills for one-half second the thunder of the surf-wall
or makes it darker, or makes the forest-wall brighter than the rest of
your world. Mind you, it is intensely beautiful, intensely soothing,
intensely interesting if you can read it and you like it, but life for a
man who cannot and does not is a living death.
But if you are seafaring there is no chance for a brooding melancholy to
seize on you hereabouts, for you soon run along this bit of coast and
see the sudden, beautiful headland of Cape Mount, which springs aloft in
several rounded hills a thousand and odd feet above the sea and looking
like an island. After passing it, the land rapidly sinks again to the
old level, for a stretch of another 46 miles or so when Cape
Mesurado,[3] rising about 200 feet, seems from seaward to be another
island.
The capital of the Liberian Republic, Monrovia, is situated on the
southern side of the river Mesurado, and right under the high land of
the Cape, but it is not visible from the roadstead, and then again comes
the low coast, unrolling its ribbon of sandy beach, walled as before
with forest wall and surf, but with the difference that between the sand
beach and the forest are long stretches of lagooned waters. Evil
looking, mud-fringed things, when I once saw them at the end of a hard,
dry season, but when the wet season's rains come they are transformed
into beautiful lakes; communicating with each other and overflowing by
shallow channels which they cut here and there through the sand-beach
ramparts into the sea.
The identification of places from aboard ship along such a coast as this
is very difficult. Even good sized rivers doubling on themselves sneak
out between sand banks, and make no obvious break in surf or forest
wall. The old sailing direction that gave as a landmark the "Tree with
two crows on it" is as helpful as any one could get of many places here,
and when either the smoke season or the wet season is on of course you
cannot get as good as that. But don't imagine that unless the navigator
wants to call on business, he can "just put up his heels and blissfully
think o' nowt," for this bit of the West Coast of Africa is one of the
most trying in the world to work. Monotonous as it is ashore, it is
exciting enough out to sea in the way of the rocks and shoals, and an
added danger exists at the beginning and end of the wet, and the
beginning of the dry, in the shape of tornadoes.[4] These are sudden
storms coming up usually with terrific violence; customarily from the
S.E. and E., but sometimes towards the end of the season straight from
S. More slave ships than enough have been lost along this bit of coast
in their time, let alone decent Bristol Guineamen into the bargain,
owing to "a delusion that occasionally seized inexperienced commanders
that it was well to heave-to for a tornado, whereas a sailing ship's
best chance lay in her heels." It was a good chance too, for owing to
the short duration of this breed of hurricane and their terrific rain,
there accompanies them no heavy sea, the tornado-rain ironing the ocean
down; so if, according to one of my eighteenth century friends, you see
that well-known tornado-cloud arch coming, and you are on a Guineaman,
for your sins, "a dray of a vessel with an Epping Forest of sea growth
on her keel, and two-thirds of the crew down with fever or dead of it,
as likely they will be after a spell on this coast," the sooner you get
her ready to run the better, and with as little on her as you can do
with. If, however, there be a white cloud inside the cloud-arch you must
strip her quick and clean, for that tornado is going to be the worst
tornado you were ever in.
Nevertheless, tornadoes are nothing to the rocks round here. At the
worst, there are but two tornadoes a day, always at tide turn, only at
certain seasons of the year, and you can always see them coming; but it
is not that way with the rocks. There is at least one to each quarter
hour in the entire twenty-four. They are there all the year round, and
more than one time in forty you can't see them coming. In case you think
I am overstating the case, I beg to lay before you the statement
concerning rocks given me by an old captain, who was used to these seas
and never lost a ship. I had said something flippant about rocks, and he
said, "I'll write them down for you, missy." This is just his statement
for the chief rocks between Junk River and Baffu; not a day's steamer
run. "Two and three quarters miles and six cables N.W. by W. from Junk
River there is 'Hooper's Patch,' irregular in shape, about a mile long
and carrying in some places only 2-1/2 fathoms of water. There is
another bad patch about a mile and a-half from Hooper's, so if you have
to go dodging your way into Marshall, a Liberian settlement, great
caution and good luck is useful. In Waterhouse Bay there's a cluster of
pinnacle rocks all under water, with a will-o'-the wisp kind of buoy,
that may be there or not to advertise them. One rock at Tobokanni has
the civility to show its head above water, and a chum of his, that lies
about a mile W. by S. from Tobokanni Point, has the seas constantly
breaking on it.
The coast there is practically reefed for the next eight miles, with a
boat channel near the shore. But there is a gap in this reef at Young
Sesters, through which, if you handle her neatly, you can run a ship in.
In some places this reef of rock is three-quarters of a mile out to sea.
Trade Town is the next place where you may now call for cargo. Its
particular rock lies a mile out and shows well with the sea breaking on
it. After Trade Town the rocks are more scattered, and the bit of coast
by Kurrau River rises in cliffs 40 to 60 feet high. The sand at their
base is strewn with fallen blocks on which the surf breaks with great
force, sending the spray up in columns; and until you come to Sestos
River the rocks are innumerable, but not far out to sea, so you can keep
outside them unless you want to run in to the little factory at Tembo.
Just beyond Sestos River, three-quarters of a mile S.S.W. of Fen River,
there are those Fen rocks on which the sea breaks, but between these and
the Manna rocks, which are a little more than a mile from shore N.W. by
N. from Sestos River, there are any quantity of rocks marked and not
marked on the chart. These Manna rocks are a jolly bad lot, black, and
only a few breaking, and there is a shoal bank to the S.E. of these for
half a mile, then for the next four miles, there are not more than 70
hull openers to the acre. Most of them are not down on the chart, so
there's plenty of opportunity now about for you to do a little African
discovery until you come to Sestos reef, off a point of the same name,
projecting half a mile to westwards with a lot of foul ground round it.
Spence rock which breaks, is W. two-thirds S., distant 1-1/4 miles from
Sestos Point; within 5 miles of it is the rock which _The Corisco_
discovered in 1885. It is not down on the chart yet, all these set of
rocks round Sestos are sharp too, so the lead gives you no warning, and
you are safer right-away from them. Then there's a very nasty one called
Diabolitos, I expect those old Portuguese found it out, it's got a lot
of little ones which extend 2 miles and more to seaward. There is
another devil rock off Bruni, called by the natives Ba Ya. It stands 60
feet above sea-level, and has a towering crown of trees on it. It is a
bad one is this, for in thick weather, as it is a mile off shore and
isolated, it is easily mistaken, and so acts as a sort of decoy for the
lot of sunken devil rocks which are round it. Further along towards
Baffu there are four more rocks a mile out, and forest ground on the
way."
I just give you this bit of information as an example, because I happen
to have this rough rock list of it; but a little to the east the rocks
and dangers of the Kru Coast are quite as bad, both in quantity and
quality, indeed, more so, for there is more need for vessels to call. I
often think of this bit of coast when I see people unacquainted with the
little local peculiarities of dear West Africa looking at a map thereof
and wondering why such and such a Bay is not utilised as a harbour, or
such and such a river not navigated, or this, that and the other bit of
Coast so little known of and traded with. Such undeveloped regions have
generally excellent local reasons, reasons that cast no blame on white
man's enterprise or black man's savagery. They are rock-reefed coast or
barred rivers, and therefore not worth the expense to the trader of
working them, and you must always remember that unless the trader opens
up bits of West Africa no one else will. It may seem strange to the
landsman that the navigator should hug such a coast as the shoals (the
_Bainos_ as the old Portuguese have it) of St. Ann--but they do. If you
ask a modern steamboat captain he will usually tell you it is to save
time, a statement that the majority of the passengers on a West Coast
boat will receive with open derision and contempt, holding him to be a
spendthrift thereof; but I myself fancy that hugging this coast is a
vestigial idea. In the old sailing-ship days, if you ran out to sea far
from these shoals you lost your wind, and maybe it would take you five
mortal weeks to go from Sierra Leone to Cape Mount or _Wash Congo_, as
the natives called it in the 17th century.
Off the Kru Coast, both West Coast and South-West Coast steamers and
men-o'-war on this station, call to ship or unship Krumen. The character
of the rocks, of which I have spoken,--their being submerged for the
most part, and pinnacles--increases the danger considerably, for a ship
may tear a wound in herself that will make short work of her, yet unless
she remains impaled on the rock, making, as it were, a buoy of herself,
that rock might not be found again for years.
This sort of thing has happened many times, and the surveying vessels,
who have been instructed to localise the danger and get it down on the
chart, have failed to do so in spite of their most elaborate efforts;
whereby the more uncharitable of the surveying officers are led in their
wrath to hold that the mercantile marine officers who reported that rock
and gave its bearings did so under the influence of drink, while the
more charitable and scientifically inclined have suggested that
elevation and subsidence are energetically and continually at work
along the Bight of Benin, hoisting up shoals to within a few feet of the
surface in some places and withdrawing them in others to a greater
depth.
The people ashore here are commonly spoken of as Liberians and Kruboys.
The Liberians are colonists in the country, having acquired settlements
on this coast by purchase from the chiefs of the native tribes. The idea
of restoring the Africans carried off by the slave trade to Africa
occurred to America before it did to England, for it was warmly
advocated by the Rev. Samuel Hoskins, of Newport, Rhode Island, in 1770,
but it was 1816 before America commenced to act on it, and the first
emigrants embarked from New York for Liberia in 1820. On the other hand,
though England did not get the idea until 1787, she took action at once,
buying from King Tom, through the St George's Bay Company, the land at
Sierra Leone between the Rochelle and Kitu River. This was done on the
recommendation of Mr. Smeatham. The same year was shipped off to this
new colony the first consignment of 460 free negro servants and 60
whites; out of those 400 arrived and survived their first fortnight, and
set themselves to build a town called Granville, after Mr. Granville
Sharpe, whose exertions had resulted in Lord Mansfield's epoch-making
decision in the case of Somerset _v._ Mr. J. G. Stewart, his master,
_i.e._, that no slave could be held on English soil.
The Liberians were differently situated from their neighbours at Sierra
Leone in many ways; in some of these they have been given a better
chance than the Africans sent to Sierra Leone--in other ways not so good
a chance. Neither of the colonies has been completely successful.
I hold the opinion that if those American and English philanthropists
could not have managed the affair better than they did, they had better
have confined their attention to talking, a thing they were naturally
great on, and left the so-called restoration of the African to his
native soil alone. For they made a direful mess of the affair from a
practical standpoint, and thereby inflicted an enormous amount of
suffering and a terrible mortality on the Africans they shipped from
England, Canada, and America; the tradition whereof still clings to the
colonies of Liberia and Sierra Leone, and gravely hinders their
development by the emigration of educated, or at any rate civilised,
Africans now living in the West Indies and the Southern States of
America.
I am aware that there are many who advocate the return to Africa of the
Africans who were exported from the West Coast during the slavery days.
But I cannot regard this as a good or even necessary policy, for two
reasons. One is that those Africans were not wanted in West Africa. The
local supply of African is sufficient to develop the country in every
way. There are in West Africa now, Africans thoroughly well educated, as
far as European education goes, and who are quite conversant with the
nature of their own country and with the language of their
fellow-countrymen. There are also any quantity of Africans there who,
though not well educated, are yet past-masters in the particular culture
which West Africa has produced on its inhabitants.
The second reason is that the descendants of the exported Africans have
seemingly lost their power of resistance to the malarial West Coast
climate. This a most interesting subject, which some scientific
gentleman ought to attend to, for there is a sufficient quantity of
evidence ready for his investigation. The mortality among the Africans
sent to Sierra Leone and Liberia has been excessive, and so also has
been that amongst the West Indians who went to Congo Belge, while the
original intention of the United Presbyterian Mission to Calabar had to
be abandoned from the same cause. In fact it looks as if the second and
third generation of deported Africans had no greater power of resistance
to West Africa than the pure white races; and, such being the case, it
seems to me a pity they should go there. They would do better to bring
their energies to bear on developing the tropical regions of America and
leave the undisturbed stock of Africa to develop its own.
However, we will not go into that now. I beg to refer you to Bishop
Ingram's _Sierra Leone after a Hundred Years_, for the history of
England's philanthropic efforts. I may some day, perhaps, in the remote
future, write myself a book on America's effort, but I cannot write it
now, because I have in my possession only printed matter--a wilderness
of opinion and a mass of abuse on Liberia as it is. No sane student of
West Africa would proceed to form an opinion on any part of it with such
stuff and without a careful personal study of the thing as it is.
The natives of this part of the West coast, the aboriginal ones, as Mrs.
Gault would call them, are a different matter. You can go and live in
West Africa without seeing a crocodile or a hippopotamus or a mountain,
but no white man can go there without seeing and experiencing a Kruboy,
and Kruboys are one of the main tribes here. Kruboys are, indeed, the
backbone of white effort in West Africa, and I think I may say there is
but one man of all of us who have visited West Africa who has not paid a
tribute to the Kruboy's sterling qualities. Alas! that one was one of
England's greatest men. Why he painted that untrue picture of them I do
not know. I know that on this account the magnificent work he did is
discredited by all West Coasters. "If he said that of Kruboys," say the
old coasters, "how can he have known or understood anything?" It is a
painful subject, and my opinion on Kruboys is entirely with the old
coasters, who know them with an experience of years, not with the
experience of any man, however eminent, who only had the chance of
seeing them for a few weeks, and whose information was so clearly drawn
from vitiated sources. All I can say in defence of my great fellow
countryman is that he came to West Africa from the very worst school a
man can for understanding the Kruboy, or any true Negro, namely, from
the Bantu African tribes, and that he only fell into the error many
other great countrymen of mine have since fallen into, whereby there is
war and misunderstanding and disaffection between our Government and the
true Negro to-day, and nothing, as far as one can see, but a grievous
waste of life and gold ahead.
The Kruboy is indeed a sore question to all old coasters. They have
devoted themselves to us English, and they have suffered, laboured,
fought, been massacred, and so on with us for generation after
generation. Many a time Krumen have come to me when we have been
together in foreign possessions and said, "Help us, we are Englishmen."
They have never asked in vain of me or any Englishman in West Africa,
but recognition of their services by our Government at home is--well,
about as much recognition as most men get from it who do good work in
West Africa. For such men are a mere handful whom Imperialism can
neglect with impunity, and, even if it has for the moment to excuse
itself for so doing, it need only call us "traders." I say us, because I
am vain of having been, since my return, classed among the Liverpool
traders by a distinguished officer.
This part of Western Africa from Sierra Leone to Cape Palmas was known
to the geographers amongst the classics as _Leuce AEthiopia_: to their
successors as the Grain or Pepper or Meleguetta Coast. I will discourse
later of the inhabitants, the Kru, from an ethnological standpoint,
because they are too interesting and important to be got in here. The
true limits of the Grain coast are from the River Sestros to Growy, two
leagues east of Cape Palmas according to Barbot, and its name came from
the fact that it was hereabouts that the Portuguese, on their early
expeditions in the 15th century, first came across grains of paradise, a
circumstance that much excited those navigators at the time and
encouraged them to pursue their expeditions to this region, for grains
of paradise were in those days much valued and had been long known in
European markets.
These euphoniously-named spices are the seeds of divers amomums, or in
lay language, cardamum--_Amomum Meleguetta_ (Roscoe) or as Pereira has
it, _Amomum granum Paradisi_. Their more decorative appellation "grains
of Paradise" is of Italian origin, the Italians having known and valued
this spice, bought it, and sold it to the rest of Europe at awful prices
long before the Portuguese, under Henry the Navigator, visited the West
African Coast. The Italians had bought the spice from the tawny Moors,
who brought it, with other products of West Africa across the desert to
the Mediterranean port Monte Barca by Tripoli.
The reason why this African cardamum received either the name of grains
of Paradise or of Meleguetta pepper is, like most African things, wrapt
in mystery to a certain extent. Some authorities hold they got the first
name on their own merits. Others that the Italian merchants gave it them
to improve prices. Others that the Italians gave it them honestly enough
on account of their being nice, and no one knowing where on earth
exactly they came from, said, therefore, why not say Paradise? It is
certain, however, that before the Portuguese went down into the unknown
seas and found the Pepper coast that the Italians knew those peppers
came from the country of Melli, but as they did not know where that was,
beyond that it was somewhere in Africa, this did not take away the sense
of romance from the spice.
As for their name Meleguetta, an equal divergence of opinion reigns. I
myself think the proper word is meneguetta. The old French name was
maneguilia, and the name they are still called by at Cape Palmas in the
native tongue is Emanequetta. The French claim to have brought peppers
and ivory from the River Sestros as early as 1364, and the River Sestros
was on the seaboard of the kingdom of Mene, but the termination quetta
is most probably a corruption of the Portuguese name for pepper. But, on
the other hand, the native name for them among the Sestros people is
Waizanzag. And therefore, the whole name may well be European, and just
as well called meleguetta as meneguetta, because the kingdom of Mene was
a fief of the Empire of Melli when the Portuguese first called at
Sestros. The other possible derivation is that which says mele is a
corruption of the Italian name for Turkey millet, _Melanga_, a thing
the grains rather resemble. Another very plausible derivation is that
the whole word is Portuguese in origin, but a corruption of _mala gens_,
the Portuguese having found the people they first bought them of a bad
lot, and so named the pepper in memory thereof. This however is
interestingly erroneous and an early example of the danger of
armchairism when dealing with West Africa. For the coast of the
_malegens_ was not the coast the Portuguese first got the pepper from,
but it was that coast just to the east of the Meleguetta, where all they
got was killing and general unpleasantness round by the Rio San Andrew,
Drewin way, which coast is now included in the Ivory.
The grains themselves are by no means confined to the Grain Coast, but
are the fruit of a plant common in all West African districts,
particularly so on Cameroon Mountain, where just above the 3,000 feet
level on the east and southeast face you come into a belt of them, and
horrid walking ground they make. I have met with them also in great
profusion in the Sierra del Crystal; but there is considerable
difference in the kinds. The grain of Paradise of commerce is, like that
of the East Indian cardamom, enclosed in a fibrous capsule, and the
numerous grains in it are surrounded by a pulp having a most pleasant,
astringent, aromatic taste. This is pleasant eating, particularly if you
do not manage to chew up with it any of the grains, for they are
amazingly hot in the mouth, and cause one to wonder why Paradise instead
of Hades was reported as their "country of origin."
The natives are very fond of chewing the capsule and the inner bark of
the stem of the plant. They are, for the matter of that, fond of
chewing anything, but the practice in this case seems to me more
repaying than when carried on with kola or ordinary twigs.
Two kinds of meleguetta pepper come up from Guinea. That from Accra is
the larger, plumper, and tougher skinned, and commands the higher price.
The capsule, which is about 2 inches long by 1 inch in breadth, is more
oval than that of the other kind, and the grains in it are round and
bluntly angular, bright brown outside, but when broken open showing a
white inside. The other kind, the ordinary Guinea grain of commerce,
comes from Sierra Leone and Liberia. They are devoid of the projecting
tuft on the umbilicus. The capsule is like that of the Accra grain. When
dry, it is wrinkled, and if soaked does not display the longitudinal
frill of the Javan _Amomum maximum_, which it is sometimes used to
adulterate. This common capsule is only about 1-1/2 inches long and 1/2
an inch in diameter, but the grain when broken open is also white like
the Accra one. There are, however, any quantity on Cameroons of the
winged Javan variety, but these have so far not been exported.
The plants that produce the grains are zingiberaceous, cane-like in
appearance, only having broader, blunter leaves than the bamboo. The
flower is very pretty, in some kinds a violet pink, but in the most
common a violet purple, and they are worn as marks of submission by
people in the Oil Rivers suing for peace. These flowers, which grow
close to the ground, seeming to belong more to the root of the plant
than the stem, or, more properly speaking, looking as if they had
nothing to do with the graceful great soft canes round them, but were a
crop of lovely crocus-like flowers on their own account, are followed by
crimson-skinned pods enclosing the black and brown seeds wrapped in
juicy pulp, quite unlike the appearance they present when dried or
withered.
There is only a small trade done in Guinea grains now, George III. (Cap.
58) having declared that no brewer or dealer in wine shall be found in
possession of grains of Paradise without paying a fine of L200, and that
if any druggist shall sell them to a brewer that druggist shall pay a
fine of L500 for each such offence.
The reason of this enactment was the idea that the grains were
poisonous, and that the brewers in using them to give fire to their
liquors were destroying their consumers, His Majesty's lieges. As far as
poison goes this idea was wrong, for Meleguetta pepper or grains of
Paradise are quite harmless though hot. Perhaps, however, some
consignment may have reached Europe with poisonous seeds in it. I once
saw four entirely different sorts of seeds in a single sample. That is
the worst of our Ethiopian friends, they adulterate every mortal thing
that passes through their hands. I will do them the justice to say they
usually do so with the intellectually comprehensible end in view of
gaining an equivalent pecuniary advantage by it. Still it is
commercially unsound of them; for example for years they sent up the
seeds of the _Kickia Africana_ as an adulteration for _Strophantus_,
whereas they would have made more by finding out that the _Kickia_ was a
great rubber-producing tree. They will often take as much trouble to put
in foreign matter as to get more legitimate raw material. I really fancy
if any one were to open up a trade in Kru Coast rocks, adulteration
would be found in the third shipment. It is their way, and legislation
is useless. All that is necessary is that the traders who buy of them
should know their business and not make infants of themselves by
regarding the African as one or expecting the government to dry nurse
them.
In private life the native uses and values these Guinea grains highly,
using them sometimes internally sometimes externally, pounding them up
into a paste with which they beplaster their bodies for various aches
and pains. For headache, not the sequelae of trade gin, but of malaria,
the forehead and temples are plastered with a stiff paste made of Guinea
grain, hard oil, chalk, or some such suitable medium, and it is a most
efficacious treatment for this fearfully common complaint in West
Africa. But the careful ethnologist must not mix this medicinal plaster
up with the sort of prayerful plaster worn by the West Africans at time
for Ju Ju, and go and mistake a person who is merely attending to his
body for one who is attending to his soul.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] This word is probably a corruption of the old name for this
district, Cerberos.
[3] The derivation of this name given by Barbot is from _misericordia_.
"As some pretend on occasion of a Portuguese ship cast away near the
little river Druro, the men of that ship were assaulted by the negroes,
which made the Portuguese cry for quarter, using the word
_misericordia_, from which by corruption mesurado."
[4] Tornado is possibly a corruption from the Portuguese _trovado_, a
thunderstorm; or from _tornado_, signifying returned; but most likely
it comes from the Spanish _torneado_, signifying thunder.