_Up the Volta--Svvanzy's trusting agent at Akuse--Amedika, the port of
Akuse on the Volta--The trials of a trolley ride--My canoe--Paddling
up-river--Rapids that raise the river thirty-four feet--Dangers of
the river--Entrancingly lovely scenery--A wealthy land--The curious
preventive service--Fears--Leaving the river--Labolabo--A notable black
man--The British Cotton-growing Experimental Farm--The lonely white
man--The fear that was catching--The lonely man's walk._
At Akuse I changed my plans. I had intended to come here, drop down the
Volta in the little river steamers that run twice a week to Addah, and
then pursue my way along the coast to Keta where there was an old Danish
castle, and possibly get across the German border and see Lome, their
capital. But there is this charm or drawback--which ever way you like to
look at it--about Africa: no one knows anything about the country beyond
his immediate district. The Provincial Commissioner had gone to Addah,
and I discussed my further progress with the D.C. and his wife as we
sat on the verandah that night and looked over the country bathed in the
most gorgeous moonlight. The D.C.'s wife, a pretty little woman who had
only been out a couple of months, was of opinion that the vile country
was killing her and her husband, that it was simply a waste of life to
live here, and she could not get over her surprise that I should find
anything of interest in it. The D.C. thought it wouldn't be half bad
if only the Government brought you back to the same place, so that you
might see some result for your labours, and he strongly advised me to go
a day or two up the river in a canoe just to see the country.
“It is quite worth seeing,” said he, and his wife smiled. She had seen
all she intended to see of the country at Akuse, and did not want to go
farther in.
The next day I went into the town, the official quarters are some
distance away, and called on a couple of the principal merchants.
The factor at Miller Bros, put a new idea into my head.
“Oh yes, go up the Volta,” said he; “you can get up as far as Labolabo,
then cut across-country and come out at Ho in German territory. You can
get to Palime from there, and that is rail-head, so you can easily make
your way down to Lome.”
It sounded rather an attractive programme.
“You go and see Rowe about it,” he suggested.
So I went and called upon Swanzy's agent, a nice young fellow, who first
laughed, then looked me up and down doubtfully, and finally said it
could be done. Mr Grey, one of their principals, had come across that
way the other day, but it was very rough going indeed. No one else that
he knew of had ever ventured it.
[Illustration: 0309]
If I liked to try he would get me a canoe to go up the river in, and
give me letters to their black agents, for I must not expect to meet any
white men. And again he looked doubtful.
If I liked; of course I liked. I am always ready to plunge in and
take any risks in the future, provided the initial steps are not too
difficult, and once he found I wanted to go, Mr Rowe made the initial
steps very easy indeed.
First he very nobly lent me twenty-five pounds in threepenny bits, for
I had got beyond the region of banks before I realised it, and had only
two pounds in hand; he engaged a canoe and six men for me; he gave me
letters to all Swanzy's agents in the back-country; and finally, when I
had said goodbye to the D.C. and his wife, he gave me luncheon and had
me rolled down on a trolley by the little hand railway, if I may coin
a word, that runs through the swamp and connects Akuse with its port
Amedika on the Volta.
This was a new mode of progression rather pleasant than otherwise, for
as it was down-hill to the river it couldn't have been hard on the men
who were pushing. I had come from the Commissioner's to the town on a
cart, proudly sitting on top of my gear, and drawn by half a dozen Kroo
boys; now my luggage went before me on another trolley, and my way was
punctuated by the number of parcels that fell off. My clothes were in
a tin uniform case supposed, mistakenly, I afterwards found, to be
air-tight and watertight, and I did not want this to fall off and break
open, because in it I had stowed all my money--twenty-five pounds all
in threepenny bits is somewhat of a care, I find. It escaped, but my
bedding went, making a nice cushion for the typewriter which followed
it.
The port Amedika, as may be seen from the picture, is very primitive,
and though twice a week the little mail steamer comes up coaly and black
as her own captain, on the occasion of my departure there were only
canoes in the harbour.
My canoe was one of the most ordinary structures, with a shelter in the
middle under which I had my chair put up. My gear was stowed fore and
aft, and six canoe-men took charge.
[Illustration: 0309]
Starting always seems to be a difficulty in Africa, and when I was weary
of the hot sun and the glare from the water, and was wondering why we
did not start, the canoe-men, true to their kind, found they had no
chop, and they had to wait till one of their number went back and got
it. But it was got at last and I was fairly afloat on the Volta.
To be paddled up a river is perhaps a very slow mode of progression, but
in no other way could I have seen the country so well; in no other way
could I have grasped its vast wealth, its wonderful resources. It is
something of an adventure to go up the Volta too, for as soon as we
started its smooth, wide reaches were broken by belts of rock that made
it seem well-nigh impassable. Again and again from the low seat in the
canoe it looked as if a rocky barrier barred all further progress, but
here and there the water rushed down the narrow chasm as in a mill-race.
Wonderful it was to find that a canoe could be poled up those rocky
stairways against the rushing water. The rapids before you reach Kpong
are innumerable; it seems as if the going were one long struggle. But
the river is wonderfully beautiful; it twists and turns, and first
on the right hand and then on the left I could see a tall peak,
verdure-clad to its very summit, Yogaga, the Long Woman. First the sun
shone on it brilliantly, as if it would emphasise its great beauty, and
then a tornado swept down, and the mist seemed to rise up and swallow
it. The Senchi Rapids raise the river thirty-four feet in a furlong or
two, and the water, white and foaming, boils over the brown rocks like
the water churned up in the wake of a great ocean steamer. I could
not believe we were going up there when we faced them, but the expert
canoe-men, stripped to a loin cloth, with shout and song defying the
river, poled and pulled and pushed the canoe up to another quiet reach,
and when they had reached calm water flung themselves down and smoked
and chattered and looked back over the way we had come. We seemed to go
up in a series of spasms; either the men were working for dear life or
they were idling so as to bring down upon them the wrath of Grant who,
after that trip along the Coast, felt himself qualified to speak, and
again and again I had to interfere and explain that if anybody was going
to scold the men it must be me. But indeed they worked so hard they
needed a spell.
[Illustration: 0313]
Many a time when the canoe was broadside on and the white water was
boiling up all round her, I thought, “Well, this really looks very
dangerous,” but nobody had told me it was, so I supposed it was only
my ignorance, but I heard afterwards that I was right, it is dangerous.
Many a bag of cotton has gone to the bottom here, and many a barrel of
oil has been dashed to pieces against the rocks, and if many a white
man's gear has not gone to the bottom too, it is only because white men
on this river are few and far between. I had one great advantage, I
did not realise the danger till we were right in it, and then it was
pressing, it absorbed every thought till we were in smooth water again,
with the men lying panting at the bottom of the canoe, so that I really
had not time to be afraid till it was all over. Frankly, I don't think
I could enter upon such a journey again so calmy, but I am glad I have
gone once, for it was such a wonderful and enchanting river. Some day
they dream the great waterway will be used to reach Tamale, a ten days'
journey farther north, but money must be spent before that happy end
is arrived at, though I fancy that if the river were in German hands
something would be attempted at once, for the country is undoubtedly
very rich.
“Scratch the earth it laughs a harvest.” Cocoa and palm oil and rubber
all come to the river or grow within a short distance of its banks, and
all tropical fruits and native food-stuffs flourish like weeds. Beauty
is perhaps hardly an asset in West Africa, but the Volta is a most
beautiful river. The Gambia is interesting, the Congo grand, but the
Volta is entrancingly lovely. I have heard men rave of the beauty of
the Thames, and it certainly is a pleasant river, with its smooth, green
lawns, its shady trees, and its picturesque houses; but to compare it
to the Volta is to compare a pretty little birch-bark canoe to a
magnificent sailing ship with all her snowy canvas set, heeling over
to the breeze. Sometimes its great, wide, quiet reaches are like still,
deep lakes, in whose clear surface is mirrored the calm, blue sky, the
fleecy clouds, the verdure-clad banks, and the hills that are clothed in
the densest green to their very peaks. Sometimes it is a raging torrent,
fighting its way over the rocks, and beneath the vivid blue sky is the
gorgeous vegetation of the Tropics, tangled, luxuriant, feathery palms,
tall and shapely silk-cotton trees bound together with twining creeper
and trailing vine in one impenetrable mass. A brown patch proclaims a
village, and here are broad-leaved bananas, handsome mangoes, fragrant
orange trees, lighter-coloured cocoa patches, and cassada that from the
distance might be a patch of lucerne. Always there are hills, rising
high, cutting the sky sharply, ever changing, ever reflected faithfully
in the river at their feet. There is traffic, of course, men fishing
from canoes, and canoes laden with barrels of oil or kernels, or cocoa
going down the river, the boats returning with the gin and the
cotton cloths for the factories run by the negro agents of the great
trading-houses; and every three or four hours or so--distance is as
yet counted by time in West Africa--are the stations of the preventive
service.
[Illustration: 0317]
This preventive service is rather curious, because both banks of the
river, in the latter part of its course, are owned by the English, and
the service is between the two portions of the Colony. But east of
the Volta, whither I was bound, the country is but little known, and
apparently the powers that be do not feel themselves equal to cope with
a very effective preventive service, so they have there the same duties,
a 4 per cent, one that the Germans have in Togo land, while west of the
Volta they have a 10 per cent. duty.
I hope there is not much smuggling on the Volta, for with all apologies
to the white preventive officers, I doubt the likelihood of the men
doing much to stop it. The stations match the river. They have been
picturesquely planned--the plans carefully carried out; the houses are
well kept up, and round them are some of the few gardens, in English
hands, on the Gold Coast that really look like gardens. Though I did not
in the course of three days' travel come across him, I felt they marked
the presence of some careful, capable white man. The credit is certainly
not due to the negro preventive men. In the presence of their white
officer they are smart-looking men; seen in his absence they relax their
efforts and look as untidy and dirty as a railway porter after a hard
day's struggle with a Bank Holiday crowd. After all one can hardly
blame the negro for not exerting himself. Nature has given him all he
absolutely requires; he has but to stretch out his hand and take it,
using almost as little forethought and exertion as the great black
cormorants or the little blue-and-white king-fishers that get their
livelihood from the river.
And I was afraid of those men. I may have wronged them for they were
quite civil, but I was afraid. Again and again they made me remember, as
the ordinary peasants never did, that I was a woman alone and very very
helpless. Nothing would have induced me to stay two nights at one of
those stations. These men were half-civilised. They had lost all awe of
a white face, and, I felt, were inclined to be presuming. What could I
have done if they had forgotten their thin veneer of civilisation, and
gone back to pure savagery. Nothing--I know it--nothing. At Adjena I had
to have my camp-bed put up on the verandah, because I found the house
too stuffy, and the moonlit river was glorious to look upon, but I was
anything but happy in my own mind; I wondered if I wanted help if my
canoe-men, who were very decent, respectable savages, would come to my
help. I wonder still. But the morning brought me a glorious view. The
sun rose behind Chai Hill, and flung its shadow all across the river,
and I attempted feebly to reproduce it in a photograph, and gladly and
thankfully I went on my way up the river, and I vowed in my own mind
that never if I could help it would I come up here again by myself. If
any adventurous woman feels desirous of following in my footsteps, I
have but one piece of advice to give her--“Don't.” I don't think I
would do it again for all the money in the Bank of England. I may do
him an injustice, but I do not trust the half-civilised black man. I got
through, I think, because for a moment he was astonished. Next time he
will not be taken by surprise, and it will not be safe.
[Illustration: 0321]
At Labolabo I left the river. Dearly I should have loved to have gone
on, to have made my way up to the Northern Territories, but for one
thing, my canoe-men were only engaged as far as Labolabo; for another,
I had not brought enough photographic plates. I really think it was that
last consideration that stopped me. What was the good of going without
taking photographs? Curiously enough, the fact that I was afraid did not
weigh much with me. I suppose we are all built alike, and at moments our
mental side weights up our emotional side. Now, my mental side very much
wanted to go up past the Afram plain. I should have had to stay in the
preventive service houses, which grew farther and farther apart, and I
was afraid of the preventive service men, afraid of them in the sordid
way one fears the low-class ruffian of the great cities, but there was
that in me that whispered that there was a doubt, and therefore it might
be exceedingly foolish to check my search after knowledge for a fear
that might only be a causeless fear. But about the photographic plates
there was no doubt; I had not brought nearly enough with me, and
therefore I landed very meekly at Labolabo.
There was rather a desolate-looking factory, but it did not look
inviting enough to induce me to go inside it, so I sat down under a tree
on the high bank of the river and interviewed the black factor to whom
Swanzy's agent had given me a letter. He was mightily surprised, but
I was accustomed to being received with surprise now, and began to
consider the making of a cup of tea. Then the factor brought another
man along and introduced him to me as Swanzy's agent at Pekki Blengo,
Mr Olympia. And once more I feel like apologising to all the African
peoples for anything I may have said against them. Mr Olympia came
from French Dahomey. He was extremely good-looking, and had polished,
courteous manners such as one dreams of in the Spanish hidalgos of old.
If you searched the wide world over I do not think you could wish to
find a more charming man than Swanzy's black agent at Pekki Blengo. I
know very little of him. I only met him casually as I met other black
men, men outside the pale for me, a white woman, but I felt when I
looked at him there might be possibilities in the African race; when
I think of their enormous strength and their wonderful vigour, immense
possibilities.
I explained to Mr Olympia that I wanted to get to the rest-house at
Anum, that I had arranged for my canoe-men to carry my kit there, and
that Mr Rowe had told me that he, Mr Olympia, could get me carriers on
to Ho. He said certainly, but he thought I ought at least to go up to
the British Cotton-growing Experimental Farm, about ten minutes' walk
away from the river. He felt that the white man in charge would be much
hurt if I did not at least call and see him.
A white man at Labolabo! How surprised I was. Of course I would go, and
Mr Olympia apologising for the absence of hammock or cart, we set off to
walk.
Those African ten minutes! It took me a good forty minutes through the
blazing heat of an African afternoon, and then I was met upon the steps
of the bungalow by a perfectly amazed white man in his shirt sleeves,
who hurriedly explained that when he had seen the luggage coming along
in charge of the faithful Grant, who made the nearest approach to a
slave-driver I have ever seen, he had asked him, “Who be your master?”
“It be no massa,” said Grant, “it be missus.”
“And then,” said my new friend, “I set him at the end of the avenue and
told him he was to keep you off till I found a coat. But I couldn't find
it. I don't know where the blamed thing's got to.”
He went on to inquire where I had come from and how I had come. I told
him, “Up the river.”
“But,” he protested, “it requires a picked crew of ten preventive
service men to come up the Volta.”
I assured him, I was ready to take my oath about it, you could do it
fairly easily with six ordinary, hired men, but he went on shaking his
head and declared he couldn't imagine what Rowe was thinking of. He
thought I had really embarked on the maddest journey ever woman dreamt
of, and while getting me a cool drink, for which I blessed him, went on
murmuring, “Rowe must have been mad.” I think his surprise brought home
to me for the first time the fact that I was doing anything unusual.
Before that it had seemed very natural to be going up the river, to
be simply wanting to get on and see the great waterway and the country
behind.
I did not go on to Anum as I had intended. It was Easter Saturday, and
my new friend suggested I should spend Easter with him. I demurred,
and he said it would be a charity. He had no words to express his
loneliness, and as for the canoe-men, who could not stay to carry my
things to Anum, let them go. He would see about my gear being taken up
there. And so I stayed, glad to see how a man managed by himself in the
wilderness.
The British Cotton-growing Experimental Farm at Labolabo is to all
intents and purposes a failure. It was set there in the midst of
gorgeously rich country to teach the native to grow cotton, and the
native seeing that cocoa, with infinitively less exertion, pays him very
much better, naturally firmly declines to do anything of the sort. So
here in this beautiful spot lives utterly alone a solitary white man
who, with four inefficient labourers, tries desperately to keep the
primeval bush from swallowing up the farm and entirely effacing all
the hard work that has been done there. This farm should be a valuable
possession besides being a very beautiful one. The red-roofed bungalow
is set in a bay of the high, green hills, which stretch out verdure-clad
arms, threatening every moment to envelop it. The land slopes gently,
and as I sat on the broad verandah, through the dense foliage of the
trees I could catch glimpses of the silver Volta a mile and a half away,
while beyond again the blue hills rose range after range till they were
lost in the bluer distance. Four years ago this man who was entertaining
me so hospitably had planted a mile-long avenue to lead up to his
bungalow, and now the tall grape-fruit and shaddock in front of his
verandah meet and have regularly to be cut away to keep the path clear.
I am too ignorant to know what could be grown with profit, only I can
see that the land is rich and fruitful, and should be, with the river
so close, a most valuable possession. As it is, it is one of the most
lonely places in the world. I sympathised deeply with the man living
there alone. The loneliness grips. If I went to my room I could hear him
tramping monotonously up and down the verandah. “Tramp, tramp, tramp,”
and when I went out he smiled queerly.
[Illustration: 0327]
“I can't help doing it,” said he; “it's the lonely man's walk. And when
I can't see those two lines,” he pointed to two boards in the verandah,
“I know I'm drunk and I go to bed.”
It was like the story of the man who kept a frog in his pocket and every
time he had a drink he took it out and looked at it.
“What the dickens do you do that for?” asked a companion.
“Well, when I see two frogs,” said he, “I know I've had enough.”
Now I don't believe my friend at Labolabo did exceed, judging by his
looks, but if ever man might be excused it was he. He had for servants
a very old cook and a slave-boy with a much-scarred face; the marks upon
his face proclaimed his former status, but no man could understand the
unintelligible jargon he spoke, so no man knew where he came from. It
was probably north of German territory. At any rate, he flitted about
the bungalow a most inadequate steward.
And he laid the table in the stone house--or rather the shelter with two
stone walls, a stone floor, and a broken-down thatch roof, where we had
our meals. It was perhaps twenty yards from the bungalow, and on the
garden side grew like a wall great bushes of light-green feathery
justitia with its yellow, bell-like flowers, while on the other side a
little grass-grown plain stretched away to the forest-clad hills behind.
Oh, but it was lonely! and fear is a very catching thing.
“There is nothing to be afraid of in Africa,” said my host, “till the
moment there is something, and then you're done.”
Whether he was right or not I do not know, but I realised as I had never
done before why men get sick in the bush, worse, why they take to drink
and why they go mad. I looked out from the verandah, and when I saw
a black figure slip silently in among the trees I wondered what it
portended. I looked behind me to see if one might not be coming from
behind the kitchen. The fool-bird in the bush crying, “Hoo! hoo! hoo!”
all on one note seemed but crying a suitable dirge. Fear hid on the
verandah; I could hear him in the creak of a door, in the “pad, pad” of
the slave-boy's feet; I could almost have sworn I saw him skulking under
the mango tree where were kept the thermometers; and when on Easter
Sunday a tornado swept down from the hills, blotting out the vivid
green in one pall of grey mist, he was in the shrieking wind and in the
shuddering rain.
Never was I more impersonally sorry to leave a man alone, for if I saw
my host again I doubt if he would recognise me, but it seemed wicked to
leave a fellow white man alone in such a place. If there had been any
real danger, of course I should only have been an embarrassment, but
at least I was company of his own kind and I kept that haunting fear at
bay.
I stayed two days and then I felt go I must. I was also faced with my
own carelessness and the casual manner in which I had dropped into the
wilderness. Anum mountain was a steep climb of five miles, and beyond
that again I had, as far as I could gather, several days' journey in the
wilds before I could hope to reach rail-head in German Togo, and I
had actually never remembered that I should want a hammock. The
Cotton-growing Association didn't possess one, and, like Christian in
the “Pilgrim's Progress,” I “cast about me” what I should do. I could
not fancy myself walking in the blazing noonday sun. My host smiled. He
did not think it was a matter of any great consequence because he felt
sure I could not get through, but he came to my rescue all the same and
sent up a couple of labourers to the Basel Mission at Anum to see what
they could suggest. The labourers came back with a hammock--rather a
dilapidated one--on their heads, and an invitation to luncheon next day.
“It's as far as you'll go,” said my friend, “if nothing else stops you;
you can't possibly get carriers. Remember, I'll put you up with pleasure
on your way back.”
But I was not going to face the Volta again by myself, though I did not
tell him that. Those black men insulted me by making me fear them.
It was a very hot morning when we started to climb up Anum mountain. The
bush on either side was rather thick, and the road was steep and very
bad going. It was shaded, luckily, most of the way, and there arose that
damp, pleasant smell that comes from moist earth, the rich, sensuous,
insidious scent of an orchid that I could not see, or the mouselike
smell of the great fruitarian bats that in these daylight hours were
hidden among the dense greenery of the roadside. It was a toilsome
journey, and my new friend walked beside me, but at last we reached Anum
town, a mud-built, native town, bare, hot, dirty, unkempt, and we passed
beyond it to the grateful shade once more of the Basel Mission grounds.