Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons/Chapter 17
CHAPTER XVII
THE LOG OF THE LAFAYETTE
As soon as I returned to Glass I naturally went to discourse with Doctor Nassau on Fetish. We discoursed, I may mention, at length and to my advantage. In one of these talks the doctor mentioned that there were lakes in the centre of the Island of Corisco, and that in those lakes were quantities of fish, which fish were always and only fished by the resident ladies, at duly appointed seasons. Needless to say, I felt it a solemn duty to go and investigate personally; and equally needless to say, Doctor Nassau gave me every assistance, which took the form of lending me a small vessel called the Lafayette. She had been long in his possession, but of late years little used, still she was a fine seaworthy boat, so with a crew headed by the Doctor's factotum, Eveke, who was a native of the said island, together with a few friends of his, we set sail.
Left Libreville at 8 A.M. so as to get full advantage of wind and tide. Doctor Nassau kindly comes along the wharf to see us clear away. We then make for the guard-ship, to pass our papers, and do this in an unyachtsmanlike way, lowering our gaff too soon, hence have ignominiously to row alongside. The off-shore breeze blows strong this morning and the tide is running out like a mill-race, so the Lafayette flies seaward gallantly. Libreville looks very bright and pleasing—with its red roofs and white walls amongst the surrounding wealth of dark green mango trees; but we soon leave it behind, passing along in front of the low, rolling hills, all densely clad with forests, out to Cape Clara, or Cape Joinville as some maps will have it—the end of the northern shore of the Gaboon estuary. When we get to the Cape we find a pretty fair sea running, and Eveke, whose seamanship I am beginning to view with suspicion, lets her gybe, and I get knocked into the bottom of the boat by the boom, and stay there. There is nothing like entering into the spirit of a thing like this if you mean to enjoy it, and after all that's the wisest thing to do out here, for there's nothing between enjoying it and dying of it. The sun is broiling hot; everything one has got to sit on or catch hold of is as hot as a burning brick, and there is no cabin, nor even locker, on our craft; so I prop myself up against my collecting-box and lazily take stock of the things round me, and write.
My crew are a miscellaneous lot of M'pongwe, black but not comely. One gentleman, however, evidently thinks he is, as he has a beautiful pair of carefully tended whiskers, rare adjuncts to the African. He also has a pair of kerseymere trousers, far too tight for him; but a man with whiskers "all same for one with white man must dress the part, and trousers are scarce in this country. Our cargo consists of two bags of salt, several bags and boxes of sand for ballast, several bottles of water for drinking, a bundle of bedding—a loan from the Doctor, and a deck chair—a loan from Mr. Hudson. Owing to the Lafayette having no deck, the latter is "not required on the voyage," and is folded up. I observe with anxiety that the cargo is not stowed in a manner that would meet with the approval of Captain Murray, and decide to get dunnage and do it in style the first port we call at. Can't possibly shift cargo in this sea. The crew drink the water in such quantities that there will be an oceán tragedy if we get becalmed. We run along close in shore from Cape Clara to Cape Esterias—a fine, sandy, rock-strewn shore, backed by a noble bush—for eight miles. The land falls away then, for Esterias is the southernmost point of Corisco Bay. Close to Cape Esterias I see the familiar bark-built village that betokens Fans, and on sighting this we change our course and lay one apparently for the Brazilian ports.
The Lafayette flies along before a heavy sea, and from my position at the bottom of her I can see nothing but her big white mainsail and her mast with its shrouds and stays standing out clear, rocking to and fro, against the hard blue sky; and just the white crests of the waves as they go dancing by. I have nothing to hear save the pleasantest sounds in the world—the rustle of the sail and the swish of the waves as they play alongside the vessel. Now and then there is added to these the lazy, laughing talk of the black men; and now and then an extra lively wave throws its crest in among us. Soon all the crew drop softly off to sleep, Eveke joining them, so I rouse up and take the main sheet and the tiller and keep her so. I feel as if I were being baked to a cinder, but there's no help for it, and some of it is very pleasant. About four o'clock I see two lumps of land on the sky-line. I wake Eveke up and he seems surprised at my not knowing what they are. "That's Corisco and Banã, sir," says he. I explain to Eveke, as I hand over the navigation to him, that every one has not been born on Corisco, and the fact of his having had this advantage is the reason of his being pilot now; and I reseat myself in the bottom of the boat and carefully look over the side, mindful of that boom palaver. We head for the bigger and most western bit of land, soon seeing the details of its undulating, black-green forests. When we get within a mile, Eveke asks me to wake up the man in front of me, and I stir him firmly, but gently, with a chart; for I know what waking black men leads to sometimes; and when he rouses I order him to wake up the others, and in a few minutes they are all more or less awake, even the man on the look-out. They wash their mouths out with sea-water, and then re-commence their laughing, talking and water-drinking again.
We run into a small, sandy-shored, wooded bay where, as I find is Eveke's habit, we lower our gaff prematurely and drift, in the proper way, leisurely towards the above, stern foremost. At last the Lafayette, finding everything is left to her, says: "Look here, you fellows, if don't help I won't play," and stops and commences to swing broadside on. So the oars—or sweeps I should call them, for we have evidently returned to fourteenth century seamanship—are got out and in a few minutes we are bumping violently on the strand. We let go the anchor, make all snug and go ashore. When ashore, of course with the exception of myself and the pilot, the crew indulge in a dance to stretch their cramped limbs. As no inhabitants turn up, Eveke runs up into the little village that fronts us and hunts a few out, who come and stare at us in a woolly stupid way, very different from my friends, the vivacious Fans. Eveke has tremendous greetings with them—particularly with the young ladies. He hastily informs me that he is related to them. I hope he is. He says most of the people are away at the farms—which is not an affliction to me, for Eveke wastes enough time on those we have got, and they seem to me a churlish lot for Africans. The only question they ask us is: Have we any tobacco? Corisco is nearly out of tobacco, owing to the weather having been too rough of late for them to get across either to Eloby, or Cocco Beach, where the factories are, for more. They are gratified by our affirmative answer, and sit down, in a line, on a large log, and beam at us in a subdued way, while we get the things we want off the Lafayette and finish securing her for the night. This being done, Eveke and I go off to his father's house—his father, the Rev. Mr. Ibea, being the sole representative of the American Presbyterian mission now on Corisco Island.
I have heard much of the strange variety of scenery to be found on this island: how it has, in a miniature way, rivers, lakes, forests, prairies, swamps and mountains; and our walk demonstrates to me the baldness of the truth of the statement. The tide being now nearly in, we cannot keep along the beach all the way, which is a mercy—for the said beach is, where it is dry, of the softest, whitest sand imaginable; where it is wet, of the softest, pink-dove-coloured sand, and it is piled with fresh, rotting, and rotten seaweed into which, at every step, you sink over your ankles in an exhausting way, and on the surface of which you observe centipedes crawling, and, needless to say, sandflies galore. When we come to a point of any one of the many little bays or indentations in the coast-line where the sea is breaking, we clamber up the bank and turn inland, still ankle deep in sand, and go through this museum of physical geography. First a specimen of grass land, then along a lane of thickly pleached bush, then down into a wood with a little (at present) nearly dried up swamp in its recesses; then up out on to an open heath which has recently been burnt and is covered with dead bracken and scorched oil palms; then through a village into grass again, and back to the beach to plough our way through seaweed across another bay; then round some remarkable rocks, up into a wood, then grass, and more bush and more beach, and up among a cluster of coco-palms, more grass; and then a long stretch of path with one side of it a thick hedge which is encroaching in a way that calls for energetic lopping, for the bush leans so across the path that you also have to lean at an angle of nearly 45° towards the other side. I begin to despair, my boots being full of sand, and to fear we shall never get through the specimens before nightfall. There is such an air of elaborate completeness about this museum, and we have not even commenced the glacier or river departments. However, at length we see what seems to be the entrance to an English park, and coming up to this find a beautiful avenue of mango trees.
Corisco evidently feels the dry season severely. The dry sandy soil is thickly strewn with dead leaves. At the end of the avenue there is a pretty wooden house, painted white, with its doors and window-frames painted a bold bright blue. Around it are a cluster of outbuildings like it, each mounted on poles, the little church, the store, and the house for the children in the mission school. A troop of children rush out and greet Eveke effusively. One of them, I am informed, is his brother, and he commences to bubble out conversation in Benga. I send Eveke off to find his mother, thinking he will like to get his greetings with her over unobserved, and after a few minutes she comes forward to greet me,—a pretty, bright-looking lady whom it is hard to believe old enough to be Eveke's mother; and not only Eveke's but the mother of a lot of strapping young women who come forward with her. and the grandmother of other strapping young women mixed up among them. I must really try and find out which is which. Until I do so perhaps it will be diplomatic to regard them all as her daughters. Mrs. Ibea insists, in the kindliest way possible, on my taking possession of her own room. Mr. Ibea is away, she says, on an evangelising visit to the mainland at Cape St. John (the northern extremity of Corisco Bay), intending to call at Eloby Island; so he may not be here for some days, and she promptly gives me tea and alligator pears, both exceedingly welcome.
The views from the windows of my clean and comfortable room are very beautiful. The house stands on a high promontory called Alondo Point, the turning point of the south and west sides of the island, and almost overhangs the sea. A reef of rock runs out at the foot of the cliff for about a mile, on which the sea breaks constantly. The great rollers of the South Atlantic, meeting here their first check since they left Cape Horn and the Americas, fly up in sheets of foam with a never-ending thunder. I go to bed early, thankfully observing that the gay mosquito curtain is entirely "for dandy"—decorative and not defensive.
The obtaining of specimens of fish from the lakes in the centre of the island being my main object in visiting Corisco, I set to work by starting immediately after breakfast to the bay that we came to last night, and which I will call Nassau Bay in future. I go along the same variegated path I came by yesterday. Eveke has slept at the village in the Bay among his relatives so as to keep an eye, he says, on the Lafayette. When I find him, he says that only women can catch the lake fish, and that they always catch them in certain baskets, and as these have to be made they cannot be ready to-day. Having heard Corisco is famous for shells, and having seen nothing on any of the many beaches on the southern side of the island more conchologically charming than half a dozen dilapidated whelks, I ask where the main deposits of shells are. Eveke says there is any quantity of them on the other little islands, Laval to the south, and Baña to the S.E. in Corisco Bay. To his horror I say I will go to those islands now, and we get our scattered crew together and the Lafayette under way, and run across first to some sandbanks, whose heads are exposed at low water—beautiful stretches of dove-coloured sand, but apparently not even a whelk as far as shells go. Up through the sand are sticking thousands of little white tubes, apparently empty; but after a few minutes,—having parted from the riot of the crew and quietness reigning—I find, when the sand is wetted by the foam, some lovely little sea anemones looking out of the tops of the tubes. After a time I rejoin the crew and find they have dug out a few olive and harp shells, but nothing remarkable; and I hurt Eveke's feelings by saying I consider Corisco, as a collecting ground for shells, a fraud. He assures me solemnly that in the wet season, which has calmer seas than the dry, when the sun comes out and shines upon the exposed sandbanks, they are covered with thousands of shells, but from his description I think they are mostly olives. We go across from the sandbank to Laval, a little rock island with a patch of bush on its summit, and from its edges—the size does not run to shores—I get some sponges. Then on to Baña, a larger island, which has a population of rats only, from whence it is sometimes called Rat Island—but I get no more shells, Before I get back to Corisco, Eveke solemnly assures me that the women with their fishing baskets will be ready to-morrow early.
Get up and hurry off early to Nassau Bay. Women not ready. Wait for two hours sitting on the steps of a native's house, which is built in the European style, and situated across the top of the village. There are two other houses like this one, I notice, between here and Alondo, each ostentatiously placed across the street. At last Eveke comes and says, "The women make trouble. They no get the baskets ready to-day; they have them ready to-morrow for sure, but not to-day." Internally blessing Eveke and the ladies, I go to see how the world is made along the southern shores of the island―along the dove-coloured sand, hedged on my right hand by the spray wall of the surf, and on the left by low-growing bushes, flowering profusely with long sprays of intensely sweet-scented, white mimosa-like flower. Behind these rises the high bush of one of the miniature forests. Every now and then I pass a path to some native village, which, though hidden behind the trees, has its existence betrayed by the canoes, three or four of them drawn high up out of the reach of the surf under a group of coco-palms, which, as a general rule, stand as a gateway to these paths. About a mile along, perhaps a little more, the point runs out which makes the eastern end of Nassau Bay, the largest bay on this southern side of the island, and the only reasonably safe anchorage on all Corisco's shores. This point is composed of similar rock to that which juts out and forms the western end of this bay.[1] The rocks are exceedingly strange and picturesque. The surf play has hollowed them out underneath, until the upper part overhangs like a snow cornice; and in several places masses of rock jut out beyond the others, weathered into strange forms, looking wonderfully like the heads of great lizard and serpent monsters stretched out, gazing towards the mainland of Africa. Some of these points of rock have trees growing along the neck of them, looking like a bristling mane. The under part of the rock is eaten back into a concavity, and in this again are eaten out groups of caves, a network of them intercommunicating in places, and pillars of rock rising in them from floor to ceiling. In the floor are perfectly lovely, clear pools of sea-water; the rock in which they are hollowed out is a soft gray-green, and some zoophyte of an exquisite bright mauve or pink-violet colour grows in a broad band round the upper edge; and in the water, lambent with the light reflected from the roof, float in a tangled skein the seaweeds—the softest, sweetest commningling of golden-browns, greens, and reds imaginable. These little caves are gems of beauty, and nothing but becoming suddenly aware that the tide is rapidly coming in, makes me tear myself away and return across the bay, past where the Lafayette lies anchored, towards Alondo. After a mile over this trying track of rotten seaweed, on going round a little point, I find a lot of wild, uncivil children, who yell and dance round me half-terrified, but wholly malignant. They spit at me and shout, "Frenchy no good," "Frenchy no good," in English, such as it is, and equally broken Spanish. At first I think, Well! France is no business of mine; but I instantly receive a severe rap on my moral knuckles from my conscience, which tells me that as I chose to place myself under the protection of the French flag above Njole, and a great protection it undoubtedly was, I must, in my turn, protect it from insult when it flies on the Lafayette in foreign waters. Moreover, the blood of the Vikings that is in me gets up on its own account at such treatment, and I make up my mind to suitably correct those children forthwith, particularly a male albino about fourteen years old, who is clad in the remains of an antique salt sack, which he wears unaltered, inverted over him. Unfortunately, holes have been roughly cut in the bottom and sides of it to let out his unnecessary head and arms; but at this identical moment I catch sight of a sweet-looking nun doing needle-work as she sits on the rocks. I go up to her and pass compliments, but do not complain to her about her flock, because she must be perfectly aware how they are going on, and secondly I am sure she is too meek to deal with them, even if she disapproves. Moreover, my knowledge of Spanish consists almost entirely of expressions of thanks and greetings—expressions which you are most in need of when dealing with Spaniards, as a general rule. So, finding she knows no English, I bow myself off and go my way round the rocky point that forms the end of another shallow bay, looking ostentatiously tired and feeble. Round that rocky point after me come the yelling pack led by the albino, and there things happen to those children that cause them to prefer the nun's company to mine. I make my way on, and to my dismay find the sea flying and churning up in a roaring rock cauldron at the extremity of the next point, so that I cannot get past. There is no path up inland that I can reach without passing the place where I have left the nun sitting. I feel naturally shy about doing this because of the male albino having gone off leaving his sack with me, and I do not know the Spanish idiom for "Please, ma'am, it came off in my hand;" though doubtless this idiom exists, for there are parlour-maids and wine-glasses in Spain, and I am sure they employ this phrase every time when, in washing a wine-glass, they have gripped one end like a vice and wrung the other off. And not the albino alone has got out of repair this side of the rock, for neither that promising young lady who spat in my face, nor the one who threw sand in my eyes are what they were this morning. There is nothing for it then but the dwarf cliff; so I climb it and get into the bush and try and strike a path. I get into a plantain plantation, which means there is a village close at hand, and on the further side I come into a three-hut one, and find a most amiable old lady sunning herself in the centre of it. Unfortunately she does not know any English, but I shed a box of lucifer matches on her, wishing to show that I mean well, and knowing that one of the great charms of a white man to a black is this habit of shedding things. It is their custom to hang round one in their native wilds in the hope something will be shed, either intentionally or unintentionally. Not, I fancy, for the bald sake of the article itself, but from a sort of sporting interest in what the next thing shed will be. I know it is my chief charm to them, and they hang round wondering whether it will be matches, leaf tobacco, pocket-handkerchiefs, or fish-hooks; and when the phenomena flag they bring me various articles for sale to try to get me into working order again. My present old lady is glad of her matches and they brighten up her intelligence, and she begins to understand I want something. After experimenting on me with a bunch of plantains and a paw-paw unsuccessfully, she goes and fetches a buxom young woman who soon comprehends I want Mrs. Ibea's house, and instantly she and the old lady escort me down a grass path and through some galleries of specimens of physical geography. We are soon joined by two pretty young girls, and wind our way back to the shore again on the further side of the point that had driven me inland. The elders then take themselves off after a mutual interchange of compliments and thanks; the young women come on with me. Mighty pretty pictures they make with their soft dusky skins, lithe, rounded figures, pretty brown eyes, and surf-white teeth showing between their laughing lips as they dance before me; and I cannot help thinking what a comfort they would be to a shipwrecked mariner and how he would enjoy it all.
On we go, climbing round every rocky point until we find the tide too far in for any more beach at all, and strike into an inland path. These Corisco paths require understanding to get on with. They all seem to start merely with the intention of taking you round a headland because the tide happens to be in; but, like all African paths, once they are started Allah or Sheitan only knows where they will go, and their presiding spirits might quote Kipling and sing, "God knows where we shall go, dear lass, and the deuce knows what we shall see," to the wayfarer who follows them. One thing and one thing only you can safely prognosticate of the African path; and that is that it will not follow the shortest line between any two given points. A Corisco one turns up off the beach, springs inland saying to you, "Want to go round that corner, do you? Oh! well; just come and see some of our noted scenery while you are here," and takes you through a miniature forest, small swamp, and a prairie. "It's a pity," says the path, "not to call at So-and-so's village now we are so near it," and off you have to go through a patch of grass and a plantation to the village. "We must hurry up and get back to that beach again. Blessed if I hadn't nearly forgotten what I came out for!" it continues; and back on to the beach it plunges, landing you about fifty yards from the place where you left it on account of the little headland.
At last we reach Alondo, and I give my guides buttons, reels of cotton, pocket-handkerchiefs, fish-hooks, and matches, and we part friends; they to show their treasures in their village, and to give rise to the hope that I may get lost on Corisco again, soon and often, I to tea and talk with Mrs. Ibea. I tell her Eveke had said in the forenoon, when I last saw him, that he was coming home in the evening; but he does not turn up and his mother says she "expects he is courting his mother-in-law." Regarding this as probably a highly interesting piece of native custom, in the interests of Science, I prop open my sleepy eyelids and listen. After all it isn't—but only a piece of strange native morality. His lady-love, it seems, is house-keeper to a man on the mainland who is always talking of leaving the district but doesn't do so, so the marriage gets perpetually postponed. I hope that man won't try the patient affection of the engaged pair too long, for I should fancy it might lead to some internal disorder.
I heard a quantity of details of Corisco family affairs—one very sad one, of how a young man who was a native trader for one of the German houses up the Cameroons River, came to his death a short time ago. The firm had decided to break factory at the place where he was stationed, a thing the natives of this country cannot bear; for having a factory that has once been established among them removed, brings them into derision and contempt among their neighbours. "You're a pretty town," say the scornful. "You can't keep a factory. Yah!" Moreover, a factory in a town is an amusement and a convenience, let alone being lucrative to the native. Well, this unfortunate young Benga man was left behind by the white men to see the last of the goods cleared out and brought down river; and while he was faithfully looking to these things, the local natives attacked him and killed him and "cut him up like a fish into small pieces and threw them into the water," says Mrs. Ibea. These native sub-traders have very risky lives of it, travelling undefended, with goods, amongst the savage tribes on this South-West Coast. They frequently get killed and robbed, and the only thing that keeps them from not being so treated still more frequently is that the commercial instinct of the bush tribes warns them that it would completely stamp out trade. In Corisco Bay the river Muni, a name given it by the Portuguese early navigators from the native word for "take care," is notoriously unsafe—all the more so because there is no settled European authority over it, France and Spain being at loggerheads about the ownership of the piece of coast from Cape Esterias to Batta. This had doubtless a good deal to do with those children's conduct this afternoon; for Corisco Island and Eloby Islands are Spanish possessions, and are under a Vice-Governor to the Governor of Fernando Po. I remember when I was out before, being led to believe that the Vice-Governorship of Eloby was a sort of pensioning-off place for Spanish officials who had gone mad, or that it was held by London County Councillors in disguise. One of the Vice-Governors was truly great at domestic legislation, and nothing but the habit of forgetting in a day or so the orders he had issued made the place habitable at all. At one time there was an ordinance that all lights on the island should be out at IO P.M., and as your African is a sad dog for late hours, this bored him terribly. Shortly after, there was another that all goats should be kept tied up. This fairly ran the native off his legs trying to catch them. The goats, I believe, liked it, regarding it as a kind of a game, though they made an awful ba-aaing which kept the lightless Africans awake. I do not know what the present Governor is like. Maybe he would have seen fit to regard me as a filibuster coming in flying the French flag, intent on annexing Corisco to Gaboon, and might have sent me off to prison at Fernando Po, as happened to Mr. Ibea once for some religious palaver he got into with the two Catholic priests who are on the island.
These priests, and I believe three nuns, are the only white live people on the island now. Dead white people are there in the two cemeteries in a sad quantity; for in the early fifties, when the American Presbyterian Mission opened work on this Coast, their opinion was that the fever risk for the white ministers would be less on this island, separated as it is by some twenty miles of sea from the mainland, and that they could establish a station on it and live in comparative safety, while they educated natives to go and do the work on the mainland. But Corisco Island behaved like every other West Coast "sanatorium," and demonstrated that it was no healthier than its neighbouring country; and several ministers having died and most of the remainder suffering severely from fever, they decided to move on to the continent, where they could carry on their work directly and could not be much worse off than they were on the island.
Dr. Nassau, of whom I have already spoken, and Mrs. Hogden, whose husband lies buried on Corisco, are the surviving members of the early days of the American Presbyterian Mission; and on the Mission moving to the continent, the Doctor, more suo, made some wonderful journeys hundreds of miles into the interior, where no white man had been before, and where in many places no white man has been since. I am quite aware that Dr. Nassau was the first white man to send home gorillas' brains; still I deeply regret he has not done more for science and geography. Had he but had Livingstone's conscientious devotion to taking notes and publishing them, we should know far more than we do at present about the hinterland from Cameroons to the Ogowé, and should have, for ethnological purposes, an immense mass of thoroughly reliable information about the manners and religions of the tribes therein, and Dr. Nassau's fame would be among the greatest of the few great African explorers—not that he would care a row of pins for that. I beg to state I am not grumbling at him, however, as I know he would say I was, because of his disparaging remarks on my pronunciation of M'pongwe names, but entirely from the justifiable irritation a student of fetish feels at knowing there is but one copy of this collection of materials, and that that copy is in the form of a human being and will disappear with him before it is half learnt by us, who cannot do the things he has done.
Get up very early, make a hasty breakfast, and walk to Nassau Bay, full of pleasant anticipations of a day's good fishing in those lakes. When I arrive at the village find I need not have hurried, so sit down for my usual wait.
At last Eveke, who has been making demonstrations of great activity in getting the ladies under way, succeeds in so doing—or, I fancy, more properly speaking, those ladies who are ready, and disposed to start on their own account, do so. Several men accompany the party and we leave the village by a path that goes round to the right of the plank-built house, plunges forthwith into a little ravine, goes across a dried swamp, up a hill and out on to an open prairie, all in about twenty minutes. The prairie has recently been burnt, and is a stretch of blackened green with the ruins of a few singed, or burnt up, trees rising from it.
These burnt lands are interesting, though they make one in a horrid mess. I now understand the rationale of the statement the natives have often made to me; namely, that if you fire the grass too soon, or when there is no wind, you kill it for good. If you wait until it is "dry too much" it is all right and you don't kill it. This is because the grass grows in a lot of bulb-like bottom tufts; when the outer and upper parts are quite dry it catches fire and, fanned by the wind, the fire licks this up and sweeps on with great rapidity, leaving the moist heart of the tuft comparatively uninjured; and this sends out fresh green leaves when the wet season's tornado rain comes down on it. Whereas if you burn it too soon, and without wind, the outer stuff, being insufficiently dry to burn with this rapidity, smoulders, and the heat of it lasting longer, kills the inside.
Some of the low-growing, bamboo-like palms act in the same way; but should there happen to be a lot of dry grass, or their own dry cast-off leaves round them, close up to the stem, their vital part just above the root gets injured, and they die or make very bad convalescences. I do not know whether it is so in Corisco, but at other places where I have been there is always a fire-doctor, who by means of ju-ju, backed as ju-ju often is by sound common sense and local knowledge, decides which is the proper day to set the grass on fire.
We go across this prairie into a little wood mainly made up of beautiful wild fig-trees, with their muscles showing through the skin like our own beech-trees' muscles do, only the wild fig stem is whitish-grey and most picturesquely twisted and branching. Then out of this on to another prairie, larger and unburnt. During the whole of our walk from the village we have been yelling in prolonged, intoned howls for ladies, whose presence is necessary to the legitimate carrying on of our fishing—lady representatives of each village being expected to attend and see the fish are properly divided. I cannot find there is any fetish at the bottom of this custom, and think its being restricted to the women is originally founded on the male African's aversion to work; and in the representation of the villages, on the Africans' distrust of each other.
Notably, and grievously, we howl for En-gou-ta-a-a and Engouta comes not; so we throw ourselves down on the deliciously soft, fine, golden brown grass, in the sun, and wait for the tardy, absent ones, smoking, and laughing, and sleeping, and when any of the avocations palls on any of us we rise up and howl "Engouta." After about two mortal hours of this, and when my companions have for some time settled down, quite reconciled, to sleep peacefully, I hear a crackle-crackle-like fusillade of miniature guns. Looking towards the place whence the sound comes I notice a cloud of bright blue smoke surmounting a rapidly advancing wall of crimson fire. I get up and mention this fact briefly to my drowsy companions, adding in the case of the more profound sleepers an enlightening kick, and make an exemplary bee-line to the bush in front of us. The others follow my example with a rapidity I should not have expected in their tribe, but, in spite of some very creditable and spirited sprint performances, three members of the party get scorched and spent the balance of the afternoon sittin in mud-holes, comforting themselves with the balmy black slime.
The fire swept across our bit of the prairie in the line of the breeze, and died out when it came to the green wood in a very short time; and shortly afterwards the absent ones, including Engouta, turn up. These ladies explained "some fool man been done burn" a patch on the other side to plant manioc. The whole island is busy planting now before the rains come on. Some days ago he thought the fire was out, and safe, but it wasn't, and the stiff breeze fanned it up. "People should be careful with fire," I say sententiously and they all agree with me, the scorched ones enthusiastically.
A little clamber down into the wood we are in brings us to the lakes. There is a little chain of them—they are just basins in the rock strata of varying sizes, and each has a thick lining of black mud. The water is at its lowest now, as it is the end of the dry season, and the water they contain is, I think, the accumulation of rain water from wet seasons.
As far as I can see there are no streams running into or out of them. In the wet season probably there may be both. One of them the ladies refuse to fish in, saying it was too deep possibly being a deep crack in the rock like the one you see as you pass the enclosed grounds of the Catholic Mission at Evangelanda; and I think they are prevented from evaporating, as that one does in the dry season, by being surrounded with the dense bush of this tangled little wood, which occupies the hollow of the interior of the island in which they are situated. Even with this I believe they would dry, were the dry season the hot season, as it is on the Gold Coast. Most of these lakes have an encircling rim of rock, from which, if you are a fisher, you jump down into unmitigated black slime to your knees you then waddle, and squatter, and grunt, and skylark generally, to the shallow remnant of water. If it is one of the larger lakes, you and your companions drive in two rows of stakes, cutting each other at right angles, more or less,in the centre of the lake.
This being done, the women, with the specially made baskets—affairs shaped like bed-pillows with one side open—form a line with their backs towards the banks, their faces to the water, in the enclosure; the other women go into the water by the stakes, and splash with hands and feet and sticks as hard as they can, needless to say shouting hard the while. The terrified fish fly from them into the baskets, and are scooped up by the peck. In little basins of water the stakes are not required, but the rest of the proceedings are the same, some women standing with their backs to the bank, holding their baskets' mouths just under water, and scooping up the fish flying from the beaters in the middle.
From twelve to fourteen bushels is the usual result of the day's fishing, and the fish are divided between the representatives and distributed among the villages. A tremendous fish dinner ensues in the evening, and what fish are left are smoked and kept as relishes and dainties until next fishing time comes round.
I was told on the island that this fishing takes place every year in August, that is after the farm planting and just before the tornado rains come on. On the mainland the tradition is that it takes place here every two years, in August. I dare say this was the case in old days; although, by the way, I heard that this regular institution of fishing with its representatives, &c., was of comparatively recent introduction, and arose from the fear that the fish, by irregular and constant fishing, would be exterminated. Corisco would not accept this view at all, and insisted that the fashion had come down from the old times, meaning it had an unlimited antiquity. But with all this formality, after all I had gone through, and all my walks and waitings, those wretched fish were nothing and nobody else but an African mud-fish, a brute I cordially hate, for whenever I ask native fishermen for fish, they bring me him; if I start catching fish for myself, nine times in ten it's him I catch. It was a bitter disappointment, for I had looked forward to getting some strange fish, or strongly modified form, in the middle of this little sea island, in fresh-water, some twenty miles from the mainland shore. But there! it's Africa all over; presenting one with familiar objects when one least requires them, like that razor in the heart of Gorilla-land; and unfamiliar, such as elephants and buffaloes when you are out for a quiet stroll armed with a butterfly net, to say nothing of snakes in one's bed and scorpions in one's boots and sponge. One's view of life gets quite distorted; I don't believe I should be in the least surprised to see a herd of hippo stroll on to the line out of one of the railway tunnels of Notting Hill Gate station. West Africa is undoubtedly bad for one's mind.
I did not go completely round all the lakes, having to watch the fishing, and at last, finding there was only this one kind of fish to be had, and that it was getting late, I set off on my weary, long walk back to Alondo, where I found on arriving that Mrs. Ibea had got tea waiting for me, and that Mr. Ibea was back from his evangelising mission to Cape St. John and Eloby. He is a splendidly built, square-shouldered man, a pure Renga, of the finest type, full of energy and enthusiasm. I found some difficulty in accepting his statement regarding the age of Mrs. Ibea and himself, and I still think he stuck a good ten years on.
His views on native social questions I had less difficulty in accepting, more particularly those which coincide with my own. We talked about the Fan—the backbone of native, and a good big factor in white conversation, all along here.
In this part of the world the descent of this great tribe is ousting the older inhabitants of the land. Mr. Ibea says that one of the first white members of the American Presbyterian Mission that came to this Coast some thirty years ago, made a journey into the interior behind Batanga. At the further end of this journey he heard of the coming Fan, even then in a state of migration westwards; and, from what he heard, on his return to Corisco he prophesied that before another ten years were past they would have the Fan to deal with on the sea-coast districts. Natives and Europeans both laughed at him; but before the ten years were past the Fans were over the border line of the M'pongwe and Igalwa, but the prophet was not alive to see the realisation of his prophecy. At this present time, the Fans are, in a few places, down by the sea-shore itself, busy learning how to manage a canoe on the open and deep sea-not yet so proficient in the art as the M'pongwe or Benga, who are great masters, but getting on well with their studies, for they are an indefatigable race, and plucky, which is the main element in any race's success. It is very evident to an observer that the Fans on the Ogowé are comparatively recent, and that when they came they brought with them no experience in dealing with a great rapid river; but they tackle it in a game way, and are getting on. In addition to the causes of decay that the presence of the Fan among the Coast tribes brings into play, there are many others helping the extinction of the latter. It always seems to me a wonder we have so many traces of early man as we have, when one sees here in Africa how one tribe sweeps out another tribe that goes like the foam of a broken wave into the Ewigkeit before it, leaving nothing, after the lapse of a century, to show it ever existed.
Here the Dualla and the M'pongwe, both tribes now becoming on their own account extinct, have their traditions of having come down to the sea-board from nearly the same region from whence the Fan are now swarming. The inhabitants of Fernando Po, the so-called Bubi, probably the oldest race now on the sea-board, remember the coming of the M'pongwe too, for they say these M'pongwe drove them out of the districts round Gaboon. How long ago this happened it is impossible to say, owing to the absence of monuments, and the weak-mindedness of the African regarding time; but I am sure, from many conversations, that you may place a limit of 500 years as the extreme one for the very oldest Negro or Bantu historical tradition. Indeed I doubt much whether any Bantu tradition would run to that; I say historical, because the religious tradition may be of intense antiquity, being handed down from generation to generation unaltered for immense periods of time. The child' would be told, for example, that a dangerous spirit lived in the rapids of a river, or lurked in the forest, which it would be advisable for him to keep an eye on, for his own safety. But who would trouble to tell him that a chief of such and such a name once lived there where the Engombie-Gombie trees have been shadowed down again by the great forest? The chief is dead. The village is dead, "palaver done set," so the historical tradition fades out like smoke.
Even the invasion of another tribe, like the Fans, for example, does not affect the religious tradition much. For it is not on the whole a war invasion: they come down in villagefuls among the older tribes, and hear the local spirit-gossip, and take it to their ample bosom, of belief, and pass the traditions on to their children. Meanwhile, the tribe that told them these things has moved West, away from them, because they have got the best bush places cleared and covered with their plantations, and they catch all the fish, and they get all the trade, and they eat respectable people occasionally, and steal from them continually, and they kick up such a noise, and have such perpetual rows among each other, and respectable villages belonging to the older tribe; that the older tribe has the opinion forced upon it, that no decent people can live near those filthy, fearful Fans, and so move nearer in to Lembarene or Libreville.
In addition to this cause of a tribe leaving its old districts, there are others which move tribes completely off earthly districts of any kind altogether: among these are the smallpox, and the sleep disease. The former is most common in Congo Français, where it receives the graphically descriptive name of "the spotted death" among the natives, the latter appears in its worst form in Kacongo and Angola, where whole villages are, at intervals, depopulated by it. The visitations of these maladies, indeed of all maladies in West Africa, take the form of epidemics, and seem periodic. I have collected much material, but not sufficient yet to make deductions from, as to the duration of the periods between the outbreaks. The natives all along the Coast from Calabar to the South will tell you: "It is when the crabs come up the river," which means when the crayfish come down the rivers; but that is just their artless, unobservant way of putting things. This swarming of the crayfish occurs about every five years, and for days the river-water is crowded with them, so that you can bale them out by basketfuls. This the native does, accompanying his operations with songs and tom-toms, and he then eats any quantity of them; another quantity he smokes and preserves, in what he pleases to regard as a dried state, for sauce making; and the greatest quantity of all he chucks in heaps to fester round his dwelling.
There are plenty more causes of the extinction of tribes besides these—so many in fact, that one gets to wonder that there are any Coast tribes of 100 years old or so left.
Mr. Ibea himself says that there are not now more than 2,000 of his own tribe left, and that those that are now representing it are far inferior, physically, to those he remembers as having seen as old men, when he was a boy.
These Benga were once an exceedingly powerful and proud tribe. Now they have little save their pride left. In old days they were very busy making war on their neighbours, elephant hunting, shipping themselves as crew to whaling vessels, and other people as slaves to slaving vessels, and so on. Great hands at the slave trade were these Benga, and slave-owners are they still; but gone is their glory, and in a few years more the Benga will themselves have gone to join the shades of the tribes that were before them in this land, leaving behind them no sign, not even a flint arrow-head, to show that they ever existed; for their wooden utensils and their iron weapons will rot like rag in the hot moist earth; and then "finish."
Mr. Ibea and I got quite low about this. He agreed it was partially the Benga's own fault; they had of late years taken to bad habits, he said; amongst these to infant marriage. This struck me as strange, for as I have already mentioned, the also dying-out Igalwas have only recently adopted this custom. He says that forty years ago it was quite unknown among the Benga, and that in former days both men and women were frequently over fifteen and twenty before they married. Now the old men buy girl children, both as wives for themselves and for their infant sons. Then Mr. Ibea blamed the rum; although he owned they had plenty of rum in the old prosperous whaling and slaving days. Indeed he said he thought the main reason of their extinction was the indolence that had come over the tribe, now these incentives to activity were gone; for inactivity in Africa is death. He said, of course as a Christian minister, he knew it was for the best that the old warlike, bloodthirsty Benga spirit was broken, but—but well, I think he felt as I feel myself when I come across quantities of my fellow countrymen talking of the wickedness of war, and the necessity of checking our growing population, and so on; only I feel it more than Mr. Ibea, for I am not a Christian minister and am more of a savage than he is.
Nothing strikes one so much, in studying the degeneration of these native tribes, as the direct effect that civilisation and reformation has in hastening it. The worst enemy to the existence of the African tribe, is the one who comes to it and says:—Now you must civilise, and come to school, and leave off all those awful goings-on of yours, and settle down quietly. The tribe does so; the African is teachable and tractable; and then the ladies and some of the young men are happy and content with the excitement of European clothes and frequent Church services; but the older men and some of the bolder young men soon get bored with these things and the, to them, irksome restraints, and they go in for too much rum, or mope themselves to death, or return to their native customs. The African treats his religion much as other men do when he gets slightly educated, a little scientific one might say, he removes from his religion all the disagreeable parts. He promptly eliminates its equivalent Hell, represented in Fetishism by immediate and not future retribution. Then goes his rigid Sabbath-keeping, and food-restriction equivalent, and he has nothing left but the agreeable portions: dances, polygamy, and so on; and it's a very bad thing for him. I only state these things so as to urge upon people at home the importance of combining technical instruction in their mission teaching; which by instilling into the African mind ideas of discipline, and providing him with manual occupation, will save him from these relapses which are now the reproach of missionary effort, and the curse and degradation of the African. I do not feel sure that one must accept Mr. Ibca's opinion, and class infant marriage among the causes of tribe extinction, because this custom is in vogue among many tribes that are still swarming, and among these Fans it is in vogue as regards the women. This, I think, is the earliest stage of the custom.
The island of Corisco is three miles in length, north and south, and averages one and three-quarters in breadth. Its north-west point is in lat. 0°,58' north and long. 9°,20' east. I have acquired a good deal of information from local traditions, charts, and personal experience, the latter being of course largely of the situation of rocks and banks when personally navigating; so I will set the general results of my studies down.
Corisco Island is situated in the middle of Corisco Bay and is most seaward of the islands in the bay. It is surrounded by a hollow bank, irregular in outline, extending in some places two-and-a-half miles off shore; and in addition to this extensive shoal are several detached rocky patches off the N.E. shore of the island. Off the N.E. point lie Corisco Banks, the outer patch with three-and-a-half fathoms of water three miles off shore. On the outer large patch you may get twelve feet of water, but I found bottom at two feet. On the inner and larger it averages three feet; among both these patches there are boat channels; and Mr. Ibea's accounts of his experiences among them during the many voyages he has made to and from the mainland, with the stiff current that runs round Cape St. John, are thrilling, but not such as would induce any one to make Corisco a yachting centre.
Laval Island, which I have mentioned above, is about 200n yards long but makes the most of itself with rocks and trees, and stands high above the water. It is one mile south of Corisco Island. It has a line of bank, on which the sea breaks, north and north-east. The "West Coast Pilot "says there is only a canoe passage between it and Corisco Island. This is not the case, for you can take a small schooner between them, though I do not advise it because of the rock reef running out from Alondo Point. The edge of the encircling bank of Corisco Island goes round outside Laval one and a half miles to the west, and two miles to the southward. About a mile S.E. of Laval there is a reef which, when I was on Corisco, was a perpetual line of foam.
Laval Bank lies S.W. ¾ S. three-and-a-half miles from Laval Island. It is rock and sand. There is good fishing near it, but the sea breaks over the head of it furiously. It stretches two miles north and south and is one and a half broad, the Pilot says. I passed through it on my return voyage to Gaboon and think it is in many places two miles wide, but this being the rough season in these seas it showed itself off in full.
Baña Island is a quarter of a mile long, and is lower than Laval. It is five miles S. of the S.E. end of Corisco Island, that is, Alondo. Its surrounding plinth of rock shows in places at low water and one large rock, which is never covered, shows about a mile out to sea, W. by S.
But Baña Island is nothing to Baña Bank, which supports Obanjo's—I beg his pardon, Captain Johnson's—statement that "half dem dar 'fernal Corisco Bay Islands lib under water."
This bank is nine miles long, in an east by north and west by south direction, averaging three and a half miles in breadth. On it the depths are very shallow and variable. The eastern part of the bank is called the Crown Sand and a patch dries, for I was shell-hunting on it. About two miles S.E. by E. ¾ E. of Baña, that is to say shorewards to the mainland, there is another patch of the Crown Sand which dries, which is called the East Sand; on this I got some sponges and Gorgonia. After trying to give a conscientious account of Baña Bank, I notice my friend the "West Coast Pilot" collapses and pathetically beseeches you, if you will, or must, go into Corisco Bay, to be very careful. I think these patches of the Crown Sand that dry must be near to the end of the bank; for Captain Porter, who knows this bit of coast well, tells me there is a passage for vessels out of Corisco Bay by Oranda Point, towards Cape Esterias, provided they do not draw more than two fathoms and know the way; but this passage is not used now.
Eleven miles east from the north-east end of Corisco Island, further into the bay, lie the two Eloby Islands. They are on the top of an extensive shoal, running in most directions for miles, but particularly eastwards and southwards. Mail steamers that come in to call at Messrs. Holt's factory on little Eloby, and off the mouth of the Muni River where Hatton and Cookson have a factory, come into Corisco Bay, from the north, round to the east of the Eloby islands, and leave by the same channel, which averages six fathoms; and go south, if they want to, well outside to the west of all Corisco Bay's banks. I do not know why little Eloby Island should be the inhabited one. Big Eloby is a fine, likely-looking island. I was told by a Benga on Cape Esterias that it was once inhabited, but there was a war and the inhabitants were killed and carried off as slaves, and it has not since been re-colonised.
The northern part of the bay I have had no personal experience in navigating, but, according to the "Pilot" it has its drawbacks, and according to people who have to work it, these drawbacks are by no means down in all their beauty in the charts. It was in this bay that the Benguella struck on a something. I cannot be more definite because some of my friends who ought to know say it was a wreck—the old wreck of the David MacLean; others, who ought to know, say it was rocks; anyhow she tore, then and there, a big wound in herself, and nothing but the fine seamanship of Captain Eversfield ever got her up into Cameroons River and successfully beached her and repaired her there. During her convalescence she was the haven of refuge for the unfortunate white folk of Cameroon while the mutiny of the Dahomeyan soldiers went on ashore in 1894.
There is another wreck not down in the chart, just off Alondo, the south-east point of Corisco Island; it is that of the schooner Elfie, belonging to the American Presbyterian Mission.
This Corisco Bay, when you look at it on the map, seems an ideally formed harbour, and I once heard it strongly recommended as a suitable site for a coaling station; but a glance at its chart will show you it is only a subtly rock-set trap for vessels, imperfect as the chart is. Its width is thirty-five miles south by west and three-quarters west. This line touches the eastern end of Corisco Island, and eastwards of it the bay is fourteen miles deep.
Two rivers fall into Corisco Bay, the Muni and the Moondah. The latter runs up behind Libreville. There is a creek, the entrance to which is on the right-hand bank near the mouth of the Moondah as you enter; this runs behind Cape Esterias, in a south-east direction, and nearly communicates with the Gaboon estuary; so nearly that it is possible to utilise it as a short cut to Corisco Bay from Libreville, it being possible to drag a boat over the intervening strip of land.
The Muni is a longer and more important river than the Moondah; its outfall is north of it, opposite little Eloby Island, on the mainland shore. On a chart it looks like the usual African river turned upside down, its upper course being split up into several streams instead of lower. Both these rivers, like many others in this region, rise in the range of the Sierra del Cristal, an enormous belt of mountainous country the eastern limitations of which are at present unexplored.
A few great rivers cut through this range from sources beyond the Sierra, such as the Ogowé and the joint streams of the Mbam and Sanaga which come into the Atlantic under the names of the O'Bengo and the Boungo. The ranges round the Ogowé are the best known parts of the Sierra del Cristal; for the Ogowé places at the traveller's disposal a path, such as I have partially described, through 500 miles of it; and the Ogowé's chief affluent, the Nguni, cuts through it again from Samba south-castwards; and the Okanda's course lies, as far as that river has been ascended, in the very heart of it, going away north-east. It is a range of old volcanic origin, running in series of ridges parallel to each other, and following the long line of the continent. Its general trend is north-west and south-east. It comes down almost to the sea beach behind Batanga, and the beautiful little Loway River falls from a small cliff some twenty or thirty feet high belonging to, it on to the sea shore itself.
It is this range which gives the coast from Cameroon to Landana the marked superiority in beauty it possesses over the rest of the West Coast; excepting, of course, the splendours of Ambas Bay, which is a thing apart and out of all keeping with the Coast. These western ridges of the Sierra make a beautiful purple blue background to the splendid band of forest that runs behind the bright yellow sands of the sea shore, which are again bordered to seaward by the white wall of surf. The mountains forming it are distinct in outline and fantastic in form, notably the one behind Batanga, which seen from seaward takes the exact form of a kneeling elephant. Its height is 1707 feet and I am told there is another one of almost identical shape in the same parallel of latitude on the East African Coast. It was first ascended by Sir Richard Burton, since then Mr. Newberry of Batanga has been up it. He tells me the view from the summit to the cast is into a mountainous country as far as eye can see. Several of the other peaks of this range that have been measured, and are visible from the sea, are higher than the Elephant. The Mitre, inland from Cape St. John, is 3940 feet; the highest of a stretch of hills called the Seven Hills, but belonging to one range, is 2786 feet. Mount Alouette is 3415 feet but none are so striking in form as Mount Elephant.
Behind Corisco Bay the range takes a trend inland, in a direction nearly at right angles to the shore, going inland to the south-east by south; but the details of its peaks are not known, this district being little explored. The range seems to turn more eastward still behind Cape Esterias, and runs towards, and unites with, that part of the Sierra del Cristal that cuts the course of the Ogowé some 170 miles from the sea at Talagouga; only a few isolated bubble-shaped hills, like Mount Sangatao, being in the Ogowé delta region. The position of this range when I struck its western flank, coming across from the Ogowé to the Rembwé, was some 140 to 150 miles inland, the main chain of this part lying to the eastward of where I was. The Rembwé cuts through a portion of it just above Agonjo, but the Rembwé itself rises in the range. The 'Como, which it joins with at 'Como Point to form the Gaboon estuary, is said to rise inlands behind this range, and is formed like the Muni by several streams uniting. Obanjo told me, when I was at Ajongo, that the range was going from there in a north by east direction, but of the upper part of the 'Como little or nothing is personally known by white men.
The inhabitants of the shores and hinterland of Corisco Bay are a wild set of savages of several tribes. The Benga were once the ruling race among them, but they have diminished rapidly of late years. The country is very rich in rubber and ebony, which is bought by the Benga native traders, and M'pongwe, and sold to the white traders at Eloby and Cocoa Beach.
Those traders who know the inland tribes describe them as savage and treacherous. The Fans are coming down through this part of the country to the beach all the way along from Batanga to the Gaboon estuary. I cannot hold out much hope that they will enlighten or ameliorate the manners and customs of the older inhabitants as regards trade, but they can teach them a thing or two worth knowing in the way of activity and courtesy. That they will suffer the same extinction that the previous migrants to the Coast have suffered, there is no reason to doubt, for they will be under similar conditions; and Mr. Ibea and myself agree again, that there is something inimical to human life, black or white, in the immediate Coast region of West and South-West Africa, as far down as Congo: and the interior tribes also join us in our opinion. Many times have I, and others, been told by interior tribes that there is a certain air which comes from the sea that kills men—that is just their way of putting it. I call it Paludisme Malariæ, which is just my way of putting it, and of course I fancy that it comes from the rotting, reeking swamp land and lagoons, and not from the sea. Anyhow, white men and black feel it, and suffer and die.
- ↑ Specimen identified by the Geological Survey as calcareous grit.