Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons/Chapter 28
CHAPTER XXXVIII
THE ISLANDS IN THE BAY OF AMBOISES
It had been my intention when I landed at Victoria either to procure a canoe and go round into that black mud mangrove-swamp-fringed river the Rio del Rey, or to get the Ambas Bay Trading Company to run me round to their trading station in that river on their little steamer. Once in the Rio del Rey I knew I could get a canoe to paddle me through the creek into the Akwayafe river, a fourteen hours' paddle. And then I expected to be able to get up in a canoe to that remarkable gentleman, Mr. Holmes, who, I was confident, would send me round somehow into the Calabar, if I could only make him hear that I wanted to go there.
Had the desire to get myself killed, with which I am constantly being taxed, been my real and only motive for going to West Africa, I should have rigidly adhered to this fine variegated plan, all the more so, because Herr von Lucke said it was highly dangerous during the tornado season to go in the open and deep sea round from Victoria to Rio del Rey in a canoe, because of the violent storms that sweep down suddenly from the mountain and the unhandiness of the native craft. He, with his abiding accuracy regarding statistics and detail, said two in six native canoes so going, got lost with all hands, and he added it would be better for me to go round to Calabar in the Nachtigal, a powerful little guard-ship which acts as the Governor of Cameroons' yacht. "True, O King!" I replied, "but I am not the Governor of Cameroons." He bowed and said he knew that, but the Nachtigal was in a few days coming into Victoria on her way to Calabar with Herr von Besser, who was the German representative on the Calabar-Cameroon Delimitation Commission, and that he was sure Governor von Puttkamer would allow me to go round in her. Previous experience of the kindness and courtesy of Governor von Puttkamer made me feel Herr von Lucke was right, and I gladly accepted this generous offer and proceeded to wait for the Nachtigal, and a very pleasant process this was.
The first day after my return from the mountain, Herr von Lucke suggested what he called a walk, and what I knew meant an affair of fourteen miles or so, taken at a good five miles an hour. And I, being as stiff as a table-leg, declined. Then he suggested going to see the islands in the bay in a boat, and I did not decline, and off we went.
This Bay of Amboises, commonly called Ambas Bay, is without doubt both the most lovely and the most fertile spot on the whole of the western side of the continent of Africa; and experienced mariners who have wandered far and wide say that it has few rivals in either quality in any other region of the world. To me with my experience of the world strictly limited to England and West Africa, it is an unthinkable thing that there can be any place more perfect in loveliness, majesty, colour and charm, with its circumambient mountains to landward—mountains that rise out of its dark, clear waters to heights from 3,000 to 13,760 feet. At their feet is just one narrow strip of flat shore, on which, nestling among the mango trees, is the pretty, long, ribbon-like town of Victoria—a soft brown native town, here and there speckled with a few white European buildings, while in the bay itself are three islands—Ambas, Mondoleh and Bobia—and several pinnacle rocks with energetic acrobats of trees growing in among their clefts and crevices.
Ambas and Bobia Islands are perfect gems of beauty. Mondoleh I cannot say I admire. It always looks to me exactly like one of those flower-stands full of ferns and plants —the sort that you come across in senemens at home, with wire-work legs, I do not mean that Mondoleh has wire-work legs under water, but it looks as if it might have. It is a bunch of crammed-together vegetation, half a mile long, 200 feet high, with rocky but rich soil made of a combination of decomposed rock and decomposed vegetation. On Mondoleh there is a very nice house, built, I believe, by that indefatigable consul Sir H. H. Johnston, once of Calabar, now of East Africa. As long as ever we have held Calabar it has been regarded as an unhealthy place to live in, so unhealthy that it was also regarded as a certainty that anywhere else must necessarily be better. At first when consuls were established there, they and the missionaries used to think it advisable to leave it during the wet season and go on to Fernando Po, which island we held up to 1858 as a naval depot for the suppression of the slave trade. Then Fernando Po, by means of several epidemics of yellow fever, demonstrated that it could not be regarded as a health resort, and Mondoleh was selected as a more suitable site for a consular residence. This house was then built nearly at its summit on the seaward side of the island, and was used until the Niger Coast Protectorate was formed under the governorship of Sir Claude MacDonald. This energetic officer soon recognised that let the healthiness of Mondoleh be what it might, it was an inconvenient spot for a consul to have as his chief residence; because, for one thing, it was a difficult place to get on to,and for another a difficult place to get off from, as the only means of doing either of these things was to wait for a man-of-war coming along, or to go knocking about this very draughty bit of rocky Atlantic in an open gig. Also there was not enough room on it for the enlarged staff and the Haussa troops. So Sir Claude built the present fine Government head-quarters in Old Calabar, and not being a man who would leave his staff to live or die in a place where he would not do so himself, he disposed of the house at Mondoleh to the German Governor, who was most anxious to possess it, for it was the only piece of British territory left in Cameroon, and its acquisition as it were rounded off the German Empire. It is not now used as a residence for any one but a black caretaker and his family, Governor von Puttkamer having a belief in the healthiness of residences open to sea breezes—a belief I do not share. Nor, evidently, did the builder of the residence on Mondoleh, for they are carefully excluded by a dense plantation of gigantic bamboos and heavily-latticed, deep verandahs, making the interior of the house very dark. The landing at Mondoleh also is bad, the water round being deep and the island's sides precipitous and rocky. From the little landing-place there is the most awful sort of staircase made carefully with logs and stone up the steep hill-side to the residence. I shall never forget either going up or coming down those stairs. There is every convenience for taking a headlong dive into the deep Atlantic on one side of it and dense bush on the other, and not two of those steps are either the same height or the same distance apart. A friend of mine who had once tried them assured me it was "exactly like going up the Tower of London when you were drunk." He may have been right, for certainly the steps gave one, in the blazing heat, a feeling of bewilderment after the first dozen or so. When I was there last, the heavy tornado rains had caused a landslip from the top of the island to the bottom, which now shows as a yellow sear, and which nearly swept the staircase clean away.
Ambas Island is the outermost island in the bay. It is smaller and lower than Mondoleh and but little forested, Indeed most of it is only covered with brushwood and grass, for there is not much soil among its rocks. It now belongs to an officer of the Hyæna, who won it in a raffle for 500 marks. But although Ambas Island is very beautiful, and so on, I do not think the returns on the invested capital will be high for some years to come. It has no human habitation or inhabitants yet on it, and its population consists of goats and pigs. The most noticeable thing about Ambas Island is the fact that both the English and the Germans have got it arranged wrong on their charts. Bobia is the most interesting of all the three islands. It is on a line with the Pirate rocks. Indeed it is really one of them, only slightly bigger than its neighbours, and it is called sometimes Pirate Island. Its sides are strictly perpendicular, and you can get to the top by a projecting rock ridge which runs up the cliff on the northern side. I did not go up, for the day I was taken round it the weather was too rough for us to get to the ledge of rock on which you land. Strangely enough, this rocky and least fertile of all the islands in Ambas Bay is densely inhabited by a quantity of fisher-folk and their wives, families, pigs, and goats, all living together in a village on the top, facing seawards. Facing landwards they have made on the top of a sheer cliff a long bench, on which the fishermen sit in a row most of the day, watching Victoria, while their wives look after the rest of the inhabitants and do odd jobs generally, and I should imagine these good ladies must lead anxious lives for fear of either the children or the live stock falling out of the village into the sea. At night Ambas Bay is dotted all over with the torches of these fishermen, as they seem to do most of their fishing by spearing, and they are obliged to be industrious at their profession because among other inconveniences Bobia has no water, and all the water has to be bought and brought from the mainland and there is no room for a plantation. Besides, the pig population is too heavy to allow of agriculture. I deeply regret not having been able to bring home a Bobia pig. One would have caused a profound sensation at the Royal Agricultural Show. These interesting animals are black in colour, as indeed is common in African pigs, two-thirds head, and after a very small and very flat bit of body, end in an inordinately long tail. Their mental dispositions are lively, frolicsome and extremely nomadic and predatory. The Chief of Bobia, in a burst of affection, gave Herr von Lucke one just before I arrived in Victoria, and a good deal of my time while waiting to start up Mungo, was spent in assisting Idabea and the steward boys in chivying this pig, err von Lucke had given strict orders it was to be kept tied up, and solemnly warned his retainers they were responsible for its safe keeping. But somehow or another it was always slipping its cable and getting away, and I used to meet it away in the Botanical Gardens, and in fact in so many unexpected places that I should not have been surprised to have met it anywhere. After my first few days' experience of it, whenever I met it I used first to try and secure it, and then failing brilliantly, post off uphill and report its iniquities. All household work would be suspended for the next hour or so, and finally, after giving good sport, the pig would be brought back squealing by triumphant and heated stewards.
When I got back to Victoria one of my first inquiries was after that Bobia pig. I instantly saw I had aroused sad memories, and learnt that the cook—its most responsible custodian—was under arrest, though out on bail—on its behalf It seems it got adrift as usual, and when the hunt was started no pig was to be found, so cook, fearing the ire of Germany, posts off into the town and gets hold of the first pig there he can lay hands on. Now this pig was the property of a lady—a woman of spirit, and she clouted cook and swore cook clouted her. But anyhow cook bore off his prize, and tied it up in place of the Bobia pig, trusting that his busy master would not notice the difference in the two pigs, and would not hear of his raid. His hopes were vain. Herr von Lucke saw that this succulent little porker was not the offering from Bobia, and with a truly Roman sense of duty, handed his own cook over to be tried by the native court, presided over by the Baptist minister and two local chiefs. The case took nearly all day, and all the Government House staff had to be absent from their work, giving evidence as to the character of the cook, and the pig, and so on. The case went against cook in the end, and he had to pay damages to the injured lady and return his capture. What became of the original Bobia pig I do not know, for it had not been found up to the time of my leaving Victoria.
The problem why so many people choose to reside on this isolated rock is quite as great as the problem of the whereabouts of that pig. Their own explanation is that the people on the mainland were too bad for respectable people to live among; in short, as Mr, Micawber would say, they were driven on to the island; but then you can very rarely believe what people say about themselves in West Africa. Then the people on the mainland say that they, the mainlanders, are injured innocents, and that the men of Bobia live on that island so as to carry on to greater advantage piratical practices: hence the name Pirate Island that Bobia hears, and that—but then again you can hardly ever believe what people say about each other in West Africa, so the problem is unsolved.
The Pirate rocks extend S. W. from Bobia Island, and are quite uninhabited. It is possible, at certain states of the tide, in calm weather, to get from Bobia to the nearest one, on which there are a few trees. The next rock has a remarkable hole in it through which the water flies in a great jet, and as the weather was rough the day we were round it, this showed grandly. The others that are above water are mere rocky pinnacles.
These rocks are by no means all the rocks in Ambas Bay, which, like Corisco Bay, though to a far less extent, is not half so good a harbour as it looks on a map.
In 1858 the Spanish Government decided definitely to retake possession of Fernando Po, which had been lent to the English for the purpose of forming a naval depot for suppressing the slave trade, and in May of that year, the Spanish man-of-war Vasco Nuñez de Balboa came into Clarence and issued a lengthy proclamation, one article of which was:—"The religion of this colony is that of the Roman Catholic Church, as the only one of the kingdom of Spain, with the exclusion of any other, and no other religious profession is tolerated or allowed but that made by the missionaries of the aforesaid Catholic religion, and no school allowed."
This proclamation, says Mr. Hutchinson, who was then the English consul for the Bights, fell like a bombshell amongst the inhabitants of Clarence, who had been since 1843 under the religious superintendence of the Baptist missionaries, and who, since their first settlement there under Captain Owen in 1827, had considered themselves to be safely under the protection of the British Government, and therefore entitled to perfect liberty of religious worship. A remonstrance was at once made by the Baptists against this proclamation as being contrary "to that liberty of worship decreed and allowed by Don J. O. de Lorena, captain of the Spanish Navy and commander of the brig Nervion, in the year 1844, and confirmed by the Spanish Consul-General (the Chevalier Guillemard) in the year 1846." This remonstrance further entreated that the execution of the foregoing decree should be delayed until a final appeal could be made to the Queen of Spain. The commander of the Balboa, Don Carlos Chacon, courteously expressed his readiness to forward this memorial to his Queen, and this was done; but things still proving most unsatisfactory to the Baptists, they decided to leave Clarence and make a settlement at the foot of Cameroon Mountain, in Ambas Bay, which was then regarded as British property, and this settlement they called Victoria. The Baptist missionary at Clarence in those days was a Mr. Saker, to whom we are indebted for a great deal of valuable scientific information about this region, and whose name is still held in great reverence among the native Baptists on the West Coast. This gentleman with his family and two or three families of the native members of his church, went to Victoria, acquired a large stretch of land there—a possession which has been honourably acknowledged by the present German Government—and built their new church and schools, and to this day they are the dominant party in Victoria, under the leadership of Mr. Wilson, who came over when a boy with Mr. Saker. Mr. Wilson has been appointed as magistrate, and presides over a bench whose other members are two chiefs; and before this bench come all the minor offences of the native population. The Baptists of Victoria have no white minister among them, but seem a very well-ordered and prosperous body. They cherish a feeling of grievance against the English for the way they were first abandoned to the Spaniards and then handed over to the Germans, but they still profess a sentimental attachment to the English. However, as far as I had opportunities of judging, they have little to complain of in the way the German Government have treated them—a very different line of action to that of the Spanish Government, for the Spaniards virtually confiscated the extensive property which the Baptists had received from the West African Company at Clarence. The Spanish version of this affair is that the real criminals were the West African Company, who had no rights whatsoever to make over the land to the Baptists, as the land was not theirs to dispose of.
Mr. Saker, when he settled in Ambas Bay, formed a very high opinion of its value as a harbour, and the high lands above it as a site for a sanatorium. Mr. MacGregor Laird communicated to Earl Grey in 1856 a lengthy statement founded on Mr. Saker's information. Read by the light of after years this memorandum is highly interesting, although almost all the asseverations in it have now been proved fallacious; for example, Ambas Bay is described as "being capable of being made a most complete naval station." Further on as "a good open harbour, accessible at all times to ships of the largest class and easily descended."
Mr. Saker made a communication to Consul Hutchinson in June, 1858, in which the advantages of Ambas Bay as a harbour were set down in detail, but a survey of the bay, made in 1859 by Commodore Wise, R.N., in H.M.S. Vesuvius, did not prove it to correspond to the description given of it by the enthusiastic missionaries. One important point in the bay described in the Reverend Mr. Saker’s chart as having four to six fathoms of water, was found by Mr. Brown, Master R.N., who had charge of the soundings, to have only from six to nine feet. And from that day to this people have gone on discovering pinnacle and shoal rocks in the bay.
I have been now five times into Ambas Bay, and with those very sporting vessels, the British and African, and the Royal African steamers, and I have never seen one of them nestle right up in Morton Cove, as the inner part is called; and as for men-o'-war, although their official organ the West Coast Pilot, says, "the anchorage is excellent in all parts of Ambas Bay with good holding ground, and a depth of six to seven fathoms," I have never seen a man-o’-war such a fool as to act on this statement and come well inside. The West Coast Pilot certainly does go on to say, "It forms a lee shore, and there is an incessant swell," and then "that the prevalent wind is S.W. to which the bay is quite open." These later observations may be the things that deter men-o'-war from coming well inside, and as for the merchant- men, although they have a sort of genial affection for the Pilot, they do not trust it, unless its statements agree with their own personal knowledge.
The Pilot, goes on to say, referring to the climate, "From the peculiarity of its situation and from local circumstances, Ambas Bay will probably be found to be one of the most healthy situations on the West Coast of Africa." Now this statement is utterly unsupported by facts, and there are no healthy places on the West Coast of Africa at all, so it cannot be more healthy than others, but it might be less unhealthy, and it is not even that; Ambas Bay, Cameroon River, and Gaboon being the three deadliest spots between Calabar and the Congo.
This idea that Ambas Bay and the mountain-sides of Mungo might give to the fever-smitten West Coast a reliable sanatorium, I have no doubt first arose from Mr, Saker's reports on it, and it is a theory that lives on, floating in air, as it were, after its foundations have been removed by experience, just as that other notion that there are no sharks south of the Congo; and it is hopeless work to attempt to destroy an idea of this kind. Any amount of sharks may display themselves ostentatiously south of Congo, and any amount of fever occur in Ambas Bay, but the statements survive. I have never been in Ambas Bay without finding severe cases of fever, and during my stay there this last time, the wife of the Basle missionary died of fever, and every one except Herr von Lucke, the head agent of the Ambas Bay Company, and myself, had fever more or less severely. This is reasonable enough when you look at the subject with the light of personal experience of the place. It is exceedingly hot, and exceedingly damp, and the cold winds from the mountains, and the sea-breezes that come into it in the mornings, are conducive to that main predisposing cause of an attack of fever—chill.
The idea that a sanatorium might be built high on the mountain, above the so-called fever line—a line that is merely an imaginative figment, for local conditions alter it in every separate place—at first seemed reasonable, but a closer knowledge of the peculiar meteorological conditions of the great mountain has proved this idea also to be an erroneous one.
A very noble and devoted Scotch gentleman named Thomson, possessed of considerable wealth and anxious to do what he could to aid the mission work of the United Presbyterians in Calabar, came out and did his best to establish a sanatorium where the fever-stricken missionaries from Calabar could come and recruit their health without having to make the voyage home to England.[1] The station he established upon the mountain at the elevation of 3,000 feet is now occupied by a Roman Catholic mission, and their health has been little, if at all, better than that of other Roman Catholics at a lower level. I say other Roman Catholics advisedly, because these missionaries live, as a rule, in a more healthy way than members of other missions in West Africa. The reasons why the upper slopes of Mungo do not afford the healthiness expected of them are many. Chief among them is the exceedingly heavy rainfall. At Babundi, I am told, there was a panic a short time ago among the natives because there was no rain for an entire week, and this extraordinary phenomenon gave rise to the idea that something serious had gone wrong with Nature and that something was going to happen, but a calm business man told me this story must be without foundation, because it has never been dry for a week at Babundi.
The reason of the heavy rainfall and drenching mists which fall on the mountain is that it is surrounded by enormous steaming swamps: to the north by those of the Rio del Rey and Calabar, to the south by those of the Cameroon, Mungo, and Bimbia Rivers, while its superior height catches the heavy, water-laden clouds floating in from the Atlantic. In addition to this, the cold air rushes down its sides in draughts that condense the water in the hot overladen lower layers of the atmosphere.
One hears a great deal in West Africa of the 3,000 feet line as being the limit of the region of malarial fever, but I do not think this is anything more than a theoretical idea, and indeed there are few situations in West Africa besides Mungo, where the theory could be put to the test. Buea, and De Buncha, Mr. Thomson’s sanatorium site, are at about this elevation. Buea has not yet had sufficient trial as a health resort to speak of it finally, but the great prevalence there of phagedænic ulcers does not lead one to regard the air as healthy. Of its climate I have spoken already. Buea, however, has this advantage over De Buncha, that it has a fine water-supply, the finest, indeed as far as is at present known, the only considerable water supply above 2,000 feet on the mountain. When one is in Victoria, particularly in the evening of a hot rainless day, you can see a great band of white mist girdling the mountain where the water-laden hot air rising from the forest and swamps meets the cold air of the upper mountain, which condensing, must cause it to deposit, not only the water, but the exhalations from the swamp lands, and every morning and evening you see great whiffs of mist coming up one of the forests on the foot-hills round Victoria, making the whole district look as if it were a great smouldering fire. The difficulty of getting a sick man up to either Buea or De Buncha would at present be great, but granting these difficulties removed, as one will be when the road to Buea is completed, I do not think that when a fever patient got up above the 3,000 feet level he would find much benefit, and he would run great risk of chill and dysentery. I regard this idea of the possibility of finding an elevated situation in West Africa suitable for a sanatorium, as one of the most dangerous the governmental authorities suffer from, for it induces them to build houses in out-of-the-way places, and send men suffering from fever to them to die, robbing the sick man of his great chance of recovery, namely, getting out to sea. The true sanatorium for the Coast would be a hospital vessel attached to each district, but as this is practically impossible, the next best thing would be for the indefatigable Mr. A. L. Jones and Messrs, Elder Dempster to have a special hospital cabin on every one of their vessels. The drawback to this is that getting out to a vessel through the Gold Coast surf would be risky work for a sick man, and in the Rivers the mail steamers have to go from one mangrove swamp river to another, and into places like Forcados, where, owing to Lagos Bar's iniquities, vessels are detained for days, lying idle in the sweltering heat waiting for cargo. Below the Rivers, on the South West-Coast, these objections would only hold to a lesser extent, but then the South-West Coast is by no means so much in need of sanatoriums, and the white men living there are fewer and more scattered than on the West Coast or in the Rivers. There is another plan which might work well for Lagos and the Oil Rivers, and that is to have hospital hulks anchored outside. The experience of the French guard-ship Minerve seems to show that this would be a repaying plan, particularly if it were not combined with the French therapeutic methods, which have an immense amount of dash and go in them, and I dare say if a man were in rude health he might undergo them with little permanent injury to his constitution.
The next excitement after cruising in the bay was the arrival of the Nachtigal early in the morning. Of course I packed furiously, and when I was quite ready found her arrival had nothing to do with going to Calabar; she had brought round the Governor from Cameroons, he having been, I am sorry to say, nearly dead with fever. With him came my old friend Doctor Plehn, and I heard sad news of the numbers of bad fever cases in Cameroon River since I had left it, and the Doctor, who had been anxiously expected here for some time, flew hither and thither and rapidly repaired the health of Victoria.
Herr von Puttkamer kindly asked me to breakfast on board the Nachtigal, and confirmed Herr von Lucke’s statement about my being welcome to go round in her to Calabar. He said as soon as he got back to Cameroons he should be sending her round with the Commissioner.
I had a very pleasant afternoon, and got a good deal of material for a work on the Natural History of Governors which I do not intend to publish, but I will just state that all the West Coast Governors, whatever may be the nation they represent, are exceedingly good society. The Governor of Cameroons I consider the best; he is the most experienced, for one thing. He was Governor in Togo before he came to Cameroons, and also was for some time in Lagos and on the Niger; but that is another story, and although a highly diverting one, we will not go into it here. But for fear there should be a rush of people out from home to enjoy the charms of the society of West African Governors, I will remark that they have their faults. They are awfully bad for your clothes. It is this way: after being in West Africa some little time, particularly if you have been away in the bush, your wardrobe is always in a rarefied state. For example, when in Cameroons I had one dress, and one only, that I regarded as fit to support the dignity of a representative of England, so of course when going to call on the representative of another Power I had to put that dress on, and then go out in open boats to war-ships or for bush walks in it, and equally of course down came tornadoes and rain by the ton. I did not care for the thunder, lightning, or wind. What worried me was the conviction that that precious rain would take the colour out of my costume.
Governor von Puttkamer has a peculiarity not shared by any other Governor on the Coast. He likes the sea, so during breakfast the Nachtigal was ordered to steam about the bay, which she energetically did. Fortunately, I like the sea too, or—well! as it was, the only inconvenience we suffered was getting a heavy shock in the middle of the meal. We thought we had discovered a new rock, but found we had only struck a sleeping whale. What the whale thought I do not know, but it made a considerable fuss and left the bay without a word of apology to the Governor.
The Nachtigal left Victoria the next day, it being held too unhealthy a place for the Governor to stay in after his severe illness, and went round to Man-o'-War Bay. And the day after Herr von Lucke took me round to the plantation in Man-o'-War Bay, whereat the Governor was staying for a few days.
Man-o'-War Bay is a very peculiar and charming bay to the south of Ambas, having a narrower inlet and not quite so great a depth as the latter, from which it is separated by a high rocky promontory of hills. I do not think it has been carefully sounded, but there is deep water close alongside its shores, which rise very steeply in densely wooded mountains. The main peculiarity of it is that through a rock wall at its eastern end there is a natural tunnel in the rock, and you can row through this in a boat and then find yourself on another sheet of water which has no other inlet or outlet, and is, if possible, more beautiful than Man-o'-War Bay itself, though much smaller. It would be an exquisite place for smuggling.
On the southern shore of Man-o'-War Bay is a beautiful little quay and landing-place for the grand plantation colloquially known as Frederickshafen, after its energetic custodian. This plantation is the property of a syndicate, the main shareholders being Messrs, Woermann, and its magnificent condition and grand output ought to do much to heal that firm’s feelings regarding their great losses over their Gaboon plantation. The house belonging to it is the finest house I know in West Africa. It is built of brick and wood and has the customary deep verandah running round it, but with this important difference, that this verandah is closed in with glazed windows, which prevent the inner rooms from being too dark to work in, and also prevents the verandah from being draughty. On the West Coast these are two dreadful faults in the European-built houses. You cannot imagine what an intolerable gloom and discomfort arises from the usual English sort of house here. The abominable structure is made of corrugated iron, roof and all, with just its skeleton and floors made of wood. Sometimes the under part of the house is closed in and used for stores and offices; sometimes it is left open, but always the living rooms are on the first floor and open out on to a verandah. The sides of this verandah are usually closed in by venetian shutters with windows at intervals. During the tornado seasons these shutters and windows have to be closed up on an average twice a day. During the wet season they are kept closed most of the six months' spell. Consequently you have to live on the verandah, for the inner rooms are then "as dark as ignorance," and the venetians only keep out a percentage of the rain, and divide the fierce tornado winds into strips which cut into you and give you your death of fever, and send all your papers flying; while the tornado, or the wet season rain plays like fifty thousand demons on the tom-tom of your corrugated iron roof. Now these things were avoided in the house at Frederickshafen, for when the windows round the verandah were shut, they, being glazed, kept out the wind and let in the light, and the roof was a roof of tiles and not a horrid tin tom-tom affair.
Herr Fredericksky most kindly showed me all over his plantation. When it was first started the cautious planter then in charge planted coffee and oil-palms so as to have something to fall back on should the coffee fail, and to a considerable extent coffee has failed throughout Victoria. It gets afflicted with a sort of blight analogous to honey-dew, and on this honey-dew grows a large black mildew which mats the coffee-berries together and ruins them, although it does not seem to injure the health of the tree much. But cacao flourishes exceedingly in the Victoria district, and has so far got no disease. And so the coffee in this plantation, and in the native plantations round Ambas Bay, is being replaced by cacao, and to such purpose has this plan been followed, that the profit on the latter product exported by the small native growers last year amounted to £1,000 English, and this large plantation ships on an average 400 bags a month. During the two flushes which occur in the year, as many as 600 and 650 bags a month would be shipped; during the intermediate seasons 200 to 300.
The enterprise with which capital has been expended here, and the judiciousness with which it has been employed, is very remarkable for a West Coast undertaking, wherein, as a general rule, there is usually one without the other, or a notable absence of both.
There are near to the living house large, well-built houses with the proper machinery for drying the cocoa, after it has been properly fermented and washed in another house, that is away at the further end of the plantation where the fermenting house is established, because of a suitable little river; and wonderful to relate these two sets of houses are connected by an excellent tramway, very carefully and soundly made, and ten times pleasanter and safer to travel on than the Congo Free State Railway. The little cars on which you, or bags of cocoa, sit are pushed by energetic labourers; a distinct improvement on West African steam-engines. After conscientiously doing the drying and the fermenting sheds, and enjoying the faint but pleasant smell of the mauve-coloured cocoa in heaps on the floors in various states of fermentation, we proceeded to seriously study cacao growing; and I was taken by the two gigantic German gentlemen over acre after acre of plants in various stages of growth, from those just showing leaf above the ground, to those whose beautiful golden fruit were being gathered by gangs of labourers imported from the Batanga region, the Kru Coast, Sierra Leone and other places. If it had not been for driver ants, I feel sure I should have acquired enough information that afternoon to enable me to go and set up a plantation on my own account and make that plantation pay; but as it was, I just made a mental note that it was well to cut down your forest to start a clearing with in the middle of the dry season; then let the trees and bush-wood dry a little; and then set them on fire. Then, just before the rains, I was to plant three cacao beans in a hole, and I learnt with pleasure that I need not bother to remove the gigantic charred tree-trunks that lay about in a glorious confusion—in fact, it was advisable to leave them, as they afforded shelter for the young plants from an excess of sun; and also I need not bother about planting my series of three beans in one hole in tidy lines, but might just stick them in, in a general sort of way, wherever I felt disposed. This was a comfort, for how any one was to do otherwise with the ground overlaid with a confused sort of network of trees, from sixty to one hundred feet long and from three to thirty feet in circumference, I don't know. Then when these seedlings had attained a sufficient growth, they were to be carefully transplanted into a cleared piece of ground—a nursery, where they were to be planted in proper rows. Just as we reached the nursery, and my education was flowing on in a peaceful, pleasant stream, forty-eight burning hot pinchers were inserted into me and I knew "joy’s short life was overpast" for that afternoon, in other words that I had got into a train of drivers. Resolving to suffer and be strong, I said nothing, and seeing that there were no more of the enemy on the ground immediately round me, I lived my tormentors down, and did my best to keep up an appearance of interest in cacao, but really the only thing that did interest me just then was whether either of my companions had got drivers on them.
They never mentioned drivers. They had a little difference of opinion over coffee disease, and a lengthy discussion on the relative value of white and blue kokos as food-supply for labourers, and one of them talked a little wildly, for him, at moments. But there was no headlong dash for water, surrounded in blue flames of bad language, such as I am accustomed to when a lord of creation gets drivers on him, and I proudly thought that to me alone belonged the glory of quietly living down driver ants, but I subsequently learnt that England had to share this honour in the field of colonial enterprise with Germany; and so, as Mr. Pepys would say, home to Victoria, in the lovely late afternoon. There was just a doubt, however, for half-an-hour or so, whether we should succeed in rounding the rocky promontory that separates Ambas from Man-o'-War Bay, for the sea had got rough in the mysterious way seas do down here, without any weather reason, and the wind, what there was of it, was dead against us. But although my dress was nearly reduced to the dead level of my other dresses, the thing was done.
The next few days I spent expecting the Nachtigal. Of course I had unpacked all my things again and most of them were at the wash, when Idabea rushes into my room saying, "Nachtigal kommt," and I packed furiously, and stood by to go aboard, having been well educated by my chief tutor, Captain Murray, on the iniquity of detaining the ship. I hasten to say the lesson on this point I never brought down on myself. I have never robbed a church or committed a murder, so should never dream of plunging into this lower-most depth of crime without a preparatory course of capital offences. When, however, I was packed, I found that it was not the Nachtigal which had come in, but the Hyæna—the guard-ship of Cameroons River—out for an airing, and as her commander Captain Baham, kindly asked me on board to lunch, I had to unpack again. At lunch I had the honour of meeting the two officers who had first ascended the peak of Cameroon from the south-east face, and I learnt from them many things which would have been of great help to me had I had this honour before I went up, but which were none the less good to know; and during the whole of their stay in Ambas Bay I received from the Hyæna an immense amount of pleasure, courtesy, and kindness, adding to the already great debt in these things I owe to Cameroons—a debt which I shall never forget, although I can never repay it.
The third announcement of the Nachtigal proved true, and with my dilapidated baggage I went round in her, under the charge of Herr von Besser, into Old Calabar, where I received every hospitality from Mr. Moore and Mr. Wall, for my good friends Sir Claude and Lady MacDonald had left for England some months previously—for the last time as it turned out, for shortly after his arrival in England Sir Claude was sent as British Minister to Pekin.
When I reached Calabar I found that the Bakana, commanded by Captain Porter and having for her chief engineer Mr. Peter Campbell, vws expected to come in daily, and being a sister ship to the Batanga and so one of the finest boats in the service, I decided to wait for her, going up to say good-bye to Miss Slessor at Okÿon during the few days at my disposal.
We had a comfortable voyage up to Sierra Leone, where a gloom fell over the whole ship from the death of the purser, Mr. Crompton. It was onc of those terribly, sudden, hopeless cases of Coast fever, so common on the West Coast, where no man knows from day to day whether he or those round him will not, before a few hours are over, be in the grip of malarial fever, on his way to the grave.
- ↑ Mr. George Thomson died at Victoria, while engaged on this work, in 1871.