Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons/Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV
LAGOS BAR
I will not detain you with any account of the Oil Rivers here. They are too big a subject to compress for one thing; for another I do not feel that I yet know enough to have the right to speak regarding them, unless I were going to do so along accepted, well-trodden lines, and what I have seen and personally know of the region does not make me feel at all inclined to do this. So I will wait until I have had further opportunities of observing them.
The natives I have worked at, but as their fetish is of exceeding interest, I have relegated it to a separate chapter, owing to its unfitness to be allowed to stray about in the rest of the text, in order to make things generally tidier. The state of confusion the mind of a collector like myself gets into on the West Coast is something simply awful, and my notes for a day will contain facts relating to the kraw-kraw, price of onions, size and number of fish caught, cooking recipes, genealogies, oaths (native form of), law cases, and market prices, &c., &c. And the undertaking of tidying these things up is no small one. As for one's personal memory it becomes a rag-bag into which you dip frantically when some one asks you a question, and you almost always fail to secure your particular fact rag for some minutes.
After returning from the short visit to Fernando Po made in their company, owing to the great kindness of Sir Claude and Lady MacDonald I remained in Calabar River from January until May, collecting fish mainly through the kindness of Dr Whitindale, and insects through the kindness of Mr. Cooper, then in charge of the botanical station. Most of my time was spent puddling about the river and the forest round Dukę Town and Creek Town, but I made a point on this visit to Calabar of going up river to see Miss Slessor at Okyon, and she allowed me to stay with her, giving me invaluable help in the matter of fetish and some of the pleasantest days in my life. This very wonderful lady has been eighteen years in Calabar; for the last six or seven living entirely alone, as far as white folks go, in a clearing in the forest near to one of the principal villages of the Okyon district, and ruling as a veritable white chief over the entire Okyon district. Her great abilities, both physical and intellectual, have given her among the savage tribe an unique position, and won her, from white and black who know her, a profound esteem. Her knowledge of the native, his language, his ways of thought, his diseases, his difficulties, and all that is his, is extraordinary, and the amount of good she has done, no man can fully estimate. Okyon, when she went there alone—living in the native houses while she built, with the assistance of the natives, her present house—was a district regarded with fear by the Duke and Creek Town natives, and practically unknown to Europeans. It was given, as most of the surrounding districts still are, to killing at funerals, ordeal by poison, and perpetual internecine wars. Many of these evil customs she has stamped out, and Okyon rarely gives trouble to its nominal rulers, the Consuls in Old Calabar, and trade passes freely through it down to the sea-ports.
This instance of what one white can do would give many important lessons in West Coast administration and development. Only the sort of man Miss Slessor represents is rare. There are but few who have the same power of resisting the malarial climate, and of acquiring the language, and an insight into the negro mind, so perhaps after all it is no great wonder that Miss Slessor stands alone, as she certainly does.
After returning down river, I just waited until the Batanga, my old friend, came into the river again, and then started for my beloved South West Coast. The various divisions of the West Coast of Africa are very perplexing to a new comer. Starting from Sierra Leone coming south you first pass the Grain Coast, which is also called the Pepper or Kru Coast, or the Liberian Coast. Next comes the Ivory Coast, also known as the Half Jack Coast, or the Bristol Coast. Then comes the Gold Coast; then the old Slave Coast, now called the Popos; then Lagos, and then the Rivers, and below the Rivers the South West Coast. In addition to these names you will hear the Timber Ports, and the Win'ard and Leeward Ports referred to, and it perplexes one when one finds a port, say Axim, referred to by one competent authority, i.e. a sea-captain, as a Win'ard port, by the next as a Timber, by the next as a Gold Coast port. It is just as well to get the matter up if you intend frequenting the Bights of Biafra and Benin. I will just give you, as a hint to facilitate your researches, the information that the Bight of Benin commences at Cape St. Paul and ends at Cape Formosa; and the Bight of Biafra commences at Cape Formosa and ends at Cape Lopez. The Windward Coast is that portion between Cape Apollonia and the Secum River, just west of Accra. At this river the Leeward Coast begins, and terminates at the Volta.
When I was on the coast in 1893, Cameroons River was regarded in nautical circles as a River. Now, alas for me! it is not, and getting from Calabar to Cameroons is a thing you ought to get a medal for, for the line of vessels that run from Liverpool to Calabar goes no further than the latter place. In former days they used to call in at Calabar, then go across to Fernando Po and into Cameroons, calling steadily at ports right down to Sant. Paul de Loanda, which was a highly convenient and beautiful arrangement, but I presume did not pay; so the South West Coast boats, that is to say boats calling below Calabar, now call at Lagos, and thus ignore the Rivers, going straight on into Cameroons River. So you see, if you have providentially kept your head clear during this disquisition, I had to go on a homeward bound boat up as far as Lagos Bar and then catch a South Wester outward bound, and I assure you changing at Lagos Bar throws changing at Clapham Junction into the shade. Now in order to make this latter point clear to that unfortunate victim the general reader, he, or she, must be dragged througha disquisition on Lagos and its bar.
Lagos is a marvellous manifestation of the perversity of man coupled with the perversity of nature, being at one and the same time one of the most important exporting ports on the West African seaboard, and one of the most difficult to get at. The town of Lagos is situated on an island in the Lagos River, a river which is much given to going into lagoons and mud, and which has its bar about two miles out. The entire breadth of the channel through this bar is half a mile, at least on paper. On each side of this channel are the worst set of breakers in West Africa, and its resident population consists of sharks, whose annual toll of human life is said by some authorities to be fourteen, by others forty, but like everything else connected with Lagos Bar, it is uncertain, but bad. This entrance channel, however, at the best of times has not more than thirteen feet of water on it, and so although the British African and Royal African lines of steamers are noble pedestrians, thinking nothing of walking a mile or so when occasion requires, and as capable of going over a grass-plot with the dew on it as any ocean vessels ever built, I am bound to own they do require a certain amount of water to get on with. They can sit high and dry on a sand or mud-bank—they prefer mud I may remark with any vessel. I have often been on them when engaged in this pastime, but it does undoubtedly cause delay, and this being the case they do not go alongside at Lagos, but lie outside the bar. Now such is the pestilential nature of Lagos Bar that even the carefully built branch boats, the noble Dodo and Qwarra, to say nothing of the Forcados and others, although drawing only ten feet, are liable to stick. For the channel, instead of sticking to its governmentally reported thirteen feet, is prone to be nine feet, and exceeding prone also to change its position; and moreover, even supposing the branch boat to get across all right, the heavy swell outside with its great rollers lounging along, intent on breaking on the bar, looking like coiling snakes under a blanket, make the vessels lying broadside on to the play pendulum to an extent that precludes the discharging or taking on of heavy cargo; and heavy cargo has to come on and off for Lagos to the value of £1,566,243 a year. So as the West African trading vessels are enterprising and determined, particularly where palm oil is concerned, they arrange the matter by going and lying up Forcados River. This river, which is 120 miles below Lagos, is a mouth of the Niger, and has a bar you can cross (if you don't mind a little walking), drawing seventeen feet nine inches. This being the case they run just inside Forcados River and then wait for the branch boat from Lagos to come and bring them their heavy cargo. When they have got this on board, they proceed up coast and call off Lagos Bar, and another unfortunate branch boat brings off mails and passengers to them.
Well, the Batanga after leaving Calabar and calling at Bonny had duly waited for the branch boat in Forcados and ultimately got her and her cargo, with its attendant uproar; and an account of the latest iniquities of Lagos Bar which had one of its bad fits on just then and was capturing and wrecking branch boats galore; and we had the usual scene with Mrs. S. Mrs. S., I may remark, is a comely and large black lady, an old acquaintance of mine, hailing from Opobo and frequently going up and down to Lagos, in connection with trading affairs of her own, and another lady with whom Mrs. S. is in a sort of partnership. This trade usually consists of extensive operations in chickens. She goes up to Lagos and buys chickens, brings them on board in crates, and takes them to Opobo and there sells them. It is not for me as a fellow woman to say what Mrs. S. makes on the transaction, nor does it interest the general public, but what does interest the general public (at least that portion of it that goes down to the sea in ships and for its sins wanders into Forcados River) is Mrs. S.'s return trip to Lagos with those empty crates and the determination in her heart not to pay freight for them. Wise and experienced chief officers never see Mrs. S.'s crates, but young and truculent ones do, and determine, in their hearts, she shall pay for them, advertising this resolve of theirs openly all the way from Opobo, which is foolish. When it comes to sending heavy goods overside into the branch boat at Forcados, the wise chief officer lets those crates go, but the truculent one says,
"Here, Mrs. S., now you have got to pay for these crates."
"Lor' mussy me, sar," says Mrs. S., "what you talk about?"
"These here chicken crates of yours, Mrs. S."
"Lor' mussy me," says Mrs. S.," those crates no 'long to me, sar."
"Then," says the truculent one, "heave 'em over side! We don't want that stuff lumbering up our deck."
Mrs. S. then expostulates and explains they are the property of a lone lorn lady in Lagos to whom Mrs. S. is taking them from the highest motives; motives "such a nice gentleman" as the first officer must understand, and which it will be a pleasure to him to share in, and she cites instances of other chief officers who according to her have felt, as it were, a ray of sunlight come into their lives when they saw those chicken crates and felt it was in their power to share in the noble work of returning them to Lagos freight free. The truculent one then loses his head and some of his temper and avows himself a heartless villain, totally indifferent to the sex, and says all sorts of things, but my faith in the ultimate victory of Mrs. S. never wavers. My money is on her all the time, and she has never disappointed me, and when I am quite rich some day, I will give Mrs. S. purses of gold in the eastern manner for the many delicious scenes she has played before me with those crates in dreary Forcados.
These affairs being duly disposed of, the Batanga left Forcados and duly proceeded up coast to call off Lagos for mails and passengers; my fate being to go on to the branch boat which brought these out, and which I then expected would take me in to Lagos, to await the arrival of the south-west outward bound boat.
I had been treated, as passengers landing at Lagos are properly and customarily treated, to a course of instruction on the dangers of going on and off branch boats on the bar, with special mention of the case of a gentleman who came down the Coast for pleasure and lost a leg to a shark while so engaged, and of the amount of fever of a bad type just then raging in Lagos; and then when we saw the branch boat that was coming out to us get stuck on the bar in the middle of what a German would call a Wirrwarr of breakers, I own it took all the fascination of my memories of the South West Coast to prevent my giving up the journey, and going home to England comfortably on the Batanga, as my best friends strongly advised my doing.
However presently the branch boat stamped her way over the bar, and came panting up, and anchored near us, and from her on to the Batanga came a Lagos Government official in a saturated state. He said he had just come out to see how a branch boat could get across the bar at low water—a noble and enterprising thing which places him in line with the Elder Pliny. He entertained us with a calm, utterly dispassionate account of how the water had washed right over them, gone down the funnel and all that sort of thing—evidently a horribly commonplace experience here; and he said the Eko (that was our branch boat's name) was not going back into Lagos until she had put the down coast mail and over a hundred deck-passengers who were going to the Congo, on to the South West Coast boat, which was hourly expected in the roads, as she had been telegraphed from Accra. He casually observed he hoped she would not be late in the afternoon as he had to go up country in the morning on the Government steamer. Well, things seeming safe and pleasant, I went off to the branch boat, being most carefully lowered over the side in a chair by the winch.
"Take care of yourself," said the Batanga.
"I will," said I, which shows the futility and vanity of such resolves, for had not other people taken care of me, goodness only knows what would have become of me. Arrived alongside of the Eko, I proceeded up her rope-ladder on deck, and that deck I shall not soon forget. The Government official had understated the case; things were in a spring-cleaning confusion the waves had not made a clean sweep of her but an uncommonly dirty one, and it would have been better if she had stuck among the breakers another half hour and given the sea-nymphs time to tidy up. They had made especial hay of the gallant captain's cabin, flinging out on to the deck his socks and hats and boots just anyhow, and over all and everything was a coating of wet coal-dust. On the little lower deck were the unfortunate native passengers. They were silent, which with native passengers means sick, and every rag they possessed was wringing wet. Rats ran freely about everywhere, and from out of the black patch of silence on the main deck rose no sound save Mrs. S.'s Chei! Chei! Chei! of disgust and disapproval of her surroundings. The kindly German captain (for the Eko belonged to a great German trading firm in Lagos, and not to the steamboat companies) did all he could to make me comfortable, and the Government official pointed out to me objects of interest on the distant shore: the lighthouse, the Government House, the Wilberforce Hall, and so on, but particularly the little Government steamer which, he observed, was getting up steam to be ready to take him up river early in the morning. He seemed to think they were beginning rather too early, as the Government are vigilant about the sin of wasting coal. As the afternoon wore away, our interest in the coming of the Benguella grew until it surpassed all other interests, and the Benguella became the one thing we really cared about in life, and yet she came not. The little Eko rolled to and fro, to and fro, all the loose gear going slipperty, slop, crash; slipperty, slop, crash: coal-dust, smuts, and a broiling sun poured down on us quietly, and the only thing or motion that gave us any variety was every three or four minutes the Eko making a vicious jerk at her anchor. About six o'clock a steamer was seen coming up into the roads. The experienced captain said she was not the Benguella, and she was not, but the Janette Woermann, and as soon as she got settled, her captain came on board the Eko, of course to ask what prospect there was of cargo on shore. He appeared as a gigantic, lithe, powerful Dane clad in a uniform of great splendour and exceeding tightness, terminating in a pair of Blucher boots and every inch of his six feet four spick and span, but that was only the visible form—his external seeming. What that man really was, was our two guardian cherubs rolled into one, for no sooner did he lay eye on us—the depressed and distracted official and the dilapidated lady—than he claimed us as his own, and in a few more minutes we were playing bob cherry again with Lagos Bar sharks, going down into his boat by the Eko's rope-ladder.
Were I but Khalif of Bagdad, I would have that captain's name—which is Heldt—written in letters of gold on ivory tablets with a full and particular account of all he did for us. No sooner did he successfully get us on board his comfortable vessel, than he gave me his own cabin on the upper deck and stowed himself in some sort of outhouse alongside it, which I observed, when going out on deck during the night to see if that Benguella had come in to the roads, was far too short for him. He gave us dinner with great promptitude—an excellent dinner commencing with what I thought was a plateful of hot jam, but which anyhow was nice. Indeed so reconciled did I become to my environment that my interest in the coming of the Benguella hourly waned, and had it not been for my having caught a sense of worry about "the way coals were being wasted" on the Government boat inside the bar, I should have forgotten the South-Wester. Not so my companion. You cannot distract a man from the higher duties and responsibilities of life so easily. His mind was a prey to the most dismal thoughts and conjectures. He regretted having come out on the Eko, although his motive to see how she would get across the bar at low water was a noble one and arose from the nature of his particular appointment, and not only did he regret that, but remembered, with remorse, all the other things he had done which he should not have done. Captain Heldt did his best to cheer him and distract him from the contemplation of these things and the way coal was being wasted on his account inside the bar. The captain offered him suits of his own clothes to change his sopped ones for; but no, he said he was lost enough already without getting into clothes of that size. Lager beer, cigars, and stories were then tried on him, but with little effect. He took a certain amount of interest in the captain's account of how he had had his back severely injured and had had to navigate his vessel among the shoals of Saint Ann while lying in great agony for weeks owing to an accident in the Grain Coast surf, and also in the various accounts of the many ribs the captain had had broken in various ways on the high seas, but any legend of a more cheerful character than these he evidently felt was unfitted to our situation, and flippant, considering the way those coals were being wasted. Still the Benguella came not, though we sat up very late looking for her, and at last we turned in.
The next morning we were up early. There was no Benguella. The Eko was still rolling about near us waiting for her, and the Eko's passengers having had, as I heard, in vivid account some months after from Mrs. S. with many chei! cheis! a wretched, ratful, foodless night, the Eko naturally not laying herself out for water pic-nic parties. We fared well on the Janette, our guardian angel providing us with an excellent breakfast. My fellow countryman's anxiety had now passed into a dark despair. He no longer looked for the South-Wester. It was past that; but he borrowed Captain Heldt's best telescope and watched the Government steamer, which lay smoking away like a Turkish man-of-war, waiting for him. Captain Heldt tried to cheer him with more stories, lager beer, and cigars, and at last produced an auto-harp, an instrument upon which he was himself proficient and capable of playing not only the march from "Ajax," but "Der Wacht am Rhein" and "Annie Laurie." This temporarily took my fellow countryman's mind off coals, and he set about to acquire the management of the auto-harp and rapidly did so, but then he only picked out with infinite feeling and pathos "Home, Sweet Home," so it was taken from him. Then we had long accounts of the region round the Swakop river, from which the Janette had just come, and at last, about two o'clock, my fellow countryman sadly said: "Here she comes!" and there she did come, and in a short time the graceful old Benguella was duly anchored in the roads and I was taken on board by my two friends.
We none of us felt very enthusiastic, I fear. I had never been on her before, so regarded her as an utter stranger. My fellow countryman felt it was a hanging matter by now for him on shore, because of those coals, and so did not feel in such a hurry to get there. And to Captain Heldt she was a rival. But often those things which you expect least of ultimately give you the most pleasure, as the moralist would say, and moreover when you are on the Coast you never know whom you may meet; and as I, after a good deal of trouble in the Janette's boat to get my companions to go on deck before me up the rope ladder, elaborately climbed that thrilling nautical institution myself and had got my head over the top of the bulwark, I saw a yard off me, dead ahead, still super-intending the hatch—my first tutor in Kru English. It was in '93 that he had last seen me, a very new comer, going ashore at San Paul de Loanda from the Lagos, on which vessel he was then officer, and vowing I meant to go home by the next boat; now seeing me coming on board, in a way I am sure would have done credit to a Half Jack captain, he naturally asked for an explanation, which, being quite busy with the rope-ladder palaver, I did not then and there give him.
In a short time I had said farewell, with many thanks to my two friends who had taken such care of me on Lagos Bar, and my fellow countryman returned in the Eko, which, having got her mails and passengers safe and sound on to the Benguella, was at last going in to Lagos again, and I am sure it will be a relief to you to know that none of those expected troubles on shore befell the official, but he lived to earn the gratitude and esteem of Lagos and its Government for his noble and determined services in working and surveying that awful bar. When, a few months after our amusing experiences on it, it went on worse than ever, and vessel after vessel was wrecked, he rescued their passengers and crews at the great risk of his own life; for going alongside a vessel that is breaking up in the breakers, and in an open boat with a native crew, and getting off panic-stricken Africans and their belongings, surrounded by such a sea, with its crowd of expectant sharks, in the West African climate, is good work for a good man, and my fellow-countryman did it and did it well.