Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI
LIBREVILLE AND GLASS
I must pause here to explain my reasons for giving extracts from my diary, being informed on excellent authority that publishing a diary is a form of literary crime. Such being the case I have to urge in extenuation of my committing it that—Firstly, I have not done it before, for so far I have given a sketchy résumé of many diaries kept by me while visiting the regions I have attempted to describe. Secondly, no one expects literature in a book of travel. Thirdly, there are things to be said in favour of the diary form, particularly when it is kept in a little known and wild region, for the reader gets therein notice of things that, although unimportant in themselves, yet go to make up the conditions of life under which men and things exist. The worst of it is these things are not often presented in their due and proper proportion in diaries. Many pages in my journals that I will spare you display this crime to perfection. For example: "Awful turn up with crocodile about ten—Paraffin good for over-oiled boots—Evil spirits crawl on ground, hence high lintel—Odeaka cheese is made thus:—" Then comes half a yard on Odeaka cheese making.
When a person is out travelling, intent mainly on geography, it is necessary, if he publishes his journals, that he should publish them in sequence. But I am not a geographer. I have to learn the geography of a region I go into in great detail, so as to get about; but my means of learning it are not the scientific ones—Taking observations, Surveying, Fixing points, &c., &c. These things I know not how to do. I do not "take lunars"; and I always sympathise with a young friend of mine, who, on hearing that an official had got dreadfully ill from taking them, said, "What do those government men do it for? It kills them all off. I don't hold with knocking yourself to pieces with a lot of doctor's stuff." I certainly have a dim idea that lunars are not a sort of pill; but I quite agree that they were unwholesome things for a man to take in West Africa. This being my point of view regarding geography, I have relegated it to a separate chapter and have dealt similarly with trade and Fetish.
I have omitted all my bush journal. It is a journal of researches in Fetish and of life in the forest and in native villages, and I think I have a better chance of making this information understood by collecting it together; for the African forest is not a place you can, within reasonable limits, give an idea of by chronicling your own experience in it day by day. As a psychological study the carefully kept journal of a white man, from the first day he went away from his fellow whites and lived in the Great Forest Belt of Africa, among natives, who had not been in touch with white culture, would be an exceedingly interesting thing, provided it covered a considerable space of time; but to the general reader it would be hopelessly wearisome, and as for myself, I am not bent on discoursing on my psychological state, but on the state of things in general in West Africa.
On first entering the great grim twilight regions of the forest you hardly see anything but the vast column-like grey tree stems in their countless thousands around you, and the sparsely vegetated ground beneath. But day by day, as you get trained to your surroundings, you see more and more, and a whole world grows up gradually out of the gloom before your eyes. Snakes, beetles, bats and beasts, people the region that at first seemed lifeless.
It is the same with the better lit regions, where vegetation is many-formed and luxuriant. As you get used to it, what seemed at first to be an inextricable tangle ceases to be so. The separate sorts of plants stand out before your eyes with ever increasing clearness, until you can pick out the one particular one you may want; and daily you find it easier to make your way through what looked at first an impenetrable wall, for you have learnt that it is in the end easier to worm your way in among networks of creepers, than to shirk these, and go for the softer walls of climbing grasses and curtains of lycopodium; and not only is it easier, but safer, for in the grass and lycopodium there are nearly certain to be snakes galore, and the chances are you may force yourself into the privacy of a gigantic python's sleeping place.
There is the same difference also between night and day in the forest. You may have got fairly used to it by day, and then some catastrophe keeps you out in it all night, and again you see another world. To my taste there is nothing so fascinating as spending a night out in an African forest, or plantation; but I beg you to note I do not advise any one to follow the practice. Nor indeed do I recommend African forest life to any one. Unless you are interested in it and fall under its charm, it is the most awful life in death imaginable. It is like being shut up in a library whose books you cannot read, all the while tormented, terrified, and bored. And if you do fall under its spell, it takes all the colour out of other kinds of living. Still, it is good for a man to have an experience of it, whether he likes it or not, for it teaches you how very dependent you have been, during your previous life, on the familiarity of those conditions you have been brought up among, and on your fellow citizens; moreover it takes the conceit out of you pretty thoroughly during the days you spend stupidly stumbling about among your new surroundings.
When this first period passes there comes a sense of growing power. The proudest day in my life was the day on which an old Fan hunter said to me—"Ah! you see." Now he did not say this, I may remark, as a tribute to the hard work I had been doing in order to see, but regarded it as the consequence of a chief having given me a little ivory half-moon, whose special mission was "to make man see Bush," and when you have attained to that power in full, a state I do not pretend to have yet attained to, you can say, "Put me where you like in an African forest, and as far as the forest goes, starve me or kill me if you can."
As it is with the forest, so it is with the minds of the natives. Unless you live alone among the natives, you never get to know them; if you do this you gradually get a light into the true state of their mind-forest. At first you see nothing but a confused stupidity and crime; but when you get to see—well! as in the other forest,—you see things worth seeing. But it is beyond me to describe the process, so we will pass on to Congo Français.
My reasons for going to this wildest and most dangerous part of the West African regions were perfectly simple and reasonable. I had not found many fish in the Oil Rivers, and, as I have said, my one chance of getting a collection of fishes from a river north of the Congo lay in the attitude Mr. C. G. Hudson might see fit to assume towards ichthyology. Mr. Hudson I had met in 1893 at Kabinda, when he rescued me from dire dilemmas, and proved himself so reliable, that I had no hesitation in depending on his advice. Since those Kabinda days he had become a sort of commercial Bishop, i.e., an Agent-General for Messrs. Hatton and Cookson in Congo Français, and in this capacity had the power to let me get up the Ogowé river, the greatest river between the Niger and the Congo. This river is mainly known in England from the works of Mr. Du Chaillu, who, however, had the misfortune on both his expeditions to miss actually discovering it. Still, he knew it was there, and said so; and from his reports other explorers went out to look for it and duly found it; but of them hereafter. It has been in the possession of France nearly forty years now, and the French authorities keep quite as much order as one can expect along its navigable water way, considering that the density of the forest around it harbours and protects a set of notoriously savage tribes, chief among which are the Fans. These Fans are a great tribe that have, in the memory of living men, made their appearance in the regions known to white men, in a state of migration seawards, and are a bright, active, energetic sort of African, who by their pugnacious and predatory conduct do much to make one cease to regret and deplore the sloth and lethargy of the rest of the West Coast tribes; but of Fans I will speak by and by; and merely preface my diary by stating that Congo Français has a coast line of about 900 miles, extending from the Campo River to a point a few miles north of Landana, with the exception of the small Corisco region claimed by Spain. The Hinterland is not yet delimitated, except as regards the Middle Congo. The French possession runs from Brazzaville on Stanley Pool up to the confluence of the M'Ubanji with the Congo, then following the western bank of the M'Ubanji. Away to the N.N.E. it is not yet delimitated, and although the French have displayed great courage and enterprise, there are still great stretches of country in Congo Français that have never been visited by a white man; but the same may be said to as great an extent of the West Coast possessions of England and Germany.
The whole of the territory that is at present roughly delimitated, may have an area of 220,000 square miles, with a population variously estimated at from two to five millions.
The two main outlets of its trade are Gaboon and Fernan Vaz. Gaboon is the finest harbour on the western side of the continent, and was thought for many years to be what it looks like, namely, the mouth of a great river. Of late years, however, it has been found to be merely one of those great tidal estuaries like Bonny—that go thirty or forty miles inland and then end in a series of small rivers. While under the impression that Gaboon was one of the great water ways of Africa, France made it a head station for her West African Squadron, and the point of development from which to start on exploring the surrounding country. Her attention, it is said, was first attracted to the importance of Gaboon by the reports brought home by the expedition under Prince de Joinville in the Belle Poule—who, in 1840, brought the body of Napoleon from St. Helena for interment in Paris—and after de Joinville the northern termination of the Gaboon estuary is officially known, although it is locally called Cape Santa Clara, which is possibly the name given it by the Portuguese navigator, Lopez Gonsalves, who, in 1469, made his great voyage of discovery on this coast, and whose name Cape Lopez—at the mouth of one of the Ogowé streams—still bears.
Fernan Vaz and Cape Lopez are nowadays more important outlets for trade than Gaboon. To the former comes the trade of the Rembo river, and a certain amount of the Ogowé main trade, since the discovery of the Ogololé creek—a sort of natural canal about twelve miles long and of a fairly uniform breadth of fifty-five feet. Its course is twisted to and fro through the dense forest, and during the rains it is possible to take a small stern wheel steam-boat up and down it. Cape Lopez is the outlet of the Yombas arm of the lower Ogowé, which is also navigable by a small steam-boat. The Chargeur Reunis Company, subsidised by the Government, supply this vessel, the Éclaireur, to run from Cape Lopez to Njole, the highest navigable point for vessels on the Ogowé. Messrs. Hatton and Cookson used to have another small steamer, which went straight to and fro from Gaboon to Njole, but alas! she is no more. Nowadays Gaboon is merely a depot, and were it not for her magnificent harbour and the fact that the government is already established there in firm solid buildings, Gaboon would be abandoned, for not only has the trade coming out at Cape Lopez and Fernan Vaz increased, but the trade coming down the Gaboon itself decreased. This is possibly on account of French enterprise having made the route for trade by the Ogowé main stream the safer and easier.
There is now another rival to Gaboon in Congo Français, Loango. Loango owes its importance to the clear-sightedness and daring of M. de Brazza who, when he reached Brazzaville, as it is now rightly called, on Stanley Pool, saw that there was a possibility of a practicable route viâ the Niari Valley from the Middle Congo regions to the sea. For M. de Brazza to see the possibility of the practicability of a thing means that he makes it so, and Loango will gradually become the outlet for a very large portion of the Congo trade, when the railway along the Niari Valley is completed. It has also been suggested that the head station of the government should be moved from Gaboon to Loango, but against, this being done is the initial expense and the inferiority of the Loango anchorage. Still, things tend to gravitate towards Loango, as it is the more important position from a local political point. And now, feeling a strong inclination to discourse of M. de Brazza instead of getting on with my own work, I descend to diary.
May 20th, 1895.—Landed at Gaboon from the Benguella amidst showers of good advice and wishes from Captain Eversfield and Mr. Fothergill, to which an unknown but amiable French official, who came aboard at Batta, adds a lovely Goliath beetle.
HATTON AND COOKSON'S FACTORY AT GLASS.
The captain winds up with the advice to run the gig on to the beach, and not attempt the steps of Hatton and Cookson's wharf, for he asserts "they are only fit for a hen." However, having had for the present enough of running ashore, I go for the steps, and they are a little sketchy, but quite practicable.
Mr. Fildes, in the absence of the Agent-General, Mr. Hudson, receives me most kindly, and in the afternoon I and Mr. Huyghens, the new clerk out for the firm, are sent off to the Custom House under the guardian care of a French gentleman, who is an agent of Hatton and Cookson's, and who speaks English perfectly, while retaining his French embellishments and decorations to conversation.
The Post, i.e. Custom House, is situated a hundred yards or so from the factory, like it, facing the strand; and we make our way thither over and among the usual débris of a south-west coast beach, logs of waterworn trees, great hard seeds, old tins, and the canoes, which are drawn up out of the reach of the ever-mischievous, thieving sea.
The Custom House is far more remarkable for quaintness than beauty; it is two stories high, the ground floor being the local lock-up. The officer in charge lives on the topmost floor and has a long skeleton wooden staircase whereby to communicate with the lower world. This staircase is a veritable "hen-roost" one. It is evidently made to kill people, but why? Individuals desirous of defrauding customs would not be likely to haunt this Custom House staircase, and good people, like me, who want to pay dues, should be encouraged and not killed.
The officer is having his siesta; but when aroused is courteous and kindly, but he incarcerates my revolver, giving me a feeling of iniquity for having had the thing. I am informed if I pay 15s. for a licence I may have it—if I fire French ammunition out of it. This seems a heavy sum, so I ask M. Pichault, our mentor, what I may be allowed to shoot if I pay this? Will it make me free, as it were, of all the local shooting? May I daily shoot governors, heads of departments, and sous officiers? M. Pichault says "Decidedly not";—I may shoot "hippo, or elephants, or crocodiles." Now I have never tried shooting big game in Africa with a revolver, and as I don't intend to, I leave the thing in pawn. My collecting-cases and spirit, the things which I expected to reduce me to a financial wreck by custom dues, are passed entirely free, because they are for science. Vive la France!
21st.—Puddle about seashore. Dr. Nassau comes down from Baraka to see if Messrs. Hatton and Cookson have not appropriated a lady intended for the mission station. One was coming from Batanga by the Benguella, he knew, and he is told one has been seen on Hatton and Cookson's quay. Mr. Fildes assures him that the lady they have has been invoiced to the firm, and I am summoned to bear out the statement which gives me the opportunity I have long desired of meeting Dr. Nassau, the great pioneer explorer of these regions and one of the greatest authorities on native subjects in all their bearings.
Although he has been out here, engaged in mission work, since 1851 he is an exceedingly active man, and has a strangely gracious, refined, courteous manner.
22nd.—Uninterrupted sea-shore investigations.
23rd.— M. Pichault conducts Mr. Huyghens and me into the town of Libreville to be registered.
The road from Glass to Libreville is, at moments, very lovely, and a fine piece of work for the country and the climate. Round Glass the land is swampy, a thing that probably induced the English to settle here when they came to Gaboon, for the English love, above all things, settling in, or as near as possible to, a good reeking, stinking swamp. We pass first along a made piece of road with the swamp on the left hand, and on the other, a sandy bush-grown piece of land with native houses on it, beyond which lies the sea-shore, and whenever the swamp chooses to go down to the edge of the shore there is an iron viaduct thrown across it. The making of this road cost the lives of seventy out of one hundred of the Tonkinese convicts engaged in its construction. After this swampy piece the road runs through sandy land, virtually the shore, with low hills on the one hand and the beach on the other.
A line of cocoanut palms has been planted along either side of the road for most of the way, looking beautiful but behaving badly, for there is a telephone wire running along it from Libreville to Glass, and these gossiping palms—the most inveterate chatterer in the vegetable kingdom is a cocoanut palm—talk to each other with their hard leaves on the wire, just as they did at Fernando Po, so that mere human beings can hardly get a word in edgeways. This irritates the human atom, and of course it uses bad words to the wire, and I fancy these are seventy-five per cent. of all the words that get through the palm leaves' patter.
Two and a half miles' walk brings us to the office of the Directeur de l'Administration de l'Intérieur, and we hang about a fine stone-built verandah. We wait so long that the feeling grows on us that elaborate preparations for incarcerating us for life must be going on, but just as Mr. H. and I have made up our minds to make a dash for it and escape, we are ushered into a cool, whitewashed office, and find a French official, clean, tidy, dark-haired, and melancholy, seated before his writing-table. Courtcously bidding us be seated, he asks our names, ages, and avocations, enters them in a book for future reference, and then writes out a permit for each of us to reside in the colony, as long as we behave ourselves, and conform to the laws thereof. These documents are sent up stairs to be signed by the acting Governor, and while we are waiting for their return, he converses with M. Pichault on death, fever, &c. Presently a black man is shown in; he is clad in a blue serge coat, from underneath which float over a pair of blue canvas trousers the tails of a flannel shirt, and on his feet are a pair of ammunition boots that fairly hobble him. His name, the interpreter says, is Joseph. "Who is your father?" says the official—clerk interprets into trade English. "Fader?" says Joseph. "Yes, fader," says the interpreter. "My fader?" says Joseph. "Yes," says the interpreter; "who's your fader?" "Who my fader?" says Joseph. "Take him away and let him think about it," says the officer with a sad, sardonic smile. Joseph is alarmed and volunteers name of mother; this is no good; this sort of information any fool can give; Government is collecting information of a more recondite and interesting character. Joseph is removed by Senegal soldiers, boots and all. As he's going to Boma, in the Congo Free State, it can only be for ethnological purposes that the French Government are taking this trouble to get up his genealogy.
Our stamped papers having arrived now we feel happier and free, and then M. Pichault alarms us by saying, "Now for the Police"; and off we trail, subdued, to the Palais de Justice, where we are promptly ushered into a room containing a vivacious, gesticulatory old gentleman, kindly civil beyond words, and a powerful, calm young man, with a reassuring "He's-all-right; it's-only-his-way" manner regarding his chief. The chief is clad in a white shirt and white pantaloons cut à la Turque, but unfortunately these garments have a band that consists of a run-in string, and that string is out of repair. He writes furiously—blotting paper mislaid—frantic flurry round—pantaloons won't stand it—grab just saves them—something wanted the other side of the room—headlong flight towards it—"now's our chance," think the pantaloons, and make off—recaptured.
Formalities being concluded regarding us, the chief makes a dash out from behind his writing-table, claps his heels together, and bows with a jerk that causes the pantaloons to faint in coils, like the White Knight in "Alice in Wonderland," and my last view was of a combat with them, I hope a successful one, and that their owner, who was leaving for home the next day, is now enjoying a well-earned, honourable repose after his long years of service to his country in Congo Français.
24th.—Pouring wet day.
25th.—Called on the Mother Superior, and collected shells from the bay beyond Libreville. In the afternoon called on the missionary lady, who has now arrived with her young son, per German boat from Batanga, and talked on fetish; Dr. Nassau telling a very pathetic and beautiful story of an old chief at Eloby praying to the spirit of the new moon, which he regarded as a representative of the higher elemental power, to prevent the evil lower spirits from entering his town.
Sunday, 26th.—Mr. Fildes evidently regards it as his duty to devote his Sunday mornings to ladies "invoiced to the firm," and takes me in the gig to go up the little river to the east, ostentatiously only the drainage of the surrounding swamp. The tide just allows us to go over the miniature sand-bar, and then we row up the river, which is about forty feet across, and runs through a perfect gem of a mangrove-swamp, and the stench is quite the right thing—real Odeur de Niger Delta.
As we go higher up, the river channel winds to and fro between walls and slopes of ink-black slime, more sparsely covered with mangrove bushes than near the entrance. This stinking, stoneless slime is honey-combed with crab holes, and the owners of these—green, blue, red, and black—are walking about on the tips of their toes sideways, with that comic pomp peculiar to the crab family. I expected only to have to sit in the boat and say "Horrible" at intervals, but no such thing; my companion, selecting a peculiarly awful-looking spot, says he "thinks that will do," steers the boat up to it, and jumps out with a squidge into the black slime. For one awful moment I thought it was suicide, and that before I could even get the address of his relations to break the news to them there would be nothing but a Panama hat lying on the slime before me. But he only sinks in a matter of a foot or so, and then starts off, to my horror, calling the boys after him, to hunt crabs for me. Now I have mentioned no desire for crabs, and was merely looking at them, as I always do when out with other white folk, noting where they were so as to come back alone next day and get them; for I don't want any one's blood, black or white, on my head. As soon as I recovered speech, I besought him to come back into the boat and leave them: but no, "tears, prayers, entreaties, all in vain," as Koko says; he would not, and dashed about in the stinking mud, regardless, with his four Kruboys far more cautiously paddling after him.
The affrighted crabs were in a great taking. It seems to be crab etiquette that, even when a powerfully built, lithe, six foot high young man is coming at you hard all with a paddle, you must not go rushing into anybody's house save your own, whereby it fell out many crabs were captured; but the thing did not end there. I had never suspected we should catch anything but our deaths of fever, and so had brought with me no collecting-box, and before I could remonstrate Mr. Fildes' handkerchief was full of crabs, and of course mine too. It was a fine sunny morning on the Equator, and therefore it was hot, and we had nothing to wipe our perspiring brows with.
All the crabs being caught or scared home on this mud bank, we proceed higher up river, and after some more crab hunts we got to a place where I noticed you did not sink very far in if you kept moving; so I got ashore, and we went towards a break in the mangroves, where some high trees were growing, where we fell in with some exceedingly lovely mayflies and had a great hunt. They have legs two to three inches long, white at the joints and black between; a very small body with purple wings belongs to the legs, but you do not suspect this until you have caught the legs, as they hover and swing to and fro over some mass of decaying wood stuff. At first I thought they were spiders hanging from some invisible thread, so strangely did they move in circumscribed spaces: but we swept our hands over them and found no thread, and then we went for the legs in sheer desperation, and found a tiny fly body belonging to them and not a tiny spider body.
We then made our way on to the slightly higher land fringing the swamp. There was at the river end of the swamp a belt of palms, and beyond this a belt of red-woods, acacias, and other trees, and passing through these, we were out on an open grass-covered country, with low, rolling hills, looking strangely English, with clumps of trees here and there, and running between the hills, in all directions, densely-wooded valleys—a pleasant, homely-looking country.
We wandered through a considerable lot of grass, wherein I silently observed there were millions of ticks, and we made for a group of hut-homesteads and chatted with the inhabitants, until Mr. Fildes' conscience smote him with the fact that he had not given out cook's stores for the mid-day meal. Then we made a short cut to the boat, which involved us in a lot of mud-hopping, and so home to 12 o'clock breakfast.
At breakfast I find Mr. Fildes regards it as his duty to do more scientific work, for he asks me to go to Woermann's farm, and I, not knowing where it is, say yes; inwardly trusting that the place may not be far away, and situated in a reasonably dry country, for I have lost all sense of reliance in Mr. Fildes' instinct of self-preservation—an instinct usually strong enough to keep a West Coaster from walking a mile. Along the windward coast, and in the Rivers, I have always been accustomed to be regarded as insane for my walking ways, but this gentleman is worth six of me any day, and worth sixty for Sundays, it's clear.
At 3 o'clock off we go, turning down the "Boulevard" towards Libreville, and then up a road to the right opposite Woermann's beach, and follow it through miles of grass over low hills. Here and there are huts new to me, and quite unlike the mud ones of the West Coast, or the grass ones of the Congo and Angola districts. They are far inferior to the swish huts of the Effiks, or the Moorish-looking mud ones you see round Cape Coast Castle, &c., and notably inferior to the exceedingly neat Dualla huts of Cameroons; but they are better than any other type of African house I have seen.
They are made of split bamboo with roofs of mats like the Effik roofs, but again inferior. I notice sometimes the sections of the walls are made on the ground and then erected. The builder drives in a row of strong wooden poles, and then ties the sections on to them very neatly with "tic-tie." The door and window-frames and shutters are made of plank painted a bright cobalt blue as a rule, but now and then red—a red I believe that had no business there, as it looks like some white gentleman's red oxide he has had out for painting the boats with.
Sometimes, however, instead of the sections being made on the ground of closely set split bamboos, the poles of unsplit bamboo are driven in, and the split bamboos are lashed on to them, alternately inside and outside, and between these are fixed palm-leaf mats. I suspect this style of architecture of being cheaper. Although there are a good many houses of both these types being erected on the hills round Glass and Libreville, I cannot say building operations are carried on with much vigour, for there are plenty of skeletons up, with just one or two sections tied in place, and then left as if the builder had gone on strike or got sick of the job somehow.
The stretch of broiling hot grass is trying, but interesting; some of it is intensely fine and a beautiful yellow-green, which I am told is gathered and dried and made into pillows. Some again is long lank stuff, carrying a maroon-coloured ear, which when ripe turns gold colour, and in either state is very lovely when one comes across stretches of it down a hillside.
On either side of us show wooded valleys like those we saw this morning; and away to the east the line of mangrove swamp fringing the little river we rowed up. Away to the west are the groves of mango trees round Libreville; mango trees are only pretty when you are close to them, prettiest of all when you are walking through an avenue of them, and you can see their richness of colour; the deep myrtle-green leaves, with the young shoots a dull crimson, and the soft gray-brown stem, and the luscious-looking but turpentiny-tasting fruit, a glory of gold and crimson, like an immense nectarine.
We gradually get into a more beautiful type of country, and down into a forest. The high trees are the usual high forest series with a preponderance of acacias. It is a forest of varied forms, but flowerless now in the dry season. There are quantities of ferns; hart's-tongues and the sort that grows on the oil-palms, and elks-horn growing out of its great brown shields on the trees above, and bracken, and pretty trailing lycopodium climbing over things, but mostly over the cardamoms which abound in the under-bush, and here and there great banks of the most lovely ferns I have ever seen save the tree-fern, an ambitious climber, called, I believe, by the botanists Nephrodium circutarium, and walls of that strange climbing grass, and all sorts of other lovely things by thousands in all directions.
Butterflies and dragon-flies were scarce here compared to Okijon, but of other flies there were more than plenty.
The roadway is exceedingly good; certainly in the grass country you are rather liable to what Captain Eversfield graphically describes as "stub your toe" against lava-like rock, for the grass has overgrown the road, leaving only a single-file path open. In the forest you come across isolated masses of stratified rock, sometimes eight and ten feet high, most prettily overgrown with moss and fern.
We pass through several villages which Mr. Fildes tells me are Fan villages, and are highly interesting after all one has already heard of this tribe of evil repute. Their houses are quite different to the M'pongwe ones we have left behind, and are built of sheets of bark, tied on to sticks.
Frequently in the street one sees the characteristic standing drum painted white in patterns with black or red-brown, and a piece of raw hide stretched across the top, and one or two talking-drums besides.
We cross several pretty streams in the forest carefully bridged with plank. This Woermann's road, I hear, is between six and seven miles long, and its breadth uniformly nine feet, and it must have cost a lot of money to make. It was made with the intention of being used for waggons drawn by oxen, which were to bring down all the produce of the coffee plantation, and the timber that might be cut down in the clearing for it, to Gaboon for shipment. A large house was erected and a quantity of coffee planted, and then the enterprise was abandoned by Messrs. Woermann, and the whole affair, coffee, road, and all is rapidly sinking back into the bush.
There is a considerable-sized Fan village just at the entrance to the farm in which is a big silk-cotton tree. It struck me as strange, after coming from Calabar where these trees are frequently smothered round the roots with fetish objects, to see nothing on this one save a framed and glazed image of the Virgin and Child. Just beyond the Fan town there is a little river.
When we get so far it is too late to proceed further, and nothing but this consideration, backed by the memory of one night when he was compelled to walk to Glass from the farm, prevents Mr. Fildes, I believe, from crossing to Corisco Bay.
So round we turn, and return in the same order we came in, Mr. Fildes lashing along first, I behind him, going like a clock, which was my one chance. When at last we reached the "Boulevard" he wanted to reverse this order, but remembering the awful state that the back of my blouse got in at Fernando Po from a black boot-lace I was reduced to employ as a stay-lace, I refuse to go in front, without explaining why.
27th.—Went up among the grass to see if there was anything to be got; ticks were, and there were any quantity of ants and flocks of very small birds, little finch-like people, with a soft, dull, gray-brown plumage, relieved by a shading of dark green on the back, and little crimson bills; they have a pretty twittering note, and are little bigger than butterflies; butterflies themselves are rare now. I see the small boys catch these birds with flake rubber as with birdlime. Down in the wooded hollows there are numbers of other birds, plantain-eaters, and the bird with the long, soft, rich, thrushlike note, and the ubiquitous Wu-tu-tu, the clock bird, so called from its regular habit of giving the cry, from which its native name comes, every two hours during the night, commencing at 4 P.M. and going off duty at 6 A.M.
On my return home, I find Mr. Hudson is back from the Ogowé on the Mové, unaltered since '93, I am glad to say. He tells me good Dom Joachim de Sousa Coutinho e Chichorro is dead, and his wife Donna Anna, and her sister Donna Maria de Sousa Coutinho, my valued friends, have returned from Kabinda to Lisbon.
28th.—Go to west side of Libreville shell-hunting; after passing through the town, and in front of the mango-tree embowered mission station of the Espiritu Santo, the road runs along close to the sea, through a beautiful avenue of cocoa-palms. Then there is a bridge, and a little beyond this the road ends, and so I take to the sandy sea-shore for a mile or so.
The forest fringes the sand, rising in a wall of high trees, not mangroves; and here and there a stinking stream comes out from under them, and here and there are masses of shingle-formed conglomerate and stratified green-gray rock. Beyond Libreville there are several little clearings in the forest with a native town tucked into them, the inhabitants of which seem a happy and contented generation mainly devoted to fishing, and very civil. On my walk back I notice the people getting water from the stinking streams; small wonder the mortality is high in Libreville: this is usually attributed to the inhabitants "going it," but they might "go it" more than they do, without killing themselves if they left off drinking this essence of stinking slime.
29th.—Went to see Mrs. Gault and Dr. Nassau, who says the natives have a legend of a volcano about sixty miles from here.
30th.—Mrs. Gault asks me to go with her to a Bible meeting, held by a native woman. I assent, I go; Mrs. Sarah, the Biblewoman, is a very handsome, portly lady who speaks English very well. There are besides her, Mrs. Gault and myself, eight or nine native women, and two men. Hymns are sung in M'pongwe, one with a rousing chorus of "Gory we, gory we, pro pa reary gory we." This M'pongwe does not sound so musical as the Effik, Sarah gives an extempore prayer however, which is very beautiful in sound, and she intones it most tastefully. But I confess my mind is distracted by a malignant-looking pig which hovers round us as we kneel upon the sand. I well remember Captain ——— being chivied by a pig in the confines of Die Grosse Colonie, and then there is the chance of ants and so on up one's ankles. Mrs. Gault gives an address which Sarah translates into M'pongwe, and then come more hymns, and the meeting closes, and the ladies settle down and have a quiet pipe and a chat. We then saunter off and visit native Christians' houses. Many houses here are built clumps round a square, but this form of arrangement seems only a survival, for I find there is no necessary relationship among the people living in the square as there is in Calabar: and so home.
31st.—Start out at 2.30 and walk through the grass country behind Baraka, and suddenly fall down into a strange place.
On sitting up after the shock consequent on an unpremeditated descent of some thirteen feet or so, I find myself in a wild place; before me are two cave-like cavities, with a rough wood seat in each; behind me another similar cavity or chamber; the space I am in is about three feet wide; to the left this is terminated by an earth wall; to the right it goes, as a path, down a cutting or trench which ends in dry grass.
No sign of human habitation. Are these sacrifice places, I wonder, or are they places where those Fans one hears so much about, come and secretly eat human flesh? Clearly they are not vestiges of an older civilisation. In fact, what in the world are they? I investigate and find they are nothing in the world more than markers' pits for a rifle range.
Disgust, followed by alarm, seizes me; those French authorities may take it into their heads to think I am making plans of their military works! Visions of incarceration flash before my yes, and I fly into more grass and ticks, going westwards until I pick up a path, and following this, find myself in a little village. In the centre of the street, see the strange arrowhead-shaped board mounted on a rough easel and alongside it a bundle of stakes, the whole affair clearly connected with making palm oil, and identical with the contrivance I saw in the far-away Fan village on Sunday morning.
Investigate, find the boiled palm nuts are put into a pineapple fibre bag, which is hung on the board, then stakes are wedged in between the uprights of the easel, so as to squeeze the bag, one stake after another being put in to increase the pressure. The oil runs out, and off the point of the arrow-shaped board into a receptacle placed to receive it.
The next object of interest is a piece of paper stuck on a stick at the further end of the villages. The inscription is of interest though evidently recent. Find it is "No thoroughfare." There is a bamboo gateway at this end, and so I go through it and find myself to my surprise on the Woermann farm road, and down this I go, butterfly hunting. Presently I observe an old gentleman with a bundle of bamboos watching me intently. Not knowing the natives of this country yet, I feel anxious, and he, in a few minutes without taking his eyes off me, crouches in the grass. I remember my great tutor Captain Boler of Bonny's maxim: "Be afraid of an African if you can't help it, but never show it anyhow," so I walk on intending to pass him with a propitiatory M'bolo.[1] As I get abreast of him he hisses out "Look him;" he's evidently got something in the grass; Heaven send it's not a snake, but I "look him,"—a lizard! The good soul understood collecting, and meant well from the first. I give him tobacco and a selection of amiable observations, and he beams and we go on down the road together, discussing the proper time to burn grass, and the differences in the practical value, for building purposes, of the two kinds of bamboo. Then coming to a path that runs evidently in the direction of the Plateau at Libreville, and thinking it's time I was tacking homewards, I say "good bye" to my companion, and turn down the path. "You sabe 'em road?" says he in a very questioning voice: I say "yes airily, and keep on down it.
The path goes on through grass, and then makes for a hollow—wish it didn't, for hollows are horrid at times, and evidently this road has got something against it somewhere, and is not popular, for the grass falls across it like unkempt hair. Road becomes damp and goes into a belt of trees, in the middle of which runs a broad stream with a log laid across it. Congratulating myself on absence of companions, ignominiously crawl across on to the road, which then and there turns round and goes back to the stream again higher up—evidently a joke, "thought-you-were-going-to-get-home-dry-did-you" sort of thing. Wade the stream, rejoin the road on the hither side. Then the precious thing makes a deliberate bolt for the interior of Africa, instead of keeping on going to Libreville. I lose confidence in it. The Wu-tu-tu says it's four o'clock. It's dark at 6.15 down here, and I am miles from home, so I begin to wish I had got an intelligent companion to guide me, as I walk on through the now shoulder-high grass. Suddenly another road branches off to the left. "Saved!" Down it I go, and then it ends in a manioc patch, with no path out the other end, and surrounded by impenetrable bush. Crestfallen, I retrace my steps and continue along my old tormentor, which now attempts to reassure me by doubling round to the left and setting off again for Libreville. I am not deceived, I have had my trust in it too seriously tampered with—Yes, it's up to mischief again, and it turns itself into a stream. Nothing for it but wading, so wade; but what will be its next manifestation, I wonder? for I begin to doubt whether it is a road at all, and suspect it of being only a local devil, one of the sort that sometimes appears as a road, sometimes as a tree or a stream, &c. I wonder what they will do if they find I don't get in to-night?—wish me—at Liverpool, at least. After a quarter of an hour's knee-deep wading, I suddenly meet a native lady who was at the Bible meeting. She has a grand knowledge of English, and she stands with her skirt tucked up round her, evidently in no hurry, and determined to definitely find out who I am. Recognising this, I attempt to take charge of the conversation, and divert its course. "Nice road this," I say, "but it's a little damp." "Washey, ma," she says, "but—" "Is this road here to go anywhere," I interposed, "or is it only a kind of joke?" "It no go nowhere 'ticular, ma," she says; "but—" "In a civilised community like this of Gaboon," I say, "it's scandalous that roads should be allowed to wander about in this loose way." "That's so for true," she assents; "but, ma, ———" "You must excuse me," I answer, "I am in a great hurry to get in, hope to meet you again. Where do you live? I'll call." She gives me her address, but does not move, and the grass walls either side of the stream road are high and dense. My husband," she says, "was in H, and C.'s; he die now." "Dear me, that's very sad; you must have been very sorry," I answer, sympathetically, thinking I have turned the conversation. "We all were; he had ten wives. "But, ma ———," I am damp and desperate and so pushing into the grass at the side, circumnavigate her portly form successfully, and saying a cheery "good-bye," bolt, and down wind after me comes the uninterrupted question at last; but I do not return to discuss the matter, and soon getting on to drier ground, and seeing a path that goes towards the boulevard, down I go, as quickly as my feet can carry me, and then before I know where I am I find myself in a network of little irrigating canals, running between neatly kept beds of tomatoes, salad, &c., whereon there are working busily a lot of Anamese convicts. The convicts are deported from the French Cochin China possessions and employed by the Public Works Department in various ways. Those who conduct themselves well, and survive, have grants of garden ground given them, which they cultivate in this tidy, carefully minute way, so entirely different from the slummacky African methods of doing things. The produce they sell to the residents in the town, and live very prosperously in this way: but the climate of Western Africa is almost, if not quite, as deadly to the Chinese races as to the white—a fact that has been amply demonstrated not only here; but in Congo Belge, where the railway company carried on a series of experiments with imported labour—a series of experiments that entailed an awful waste of human life—for none of the imported people stood the climate any better than the whites, and you know what that means. This labour question out here, a question that increases daily with the development of plantation enterprise, I do not think will ever be solved by importing foreign labour. Nor is it advisable that it should be, for our European Government puts a stop to the action of those causes which used to keep the native population down, intertribal wars, sacrifices, &c., &c.; and to the deportation of surplus population in the form of slaves, and so unless means of support are devised for "the indigenous ones," as Mrs. Gault calls them, Africa will have us to thank for some smart attacks of famine, for the natives, left to their own devices, will never cultivate the soil sufficiently to support a large population, and moreover a vast percentage of the West African soil is very poor, sour stuff, that will grow nothing but equally valueless vegetation. From this discourse you will argue I did get home at last.
June 2nd.—Nubia in, but she will not call at Batanga, so Mrs. Gault is stranded until some other steamer calls. Nubia has lost all her heavy anchors down south, where she reports the Calemma extra bad this year.
3rd.—Went alone for a long walk to the bend of the mangrove-swamp river to the east. It stank severely, but was most interesting, giving one the conditions of life in a mangrove-swamp in what you might call a pocket edition. Leaving this, I made my way north-west along native paths across stretches of grass growing on rolling hills and down through wooded valleys, each of which had a little stream in it, or a patch of swamp, with enormous arums and other water plants growing, and along through Fan villages, each with just one straight street, having a club-house at the alternate ends. I met in the forest a hunter, carrying home a deer he had shot; in addition to his musket, he carried a couple of long tufted spears, archaic in type. He was very chatty, and I gave him tobacco, and we talked sport, and on parting I gave him some more tobacco, because he kindly gave me a charm to enable me to see things in the forest. He was gratified, and said, "You ver nice," "Good-bye," "Good-day," "So long," "Good-night," which was very nice of him, as these phrases were evidently all the amiable greetings in English that he knew. The "So long" you often hear the natives in Gaboon say: it always sounds exceedingly quaint. They have of course picked it up from the American missionaries, who have been here upwards of thirty years.
4th.—Mr. Hudson announces that the Mové will leave at 5.30 on the morning after next. Later in the day he expects to get her off by 5.30 to-morrow—towards evening he thinks to-morrow at 8.30 is more likely still. Mrs. Gault called with her boy Harry; she says, "John Holt has got a lovely waist at only two dollars." I don't want a waist—I am too thin any how—so I don't investigate the matter. We go up to Dr. Nassau and talk ju-ju. He agrees with me that dead black men go white when soaked in water.
A TYPICAL WEST AFRICAN RIVER BANK.
- ↑ The M'pongwe greeting; meaning, "May you live long."