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+Project Gutenberg's West African studies, by Mary Henrietta Kingsley
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: West African studies
+
+Author: Mary Henrietta Kingsley
+
+Release Date: February 13, 2012 [EBook #38870]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WEST AFRICAN STUDIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Clare Boothby, KD Weeks and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+    Transcriber's Notes: Printer's errors have been corrected.
+
+    Italics are indicated using _underscore_ characters. Bold
+    characters are indicated using =equal= characters. The 'oe'
+    ligature is represented with 'oe'.
+
+    Footnotes have been located at the end of each chapter.
+
+    Consult the Transcriber's Notes at the end of this text
+    for details.
+
+
+
+                      [Illustration: SIRIMBA PLAYERS, CONGO.]
+
+
+
+
+                             WEST AFRICAN STUDIES
+
+
+                                      BY
+
+                              MARY H. KINGSLEY
+
+                     AUTHOR OF "TRAVELS IN WEST AFRICA"
+
+
+                       _WITH ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAPS_
+
+
+  LONDON MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+
+                                    1899
+
+                           _All rights reserved_
+
+                      RICHARD CLAY AND SONS, LIMITED
+
+                             LONDON AND BUNGAY.
+
+
+
+
+                              TO MY BROTHER
+
+                            MR. C.G. KINGSLEY
+
+                     AND TO MY FRIEND WHO IS DEAD
+
+                              THIS BOOK IS
+
+                                Dedicated
+
+
+
+
+                         PREFACE TO THE READER
+
+
+I pray you who may come across this book to distinguish carefully
+between the part of it written by others and that written by me.
+
+Anything concerning West Africa written by M. le Comte C. de Cardi or
+Mr. John Harford, of Bristol, does not require apology and explanation;
+while anything written by me on this, or any subject, does. M. le Comte
+de Cardi possesses an unrivalled knowledge of the natives of the Niger
+Delta, gained, as all West Coasters know, by personal experience, and
+gained in a way whereby he had to test the truth of his ideas about
+these natives, not against things said concerning them in books, but
+against the facts themselves, for years; and depending on the accuracy
+of his knowledge was not a theory, but his own life and property. I have
+always wished that men having this kind of first-hand, well-tested
+knowledge regarding West Africa could be induced to publish it for the
+benefit of students, and for the foundation of a true knowledge
+concerning the natives of West Africa in the minds of the general
+public, feeling assured that if we had this class of knowledge
+available, the student of ethnology would be saved from many fantastic
+theories, and the general public enabled to bring its influence to bear
+in the cause of justice, instead of in the cause of fads. I need say
+nothing more regarding Appendix I.; it is a mine of knowledge concerning
+a highly developed set of natives of the true Negro stem, particularly
+valuable because, during recent years, we have been singularly badly off
+for information on the true Negro. It would not be too much to say that,
+with the exception of the important series of works by the late Sir A.
+B. Ellis, and a few others, so few that you can count them on the
+fingers of one hand, and Dr. Freeman's _Ashanti and Jaman_, published
+this year, we have practically had no reliable information on these, the
+most important of the races of Africa, since the eighteenth century. The
+general public have been dependent on the work of great East and Central
+African geographical explorers, like Dr. Livingstone, Mr. H. M. Stanley,
+Dr. Gregory, Mr. Scott Elliott, and Sir H. H. Johnston, men whose work
+we cannot value too highly, and whom we cannot sufficiently admire; but
+who, nevertheless, were not when describing Africans describing Negroes,
+but that great mixture of races existing in Central and East Africa
+whose main ingredient is Bantu. To argue from what you know about Bantus
+when you are dealing with Negroes is about as safe and sound as to argue
+from what you may know about Eastern Europeans when you are dealing with
+Western Europeans. Nevertheless, this fallacious method has been
+followed in the domain of ethnology and politics with, as might be
+expected, bad results. I am, therefore, very proud at being permitted by
+M. le Comte de Cardi to publish his statements on true Negroes; and I
+need not say I have in no way altered them, and that he is in no way
+responsible for any errors that there may be in the portions of this
+book written by me.
+
+Mr. John Harford, the man who first[1] opened up that still little-known
+Qua Ibo river, another region of Negroes, also requires no apology. I am
+confident that the quite unconscious picture of a West Coast trader's
+life given by him in Appendix II. will do much to remove the fantastic
+notions held concerning West Coast traders and the manner of life they
+lead out there; and I am convinced that if the English public had more
+of this sort of material it would recognise, as I, from a fairly
+extensive knowledge of West Coast traders, have been forced to
+recognise, that they are the class of white men out there who can be
+trusted to manage West Africa.
+
+I most sincerely wish that the whole of this book had been written by
+such men as the authors of Appendices I. and II. We are seriously in
+want of reliable information on West African affairs. It is a sort of
+information you can only get from resident white men, those who live in
+close touch with the natives, and who are forced to know the truth about
+them in order to live and prosper, and from scientific trained
+observers. The transient traveller, passing rapidly through such a
+region as West Africa, is not so valuable an informant as he may be in
+other regions of the Earth, where his observations can be checked by
+those of acknowledged authorities, and supplemented by the literature of
+the natives to whom he refers. For on West Africa, outside Ellis's
+region, there is no authority newer than the eighteenth century, and the
+natives have no written literature. You must, therefore, go down to
+_Urstuff_ and rely only on expert observers, whose lives and property
+depend on their observing well, or whose science trains them to observe
+carefully.
+
+Now of course I regard myself as one of the second class of these
+observers: did I not do so I would not dare speak about West Africa at
+all, especially in such company; but whatever I am or whatever I do,
+requires explanation, apology, and thanks.
+
+You may remember that after my return from a second sojourn in West
+Africa, when I had been to work at fetish and fresh-water fishes, I
+published a word-swamp of a book about the size of Norie's _Navigation_.
+Mr. George Macmillan lured me into so doing by stating that if I gave my
+own version of the affair I should remove misconceptions; and if I did
+not it was useless to object to such things as paragraphs in American
+papers to the effect that "Miss Kingsley, having crossed the continent
+of Africa, ascended the Niger to Victoria, and then climbed the Peak of
+Cameroon; she is shortly to return to England, when she will deliver a
+series of lectures on French art, which she has had great opportunities
+of studying." Well, thanks to Mr. Macmillan's kindness, I did publish a
+sort of interim report, called _Travels in West Africa_. It did not work
+out in the way he prophesied. It has led to my being referred to as "an
+intrepid explorer," a thing there is not the making of in me, who am
+ever the prey of frights, worries, and alarms; and its main effect, as
+far as I am personally concerned, has been to plunge me further still in
+debt for kindness from my fellow creatures, who, though capable of doing
+all I have done and more capable of writing about it in really good
+English, have tolerated that book and frequently me also, with
+half-a-dozen colds in my head and a dingy temper. Chief among all these
+creditors of mine I must name Mrs. J. R. Green, Mrs. George Macmillan,
+and Miss Lucy Toulmin Smith; but don't imagine that they or any other of
+my creditors approve of any single solitary opinion I express, or the
+way in which I express it. It is merely that I have the power of
+bringing out in my fellow-creatures, white or black, their virtues, in a
+way honourable to them and fortunate for me.
+
+I must here also acknowledge the great debt of gratitude I owe to Mr.
+John Holt, of Liverpool. A part of my work lies in the affairs of the
+so-called Bubies of Fernando Po, and no one knows so much about Fernando
+Po as Mr. Holt. He has also been of the greatest help to me in other
+ethnological questions, and has permitted me to go through his
+collections of African things most generously. It is, however, idle for
+me to attempt to chronicle my debt to Mr. Holt, for in every part of my
+work I owe him much. I do not wish you to think he is responsible for
+any of it, but his counsels have ever been on the side of moderation and
+generosity in adverse criticism. I honestly confess I believe I am by
+nature the very mildest of critics; but Mr. Holt and others think
+otherwise; and so, although I have not altered my opinions, I have
+restrained from publishing several developments of them, in deference to
+superior knowledge.
+
+I am also under a debt of gratitude to Professor Tylor. He also is not
+involved in my opinions, but he kindly permits me to tell him things
+that I can only "tell Tylor"; and now and again, as you will see in the
+Fetish question, he comes down on me with a refreshing firmness; in
+fact, I feel that any attempt at fantastic explanations of West African
+culture will not receive any encouragement from him; and it is a great
+comfort to a mere drudge like myself to know there is some one who
+cares for facts, without theories draping them.
+
+I will merely add that to all my own West Coast friends I remain
+indebted; and that if you ever come across any one who says I owe them
+much, you may take it as a rule that I do, though in all my written
+stuff I have most carefully ticketed its source.
+
+I now turn to the explanation and apology for this book, briefly.
+Apology for its literary style I do not make. I am not a literary man,
+only a student of West Africa. I am not proud of my imperfections in
+English. I would write better if I could, but I cannot. I find when I
+try to write like other people that I do not say what seems to me true,
+and thereby lose all right to say anything; and I am more convinced, the
+more I know of West Africa--my education is continuous and unbroken by
+holidays,--that it is a difficult thing to write about, particularly
+when you are a student hampered on all sides by masses of inchoate
+material, unaided by a set of great authors to whose opinions you can
+refer, and addressing a public that is not interested in the things that
+interest you so keenly and that you regard as so deeply important.
+
+In my previous book I most carefully confined myself to facts and
+arranged those facts on as thin a line of connecting opinion as
+possible. I was anxious to see what manner of opinion they would give
+rise to in the minds of the educated experts up here; not from a mere
+feminine curiosity, but from a distrust in my own ability to construct
+theories. On the whole this method has worked well. Ethnologists of
+different theories have been enabled to use such facts as they saw fit;
+but one of the greatest of ethnologists has grumbled at me, not for not
+giving a theory, but for omitting to show the inter-relationship of
+certain groups of facts, an inter-relationship his acuteness enabled him
+to know existed. Therefore I here give the key to a good deal of this
+inter-relationship by dividing the different classes of Fetishism into
+four schools. In order to do this I have now to place before you a good
+deal of material that was either crowded out of the other work or
+considered by me to require further investigation and comparison. As for
+the new statements I make, I have been enabled to give them this from
+the constant information and answers to questions I receive from West
+Africa. For the rest of the Fetish I remain a mere photographic plate.
+
+Regarding the other sections of this book, they are to me all subsidiary
+in importance to the Fetish, but they belong to it. They refer to its
+environment, without a knowledge of which you cannot know the thing.
+What Mr. Macmillan has ticketed as Introductory--I could not find a name
+for it at all--has a certain bearing on West African affairs, as showing
+the life on a West Coast boat. I may remark it is a section crowded out
+of my previous book; so, though you may not be glad to see it here, you
+must be glad it was not there.
+
+The fishing chapter was also cast out of _Travels in West Africa_.
+Critics whom I respect said it was wrong of me not to have explained how
+I came by my fishes. This made me fear that they thought I had stolen
+them, so I published the article promptly in the _National Review_, and,
+by the kindness of its editor, Mr. Maxse, I reprint it. It is the only
+reprint in this book.
+
+The chapter on Law contains all the material I have been so far able to
+arrange on this important study. The material on Criminal Law I must
+keep until I can go out again to West Africa, and read further in the
+minds of men in the African Forest Belt region; for in them, in that
+region, is the original text. The connection between Religion and Law I
+have not reprinted here, it being available, thanks to the courtesy of
+the Hibbert Trustees, in the _National Review_, September, 1897.
+
+I have left my stiffest bit of explanation and apology till the last,
+namely, that relating to the Crown Colony system, which is the thing
+that makes me beg you to disassociate from me every friend I have, and
+deal with me alone. I am alone responsible for it, the only thing for
+which I may be regarded as sharing the responsibility with others being
+the statistics from Government sources.
+
+It has been the most difficult thing I have ever had to do. I would have
+given my right hand to have done it well, for I know what it means if
+things go on as they are. Alas! I am hampered with my bad method of
+expression. I cannot show you anything clearly and neatly. I have to
+show you a series of pictures of things, and hope you will get from
+those pictures the impression which is the truth. I dare not set myself
+up to tell you the truth. I only say, look at it; and to the best of my
+ability faithfully give you, not an artist's picture, but a photograph,
+an overladen with detail, colourless version; all the time wishing to
+Heaven there was some one else doing it who could do it better, and then
+I know you would understand, and all would be well. I know there are
+people who tax me with a brutality in statement, I feel unjustly; and it
+makes me wonder what they would say if they had to speak about West
+Africa. It is a repetition of the difficulty a friend of mine and myself
+had over a steam launch called the Dragon Fly, whose internal health was
+chronically poor, and subject to bad attacks. Well, one afternoon, he
+and I had to take her out to the home-going steamer, and she had
+suffered that afternoon in the engines, and when she suffered anywhere
+she let you know it. We did what we could for her, in the interests of
+humanity and ourselves; we gave her lots of oil, and fed her with
+delicately-chopped wood; but all to but little avail. So both our
+tempers being strained when we got to the steamer, we told her what the
+other one of us had been saying about the Dragon Fly. The purser of the
+steamer thereon said "that people who said things like those about a
+poor inanimate steam launch were fools with a flaming hot future, and
+lost souls entirely." We realised that our observations had been
+imperfect; and so, being ever desirous of improving ourselves, we
+offered to put the purser on shore in the Dragon Fly. We knew she was
+feeling still much the same, and we wanted to know what he would say
+when jets of superheated steam played on him. He came, and they did; and
+when they did, you know, he said things I cannot repeat. Nevertheless,
+things of the nature of our own remarks, but so much finer of the kind,
+that we regarded him with awe when he was returning thanks to the "poor
+inanimate steam launch"; but it was when it came to his going ashore,
+gladly to leave us and her, that we found out what that man could say;
+and we morally fainted at his remarks made on discovering that he had
+been sitting in a pool of smutty oil, which she had insidiously treated
+him to, in order to take some of the stuffing out of him about the
+superior snowwhiteness of his trousers. Well, that purser went off the
+scene in a blue flame; and I said to my companion, "Sir! we cannot say
+things like that." "Right you are, Miss Kingsley," he said sadly; "you
+and I are only fit for Sunday school entertainments."
+
+It is thus with me about this Crown Colony affair. I know I have not
+risen to the height other people--my superiors, like the purser--would
+rise to, if they knew it; but at the same time, I may seem to those who
+do not know it, who only know the good intentions of England, and who
+regard systems as inanimate things, to be speaking harshly. I would not
+have mentioned this affair at all, did I not clearly see that our
+present method of dealing with tropical possessions under the Crown
+Colony system was dangerous financially, and brought with it suffering
+to the native races and disgrace to English gentlemen, who are bound to
+obey and carry out the orders given them by the system.
+
+Plotinus very properly said that the proper thing to do was to
+superimpose the idea upon the actual. I am not one of those who will
+ever tell you things are impossible, but I am particularly hopeful in
+this matter. England has an excellent idea regarding her duty to native
+races in West Africa. She has an excellent actual in the West African
+native to superimpose her idea upon. All that is wanted is the proper
+method; and this method I assure you that Science, true knowledge, that
+which Spinoza termed the inward aid of God, can give you. I am not
+Science, but only one of her brick-makers, and I beg you to turn to her.
+Remember you have tried to do without her in African matters for 400
+years, and on the road to civilisation and advance there you have
+travelled on a cabbage leaf.
+
+I have now only the pleasant duty of remarking that in this book I have
+said nothing regarding missionary questions. I do not think it will ever
+be necessary for me to mention those questions again except to
+Nonconformist missionaries. I say this advisedly, because, though I have
+not one word to retract of what I have said, the saying of it has
+demonstrated to me the fearless honesty and the perfect chivalry in
+controversy of the Nonconformist missions in England. As they are the
+most extensively interested in West Africa, if on my next stay out in
+West Africa I find anything I regard as rather wrong in missionary
+affairs I intend to have it out within doors; for I know that the
+Nonconformists will be clear-headed, and fight fair, and stick to the
+point.
+
+                                                      MARY H. KINGSLEY.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [1] Mr. McEachen first traded there in a hulk, but, after about two
+   years, withdrew in 1873. No trade was done in this river by white men
+   until Mr. Harford went in, since then it has continued.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                              PAGE
+   CHAPTER I
+   INTRODUCTORY                                                  1
+
+   CHAPTER II
+   SIERRA LEONE AND ITS SURROUNDINGS                            35
+
+   CHAPTER III
+   AFRICAN CHARACTERISTICS                                      62
+
+   CHAPTER IV
+   FISHING IN WEST AFRICA                                       88
+
+   CHAPTER V
+   FETISH                                                      112
+
+   CHAPTER VI
+   SCHOOLS OF FETISH                                           136
+
+   CHAPTER VII
+   FETISH AND WITCHCRAFT                                       156
+
+   CHAPTER VIII
+   AFRICAN MEDICINE                                            180
+
+   CHAPTER IX
+   THE WITCH DOCTOR                                            199
+
+   CHAPTER X
+   EARLY TRADE IN WEST AFRICA                                  220
+
+   CHAPTER XI
+   FRENCH DISCOVERY OF WEST AFRICA                             250
+
+   CHAPTER XII
+   COMMERCE IN WEST AFRICA                                     281
+
+   CHAPTER XIII
+   THE CROWN COLONY SYSTEM                                     301
+
+   CHAPTER XIV
+   THE CROWN COLONY SYSTEM IN WEST AFRICA                      314
+
+   CHAPTER XV
+   MORE OF THE CROWN COLONY SYSTEM                             324
+
+   CHAPTER XVI
+   THE CLASH OF CULTURES                                       363
+
+   CHAPTER XVII
+   AN ALTERNATIVE PLAN                                         392
+
+   CHAPTER XVIII
+   AFRICAN PROPERTY                                            420
+
+
+   APPENDIX
+
+   I. A SHORT DESCRIPTION OF THE NATIVES OF THE NIGER
+   COAST PROTECTORATE, WITH SOME ACCOUNT OF THEIR
+   CUSTOMS, RELIGION, TRADE, ETC. BY M. LE COMTE
+   C. N. DE CARDI                                              443
+
+   II. A VOYAGE TO THE AFRICAN OIL RIVERS TWENTY-FIVE
+   YEARS AGO. BY JOHN HARFORD                                  567
+
+   III. TRADE GOODS USED IN THE EARLY TRADE WITH AFRICA
+   AS GIVEN BY BARBOT AND OTHER WRITERS OF THE
+   SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. BY M. H. KINGSLEY.                     615
+
+
+   INDEX                                                       635
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+   SIRIMBA PLAYERS, CONGO                  _Frontispiece_.
+
+   SANTA CRUZ, TENERIFFE                   _To face page_       12
+
+   FOR PALM WINE                                "               63
+
+   SECRET SOCIETY LEAVING THE SACRED GROVE      "               69
+
+   JENGU DEVIL DANCE OF KING WILLIAM'S SLAVES,
+   SETTE CAMMA, NOVEMBER 9, 1888[A]             "               69
+
+   BATANGA CANOES                               "               89
+
+   FALLS ON THE TONGUE RIVER                    "              101
+
+   LOANDA CANOE WITH MAT SAILS.                 "              101
+
+   ST. PAUL DO LOANDA                           "              102
+
+   ROUND A KACONGO CAMP FIRE                    "              105
+
+   FANTEE NATIVES OF THE GOLD COAST             "              137
+
+   YORUBA                                       "              141
+
+   A CALABAR CHIEF                              "              145
+
+   NATIVES OF GABOON                            "              151
+
+   FJORT NATIVES OF KACONGO AND LOANGO          "              155
+
+   OIL RIVER NATIVES                            "              245
+
+   ST. PAUL DO LOANDA                           "              281
+
+   CLIFFS AT LOANDA                             "              285
+
+   DONDO ANGOLA                                 "              287
+
+   TRADING STORES                               "              289
+
+   ST. PAUL DO LOANDA                           "              291
+
+   IN AN ANGOLA MARKET                          "              297
+
+   A MAN OF SOUTH ANGOLA                        "              297
+
+   A HOUSA                                      "              420
+
+   HOUSE PROPERTY IN KACONGO                    "              423
+
+   BUBIES OF FERNANDO PO                        "              423
+
+   JA JA, KING OF OPOBO                         "              443
+
+   JA JA MAKING JU JU                           "              540
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [A] By permission of R. B. N. Walker, Esq.
+
+
+
+
+WEST AFRICAN STUDIES
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+INTRODUCTORY
+
+     Regarding a voyage on a West Coast boat, with some observations on
+     the natural history of mariners never before published; to which is
+     added some description of the habits and nature of the ant and
+     other insects, to the end that the new-comer be informed concerning
+     these things before he lands in Afrik.
+
+
+There are some people who will tell you that the labour problem is the
+most difficult affair that Africa presents to the student; others give
+the first place to the influence of civilisation on native races, or to
+the interaction of the interests of the various white Powers on that
+continent, or to the successful sanitation of the said continent, or
+some other high-sounding thing; but I, who have an acquaintance with all
+these matters, and think them well enough, as intellectual exercises,
+yet look upon them as slight compared to the problem of the West Coast
+Boat.
+
+Now life on board a West Coast steamer is an important factor in West
+African affairs, and its influence is far reaching. It is, indeed, akin
+to what the Press is in England, in that it forms an immense amount of
+public opinion. It is on board the steamer that men from one part of
+West Africa meet men from another part of West Africa--parts of West
+Africa are different. These men talk things over together without
+explaining them, and the consequence is confusion in idea and the
+darkening of counsel from the ideas so formed being handed over to
+people at home who practically know no part of the West Coast
+whatsoever.
+
+I had an example of this the other day, when a lady said to me in an
+aggrieved tone, after I had been saying a few words on swamps, "Oh, Miss
+Kingsley, but I thought it was wrong to talk about swamps nowadays, and
+that Africa was really quite dry. I have a cousin who has been to Accra
+and he says," &c. That's the way the formation of an erroneous opinion
+on West Africa gets started. Many a time have I with a scientific
+interest watched those erroneous opinions coming out of the egg on a
+West Coast boat. Say, for example, a Gold Coaster meets on the boat a
+River-man. River-man in course of conversation, states how, "hearing a
+fillaloo in the yard one night I got up and found the watchman going to
+sleep on the top of the ladder had just lost a leg by means of one
+crocodile, while another crocodile was kicking up a deuce of a row
+climbing up the crane." Gold Coaster says, "Tell that to the Marines."
+River-man says, "Perfect fact, Sir, my place swarms with crocodiles.
+Why, once, when I was," &c., &c. Anyhow it ends in a row. The Gold
+Coaster says, "Sir, I have been 7 years" (or 13 or some impressive
+number of years) "on the West Coast of Africa, Sir, and I have never
+seen a crocodile." River-man makes remarks on the existence of a toxic
+state wherein a man can't see the holes in a ladder, for he knows he's
+seen hundreds of crocodiles.
+
+I know Gold Coasters say in a trying way when any terrific account of
+anything comes before them, "Oh, that was down in the Rivers," and one
+knows what they mean. But don't you go away with the idea that a Gold
+Coaster cannot turn out a very decent tale; indeed, considering the
+paucity of their material, they often display the artistic spirit to a
+most noteworthy degree, but the net result of the conversation on a West
+African steamboat is error. Parts of it, like the curate's egg, are
+quite excellent, but unless you have an acquaintance with the various
+regions of the Coast to which your various informants refer, you cannot
+know which is which. Take the above case and analyse it, and you will
+find it is almost all, on both sides, quite true. I won't go bail for
+the crocodile up the crane, but for the watchman's leg and the watchman
+being asleep on the top of the ladder I will, for watchmen will sleep
+anywhere; and once when I was, &c., I myself saw certainly not less than
+70 crocodiles at one time, let alone smelling them, for they do swarm in
+places and stink always. But on the other hand the Gold Coaster might
+have remained 7, 13, or any other number of centuries instead of years,
+in a teetotal state, and yet have never seen a crocodile.
+
+It may seem a reckless thing to say, but I believe that the great
+percentage of steamboat talk is true; only you must remember that it is
+not stuff that you can in any way use or rely on unless you know
+yourself the district from which the information comes, and it must,
+like all information--like all specimens of any kind--be very carefully
+ticketed, then and there, as to its giver and its district. In this it
+is again like the English Press, wherein you may see a statement one day
+that everything is quite satisfactory, say in Uganda, and in the next
+issue that there has been a massacre or some unpleasantness. The two
+statements have in them the connecting thread of truth, that truth that,
+according to Fichte, is in all things. The first shows that it is the
+desire in the official mind that everything should be quite satisfactory
+to every one; the second, that practically this blessed state has not
+yet arrived--that is all.
+
+I need not, however, further dwell on this complex phase, and will turn
+to the high educational value of the West African steamboat to the young
+Coaster, holding that on the conditions under which the Coaster makes
+his first voyage out to West Africa largely depends whether or no he
+takes to the Coast. Strange as it is to me, who love West Africa, there
+are people who have really been there who have not even liked it in the
+least. These people, I fancy, have not been properly brought up in a
+suitable academy as I was.
+
+Doubtless a P. & O. is a good preparatory school for India, or a Union,
+or Castle liner for the Cape, or an Empereza Nacioņal simply superb for
+a Portuguese West Coast Possession, but for the Bights, especially for
+the terrible Bight of Benin, "where for one that comes out there are
+forty stay in," I have no hesitation in recommending the West Coast
+cargo boat. Not one of the best ships in the fleet, mind you; they are
+well enough to come home in, and so on, but you must go on a steamer
+that has her saloon aft on your first trip out or you will never
+understand West Africa.
+
+It was on such a steamer that I made my first voyage out in '93, when,
+acting under the advice of most eminent men, before whose names European
+Science trembles, I resolved that the best place to study early religion
+and law, and collect fishes, was the West Coast of Africa.
+
+On reaching Liverpool, where I knew no one and of which I knew nothing
+in '93, I found the boat I was to go by was a veteran of the fleet. She
+had her saloon aft, and I am bound to say her appearance was anything
+but reassuring to the uninitiated and alarmed young Coaster, depressed
+by the direful prophecies of deserted friends concerning all things West
+African. Dirt and greed were that vessel's most obvious attributes. The
+dirt rapidly disappeared, and by the time she reached the end of her
+trip out, at Loanda, she was as neat as a new pin, for during the voyage
+every inch of paint work was scraped and re-painted, from the red below
+her Plimsoll mark to the uttermost top of her black funnel. But on the
+day when first we met these things were yet to be. As for her greed, her
+owners had evidently then done all they could to satisfy her. She was
+heavily laden, her holds more full than many a better ship's; but no,
+she was not content, she did not even pretend to be, and shamelessly
+whistled and squarked for more. So, evidently just to gratify her, they
+sent her a lighter laden with kegs of gunpowder, and she grunted
+contentedly as she saw it come alongside. But she was not really
+entirely content even then, or satisfied. I don't suppose, between
+ourselves, any South West Coast boat ever is, and during the whole time
+I was on her, devoted to her as I rapidly became, I saw only too clearly
+that the one thing she really cared for was cargo. It was the criterion
+by which she measured the importance, nay the very excuse for existence,
+of a port. If she is ever sold to other owners and sent up the
+Mediterranean, she will anathematise Malta and scorn Naples. "What! no
+palm oil!" she'll say; "no rubber? Call yourself a port!" and tie her
+whistle string to a stanchion until the authorities bring off her papers
+and let her clear away. Every one on board her she infected with a
+commercial spirit. I am not by nature a commercial man myself, yet
+under her influence I found myself selling paraffin oil in cases in the
+Bights: and even to missionaries and Government officials travelling on
+her in between ports, she suggested the advisability of having out
+churches, houses, &c., in sections carefully marked with her name.
+
+As we ran down the Irish Channel and into the Bay of Biscay, the weather
+was what the mariners termed "a bit fresh." Our craft was evidently a
+wet ship, either because she was nervous and femininely flurried when
+she saw a large wave coming, or, as I am myself inclined to believe,
+because of her insatiable mania for shipping cargo. Anyhow, she
+habitually sat down in the rise of those waves, whereby, from whatever
+motive, she managed to ship a good deal of the Atlantic Ocean in various
+sized sections.
+
+Her saloon, as aforesaid, was aft, and I observed it was the duty, in
+order to keep it dry, of any one near the main door who might notice a
+ton or so of the fourth element coming aboard, to seize up three
+cocoa-fibre mats, shut three cabin doors and yell "Bill!" After doing
+this they were seemingly at full liberty to retire into the saloon and
+dam the Atlantic Ocean, and remark, "It's a dog's life at sea." I never
+noticed "Bill" come in answer to this performance, so I was getting to
+regard "Bill" as an invocation to a weather Ju Ju; but this was hasty,
+for one night in the Bay I was roused by a new noise, and on going into
+the saloon to see what it was, found the stewardess similarly engaged;
+mutually we discovered, in the dim light--she wasn't the boat to go and
+throw away money on electric--that it was the piano adrift off its daīs,
+and we steered for it. Very cleverly we fielded _en route_ a palm in pot
+complete, but shipped some beer and Worcester sauce bottles that came at
+us from the rack over the table, whereby we got a bit messy and sticky
+about the hair and a trifle cut; nevertheless, undaunted we held our
+course and seized the instrument, instinctively shouting "Bill," and
+"Bill" came, in the form of a sandy-haired steward, amiable in nature
+and striking in costume.
+
+After the first three or four days, a calm despair regarding the fate of
+my various lost belongings and myself having come on me, and the weather
+having moderated, I began to make observations on what manner of men my
+fellow-passengers were. I found only two species of the genus Coaster,
+the Government official and the trading Agent, were represented; so far
+we had no Missionaries. I decided to observe those species we had
+quietly, having heard awful accounts of them before leaving England, but
+to reserve final judgment on them until they had quite recovered from
+sea-sickness and had had a night ashore. Some of the Agents soon revived
+sufficiently to give copious information on the dangers and mortality of
+West Africa to those on board who were going down Coast for the first
+time, and the captain and doctor chipped in ever and anon with a
+particularly convincing tale of horror in support of their statements.
+This used to be the sort of thing. One of the Agents would look at the
+Captain during a meal-time, and say, "You remember J., Captain?" "Knew
+him well," says the Captain; "why I brought him out his last time, poor
+chap!" then follows full details of the pegging-out of J., and his
+funeral, &c. Then a Government official who had been out before, would
+kindly turn to a colleague out for the first time, and say, "Brought any
+dress clothes with you?" The unfortunate new comer, scenting an allusion
+to a more cheerful phase of Coast life, gladly answers in the
+affirmative.
+
+"That's right," says the interlocutor; "you want them to wear at
+funerals. Do you know," he remarks, turning to another old Coaster, "my
+dress trousers did not get mouldy once last wet season."
+
+"Get along," says his friend, "you can't hang a thing up twenty-four
+hours without its being fit to graze a cow on."
+
+"Do you get anything else but fever down there?" asks a new comer,
+nervously.
+
+"Haven't time as a general rule, but I have known some fellows get kraw
+kraw."
+
+"And the Portuguese itch, abscesses, ulcers, the Guinea worm and the
+smallpox," observe the chorus calmly.
+
+"Well," says the first answerer, kindly but regretfully, as if it pained
+him to admit this wealth of disease was denied his particular locality;
+"they are mostly on the South-west Coast." And then a gentleman says
+parasites are, as far as he knows, everywhere on the Coast, and some of
+them several yards long. "Do you remember poor C.?" says he to the
+Captain, who gives his usual answer, "Knew him well. Ah! poor chap,
+there was quite a quantity of him eaten away, inside and out, with
+parasites, and a quieter, better living man than C. there never was."
+"Never," says the chorus, sweeping away the hope that by taking care you
+may keep clear of such things--the new Coaster's great hope. "Where do
+you call--?" says a young victim consigned to that port. Some say it is
+on the South-west, but opinions differ, still the victim is left assured
+that it is just about the best place on the seaboard of the continent
+for a man to go to who wants to make himself into a sort of complete
+hospital course for a set of medical students.
+
+This instruction of the young in the charms of Coast life is the
+faithfully discharged mission of the old Coasters on steamboats,
+especially, as aforesaid, at meal times. Desperate victims sometimes
+determine to keep the conversation off fever, but to no avail. It is in
+the air you breath, mentally and physically; one will mention a lively
+and amusing work, some one cuts in and observes "Poor D. was found dead
+in bed at C. with that book alongside him." With all subjects it is the
+same. Keep clear of it in conversation, for even a half hour, you
+cannot. Far better is it for the young Coaster not to try, but just to
+collect all the anecdotes and information you can referring to it, and
+then lie low for a new Coaster of your own to tell them to, and when
+your own turn comes, as come it will if you haunt the West Coast long
+enough, to peg out and be poor so and so yourself. For goodness sake die
+somewhere where they haven't got the cemetery on a hill, because going
+up a hill in shirt collars, &c., will cause your mourners to peg out
+too, at least this is the lesson I was taught in that excellent West
+Coast school.
+
+When, however, there is no new Coaster to instruct on hand, or he is
+tired for ten minutes of doing it, the old Coaster discourses with his
+fellow old Coasters on trade products and insects. Every attention
+should be given to him on these points. On trade products I will
+discourse elsewhere; but insects it is well that the new comer should
+know about before he sets foot on Africa. On some West Coast boats
+excellent training is afforded by the supply of cockroaches on board,
+and there is nothing like getting used to cockroaches early when your
+life is going to be spent on the Coast--but I need not detain you with
+them now, merely remarking that they have none of the modest reticence
+of the European variety. They are very companionable, seeking rather
+than shunning human society, nestling in the bunk with you if the
+weather is the least chilly, and I fancy not averse to light; it is true
+they come out most at night, but then they distinctly like a bright
+light, and you can watch them in a tight packed circle round the lamp
+with their heads towards it, twirling their antennæ at it with evident
+satisfaction; in fact it's the lively nights those cockroaches have that
+keep them abed during the day. They are sometimes of great magnitude; I
+have been assured by observers of them in factories ashore and on moored
+hulks that they can stand on their hind legs and drink out of a quart
+jug, but the most common steamer kind is smaller, as far as my own
+observations go. But what I do object to in them is, that they fly and
+feed on your hair and nails and disturb your sleep by so doing; and you
+mayn't smash them--they make an awful mess if you do. As for insect
+powder, well, I'd like to see the insect powder that would disturb the
+digestion of a West African insect.
+
+But it's against the insects ashore that you have to be specially
+warned. During my first few weeks of Africa I took a general natural
+historical interest in them with enthusiasm as of natural history; it
+soon became a mere sporting one, though equally enthusiastic at first.
+Afterwards a nearly complete indifference set in, unless some wretch
+aroused a vengeful spirit in me by stinging or biting. I should say,
+looking back calmly upon the matter, that 75 per cent. of West African
+insects sting, 5 per cent. bite, and the rest are either permanently or
+temporarily parasitic on the human race. And undoubtedly one of the many
+worst things you can do in West Africa is to take any notice of an
+insect. If you see a thing that looks like a cross between a flying
+lobster and the figure of Abraxas on a Gnostic gem, do not pay it the
+least attention, never mind where it is; just keep quiet and hope it
+will go away--for that's your best chance; you have none in a stand-up
+fight with a good thorough-going African insect. Well do I remember, at
+Cabinda, the way insects used to come in round the hanging lamp at
+dinner time. Mosquitoes were pretty bad there, not so bad as in some
+other places, but sufficient, and after them hawking came a cloud of
+dragon-flies, swishing in front of every one's face, which was worrying
+till you got used to it. Ever and anon a big beetle, with a terrific
+boom on, would sweep in, go two or three times round the room and then
+flop into the soup plate, out of that, shake himself like a retriever
+and bang into some one's face, then flop on the floor. Orders were then
+calmly but firmly given to the steward boys to "catch 'em;" down on the
+floor went the boys, and an exciting hunt took place which sometimes
+ended in a capture of the offender, but always seemed to irritate a
+previously quiet insect population who forthwith declared war on the
+human species, and fastened on to the nearest leg. It is best, as I have
+said, to leave insects alone. Of course you cannot ignore driver ants,
+they won't go away, but the same principle reversed is best for them,
+namely, your going away yourself.
+
+One way and another we talked a good deal of insects as well as fever on
+the----, but she herself was fairly free from these until she got a
+chance of shipping; then, of course, she did her best--with the flea
+line at Canary, mixed assortment at Sierra Leone, scorpions and
+centipedes in the Timber ports, heavy cargo of the beetle and
+mangrove-fly line, with mosquitoes for dunnage, in the Oil Rivers; it
+was not till she reached Congo--but of that anon.
+
+We duly reached Canary. This port I had been to the previous year on a
+Castle liner, having, in those remote and dark ages, been taught to
+believe that Liverpool boats were to be avoided; I was, so far, in a
+state of mere transition of opinion from this view to the one I at
+present hold, namely, that Liverpool West African boats are quite the
+most perfect things in their way, and, at any rate, good enough for me.
+
+I need not discourse on the Grand Canary; there are many better
+descriptions of that lovely island, and likewise of its sister,
+Teneriffe, than I could give you. I could, indeed give you an account of
+these islands, particularly "when a West Coast boat is in from South,"
+that would show another side of the island life; but I forbear, because
+it would, perhaps, cause you to think ill of the West Coaster unjustly;
+for the West Coaster, when he lands on the island of the Grand Canary,
+homeward bound, and realises he has a good reasonable chance to see his
+home and England again, is not in a normal state, and prone to fall
+under the influence of excitement, and display emotions that he would
+not dream of either on the West Coast itself or in England. Indeed, it
+is not too much to say that on the Canary Islands a good deal of the
+erroneous prejudice against West Africa is formed; but this is not the
+place to go into details on the subject.
+
+It was not until we left Canary that my fellow passengers on
+the ---- realised that I was going to "the Coast." They had most civilly
+bidden me good-bye when they were ashore on the morning of our arrival
+at Las Palmas; and they were surprised at my presence on board at
+dinner, as attentive to their conversation as ever. They explained that
+they had regarded me at first as a lady missionary, until my failure,
+during a Sunday service in the Bay of Biscay, to rescue it from the
+dire confusion into which it had been thrown by an esteemed and able
+officer and a dutiful but inexperienced Purser caused them to regard me
+as only a very early visitor to Canary. Now they required explanation. I
+said I was interested in Natural History. "Botany," they said, "They had
+known some men who had come out from Kew, but they were all dead now."
+
+     [Illustration: SANTA CRUZ, TENERIFFE. [_To face page 12_]
+
+I denied a connection with Kew, and in order to give an air of
+definiteness to my intentions, remembering I had been instructed that
+"one of the worst things you can do in West Africa is to be indefinite,"
+I said I was interested in the South Antarctic Drift--I was in those
+days.
+
+They promptly fell into the pit of error that this was a gold mine
+speculation, and said they had "never heard of such a mine." I attempted
+to extricate them from this idea, and succeeded, except with a deaf
+gentleman who kept on sweeping into the conversation with yarns and
+opinions on gold mines in West Africa and the awful mortality among
+people who attended to such things, which naturally led to a prolonged
+discussion ending in a general resolution that people who had anything
+to do with gold mines generally died rather quicker even than men from
+Kew. Indeed, it took me days to get myself explained, and when it was
+accomplished I found I had nearly got myself regarded as a lunatic to go
+to West Africa for such reasons. But fortunately for me, and for many
+others who have ventured into this kingdom, the West African merchants
+are good-hearted, hospitable English gentlemen, who seem to feel it
+their duty that no harm they can prevent should happen to any one; and
+my first friends, among them my fellow passengers on the----, failing
+in inducing me to return from Sierra Leone, which they strongly
+advised, did their best to save me by means of education. The things
+they thought I "really ought to know" would make wild reading if
+published in extenso. Led by the kindest and most helpful of captains,
+they poured in information, and I acquired a taste for "facts"--any sort
+of facts about anything--a taste when applied to West African facts,
+that I fancy ranks with that for collecting venomous serpents; but to my
+listening to everything that was told me by my first instructors, and
+believing in it, undoubtedly I have often owed my life, and countless
+times have been enabled to steer neatly through shoaly circumstances
+ashore.
+
+Our captain was not a man who would deliberately alarm a new comer, or
+shock any one, particularly a lady; indeed, he deliberately attempted to
+avoid so doing. He held it wrong to dwell on the dark side of Coast
+life, he said, "because youngsters going out were frequently so
+frightened on board the boats that they died as soon as they got on
+shore of the first cold they got in the head, thinking it was Yellow
+Jack"; so he always started conversation at meal times with anecdotes of
+his early years on an ancestral ranch in America. One great charm about
+"facts" is that you never know but what they may come in useful; so I
+eagerly got up a quantity of very strange information on the conduct of
+the American cow. He would then wander away among the China Seas or the
+Indian Ocean, and I could pass an examination on the social habits of
+captains of sailing vessels that ran to Bombay in old days. Sometimes
+the discourse visited the South American ports, and I took on
+information that will come in very handy should I ever find myself
+wandering about the streets of Callao after dark, searching for a
+tavern. But the turn that serious conversation always drifted into was
+the one that interested me most, that relating to the Coast.
+Particularly interesting were those tales of the old times and the men
+who first established the palm oil trade. They were, many of them, men
+who had been engaged in the slave trade, and on the suppression thereof
+they turned their attention to palm oil, to which end their knowledge of
+the locality and of the native chiefs and their commercial methods was
+of the greatest help. Their ideas were possibly not those at present in
+fashion, but the courage and enterprise those men displayed under the
+most depressing and deadly conditions made me proud of being a woman of
+the nation that turned out the "Palm oil ruffians"--Drake, Hawkins, the
+two Roberts, Frobisher, and Hudson--it is as good as being born a
+foreign gentleman.
+
+There was one of these old coasters of the palm oil ruffian type who
+especially interested me. He is dead now. For the matter of that he died
+at a mature age the year I was born, and I am in hopes of collecting
+facts sufficient to enable me to publish his complete biography. He
+lived up a creek, threw boots at leopards, and "had really swell
+spittoons, you know, shaped like puncheons, and bound with brass." I am
+sure it is unnecessary for me to mention his name.
+
+Two of the old Coasters never spoke unless they had something useful and
+improving to say. They were Scotch; indeed, most of us were that trip,
+and I often used to wonder if the South Atlantic Ocean were broad enough
+for the accent of the "a," or whether strange sounds would ever worry
+and alarm Central America and the Brazils. For general social purposes
+these silent ones used coughs, and the one whose seat was always next to
+mine at table kept me in a state of much anxiety, for I used to turn
+round, after having been riveted to the captain's conversation for
+minutes, and find him holding some dish for me to help myself from; he
+never took the least notice of my apologies, and I felt he had made up
+his mind that, if I did it again, he should take me by the scruff of my
+neck some night and drop me overboard. He was an alarmingly powerfully
+built man, and I quite understood the local African tribe wishing to
+have him for a specimen. Some short time before he had left for home
+last trip, they had attempted to acquire his head for their local ju ju
+house, from mixed æsthetic and religious reasons. In a way, it was
+creditable of them, I suppose, for it would have caused them grave
+domestic inconvenience to have removed thereby at one fell swoop, their
+complete set of tradesmen; and as a fellow collector of specimens I am
+bound to admit the soundness of their methods of collecting! Wishing for
+this gentleman's head they shot him in the legs. I have never gone in
+for collecting specimens of hominidae but still a recital of the
+incident did not fire me with a desire to repeat their performance;
+indeed, so discouraged was I by their failure that I hesitated about
+asking him for his skeleton when he had quite done with it, though it
+was gall and wormwood to think of a really fine thing like that falling
+into the hands of another collector.
+
+The run from Canary to Sierra Leone takes about a week. That part of it
+which lies in the track of the N.E. Trade Winds, _i.e._, from Canary to
+Cape Verde, makes you believe Mr. Kipling when he sang--
+
+          "There are many ways to take
+          Of the eagle and the snake,
+          And the way of a man with a maid;
+          But the sweetest way for me
+          Is a ship upon the sea
+          On the track of the North-East trade."
+
+was displaying, gracefully, a sensible choice of things; but you only
+feel this outward bound to the West Coast. When you come up from the
+Coast, fever stricken, homeward bound, you think otherwise. I do not
+mean to say that owing to a disintegrating moral effect of West Africa
+you wish to pursue the other ways mentioned in the stanza, but you do
+wish the Powers above would send that wind to the Powers below and get
+it warmed. Alas! it is in this Trade Wind zone that most men die, coming
+up from the Coast sick with fever, and it is to the blame of the Trade
+Wind that you see obituary notices--"of fever after leaving Sierra
+Leone." Nevertheless, outward bound the thing is delightful, and
+dreadfully you feel its loss when you have run through it as you close
+in to the African land by Cape Verde. At any rate I did; and I began to
+believe every bad thing I had ever heard of West Africa, and straightway
+said to myself, what every man has said to himself who has gone there
+since Hanno of Carthage, "Why was I such a fool as to come to such an
+awful place?" It is the first meeting with the hot breath of the Bights
+that tries one; it is the breath of Death himself to many. You feel when
+first you meet it you have done with all else; not alone is it hot, but
+it smells--smells like nothing else. It does not smell all it can then;
+by and by, down in the Rivers, you get its perfection, but off Cape
+Verde you have to ask yourself, "Can I live in this or no?" and you
+have to leave it, like all other such questions, to Allah, and go on.
+
+We passed close in to Cape Verde, which consists of rounded hills having
+steep bases to the sea. From these bases runs out a low, long strip of
+sandy soil, which is the true cape. Beyond, under water, runs out the
+dangerous Almadia reef, on which were still, in '93, to be seen the
+remains of the _Port Douglas_, who was wrecked there on her way to
+Australia in '92. Her passengers were got ashore and most kindly treated
+by the French officers of Senegal; and finally, to the great joy and
+relief of their rescuers the said passengers were fetched away by an
+English vessel, and taken to what England said was their destination and
+home, Australia, but what France regarded as merely a stage on their
+journey to hell, to which port they had plainly been consigned.
+
+It was just south of Cape Verde that I met my first tornado. The weather
+had been wet in violent showers all the morning and afternoon. Our old
+Coasters took but little notice of it, resigning themselves to
+saturation without a struggle, previous experience having taught them it
+was the best thing to do, dryness being an unattainable state during the
+wet season, and "worrying one's self about anything one of the worst
+things you can do in West Africa." So they sat on deck calmly smoking,
+their new flannel suits, which were donned after leaving the trade
+winds, shrinking, and their colours running on to the other deck,
+uncriticised even by the First officer. He was charging about shouting
+directions and generally making that afternoon such a wild, hurrying
+fuss about "getting in awnings," "tricing up all loose gear," such as
+deck chairs, and so on, to permanent parts of the----, that, as nothing
+beyond showers had happened, and there was no wind, I began to feel
+most anxious about his mental state. But I soon saw that this activity
+was the working of a practical prophetic spirit in the man, and these
+alarms and excursions of his arose from a knowledge of what that low
+arch of black cloud coming off the land meant.
+
+We were surrounded by a wild, strange sky. Indeed, there seemed to be
+two skies, one upper, and one lower; for parts of it were showing
+evidences of terrific activity, others of a sublime, utterly indifferent
+calm. At one part of our horizon were great columns of black cloud,
+expanding and coalescing at their capitals. These were mounted on a
+background of most exquisite pale green. Away to leeward was a gigantic
+black cloud-mountain, across whose vast face were bands and wreaths of
+delicate white and silver clouds, and from whose grim depths every few
+seconds flashed palpitating, fitful, livid lightnings. Striding towards
+us came across the sea the tornado, lashing it into spray mist with the
+tremendous artillery of its rain, and shaking the air with its own
+thunder-growls. Away to windward leisurely boomed and grumbled a third
+thunderstorm, apparently not addressing the tornado but the
+cloud-mountain, while in between these phenomena wandered strange, wild
+winds, made out of lost souls frightened and wailing to be let back into
+Hell, or taken care of somehow by some one. This sort of thing naturally
+excited the sea, and all together excited the----, who, not being built
+so much for the open and deep sea as for the shoal bars of West African
+rivers, made the most of it.
+
+In a few seconds the wind of the tornado struck us, screaming through
+the rigging, eager for awnings or any loose gear, but foiled of its prey
+by the First officer, who stood triumphantly on a heap of them, like a
+defiant hen guarding her chickens.
+
+Some one really ought to write a monograph on the natural history of
+mariners. They are valuable beings, and their habits are exceedingly
+interesting. I myself, being already engaged in the study of other
+organisms, cannot undertake the work; however, I place my observations
+at the disposal of any fellow naturalist who may have more time, and
+certainly will have more ability.
+
+The sailor officer (_Nauta pelagius vel officinalis_) is metamorphic.
+The stage at which the specimen you may be observing has arrived is
+easily determined by the band of galoon round his coat cuff; in the
+English form the number of gold stripes increasing in direct ratio with
+rank. The galoon markings of the foreign species are frequently merely
+decorative, and in many foreign varieties only conditioned by the extent
+of surface available to display them and the ability of the individual
+to acquire the galoon wherewith to decorate himself.
+
+The English third officer, you will find, has one stripe, the second
+two, the first three, and the _imago_, or captain, four, the upper one
+having a triumphant twist at the top.
+
+You may observe, perhaps, about the ship sub-varieties, having a red
+velvet, or a white or blue velvet band on the coat cuff; these are
+respectively the Doctor, Purser, and Chief engineer; but with these
+sub-varieties I will not deal now, they are not essentially marine
+organisms, but akin to the amphibia.
+
+The metamorphosis is as clearly marked in the individual as in the
+physical characteristics. A third officer is a hard-working individual
+who has to do any thing that the other officers do not feel inclined
+to, and therefore rarely has time to wash. He in course of time becomes
+second officer, and the slave of the hatch. During this period of his
+metamorphosis he feels no compunction whatever in hauling out and
+dumping on the deck burst bacon barrels or leaking lime casks, actions
+which, when he reaches the next stage of development, he will regard as
+undistinguishable in a moral point of view from a compound commission of
+the seven deadly sins. For the deck, be it known, is to the First
+officer the most important thing in the cosmogony, and there is probably
+nothing he would not sacrifice to its complexion. One that I had the
+pleasure of knowing once lamented to me that he was not allowed by his
+then owners to spread a layer of ripe pineapples upon his precious idol,
+and let them be well trampled in and then lie a few hours, for this he
+assured me gave a most satisfactory bloom to a deck's complexion. Yet
+when this same man becomes a captain and grows another stripe round his
+cuffs, he no longer takes an active part in the ship's household
+affairs, that is his First officer's business, the ship's husband's
+affair; and should he have an inefficient First the captain expects Men
+and Nations to sympathise with him, just as a lady expects to be
+sympathised with over a bad housemaid.
+
+There are, however, two habits which are constant to all the species
+through each stage of transformation from roustabout to captain. One is
+a love of painting. I have never known an officer or captain who could
+pass a paint-pot, with the brush sticking temptingly out, without
+emotion. While, as for Jack, the happiest hours he knows seemingly are
+those he spends sitting on a slung plank over the side of his ocean
+home, with his bare feet dangling a few feet above the water as
+tempting bait for sharks, and the tropical sun blazing down on him and
+reflected back at him from the iron ship's side and from the oily ocean
+beneath. Then he carols forth his amorous lay, and shouts, "Bill, pass
+that paint-pot" in his jolliest tones. It is very rarely that a black
+seaman is treated to a paint-pot; all they are allowed to do is to knock
+off the old stuff, which they do in the nerveless way the African does
+most handicraft. The greatest dissipation of the black hands department
+consists in being allowed to knock the old stuff off the steam-pipe
+covers, donkey, and funnel. This is a delicious occupation, because,
+firstly, you can usually sit while doing it, and secondly, you can make
+a deafening din and sing to it.
+
+The other habit and the more widely known is the animistic view your
+seaman takes of Nature. Every article that is to a landsman an article
+and nothing more, is to him an individual with a will and mind of his
+own. I myself believe there is something in it. I feel sure that a
+certain hawser on board the ---- had a weird influence on the minds of
+all men who associated with it. It was used at Liverpool coming out of
+dock, but owing to the absence of harbours on the Coast it was not
+required again until it tied our ocean liner up to a tree stump at Boma,
+on the Congo. Nevertheless it didn't suit that hawser's views to be down
+below in the run and see nothing of life. It insisted on remaining on
+deck, and the officers gave in to it and said "Well, perhaps it was
+better so, it would rot if it went down below," so some days it abode on
+the quarter-deck, some days on the main, and now and again it would
+condescend to lie on the fo'castle, head in the sun. It had too its
+varying moods of tidiness, now neat and dandy coiled, now dishevelled
+and slummocky after association with the Kru boys.
+
+It is almost unnecessary to remark that the relationship between the
+First officer and the Chief engineer is rarely amicable. I certainly did
+once hear a First officer pray especially for a Chief engineer all to
+himself under his breath at a Sunday service; but I do not feel certain
+that this was a display of true affection. I am bound to admit that "the
+engineer is messy," which is magnanimous of me, because I had almost
+always a row of some kind on with the First officer, owing to other
+people upsetting my ink on his deck, whereas I have never fallen out
+with an engineer--on the contrary, two Chief engineers are amongst the
+most valued friends I possess.
+
+The worst of it is that no amount of experience will drive it into the
+head of the First officer that the engineer will want coal--particularly
+and exactly when the ship has just been thoroughly scrubbed and painted
+to go into port. I have not been at sea so long as many officers, yet I
+know that you might as well try and get a confirmed dipsomaniac past a
+grog shop as the engineer past, say the Canary Coaling Company; indeed
+he seems to smell the Dakar coal, and hankers after it when passing it
+miles out to sea. Then, again, if the engineer is allowed to have a coal
+deposit in the forehold it is a fresh blow and grief to the First
+officer to find he likes to take them as Mrs. Gamp did her stimulant,
+when she "feels dispoged," whether the deck has just been washed down or
+no.
+
+The cook, although he always has a blood feud on with the engineer
+concerning coals for the galley fire, which should endear him to the
+First officer, is morally a greater trial to the First than he is to his
+other victims. You see the cook has a grease tub, and what that means
+to the deck in a high sea is too painful to describe. So I leave the
+First officer with his pathetic and powerful appeals to the immortal
+gods to be told why it is his fate to be condemned to this "dog's life
+on a floating Hanwell lunatic asylum," commending him to the sympathetic
+consideration of all good housewives, for only they can understand what
+that dear good man goes through.
+
+After we passed Cape Verde we ran into the West African wet season rain
+sheet. There ought to be some other word than rain for that sort of
+thing. We have to stiffen this poor substantive up with adjectives, even
+for use with our own thunderstorms, and as is the morning dew to our
+heaviest thunder "torrential downpour of rain," so is that to the rain
+of the wet season in West Africa. For weeks it came down on us that
+voyage in one swishing, rushing cataract of water. The interspaces
+between the pipes of water--for it did not go into details with
+drops--were filled with gray mist, and as this rain struck the sea it
+kicked up such a water dust that you saw not the surface of the sea
+round you, but only a mist sea gliding by. It seemed as though we had
+left the clear cut world and entered into a mist universe. Sky, air, and
+sea were all the same, as our vessel swept on in one plane, just because
+she capriciously preferred it. Many days we could not see twenty yards
+from the ship. Once or twice another vessel would come out of the mist
+ahead, slogging past us into the mist behind, visible in our little
+water world for a few minutes only as a misty thing, and then we
+leisurely tramped on alone "o'er the viewless, hueless deep," with our
+horizon alongside.
+
+If you cleared your mind of all prejudice the thing was really not
+uncomfortable, and it seemed restful to the mind. As I used to be
+sitting on deck every one who came across me would say, "Wet, isn't it?
+Well, you see this is the wet season on the Coast"--or, "Damp, isn't it?
+Well, you see this is the wet season on the Coast"--and then they went
+away, and, I believe slept for hours exhausted by their educational
+efforts. After this they would come on deck and sit in their respective
+chairs, smoking, save that irrepressible deaf gentleman, who spent his
+time squirrel like between vivid activity and complete quiescence. You
+might pass the smoking room door and observe the soles of his shoes
+sticking out off the end of the settee with an air of perfect restful
+calm hovering over them, as if the owner were hibernating for the next
+six months. Within two minutes after this an uproar on the poop would
+inform the experienced ear that he was up and about again, and had found
+some one asleep on a chair and attacked him.
+
+It was during one of these days, furnishing reminiscences of Noah's
+flood, that conversation turned suddenly on Driver ants. One of the
+silent men, who had been sitting for an hour or so, with a countenance
+indicative of a contemplative acceptance of the penitential psalms,
+roused by one of the deaf man's rows, observed, "Paraffin is good for
+Driver ants." "Oh," said the deaf gentleman as he sat suddenly down on
+my ink-pot, which, for my convenience, was on a chair, "you wait till
+you get them up your legs, or sit down among them, as I saw Smith, when
+he was tired clearing bush. They took the tire out of him, he live for
+scratch one time. Smith was a pocket circus. You should have seen him
+get clear of his divided skirt. Oh lor! what price paraffin?"
+
+The conversation on the Driver ant now became general. As far as I
+remember, Mr. Burnand, who in _Happy Thoughts_ and _My Health_, gave
+much information, curious and interesting, on earwigs and wasps, omitted
+this interesting insect. So, perhaps, a _précis_ of the information I
+obtained may be interesting. I learnt that the only thing to do when you
+have got them on you is to adopt the course of action pursued by Brer
+Fox on that occasion when he was left to himself enough to go and buy
+ointment from Brer Rabbit, namely, make "a burst for the creek," water
+being the quickest thing to make them leave go. Unfortunately, the first
+time I had occasion to apply this short and easy method with the ant was
+when I was strolling about by Bell-Town with a white gentleman and his
+wife, and we strolled into Drivers. There were only two water-barrels in
+the vicinity, and my companions, being more active than myself, occupied
+them.
+
+While in West Africa you should always keep an eye lifting for Drivers.
+You can start doing it as soon as you land, which will postpone the
+catastrophe, not avoid it; for the song of the West Coaster to his enemy
+is truly, "Some day, some day, some day I shall meet you; Love, I know
+not when nor how." Perhaps, therefore, this being so, and watchfulness a
+strain when done deliberately, and worrying one of the worst things you
+can do in West Africa, it may be just as well for you to let things
+slide down the time-stream until Fate sends a column of the wretches up
+your legs. This experience will remain "indelibly limned on the tablets
+of your mind when a yesterday has faded from its page," or, as the
+modern school of psychologists would have it, "The affair will be
+brought to the notice of your sublimated consciousness, and that part of
+your mind will watch for Drivers without worrying you, and an automatic
+habit will be induced that will cause you never to let more than one eye
+roam spell-bound over the beauties of the African landscape; the other
+will keep fixed, turned to the soil at your feet."
+
+The Driver is of the species _Ponera_, and is generally referred to the
+species _anomma arcens_. The females and workers of these ants are
+provided with stings as well as well-developed jaws. They work both for
+all they are worth, driving the latter into your flesh, enthusiastically
+up to the hilt; they then remain therein, keeping up irritation when you
+have hastily torn their owner off in response to a sensation that is
+like that of red hot pinchers. The full-grown worker is about half an
+inch long, and without ocelli even. Yet one of the most remarkable among
+his many crimes is that he will always first attack the eyes of any
+victim. These creatures seem to have no settled home; no man has seen
+the beginning or end, as far as I know, of one of their long trains. As
+you are watching the ground you see a ribbon of glistening black, one
+portion of it lost in one clump of vegetation, the other in another, and
+on looking closer you see that it is an _acies instituta_ of Driver
+ants. If you stir the column up with a stick they make a peculiar
+fizzing noise, and open out in all directions in search of the enemy,
+which you take care they don't find.
+
+These ants are sometimes also called "visiting ants," from their habit
+of calling in quantities at inconvenient hours on humanity. They are
+fond of marching at night, and drop in on your house usually after you
+have gone to bed. I fancy, however, they are about in the daytime as
+well, even in the brightest weather; but it is certain that it is in
+dull, wet weather, and after dusk, that you come across them most on
+paths and open spaces. At other times and hours they make their way
+among the tangled ground vegetation.
+
+Their migrations are infinite, and they create some of the most
+brilliant sensations that occur in West Africa, replacing to the English
+exile there his lost burst water pipes of winter, and such like things,
+while they enforce healthy and brisk exercise upon the African.
+
+I will not enter into particulars about the customary white man's method
+of receiving a visit of Drivers, those methods being alike ineffective
+and accompanied by dreadful language. Barricading the house with a rim
+of red hot ashes, or a river of burning paraffin, merely adds to the
+inconvenience and endangers the establishment.
+
+The native method with the Driver ant is different: one minute there
+will be peace in the simple African home, the heavy-scented hot night
+air broken only by the rhythmic snores and automatic side slaps of the
+family, accompanied outside by a chorus of cicadas and bull frogs. Enter
+the Driver--the next moment that night is thick with hurrying black
+forms, little and big, for the family, accompanied by rats, cockroaches,
+snakes, scorpions, centipedes, and huge spiders animated by the one
+desire to get out of the visitors' way, fall helter skelter into the
+street, where they are joined by the rest of the inhabitants of the
+village, for the ants when they once start on a village usually make a
+regular house-to-house visitation. I mixed myself up once in a
+delightful knockabout farce near Kabinda, and possibly made the biggest
+fool of myself I ever did. I was in a little village, and out of a hut
+came the owner and his family and all the household parasites pell mell,
+leaving the Drivers in possession; but the mother and father of the
+family, when they recovered from this unwonted burst of activity, showed
+such a lively concern, and such unmistakable signs of anguish at having
+left something behind them in the hut, that I thought it must be the
+baby. Although not a family man myself, the idea of that innocent infant
+perishing in such an appalling manner roused me to action, and I joined
+the frenzied group, crying, "Where him live?" "In him far corner for
+floor!" shrieked the distracted parents, and into that hut I charged.
+Too true! There in the corner lay the poor little thing, a mere inert
+black mass, with hundreds of cruel Drivers already swarming upon it. To
+seize it and give it to the distracted mother was, as the reporter would
+say, "the work of an instant." She gave a cry of joy and dropped it
+instantly into a water barrel, where her husband held it down with a
+hoe, chuckling contentedly. Shiver not, my friend, at the callousness of
+the Ethiopian; that there thing wasn't an infant--it was a ham!
+
+These ants clear a house completely of all its owner's afflictions in
+the way of vermin, killing and eating all they can get hold of. They
+will also make short work of any meat they come across, but don't care
+about flour or biscuits. Like their patron Mephistopheles, however, they
+do not care for carrion, nor do they destroy furniture or stuffs. Indeed
+they are typically West African, namely, good and bad mixed. In a few
+hours they leave the house again on their march through the Ewigkeit,
+which they enliven with criminal proceedings. Yet in spite of the
+advantage they confer on humanity, I believe if the matter were put to
+the human vote, Africa would decide to do without the Driver ant.
+Mankind has never been sufficiently grateful to its charwomen, like
+these insect equivalents, who do their tidying up at supremely
+inconvenient times. I remember an incident at one place in the Lower
+Congo where I had been informed that "cork fever" was epidemic in a
+severe form among the white population. I was returning to quarters from
+a beetle hunt, in pouring rain; it was as it often is, "the wet season,"
+&c., when I saw a European gentleman about twenty yards from his
+comfortable-looking house seated on a chair, clad in a white cotton
+suit, umbrellaless, and with the water running off him as if he was in a
+douche bath. I had never seen a case of cork fever, but I had heard such
+marvellous and quaint tales of its symptoms that I thought--well,
+perhaps, anyhow, I would not open up conversation. To my remorse he
+said, as I passed him, "Drivers." Inwardly apologising, I outwardly
+commiserated him, and we discoursed. It was on this occasion that I saw
+a mantis, who is by way of being a very pretty pirate on his own
+account, surrounded by a mob of the blind hurrying Drivers who, I may
+remark, always attack like Red Indians in open order. That mantis
+perfectly well knew his danger, but was as cool as a cucumber, keeping
+quite quiet and lifting his legs out of the way of the blind enemies
+around him. But the chances of keeping six legs going clear, for long,
+among such brutes without any of them happening on one, were small, even
+though he only kept three on the ground at one time. So, being a devotee
+of personal courage, I rescued him--whereupon he bit me for my pains.
+Why didn't he fly? How can you fly, I should like to know, unless you
+have a jumping off place?
+
+Drivers are indeed dreadful. I was at one place where there had been a
+white gentleman and a birthday party in the evening; he stumbled on his
+way home and went to sleep by the path side, and in the morning there
+was only a white gentleman's skeleton and clothes.
+
+However, I will dwell no more on them now. Wretches that they are, they
+have even in spirit pursued me to England, causing a critic to observe
+that _brevi spatio interjecto_ is my only Latin, whereas the matter is
+this. I was once in distinguished society in West Africa that included
+other ladies. We had a distinguished native gentleman, who had had an
+European education, come to tea with us. The conversation turned on
+Drivers, for one of the ladies had the previous evening had her house
+invaded by them at midnight. She snatched up a blanket, wrapped herself
+round with it, unfortunately allowed one corner thereof to trail,
+whereby it swept up Drivers, and awful scenes followed. Then our visitor
+gave us many reminiscences of his own, winding up with one wherein he
+observed "_brevi spatio interjecto_, ladies; off came my breeches."
+After this we ladies all naturally used this phrase to describe rapid
+action.
+
+There is another ant, which is commonly called the red Driver, but it is
+quite distinct from the above-mentioned black species. It is an
+unwholesome-looking, watery-red thing with long legs, and it abides
+among trees and bushes. An easy way of obtaining specimens of this ant
+is to go under a mango or other fruit tree and throw your cap at the
+fruit. You promptly get as many of these insects as the most ardent
+naturalist could desire, its bite being every bit as bad as that of the
+black Driver.
+
+These red ones build nests with the leaves of the tree they reside on.
+The leaves are stuck together with what looks like spiders' webs. I have
+seen these nests the size of an apple, and sent a large one to the
+British Museum, but I have been told of many larger nests than I have
+seen. These ants, unfortunately for me who share the taste, are
+particularly devoted to the fruit of the rubber vine, and also to that
+of a poisonous small-leaved creeping plant that bears the most
+disproportionately-sized spiny, viscid, yellow fruit. It is very
+difficult to come across specimens of either of these fruits that have
+not been eaten away by the red Driver.
+
+It is a very fascinating thing to see the strange devices employed by
+many kinds of young seedlings and saplings to keep off these evidently
+unpopular tenants. They chiefly consist in having a sheath of
+exceedingly slippery surface round the lower part of the stem, which the
+ants slide off when they attempt to climb. I used to spend hours
+watching these affairs. You would see an ant dash for one of these
+protected stems as if he were a City man and his morning train on the
+point of starting from the top of the plant stem. He would get up half
+an inch or so because of the dust round the bottom helping him a bit,
+then, getting no holding-ground, off he would slip, and falling on his
+back, desperately kick himself right side up, and go at it again as if
+he had heard the bell go, only to meet with a similar rebuff. The plants
+are most forbearing teachers, and their behaviour in every way a credit
+to them. I hope that they may in time have a moral and educational
+effect on this overrated insect, enabling him to realise how wrong it is
+for him to force himself where he is not welcome; but a few more
+thousand years, I fear, will elapse before the ant is anything but a
+chuckleheaded, obstinate wretch. Nothing nowadays but his happening to
+fall off with his head in the direction of some other vegetable frees
+the slippery plant from his attempts. To this other something off he
+rushes, and if it happens to be a plant that does not mind him up he
+goes, and I have no doubt congratulates himself on having carried out
+his original intentions, understanding the world, not being the man to
+put up with nonsense and all that sort of thing, whereas it is the plant
+that manages him. Some plants don't mind ants knocking about among the
+grown-up leaves, but will not have them with the infants, and so cover
+their young stuff with a fur or down wherewith the ant can do nothing.
+Others, again, keep him and feed him with sweetstuff so that he should
+keep off other enemies from its fruit, &c. But I have not space to sing
+in full the high intelligence of West African vegetation, and I am no
+botanist; yet one cannot avoid being struck by it, it is so manifold and
+masterly.
+
+Before closing these observations I must just mention that tiny,
+sandy-coloured abomination _Myriaica molesta_. In South West Africa it
+swarms, giving a quaint touch to domestic arrangements. No reckless
+putting down of basin, tin, or jam-pot there, least of all of the
+sugar-basin, unless the said sugar-basin is one of those commonly used
+in those parts, of rough, violet-coloured glass, with a similar lid.
+Since I left South West Africa I have read some interesting observations
+of Sir John Lubbock's on the dislike of ants to violet colour. I wonder
+if the Portuguese of Angola observed it long ago and adopted violet
+glass for basins, or was it merely accidental and empirical. I suspect
+the latter, or they would use violet glass for other articles. As it is,
+everything eatable in a house there is completely insulated in
+water--moats of water with a dash of vinegar in it--to guard it from the
+ants from below; to guard from the ants from above, the same breed and
+not a bit better. Eatables are kept in swinging safes at the end of coir
+rope recently tarred. But when, in spite of these precautions, or from
+the neglect of them, you find, say your sugar, a brown, busy mass, just
+stand it in the full glare of the sun. Sun is a thing no ant likes, I
+believe, and it is particularly distasteful to ants with pale
+complexions; and so you can see them tear themselves away from their
+beloved sugar and clear off into a Hyde Park meeting smitten by a
+thunderstorm.
+
+This kind of ant, or a nearly allied species, is found in houses in
+England, where it is supposed they have been imported from the Brazils
+or West Indies in 1828. Possibly the Brazils got it from South West
+Africa, with which they have had a trade since the sixteenth century,
+most of the Brazil slaves coming out of Congo. It is unlikely that the
+importation was the other way about; for exotic things, whether plants
+or animals, do not catch on in Western Africa as they do in Australia.
+In the former land everything of the kind requires constant care to keep
+it going at all, and protect it from the terrific local circumstances.
+It is no use saying to animal or vegetable, "there is room for all in
+Africa"--for Africa, that is Africa properly so called--Equatorial West
+Africa, is full up with its own stuff now, crowded and fighting an
+internecine battle with the most marvellous adaptations to its
+environment.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+SIERRA LEONE AND ITS SURROUNDINGS
+
+     Concerning the perils that beset the navigator in the Baixos of St.
+     Ann, with some description of the country between the Sierra Leone
+     and Cape Palmas and the reasons wherefrom it came to be called the
+     Pepper, Grain, or Meleguetta Coast.
+
+
+It was late evening-time when the ---- reached that part of the South
+Atlantic Ocean where previous experience and dead reckoning led our
+captain to believe that Sierra Leone existed. The weather was too thick
+to see ten yards from the ship, so he, remembering certain captains who,
+under similar circumstances, failing to pick up the light on Cape Sierra
+Leone, had picked up the Carpenter Rock with their keels instead, let go
+his anchor, and kept us rolling about outside until the morning came.
+Slipperty slop, crash! slipperty slop, crash! went all loose gear on
+board all the night long; and those of the passengers who went in for
+that sort of thing were ill from the change of motion. The mist, our
+world, went gently into grey, and then black, growing into a dense
+darkness filled with palpable, woolly, wet air, thicker far than it had
+been before. This, my instructors informed me, was caused by the
+admixture of the "solid malaria coming off the land."
+
+However, morning came at last, and even I was on deck as it dawned, and
+was rewarded for my unwonted activity by a vision of beautiful, definite
+earth-form dramatically unveiled. No longer was the ---- our only
+material world. The mist lifted itself gently off, as it seemed, out of
+the ocean, and then separated before the morning breeze; one great mass
+rolling away before us upwards, over the land, where portions of it
+caught amongst the forests of the mountains and stayed there all day,
+while another mass went leisurely away to the low Bullam shore, from
+whence it came again after sunset to join the mountain and the ocean
+mists as they drew down and in from the sea, helping them to wrap up
+Freetown, Sierra Leone and its lovely harbour for the night.
+
+It was with a thrill of joy that I looked on Freetown harbour for the
+first time in my life. I knew the place so well. Yes; there were all the
+bays, Kru, English and Pirate; and the mountains, whose thunder rumbling
+caused Pedro do Centra to call the place Sierra Leona when he discovered
+it in 1462. And had not my old friend, Charles Johnson, writing in 1724,
+given me all manner of information about it during those delicious hours
+rescued from school books and dedicated to a most contentious study of
+_A General History of Robberies and Murders of the most Notorious
+Pyrates_? That those bays away now on my right hand "were safe and
+convenient for cleaning and watering;" and so on and there rose up
+before my eyes a vision of the society ashore here in 1724 that lived
+"very friendly with the natives--being thirty Englishmen in all; men who
+in some part of their lives had been either privateering, buccaneering,
+or pirating, and still retain and have the riots and humours common to
+that sort of life." Hard by, too, was Bence Island, where, according to
+Johnson, "there lives an old fellow named _Crackers_ (his true name he
+thinks fit to conceal), and who was formerly a noted buccaneer; he
+keeps the best house in the place, has two or three guns before his door
+with which he salutes his friends the pyrates when they put in, and
+lives a jovial life with them all the while they are there." Alas! no
+use to me was the careful list old Johnson had given me of the
+residents. They were all dead now, and I could not go ashore and hunt up
+"Peter Brown" or "John Jones," who had "one long boat and an Irish young
+man." Social things were changed in Freetown, Sierra Leone; but only
+socially, for the old description of it is, as far as scenery goes,
+correct to-day, barring the town. Whether or no everything has changed
+for the better is not my business to discuss here, nor will I detain you
+with any description of the town, as I have already published one after
+several visits, with a better knowledge than I had on my first call
+there.
+
+On one of my subsequent visits I fell in with Sierra Leone receiving a
+shock. We were sitting, after a warm and interesting morning spent going
+about the town talking trade, in the low long pleasant room belonging to
+the Coaling Company whose windows looked out over an eventful warehouse
+yard; for therein abode a large dog-faced baboon, who shied stones and
+sticks at boys and any one who displeased him, pretty nearly as well as
+a Flintshire man. Also in the yard were a large consignment of kola nuts
+packed as usual in native-made baskets, called bilys, lined inside with
+the large leaves of a Ficus and our host was explaining to my mariner
+companions their crimes towards this cargo while they defended
+themselves with spirit. It seemed that this precious product if not kept
+on deck made a point of heating and then going mildewed; while, if you
+did keep it on deck, either the First officer's minions went fooling
+about it with the hose, which made it swell up and burst and ruined it,
+or left it in unmitigated sun, which shrivelled it--and so on. This led,
+naturally, to a general conversation on cargo between the mariners and
+the merchants, during which some dreadful things were said about the way
+matches arrived, in West Africa and other things, shipped at shipper's
+own risk, let alone the way trade suffered by stowing hams next the
+boilers. Of course the other side was a complete denial of these
+accusations, but the affair was too vital for any of us to attend to a
+notorious member of the party who kept bothering us "to get up and look
+at something queer over King Tom."
+
+Now it was market day in Freetown; and market day there has got more
+noise to the square inch in it than most things. You feel when you first
+meet it that if it were increased a little more it would pass beyond the
+grasp of human ear, like the screech of that whistle they show off at
+the Royal Society's Conversazione. However, on this occasion the market
+place sent up an entire compound yell, still audible, and we rose as one
+man as the portly housekeeper, followed by the small, but able steward,
+burst into the room, announcing in excited tones, "Oh! the town be took
+by locusts! The town be took by locusts!" (_D.C. fortissimo_). And we
+attended to the incident; ousting the reporter of "the queer thing over
+King Tom" from the window, and ignoring his "I told you so," because he
+hadn't.
+
+This was the first cloud of locusts that had come right into the town in
+the memory of the oldest inhabitant, though they occasionally raid the
+country away to the North. I am informed that when the chiefs of the
+Western Soudan do not give sufficient gifts to the man who is locust
+king and has charge of them--keeping them in holes in the desert of
+Sahara--he lets them out in revenge. Certainly that year he let them out
+with a vengeance, for when I was next time down Coast in the Oil Rivers
+I was presented with specimens that had been caught in Old Calabar and
+kept as big curios.
+
+This Freetown swarm came up over the wooded hills to the South-West in a
+brown cloud of singular structure, denser in some parts than others,
+continually changing its points of greatest density, like one of
+Thompson's diagrams of the ultimate structure of gases, for you could
+see the component atoms as they swept by. They were swirling round and
+round upwards-downwards like the eddying snowflakes in a winter's storm,
+and the whole air rustled with the beat of the locusts' wings. They
+hailed against the steep iron roofs of the store-houses, slid down it,
+many falling feet through the air before they recovered the use of their
+wings--the gutters were soon full of them--the ducks in the yard below
+were gobbling and squabbling over the layer now covering the ground, and
+the baboon chattered as he seized handfuls and pulled them to pieces.
+
+Everybody took them with excitement, save the jack crows, who on their
+arrival were sitting sleeping on the roof ridge. They were horribly
+bored and bothered by the affair. Twice they flopped down and tried
+them. There they were lying about in gutters with a tempting garbagey
+look, but evidently the jack crows found them absolutely mawkish; so
+they went back to the roof ridge in a fuming rage, because the locusts
+battered against them and prevented them from sleeping.
+
+We left Sierra Leone on the ---- late in the afternoon, and ran out
+again into the same misty wet weather. The next morning the balance
+of our passengers were neither up early, nor lively when they were
+up; but to my surprise after what I had heard, no one had the
+much-prognosticated attack of fever. All day long we steamed onwards,
+passing the Banana Isles and Sherboro Island and the sound usually
+called Sherboro River.[2] We being a South-West Coast boat, did not call
+at the trading settlements here, but kept on past Cape St. Ann for the
+Kru coast.
+
+All day long the rain came down as if thousands of energetic--well, let
+us say--angels were hurriedly baling the waters above the firmament out
+into the ocean. Everything on board was reeking wet.
+
+You could sweep the moisture off the cabin panelling with your hand, and
+our clothes were clammy and musty, and the towels too damp on their own
+account to dry you. Why none of us started specialising branchiae I do
+not know, but feel that would have been the proper sort of breathing
+apparatus for such an atmosphere.
+
+The passengers were all at the tail end of their spirits, for Sierra
+Leone is the definite beginning of the Coast to the out-goer. You are
+down there when you leave it outward bound; it is indeed, the complement
+of Canary. Those going up out of West Africa begin to get excited at
+Sierra Leone; those going down into West Africa, particularly when it is
+the wet season, begin to get depressed. It did not, however, operate in
+this manner on me. I had survived Sierra Leone, I had enjoyed it; why,
+therefore, not survive other places, and enjoy them? Moreover, my
+scientific training, combined with close study of the proper method of
+carrying on the local conversation, had by now enabled me to understand
+its true spirit,--never contradict, and, if you can, help it onward.
+When going on deck about 6 o'clock that evening, I was alarmed to see
+our gallant captain in red velvet slippers. A few minutes later the
+chief officer burst on my affrighted gaze in red velvet slippers too. On
+my way hurriedly to the saloon I encountered the third officer similarly
+shod. When I recovered from these successive shocks, I carried out my
+mission of alarming the rest of the passengers, who were in the saloon
+enjoying themselves peacefully, and reported what I had seen. The old
+coasters, even including the silent ones, agreed with me that we were as
+good as lost so far as this world went; and the deaf gentleman went
+hurriedly on deck, we think "to take the sun,"--it was a way he had at
+any time of day, because "he had been studying about how to fix points
+for the Government--and wished to keep himself in practice."
+
+My fellow new-comers were perplexed; and one of them, a man who always
+made a point of resisting education, and who thought nothing of calling
+some of our instructor's best information "Tommy Rot!" said, "I don't
+see what can happen; we're right out at sea, and it's as calm as a
+millpond."
+
+"Don't you, my young friend? don't you?" sadly said an old Coaster.
+"Well, I'll just tell you there's precious little that can't happen, for
+we're among the shoals of St. Ann."
+
+The new-comers went on deck "just to look round;" and as there was
+nothing to be seen but a superb specimen of damp darkness, they returned
+to the saloon, one of them bearing an old chart sheet which he had
+borrowed from the authorities. Now that chart was not reassuring; the
+thing looked like an exhibition pattern of a prize shot gun, with the
+quantity of rocks marked down on it.
+
+"Look here," said an anxious inquirer; "why are some of these rocks
+named after the Company's ships?"
+
+"Think," said the calm old Coaster.
+
+"Oh, I say! hang it all, you don't mean to say they've been wrecked
+here? Anyhow, if they have they got off all right. How is it the 'Yoruba
+Rock' and the 'Gambia Rock?' The 'Yoruba' and the 'Gambia' are running
+now."
+
+"Those," explains the old Coaster kindly, "were the old 'Yoruba' and
+'Gambia.' The 'Bonny' that runs now isn't the old 'Bonny.' It's the way
+with most of them, isn't it?" he says, turning to a fellow old Coaster.
+"Naturally," says his friend. "But this is the old original, you know,
+and it's just about time she wrote up her name on one of these
+tombstones." "You don't save ships," he continues, for the instruction
+of the new-comers, attentive enough now; "that go on the Kru coast, and
+if you get ashore you don't save the things you stand up in--the natives
+strip you."
+
+"Cannibals!" I suggest.
+
+"Oh, of course they are cannibals; they are all cannibals, are natives
+down here when they get the chance. But, that does not matter; you see
+what I object to is being brought on board the next steamer that happens
+to call crowded with all sorts of people you know, and with a lady
+missionary or so among them, just with nothing on one but a flyaway
+native cloth. You remember D----?" "Well," says his friend. Strengthened
+by this support, he takes his turn at instructing the young critic,
+saying soothingly, "there, don't you worry; have a good dinner." (It was
+just being laid.) "For if you do get ashore the food is something
+beastly. But, after all, what with the sharks and the surf and the
+cannibals, you know the chances are a thousand to one that the worst
+will come to the worst and you live to miss your trousers."
+
+After dinner we new-comers went on deck to keep an eye on Providence,
+and I was called on to explain how the alarm had been given me by the
+footgear of the officers. I said, like all great discoveries, "it was
+founded on observation made in a scientific spirit." I had noticed that
+whenever a particularly difficult bit of navigation had to be done on
+our boat, red velvet slippers were always worn, as for instance, when
+running through the heavy weather we had met south of the Bay, on going
+in at Puerto de la Luz, and on rounding the Almadia reefs, and on
+entering Freetown harbour in fog. But never before had I seen more than
+one officer wearing them at a time, while tonight they were blazing like
+danger signals at the shore ends of all three.
+
+My opinion as to the importance of these articles to navigation became
+further strengthened by subsequent observations in the Bights of Biafra
+and Benin. We picked up rivers in them, always wore them when crossing
+bars, and did these things on the whole successfully. But once I was on
+a vessel that was rash enough to go into a difficult river--Rio del
+Rey--without their aid. That vessel got stuck fast on a bank, and, as
+likely as not, would be sticking there now with her crew and passengers
+mere mosquito-eaten skeletons, had not our First officer rushed to his
+cabin, put on red velvet slippers and gone out in a boat, energetically
+sounding around with a hand lead. Whereupon we got off, for clearly it
+was not by his sounding; it never amounted to more than two fathoms,
+while we required a good three-and-a-half. Yet that First officer, a
+truthful man, always, said nobody did a stroke of work on board that
+vessel bar himself; so I must leave the reader to escape if he can from
+believing it was the red velvet slippers that saved us, merely remarking
+that these invaluable nautical instruments were to be purchased at
+Hamburg, and were possibly only met with on boats that run to Hamburg
+and used by veterans of that fleet.
+
+If you will look on the map, not mine, but one visible to the naked eye,
+you will see that the Coast from Sierra Leone to Cape Palmas is the
+lower bend of the hump of Africa and the turning point into the Bights
+of Benin, Biafra and Panavia.
+
+Its appearance gives the voyager his first sample of those stupendous
+sweeps of monotonous landscapes so characteristic of Africa. From
+Sherboro River to Cape Mount, viewed from the sea, every mile looks as
+like the next as peas in a pod, and should a cruel fate condemn you to
+live ashore here in a factory you get so used to the eternal sameness
+that you automatically believe that nothing else but this sort of world,
+past, present, or future, can ever have existed: and that cities and
+mountains are but the memories of dreams. A more horrible life than a
+life in such a region for a man who never takes to it, it is impossible
+to conceive; for a man who does take to it, it is a kind of dream life,
+I am judging from the few men I have met who have been stationed here in
+the few isolated little factories that are established. Some of them
+look like haunted men, who, when they are among white men again, cling
+to their society: others are lazy, dreamy men, rather bored by it.
+
+The kind of country that produces this effect must be exceedingly simple
+in make: it is not the mere isolation from fellow white men that does
+it--for example, the handful of men who are on the Ogowé do not get
+like this though many of them are equally lone men, yet they are bright
+and lively enough. Anyhow, exceedingly simple in make as is this region
+of Africa from Sherboro to Cape Mount, it consists of four different
+things in four long lines--lines that go away into eternity for as far
+as eye can see. There is the band of yellow sand on which your little
+factory is built. This band is walled to landwards by a wall of dark
+forest, mounted against the sky to seaward by a wall of white surf;
+beyond that there is the horizon-bounded ocean. Neither the forest wall
+nor surf wall changes enough to give any lively variety; they just run
+up and down a gamut of the same set of variations. In the light of
+brightest noon the forest wall stands dark against the dull blue sky, in
+the depth of the darkest night you can see it stand darker still,
+against the stars; on moonlight nights and on tornado nights, when you
+see the forest wall by the lightning light, it looks as if it had been
+done over with a coat of tar. The surf wall is equally consistent, it
+may be bad, or good as surf, but it's generally the former, which merely
+means it is a higher, broader wall, and more noisy, but it's the same
+sort of wall making the same sort of noise all the time. It is always
+white; in the sunlight, snowy white, suffused with a white mist wherein
+are little broken, quivering bits of rainbows. In the moonlight, it
+gleams with a whiteness there is in nothing else on earth. If you can
+imagine a non-transparent diamond wall, I think you will get some near
+idea to it, and even on the darkest of dark nights you can still see the
+surf wall clearly enough, for it shows like the ghost of its daylight
+self, seeming to have in it a light of its own, and you love or hate it.
+Night and day and season changes pass over these things, like
+reflections in a mirror, without altering the mirror frame; but nothing
+comes that ever stills for one-half second the thunder of the surf-wall
+or makes it darker, or makes the forest-wall brighter than the rest of
+your world. Mind you, it is intensely beautiful, intensely soothing,
+intensely interesting if you can read it and you like it, but life for a
+man who cannot and does not is a living death.
+
+But if you are seafaring there is no chance for a brooding melancholy to
+seize on you hereabouts, for you soon run along this bit of coast and
+see the sudden, beautiful headland of Cape Mount, which springs aloft in
+several rounded hills a thousand and odd feet above the sea and looking
+like an island. After passing it, the land rapidly sinks again to the
+old level, for a stretch of another 46 miles or so when Cape
+Mesurado,[3] rising about 200 feet, seems from seaward to be another
+island.
+
+The capital of the Liberian Republic, Monrovia, is situated on the
+southern side of the river Mesurado, and right under the high land of
+the Cape, but it is not visible from the roadstead, and then again comes
+the low coast, unrolling its ribbon of sandy beach, walled as before
+with forest wall and surf, but with the difference that between the sand
+beach and the forest are long stretches of lagooned waters. Evil
+looking, mud-fringed things, when I once saw them at the end of a hard,
+dry season, but when the wet season's rains come they are transformed
+into beautiful lakes; communicating with each other and overflowing by
+shallow channels which they cut here and there through the sand-beach
+ramparts into the sea.
+
+The identification of places from aboard ship along such a coast as this
+is very difficult. Even good sized rivers doubling on themselves sneak
+out between sand banks, and make no obvious break in surf or forest
+wall. The old sailing direction that gave as a landmark the "Tree with
+two crows on it" is as helpful as any one could get of many places here,
+and when either the smoke season or the wet season is on of course you
+cannot get as good as that. But don't imagine that unless the navigator
+wants to call on business, he can "just put up his heels and blissfully
+think o' nowt," for this bit of the West Coast of Africa is one of the
+most trying in the world to work. Monotonous as it is ashore, it is
+exciting enough out to sea in the way of the rocks and shoals, and an
+added danger exists at the beginning and end of the wet, and the
+beginning of the dry, in the shape of tornadoes.[4] These are sudden
+storms coming up usually with terrific violence; customarily from the
+S.E. and E., but sometimes towards the end of the season straight from
+S. More slave ships than enough have been lost along this bit of coast
+in their time, let alone decent Bristol Guineamen into the bargain,
+owing to "a delusion that occasionally seized inexperienced commanders
+that it was well to heave-to for a tornado, whereas a sailing ship's
+best chance lay in her heels." It was a good chance too, for owing to
+the short duration of this breed of hurricane and their terrific rain,
+there accompanies them no heavy sea, the tornado-rain ironing the ocean
+down; so if, according to one of my eighteenth century friends, you see
+that well-known tornado-cloud arch coming, and you are on a Guineaman,
+for your sins, "a dray of a vessel with an Epping Forest of sea growth
+on her keel, and two-thirds of the crew down with fever or dead of it,
+as likely they will be after a spell on this coast," the sooner you get
+her ready to run the better, and with as little on her as you can do
+with. If, however, there be a white cloud inside the cloud-arch you must
+strip her quick and clean, for that tornado is going to be the worst
+tornado you were ever in.
+
+Nevertheless, tornadoes are nothing to the rocks round here. At the
+worst, there are but two tornadoes a day, always at tide turn, only at
+certain seasons of the year, and you can always see them coming; but it
+is not that way with the rocks. There is at least one to each quarter
+hour in the entire twenty-four. They are there all the year round, and
+more than one time in forty you can't see them coming. In case you think
+I am overstating the case, I beg to lay before you the statement
+concerning rocks given me by an old captain, who was used to these seas
+and never lost a ship. I had said something flippant about rocks, and he
+said, "I'll write them down for you, missy." This is just his statement
+for the chief rocks between Junk River and Baffu; not a day's steamer
+run. "Two and three quarters miles and six cables N.W. by W. from Junk
+River there is 'Hooper's Patch,' irregular in shape, about a mile long
+and carrying in some places only 2-1/2 fathoms of water. There is
+another bad patch about a mile and a-half from Hooper's, so if you have
+to go dodging your way into Marshall, a Liberian settlement, great
+caution and good luck is useful. In Waterhouse Bay there's a cluster of
+pinnacle rocks all under water, with a will-o'-the wisp kind of buoy,
+that may be there or not to advertise them. One rock at Tobokanni has
+the civility to show its head above water, and a chum of his, that lies
+about a mile W. by S. from Tobokanni Point, has the seas constantly
+breaking on it.
+
+The coast there is practically reefed for the next eight miles, with a
+boat channel near the shore. But there is a gap in this reef at Young
+Sesters, through which, if you handle her neatly, you can run a ship in.
+In some places this reef of rock is three-quarters of a mile out to sea.
+Trade Town is the next place where you may now call for cargo. Its
+particular rock lies a mile out and shows well with the sea breaking on
+it. After Trade Town the rocks are more scattered, and the bit of coast
+by Kurrau River rises in cliffs 40 to 60 feet high. The sand at their
+base is strewn with fallen blocks on which the surf breaks with great
+force, sending the spray up in columns; and until you come to Sestos
+River the rocks are innumerable, but not far out to sea, so you can keep
+outside them unless you want to run in to the little factory at Tembo.
+Just beyond Sestos River, three-quarters of a mile S.S.W. of Fen River,
+there are those Fen rocks on which the sea breaks, but between these and
+the Manna rocks, which are a little more than a mile from shore N.W. by
+N. from Sestos River, there are any quantity of rocks marked and not
+marked on the chart. These Manna rocks are a jolly bad lot, black, and
+only a few breaking, and there is a shoal bank to the S.E. of these for
+half a mile, then for the next four miles, there are not more than 70
+hull openers to the acre. Most of them are not down on the chart, so
+there's plenty of opportunity now about for you to do a little African
+discovery until you come to Sestos reef, off a point of the same name,
+projecting half a mile to westwards with a lot of foul ground round it.
+Spence rock which breaks, is W. two-thirds S., distant 1-1/4 miles from
+Sestos Point; within 5 miles of it is the rock which _The Corisco_
+discovered in 1885. It is not down on the chart yet, all these set of
+rocks round Sestos are sharp too, so the lead gives you no warning, and
+you are safer right-away from them. Then there's a very nasty one called
+Diabolitos, I expect those old Portuguese found it out, it's got a lot
+of little ones which extend 2 miles and more to seaward. There is
+another devil rock off Bruni, called by the natives Ba Ya. It stands 60
+feet above sea-level, and has a towering crown of trees on it. It is a
+bad one is this, for in thick weather, as it is a mile off shore and
+isolated, it is easily mistaken, and so acts as a sort of decoy for the
+lot of sunken devil rocks which are round it. Further along towards
+Baffu there are four more rocks a mile out, and forest ground on the
+way."
+
+I just give you this bit of information as an example, because I happen
+to have this rough rock list of it; but a little to the east the rocks
+and dangers of the Kru Coast are quite as bad, both in quantity and
+quality, indeed, more so, for there is more need for vessels to call. I
+often think of this bit of coast when I see people unacquainted with the
+little local peculiarities of dear West Africa looking at a map thereof
+and wondering why such and such a Bay is not utilised as a harbour, or
+such and such a river not navigated, or this, that and the other bit of
+Coast so little known of and traded with. Such undeveloped regions have
+generally excellent local reasons, reasons that cast no blame on white
+man's enterprise or black man's savagery. They are rock-reefed coast or
+barred rivers, and therefore not worth the expense to the trader of
+working them, and you must always remember that unless the trader opens
+up bits of West Africa no one else will. It may seem strange to the
+landsman that the navigator should hug such a coast as the shoals (the
+_Bainos_ as the old Portuguese have it) of St. Ann--but they do. If you
+ask a modern steamboat captain he will usually tell you it is to save
+time, a statement that the majority of the passengers on a West Coast
+boat will receive with open derision and contempt, holding him to be a
+spendthrift thereof; but I myself fancy that hugging this coast is a
+vestigial idea. In the old sailing-ship days, if you ran out to sea far
+from these shoals you lost your wind, and maybe it would take you five
+mortal weeks to go from Sierra Leone to Cape Mount or _Wash Congo_, as
+the natives called it in the 17th century.
+
+Off the Kru Coast, both West Coast and South-West Coast steamers and
+men-o'-war on this station, call to ship or unship Krumen. The character
+of the rocks, of which I have spoken,--their being submerged for the
+most part, and pinnacles--increases the danger considerably, for a ship
+may tear a wound in herself that will make short work of her, yet unless
+she remains impaled on the rock, making, as it were, a buoy of herself,
+that rock might not be found again for years.
+
+This sort of thing has happened many times, and the surveying vessels,
+who have been instructed to localise the danger and get it down on the
+chart, have failed to do so in spite of their most elaborate efforts;
+whereby the more uncharitable of the surveying officers are led in their
+wrath to hold that the mercantile marine officers who reported that rock
+and gave its bearings did so under the influence of drink, while the
+more charitable and scientifically inclined have suggested that
+elevation and subsidence are energetically and continually at work
+along the Bight of Benin, hoisting up shoals to within a few feet of the
+surface in some places and withdrawing them in others to a greater
+depth.
+
+The people ashore here are commonly spoken of as Liberians and Kruboys.
+The Liberians are colonists in the country, having acquired settlements
+on this coast by purchase from the chiefs of the native tribes. The idea
+of restoring the Africans carried off by the slave trade to Africa
+occurred to America before it did to England, for it was warmly
+advocated by the Rev. Samuel Hoskins, of Newport, Rhode Island, in 1770,
+but it was 1816 before America commenced to act on it, and the first
+emigrants embarked from New York for Liberia in 1820. On the other hand,
+though England did not get the idea until 1787, she took action at once,
+buying from King Tom, through the St George's Bay Company, the land at
+Sierra Leone between the Rochelle and Kitu River. This was done on the
+recommendation of Mr. Smeatham. The same year was shipped off to this
+new colony the first consignment of 460 free negro servants and 60
+whites; out of those 400 arrived and survived their first fortnight, and
+set themselves to build a town called Granville, after Mr. Granville
+Sharpe, whose exertions had resulted in Lord Mansfield's epoch-making
+decision in the case of Somerset _v._ Mr. J. G. Stewart, his master,
+_i.e._, that no slave could be held on English soil.
+
+The Liberians were differently situated from their neighbours at Sierra
+Leone in many ways; in some of these they have been given a better
+chance than the Africans sent to Sierra Leone--in other ways not so good
+a chance. Neither of the colonies has been completely successful.
+
+I hold the opinion that if those American and English philanthropists
+could not have managed the affair better than they did, they had better
+have confined their attention to talking, a thing they were naturally
+great on, and left the so-called restoration of the African to his
+native soil alone. For they made a direful mess of the affair from a
+practical standpoint, and thereby inflicted an enormous amount of
+suffering and a terrible mortality on the Africans they shipped from
+England, Canada, and America; the tradition whereof still clings to the
+colonies of Liberia and Sierra Leone, and gravely hinders their
+development by the emigration of educated, or at any rate civilised,
+Africans now living in the West Indies and the Southern States of
+America.
+
+I am aware that there are many who advocate the return to Africa of the
+Africans who were exported from the West Coast during the slavery days.
+But I cannot regard this as a good or even necessary policy, for two
+reasons. One is that those Africans were not wanted in West Africa. The
+local supply of African is sufficient to develop the country in every
+way. There are in West Africa now, Africans thoroughly well educated, as
+far as European education goes, and who are quite conversant with the
+nature of their own country and with the language of their
+fellow-countrymen. There are also any quantity of Africans there who,
+though not well educated, are yet past-masters in the particular culture
+which West Africa has produced on its inhabitants.
+
+The second reason is that the descendants of the exported Africans have
+seemingly lost their power of resistance to the malarial West Coast
+climate. This a most interesting subject, which some scientific
+gentleman ought to attend to, for there is a sufficient quantity of
+evidence ready for his investigation. The mortality among the Africans
+sent to Sierra Leone and Liberia has been excessive, and so also has
+been that amongst the West Indians who went to Congo Belge, while the
+original intention of the United Presbyterian Mission to Calabar had to
+be abandoned from the same cause. In fact it looks as if the second and
+third generation of deported Africans had no greater power of resistance
+to West Africa than the pure white races; and, such being the case, it
+seems to me a pity they should go there. They would do better to bring
+their energies to bear on developing the tropical regions of America and
+leave the undisturbed stock of Africa to develop its own.
+
+However, we will not go into that now. I beg to refer you to Bishop
+Ingram's _Sierra Leone after a Hundred Years_, for the history of
+England's philanthropic efforts. I may some day, perhaps, in the remote
+future, write myself a book on America's effort, but I cannot write it
+now, because I have in my possession only printed matter--a wilderness
+of opinion and a mass of abuse on Liberia as it is. No sane student of
+West Africa would proceed to form an opinion on any part of it with such
+stuff and without a careful personal study of the thing as it is.
+
+The natives of this part of the West coast, the aboriginal ones, as Mrs.
+Gault would call them, are a different matter. You can go and live in
+West Africa without seeing a crocodile or a hippopotamus or a mountain,
+but no white man can go there without seeing and experiencing a Kruboy,
+and Kruboys are one of the main tribes here. Kruboys are, indeed, the
+backbone of white effort in West Africa, and I think I may say there is
+but one man of all of us who have visited West Africa who has not paid a
+tribute to the Kruboy's sterling qualities. Alas! that one was one of
+England's greatest men. Why he painted that untrue picture of them I do
+not know. I know that on this account the magnificent work he did is
+discredited by all West Coasters. "If he said that of Kruboys," say the
+old coasters, "how can he have known or understood anything?" It is a
+painful subject, and my opinion on Kruboys is entirely with the old
+coasters, who know them with an experience of years, not with the
+experience of any man, however eminent, who only had the chance of
+seeing them for a few weeks, and whose information was so clearly drawn
+from vitiated sources. All I can say in defence of my great fellow
+countryman is that he came to West Africa from the very worst school a
+man can for understanding the Kruboy, or any true Negro, namely, from
+the Bantu African tribes, and that he only fell into the error many
+other great countrymen of mine have since fallen into, whereby there is
+war and misunderstanding and disaffection between our Government and the
+true Negro to-day, and nothing, as far as one can see, but a grievous
+waste of life and gold ahead.
+
+The Kruboy is indeed a sore question to all old coasters. They have
+devoted themselves to us English, and they have suffered, laboured,
+fought, been massacred, and so on with us for generation after
+generation. Many a time Krumen have come to me when we have been
+together in foreign possessions and said, "Help us, we are Englishmen."
+They have never asked in vain of me or any Englishman in West Africa,
+but recognition of their services by our Government at home is--well,
+about as much recognition as most men get from it who do good work in
+West Africa. For such men are a mere handful whom Imperialism can
+neglect with impunity, and, even if it has for the moment to excuse
+itself for so doing, it need only call us "traders." I say us, because I
+am vain of having been, since my return, classed among the Liverpool
+traders by a distinguished officer.
+
+This part of Western Africa from Sierra Leone to Cape Palmas was known
+to the geographers amongst the classics as _Leuce Æthiopia_: to their
+successors as the Grain or Pepper or Meleguetta Coast. I will discourse
+later of the inhabitants, the Kru, from an ethnological standpoint,
+because they are too interesting and important to be got in here. The
+true limits of the Grain coast are from the River Sestros to Growy, two
+leagues east of Cape Palmas according to Barbot, and its name came from
+the fact that it was hereabouts that the Portuguese, on their early
+expeditions in the 15th century, first came across grains of paradise, a
+circumstance that much excited those navigators at the time and
+encouraged them to pursue their expeditions to this region, for grains
+of paradise were in those days much valued and had been long known in
+European markets.
+
+These euphoniously-named spices are the seeds of divers amomums, or in
+lay language, cardamum--_Amomum Meleguetta_ (Roscoe) or as Pereira has
+it, _Amomum granum Paradisi_. Their more decorative appellation "grains
+of Paradise" is of Italian origin, the Italians having known and valued
+this spice, bought it, and sold it to the rest of Europe at awful prices
+long before the Portuguese, under Henry the Navigator, visited the West
+African Coast. The Italians had bought the spice from the tawny Moors,
+who brought it, with other products of West Africa across the desert to
+the Mediterranean port Monte Barca by Tripoli.
+
+The reason why this African cardamum received either the name of grains
+of Paradise or of Meleguetta pepper is, like most African things, wrapt
+in mystery to a certain extent. Some authorities hold they got the first
+name on their own merits. Others that the Italian merchants gave it them
+to improve prices. Others that the Italians gave it them honestly enough
+on account of their being nice, and no one knowing where on earth
+exactly they came from, said, therefore, why not say Paradise? It is
+certain, however, that before the Portuguese went down into the unknown
+seas and found the Pepper coast that the Italians knew those peppers
+came from the country of Melli, but as they did not know where that was,
+beyond that it was somewhere in Africa, this did not take away the sense
+of romance from the spice.
+
+As for their name Meleguetta, an equal divergence of opinion reigns. I
+myself think the proper word is meneguetta. The old French name was
+maneguilia, and the name they are still called by at Cape Palmas in the
+native tongue is Emanequetta. The French claim to have brought peppers
+and ivory from the River Sestros as early as 1364, and the River Sestros
+was on the seaboard of the kingdom of Mene, but the termination quetta
+is most probably a corruption of the Portuguese name for pepper. But, on
+the other hand, the native name for them among the Sestros people is
+Waizanzag. And therefore, the whole name may well be European, and just
+as well called meleguetta as meneguetta, because the kingdom of Mene was
+a fief of the Empire of Melli when the Portuguese first called at
+Sestros. The other possible derivation is that which says mele is a
+corruption of the Italian name for Turkey millet, _Melanga_, a thing
+the grains rather resemble. Another very plausible derivation is that
+the whole word is Portuguese in origin, but a corruption of _mala gens_,
+the Portuguese having found the people they first bought them of a bad
+lot, and so named the pepper in memory thereof. This however is
+interestingly erroneous and an early example of the danger of
+armchairism when dealing with West Africa. For the coast of the
+_malegens_ was not the coast the Portuguese first got the pepper from,
+but it was that coast just to the east of the Meleguetta, where all they
+got was killing and general unpleasantness round by the Rio San Andrew,
+Drewin way, which coast is now included in the Ivory.
+
+The grains themselves are by no means confined to the Grain Coast, but
+are the fruit of a plant common in all West African districts,
+particularly so on Cameroon Mountain, where just above the 3,000 feet
+level on the east and southeast face you come into a belt of them, and
+horrid walking ground they make. I have met with them also in great
+profusion in the Sierra del Crystal; but there is considerable
+difference in the kinds. The grain of Paradise of commerce is, like that
+of the East Indian cardamom, enclosed in a fibrous capsule, and the
+numerous grains in it are surrounded by a pulp having a most pleasant,
+astringent, aromatic taste. This is pleasant eating, particularly if you
+do not manage to chew up with it any of the grains, for they are
+amazingly hot in the mouth, and cause one to wonder why Paradise instead
+of Hades was reported as their "country of origin."
+
+The natives are very fond of chewing the capsule and the inner bark of
+the stem of the plant. They are, for the matter of that, fond of
+chewing anything, but the practice in this case seems to me more
+repaying than when carried on with kola or ordinary twigs.
+
+Two kinds of meleguetta pepper come up from Guinea. That from Accra is
+the larger, plumper, and tougher skinned, and commands the higher price.
+The capsule, which is about 2 inches long by 1 inch in breadth, is more
+oval than that of the other kind, and the grains in it are round and
+bluntly angular, bright brown outside, but when broken open showing a
+white inside. The other kind, the ordinary Guinea grain of commerce,
+comes from Sierra Leone and Liberia. They are devoid of the projecting
+tuft on the umbilicus. The capsule is like that of the Accra grain. When
+dry, it is wrinkled, and if soaked does not display the longitudinal
+frill of the Javan _Amomum maximum_, which it is sometimes used to
+adulterate. This common capsule is only about 1-1/2 inches long and 1/2
+an inch in diameter, but the grain when broken open is also white like
+the Accra one. There are, however, any quantity on Cameroons of the
+winged Javan variety, but these have so far not been exported.
+
+The plants that produce the grains are zingiberaceous, cane-like in
+appearance, only having broader, blunter leaves than the bamboo. The
+flower is very pretty, in some kinds a violet pink, but in the most
+common a violet purple, and they are worn as marks of submission by
+people in the Oil Rivers suing for peace. These flowers, which grow
+close to the ground, seeming to belong more to the root of the plant
+than the stem, or, more properly speaking, looking as if they had
+nothing to do with the graceful great soft canes round them, but were a
+crop of lovely crocus-like flowers on their own account, are followed by
+crimson-skinned pods enclosing the black and brown seeds wrapped in
+juicy pulp, quite unlike the appearance they present when dried or
+withered.
+
+There is only a small trade done in Guinea grains now, George III. (Cap.
+58) having declared that no brewer or dealer in wine shall be found in
+possession of grains of Paradise without paying a fine of Ŗ200, and that
+if any druggist shall sell them to a brewer that druggist shall pay a
+fine of Ŗ500 for each such offence.
+
+The reason of this enactment was the idea that the grains were
+poisonous, and that the brewers in using them to give fire to their
+liquors were destroying their consumers, His Majesty's lieges. As far as
+poison goes this idea was wrong, for Meleguetta pepper or grains of
+Paradise are quite harmless though hot. Perhaps, however, some
+consignment may have reached Europe with poisonous seeds in it. I once
+saw four entirely different sorts of seeds in a single sample. That is
+the worst of our Ethiopian friends, they adulterate every mortal thing
+that passes through their hands. I will do them the justice to say they
+usually do so with the intellectually comprehensible end in view of
+gaining an equivalent pecuniary advantage by it. Still it is
+commercially unsound of them; for example for years they sent up the
+seeds of the _Kickia Africana_ as an adulteration for _Strophantus_,
+whereas they would have made more by finding out that the _Kickia_ was a
+great rubber-producing tree. They will often take as much trouble to put
+in foreign matter as to get more legitimate raw material. I really fancy
+if any one were to open up a trade in Kru Coast rocks, adulteration
+would be found in the third shipment. It is their way, and legislation
+is useless. All that is necessary is that the traders who buy of them
+should know their business and not make infants of themselves by
+regarding the African as one or expecting the government to dry nurse
+them.
+
+In private life the native uses and values these Guinea grains highly,
+using them sometimes internally sometimes externally, pounding them up
+into a paste with which they beplaster their bodies for various aches
+and pains. For headache, not the sequelæ of trade gin, but of malaria,
+the forehead and temples are plastered with a stiff paste made of Guinea
+grain, hard oil, chalk, or some such suitable medium, and it is a most
+efficacious treatment for this fearfully common complaint in West
+Africa. But the careful ethnologist must not mix this medicinal plaster
+up with the sort of prayerful plaster worn by the West Africans at time
+for Ju Ju, and go and mistake a person who is merely attending to his
+body for one who is attending to his soul.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [2] This word is probably a corruption of the old name for this
+   district, Cerberos.
+
+   [3] The derivation of this name given by Barbot is from _misericordia_.
+   "As some pretend on occasion of a Portuguese ship cast away near the
+   little river Druro, the men of that ship were assaulted by the negroes,
+   which made the Portuguese cry for quarter, using the word
+   _misericordia_, from which by corruption mesurado."
+
+   [4] Tornado is possibly a corruption from the Portuguese _trovado_, a
+   thunderstorm; or from _tornado_, signifying returned; but most likely
+   it comes from the Spanish _torneado_, signifying thunder.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+AFRICAN CHARACTERISTICS
+
+     Containing some account of the divers noises of Western Afrik and
+     an account of the country east of Cape Palmas, and other things; to
+     which is added an account of the manner of shipping timber; of the
+     old Bristol trade; and, mercifully for the reader, a leaving off.
+
+
+When we got our complement of Krumen on board, we proceeded down Coast
+with the intention of calling off Accra. I will spare you the
+description of the scenes which accompany the taking on of Kruboys; they
+have frequently been described, for they always alarm the
+new-comer--they are the first bit of real Africa he sees if bound for
+the Gold Coast or beyond. Sierra Leone, charming, as it is, has a sort
+of Christy Minstrel air about it for which he is prepared, but the
+Kruboy as he comes on board looks quite the Boys' Book of Africa sort of
+thing; though, needless to remark, as innocent as a lamb, bar a tendency
+to acquire portable property. Nevertheless, Kruboys coming on board for
+your first time alarm you; at any rate they did me, and they also
+introduced me to African noise, which like the insects is another most
+excellent thing, that you should get broken into early.
+
+Woe! to the man in Africa who cannot stand perpetual uproar. Few things
+surprised me more than the rarity of silence and the intensity of it
+when you did get it. There is only that time which comes between
+10.30 A.M. and 4.30 P.M., in which you can look for anything like the
+usual quiet of an English village. We will give Man the first place in
+the orchestra, he deserves it. I fancy the main body of the lower
+classes of Africa think externally instead of internally. You will hear
+them when they are engaged together on some job--each man issuing the
+fullest directions and prophecies concerning it, in shouts; no one
+taking the least notice of his neighbours. If the head man really wants
+them to do something definite he fetches those within his reach an
+introductory whack; and even when you are sitting alone in the forest
+you will hear a man or woman coming down the narrow bush path chattering
+away with such energy and expression that you can hardly believe your
+eyes when you learn from them that he has no companion.
+
+     [Illustration: FOR PALM WINE. [_To face page 63._]
+
+Some of this talking is, I fancy, an equivalent to our writing. I know
+many English people who, if they want to gather a clear conception of an
+affair write it down; the African not having writing, first talks it
+out. And again more of it is conversation with spirit guardians and
+familiar spirits, and also with those of their dead relatives and
+friends, and I have often seen a man, sitting at a bush fire or in a
+village palaver house, turn round and say, "You remember that, mother?"
+to the ghost that to him was there.
+
+I remember mentioning this very touching habit of theirs, as it seemed
+to me, in order to console a sick and irritable friend whose cabin was
+close to a gangway then in possession of a very lively lot of Sierra
+Leone Kruboys, and he said, "Oh, I daresay they do, Miss Kingsley; but
+I'll be hanged if Hell is such a damned way off West Africa that they
+need shout so loud."
+
+The calm of the hot noontide fades towards evening time, and the noise
+of things in general revives and increases. Then do the natives call in
+instrumental aid of diverse and to my ear pleasant kinds. Great is the
+value of the tom-tom, whether it be of pure native origin or constructed
+from an old Devos patent paraffin oil tin. Then there is the
+kitty-katty, so called from its strange scratching-vibrating sound,
+which you hear down South, and on Fernando Po, of the excruciating mouth
+harp, and so on, all accompanied by the voice.
+
+If it be play night, you become the auditor to an orchestra as strange
+and varied as that which played before Shadrach, Meshech, and Abednego.
+I know I am no musician, so I own to loving African music, bar that
+Fernandian harp! Like Benedick, I can say, "Give me a horn for my money
+when all is done," unless it be a tom-tom. The African horn, usually
+made of a tooth of ivory, and blown from a hole in the side, is an
+instrument I unfortunately cannot play on. I have not the lung capacity.
+It requires of you to breathe in at one breath a whole S.W. gale of wind
+and then to empty it into the horn, which responds with a preliminary
+root-too-toot before it goes off into its noble dirge bellow. It is a
+fine instrument and should be introduced into European orchestras, for
+it is full of colour. But I think that even the horn, and certainly all
+other instruments, savage and civilised, should bow their heads in
+homage to the tom-tom, for, as a method of getting at the inner soul of
+humanity where are they compared with that noble instrument! You doubt
+it. Well go and hear a military tattoo or any performance on kettle
+drums up here and I feel you will reconsider the affair; but even then,
+remember you have not heard all the African tom-tom can tell you. I
+don't say it's an instrument suited for serenading your lady-love with,
+but that is a thing I don't require of an instrument. All else the
+tom-tom can do, and do well. It can talk as well as the human tongue. It
+can make you want to dance or fight for no private reason, as nothing
+else can, and be you black or white it calls up in you all your
+Neolithic man.
+
+Many African instruments are, however, sweet and gentle, and as mild as
+sucking doves, notably the xylophonic family. These marimbas, to use
+their most common name, are all over Africa from Senegal to Zambesi.
+Their form varies with various tribes--the West African varieties almost
+universally have wooden keys instead of iron ones like the East African.
+Personally, I like the West African best; there is something exquisite
+in the sweet, clear, water-like notes produced from the strips of soft
+wood of graduated length that make the West African keyboard. All these
+instruments have the sound magnified and enriched by a hollow wooden
+chamber under their keyboard. In Calabar this chamber is one small
+shallow box, ornamented, as most wooden things are in Calabar, with
+poker work--but in among the Fan, under the keyboard were a set of
+calabashes, and in the calabashes one hole apiece and that hole covered
+carefully with the skin of a large spider. While down in Angola you met
+the xylophone in the imposing form you can see in the frontispiece to
+this volume. Of the orchid fibre-stringed harp, I have spoken elsewhere,
+and there remains but one more truly great instrument that I need
+mention. I have had a trial at playing every African instrument I have
+come across, under native teachers, and they have assured me that, with
+application, I should succeed in becoming a rather decent performer on
+the harp and xylophone, and had the makings of a genius for the tom-tom,
+but my greatest and most rapid triumph was achieved on this other
+instrument. I picked up the hang of the thing in about five minutes, and
+then, being vain, when I returned to white society I naturally desired
+to show off my accomplishment, but met with no encouragement
+whatsoever--indeed my friends said gently, but firmly, that if I did it
+again they should leave, not the settlement merely, but the continent,
+and devote their remaining years to sweeping crossings in their native
+northern towns--they said they would rather do this than hear that
+instrument played again by any one.
+
+This instrument is made from an old powder keg, with both ends removed;
+a piece of raw hide is tied tightly round it over what one might call a
+bung-hole, while a piece of wood with a lump of rubber or fastening is
+passed through this hole. The performer then wets his hand, inserts it
+into the instrument, and lightly grasps the stick and works it up and
+down for all he is worth; the knob beats the drum skin with a beautiful
+boom, and the stick gives an exquisite screech as it passes through the
+hole in the skin which the performer enhances with an occasional howl or
+wail of his own, according to his taste or feeling. There are other
+varieties of this instrument, some with one end of the cylinder covered
+over and the knob of the stick beating the inside, but in all its forms
+it is impressive.
+
+Next in point of strength to the human vocal and instrumental performers
+come frogs. The small green one, whose note is like that of the
+cricket's magnified, is a part-singer, but the big bull frog, whose
+tones are all his own, sings in Handel Festival sized choruses. I don't
+much mind either of these, but the one I hate is a solo frog who seems
+eternally engaged at night in winding up a Waterbury watch. Many a night
+have I stocked thick with calamity on that frog's account; many a night
+have I landed myself in hailing distance of Amen Corner from having gone
+out of hut, or house, with my mind too full of the intention of
+flattening him out with a slipper, to think of driver ants, leopards, or
+snakes. Frog hunting is one of the worst things you can do in West
+Africa.
+
+Next to frogs come the crickets with their chorus of "she did, she
+didn't," and the cicadas, but they knock off earlier than frogs, and
+when the frogs have done for the night there is quiet for the few hours
+of cool, until it gets too cool and the chill that comes before the dawn
+wakes up the birds, and they wake you with their long, mellow,
+exquisitely beautiful whistles.
+
+The aforesaid are everyday noises in West Africa, and you soon get used
+to them or die of them; but there are myriads of others that you hear
+when in the bush. The grunting sigh of relief of the hippos, the strange
+groaning, whining bark of the crocodiles, the thin cry of the bats, the
+cough of the leopards, and that unearthly yell that sometimes comes out
+of the forest in the depths of dark nights. Yes, my naturalist friends,
+it's all very well to say it is only a love-lorn, innocent little
+marmoset-kind of thing that makes it. I know, poor dear, Softly, Softly,
+and he wouldn't do it. Anyhow, you just wait until you hear it in a
+shaky little native hut, or when you are spending the night, having been
+fool enough to lose yourself, with your back against a tree quite alone
+and that yell comes at you with its agony of anguish and appeal out of
+that dense black world of forest which the moon, be she never so strong,
+cannot enlighten, and which looks all the darker for the contrast of
+the glistening silver mist that shows here and there in the clearings,
+or over lagoon, or river, wavering twining, rising and falling; so full
+of strange motion and beauty, yet, somehow, as sinister in its way as
+the rest of your surroundings, and so deadly silent. I think if you hear
+that yell cutting through this sort of thing like a knife and sinking
+despairingly into the surrounding silence, you will agree with me that
+it seems to favour Duppy, and that, perchance, the strange red patch of
+ground you passed at the foot of the cotton tree before night came down
+on you, was where the yell came from, for it is red and damp and your
+native friends have told you it is so because of the blood whipped off a
+sasa-bonsum and his victims as he goes down through it to his
+under-world home.
+
+Seen from the sea, the Ivory Coast is a relief to the eye after the dead
+level of the Grain Coast, but the attention of the mariner to rocks has
+no practical surcease; and there is that submarine horror for sailing
+ships, the Bottomless pit. They used to have great tragedies with it in
+olden times, and you can still, if you like, for that matter; but the
+French having a station 15 miles to the east of it at Grand Bassam would
+nowadays prevent your experiencing the action of this phenomenon
+thoroughly, and getting not only wrecked but killed by the natives
+ashore, though they are a lively lot still.
+
+Now although this is not a manual of devotion, I must say a few words on
+the Bottomless pit. All along the West Coast of Africa there is a great
+shelving bank, submarine, formed by the deposit of the great mud-laden
+rivers and the earth-wash of the heavy rains. The slope of what the
+scientific term the great West African bank is, on the whole, very
+regular, except opposite Piccaninny Bassam, where it is cut right
+through by a great chasm, presumably the result of volcanic action. This
+chasm commences about 15 miles from land and is shaped like a V, with
+the narrow end shorewards. Nine miles out it is three miles wider and
+2,400 feet deep, at three miles out the sides are opposite each other
+and there is little more than a mile between them, and the depth is
+1,536 feet; at one mile from the beach the chasm is only a quarter of a
+mile wide and the depth 600 feet--close up beside the beach the depth is
+120 feet. The floor of this chasm is covered with grey mud, and some
+five miles out the surveying vessels got fragments of coral rock.
+
+     [Illustration: SECRET SOCIETY LEAVING THE SACRED GROVE]
+
+     [Illustration: JENGU DEVIL DANCE OF KING WILLIAM'S SLAVES,
+               SETTE CAMMA, NOV. 9, 1888. [_To face page 69._]
+
+The sides of this submarine valley seem almost vertical cliffs, and
+herein lies its danger for the sailing ship. The master thereof, in the
+smoke or fog season (December-February), may not exactly know to a mile
+or so where he is, and being unable to make out Piccaninny Bassam, which
+is only a small native village on the sand ridge between the surf and
+the lagoon, he lets go his anchor on the edge of the cliffs of this
+Bottomless pit. Then the set of the tide and the onshore breeze cause it
+to drag a little, and over it goes down into the abyss, and ashore he is
+bound to go. In old days he and his ship's crew formed a welcome change
+in the limited dietary of the exultant native. Mr. Barbot, who knew them
+well, feelingly remarks, "it is from the bloody tempers of these brutes
+that the Portuguese gave them the name of Malagens for they eat human
+flesh," and he cites how "recently they have massacred a great number of
+Portuguese, Dutch and English, who came for provisions and water, not
+thinking of any treachery, and not many years since, (that is to say,
+in 1677) an English ship lost three of its men; a Hollander fourteen;
+and, in 1678, a Portuguese, nine, of whom nothing was ever heard since."
+
+From Cape Palmas until you are past the mouth of the Taka River (St.
+Andrew) the coast is low. Then comes the Cape of the Little Strand
+(Caboda Prazuba), now called, I think, Price's Point. To the east of
+this you will see ranges of dwarf red cliffs rising above the beach and
+gradually increasing in height until they attain their greatest in the
+face of Mount Bedford, where the cliff is 280 feet high. The Portuguese
+called these Barreira Vermelhas; the French, Kalazis Rouges; and the
+Dutch, Roode Kliftin, all meaning Red Cliffs. The sand at their feet is
+strewn with boulders, and the whole country round here looks fascinating
+and interesting. I regret never having had an opportunity of seeing
+whether those cliffs had fossils on them, for they seem to me so like
+those beloved red cliffs of mine in Kacongo which have. The
+investigation, however, of such makes of Africa is messy. Those Kacongo
+cliffs were of a sort of red clay that took on a greasy slipperiness
+when they were wet, which they frequently were on account of the little
+springs of water that came through their faces. When pottering about
+them, after having had my suspicions lulled by twenty or thirty yards of
+crumbly dryness, I would ever and anon come across a water spring, and
+down I used to go--and lose nothing by it, going home in the evening
+time in what the local natives would have regarded as deep mourning for
+a large family--red clay being their sign thereof. The fossils I found
+in them were horizontally deposed layers of clam shells with regular
+intervals, or bands, of red clay, four or five feet across; between the
+layers some of the shell layers were 40 or more feet above the present
+beach level. Identical deposits of shell I also found far inland in Ka
+Congo, but that has nothing to do with the Ivory Coast.
+
+Inland, near Drewin, on the Ivory Coast, you can see from the sea
+curious shaped low hills; the definite range of these near Drewin is
+called the Highland of Drewin; after this place they occur frequently
+close to the shore, usually isolated but now and again two or three
+together, like those called by sailors the Sisters. I am much interested
+in these peculiar-shaped hills that you see on the Ivory and Gold Coast,
+and again, far away down South, rising out of the Ouronuogou swamp, and
+have endeavoured to find out if any theories have been suggested as to
+their formation, but in vain. They look like great bubbles, and run from
+300 to 2,000 feet.
+
+The red cliffs end at Mount Bedford and the estuary of the Fresco River,
+and after passing this the coast is low until you reach what is now
+called the district of Lahu, a native sounding name, but really a
+corruption from its old French name La-Hoe or Hou.
+
+You would not think, when looking at this bit of coast from the sea,
+that the strip of substantial brown sand beach is but a sort of viaduct,
+behind which lies a chain of stagnant lagoons. In the wet season, these
+stretches of dead water cut off the sand beach from the forest for as
+much as 40 miles and more.
+
+Beyond Mount La-Hou on this sand strip there are many native
+villages--each village a crowded clump of huts, surrounded by a grove of
+coco palm trees, each tree belonging definitely to some native family or
+individual, and having its owner's particular mark on it, and each grove
+of palm trees slanting uniformly at a stiff angle, which gives you no
+cause to ask which is the prevailing wind here, for they tell you bright
+and clear, as they lean N.E., that the S.W. wind brought them up to do
+so.
+
+Groves of coco palms are no favourites of mine. I don't like them. The
+trees are nice enough to look on, and nice enough to use in the divers
+ways you can use a coco-nut palm; but the noise of the breeze in their
+crowns keeps up a perpetual rattle with their hard leaves that sounds
+like heavy rain day and night, so that you feel you ought to live under
+an umbrella, and your mind gets worried about it when you are not
+looking after it with your common sense.
+
+Then the natives are such a nuisance with coco-nuts. For a truly
+terrific kniff give me even in West Africa a sand beach with coco-nut
+palms and natives. You never get coco-nut palms without natives, because
+they won't grow out of sight of human habitation. I am told also that
+one coco will not grow alone; it must have another coco as well as human
+neighbours, so these things, of course, end in a grove. It's like
+keeping cats with no one to drown the kittens.
+
+Well, the way the smell comes about in this affair is thus. The natives
+bury the coco-nuts in the sand, so as to get the fibre off them. They
+have buried nuts in that sand for ages before you arrive, and the nuts
+have rotted, and crabs have come to see what was going on, a thing crabs
+will do, and they have settled down here and died in their generations,
+and rotted too. The sandflies and all manner of creeping things have
+found that sort of district suits them, and have joined in, and the
+natives, who are great hands at fishing, have flung all the fish offal
+there, and there is usually a lagoon behind this sort of thing which
+contributes its particular aroma, and so between them the smell is a
+good one, even for West Africa.
+
+The ancient geographers called this coast Ajanginal Æthiope, and the
+Dutch and French used to reckon it from Growe, where the Melaguetta
+Coast ends. Just east of Cape Palmas, to the Rio do Sweiro da Costa,
+where they counted the Gold Coast to begin, the Portuguese divided the
+coast thus. The Ivory, or, as the Dutchmen called it, the Tand Kust,
+from Gowe to Rio St. Andrew; the Malaguetta from St. Andrew to the Rio
+Lagos;[5] and the Quaqua from the Rio Lagos to Rio de Sweiro da Costa,
+which is just to the east of what is now called Assini.
+
+It is undoubtedly one of the most interesting and nowadays least known
+bits of the coast of the Bight of Benin; but, taken altogether, with my
+small knowledge of it, I do not feel justified in recommending the Ivory
+Coast as either a sphere for emigration or a pleasure resort.
+Nevertheless, it is a very rich district naturally, and one of the most
+amusing features of West African trade you can see on a steamboat is to
+watch the shipping of timber therefrom.
+
+This region of the Bight of Benin is one of enormous timber wealth, and
+the development of this of late years has been great, adding the name of
+Timber Ports to the many other names this particular bit of West Africa
+bears, the Timber Ports being the main ports of the French Ivory Coast,
+and the English port of Axim on the Gold Coast.
+
+The best way to watch the working of this industry is to stay on board
+the steamer; if by chance you go on shore when this shipping of mahogany
+is going on you may be expected to help, or get out of the way, which is
+hot work, or difficult. The last time I was in Africa we on the----
+shipped 170 enormous bulks of timber. These logs run on an average 20 to
+30 feet long and 3 to 4 feet in diameter. They are towed from the beach
+to the vessel behind the surf boats, seven and eight at a time, tied
+together by a rope running through rings called dogs, which are driven
+into the end of each log, and when alongside, the rope from the donkey
+engine crane is dropped overboard, and passed round the log by the
+negroes swimming about in the water regardless of sharks and as agile as
+fish. Then, with much uproar and advice, the huge logs are slowly heaved
+on board, and either deposited on the deck or forthwith swung over the
+hatch and lowered down. It is almost needless to remark that, with the
+usual foresight of men, the hatch is of a size unsuited to the log, and
+therefore, as it hangs suspended, a chorus of counsel surges up from
+below and from all sides.
+
+The officer in command on this particular hatch presently shouts "Lower
+away," waving his hand gracefully from the wrist as though he were
+practising for piano playing, but really to guide Shoo Fly, who is
+driving the donkey engine. The tremendous log hovers over the hatch, and
+then gradually, "softly, softly," as Shoo Fly would say, disappears into
+the bowels of the ship, until a heterogeneous yell in English and Kru
+warns the trained intelligence that it is low enough, or more probably
+too low. "Heave a link!" shouts the officer, and Shoo Fly and the donkey
+engine heaveth. Then the official hand waves, and the crane swings round
+with a whiddle, whiddle, and there is a moment's pause, the rope
+strains, and groans, and waits, and as soon as the most important and
+valuable people on board, such as the Captain, the Doctor, and myself,
+are within its reach to give advice, and look down the hatch to see
+what is going on, that rope likes to break and comes clawing at us a
+mass of bent and broken wire, and as we scatter, the great log goes with
+a crash into the hold. Fortunately, the particular log I remember as
+indulging in this catastrophe did not go through the ship's bottom, as I
+confidently expected it had at the time, nor was any one killed, such a
+batch of miraculous escapes occurring for the benefit of the officer and
+men below as can only be reasonably accounted for by their having
+expected this sort of thing to happen.
+
+Quaint are the ways of mariners at times. That time they took on
+quantities of great logs at the main gangway, well knowing that they
+would have to go down the hatch aft, and that this would entail hauling
+them along the narrow alley ways. This process was effected by rigging
+the steam winches aft, then two sharp hooks connected together by a
+chain at the end of the wire hawser were fixed into the head of the log,
+and the word passed "Haul away," water being thrown on the deck to make
+the logs slip easier over it, and billets of wood put underneath the log
+with the same intention, and the added hope of saving the deck from
+being torn by the rough hewn, hard monster.
+
+Now there are two superstitions rife regarding this affair. The first
+is, that if you hitch the hooks lightly into each side of the log's head
+and then haul hard, the weight of the log will cause the hooks to get
+firmly and safely embedded in it. The second is, that the said weight
+will infallibly keep the billets under it in due position.
+
+Nothing short of getting himself completely and permanently killed
+shakes the mariner's faith in these notions. What often happens is this.
+When the strain is at its highest the hooks slip out of the wood, and
+try and scalp any one that's handy, and now and again they succeed.
+There was a man helping that day at Axim whom the Doctor said had only
+last voyage fell a victim to the hooks; they slipped out of the head of
+the log and played round his own, laying it open to the bone at the
+back, cutting him over the ears and across the forehead, and if that man
+had not had a phenomenally thick skull he must have died. But no, there
+he was on this voyage as busy as ever with the timber, close to those
+hooks, and evidently with his superstitious trust in the invariable
+embedding of hooks in timber unabated one fraction.
+
+Sometimes the performance is varied by the hauling rope itself parting
+and going up the alley way like a boa constrictor in a fit, whisking up
+black passengers and boxes full of screaming parrots in its path from
+places they had placed themselves, or been placed in, well out of its
+legitimate line of march. But the day it succeeds in clawing hold of and
+upsetting the cook's grease tub, which lives in the alley-way, that is
+the day of horror for the First officer and the inauguration of a period
+of ardent holystoning for his minions.
+
+Should, however, the broken rope fail to find, as the fox-hunters would
+say, in the alley-way, it flings itself in a passionate embrace round
+the person of the donkey engine aft, and gives severe trouble there. The
+mariners, with an admirable faith and patience, untwine it, talking
+seriously to it meanwhile, and then fix it up again, may be with more
+care, and the shout, "Heave away!"--goes forth again; the rope groans
+and creaks, the hooks go in well on either side of the log, and off it
+moves once more with a graceful, dignified glide towards its
+destination. The Bo'sun and Chips with their eyes on the man at the
+winch, and let us hope their thoughts employed in the penitential
+contemplation of their past sins, so as to be ready for the consequences
+likely to arise for them if the rope parts again, do not observe the
+little white note--underbill--as a German would call it, which is
+getting nearer and nearer the end of the log, which has stuck to the
+deck. In a few moments the log is off it, and down on Chips' toes, who
+returns thanks with great spontaneity, in language more powerful then
+select. The Bo'sun yells, "Avast heaving, there!" and several other
+things, while his assistant Kruboys, chattering like a rookery when an
+old lady's pet parrot has just joined it, get crowbars and raise up the
+timber, and the Carpenter is a free man again, and the little white
+billet reinstated. "Haul away," roars the Bo'sun, "Abadeo Na nu de um
+oro de Kri Kri," join in the hoarse-voiced Kruboys, "Ji na oi," answers
+the excited Shoo Fly, and off goes that log again. The particular log
+whose goings on I am chronicling slewed round at this juncture with the
+force of a Roman battering ram, drove in the panel of my particular
+cabin, causing all sorts of bottles and things inside to cast themselves
+on the floor and smash, whereby I, going in after dark, got cut. But no
+matter, that log, one of the classic sized logs, was in the end safely
+got up the alley-way and duly stowed among its companions. For let West
+Africa send what it may, be it never so large or so difficult, be he
+never so ill-provided with tackle to deal with it, the West Coast
+mariner will have that thing on board, and ship it--all honour to his
+determination and ability.
+
+The varieties of timber chiefly exported from the West African timber
+ports are _Oldfieldia Africana_, of splendid size and texture, commonly
+called mahogany, but really teak, Bar and Camwood and Ebony. Bar and
+Cam are dye-woods, and, before the Anilines came in these woods were in
+great request; invaluable they were for giving the dull rich red to
+bandana handkerchiefs and the warm brown tints to tweed stuffs. Camwood
+was once popular with cabinet makers and wood-turners here, but of late
+years it has only come into this market in roots or twisty bits--all the
+better these for dyeing, but not for working up, and so it has fallen
+out of demand among cabinet makers in spite of its beautiful grain and
+fine colour, a pinky yellow when fresh cut, deepening rapidly on
+exposure to the air into a rich, dark red brown. Amongst old Spanish
+furniture you will find things made from Camwood that are a joy to the
+eye. There has been some confusion as to whether Bar and Camwood are
+identical--merely a matter of age in the same tree or no--but I have
+seen the natives cutting both these timbers, and they are quite
+different trees in the look of them, as any one would expect from seeing
+a billet of Bar and one of Cam; the former is a light porous wood and
+orange colour when fresh cut, while 500 billets of Bar and only 150 to
+200 of Cam go to the ton.
+
+There are many signs of increasing enterprise in the West African timber
+trade, but so far this form of wealth has barely been touched, so vast
+are the West African forests and so varied the trees therein. At present
+it, like most West African industries, is fearfully handicapped by the
+deadly climate, the inferiority and expensiveness of labour, and the
+difficulties of transport.
+
+At present it is useless to fell a tree, be it ever so fine, if it is
+growing at any distance from a river down which you can float it to the
+sea beach, for it would be impossible to drag it far through the
+Liane-tangled West African forest.
+
+Indeed, it is no end of a job to drag a decent-sized log even two
+hundred yards or so to a river. The way it is done is this. When felling
+the tree you arrange that its head shall fall away from the river, then
+trim off the rough stuff and hew the heavy end to a rough point, so that
+when the boys are pully-hauling down the slope--you must have a
+slope--to the bank, it may not only be able to pierce the opposing
+undergrowth spearwise more easily than if its end were flat or jagged,
+but also by the fact of its own weight it may help their exertions.
+
+I have seen one or two grand scenes on the Ogowé with trees felled on
+steep mountain sides, wherein you had only got to arrange these
+circumstances, start your log on its downward course to the river, get
+out of the fair way of it, and leave the rest to gravity, which carried
+things through in grand style, with a crashing rush and a glorious
+splash into the river. You had, of course, to take care you had a clear
+bank and not one fringed with dead-trees, into which your mighty spear
+would embed itself and also to have a canoe load of energetic people to
+get hold of the log and keep it out of the current of that lively Ogowé
+river, or it would go off to Kama Country express. But this work on
+timber was far easier than that on the Gold or Ivory Coasts, whence most
+timber comes to Europe, and where the make of the country does not give
+you so fully the assistance of steep gradients.
+
+After what I have told you about the behaviour of these great baulks on
+board ship you will not imagine that the log behaves well during its
+journey on land. Indeed, my belief in the immorality of inanimate nature
+has been much strengthened by observing the conduct of African timber.
+Nor am I alone in judging it harshly, for an American missionary once
+said to me, "Ah! it will be a grand day for Africa when we have driven
+out all the heathen devils; they are everywhere, not only in graven
+images, but just universally scattered around." The remark was made on
+the occasion of a floor that had been laid down by a mission carpenter
+coming up on its own account, as native timber floors laid down by
+native carpenters customarily come, though the native carpenter lays
+Norway boards well enough.
+
+When, after much toil and tribulation and uproar, the log has been got
+down to the river and floated, iron rings are driven into it, and it is
+branded with its owner's mark. Then the owner does not worry himself
+much about it for a month or so, but lets it float its way down and
+soak, and generally lazy about until he gets together sufficient of its
+kind to make a shipment.
+
+One of the many strange and curious things they told me of on the West
+Coast was that old idea that hydrophobia is introduced into Europe by
+means of these logs. There is, they say, on the West Coast of Africa a
+peculiarly venomous scorpion that makes its home on the logs while they
+are floating in the river, three-parts submerged on account of weight,
+and the other part most delightfully damp and cool to the scorpion's
+mind. When the logs get shipped frequently the scorpion gets shipped
+too, and subsequently comes out in the hold and bites the resident rats.
+So far I accept this statement fully, for I have seen more than enough
+rats and scorpions in the hold, and the West Coast scorpions are
+particularly venomous, but feeling that in these days it is the duty of
+every one to keep their belief for religious purposes, I cannot go on
+and in a whole souled way believe that the dogs of Liverpool, Havre,
+Hamburg, and Marseilles worry the said rats when they arrive in dock,
+and, getting bitten by them, breed rabies.
+
+Nevertheless, I do not interrupt and say, "Stuff," because if you do
+this to the old coaster he only offers to fight you, or see you
+shrivelled, or bet you half-a-crown, or in some other time-honoured way
+demonstrate the truth of his assertion, and he will, moreover, go on and
+say there is more hydrophobia in the aforesaid towns than elsewhere, and
+as the chances are you have not got hydrophobia statistics with you, you
+are lost. Besides, it's very unkind and unnecessary to make a West
+Coaster go and say or do things which will only make things harder for
+him in the time "to come," and anyhow if you are of a cautious, nervous
+disposition you had better search your bunk for scorpions, before
+turning in, when you are on a vessel that has got timber on board, and
+the chances are that your labours will be rewarded by discovering
+specimens of this interesting animal.
+
+Scorpions and centipedes are inferior in worrying power to driver ants,
+but they are a feature in Coast life, particularly in places--Cameroons,
+for example. If you see a man who seems to you to have a morbid caution
+in the method of dealing with his hat or folded dinner napkin, judge him
+not harshly, for the chances are he is from Cameroon, where there are
+scorpions--scorpions of great magnitude and tough constitutions, as was
+demonstrated by a little affair up here that occurred in a family I
+know.
+
+The inhabitants of the French Ivory Coast are an exceedingly industrious
+and enterprising set of people in commercial matters, and the export and
+import trade is computed by a recent French authority at ten million
+francs per annum. No official computation, however, of the trade of a
+Coast district is correct, for reasons I will not enter into now.
+
+The native coinage equivalent here is the manilla--a bracelet in a state
+of sinking into a more conventional token. These manillas are made of an
+alloy of copper and pewter, manufactured mainly at Birmingham and
+Nantes, the individual value being from 20 to 25 centimes.
+
+Changes for the worse as far as English trade is concerned have passed
+over the trade of the Ivory Coast recently, but the way, even in my
+time, trade was carried on was thus. The native traders deal with the
+captains of the English sailing vessels and the French factories, buying
+palm oil and kernels from the bush people with merchandise, and selling
+it to the native or foreign shippers. They get paid in manillas, which
+they can, when they wish, get changed again into merchandise either at
+the factory or on the trading ship. The manilla is, therefore, a kind of
+bank for the black trader, a something he can put his wealth into when
+he wants to store it for a time.
+
+They have a singular system of commercial correspondence between the
+villages on the beach and the villages on the other side of the great
+lagoon that separates it from the mainland. Each village on the shore
+has its particular village on the other side of the lagoon, thus Alindja
+Badon is the interior commercial centre for Grand Jack on the beach,
+Abia for Anamaquoa, or Half Jack, and so on. Anamaquoa is only separated
+from its sister village by a little lagoon that is fordable, but the
+other towns have to communicate by means of canoes.
+
+Grand Bassam, Assini, and Half Jack are the most important places on the
+Ivory Coast. The main portion of the first-named town is out of sight
+from seaboard, being some five miles up the Costa River, and all you can
+see on the beach are two large but lonesome-looking factories. Half
+Jack, Jack a Jack, or Anamaquoa--there is nothing like having plenty of
+names for one place in West Africa, because it leads people at home who
+don't know the joke to think there is more of you than there naturally
+is--gives its name to the bit of coast from Cape Palmas to Grand Bassam,
+this coast being called the Half Jack, or quite as often the Bristol
+Coast, and for many years it was the main point of call for the
+Guineamen, old-fashioned sailing vessels which worked the Bristol trade
+in the Bights.
+
+This trade was established during the last century by Mr. Henry King, of
+Bristol, for supplying labour to the West Indies, and was further
+developed by his two sons, Richard, who hated men-o'-war like a quaker,
+and William who loved science, both very worthy gentlemen. After their
+time up till when I was first on the Coast, this firm carried on trade
+both on the Bristol Coast and down in Cameroon, which in old days bore
+the name of Little Bristol-in-Hell, but now the trade is in other hands.
+
+According to Captain Binger, there are now about 30 sailing ships still
+working the Ivory Coast trade, two of them the property of an energetic
+American captain, but the greater part belonging to Bristol. Their
+voyage out from Bristol varies from 60 to 90 days, according as you get
+through the Horse latitudes--so-called from the number of horses that
+used to die in this region of calms when the sailing vessels bringing
+them across from South America lay week out and week in short alike of
+wind and water.
+
+In old days, when the Bristol ship got to the Coast she would call at
+the first village on it. Then the native chiefs and head men would come
+on board and haggle with the captain as to the quantity of goods he
+would let them have on trust, they covenanting to bring in exchange for
+them in a given time a certain number of slaves or so much produce. This
+arrangement being made, off sailed the Guineaman to his next village,
+where a similar game took place all the way down Coast to Grand Bassam.
+
+When she had paid out the trust goods to the last village, she would
+stand out to sea and work back to her first village of call on the
+Bristol Coast to pick up the promised produce, this arrangement giving
+the native traders time to collect it. In nine cases out of ten,
+however, it was not ready for her, so on she went to the next. By this
+time the Guineaman would present the spectacle of a farmhouse that had
+gone mad, grown masts, and run away to sea; for the decks were protected
+from the burning sun by a well-built thatch roof, and she lounged along
+heavy with the rank sea growth of these seas. Sometimes she would be
+unroofed by a tornado, sometimes seized by a pirate parasitic on the
+Guinea trade, but barring these interruptions to business she called
+regularly on her creditors, from some getting the promised payment, from
+others part of it, from others again only the renewal of the promise,
+and then when she had again reached her last point of call put out to
+sea once more and worked back again to the first creditor village. In
+those days she kept at this weary round until she got in all her debts,
+a process that often took her four or five years, and cost the lives of
+half her crew from fever, and then her consorts drafted a man or so on
+board her and kept her going until she was full enough of pepper, gold,
+gum, ivory, and native gods to sail for Bristol. There, when the
+Guineaman came in, were grand doings for the small boys, what with
+parrots, oranges, bananas, &c., but sad times for most of those whose
+relatives and friends had left Bristol on her.
+
+In much the same way, and with much the same risks, the Bristol Coast
+trade goes on now, only there is little of it left, owing to the French
+system of suppressing trade. Palm oil is the modern equivalent to
+slaves, and just as in old days the former were transhipped from the
+coasting Guineamen to the transatlantic slavers, so now the palm oil is
+shipped off on to the homeward bound African steamers, while, as for the
+joys and sorrows, century-change affects them not. So long as Western
+Africa remains the deadliest region on earth there will be joy over
+those who come up out of it; heartache and anxiety over those who are
+down there fighting as men fought of old for those things worth the
+fighting, God, Glory and Gold; and grief over those who are dead among
+all of us at home who are ill-advised enough to really care for men who
+have the pluck to go there.
+
+During the smoke season when dense fogs hang over the Bight of Benin,
+the Bristol ships get very considerably sworn at by the steamers. They
+have letters for them, and they want oil off them; between ourselves,
+they want oil off every created thing, and the Bristol boat is not easy
+to find. So the steamer goes dodging and fumbling about after her,
+swearing softly about wasting coal all the time, and more harshly still
+when he finds he has picked up the wrong Guineaman, only modified if she
+has stuff to send home, stuff which he conjures the Bristol captain by
+the love he bears him to keep, and ship by him when he is on his way
+home from windward ports, or to let him have forthwith.
+
+Sometimes the Bristolman will signal to a passing steamer for a doctor.
+The doctors of the African and British African boats are much thought of
+all down the Coast, and are only second in importance to the doctor on
+board a telegraph ship, who, being a rare specimen, is regarded as,
+_ipso facto_, more gifted, so that people will save up their ailments
+for the telegraph ship's medical man, which is not a bad practice, as it
+leads commonly to their getting over those ailments one way or the other
+by the time the telegraph ship arrives. It is reported that one day one
+of the Bristolmen ran up an urgent signal to a passing mail steamer for
+a doctor, and the captain thereof ran up a signal of assent, and the
+doctor went below to get his medicines ready. Meanwhile, instead of
+displaying a patient gratitude, the Bristolman signalled "Repeat
+signal." "Give it 'em again," said the steamboat captain, "those
+Bristolmen ain't got no Board schools." Still the Bristolman kept
+bothering, running up her original signal, and in due course off went
+the doctor to her in the gig. When he returned his captain asked him,
+saying, "Pills, are they all mad on board that vessel or merely drunk as
+usual?" "Well," says the doctor, "that's curious, for it's the very same
+question Captain N. has asked me about you. He is very anxious about
+your mental health, and wants to know why you keep on signalling 'Haul
+to, or I will fire into you,'" and the story goes that an investigation
+of the code and the steamer's signal supported the Bristolman's reading,
+and the subject was dropped in steam circles.
+
+Although the Bristolmen do not carry doctors, they are provided with
+grand medicine chests, the supply of medicines in West Africa being
+frequently in the inverse ratio with the ability to administer them
+advantageously.
+
+Inside the lid of these medicine chests is a printed paper of
+instructions, each drug having a number before its name, and a hint as
+to the proper dose after it. Thus, we will say, for example, 1 was
+jalap; 2, calomel; 3, croton oil; and 4, quinine. Once upon a time there
+was a Bristol captain, as good a man as need be and with a fine head on
+him for figures. Some of his crew were smitten with fever when he was
+out of number 4, so he argues that 2 and 2 are 4 all the world over, but
+being short of 2, it being a popular drug, he further argues 3 and 1
+make 4 as well, and the dose of 4 being so much he makes that dose up
+out of jalap and croton oil. Some of the patients survived; at least, a
+man I met claimed to have done so. His report is not altogether
+reproducible in full, but, on the whole, the results of the treatment
+went more towards demonstrating the danger of importing raw abstract
+truths into everyday affairs than to encouraging one to repeat the
+experiment of arithmetical therapeutics.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [5] No connection with the Colony of Lagos.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+FISHING IN WEST AFRICA.
+
+
+There is one distinctive charm about fishing--its fascinations will
+stand any climate. You may sit crouching on ice over a hole inside the
+arctic circle, or on a Windsor chair by the side of the River Lea in the
+so-called temperate zone, or you may squat in a canoe on an equatorial
+river, with the surrounding atmosphere 45 per cent. mosquito, and if you
+are fishing you will enjoy yourself; and what is more important than
+this enjoyment, is that you will not embitter your present, nor endanger
+your future, by going home in a bad temper, whether you have caught
+anything or not, provided always that you are a true fisherman.
+
+This is not the case with other sports; I have been assured by
+experienced men that it "makes one feel awfully bad" when, after
+carrying for hours a very heavy elephant gun, for example, through a
+tangled forest you have got a wretched bad chance of a shot at an
+elephant; and as for football, cricket, &c., well, I need hardly speak
+of the unchristian feelings they engender in the mind towards umpires
+and successful opponents.
+
+     [Illustration: BATANGA CANOES. _To face page 89._]
+
+Being, as above demonstrated, a humble, but enthusiastic, devotee of
+fishing--I dare not say, as my great predecessor Dame Juliana Berners
+says, "with an angle," because my conscience tells me I am a born
+poacher,--I need hardly remark that when I heard, from a reliable
+authority at Gaboon, that there were lakes in the centre of the island
+of Corisco, and that these fresh-water lakes were fished annually by
+representative ladies from the villages on this island, and that their
+annual fishing was just about due, I decided that I must go there
+forthwith. Now, although Corisco is not more than twenty miles out to
+sea from the Continent, it is not a particularly easy place to get at
+nowadays, no vessels ever calling there; so I got, through the kindness
+of Dr. Nassau, a little schooner and a black crew, and, forgetting my
+solemn resolve, formed from the fruits of previous experiences, never to
+go on to an Atlantic island again, off I sailed. I will not go into the
+adventures of that voyage here. My reputation as a navigator was great
+before I left Gaboon. I had a record of having once driven my bowsprit
+through a conservatory, and once taken all the paint off one side of a
+smallpox hospital, to say nothing of repeatedly having made attempts to
+climb trees in boats I commanded, but when I returned, I had surpassed
+these things by having successfully got my main-mast jammed up a tap,
+and I had done sufficient work in discovering new sandbanks, rock
+shoals, &c., in Corisco Bay, and round Cape Esterias, to necessitate, or
+call for, a new edition of _The West African Pilot_.
+
+Corisco Island is about three miles long by 1-3/4 wide: its latitude
+0°56 N., long. 9°20-1/2 E. Mr. Winwood Reade was about the last
+traveller to give a description of Corisco, and a very interesting
+description it is. He was there in the early sixties, and was evidently
+too fully engaged with a drunken captain and a mad Malay cook to go
+inland. In his days small trading vessels used to call at Corisco for
+cargo, but they do so no longer, all the trade in the Bay now being
+carried on at Messrs. Holt's factory on Little Eloby Island (an island
+nearer in shore), and on the mainland at Coco Beach, belonging to
+Messrs. Hatton and Cookson.
+
+In Winwood Reade's days, too, there was a settlement of the American
+Presbyterian Society on Corisco, with a staff of white men. This has
+been abandoned to a native minister, because the Society found that
+facts did not support their theory that the island would be more healthy
+than the mainland, the mortality being quite as great as at any
+continental station, so they moved on to the continent to be nearer
+their work. The only white people that are now on Corisco are two
+Spanish priests and three nuns; but of these good people I saw little or
+nothing, as my headquarters were with the Presbyterian native minister,
+Mr. Ibea, and there was war between him and the priests.
+
+The natives are Benga, a coast tribe now rapidly dying out. They were
+once a great tribe, and in the old days, when the slavers and the
+whalers haunted Corisco Bay, these Benga were much in demand as crew
+men, in spite of the reputation they bore for ferocity. Nowadays the
+grown men get their living by going as travelling agents for the white
+merchants into the hinterland behind Corisco Bay, amongst the very
+dangerous and savage tribes there, and when one of them has made enough
+money by this trading, he comes back to Corisco, and rests, and
+luxuriates in the ample bosom of his family until he has spent his
+money--then he gets trust from the white trader, and goes to the Bush
+again, pretty frequently meeting there the sad fate of the pitcher that
+went too often to the well, and getting killed by the hinterlanders.
+
+On arriving at Corisco Island, I "soothed with a gift, and greeted with
+a smile" the dusky inhabitants. "Have you got any tobacco?" said they.
+"I have," I responded, and a friendly feeling at once arose. I then
+explained that I wanted to join the fishing party. They were quite
+willing, and said the ladies were just finishing planting their farms
+before the tornado season came on, and that they would make the
+peculiar, necessary baskets at once. They did not do so at once in the
+English sense of the term, but we all know there is no time south of
+40°, and so I waited patiently, walking about the island.
+
+Corisco is locally celebrated for its beauty. Winwood Reade says: "It is
+a little world in miniature, with its miniature forests, miniature
+prairies, miniature mountains, miniature rivers, and miniature
+precipices on the sea-shore." In consequence partly of these things, and
+partly of the inhabitants' rooted idea that the proper way to any place
+on the island is round by the sea-shore, the paths of Corisco are as
+strange as several other things are in latitude 0, and, like the other
+things, they require understanding to get on with.
+
+They start from the beach with the avowed intention of just going round
+the next headland because the tide happens to be in too much for you to
+go along by the beach; but, once started, their presiding genii might
+sing to the wayfarer Mr. Kipling's "The Lord knows where we shall go,
+dear lass, and the Deuce knows what we shall see." You go up a path off
+the beach gladly, because you have been wading in fine white sand over
+your ankles, and in banks of rotten and rotting seaweed, on which
+centipedes, and other catamumpuses, crawl in profusion, not to mention
+sand-flies, &c., and the path makes a plunge inland, as much as to say,
+"Come and see our noted scenery," and having led you through a miniature
+swamp, a miniature forest, and a miniature prairie, "It's a pity," says
+the path, "not to call at So-and-so's village now we are so near it,"
+and off it goes to the village through a patch of grass or plantation.
+It wanders through the scattered village calling at houses, for some
+time, and then says, "Bless me, I had nearly forgotten what I came out
+for; we must hurry back to that beach," and off it goes through more
+scenery, landing you ultimately about fifty yards off the place where
+you first joined it, in consequence of the South Atlantic waves flying
+in foam and fury against a miniature precipice--the first thing they
+have met that dared stay their lordly course since they left Cape Horn
+or the ice walls of the Antarctic.
+
+At last the fishing baskets were ready, and we set off for the lakes by
+a path that plunged into a little ravine, crossed a dried swamp, went up
+a hill, and on to an open prairie, in the course of about twenty
+minutes. Passing over this prairie, and through a wood, we came to
+another prairie, like most things in Corisco just then (August), dried
+up, for it was the height of the dry season. On this prairie we waited
+for some of the representative ladies from other villages to come up;
+for without their presence our fishing would not have been legal. When
+you wait in West Africa it eats into your lifetime to a considerable
+extent, and we spent half-an-hour or so standing howling, in prolonged,
+intoned howls, for the absent ladies, notably grievously for On-gou-ta,
+and when they came not, we threw ourselves down on the soft, fine,
+golden-brown grass, in the sun, and all, with the exception of myself,
+went asleep. After about two and a half hours I was aroused from the
+contemplation of the domestic habits of some beetles, by hearing a
+crackle, crackle, interspersed with sounds like small pistols going off,
+and looking round saw a fog of blue-brown smoke surmounting a
+rapidly-advancing wall of red fire.
+
+I rose, and spread the news among my companions, who were sleeping, with
+thumps and kicks. Shouting at a sleeping African is labour lost. And
+then I made a bee-line for the nearest green forest wall of the prairie,
+followed by my companions. Yet, in spite of some very creditable sprint
+performances on their part, three members of the band got scorched.
+Fortunately, however, our activity landed us close to the lakes, so the
+scorched ones spent the rest of the afternoon sitting in mud-holes,
+comforting themselves with the balmy black slime. The other ladies
+turned up soon after this, and said that the fire had arisen from some
+man having set fire to a corner of the prairie some days previously, to
+make a farm; he had thought the fire was out round his patch, whereas it
+was not, but smouldering in the tussocks of grass, and the wind had
+sprung up that afternoon from a quarter that fanned it up. I said,
+"People should be very careful of fire," and the scorched ladies
+profoundly agreed with me, and said things I will not repeat here,
+regarding "that fool man" and his female ancestors.
+
+The lakes are pools of varying extent and depth, in the bed-rock[6] of
+the island, and the fact that they are surrounded by thick forests on
+every side, and that the dry season is the cool season on the Equator,
+prevents them from drying up.
+
+Most of these lakes are encircled by a rim of rock, from which you jump
+down into knee-deep black slime, and then, if you are a representative
+lady, you waddle, and squeal, and grunt, and skylark generally on your
+way to the water in the middle. If it is a large lake you are working,
+you and your companions drive in two rows of stakes, cutting each other
+more or less at right angles, more or less in the middle of the lake, so
+as to divide it up into convenient portions. Then some ladies with their
+specially shaped baskets form a line, with their backs to the bank, and
+their faces to the water-space, in the enclosure, holding the baskets
+with one rim under water. The others go into the water, and splash with
+hands, and feet, and sticks, and, needless to say, yell hard all the
+time. The naturally alarmed fish fly from them, intent on getting into
+the mud, and are deftly scooped up by the peck by the ladies in their
+baskets. In little lakes the staking is not necessary, but the rest of
+the proceedings are the same. Some of the smaller lakes are too deep to
+be thus fished at all, being, I expect, clefts in the rock, such as you
+see in other parts of the island, sometimes 30 or 40 feet deep.
+
+The usual result of the day's fishing is from twelve to fifteen bushels
+of a common mud-fish,[7] which is very good eating. The spoils are
+divided among the representative ladies, and they take them back to
+their respective villages and distribute them. Then ensues, that same
+evening, a tremendous fish supper, and the fish left over are smoked
+and carefully kept as a delicacy, to make sauce with, &c., until the
+next year's fishing day comes round.
+
+The waters of West Africa, salt, brackish, and fresh abound with fish,
+and many kinds are, if properly cooked, excellent eating. For culinary
+purposes you may divide the fish into sea-fish, lagoon-fish and
+river-fish; the first division, the sea-fish, are excellent eating, and
+are in enormous quantities, particularly along the Windward Coast on the
+Great West African Bank. South of this, at the mouths of the Oil rivers,
+they fall off, from a culinary standpoint, though scientifically they
+increase in charm, as you find hereabouts fishes of extremely early
+types, whose relations have an interesting series of monuments in the
+shape of fossils, in the sandstone; but if primeval man had to live on
+them when they were alive together, I am sorry for him, for he might
+just as well have eaten mud, and better, for then he would not have run
+the risk of getting choked with bones. On the South-West Coast the
+culinary value goes up again; there are found quantities of excellent
+deep-sea fish, and round the mouths of the rivers, shoals of bream and
+grey mullet.
+
+The lagoon-fish are not particularly good, being as a rule supremely
+muddy and bony; they have their uses, however, for I am informed that
+they indicate to Lagos when it may expect an epidemic; to this end they
+die, in an adjacent lagoon, and float about upon its surface, wrong side
+up, until decomposition does its work. Their method of prophecy is a
+sound one, for it demonstrates (_a_) that the lagoon drinking water is
+worse than usual; (_b_) if it is not already fatal they will make it so.
+
+The river-fish of the Gold Coast are better than those of the mud-sewers
+of the Niger Delta, because the Gold Coast rivers are brisk sporting
+streams, with the exception of the Volta, and at a short distance inland
+they come down over rocky rapids with a stiff current. The fish of the
+upper waters of the Delta rivers are better than those down in the
+mangrove-swamp region; and in the South-West Coast rivers, with which I
+am personally well acquainted, the up-river fish are excellent in
+quality, on account of the swift current. I will however leave culinary
+considerations, because cooking is a subject upon which I am liable to
+become diffuse, and we will turn to the consideration of the sporting
+side of fishing.
+
+Now, there is one thing you will always hear the Gold Coaster (white
+variety) grumbling about, "There is no sport." He has only got himself
+to blame. Let him try and introduce the Polynesian practice of swimming
+about in the surf, without his clothes, and with a suitable large, sharp
+knife, slaying sharks--there's no end of sharks on the Gold Coast, and
+no end of surf. The Rivermen have the same complaint, and I may
+recommend that they should try spearing sting-rays, things that run
+sometimes to six feet across the wings, and every inch of them wicked,
+particularly the tail. There is quite enough danger in either sport to
+satisfy a Sir Samuel Baker; for myself, being a nervous, quiet, rational
+individual, a large cat-fish in a small canoe supplies sufficient
+excitement.
+
+The other day I went out for a day's fishing on an African river. I and
+two black men, in a canoe, in company with a round net, three stout
+fishing-lines, three paddles, Dr. Günther's _Study of Fishes_, some bait
+in an old Morton's boiled-mutton tin, a little manioc, stinking awfully
+(as is its wont), a broken calabash baler, a lot of dirty water to sit
+in, and happy and contented minds. I catalogue these things because
+they are either essential to, or inseparable from, a good day's sport in
+West Africa. Yes, even _I_, ask my vict----friends down there, I feel
+sure they will tell you that they never had such experiences before my
+arrival. I fear they will go on and say, "Never again!" and that it was
+all my fault, which it was not. When things go well they ascribe it, and
+their survival, to Providence or their own precautions; when things are
+merely usual in horror, it's my fault, which is a rank inversion of the
+truth, for it is only when circumstances get beyond my control, and
+Providence takes charge, that accidents happen. I will demonstrate this
+by continuing my narrative. We paddled away, far up a mangrove creek,
+and then went up against the black mud-bank, with its great network of
+grey-white roots, surmounted by the closely-interlaced black-green
+foliage. Absolute silence reigned, as it can only reign in Africa in a
+mangrove swamp. The water-laden air wrapped round us like a warm, wet
+blanket. The big mangrove flies came silently to feed on us and leave
+their progeny behind them in the wounds to do likewise. The stink of the
+mud, strong enough to break a window, mingled fraternally with that of
+the sour manioc.
+
+I was reading, the negroes, always quiet enough when fishing, were
+silently carrying on that great African native industry--scratching
+themselves--so, with our lines over side, life slid away like a
+dreamless sleep, until the middle man hooked a cat-fish. It came on
+board with an awful grunt, right in the middle of us; flop, swish,
+scurry and yell followed; I tucked the study of fishes in general under
+my arm and attended to this individual specimen, shouting "Lef em, lef
+em; hev em for water one time, you sons of unsanctified house
+lizards,"[8] and such like valuable advice and admonition. The man in
+the more remote end of the canoe made an awful swipe at the 3 ft.-long,
+grunting, flopping, yellow-grey, slimy, thing, but never reached it
+owing to the paddle meeting in mid-air with the flying leg of the man in
+front of him, drawing blood profusely. I really fancy, about this time,
+that, barring the cat-fish and myself, the occupants of the canoe were
+standing on their heads, with a view of removing their lower limbs from
+the terrible pectoral and dorsal fins, with which our prey made such
+lively play.
+
+"_Brevi spatio interjecto_," as Cæsar says, in the middle of a bad
+battle, over went the canoe, while the cat-fish went off home with the
+line and hook. One black man went to the bank, whither, with a blind
+prescience of our fate, I had flung, a second before, the most valuable
+occupant of the canoe, _The Study of Fishes_. I went personally to
+investigate fluvial deposit _in situ_. When I returned to the
+surface--accompanied by great swirls of mud and great bubbles of the
+gases of decomposition I had liberated on my visit to the bottom of the
+river--I observed the canoe floating bottom upwards, accompanied by
+Morton's tin, the calabash, and the paddles, while on the bank one black
+man was engaged in hauling the other one out by the legs; fortunately
+this one's individual god had seen to it that his toes should become
+entangled in the net, and this floated, and so indicated to his
+companion where he was, when he had dived into the mud and got fairly
+embedded.
+
+Now it's my belief that the most difficult thing in the world is to
+turn over a round-bottomed canoe that is wrong side up, when you are in
+the water with the said canoe. The next most difficult thing is to get
+into the canoe, after accomplishing triumph number one, and had it not
+been for my black friends that afternoon, I should not have done these
+things successfully, and there would be by now another haunted creek in
+West Africa, with a mud and blood bespattered ghost trying for ever to
+turn over the ghost of a little canoe. However, all ended happily. We
+collected all our possessions, except the result of the day's
+fishing--the cat-fish--but we had had as much of him as we wanted, and
+so, adding a thankful mind to our contented ones, went home.
+
+None of us gave a verbatim report of the incident. I held my tongue for
+fear of not being allowed out fishing again, and I heard my men giving a
+fine account of a fearful fight, with accompanying prodigies of valour,
+that we had had with a witch crocodile. I fancy that must have been just
+their way of putting it, because it is not good form to be frightened by
+cat-fish on the West Coast, and I cannot for the life of me remember
+even having seen a witch crocodile that afternoon.
+
+I must, however, own that native methods of fishing are usually safe,
+though I fail to see what I had to do in producing the above accident.
+The usual method of dealing with a cat-fish is to bang him on the head
+with a club, and then break the spiny fins off, for they make nasty
+wounds that are difficult to heal, and very painful.
+
+The native fishing-craft is the dug-out canoe in its various local
+forms. The Accra canoe is a very safe and firm canoe for work of any
+sort except heavy cargo, and it is particularly good for surf; it is,
+however, slower than many other kinds. The canoe that you can get the
+greatest pace out of is undoubtedly the Adooma, which is narrow and
+flat-bottomed, and simply flies over the water. The paddles used vary
+also with locality, and their form is a mere matter of local fashion,
+for they all do their work well. There is the leaf-shaped Kru paddle,
+the trident-shaped Accra, the long-lozenged Niger, and the long-handled,
+small-headed Igalwa paddle; and with each of these forms the native, to
+the manner born, will send his canoe flying along with that unbroken
+sweep I consider the most luxurious and perfect form of motion on earth.
+
+It is when it comes to sailing that the African is inferior. He does not
+sail half as much as he might, but still pretty frequently. The
+materials of which the sails are made vary immensely in different
+places, and the most beautiful are those at Loanda, which are made of
+small grass mats, with fringes, sewn together, and are of a warm, rich
+sand-colour. Next in beauty comes the branch of a palm, or other tree,
+stuck in the bows, and least in beauty is the fisherman's own damaged
+waist-cloth. I remember it used to seem very strange to me at first, to
+see my companion in a canoe take off his clothing and make a sail with
+it, on a wind springing up behind us. The very strangest sail I ever
+sailed under was a black man's blue trousers, they were tied waist
+upwards to a cross-stick, the legs neatly crossed, and secured to the
+thwarts of the canoe. You cannot well tack, or carry out any neat
+sailing evolutions with any of the African sails, particularly with the
+last-named form. The shape of the African sail is almost always in
+appearance a triangle, and fastened to a cross-stick which is secured to
+an upright one. It is not the form, however, that prevents it from being
+handy, but the way it is put up, almost always without sheets, for
+river and lake work, and it is tied together with tie tie--bush rope. If
+you should personally be managing one, and trouble threatens, take my
+advice, and take the mast out one time, and deal with that tie tie
+palaver at your leisure. Never mind what people say about this method
+not being seaman-like--you survive.
+
+     [Illustration: FALLS ON THE TONGUE RIVER.]
+
+     [Illustration: LOANDA CANOE WITH MAT SAILS. [_To face page 101._]
+
+The mat sails used for sea-work are spread by a bamboo sprit. There is a
+single mast, to the head of which the sail is either hoisted by means of
+a small line run through the mast, or, more frequently, made fast with a
+seizing. Such a sail is worked by means of a sheet and a brace on the
+sprit, usually by one man, whose companion steers by a paddle over the
+stern; sometimes, however, one man performs both duties. Now and again
+you will find the luff of the sail bowlined out with another stick. This
+is most common round Sierra Leone.
+
+The appliances for catching fish are, firstly, fish traps, sometimes
+made of hollow logs of trees, with one end left open and the other
+closed. One of these is just dropped alongside the bank, left for a week
+or so, until a fish family makes a home in it, and then it is removed
+with a jerk. Then there are fish-baskets made from split palm-stems tied
+together with tie tie; they are circular and conical, resembling our
+lobster pots and eel baskets, and they are usually baited with lumps of
+kank soaked in palm-oil. Then there are drag nets made of pineapple
+fibre, one edge weighted with stones tied in bunches at intervals; as a
+rule these run ten to twenty-five feet long, but in some places they are
+much longer. The longest I ever saw was when out fishing in the lovely
+harbour of San Paul de Loanda. This was over thirty feet and was
+weighted with bunches of clam shells, and made of European yarn, as
+indeed most nets are when this is procurable by the natives, and it was
+worked by three canoes which were being poled about, as is usual in
+Loanda Harbour. Then there is the universal hook and line, the hook
+either of European make or the simple bent pin of our youth.
+
+But my favourite method, and the one by which I got most of my fish up
+rivers or in creeks is the stockade trap. These are constructed by
+driving in stakes close together, leaving one opening, not in the middle
+of the stockade, but towards the up river end. In tidal waters these
+stockades are visited daily, at nearly low tide, for the high tide
+carries the fish in behind the stockade, and leaves them there on
+falling. Up river, above tide water, the stockades are left for several
+days, in order to allow the fish to congregate. Then the opening is
+closed up, the fisher-women go inside and throw out the water and
+collect the fish. There is another kind of stockade that gives great
+sport. During the wet season the terrific rush of water tears off bits
+of bank in such rivers as the Congo, and Ogowé, where, owing to the
+continual fierce current of fresh water the brackish tide waters do not
+come far up the river, so that the banks are not shielded by a great
+network of mangrove roots. In the Ogowé a good many of the banks are
+composed of a stout clay, and so the pieces torn off hang together, and
+often go sailing out to sea, on the current, waving their bushes, and
+even trees, gallantly in the broad Atlantic, out of sight of land. Bits
+of the Congo Free State are great at seafaring too, and owing to the
+terrific stream of the great Zaire, which spreads a belt of fresh water
+over the surface of the ocean 200 miles from land, ships fall in with
+these floating islands, with their trees still flourishing. The Ogowé
+is not so big as the Congo, but it is a very respectable stream even
+for the great continent of rivers, and it pours into the Atlantic, in
+the wet season, about 1,750,000 cubic feet of fresh water per second, on
+which float some of these islands. But by no means every island gets out
+to sea, many of them get into slack water round corners in the Delta
+region of the Ogowé and remain there, collecting all sorts of _débris_
+that comes down on the flood water, getting matted more and more firm by
+the floating grass, every joint of which grows on the smallest
+opportunity. In many places these floating islands are of considerable
+size; one I heard of was large enough to induce a friend of mine to
+start a coffee plantation on it; unfortunately the wretched thing came
+to pieces when he had cut down its trees and turned the soil up. And one
+I saw in the Karkola river, was a weird affair. It was in the river
+opposite our camp, and very slowly, but perceptibly it went round and
+round in an orbit, although it was about half an acre in extent. A good
+many of these bits of banks do not attain to the honour of becoming
+islands, but get on to sand-banks in their early youth, near a native
+town, to the joy of the inhabitants, who forthwith go off to them, and
+drive round them a stockade of stakes firmly anchoring them. Thousands
+of fishes then congregate round the little island inside the stockade,
+for the rich feeding in among the roots and grass, and the affair is
+left a certain time. Then the entrance to the stockade is firmly closed
+up, and the natives go inside and bale out the water, and catch the fish
+in baskets, tearing the island to pieces, with shouts and squeals of
+exultation. It's messy, but it is amusing, and you get tremendous
+catches.
+
+     [Illustration: ST. PAUL DO LOANDA. [_To face page 102._]
+
+A very large percentage of fish traps are dedicated to the capture of
+shrimp and craw-fish, which the natives value highly when smoked, using
+them to make a sauce for their kank; among these is the shrimp-basket.
+These baskets are tied on sticks laid out in parallel lines of
+considerable extent. They run about three inches in diameter, and their
+length varies with the place that is being worked. The stakes are driven
+into the mud, and to each stake is tied a basket with a line of tie tie,
+the basket acting as a hat to the stake when the tide is ebbing; as the
+tide comes in, it lowers the basket into the current and carries into
+its open end large quantities of shrimps, which get entangled and packed
+by the force of the current into the tapering end of the basket, which
+is sometimes eight or ten feet from the mouth. You can always tell where
+there is a line of these baskets by seeing the line of attendant
+sea-gulls all solemnly arranged with their heads to win'ard, sea-gull
+fashion.
+
+Another device employed in small streams for the capture of either
+craw-fish or small fish is a line of calabashes, or earthen pots with
+narrow mouths; these are tied on to a line, I won't say with tie tie,
+because I have said that irritating word so often, but still you
+understand they are; this line is tied to a tree with more, and carried
+across the stream, sufficiently slack to submerge the pots, and then to
+a tree on the other bank, where it is secured with the same material. A
+fetish charm is then secured to it that will see to it, that any one who
+interferes with the trap, save the rightful owner, will "swell up and
+burst," then the trap is left for the night, the catch being collected
+in the morning.
+
+Single pots, well baited with bits of fish and with a suitable stone in
+to keep them steady, are frequently used alongside the bank. These are
+left for a day or more, and then the owner with great care, crawls
+along the edge of the bank and claps on a lid and secures the prey.
+
+     [Illustration: ROUND A KACONGO CAMP FIRE. [_To face page 105._]
+
+Hand nets of many kinds are used. The most frequent form is the round
+net, weighted all round its outer edge. This is used by one man, and is
+thrown with great deftness and grace, in shallow waters. I suppose one
+may hardly call the long wreaths of palm and palm branches, used by the
+Loango and Kacongo coast native for fishing the surf with, nets, but
+they are most effective. When the Calemma (the surf) is not too bad, two
+or more men will carry this long thick wreath out into it, and then drop
+it and drag it towards the shore. The fish fly in front of it on to the
+beach, where they fall victims to the awaiting ladies, with their
+baskets. Another very quaint set of devices is employed by the Kruboys
+whenever they go to catch their beloved land and shore crabs. I remember
+once thinking I had providentially lighted on a beautiful bit of ju-ju;
+the whole stretch of mud beach had little lights dotted over it on the
+ground. I investigated. They were crab-traps. "Bottle of Beer," "The
+Prince of Wales," "Jane Ann," and "Pancake" had become--by means we will
+not go into here--possessed of bits of candle, and had cut them up and
+put in front of them pieces of wood in an ingenious way. The crab, a
+creature whose intelligence is not sufficiently appreciated, fired with
+a scientific curiosity, went to see what the light was made of, and then
+could not escape, or perhaps did not try to escape, but stood
+spell-bound at the beauty of the light; anyhow, they fell victims to
+their spirit of inquiry. I have also seen drop-traps put for crabs round
+their holes. In this case the sense of the beauty of light in the crab
+is not relied on, and once in he is shut in, and cannot go home and
+communicate the result of his investigations to his family.
+
+Yet, in spite of all these advantages and appliances above cited, I
+grieve to say the West African, all along the Coast, decends to the
+unsportsmanlike trick of poisoning. Certain herbs are bruised and thrown
+into the water, chiefly into lagoons and river-pools. The method is
+effective, but I should doubt whether it is wholesome. These herbs cause
+the fish to rise to the surface stupefied, when they are scooped up with
+a calabash. Other herbs cause the fish to lie at the bottom, also
+stupefied, and the water in the pool is thrown out, and they are
+collected.
+
+More as a pastime than a sport I must class the shooting of the peculiar
+hopping mud-fish by the small boys with bows and arrows, but this is the
+only way you can secure them as they go about star-gazing with their
+eyes on the tops of their heads, instead of attending to baited hooks,
+and their hearing (or whatever it is) is so keen that they bury
+themselves in the mud-banks too rapidly for you to net them. Spearing is
+another very common method of fishing. It is carried on at night, a
+bright light being stuck in the bow of the canoe, while the spearer
+crouching, screens his eyes from the glare with a plantain leaf, and
+drops his long-hafted spear into the fish as they come up to look at the
+light. It is usually the big bream that are caught in this way out in
+the sea, and the carp up in fresh water.
+
+The manners and customs of many West African fishes are quaint. I have
+never yet seen that fish the natives often tell me about that is as big
+as a man, only thicker, and which walks about on its fins at night, in
+the forest, so I cannot vouch for it; nor for that other fish that hates
+the crocodile, and follows her up and destroys her eggs, and now and
+again dedicates itself to its hate, and goes down her throat, and then
+spreads out its spiny fins and kills her.
+
+The fish I know personally are interesting in quieter ways. As for
+instance the strange electrical fish, which sometimes have sufficient
+power to kill a duck and which are much given to congregating in sunken
+boats, causing much trouble when the boat has to be floated again,
+because the natives won't go near them, to bail her out.
+
+Then there is that deeply trying creature the Ning Ning fish, who, when
+you are in some rivers in fresh water and want to have a quiet night's
+rest, just as you have tucked in your mosquito bar carefully and
+successfully, comes alongside and serenades you, until you have to get
+up and throw things at it with a prophetic feeling, amply supported by
+subsequent experience, that hordes of mosquitos are busily ensconcing
+themselves inside your mosquito bar. What makes the Ning Ning--it is
+called after its idiotic song--so maddening is that it never seems to be
+where you have thrown the things at it. You could swear it was close to
+the bow of the canoe when you shied that empty soda-water bottle or that
+ball of your precious indiarubber at it, but instantly comes "ning,
+ning, ning" from the stern of the canoe. It is a ventriloquist or goes
+about in shoals, I do not know which, for the latter and easier
+explanation seems debarred by their not singing in chorus; the
+performance is undoubtedly a solo; any one experienced in this fish soon
+finds out that it is not driven away or destroyed by an artillery of
+missiles, but merely lies low until its victim has got under his
+mosquito curtain, and resettled his mosquito palaver,--and then back it
+comes with its "ning ning."
+
+A similar affliction is the salt-water drum-fish, with its "bum-bum."
+Loanda Harbour abounds with these, and so does Chiloango. In the bright
+moonlight nights I have looked overside and seen these fish in a wreath
+round the canoe, with their silly noses against the side, "bum-bumming"
+away; whether they admire the canoe, or whether they want it to come on
+and fight it out, I do not know, because my knowledge of the different
+kinds of fishes and of their internal affairs is derived from Dr.
+Günther's great work, and that contains no section on ichthyological
+psychology. The West African natives have, I may say, a great deal of
+very curious information on the thoughts of fishes, but, much as I liked
+those good people, I make it a hard and fast rule to hold on to my
+common-sense and keep my belief for religious purposes when it comes to
+these deductions from natural phenomena--not that I display this mental
+attitude externally, for there is always in their worst and wildest
+fetish notions an underlying element of truth. The fetish of fish is too
+wide a subject to enter on here, it acts well because it gives a close
+season to river and lagoon fish; the natives round Lake Ayzingo, for
+example, saying that if the first fishes that come up into the lake in
+the great dry season are killed, the rest of the shoal turn back, so on
+the arrival of this vanguard they are treated most carefully, talked to
+with "a sweet mouth," and given things. The fishes that form these
+shoals are _Hemichromis fasciatus_ and _Chromis ogowensis_.
+
+I know no more charming way of spending an afternoon than to leisurely
+paddle alone to the edge of the Ogowé sand bank in the dry season, and
+then lie and watch the ways of the water-world below. If you keep quiet,
+the fishes take no notice of you, and go on with their ordinary
+avocations, under your eyes, hunting, and feeding, and playing, and
+fighting, happily and cheerily until one of the dreaded raptorial fishes
+appears upon the scene, and then there is a general scurry. Dreadful
+warriors are the little fishes that haunt sand banks (_Alestis
+Kingsleyæ_) and very bold, for when you put your hand down in the water,
+with some crumbs, they first make two or three attempts to frighten it,
+by sidling up at it and butting, but on finding there's no fight in the
+thing, they swagger into the palm of your hand and take what is to be
+got with an air of conquest; but before the supply is exhausted, there
+always arises a row among themselves, and the gallant bulls, some two
+inches long, will spin round and butt each other for a second or so, and
+then spin round again, and flap each other with their tails, their
+little red-edged fins and gill-covers growing crimson with fury. I never
+made out how you counted points in these fights, because no one ever
+seemed a scale the worse after even the most desperate duels.
+
+Most of the West Coast tribes are inveterate fishermen. The Gold Coast
+native regards fishing as a low pursuit, more particularly
+oyster-fishing, or I should say oyster-gathering, for they are collected
+chiefly from the lower branches of the mangrove-trees; this occupation
+is, indeed, regarded as being only fit for women, and among all tribes
+the villages who turn their entire attention to fishing are regarded as
+low down in the social scale. This may arise from fetish reasons, but
+the idea certainly gains support from the conduct of the individual
+fisherman. Do not imagine Brother Anglers, that I am hinting that the
+Gentle Art is bad for the moral nature of people like you and me, but I
+fear it is bad for the African. You see, the African, like most of us,
+can resist anything but temptation--he will resist attempts to reform
+him, attempts to make him tell the truth, attempts to clothe, and keep
+him tidy, &c., and he will resist these powerfully; but give him real
+temptation and he succumbs, without the European preliminary struggle.
+He has by nature a kleptic bias, and you see being out at night fishing,
+he has chances--temptations, of succumbing to this--and so you see a man
+who has left his home at evening with only the intention of spearing
+fish, in his mind, goes home in the morning pretty often with his
+missionary's ducks, his neighbours' plantains, and a few odd trifles
+from the trader's beaches, in his canoe, and the outer world says "Dem
+fisherman, all time, all same for one, with tief man."[9]
+
+The Accras, who are employed right down the whole West Coast, thanks to
+the valuable education given them by the Basel Mission as cooks,
+carpenters, and coopers, cannot resist fishing, let their other
+avocations be what they may. A friend of mine the other day had a new
+Accra cook. The man cooked well, and my friend vaunted himself, and was
+content for the first week. At the beginning of the second week the
+cooking was still good, but somehow or other, there was just the
+suspicion of a smell of fish about the house. The next day the suspicion
+merged into certainty. The third day the smell was insupportable, and
+the atmosphere unfit to support human life, but obviously healthy for
+flies.
+
+The cook was summoned, and asked by Her Britannic Majesty's
+representative "Where that smell came from?" He said he "could not smell
+it, and he did not know." Fourth day, thorough investigation of the
+premises revealed the fact that in the back-yard there was a large
+clothes-horse which had been sent out by my friend's wife to air his
+clothes; this was literally converted into a screen by strings of fish
+in the process of drying, _i.e._, decomposing in the sun.
+
+The affair was eliminated from the domestic circle and cast into the
+Ocean by seasoned natives; and awful torture in this world and the next
+promised to the cook if he should ever again embark in the fish trade.
+The smell gradually faded from the house, but the poor cook, bereaved of
+his beloved pursuit, burst out all over in boils, and took to religious
+mania and drink, and so had to be sent back to Accra, where I hope he
+lives happily, surrounded by his beloved objects.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [6] Specimens of rock identified by the Geological Survey, London, as
+   cretaceous, and said by other geologists up here to be possibly
+   Jurassic.
+
+   [7] _Clarias laviaps._
+
+   [8] Translation: "Leave it alone! Leave it alone! Throw it into the
+   water at once! What did you catch it for?"
+
+   [9] Translation: "All fishermen are thieves."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+FETISH.
+
+     Wherein the student of Fetish determines to make things quite clear
+     this time, with results that any sage knowing the subject and the
+     student would have safely prophesied; to which is added some
+     remarks concerning the position of ancestor worship in West Africa.
+
+
+The final object of all human desire is a knowledge of the nature of
+God. The human methods, or religions, employed to gain this object are
+divisible into three main classes, inspired--
+
+_Firstly_, the submission to and acceptance of a direct divine message.
+
+_Secondly_, the attempt by human intellectual power to separate the
+conception of God from material phenomena, and regard Him as a thing
+apart and unconditioned.
+
+_Thirdly_, the attempt to understand Him as manifest in natural
+phenomena.
+
+I personally am constrained to follow this last and humblest method, and
+accept as its exposition Spinoza's statement of it, "Since without God
+nothing can exist or be conceived, it is evident that all natural
+phenomena involve and express the conception of God, as far as their
+essence and perfection extends. So we have a greater and more perfect
+knowledge of God in proportion to our knowledge of natural phenomena.
+Conversely (since the knowledge of an effect through a cause is the same
+thing as the knowledge of a particular property of a cause), the greater
+our knowledge of natural phenomena the more perfect is our knowledge of
+the essence of God which is the cause of all things."[10] But I have a
+deep respect for all other forms of religion and for all men who truly
+believe, for in them clearly there is this one great desire of the
+knowledge of the nature of God, and "_Ein guter Mensch in seinem dunkeln
+Drange Ist sich des rechten Weges wohl bewuszt._" Nevertheless the most
+tolerant human mind is subject to a feeling of irritation over the
+methods whereby a fellow-creature strives to attain his end,
+particularly if those methods are a sort of heresy to his own, and
+therefore it is a most unpleasant thing for any religious-minded person
+to speak of a religion unless he either profoundly believes or
+disbelieves in it. For, if he does the one, he has the pleasure of
+praise; if he does the other, he has the pleasure of war, but the thing
+in between these is a thing that gives neither pleasure; it is like
+quarrelling with one's own beloved relations. Thus it is with Fetish and
+me. I cannot say I either disbelieve or believe in it, for, on the one
+hand, I clearly see it is a religion of the third class; but, on the
+other, I know that Fetish is a religion that is regarded by my fellow
+white men as the embodiment of all that is lowest and vilest in man--not
+altogether without cause. Before speaking further on it, however, I must
+say what I mean by Fetish, for "the word of late has got ill sorted."
+
+I mean by Fetish the religion of the natives of the Western Coast of
+Africa, where they have not been influenced either by Christianity or
+Mohammedanism. I sincerely wish there were another name than Fetish
+which we could use for it, but the natives have different names for
+their own religion in different districts, and I do not know what other
+general name I could suggest, for I am sure that the other name
+sometimes used in place of Fetish, namely Juju, is, for all the fine
+wild sound of it, only a modification of the French word for toy or
+doll, _joujou_. The French claim to have visited West Africa in the
+fourteenth century, prior to the Portuguese, and whether this claim can
+be sustained on historic evidence or no, it is certain that the French
+have been on the Coast in considerable numbers since the fifteenth
+century, and no doubt have long called the little objects they saw the
+natives valuing so strangely _joujou_, just as I have heard many a
+Frenchman do down there in my time. Therefore, believing Juju to mean
+doll or toy, I do not think it is so true a word as Fetish; and, after
+all, West Africa has a prior right to the use of this word Fetish, for
+it has grown up out of the word _Feitiįo_ used by the Portuguese
+navigators who rediscovered West Africa with all its wealth and worries
+for modern Europe. These worthy voyagers, noticing the veneration paid
+by Africans to certain objects, trees, fish, idols, and so on, very
+fairly compared these objects with the amulets, talismans, charms, and
+little images of saints they themselves used, and called those things
+similarly used by the Africans _Feitiįo_, a word derived from the Latin
+_factitius_, in the sense magically artful. Modern French and English
+writers have adopted this word from the Portuguese; but it is a modern
+word in its present use. It is not in Johnson, and the term _Fétichisme_
+was introduced by De Brosses in his remarkable book, _Du Culte des Dieux
+fetiches_, 1760; but doubtless, as Professor Tylor points out, it has
+obtained a great currency from Comte's use of it to denote a general
+theory of primitive religion. Professor Tylor, most unfortunately for us
+who are interested in West African religion, confines the use of the
+word to one department of his theory of animism only--namely to the
+doctrine of spirits embodied in, or attached to, or conveying influence
+through certain material objects.[11]
+
+I do not in the least deny Professor Tylor's right to use the word
+Fetish[12] in that restricted sense in his general study of comparative
+religion. I merely wish to mention that you cannot use it in this
+restricted sense, but want the whole of his grand theory of animism
+wherewith to describe the religion of the West Africans. For although
+there is in that religion a heavy percentage of embodied spirits, there
+is also a heavier percentage of unembodied spirits--spirits that have no
+embodiment in matter and spirits that only occasionally embody
+themselves in matter.
+
+Take, for example, the gods of the Ewe and Tshi.[13] There is amongst
+them Tando, the native high god of Ashantee. He appears to his
+priesthood as a giant, tawny skinned, lank haired, and wearing the
+Ashantee robe. But when visiting the laity, on whom he is exceedingly
+hard, he comes in pestilence and tempest, or, for more individual
+village visitations, as a small and miserable boy, desolate and crying
+for help and kindness, which, when given to him, Tando repays by killing
+off his benefactors and their fellow-villagers with a certain disease.
+This trick, I may remark, is not confined to Tando, for several other
+West African gods use it when sacrifices to them are in arrears; and I
+am certain it is more at the back of outcast children being neglected
+than is either sheer indifference to suffering or cruelty. Because,
+fearing the disease, your native will be far more likely to remember he
+is in debt to the god and go and pay an instalment, than to take in that
+child whom he thinks is the god who has come to punish.
+
+But you have only to look through Ellis's important works, the
+"Tshi-speaking, Ewe-speaking, and Yoruba-speaking peoples of the West
+Coast of Africa," to find many instances of the gods of Fetish who do
+not require a material object to manifest themselves in. And I, while in
+West Africa, have often been struck by incidents that have made this
+point clear to me. When I have been out with native companions after
+nightfall, they pretty nearly always saw an apparition of some sort,
+frequently apparitions of different sorts, in our path ahead. Then came
+a pause, and after they had seen the apparition vanish, on we went--not
+cheerily, however, until we were well past the place where it had been
+seen. This place they closely examined, and decided whether it was an
+Abambo, or Manu, or whatever name these spirit classes had in their
+local language, or whether it was something worse that had been there,
+such as a Sasabonsum or Ombuiri.
+
+They knew which it was from the physical condition of the spot. Either
+there was nothing there but ordinary path stuff; or there was white ash,
+or there was a log or rock, or tree branch, and the reason for the
+different emotion with which they regarded this latter was very simple,
+for it had been an inferior class spirit, one that their charms and
+howled incantations could guard them against. When there was ash, it had
+been a witch destroyed by the medicine they had thrown at it, or a
+medium class spirit they could get protection from "in town." But if "he
+left no ash" the rest of our march was a gloomy one; it was a bad
+business, and unless the Fetish authorities in town chose to explain
+that it was merely a demand for so much white calico, or a goat, &c.,
+some one of our party would certainly get ill.
+
+Well do I remember our greatest terror when out at night on a forest
+path. I believe him to have been a Sasabonsum, but he was very widely
+distributed--that is to say we dreaded him on the forest paths round
+Mungo Mah Lobeh; we confidently expected to meet him round Calabar; and,
+to my disgust, for he was a hindrance, when I thought I had got away
+from his distribution zone, down in the Ogowé region, coming home one
+night with a Fan hunter from Fula to Kangwe, I saw some one coming down
+the path towards us, and my friend threw himself into the dense bush
+beside the path so as to give the figure a wide berth. It was the old
+symptom. You see what we object to in this spirit is that one side of
+him is rotting and putrifying, the other sound and healthy, and it all
+depends on which side of him you touch whether you see the dawn again or
+no. Such being the case, and African bush paths being narrow, this
+spirit helps to make evening walks unpopular, for there are places in
+every bush path where, if you meet him, you must brush against
+him--places where the wet season's rains have made the path a narrow
+ditch, with clay incurved walls above your head--places where the path
+turns sharply round a corner--places where it runs between rock walls.
+Such being the case, the risk of rubbing against his rotting side is
+held to be so great that it is best avoided by staying at home in the
+village with your wives and families, and playing the tom-tom or the
+orchid-fibre-stringed harp, or, if you are a bachelor, sitting in the
+village club-house listening to the old ones talking like retired
+Colonels. Yet however this may be, I should hesitate to call this
+half-rotten individual "a material object." Sometimes we had merry
+laughs after these meetings, for he was only So-and-so from the
+village--it was not him. Sometimes we had cold chills down the back, for
+we lost sight of him; under our eyes he went and he left no ash.
+
+Take again Mbuiri of the Mpongwe, who comes in the form usually of a
+man; or Nkala, who comes as a crab; or the great Nzambi of the
+Fjort--they leave no ash--and so on. This subject of apparition-forms is
+a very interesting one, and requires more investigation. For such gods
+as Nzambi Mpungu do not appear to human beings on earth at all, except
+in tempest and pestilence. The great gods next in order leave no ash.
+The witch, if he or she be destroyed, does leave ash, and the ordinary
+middle and lower class spirits leave the thing they have been in, so
+unaltered by their use of it that no one but a witch doctor can tell
+whether or no it has been possessed by a spirit.
+
+You see therefore Fetish is in a way complex and cannot be got into
+"worship of a material object." There is no worship in West Africa of a
+material not so possessed, for material objects are regarded as in
+themselves so low down in the scale of things that nothing of the human
+grade would dream of worshipping them. Moreover, apart from these
+apparitions, I do not think you can accurately use the word Fetish in
+its restricted sense to include the visions seen by witch-doctors, or
+incantations made of words possessing power in themselves, and yet these
+things are part and parcel of Fetish. In fact, not being a comparative
+ethnologist, but a student of West African religion, I wish to goodness
+those comparative ethnologists would get another word of their own,
+instead of using our own old West Coast one.
+
+It is, however, far easier to state what Fetish is not, than to state
+what it is. Although a Darwinian to the core, I doubt if evolution in a
+neat and tidy perpendicular line, with Fetish at the bottom and
+Christianity at the top, represents the true state of things. It seems
+to me--I have no authority to fortify my position with, so it is only
+me--that things are otherwise in this matter. That there are lines of
+development in religious ideas, and that no form of religious idea is a
+thing restricted to one race, I will grant; but if you will make a
+scientific use of your imagination, most carefully on the lines laid
+down for that exercise by Professor Tyndall, I think you would see that
+the higher form of the Fetish idea is Brahmanism; and that the highest
+possible form it could attain to is shown by two passages in the works
+of absolutely white people to have already been reached,--first in that
+passage from a poem by an author, whose name I have never known, though
+I have known the lines these five-and-twenty years--
+
+          "God of the granite and the rose,
+          Soul of the lily and the bee,
+          The mighty tide of being flows
+          In countless channels, Lord, from Thee.
+          It springs to life in grass and flowers,
+          Through every range of Being runs,
+          And from Creation's mighty towers,
+          Its glory flames in stars and suns"--
+
+and secondly in this statement by Spinoza--"By the help of God, I mean
+the fixed and unchangeable order of nature, or chain of natural events,
+for I have said before and shown elsewhere that the universal laws of
+nature, according to which all things exist and are determined, are only
+another name for the eternal decrees of God, which always involves
+eternal truth and necessity, so that to say everything happens according
+to natural laws, and to say everything is ordained by the decree and
+ordinance of God, is to say the same thing. Now, since the power in
+nature is identical with the power of God, by which alone all things
+happen and are determined, it follows that whatsoever man as a part of
+nature provides himself with to aid and preserve his existence, or
+whatsoever nature affords him without his help, is given him solely by
+the Divine power acting either through human nature or through external
+circumstances. So whatever human nature can furnish itself with by its
+own efforts to preserve its existence may be fitly termed the inward aid
+of God, whereas whatever else accrues to man's profit from outward
+causes may be called the external aid of God."[14]
+
+Now both these utterances are magnificent Fetish, and because I accept
+them as true, I have said I neither believe nor disbelieve in Fetish. I
+could quote many more passages from acknowledged philosophers,
+particularly from Goethe. If you want, for example, to understand the
+position of man in Nature according to Fetish, there is, as far as I
+know, no clearer statement of it made than is made by Goethe in his
+superb _Prometheus_. By all means read it, for you cannot know how
+things really stand until you do.
+
+This was brought home to me very keenly when I was first out in West
+Africa. I had made friends with a distinguished witch doctor, or, more
+correctly speaking, he had made friends with me. I was then living in a
+deserted house the main charm of which was that it was the house that
+Mr. H. M. Stanley had lived in while he was waiting for a boat home
+after his first crossing Africa. This charm had not kept the house tidy,
+and it was a beetlesome place by day, while after nightfall, if you
+wanted to see some of the best insect society in Africa, and have
+regular Walpurgis all round, you had only got to light a lamp; but these
+things were advantageous to an insect collector like myself, therefore I
+lodge no complaint against the firm of traders to whom that house
+belongs. Well, my friend the witch doctor used to call on me, and I
+apologetically confess I first thought his interest in me arose from
+material objects. I wronged that man in thought, as I have many others,
+for one night, about 11 p.m., I heard a pawing at the shutters--my
+African friends don't knock. I got up and opened the door, and there he
+was. I made some observations, which I regret now, about tobacco at that
+time of night, and he said, "No. You be big man, suppose pusson sick?" I
+acknowledged the soft impeachment. "Pusson sick too much; pusson live
+for die. You fit for come?" "Fit," said I. "Suppose you come, you no
+fit to talk?" said he. "No fit," said I, with a shrewd notion it was one
+of my Portuguese friends who was ill and who did not want a blazing
+blister on, a thing that was inevitable if you called in the local
+regular white medical man, so, picking up a medicine-case, I went out
+into the darkness with my darker friend. After getting outside the
+closed ground he led the way towards the forest, and I thought it was
+some one sick at the Roman Catholic mission. On we went down the path
+that might go there; but when we got to where you turn off for it, he
+took no heed, but kept on, and then away up over a low hill and down
+into deeper forest still, I steering by his white cloth. But Africa is
+an alarming place to walk about in at night, both for a witch doctor who
+believes in all his local forest devils, and a lady who believes in all
+the local material ones, so we both got a good deal chipped and frayed
+and frightened one way and another; but nothing worse happened than our
+walking up against a python, which had thoughtfully festooned himself
+across the path, out of the way of ground ants, to sleep off a heavy
+meal. My eminent friend, in the inky darkness and his hurry to reach his
+patient, failed to see this, and went fair up against it. I, being close
+behind, did ditto. Then my leader ducked under the excited festoon and
+went down the path at headlong speed, with me after him, alike terrified
+at losing sight of his guiding cloth and at the python, whom we heard
+going away into the bush with that peculiar-sounding crackle a big snake
+gives when he is badly hurried.
+
+Finally we reached a small bush village, and on the ground before one of
+the huts was the patient extended, surrounded by unavailing, wailing
+women. He was suffering from a disease common in West Africa, but
+amenable to treatment by European drugs, which I gave to the medical
+man, who gave them to his patient with proper incantations and a few
+little things of his own that apparently did not hinder their action. As
+soon as the patient had got relief, my friend saw me home, and when we
+got in, I said, Why did you do this, that and the other, as is usual
+with me, and he sat down, looked far away, and talked for an hour,
+softly, wordily and gently; and the gist of what that man talked was
+Goethe's _Prometheus_. I recognised it after half an hour, and when he
+had done, said, "You got that stuff from a white man." "No, sir," he
+said, "that no be white man fash, that be country fash, white man no fit
+to savee our fash." "Aren't they, my friend?" I said; and we parted for
+the night, I the wiser for it, he the richer.
+
+Now, I pray you, do not think I am saying that there is a "wisdom
+religion" in Fetish, or anything like that, or that Fetish priests are
+Spinozas and Goethes--far from it. All that it seems to me to be is a
+perfectly natural view of Nature, and one that, if you take it up with
+no higher form of mind in you than a shrewd, logical one alone, will, if
+you carry it out, lead you necessarily to paint a white chalk rim round
+one eye, eat your captive, use Woka incantations for diseases, and dance
+and howl all night repeatedly, to the awe of your fellow-believers, and
+the scandal of Mohammedan gentlemen who have a revealed religion.
+
+Moreover, the mind-form which gets hold of this truth that is in all
+things, makes a great difference in the form in which the religion works
+out. For instance, to a superficial observer, it would hardly seem
+possible that a Persian and a Mahdist were followers of the same
+religion, or that a Spaniard and an English Broad Churchman were so.
+And yet it seems to me that it is only this class of difference that
+exists between the African, the Brahmanist, and the Shintoist.
+
+Another and more fundamental point to be considered is the influence of
+physical environment on religions, particularly these Nature religions.
+
+The Semitic mind, which had never been kept quite in its proper place by
+Natural difficulties, gave to man in the scheme of Creation a
+pre-eminence that deeply influences Europeans, who have likewise not
+been kept in their place owing to the environments of the temperate
+zone. On the other hand, the African race has had about the worst set of
+conditions possible to bring out the higher powers of man. He has been
+surrounded by a set of terrific natural phenomena, combined with a good
+food supply and a warm and equable climate. These things are not enough
+in themselves to account for his low-culture condition, but they are
+factors that must be considered. Then, undoubtedly, the nature of the
+African's mind is one of the most important points. It may seem a
+paradox to say of people who are always seeing visions that they are not
+visionaries; but they are not.
+
+The more you know the African, the more you study his laws and
+institutions, the more you must recognise that the main characteristic
+of his intellect is logical, and you see how in all things he uses this
+absolutely sound but narrow thought-form. He is not a dreamer nor a
+doubter; everything is real, very real, horribly real to him. It is
+impossible for me to describe it clearly, but the quality of the African
+mind is strangely uniform. This may seem strange to those who read
+accounts of wild and awful ceremonials, or of the African's terror at
+white man's things; but I believe you will find all people experienced
+in dealing with uncultured Africans will tell you that this alarm and
+brief wave of curiosity is merely external, for the African knows the
+moment he has time to think it over, what that white man's thing really
+is, namely, either a white man's Juju or a devil.
+
+It is this power of being able logically to account for everything that
+is, I believe, at the back of the tremendous permanency of Fetish in
+Africa, and the cause of many of the relapses into it by Africans
+converted to other religions; it is also the explanation of the fact
+that white men who live in districts where death and danger are everyday
+affairs, under a grim pall of boredom, are liable to believe in Fetish,
+though ashamed of so doing. For the African, whose mind has been soaked
+in Fetish during his early most impressionable years, the voice of
+Fetish is almost irresistible when affliction comes on him. Sudden
+dangers or terror he can face with his new religion, because he is not
+quick at thinking. But give him time to think when under the hand of
+adversity, and the old explanation that answered it all comes back. I
+know no more distressing thing than to see an African convert brought
+face to face with that awful thing we are used to, the problem of an
+omnipotent God and a suffering world. This does not worry the African
+convert until it hits him personally in grief and misery. When it does,
+and he turns and calls upon the God he has been taught will listen, pity
+and answer, his use of what the scoffers at the converted African call
+"catch phrases" is horribly heartrending to me, for I know how real,
+terribly real, the whole thing is to him, and I therefore see the
+temptation to return to those old gods--gods from whom he never expected
+pity, presided over by a god that does not care. All that he had to do
+with them was not to irritate them, to propitiate them, to buy their
+services when wanted, and, above all, to dodge and avoid them, while he
+fought it out and managed devils at large. Risky work, but a man is as
+good as a devil any day if he only takes proper care; and even if any
+devil should get him unaware--kill him bodily--he has the satisfaction
+of knowing he will have the power to make it warm for that devil when
+they meet on the other side.
+
+There is something alluring in this, I think, to any make of human mind,
+but particularly so to the logical, intensely human one possessed by the
+West African. Therefore, when wearied and worn out by confronting things
+that he cannot reconcile, and disappointed by unanswered prayers, he
+turns back to his old belief entirely, or modifies the religion he has
+been taught until it fits in with Fetish, and is gradually absorbed by
+it.
+
+It is often asked whether Christianity or Mohammedanism is to possess
+Africa--as if the choice of Fate lay between these two things alone. I
+do not think it is so, at least it is not wise for a mere student to
+ignore the other thing in the affair, Fetish, which is as it were a sea
+wherein all things suffer a sea change. For remember it is not
+Christianity alone that becomes tinged with Fetish, or gets engulfed and
+dominated by it. Islam, when it strikes the true heart of Africa, the
+great Forest Belt region, fares little better though it is more recent
+than Christianity, and though it is preached by men who know the make of
+the African mind. Islam is in its blüth-period now in all the open
+parts, even on the desert regions of Africa from its Mediterranean shore
+to below the Equator, but so far it has beaten up against the Forest
+Belt like a sea on a sand beach. It has crossed the Forest Belt by the
+Lakes, it has penetrated it in channels, but in those channels the
+waters of Islam are, recent as their inroad there is, brackish.
+
+Therefore I make no pretence at prophesying which of these great
+revealed religions will ultimately possess Africa; but it is an
+interesting point to notice what has been the reason of the great power
+of immediate appeal to the African which they both possess.
+
+The African has a great over-God, and below him lesser spirits,
+including man; but the African has not in West Africa, nor so far as I
+have been able to ascertain elsewhere in the whole Continent, a God-man,
+a thing that directly connects man with the great over-God. This thing
+appeals to the African when it is presented to him by Christianity and
+Islam.
+
+It is, I am quite aware, not doctrinally true to say that Islam offers
+him a God-man, nevertheless in Mohammed practically it does so, and that
+too in a more easily believable form--by easily I do not mean that it is
+necessarily true. Moreover it minimises the danger of death in a more
+definite way, more in keeping with his own desires, and it is more
+reconcilable with his conscience in the treatment of life as he has to
+live it. Most of the higher class Africans are traders. Islam gives an
+easier, clearer line of rectitude to a trader than its great rival in
+Africa--under African conditions.
+
+There are many who will question whether conscience is a sufficiently
+large factor in an African mind for us to think of taking it into
+account, but whether you call it conscience, or religious bent, or fear,
+the factor is a large one. An African cannot say, as so many Europeans
+evidently easily can, "Oh, that is all right from a religious point of
+view, but one must be practical, you know"; and it is this factor that
+makes me respect the African deeply and sympathise with him, for I have
+this same unmanageable hindersome thing in my own mind, which you can
+call anything you like; I myself call it honour. Now conscience when
+conditioned by Christianity is an exceedingly difficult thing for a
+trader to manage satisfactorily to himself. A mass of compromises have
+to be made with the world, and a man who is always making compromises
+gets either sick of them or sick of the thing that keeps on nagging at
+him about them, or he becomes merely gaseous-minded all round. There are
+some few in all races of men who can think comfortably
+
+          "That conscience, like a restive horse,
+          Will stumble if you check his course,
+          But ride him with an easy rein,
+          And rub him down with worldly gain,
+          He'll carry you through thick and thin,
+          Safe, although dirty, 'till you win,"
+
+but such men are in Africa a very small minority, and so it falls out
+that most men engaged in trade revert to Fetish, or become lax as Church
+members, or embrace Islam.
+
+I think, if you will consider the case, you will see that the
+workability of Islam is one of the chief reasons of its success in
+Africa. It is, from many African points of view, a most inconvenient
+religion, with its Rahmadhizan, bound every now and again to come in the
+height of the dry season; its restrictions on alcoholic drinks and
+gambling; but, on the whole it is satisfying to the African conscience.
+Moreover, like Christianity, it lifts man into a position of paramount
+importance in Creation. He is the thing God made the rest for. I have
+often heard Africans say, "It does a man good to know God loves him; it
+makes him proud too much." Well, at any rate it is pleasanter than
+Fetish, where man, in company with a host of spirits, is fighting for
+his own hand, in an arena before the gods, eternally.
+
+We will now turn to the consideration of the status of the human soul in
+pure Fetish, that is to say in Fetish that is common to all the
+different schools of West African Fetishism.
+
+What strikes a European when studying it is the lack of gaps between
+things. To the African there is perhaps no gap between the conception of
+spirit and matter, animate or inanimate. It is all an affair of
+grade--not of essential difference in essence. At the head of existence
+are those beings who can work without using matter, either as a constant
+associate or as an occasional tool--do it all themselves, as an African
+would say. Beneath this grade there are many grades of spirits, who
+occasionally or habitually, as in the case of the human grade, are
+associated with matter, and at the lower end of the scale is what we
+call matter, but which I believe the West African regards as the same
+sort of stuff as the rest, only very low--so low that practically it
+doesn't matter; but it is spirits, the things that cause all motion, all
+difficulties, dangers and calamities, that do matter and must be thought
+about, for they are _real_ things whether "they live for thing" or no.
+
+The African and myself are also in a fine fog about form, but I will
+spare you that point, for where that thing comes from, often so quickly
+and silently, and goes, often so quickly and silently, too, under our
+eyes, everlastingly, that thing on which we all so much depend at every
+moment of our lives, that thing we are quite as conscious of as light
+and darkness, heat or cold, yet which makes a thing no heavier in one
+shape than in another,--is altogether too large a subject to touch on
+now. Yet, remember it is a most important part of practical Fetish, for
+on it depends divination and heaps of such like matters, that are parts
+of both the witch doctor and the Fetish priest's daily work.
+
+One of the fundamental doctrines of Fetish is that the connection of a
+certain spirit with a certain mass of matter, a material object, is not
+permanent; the African will point out to you a lightning-stricken tree
+and tell you that its spirit has been killed; he will tell you when the
+cooking pot has gone to bits that it has lost its spirit; if his weapon
+fails it is because some one has stolen or made sick its spirit by means
+of witchcraft. In every action of his daily life he shows you how he
+lives with a great, powerful spirit world around him. You will see him
+before starting out to hunt or fight rubbing medicine into his weapons
+to strengthen the spirits within them, talking to them the while;
+telling them what care he has taken of them, reminding them of the gifts
+he has given them, though those gifts were hard for him to give, and
+begging them in the hour of his dire necessity not to fail him. You will
+see him bending over the face of a river talking to its spirit with
+proper incantations, asking it when it meets a man who is an enemy of
+his to upset his canoe or drown him, or asking it to carry down with it
+some curse to the village below which has angered him, and in a thousand
+other ways he shows you what he believes if you will watch him
+patiently.
+
+It is a very important point in the study of pure Fetish to gain a clear
+conception of this arrangement of things in grades. As far as I have
+gone I think I may say fourteen classes of spirits exist in Fetish. Dr.
+Nassau of Gaboon thinks that the spirits commonly affecting human
+affairs can be classified fairly completely into six classes.[15]
+
+Regarding the Fetish view of the state and condition of the human soul
+there are certain ideas that I think I may safely say are common to the
+various cults of Fetish, both Negro and Bantu, in Western Africa.
+Firstly, the class of spirits that are human souls always remain human
+souls. They do not become deified, nor do they sink in grade. I am aware
+that here I am on dangerous ground so I am speaking carefully.[16] An
+eminent authority, when criticising my statements,[17] dwelt upon their
+heterodoxy on this point, saying however, "We may throw out the
+conjecture that in remote and obscure West Africa men do not reach the
+necessary pitch of renown for mighty deeds or sanctity that qualifies
+them in larger countries for elevation after death to high places among
+recognised divinities."
+
+This conjecture I quite accept as an explanation of the non-deification
+of human beings in West Africa, and I think, taken in conjunction with
+the grade conception, it fairly explains why West Africa has not what
+undoubtedly other regions of the world have in their religions, deified
+ancestors.
+
+After having had my attention drawn to the strangeness of this
+non-deification of ancestors, I did my best to work the subject out in
+order to see if by any chance I had badly observed it. I consulted the
+accounts of West African religions given by Labat, Bosman, Bastian and
+Ellis, and to my great pleasure found that the three first said nothing
+against my statements, and that Sir A. B. Ellis had himself said the
+same thing in his _Ewe Speaking People_. Moreover, I sent a circular
+written on this point to people in West Africa whom I knew had
+opportunities of knowing the facts as at present existing,--the answers
+were unanimous with Ellis and myself.
+
+Nevertheless, mind, you will find something that looks like worship of
+ancestors in West Africa. Only it is no more worship, properly so
+called, than our own deference to our living, elderly, and influential
+relations.
+
+In almost all Western African districts (it naturally does not show
+clearly in those where reincarnation is believed to be the common and
+immediate lot of all human spirits) is a class of spirits called "the
+well disposed ones," and this class is clearly differentiated from
+"them," the generic name used for non-human spirits. These "well
+disposed ones" are ancestors, and they do what they can to benefit their
+particular village or family, acting in conjunction with the village or
+family Fetish, who is not a human spirit, nor an ancestor. But the
+things given to ancestors are gifts, not in the proper sense of the word
+sacrifices, for the well disposed ones are not gods even of the rank of
+a Sasabonsum or an Ombuiri.
+
+In an extremely interesting answer to my inquiries that I received from
+Mr. J. H. Batty, of Cape Coast, who had kindly submitted my questions to
+a native gentleman well versed in affairs, the statement regarding
+ancestors is, "The people believe that the spirits of their departed
+relations exercise a guardian care over them, and they will frequently
+stand over the graves of their deceased friends and invoke their
+spirits to protect them and their children from harm. It is imagined
+that the spirit lingers about the house some time after death. If the
+children are ill the illness is ascribed to the spirit of the deceased
+mother having embraced them. Elderly women are often heard to offer up a
+kind of prayer to the spirit of a departed parent, begging it either to
+go to its rest, or to protect the family by keeping off evil spirits,
+instead of injuring the children or other members of the family by its
+touch. The ghosts of departed enemies are considered by the people as
+bad spirits, who have power to injure them."
+
+In connection with this fear of the ancestor's ghost hurting members of
+its own family, particularly children, I may remark it has several times
+been carefully explained to me that this "touching" comes not from
+malevolence, but from loneliness and the desire to have their company. A
+sentimental but inconvenient desire that the living human cannot give in
+to perpetually, though big men will accede to their ancestor's desire
+for society by killing off people who may serve or cheer him. This
+desire for companionship is of course immensely greater in the spirit
+that is not definitely settled in the society of spiritdom, and it is
+therefore more dangerous to its own belongings, in fact to all living
+society, while it is hanging about the other side of the grave, but this
+side of Hades. Thus I well remember a delicious row that arose primarily
+out of trade matters, but which caused one family to yell at another
+family divers remarks, ending up with the accusation, "You
+good-for-nothing illegitimate offspring of house lizards, you don't bury
+your ditto ditto dead relations, but leave them knocking about anyhow, a
+curse to Calabar." Naturally therefore the spirit of a dead enemy is
+feared because it would touch for the purpose of getting spirit slaves;
+therefore it follows that powerful ancestors are valued when they are on
+the other side, for they can keep off the dead enemies. A great chief's
+spirit is a thoroughly useful thing for a village to keep going, and in
+good order, for it conquered those who are among the dead with it, and
+can keep them under, keep them from aiding their people in the fights
+between its living relations and itself and them, with its slave spirit
+army. I ought to say that it is customary for the living to send the
+dead out ahead of the army, to bear the brunt in the first attack.
+
+Ancestor-esteem you will find at its highest pitch in West Africa under
+the school of Fetish that rules the Tshi and Ewe peoples. Ellis gives
+you a full description of it for Ashanti and Dahomey.[18] The next
+district going down coast is the Yoruba one; but Yoruba has been so long
+under the influence of Mahometanism that its Fetish, judging from
+Ellis's statement in his _Yoruba Speaking People_, is deeply tinged with
+it. I have no personal acquaintance with Yorubaland, but have no
+hesitation for myself in accepting his statements from the accuracy I
+have found them, by personal experience with Tshi and Ewe people, to
+possess. Below Yoruba comes a district, the Oil Rivers, where, alas,
+Ellis did not penetrate, and where no ethnologist, unless you will
+graciously extend the term to me, has ever cautiously worked.
+
+In this district you have a school where reincarnation is strongly
+believed in, a different school of Fetish to that of Tshi and Ewe, a
+class of human ghosts called the well-disposed ones. And these are
+ancestors undoubtedly. They do not show up clearly in those districts
+where reincarnation is believed to be the common lot of all human
+souls. Nevertheless, they are clear enough even there, as I will
+presently attempt to explain.
+
+These ancestor spirits have things given to them for their consolation
+and support, and in return they do what they can to benefit and guard
+their own villages and families. Nevertheless, the things given to the
+well-disposed ones are not as things sacrificed to gods. Nor are the
+well-disposed ones gods, even of the grade of a Sasabonsum or an
+Ombuiri. It is a low down thing to dig up your father--i.e., open his
+grave and take away the things in it that have been given him. It will
+get you cut by respectable people, and rude people when there is a
+market-place row on will mention it freely; but it won't bring on a
+devastating outbreak of small-pox in the whole district.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [10] Of the Divine Law, _Tractatus Theologico Politicus_, Spinoza.
+
+   [11] _Primitive Culture_, E. B. Tylor, p. 144.
+
+   [12] Professor Tylor kindly allowed me to place this statement before
+   him, and he says that as the word Fetish, with the sense of the use
+   of bones, claws, stones, and such objects as receptacles of spiritual
+   influences, has had nearly two centuries of established usage, it
+   would not be easy to set it aside, and he advises me to use the term
+   West African religion, or in some way make my meaning clear without
+   expecting to upset the established nomenclature of comparative
+   ethnology.
+
+   [13] This word is pronounced by the natives and by people knowing them,
+   Cheuwe, as Ellis undoubtedly knew, but presumably he spelt it Tshi to
+   please the authorities.
+
+   [14] _The Vocation of the Hebrews_, Spinoza.
+
+   [15] See _Travels in West Africa_, by M. H. Kingsley. Macmillan & Co.
+   1897.
+
+   [16] For further details see _Travels in West Africa_, p. 444.
+
+   [17] "Origins and Interpretations of Primitive Religions." _Edinburgh
+   Review_, July, 1897, p. 219.
+
+   [18] _The Tshi Speaking, Ewe Speaking and Yoruba Speaking People of
+   West Africa._--A. B. Ellis.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+SCHOOLS OF FETISH
+
+     Wherein the student, thinking things may be made clearer if it be
+     perceived that there are divers schools of Fetish, discourses on
+     the schools of West African religious thought.
+
+
+As I have had occasion to refer to schools of Fetish, and as that is a
+term of my own, I must explain why I use it, and what I mean by it, in
+so far as I am able. When travelling from district to district you
+cannot fail to be struck by the difference in character of the native
+religion you are studying. My own range on the West Coast is from Sierra
+Leone to Loanda; and here and there in places such as the Oil Rivers,
+the Ogowe, and the Lower Congo, I have gone inland into the heart of
+what I knew to be particularly rich districts for an ethnologist. I make
+no pretence to a thorough knowledge of African Fetish in all its
+schools, but I feel sure no wandering student of the subject in Western
+Africa can avoid recognising the existence of at least four distinct
+forms of development of the Fetish idea. They have, every one of them,
+the underlying idea I have attempted to sketch as pure Fetish when
+speaking of the position of the human soul; and yet they differ. And I
+believe much of the confusion which is supposed to exist in African
+religious ideas is a confusion only existing in the minds of cabinet
+ethnologists from a want of recognition of the fact of the existence of
+these schools.
+
+     [Illustration: FANTEE NATIVES OF THE GOLD COAST.
+                     [_To face page 137._]
+
+For example, suppose you take a few facts from Ellis and a few from
+Bastian and mix, and call the mixture West African religion, you do much
+the same sort of thing as if you took bits from Mr. Spurgeon's works,
+and from those of some eminent Jesuit and of a sound Greek churchman,
+and mixed them and labelled it European religion. The bits would be all
+right in themselves, but the mixture would be a quaint affair.
+
+As far as my present knowledge of the matter goes, I should state that
+there were four main schools of West African Fetish: (1) the Tshi and
+Ewe school, Ellis' school; (2) the Calabar school; (3) the Mpongwe
+school; (4) Nkissism or the Fjort school. Subdivisions of these schools
+can easily be made, but I only make the divisions on the different main
+objects of worship, or more properly speaking, the thing each school
+especially endeavours to secure for man. The Tshi and Ewe school is
+mainly concerned with the preservation of life; the Calabar school with
+attempting to enable the soul successfully to pass through death; the
+Mpongwe school with the attainment of material prosperity; while the
+school of Nkissi is mainly concerned with the worship of the mystery of
+the power of Earth--Nkissi-nsi. You will find these divers things
+worshipped, or, rather, I would say cultivated, in all the schools of
+Fetish, but in certain schools certain ideas are predominant. Look at
+Srahmantin of the Tshi people, and at Nzambi of the Fjort. Both these
+ladies know where the animals go to drink, what they say to each other,
+where their towns are, and what not; also they both know what the
+forest says to the wind and the rain, and all the forests' own small
+talk in the bargain, and, therefore, also the inner nature of all these
+things; and both, like other ladies, I have heard prefer gentlemen's
+society. Women they have a tendency to be hard on, but either Srahmantin
+or Nzambi think nothing of taking up a man's time, making him neglect
+his business or his family affairs, or both together, by keeping him in
+the bush for a month or so at a time, teaching him things about
+medicines, and finally sending him back into town in so addlepated a
+condition that for months he hardly knows who he exactly is. When he
+comes round, however, if he has any sense, he sets up in business as a
+medical man; sometimes, however, he just remains merely crackey. Such a
+man was my esteemed Kefalla.
+
+But look how different under different schools is the position of
+Srahmantin and Nzambi. Srahmantin is only propitiated by doctors and
+hunters; by all respectable, busy, family men forced to go through
+forests, she is simply dreaded, while Nzambi, the great Princess,
+entirely dominates the whole school of Nkissism.
+
+From what cause or what series of causes the predominance of these
+different things has come, I do not know, unless it be from different
+natural environment and different race. It is certainly not a mere
+tribal affair, for there are many different tribes under each school.
+For example, I do not think you need make more than a subdivision
+between the Tshi, the Ga or Ogi and the Ewe peoples' Fetish, nor more
+than a subdivision between those of the Eboes and the Ibbibios, or those
+of the Fjort and Mussurongoes; but we want more information before it
+would be quite safe to dogmatise.
+
+It is impossible in the present state of our knowledge to give exact
+geographical limits of the different schools of Fetish, and I therefore
+only sketch their geographical distribution in Western Africa, from
+Sierra Leone to Loanda, hoping thereby to incite further research.
+
+Sierra Leone and its adjacent districts have not been studied by an
+ethnologist. We have only scattered information regarding the religion
+there; and unfortunately the observations we have on it mainly bear on
+the operations of the secret societies, which in these regions have
+attained to much power, and are usually though erroneously grouped under
+the name of Poorah. Poorah, like all secret societies, is intensely
+interesting, for it is the manifestation of the law form of Fetish; but
+secret societies are pure Fetish, and common to all districts. All that
+we can gather from the scattered observations on the rest of the Fetish
+in this region is that it is allied to the Fetish school of the
+Tshi-speaking people.
+
+Next to this unobserved district, we come to the well-observed districts
+of the Tshi, Ewe, and Yoruba-speaking people--Ellis's region.
+
+It may seem unwise for me to attempt to group these three together and
+call them one school, because from this one district we have two
+distinct cults of Fetish in the West Indies, Voudou and Obeah (Tchanga
+and Wanga). Voudou itself is divided into two sects, the white and the
+red--the first, a comparatively harmless one, requiring only the
+sacrifice of, at the most, a white cock or a white goat, whereas the red
+cult only uses the human sacrifice--the goat without horns. Obeah, on
+the other hand, kills only by poison--does not show the blood at all.
+And there is another important difference between Voudou and Obeah, and
+that is that Voudou requires for the celebration of its rites a
+priestess and a priest. Obeah can be worked by either alone, and is not
+tied to the presence of the snake. Both these cults have sprung from
+slaves imported from Ellis's district, Obeah from slaves bought at
+Koromantin mainly, and Voudou from those bought at Dahomey.
+Nevertheless, it seems to me these good people have differentiated their
+religion in the West Indies considerably; for example, in Obeah the
+spider (_anansi_) has a position given it equal to that of the snake in
+Voudou. Now the spider is all very well in West Africa; round him there
+has grown a series of most amusing stories, always to be told through
+the nose, and while you crawl about; but to put him on a plane with the
+snake in Dahomey is absurd; his equivalent there is the turtle, also a
+focus for many tales, only more improper tales, and not half so amusing.
+
+The true importance and status of the snake in Dahomey is a thing hard
+to fix. Personally I believe it to be merely a case of especial
+development of a local ju-ju. We all know what the snake signifies, and
+instances of its attaining a local eminence occur elsewhere. At Creek
+Town, in Calabar, and Brass River it is more than respected. It is an
+accidental result of some bit of history we have lost, like the worship
+of the crocodile at Dixcove and in the Lower Congo. Whereas it is clear
+that the general respect, amounting to seeming worship, of the leopard
+is another affair altogether, for the leopard is the great thing in all
+West African forests, and forests and surf are the great things in
+Western Africa--the lines of perpetual danger to the life of man.
+
+     [Illustration: YORUBA. [_To face page 141._]
+
+But there is a remarkable point that you cannot fail to notice in the
+Fetish of these three divisions of true Negro Fetish studied by
+Ellis, namely, that what is one god in Yoruba you get as several gods
+exercising one particular function in Dahomey, as hundreds of gods on
+the Gold Coast. Moreover, all these gods in all these districts have
+regular priests and priestesses in dozens, while below Yoruba regular
+priests and priestesses are rare. There the officials of the law
+societies abound, and there are Fetish men, but these are different
+people to the priests of Bohorwissi and Tando.
+
+I do not know Yoruba land personally, but have had many opportunities of
+inquiring regarding its Fetish from educated and uneducated natives of
+that country whom I have met down Coast as traders and artisans.
+Therefore, having found nothing to militate against Ellis's statements,
+I accept them for Yoruba as for Dahomey and the Gold Coast; and my great
+regret is that his careful researches did not extend down into the
+district below Yoruba--the district I class under the Calabar
+school--more particularly so because the districts he worked at are all
+districts where there has been a great and long-continued infusion of
+both European and Mohammedan forms of thought, owing to the
+four-hundred-year-old European intercourse on the seaboard, and the even
+older and greater Mohammedan influence from the Western Soudan; whereas
+below these districts you come to a region of pure Negro Fetish that has
+undergone but little infusion of alien thought.
+
+Whether or no to place Benin with Yoruba or with Calabar is a problem.
+There is, no doubt, a very close connection between it and Yoruba. There
+is also no doubt that Benin was in touch, even as late as the
+seventeenth century, with some kingdom of the higher culture away in the
+interior. It may have been Abyssinia, or it may have been one of the
+cultured states that the chaos produced by the Mohammedan invasion of
+the Soudan destroyed. In our present state of knowledge we can only
+conjecture, I venture to think, idly, until we know more. The only thing
+that is certain is that Benin was influenced as is shown by its art
+development. Benin practically broke up long before Ashantee or Dahomey,
+for, as Proyart[19] remarks, "many small kingdoms or native states which
+at the present day share Africa among them were originally provinces
+dependent on other kingdoms, the particular governors of which usurped
+the sovereignty." Benin's north-western provinces seem to have done
+this, possibly with the assistance of the Mohammedanised people who came
+down to the seaboard seeking the advantages of white trade; and Benin
+became isolated in its forest swamps, cut off from the stimulating
+influence of successful wars, and out of touch with the expanding
+influence of commerce, and devoted its attention too much to Fetish
+matters to be healthy for itself or any one who fell in with it. It is
+an interesting point in this connection to observe that we do not find
+in the accounts given by the earlier voyagers to Benin city anything
+like the enormous sacrifice of human life described by visitors to it of
+our own time. Other districts round Calabar, Bonny, Opobo, and so on,
+have human sacrifice as well, but they show no signs of being under
+Benin in trade matters, in which Benin used to be very strict when it
+had the chance. In fact, whatever respect they had for Benin was a
+sentimental one, such as the King of Kongo has, and does not take the
+practical form of paying taxes.
+
+The extent of the direct influence of Benin away into the forest belt to
+the east and south I do not think at any time was great. Benin was
+respected because it was regarded as possessing a big Fetish and great
+riches. In recent years it was regarded by people discontented with
+white men as their great hope, from its power to resist these being
+greater than their own. Nevertheless, the adjacent kingdom of Owarie
+(Warri), even in the sixteenth century, was an independent kingdom. So
+different was its Fetish from that of Benin that Warri had not then, and
+has not to this day, human sacrifice in its religious observances, only
+judicial and funeral killings.
+
+Considering how very easily Africans superficially adopt the religious
+ideas of alien people with whom they have commercial intercourse, we
+must presume that the people who imported the art of working in metals
+into Benin also imported some of their religion. The relics of religion,
+alien to Fetish, that show in Benin Fetish are undoubtedly Christian.
+Whether these relics are entirely those of the Portuguese Roman Catholic
+missions, or are not also relics of some earlier Christian intercourse
+with Western Soudan Christianised states existing prior to the
+Mohammedan invasion of Northern Africa, is again a matter on which we
+require more information. But just as I believe some of the metal
+articles found in Benin to be things made in Birmingham, some to be old
+Portuguese, some to be native castings, copies of things imported from
+that unknown inland state, and some to be the original inland state
+articles themselves, so do I believe the relics of Christianity in the
+Fetish to be varied in origin, all alike suffering absorption by the
+native Fetish.
+
+There is no doubt that up to the last twenty years the three great
+Fetish kings in Western Africa were those of Ashantee, Dahomey, and
+Benin. Each of these kings was alike believed by the whole of the people
+to have great Fetish power in his own locality. In the time of which we
+have no historical record--prior to the visits of the first white
+voyagers in the fifteenth century--there is traditional record of the
+King of Benin fighting with his cousin of Dahomey. Possibly Dahomey beat
+him badly; anyhow something went seriously wrong with Benin as a
+territorial kingdom, before its discovery by modern Europe.
+
+I now turn to the Fetish of the Oil Rivers which I have called the
+Calabar school. The predominance of the belief there in reincarnation
+seems to me sufficient to separate it from the Gold Coast and Dahomey
+Fetish. Funeral customs, important in all Negro Fetish, become in the
+Calabar school exceedingly so. A certain amount of care anywhere is
+necessary to successfully establish the human soul after death, for the
+human soul strongly objects to leaving material pleasures and
+associations and going to, at best, an uninteresting under-world; but
+when you have not only got to send the soul down, but to bring it back
+into the human form again, and not any human form at that, but one of
+its own social status and family, the thing becomes more complicated
+still; and to do it so engrosses human attention, and so absorbs human
+wealth, that you do not find under the Calabar school a multitude of
+priest-served gods as you do in Dahomey and on the Gold Coast. Mind you,
+so far as I could make out while in the Calabar districts myself, the
+equivalents of those same gods, were quite believed in; but they were
+neglected in a way that would have caused them in Dahomey, where they
+have been taught to fancy themselves to wreck the place. Not only is
+care taken to send a soul down, but means are taken to see whether or no
+it has duly returned; for keeping a valuable soul, like that of a great
+Fetish proficient who could manage outside spirits, or that of a good
+trader, is a matter of vital importance to the prosperity of the Houses,
+so when such a soul has left the House in consequence of some sad
+accident or another, or some vile witchcraft, the babies that arrive to
+the House are closely watched. Assortments of articles belonging to
+deceased members of the house are presented to it, and then, according
+to the one it picks out, it is decided who that baby really is--See,
+Uncle so-and-so knows his own pipe, &c.--and I have often heard a mother
+reproaching a child for some fault say, "Oh, we made a big mistake when
+we thought you were so-and-so." I must say I think the absence of the
+idea of the deification of ancestors in West Africa shows up
+particularly strongly in the Calabar school, for herein you see so
+clearly that the dead do not pass into a higher, happier state--that the
+soul separate from the body is only a part of that thing we call a human
+being, and in West Africa the whole is greater than a part, even in this
+matter.
+
+     [Illustration: A CALABAR CHIEF. [_To face page 145._]
+
+The pathos of the thing, when you have grasped the underlying idea, is
+so deep that the strangeness of it passes away, and you almost forget to
+hate the horrors of the slaughter that hang round Oil River funeral
+customs, or, at any rate, you understand the tenacity you meet with here
+of the right to carry out killing at funerals, a greater tenacity than
+confronted us in Gold Coast or Dahomey regions, because a different idea
+is involved in the affair. On the Gold Coast, for example, you can
+substitute wealth for the actual human victim, because with wealth the
+dead soul could, after all, make itself comfortable in Srahmandazi, but
+not so in the Rivers. Without slaves, wives, and funds, how can the dead
+soul you care for speak with the weight of testimony of men as to its
+resting place or position? Rolls of velvet or satin, and piles of
+manillas or doubloons alone cannot speak; besides, they may have been
+stolen stuff, and the soul you care for may be put down by the
+authorities as a mere thieving slave, a sort of mere American gold bug
+trying to pass himself off as a duke--or a descendant of General
+Washington--which would lead to that soul being disgraced and sent back
+in a vile form. Think how you yourself, if in comfortable circumstances,
+belonging to a family possessing wealth and power, would like father,
+mother, sister, or brother of yours who by this change of death had just
+left these things, to go down through death, and come back into life in
+a squalid slum!
+
+We meet in this school, however, with a serious problem--namely, what
+does become of dead chiefs? It is a point I will not dogmatise on, but
+it certainly looks as if the Calabar under-world was a most aristocratic
+spot, peopled entirely by important chiefs and the retinues sent down
+with them--by no means having the fine mixed society of Srahmandazi.
+
+The Oil River deceased chief is clearly kept as a sort of pensioner. The
+chief who succeeds him in his headship of the House is given to "making
+his father" annually. It is not necessarily his real father that he
+makes, but his predecessor in the headmanship--a slave succeeding to a
+free man would "make his father" to the dead free man, and so on. This
+function undoubtedly consists in sending his predecessor a big subsidy
+for his support, and consolation in the shape of slaves and goods. I may
+as well own I have long had a dark suspicion regarding this matter--a
+suspicion as to where those goods went. Their proper destination, of
+course, should be the under-world. Thither undoubtedly on the Gold Coast
+they would go; but when sent in the Rivers I do not think they go so
+far. In fact, to make a clean breast of it, I do not believe big chiefs
+are properly buried in the Oil Rivers at all. I think they are, for
+political purposes, kept hanging about outside life, but not inside
+death, by their diplomatic successors. I feel emboldened to say this by
+what my friend, Major Leonard, Vice-Consul of the Niger Coast
+Protectorate, recently told me. When he was appointed Vice-Consul, and
+was introducing himself to his chiefs in this capacity, one chief he
+visited went aside to a deserted house, opened the door, and talked to
+somebody inside; there was not any one in material form inside, only the
+spirit of his deceased predecessor, and all the things left just as they
+were when he died; the live chief was telling the dead chief that the
+new Consul was come, &c.
+
+The reason, that is the excuse, for this seemingly unprincipled conduct
+in not properly burying the chief, so that he may be reincarnated to a
+complete human form, lies in the fact that he would be a political
+nuisance to his successor if he came back promptly; therefore he is kept
+waiting.
+
+From first-class native informants I have had fragments of accounts of
+making-father ceremonies. Particularly interesting have been their
+accounts of what the live chief says to the dead one. Much of it, of
+course, is, for diplomatic reasons, not known outside official circles.
+But the general tone of these communications is well known to be of a
+nature to discourage the dead chief from returning, and to reconcile
+him to his existing state. Things are not what they were here. The price
+of oil is down, women are ten times more frivolous, slaves ten times
+more trying, white Consul men abound, also their guns are more deadly
+than of old, this new Consul looks worse than the last, there is nothing
+but war and worry for a chief nowadays. The whole country is going to
+the dogs financially and domestically, in fact, and you are much better
+off where you are. Then come petitions for such help as the ghost chief
+and his ghost retinue can give.
+
+This, I think, explains why chiefs' funeral customs in the Rivers differ
+in kind, not merely in grade, from those of big trade boys or other
+important people, and also accounts for their repetition at intervals.
+Big trade boys, and the slaves and women sent down with them, return to
+a full human form more or less promptly; mere low grade slaves, slaves
+that cannot pull a canoe, _i.e._, provide a war canoe for the service of
+the House out of their own private estate, are not buried at all--they
+are thrown away, unless they have a mother who will bury them. They will
+come back again all right as slaves, but then that is all they are fit
+for.
+
+Then we have left very interesting sections of the community to consider
+from a funeral rite point of view--namely, those in human form who are
+not, strictly speaking, human beings, and those who, though human, have
+committed adultery with spirits--women who bear twins or who die in
+child-birth. These sinners, I may briefly remark, are neither buried nor
+just thrown away; they are, as far as possible, destroyed. But with the
+former class the matter is slightly different. Children, for example,
+that arrive with ready cut teeth, will in a strict family be killed or
+thrown away in the bush to die as they please; but the feeling against
+them is not really keen. They may, if the mother chooses to be bothered
+with them, be reared; but the interesting point is that any property
+they may acquire during life has no legal heir whatsoever. It must be
+dissipated, thrown away. This shows clearly that such individuals are
+not human, and, moreover, they are not buried nor destroyed at death;
+they are just thrown away. There is no particular harm in them as there
+is in the sin-stained twins.
+
+The only class in West Africa I have found that are like these spirit
+humans is that strange class, the minstrels. I wish I knew more about
+these people. Were it not that Mr. F. Swanzy possesses material evidence
+of their existence, in the shape of the most superb song-net, I should
+hesitate to mention them at all. Some of my French friends, however,
+tell me they have seen them in Senegal, and I venture to think that
+region must be their headquarters. I have seen one in Accra, one in
+Sierra Leone, two on board steamers, and one in Buana town, Cameroon.
+Briefly, these are minstrels who frequent market towns, and for a fee
+sing stories. Each minstrel has a song-net--a strongly made net of a
+fishing net sort. On to this net are tied all manner and sorts of
+things, pythons' back bones, tobacco pipes, bits of china, feathers,
+bits of hide, birds' heads, reptiles' heads, bones, &c., &c., and to
+every one of these objects hangs a tale. You see your minstrel's net,
+you select an object and say how much that song. He names an exorbitant
+price; you haggle; no good. He won't be reasonable, say over the python
+bone, so you price the tobacco pipe--more haggle; finally you settle on
+some object and its price, and sit down on your heels and listen with
+rapt attention to the song, or, rather, chant. You usually have
+another. You sort of dissipate in novels, in fact. I do not say it's
+quiet reading, because unprincipled people will come headlong and listen
+when you have got your minstrel started, without paying their
+subscription. Hence a row, unless you are, like me, indifferent to other
+people having a little pleasure.
+
+These song-nets, I may remark, are not of a regulation size. I have
+never seen on the West Coast anything like so superb a collection of
+stories as Mr. Swanzy has tied on that song-net of his--Woe is me!
+without the translating minstrel, a cycle of dead songs that must have
+belonged to a West African Shakespeare. The most impressive song-net
+that I saw was the one at Buana. Its owner I called Homer on the spot,
+because his works were a terrific two. Tied on to his small net were a
+human hand and a human jaw bone. They were his only songs. I heard them
+both regardless of expense. I did not understand them, because I did not
+know his language; but they were fascinating things, and the human hand
+one had a passage in it which caused the singer to crawl on his hands
+and knees, round and round, stealthily looking this side and that,
+giving the peculiar leopard questing cough, and making the leopard mark
+on the earth with his doubled-up fist. Ah! that was something like a
+song! It would have roused a rock to enthusiasm; a civilised audience
+would have smothered its singer with bouquets. I--well, the headman with
+me had to interfere and counsel moderation in heads of tobacco.
+
+But what I meant to say about these singers was only this. They are not
+buried as other people are; they are put into trees when they are
+dead--may be because they are "all same for one" with those singers the
+birds. I do not know, I only hope Homer is still extant, and that
+some more intelligent hearer than I will meet with him.
+
+     [Illustration: NATIVES OF GABOON. [_To face page 151._]
+
+The southern boundary of the Calabar school of Fetish lies in narrower
+regions than the boundary between it and Ellis's school in the north. I
+venture to think that this may in a measure arise from there being in
+the southern region the additional element of difference of race. For
+immediately below Calabar in the Cameroon territory the true Negro meets
+the Bantu. In Cameroon in the tribes of the Dualla stem we have a people
+speaking a Bantu language, and having a Bantu culture, yet nevertheless
+having a great infusion of pure Negro blood, and largely under the
+dominion of the true Negro thought form.
+
+I own that of all the schools of Fetish that I know, the Calabar school
+is the one that fascinates me most. I like it better than Ellis's
+school, wherein the fate of the soul after death is a life in a shadow
+land, with shadows for friends, lovers, and kinsfolk, with the shadows
+of joys for pleasures, the shadows of quarrels for hate--a thing that at
+its best is inferior to the wretchedest full-life on earth. Yet this
+settled shadow-land of Srahmandazi or Gboohiadse is a better thing than
+the homeless drifting state of the soul in the school below
+Calabar--namely, the school I have ventured to term the Mpongwe school.
+To the brief consideration of this school we will now turn.
+
+In between the strongly-marked Calabar school and the strongly-marked
+school of Nkissism of Loango Kacongo, and Bas Congo there exists a
+school plainly differing from both. This region is interesting for many
+reasons, chief amongst which is that it is the sea-board region of the
+great African Forest belt. Tribe after tribe come down into it, flourish
+awhile, and die, uninfluenced by Mohammedan or European culture. The
+Mohammedans in Africa as aforesaid have never mastered the western
+region of the forest belt; and the Europeans have never, in this region
+between Cameroon and Loango, established themselves in force. It is
+undoubtedly the wildest bit of West Africa.
+
+The dominant tribes here have, for as far back as we can get
+evidence--some short four hundred years--been tribes of the Mpongwe
+stem--the so-called noble tribes. To-day they are dying--going off the
+face of the earth, leaving behind them nothing to bear testimony in this
+world to their great ability, save the most marvellously beautiful
+language, the Greek of Africa, as Dr. Nassau calls it, and the impress
+of their more elaborate thought-form on the minds of the bush tribes
+that come into contact with them. Their last pupils are the great
+Bafangh, now supplanting them in the regions of the Bight of Panavia.
+
+From their influence I think the school of Fetish of this region is
+perhaps best called the Mpongwe school, though I do not altogether like
+the term, because I believe the Mpongwe stem to be in origin pure Negro,
+and the Fetish school they have elaborated and co-ordinated is Bantu in
+thought-form, just as the language they have raised to so high a pitch
+of existence is in itself a Bantu language. Yet the Mpongwe are rulers
+of both these things, and they will thereby leave imprinted on the minds
+of their supplanters in the land the mark of their intelligence.
+
+I have said the predominant idea in this Mpongwe school is the securing
+of material prosperity. That is to say this is the part of pure Fetish
+that receives more attention than other parts of pure Fetish in this
+school; but it attains to no such definite predominance as funeral rites
+do in the Calabar school, or the preservation of life in Ellis's
+school. One might, however, quite fairly call the Mpongwe school the
+trade-charm school, great as trade charms are in all West African
+Fetish.
+
+This lack of a predominance sufficient to dwarf other parts of pure
+Fetish makes the Mpongwe school particularly interesting and valuable to
+a student; it is a magnificent school to study your pure Fetish in, as
+none of it is here thrown by a predominant factor into the background of
+thought, and left in a neglected state.
+
+It is of this school that you will find Dr. Nassau's classification of
+spirits, and all the other observations of his that I have quoted of
+things absolutely believed in by the natives, and also all the Mpongwe,
+Benga, Igalwa, Ncomi, and Fetish I have attempted to describe.[20]
+
+It has no gods with proper priests. Human beings are here just doing
+their best to hold their own with the spirit world, getting spirits
+under their control as far as possible, and dealing with the rest of
+them diplomatically. This state I venture to think is Fetish in a very
+early form, a form through which the now elaborate true Negro Fetish
+must have passed before reaching its present co-ordinated state. How
+long ago it was when the true Negro was in this stage I will not venture
+to conjecture. Sir Henry Maine, of whom I am a very humble follower,
+says, "Nothing moves that is not Greek." This is a hard saying to
+accept, but the truth of it grows on you when you are studying things
+such as these, and you are forced to acknowledge that they at any rate
+have a slow rate of development--sometimes indeed it seems that there is
+a mere wave motion of thought among all men rising here and there when
+in the hands of superior tribes, like the Mpongwe for example, to a
+wave crest destined on their extinction to fall again. Now and again as
+a storm on the sea, the impulse of a revealed religion sweeps down on to
+this ocean of nature philosophy, elevates it or confuses it according to
+the initial profundity of it. If you have ever seen the difference
+between a deep sea storm and an esturial storm, you will know what I
+mean. Yet this has nothing to do with the truth or falsity of the Fetish
+thought-form, but merely has a bearing on the quality of the minds that
+deal with it, as it must on all minds not under the influence of a
+revealed religion; and I now turn, in conclusion of this brief
+consideration of the schools of Fetish in West Africa, to the next
+school to the Mpongwe, namely, the school of Nkissism. I need not go
+into details concerning it here; you have them at your command in the
+two great works of Bastian, _An Expedition under Loango Küste und Besuch
+in San Salvador_, and in Mr. R. E. Dennett's _Folk Lore of the Fjorts_,
+published by the liberality of the Folk Lore Society, and also his
+former book, _Seven Years among the Fjorts_.[21]
+
+     [Illustration: FJORT NATIVES OF KACONGO AND LOANGO.
+                     [_To face page 155._]
+
+The predominant feature in this school is undoubtedly the extra
+recognition given to the mystery of the power of the earth, Nkissi 'nsi.
+Here you find the earth goddess Nzambi the paramount feature in the
+Fetish; from her the Fetish priests have their knowledge of the proper
+way to manage and communicate with lower earth spirits, round her circle
+almost all the legends, in her lies the ultimate human hope of help and
+protection. Nzambi is too large a subject for us to enter into here. She
+is the great mother, but she is not absolute in power. She is not one of
+the forms of the great unheeding over-lord of gods, like Nyankupong,
+or Abassi-boom; the equivalent to him, is her husband Nzambi Mpungu,
+among the followers of Nkissism; but the predominance given in this
+school to the great Princess Nzambi has had two effects that must be
+borne in mind in studying the region from Loango to the south bank of
+Congo. Firstly, it apparently led to Nzambi being confused by the
+natives with the Holy Virgin, when they were under the tuition of the
+Roman Catholic missionaries during the sixteenth and seventeenth
+centuries; hence Nzambi's cult requires to be studied with the greatest
+care at the present day. Secondly, partly in consequence of the native
+predominance given to her, and partly in the predominance she has gained
+from the aforesaid confusion, women have a very singular position, a
+superior one to that which they have in other schools; this you will see
+by reading the stories collected by Mr. Dennett. I will speak no further
+now concerning these schools of Fetish, for Nkissism is the most
+southern of the West African schools, its domain extending over the
+whole of the regions once forming the kingdom of Kongo down to Angola.
+Below Angola, on the West Coast, you come to the fringing zone of the
+Kalahi desert, and to those interesting people the Bushmen, of whose
+religion I am unable, with any personal experience, to speak. Below them
+you strike South Africa. South Africa is South Africa; West Africa is
+West Africa. Of the former I know nothing, of the latter alas! only a
+tenth part of what I should wish to know, so I return to pure Fetish and
+to its bearing on witchcraft.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [19] _History of Loango_, by the Abbé Proyart, 1776. Pinkerton, vol.
+   xvi., p. 587.
+
+   [20] _Travels in West Africa._ Fetish Chapters.
+
+   [21] Sampson Low and Co.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+FETISH AND WITCHCRAFT
+
+     Wherein the student having by now got rather involved in things in
+     general, is constrained to discourse on witchcraft and its position
+     in West African religious thought, concluding with the conviction
+     that Fetish is quite clear though the student has not succeeded in
+     making it so.
+
+
+Now, here we come to a very interesting question: What is witchcraft in
+itself? Conversing freely with the Devil, says Christendom, firmly; and
+taking the Devil to mean the Spirit of Evil, I am bound to think
+Christendom is in a way scientifically quite right, though the accepted
+scientific definition of witchcraft at present is otherwise, and holds
+witchcraft to be conversing with Natural Science, which of course I
+cannot accept as the Devil. Thus I cannot reconcile the two definitions
+should they mean the same thing; and so I am here really in the position
+of being at one in opinion with the Roman Catholic missionaries of the
+fifteenth century, who, as soon as they laid eyes on my friend the
+witch-doctor, recognised him and his goings on as a mass of witchcraft,
+and went for the whole affair in an exceeding game way.
+
+But let us take the accepted view, that first propounded by Sir Alfred
+Lyall; and I humbly beg it to be clearly understood I am only speaking
+of the bearing of that view on Fetish in West Africa. I was of course
+fully aware of the accepted view of the innate antagonism between
+religion and witchcraft when I published in a deliberately scattered
+form some of my observations on Fetish, being no more desirous of giving
+a mental lead to white men than to black, but only wistful to find out
+what they thought of things as they are. The consequence of this action
+of mine has been, I fear, on the whole a rather more muddled feeling in
+the white mind regarding Fetish than ever heretofore existed; a feeling
+that, if what I said was true, (and in this matter of Fetish information
+no one has gainsaid the truth of it), West African religion was more
+perplexing than it seemed to be when regarded as a mere degraded brutal
+superstition or childish foolishness.
+
+However, one distinguished critic has tackled my Fetish, and gallantly:
+the writer in the _Edinburgh Review_. With his remarks on our heresy
+regarding the deification of ancestors I have above attempted to deal,
+owning he is quite right--we do not believe in deified ancestors. I now
+pass on to his other important criticism, and again own he is quite
+right, and that "witchcraft and religious rites in West Africa are
+originally indistinguishable."[22] This is evidently a serious affair
+for West Africa and me, so I must deal with it carefully, and first
+quote my critic's words following immediately those just cited. "If this
+is correct there can be no doubt that such a confusion of the two ideas
+that in their later forms not only stand widely apart, but are always
+irreconcilably hostile, denotes the very lowest stage of aboriginal
+superstition wherever it prevails, for it has been held that, although
+the line between abject fetishism and witchcraft may be difficult to
+trace in the elementary stages, yet from the beginning a true
+distinction can invariably be recognised. According to this theory, the
+witch is more nearly allied with rudimentary science than with
+priestcraft, for he relies not upon prayer, worship, or propitiation of
+divinities, but upon his own secret knowledge and experience of the
+effect producible by certain tricks and mysterious devices upon the
+unseen powers, over whom he has obtained a sort of command. Instead of
+serving like a priest these powers, he is enabled by his art to make
+them serve him, and it is for this reason that his practices very soon
+become denounced and detested by the priesthood."
+
+Now there are many interesting points to be considered in West Africa
+bearing on the above statement of Sir Alfred Lyall's theory of the
+nature of witchcraft,--points which I fancy, if carefully considered,
+would force upon us the strange conclusion that, accepting this theory
+as a general statement of the nature of witchcraft, there was no
+witchcraft whatever in West Africa, nothing having "a true distinction"
+in the native mind from religion. You may say there is no religion and
+it's all witchcraft, but this is a superficial view to take; you see the
+orthodox Christian view of witchcraft contains in it an element not
+present in the West African affair; the Christian regards the witch with
+hatred as one knowing good, yet choosing evil. The West African has not
+this choice in his mind; he has to deal with spirits who are not, any of
+them, up to much in the way of virtue viewed from a human standpoint. I
+don't say they are all what are called up here devils; a good many of
+them are what you might call reasonable, respectable, easy-going sort of
+people; some are downright bad; in fact, I don't think it would be
+going too far to say that they are all downright bad if they get their
+tempers up or take a dislike to a man; there is not one of them
+beneficent to the human race at large. Nzambi is the nearest approach to
+a beneficent deity I have come across, and I feel she owes much of this
+to the confusion she profits by, and the Holy Virgin suffers from, in
+the regions under Nkissism; but Nzambi herself is far from morally
+perfect and very difficult tempered at times. You need not rely on me in
+this matter; take the important statement of Dr. Nassau: "Observe, these
+were distinctly prayers, appeals for mercy, agonising protests; but
+there was no praise, no love, no thanks, no confession of sin."[23] He
+was speaking regarding utterances made down there in the face of great
+afflictions and sorrow; and there was no praise, because there was no
+love, I fancy; no thanks because what good was done to the human being
+was a mere boughten thing he had paid for. No confession of sin, because
+the Fetish believer does not hold he lives in a state of sin, but that
+it is a thing he can commit now and again if he is fool enough. Sin to
+him not being what it is to us, a vile treason against a loving Father,
+but a very ill-advised act against powerful, nasty-tempered spirits.
+Herein you see lies one difference between the Christian and the Fetish
+view,--a fundamental one, that must be borne in mind.
+
+Then in the above-quoted passage you will observe that the dislike to
+witchcraft is traced in a measure to the action of priesthoods. This
+hatred is undoubted. But witchcraft is as much hated in districts in
+West Africa where there are no organised priesthoods as in districts
+where there are--in the regions under the Calabar and Mpongwe schools,
+for example, where the father of the house is the true priest to the
+family, where what looks like a priesthood, but which is a law god-cult
+only--the secret society--is the dominant social thing. Now this law
+god-cult affair, Purroh, Oru, Egbo, Ukukiwe, etc., etc., call it what
+you please, it's all the same thing, is not the organisation that makes
+war on witchcraft in West Africa. It deals with it now and then, if it
+is brought under its official notice; but it is not necessary that this
+should be done; summary methods are used with witches. It just appeals
+at once to ordeal, any one can claim it. You can claim it, and
+administer it yourself to yourself, if you are the accused party and in
+a hurry. A. says to you, "You're a witch." "I'm not," you ejaculate. I
+take the bean; down it goes; you're sick or dead long before the
+elaborate mechanism of the law society has heard of the affair. Of
+course, if you want to make a big palaver and run yourself and your
+accuser into a lot of expense you can call in the society; but you
+needn't. From this and divers things like it I do not think the hatred
+of witchcraft in West Africa at large has anything originally to do with
+the priesthood. You will say, but there is the hatred of witchcraft in
+West Africa. You have only to shout "_Ifot_" at a man or woman in
+Calabar, or "_Ndo tchi_" in Fjort-land, and the whole population, so
+good-tempered the moment before, is turned bloodthirsty. Witches are
+torn to bits, destroyed in every savage way, when the ordeal has
+conclusively proved their guilt--mind you, never before. Granted; but I
+believe this to be just a surging up of that form of terror called hate.
+
+I am old enough to remember the dynamite scares up here, and the Jack
+the Ripper incidents; then it was only necessary for some one to call
+out, "Dynamiter" or "Jack the Ripper" at a fellow-citizen, and up surged
+our own people, all same for one with those Africans, only our people,
+not being so law-governed, would have shredded the accused without
+ordeal, had we not possessed that great factor in the formation of
+public virtue, the police, who intervened, carried away the accused to
+the ordeal--the police court--where the affair was gone into with
+judicial calm. Honestly, I don't believe there is the slightest mystic
+revulsion against witchcraft in West Africa; public feeling is always at
+bursting-point on witches, their goings-on are a constant danger to
+every peaceful citizen's life, family, property, and so on, and when the
+general public thinks it's got hold of one of the vermin it goes off
+with a bang; but it does not think for one moment that the witch is _per
+se_ in himself a thing apart; he is just a bad man too much, who has
+gone and taken up with spirits for illegitimate purposes. The mere
+keeping of a familiar power, which under Christendom is held so vile a
+thing, is not so held in West Africa. Everyone does it; there is not a
+man, woman, or child who has not several attached spirits for help and
+preservation from danger and disease. It is keeping a spirit for bad
+purposes only that is hateful. It is one thing to have dynamite in the
+hand of the government or a mining company for reasonable reasons, quite
+another to have it in the hands of enemies to society; and such an enemy
+is a witch who trains the spirits over which he has got control to
+destroy his fellow human beings' lives and properties.
+
+The calling in of ordeal to try the witch before destroying him has many
+interesting points. The African, be it granted, is tremendously under
+the dominion of law, and it is the law that such trials should take
+place before execution; but there is also involved in it another
+curious fact, and that is that the spirit of the ordeal is held to be
+able to manage and suppress the bad spirits trained by the witch to
+destruction. Human beings alone can collar the witch and destroy him in
+an exemplary manner, but spiritual aid is required to collar the witch's
+devil, or it would get adrift and carry on after its owner's death.
+Regarding ordeal affairs I will speak when dealing with legal procedure.
+
+Such being the West African view of witchcraft, I venture to think there
+are in this world divers reasons for hating witchcraft. There is the
+fetish one, that he is an enemy to society; there is the priesthood one,
+that he is a sort of quack or rival practitioner--under this head of
+priesthood aversion for witchcraft I think we may class the witchcraft
+that is merely a hovering about of the old religion which the priesthood
+of an imported religion are anxious to stamp out; and there is that
+aversion to witchcraft one might call the Protestant aversion, which
+arises from the feeling that it is a direct sin against God Himself.
+This latter feeling has been the cause of as violent a persecution of
+witches, witness the action of King James I. and that of the Quakers in
+America, as any West African has ever presented to the world. Throughout
+all these things the fact remains, that whether black, white, or yellow,
+the witch is a bad man, a murderer in the eyes of Allah as well as those
+of humanity.
+
+That all witches act by means of poison alone would be too hasty a thing
+to say, because I think we need hardly doubt that the African is almost
+as liable to die from a poisonous idea put into his mind as a poisonous
+herb put into his food; indeed, I do not know that in West Africa we
+need confine ourselves to saying natives alone do this, for white men
+sink and die under an idea that breaks their spirit. All the vital
+powers are required there to resist the depressing climate. If they are
+weakened seriously in any way, death is liable to ensue. The profound
+belief in the power of a witch causes a man who knows, say, that either
+a nail has been driven into an Nkiss down on the South-West coast, or
+the Fangaree drum beaten on him up in the Sierra Leone region, to
+collapse under the terror of it, and I own I can see no moral difference
+between the guilt of the man or woman who does these things with the
+intent to slay a fellow-citizen and that of one who puts bush into his
+chop--both mean to kill and do kill, but both methods are good West
+African witchcraft. The latter may seem to be an incipient form of
+natural science, but it seems to me--I say it humbly--that the West
+African incipient scientist is not the local witch, but that highly
+respectable gentleman or lady, the village apothecary, the _Nganga
+bilongo_ or the _Abiabok_. The means of killing in vogue in West African
+witchcraft without the direct employment of poison are highly
+interesting, but I think it would serve no good purpose for me to give
+even the few I know in detail. There is one interesting point in this
+connection. I have said that in order to make a charm efficacious
+against a particular person you must have preferably some of his blood
+in your possession, or, failing that, some hair or nail clipping;
+failing these, some articles belonging intimately to him--a piece of his
+loin-cloth, or, under the school of Nkissi, a bit of his iron. This I
+believe to hold good for all true fetish charms; but we have in the
+Bight of Benin charms which are under the influence of a certain amount
+of Mohammedan ideas--for example, the deadly charms of the Kufong
+society. This class of charm does not require absolutely a bit of
+something nearly connected with the victim, but nevertheless it cannot
+act at a great distance, or without the element of personal connection.
+Take the Fangaree charm, for example, to be found among the Mendi
+people, and all the neighbouring peoples who are liable to go in for
+Kufong.
+
+Fangaree is the name of a small drum that is beaten by a hammer made of
+bamboo. The uses of this drum are wide and various, but it also gives
+its name to the charm, because the charm, like the drum, is beaten with
+a similar stick. The charm stuff itself is made of a dead man's bone, of
+different herbs smoked over a fire and powdered the same day, ants'-hill
+earth, and charcoal. This precious mixture is made into a parcel; that
+parcel is placed on a frame made of bamboo sticks. On the top of the
+charm a small live animal--an insect, I am informed, will do--is secured
+by a string passing over it, and the charm is fixed with wooden forks
+into the ground on either side. This affair is placed by the murderer
+close to a path the victim will pass along, and the murderer sits over
+it, waiting for him to come. When he comes, he is allowed to pass just
+by, and then his enemy breaks a dry bamboo stick; the noise causes the
+victim to turn and look in the direction of the noise--_i.e._ on to the
+charm--and then the murderer hits the live animal on it, calling his
+victim's name, and the charm is on him. If the animal is struck on the
+head, the victim's head is affected, and he has violent fits until "he
+dies from breaking his neck" in one of them; if the animal is struck to
+tailwards, the victim gets extremely ill, but in this latter case he can
+buy off the charm and be cured by a Fangaree man. A similar arrangement
+is in working order under some South-West coast murder societies I am
+acquainted with. The interesting point, however, is the necessity of
+establishing the personal connection between the victim and the charm
+by means of making him look on the charm and calling his name. Without
+his looking it's no good. Hence it comes that it is held unwise to look
+behind when you hear a noise o'night in the bush; indeed, no cautious
+person, with sense in his head and strength in his legs, would dream of
+doing this unless caught off guard. In connection also with this turning
+the face being necessary to the working of the Fangaree charm, there is
+another charm that is worked under Kufong, according to several natives
+from its region--the hinterland of Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Ivory
+Coast--with whom I have associated when we have both been far from our
+respective homes away in South-West Africa. It is a charm I have never
+met with as indigenous in the South-West or Oil Rivers Fetish, and I
+think it has a heavier trace of Mohammedan influence in it than the
+Fangaree charm. The way it works is this. A man wants to kill you
+without showing blood. Only leopard society men do that, and your enemy,
+we will presume, is not a leopard. So he throws his face on you by a
+process I need not enter into. You hardly know anything is wrong at
+first; by-and-by you notice that every scene that you look on, night or
+day, has got that face in it, not a filmy vision of a thing, but quite
+material in appearance, only it's in abnormal places for a face to be,
+and it is a face only. It may be on the wall, or amongst the roof poles,
+or away in a corner of the hut floor; outdoors it is the same--the face
+is first always, there just where you can see it. Some of my informants
+hold that it keeps coming closer to you as time goes on; but others say
+no; it keeps at one distance all the time. This, however, is a minor
+point; it is its being there that gets to matter. It is in amongst the
+bushes at the side of the path, or in the water of the river, or at the
+end of your canoe, or in the oil in the pots, or in the Manchester
+cottons in the factory shop. Wherever you look, there it is. In a way
+it's unobtrusive, it does not spread itself out, or make a noise, or
+change, yet, sooner or later, in every place, you cannot miss seeing it.
+At first you think, by changing your environment--going outdoors, coming
+in, going on a journey, mixing with your fellow-men, or avoiding
+them--you can get rid of the thing; but you find, when you look
+round,--a thing you are certain to do when the charm has got its
+grip,--for sure that face is there as usual. Now this sort of thing
+tells on the toughest in time, and you get sick of life when it has
+always got that face mixed up in it, so sick that you try the other
+thing--death. This is an ill-advised course, but you do not know in time
+that, when you kill yourself, you will find that on the other side, in
+the other thing, you will see nothing but that face, that unchanging
+silent face you are so sick of. The Kufong man who has thrown his face
+at you knows, and when he hears of your suicide he laughs. Naturally you
+cannot know, because you are not a Kufong man, or the charm could not be
+put on you. What you "can do in this here most awful go," as Mr. Squeers
+would say, I am unfortunately not able to tell you. I made many
+inquiries from men who know "the face," who had had it happen on people
+in their families, and so on, but in answer to my inquiries as to why
+the afflicted did not buy it off, what charms there were against it, and
+so forth, I was always told it was a big charm, that the man who put it
+on lost something of himself by so doing, so it was never put on except
+in cases of great hatred that would stick at nothing and would kill;
+also that it was of no real use for the victim to kill his charmer,
+though that individual, knowing the pleasure so doing would afford his
+victim, takes good care to go on a journey, and to keep out of the way
+until the charm has worked out in suicide. There is a certain amount of
+common sense in this proceeding which is undoubtedly true African, but
+there is a sort of imaginative touch which makes me suspect Mohammedan
+infusion; anyhow, I leave you to judge for yourself whether,
+presupposing you accept the possibility of a man doing such a thing to
+you or to any one you love, you think he can be safely ignored, or
+whether he is not an enemy to society who had better be found out and
+killed--killed in a showy way. Personally I favour the latter course.
+
+There is but one other point in witchcraft in West Africa that I need
+now detain you with, and that is why a person killed by witchcraft
+suffers more than one who dies of old age, for herein lies another
+reason for this hatred of witchcraft. Every human soul in West Africa
+throughout all the Fetish schools is held to have a certain proper time
+of incarnation in a human body, whether it be one incarnation or endless
+series of incarnations; anything that cuts that incarnation period short
+inconveniences the soul, to say the least of it. Under Ellis's school,
+and I believe throughout all the others, the soul that lives its life in
+a body fully through is held happy; it is supposed to have learnt its
+full lesson from life, and to know the way down to the shadow-land home
+and all sorts of things. Hence also comes the respect for the aged,
+common throughout all West Africa. They are the knowing ones. Such an
+one was the late Chief Long John of Bonny. Now if this process of
+development is checked by witchcraft and the soul is prematurely driven
+from the body, it does not know all that it should, and its condition
+is therefore miserable. It is, as it were, sent blind, or deaf, or lame
+into the spirit-land. This is a thing not only dreaded by individuals
+for themselves, but hated for those they love; hence the doer of it is a
+hated thing. You must remember that when you get keen hatred you must
+allow for keen affection, it is not human to have one without the other.
+That the Africans are affectionate I am fully convinced. This affection
+does not lie precisely on the same lines as those of Europeans, I allow.
+It is not with them so deeply linked with sex; but the love between
+mother and child, man and man, brother and sister, woman and woman, is
+deep, true, and pure, and it must be taken into account in observing
+their institutions and ideas, particularly as to this witchcraft where
+it shows violently and externally in hatred only to the superficial
+observer. I well remember gossiping with a black friend in a plantation
+in the Calabar district on witchcraft, and he took up a stick and struck
+a plant of green maize, breaking the stem of it, saying, "There, like
+that is the soul of a man who is witched, it will not ripen now."
+
+We will now turn to the consideration of that class whose business in
+life is mainly to guard the community from witchcraft and from
+miscellaneous evil spirits acting on their own initiative, the Fetish
+Men of West Africa, namely, those men and women who devote their lives
+to the cult of West African religion. Such people you find in every West
+African district; but their position differs under different schools,
+and it is in connection with them that we must recognise the differences
+in the various schools, remembering that the form of Fetish makes the
+form of Fetish Man, not the Fetish Man the form of Fetish. He may, as it
+were, embroider it, complicate it, mystify it, as is the nature of all
+specialists in all professions, but primarily he is under it, at any
+rate in West Africa, where you find the Fetish man in every district,
+but in every district in a different form. For example, look at him
+under the Ellis school. Where there are well-defined gods, there your
+Fetish Man is quite the priest, devoting himself to the cult of one god
+publicly, probably doing a little general practice into the bargain with
+other minor spirits. To the laity he of course advertises the god he
+serves as the most reliably important one in the neighbourhood; but it
+has come under my notice, and you will find under Ellis's, that if the
+priest of a god gets personally unwell and finds his own deity
+ineffective, he will apply for aid to a professional brother who serves
+another god. Below Ellis's school, in the Calabar school, your Fetish
+Man is somewhat different; the gods are not so definite or esteemed, and
+the Fetish Man is becoming a member of a set of men who deal with gods
+in a lump, and have the general management of minor spirits. Below this
+school, in the Mpongwe, the Fetish Man is even less specialised as
+regards one god; he is here a manager of spirits at large, with the
+assistance of a strong spirit with whom he has opened up communication.
+Below this school, in that of Nkissi, the Fetish Man becomes more truly
+priest-like--he is the Nganga of an Nkiss; but nevertheless his position
+is a different one to that of the priest in Ellis's school; here he is
+in a better position than in the Mpongwe school, but in an inferior one
+to that in Ellis's, where he is not the lone servitor or manager for a
+god, but a member of a powerful confraternity. You must bear in mind, of
+course, that the Fetish Man is always, from a lay standpoint, a highly
+important person; but professionally, I cannot but think, a priest say
+of Tando in Ashantee or of Shango in Dahomey, is of a higher grade than
+a Nganga to an Nkiss, certainly far higher than a Fetish Man under the
+Mpongwe school, where every house father and every village chief does a
+lot of his own Fetish without professional assistance. Of course chiefs
+and house fathers do a certain amount in all districts--in fact, in West
+Africa every man and woman does a certain amount of Fetish for himself;
+but where, as in Ellis's school, you get a regular set of priests and
+plenty of them, the religion falls into their hands to a greater extent.
+I feel that the study of the position of Fetish-Men is deserving of
+great attention. I implore the student who may take it up to keep the
+Fetish Man for practical purposes distinct from the gentleman who
+represents the law god-cult--the secret tribal society. If you persist
+in mixing them, you will have in practical politics as fine a mess as if
+you mixed up your own Bench of Bishops with the Woolsack. I beg to
+contribute to the store of knowledge on this point sundry remarks sent
+me on most excellent native authority from the Gold Coast:--
+
+"The inhabitants of Cape Coast must congratulate themselves that they
+enjoy the protection of seventy-seven fetishes. Every town (and this
+town) has one fetish house or temple, often built in a square or oblong
+form of mud or swish, and thatched over, or constructed of sticks or
+poles placed in a circular form and thatched. In these temples several
+images are generally placed. Every Fetish-Man or priest, moreover, has
+his private fetishes in his own house, one of a bird, stones encased by
+string, large lumps of cinder from an iron furnace, calabashes, and
+bundles of sticks tied together with string. All these are stained with
+red ochre and rubbed over with eggs. They are placed on a square
+platform and shrouded from the vulgar gaze.
+
+"The fetishes are regarded as spiritual intelligent beings who make the
+remarkable objects of nature their residence or enter occasionally into
+the images and other artificial representations which have been duly
+consecrated by certain ceremonies. It is the belief of this people that
+the fetishes not unfrequently render themselves visible to mortals. Thus
+the great fetish of the rock on which Cape Coast Castle stands is said
+to come forth at night in human form, but of superhuman size, and to
+proceed through the town dressed in white to chase away evil spirits.
+
+"In all the countries along the Coast (Gold) the regular fetish day is
+Tuesday. The fishermen would expect that, were they to go out on that
+day, it would spoil their fishing.
+
+"The priest's office may in some cases be hereditary, but it is not
+uniformly so, for the children of Fetish-Men sometimes refuse to devote
+themselves to the pursuits of their parents and engage in other
+occupations. Any one may enter the office after suitable training, and
+parents who desire that their children may be instructed in its
+mysteries place them with a Fetish-Man, who receives a premium for each.
+The order of Fetish-Men is further augmented by persons who declare that
+the fetish has suddenly seized on them. A series of convulsive and
+unnatural bodily distortions establish their claim. Application is made
+to the fetish for counsel and aid in every domestic and public
+emergency. When persons find occasion to consult a private Fetish-Man,
+they take a present of gold-dust and rum and proceed to his house. He
+receives the presents, and either puts a little of the rum on the head
+of every image or pours a small quantity on the ground before the
+platform as an offering to the whole pantheon; then, taking a brass pan
+with water in it, he sits down with the pan between him and the
+fetishes, and his inquirers also seat themselves to await the result.
+Having made these preparatory arrangements, looking earnestly into the
+water, he begins to snap his fingers, and addressing the fetish, extols
+his power, telling him that the people have arrived to consult him, and
+requesting him to come and give the desired answer. After a time the
+fetish-man is wrought up into a state of fury. He shakes violently and
+foams at the mouth; this is to intimate that the fetish was come home
+and that he himself is no longer the speaker, but the fetish, who uses
+his mouth and speaks by him. He now growls like a tiger and asks the
+people if they have brought rum, requiring them at the same time to
+present it to him. He drinks, and then inquires for what purpose they
+have sent for him. If a relative is ill, they reply that such a member
+of their family is sick and they have tried all the means they could
+devise to restore him, but without success, and they, knowing he is a
+great fetish, have come to ask his aid, and beg him to teach them what
+they should do. He then speaks kindly to them, expresses a hope that he
+shall be able to help them, and says, "I go to see." It is imagined that
+the fetish then quits the priest, and, after a silence of a few minutes,
+he is supposed to return, and gives his response to the inquirers.
+
+"In cases of great difficulty the oracle at Abrah is the last resort of
+the Fantees. This notable oracle is always consulted at night. They find
+a large fire made upon the ground, and the presents they have brought
+they place in the hands of the priests who are in attendance. They are
+then directed to elevate their presents above their heads and to fix
+their eyes steadfastly upon the ground, for should they look up, the
+fetish, it is said, would inflict blindness on them for their
+sacrilegious gaze. After a time the oracle gives a response in a shrill,
+small voice intended to convey the idea that it proceeds from an
+unearthly source, and the inquirers, having obtained the end of their
+visit, then depart.
+
+"In cases of bodily affliction the fetish orders medical preparations
+for the patient. If the malady of the patient does not appear to yield
+to such applications, the fetish is again consulted, and in some cases,
+as a further expedient, the priest takes a fowl and ties it to a stick,
+by which operation it is barbarously squeezed to death. The stick is
+then placed in the path leading to the house for the purpose of
+deterring evil spirits from approaching it. When the patient is a rich
+man, several sheep are sacrificed, and he is fetished until the last
+moment arrives amidst the howls of a number of old Fetish Women, who
+continue to besmear with eggs and other medicine the walls and doorposts
+of his house and everything that is around him until he has ceased to
+breathe."
+
+Not only does the African depart from life under the care of
+Fetish-Men--and, as my valued correspondent ungallantly remarks, "old
+fetish-women"--but he is met, as it were, by them on his arrival. My
+correspondent says "as soon as the child is born the Fetish-Man binds
+certain fetish preparations round his limbs, using at the same time a
+form of incantation or prayer. This is done to fortify the infant
+against all kinds of evil. On the eighth day after the birth, the father
+of the child, accompanied by a number of friends, proceeds to the house
+of the mother. If he be a rich man, he takes with him a gallon of ardent
+spirits to be used on the festive occasion. On arriving at the house,
+the friends form a circle round the father, who delivers a kind of
+address in which he acknowledges the kindness of the gods for giving him
+the child, and calls upon those present also to thank the fetishes on
+his account; then, taking the child in his arms, he squirts upon it a
+little spirit from his mouth, pronouncing the name by which it is to be
+called. A second name which the child usually takes is that of the day
+of the week on which it is born. The following are the names of the days
+in the Fanti language, varied in their orthography according to the sex
+of the child:--
+
+                      Male.     Female.
+
+          Sunday      Quisi     Akosua.
+
+          Monday      Kujot     Ajua.
+
+          Tuesday     Quabina   Abmaba.
+
+          Wednesday   Quaku     Ekua.
+
+          Thursday    Quahu     Aba.
+
+          Friday      Kufi      Efua.
+
+          Saturday    Qamina    Ama.
+
+Those ceremonials called on the Coast "customs" are the things that show
+off the Fetish-Man at the best in more senses of the word than one. We
+will take the yam custom. The intentions of these yam customs are
+twofold--firstly they are a thanksgiving to the fetishes for allowing
+their people to live to see the new yams, and for the new yams, but they
+are also institutions to prevent the general public eating the new yam
+before it's ready. The idea is, and no doubt rightly, that unripe yams
+are unwholesome, and the law is that no new yams must be eaten until the
+yam custom is made. The Fetish-Men settle when the yams are in a fit
+state to pass into circulation, and then make the custom. It generally
+occurs at the end of August, but is sometimes kept back until the
+beginning of September. In Fantee all the inhabitants of the towns
+assemble under the shade of the grove adjoining the fetish hut, and a
+sheep and a number of fowls are killed, part of their flesh is mixed
+with boiled yams and palm-oil, and a portion of this mixture is placed
+on the heads of the images, and the remainder is thrown about before the
+fetish hut as a peace-offering to the deities.
+
+At Winnebah, on the Gold Coast, there is an interesting modification in
+the yam custom. The principal fetish of that place, it is believed, will
+not be satisfied with a sheep, but he must have a deer brought alive to
+his temple, and there sacrificed. Accordingly on the appointed day every
+year when the custom is to be celebrated, almost all the inhabitants
+except the aged and infirm go into the adjoining country--an open
+park-like country, studded with clumps of trees. The women and children
+look on, give good advice, and shriek when necessary, while the men beat
+the bush with sticks, beat tom-toms, and halloo with all their might.
+While thus engaged, my correspondent remarks in his staid way,
+"sometimes a leopard starts forth, but it is usually so frightened with
+the noise and confusion that it scampers off in one direction as fast as
+the people run from it in another. When a deer is driven out, the chase
+begins, the people try to run it down, flinging sticks at its legs. At
+last it is secured and carried exultingly to the town with shoutings and
+drummings. On entering the town they are met by the aged people carrying
+staves, and, having gone in procession round the town, they proceed to
+the fetish house, where the animal is sacrificed, and partly offered to
+the fetish, partly eaten by the priests."
+
+These yam customs are at their fullest in the Benin Bights, but you get
+a custom made for the new yam in all the districts lower down. These
+customs have long been credited with being stained by human sacrifices.
+Not altogether unjustly. You can always read human sacrifice for goats
+and fowls when you are considering a district inhabited by true Negroes,
+and the occasion is an important one, because in West Africa a human
+sacrifice is the most persuasive one to the fetishes. It is just with
+them as with a chief--if you want to get some favour from him you must
+give him a present. A fowl or a goat or a basket of vegetables, or
+anything like that is quite enough for most favours, but if you want a
+big thing, and want it badly, you had better give him a slave, because
+the slave is alike more intrinsically valuable and also more useful. So
+far as I know, all human beings sacrificed pass into the service of the
+fetish they are sacrificed to. They are not merely killed that he may
+enjoy their blood, but that he may have their assistance. Fetishes have
+much to do, and an extra pair of hands is to them always acceptable. As
+for the importance of these harvest customs to the general system of
+Fetish, I think in West Africa it is small. The goings on, the
+licentiousness and general jollification that accompany them, upsetting
+law and order for days, give them a fallacious look of importance; but I
+think far more really near the heart of the Fetish thought-form is the
+lonely man who steals at night into the forest to gain from Sasabonsom a
+charm, and the woman who, on her way back from market, throws down
+before the fetish houses she passes a scrap of her purchases; compared
+to the cult of the law-god, well, yam customs are dirty water price,
+palaver, and insignificant politically.
+
+I have dealt here with Fetish as far as the position of the human being
+is concerned, because this phase may make it more comprehensible to my
+fellow white men who regard the human being as the main thing in the
+created universe, but I must beg you to remember that this idea of the
+importance of the human race is not held by the African. The individual
+is supremely important to himself, and he values his friends and
+relations and so on, but abstract affection for humanity at large or
+belief in the sanctity of the lives of people with whom he is unrelated
+and unacquainted, the African barely possesses. He is only capable of
+feeling this abstract affection when under the influence of one of the
+great revealed religions which place the human being higher in the scale
+of Creation. This comes from no cruelty of mind _per se_, but is the
+result of the hardness of the fight he has to fight against the world;
+and possessing this view of the equal, if not greater importance of many
+of the things he sees round him, the African conceives these things also
+have their fetish--a fetish on the same ground idea, but varying from
+human fetish. The politics of Mungo mah Lobeh, the mountain, with the
+rest of nature, he believes to exist. The Alemba rapid has its affairs
+clearly, but the private matters of these very great people are things
+the human being had better keep out of; and it is advisable for him to
+turn his attention to making terms with them and go into their presence
+with his petition when their own affairs are prosperous, when their
+tempers are not as it were up over some private ultra-human affair of
+their own. I well remember the opinions expressed by my companions
+regarding the folly--mine, of course--of obtruding ourselves on Mungo
+when that noble mountain was vexed too much, and the opinion expressed
+by an Efik friend in a tornado that came down on us. Well, there you
+have this difference. I instinctively say "us." She did not think we
+were objects of interest to the tornado or the forest it was scourging.
+She took it they had a sort of family row on, and we might get hit with
+the bits, therefore it was highly unfortunate that we were present at
+the meeting. Again, it is the same with the surf. The boat-boys see it's
+in a nasty temper, they keep out of it, it may be better to-morrow, then
+it will tolerate them, for it has no real palaver with them
+individually. Of course you can go and upset the temper of big nature
+spirits, but when you are not there they have their own affairs.
+
+Hence it comes that we have in Fetish a religion in which its believers
+do not hold that devotion to religion constitutes Virtue. The ordinary
+citizen is held to be most virtuous who is least mixed up in religious
+affairs. He can attain Virtue, the love and honour of his fellow-men, by
+being a good husband and father, an honest man in trade, a just man in
+the palaver-house, and he must, for the protection of his interests,
+that is to say, not only his individual well-being, but the well-being
+of those dependent on him, go in to a certain extent for religious
+practices. He must associate with spirits because spirits are in all
+things and everywhere and over everything; and the good citizen deals
+with the other spirits as he deals with that class of spirits we call
+human beings; he does not cheat the big ones of their dues; he spills a
+portion of his rum to them; he gives them their white calicoes; he
+treats his slave spirits honourably, and he uses his slave spirits for
+no bad purpose, and if any great grief falls on him he calls on the
+great over-lord of gods, mentioning these things. But men are not all
+private citizens; there are men whose destiny puts them in high
+places--men who are not only house fathers but who are tribe fathers.
+They, to protect and further the interests of those under them, must
+venture greatly and further, and deal with more powerful spirits, as it
+were, their social equals in spiritdom. These good chiefs in their
+higher grade dealings preserve the same clean-handed conduct. And
+besides these there are those men, the Fetish men, who devote their
+lives to combating evil actions through witches and miscellaneous
+spirits who prey on mankind. These men have to make themselves important
+to important spirits. It is risky work for them, for spirits are a risky
+set to deal with. Up here in London, when I have to deal with a spirit
+as manifest in the form of an opinion, or any big mind-form incarnate in
+one man, or in thousands, I often think of an African friend of mine who
+had troubles, and I think sympathetically, for his brother explained the
+affair to me. He was an educated man. "You see," he said, "my brother's
+got a strong Ju Ju, but it's a damned rocky Ju Ju to get on with."
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [22] July, 1897, p. 221.
+
+   [23] _Travels in West Africa._ (Macmillan, 1897, p. 453.)
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+AFRICAN MEDICINE
+
+     Mainly from the point of view of the native apothecary, to which is
+     added some account of the sleep disease and the malignant
+     melancholy.
+
+
+There is, as is in all things West African, a great deal of fetish
+ceremonial mixed up with West African medical methods. Underlying them
+throughout there is the fetish form of thought; but it is erroneous to
+believe that all West African native doctors are witch doctors, because
+they are not. One of my Efik friends, for example, would no more think
+of calling in a witch doctor for a simple case of rheumatism than you
+would think of calling in a curate or a barrister; he would just call in
+the equivalent to our general practitioner, the abiabok. If he grew
+worse instead of better, he would then call in his equivalent to our
+consulting physician, the witch doctor, the abiadiong. But if he started
+being ill with something exhibiting cerebral symptoms he would have in
+the witch doctor at once.
+
+This arises from the ground principle of all West African physic.
+Everything works by spirit on spirit, therefore the spirit of the
+medicine works on the spirit of the disease. Certain diseases are
+combatable by certain spirits in certain herbs. Other diseases are
+caused by spirits not amenable to herb-dwelling spirits; they must be
+tackled by spirits of a more powerful grade. The witch doctor who
+belongs to the school of Nkissism will become more profound on this
+matter still, and will tell you all herbs, indeed everything that comes
+out of the Earth, have in them some of the power of the Earth, Nkissi
+nisi; but the general view is the less concrete one--that it is a matter
+of only certain herbs having power. This I have been told over and over
+again in various West Coast tongues by various West African physicians,
+and in it lies the key to their treatment of disease--a key without
+which many of their methods are incomprehensible, but which shows up
+most clearly in the methods of the witch doctor himself. In the practice
+of the general practitioner, or, more properly speaking, the apothecary,
+it is merely a theory, just as a village chemist here may prescribe blue
+pill without worrying himself about its therapeutic action from a
+scientific point of view.
+
+Before I pass on to the great witch doctor, the
+physician, I must detain you with a brief account of the
+neglected-by-traveller-because-less-showy African village apothecary, a
+really worthy person, who exists in every West African district I know
+of; often, as in the Calabar and Bonny region, a doctor whose practice
+extends over a fair-sized district, wherein he travels from village to
+village. If he comes across a case, he sits down and does his best with
+it, may be for a fortnight or a month at a time, and when he has
+finished with it and got his fee, off he goes again. Big towns, of
+course, have a resident apothecary, but I never came across a town that
+had two apothecaries. It may be professional etiquette, but, though I
+never like to think evil of the Profession whatever colour its
+complexion may be, it may somehow be connected with a knowledge of the
+properties of herbs, for I observed when at Corisco that an apothecary
+from the mainland who was over there for a visit shrank from dining with
+the local medico.
+
+These apothecaries are, as aforesaid, learned in the properties of
+herbs, and they are the surgeons, in so far as surgery is ventured on. A
+witch doctor would not dream of performing an operation. Amongst these
+apothecaries there are lady doctors, who, though a bit dangerous in
+pharmacy, yet, as they do not venture on surgery, are, on the whole,
+safer than their _confrčres_, for African surgery is heroic.
+
+Many of the apothecaries' medical methods are fairly sound, however. The
+Dualla practitioner is truly great on poultices for extracting foreign
+substances from wounds, such as bits of old iron cooking pot, a very
+frequent foreign substance for a man to get into him in West Africa,
+owing to pots being broken up and used as bullets. Almost incredible
+stories are told by black men and white in Cameroons concerning the
+efficiency of these poultices; one I heard from a very reliable white
+authority there of a man who had been shot with bits of iron pot in the
+thigh. The white doctor extracted several pieces, and declared he had
+got them all out; but the man went on suffering and could not walk, so
+finally a country doctor was called in, and he applied his poultice. In
+a few minutes he removed it, and on its face lay two pieces of iron pot.
+The white doctor said they had been in the poultice all the time, but he
+did not carry public opinion with him, for the patient recovered
+rapidly.
+
+The Negroes do not seem to me to go in for baths in medical treatment
+quite so much as the Bantu; they hold more with making many little
+incisions in the skin round a swollen joint, then encasing it with clay
+and keeping a carefully tended fire going under it. But the Bantu is
+given greatly to baths, accompanied by massage, particularly in the
+treatment of that great West African affliction, rheumatism. The Mpongwe
+make a bath for the treatment of this disease by digging a suitably
+sized hole in the ground and putting into it seven herbs--whereof I know
+the native names only, not the scientific--and in addition in go
+cardamoms and peppers. Boiling water is then plentifully poured over
+these, and the patient is laid on and covered with the parboiled green
+stuff. Next a framework of twigs is placed over him, and he is hastily
+clayed up to keep the steam in, only his head remaining above ground. In
+this bath he is sometimes kept a few hours, sometimes a day and a half.
+He is liable to give the traveller who may happen suddenly on him while
+under treatment the idea that he is an atrocity; but he is not; and when
+he is taken out of the bath-poultice he is rubbed and kneaded all over,
+plenty more hot water being used in the process, this indeed being the
+palladium of West Coast physic.
+
+The Fjort tribe do not bury their rheumatic patients until they are dead
+and all their debts paid, but they employ the vapour bath. My friend,
+Mr. R. E. Dennet, who has for the past eighteen years lived amongst the
+Fjort, and knows them as no other white man does, and knows also my
+insatiable thirst for any form of West African information, has kindly
+sent me some details of Fjort medical methods, which I give in his own
+words--"The Fjort have names for many diseases; aches are generally
+described as _tanta ki tanta_; they say the head suffers _Ntu tanta ki
+tanta_, the chest suffers _Mtima tanta ki tanta_, and so on. Rheumatism
+that keeps to the joints of the bones and cripples the sufferer is
+called _Ngoyo_, while ordinary rheumatism is called _Macongo_. They
+generally try to cure this disease by giving the sufferers vapour baths.
+They put the leaves of the _Nvuka_ into a pot of boiling water, and
+place the pot between the legs of the patient, who is made to sit up.
+They then cover up the patient and the pot with coverings.
+
+"They try to relieve the local pain by spluttering the affected part
+with chalk, pepper, and logwood, and the leaves of certain plants that
+have the power of blistering.
+
+"Small-pox they try to cure by smearing the body of the patient over
+with the pulped leaves of the mzeuzil. Palm oil is also used. These
+patients are taken to the woods, where a hut is built for them, or not,
+according to the wealth and desire of their relations. If poor they are
+often allowed to die of starvation. A kind of long thin worm that creeps
+about under the eyelid is called _Loyia_, and is skilfully extracted by
+many of the natives by means of a needle or piece of wood cut to a sharp
+point.
+
+"Blind boils they call _Fvuma_, and they cure them by splintering over
+them the pulped root _Nchechi_, mixed with red and white earth. Leprosy
+they call _Boisi_, ague _Chiosi_, matter from the ear _Mafina_, rupture
+_Sangafulla_. But diseases of the lungs, heart, liver, and spleen seem
+to puzzle the native leeches and many natives die from these terrible
+ills. Cupping and bleeding, which they do with the hollow horns of the
+goat and the sharpened horn of a kid, are the remedies usually resorted
+to.
+
+"All persons are supposed to have the power to give their enemies these
+different sicknesses. Amulets, frontlets, bracelets, and waistbands
+charged with medicines are also used as either charms or cures.
+
+"A woman who was stung by a scorpion went nearly mad, and, rushing into
+the river, tried to drown herself. I tried my best to calm her and cure
+her by the application of a few simple remedies, but she kept us awake
+all night, and we had to hold her down nearly the whole time. I called
+in a native surgeon to see if he could do anything, and he spluttered
+some medicine over her, and, placing himself opposite to her, shouted at
+her and the evil spirit that was in her. She became calmer, and the
+surgeon left us. As I was afraid of a relapse, I sent the woman to be
+cured in a town close by. The Princess of the town picked out the sting
+of the scorpion with a needle, and gave the woman some herbs, which
+acted as a strong purge, and cured her. As the Nganga bilongo
+(apothecary) is busy curing the patient, he generally has a white fowl
+tied to a string fastened to a peg in the ground close to him. I have
+described this in _Seven Years among the Fjort_."
+
+I think this communication of Mr. Dennett's is of much interest, and I
+hastily beg to remark that, if you have not got a devoted friend to hold
+you down all night, call in an apothecary in the morning time, and then
+hand you over to a Princess--things that are not always handy even in
+West Africa when you have been stung by a scorpion--things that, on the
+other hand, are always handy in West Africa--carbonate of soda applied
+promptly to the affected part will save you from wanting to drown
+yourself and much other inconvenience. The sting should be extracted
+regardless of the shedding of blood, carbonate of soda in hot water
+washed over the place, and then a poultice faced with carbonate of soda
+put on.
+
+Although I do not say these West African doctors possess any specific
+for rheumatism, it is an undoubted fact that the South-west Coast
+tribes, with their poultices and vapour baths, are very successful in
+treating it, more so than the true Negroes, with their clay plaster and
+baking method. Rheumatism is a disease the Africans seem especially
+liable to, whatever may be the local climate, whether it be that of the
+reeking Niger Delta, or the dry delightful climate of Cabinda; moreover,
+my friends who go whaling tell me the Bermuda negroes also suffer from
+rheumatism severely, and are "a perfect cuss," wanting to come and sit
+in the blood and blubber of fresh-killed whales. Small-pox is a vile
+scourge to Africa. The common treatment is to smear the body of the
+patient with the pulped leaves of the mzeuzil palm and with palm oil;
+but I cannot say the method is successful, save in preventing pitting,
+which it certainly does. The mortality from this disease, particularly
+among the South-west Coast tribes, is simply appalling. But it is
+extremely difficult to make the bush African realise that it is
+infectious, for he regards it as a curse from a great Nature spirit,
+sent in consequence of some sin, such as a man marrying within the
+restricted degree, or something of that kind. Mr. Dennett mentions
+small-pox patients being sent into the bush with more or less
+accommodation provided. Mr. Du Chaillu gave Mr. Fraser the idea that the
+Bakele tribe habitually drove their small-pox sick into the bush and
+neglected them, which certainly, from my knowledge of the tribe, I must
+say is not their constant habit by any means. I venture to think that
+this rough attempt at isolation among the Fjort is a remnant of the
+influence of the great Portuguese domination of the kingdom of Congo in
+the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, when the Roman
+Catholic missionaries got hold of the Fjort as no other West African has
+since been got hold of. Nevertheless the keeping of the sick in huts
+you will find in almost all districts in places--_i.e._ round the house
+of a great doctor. My friend Miss Mary Slessor, of Ok˙on, has the bush
+round her compound fairly studded with little temporary huts, each with
+a patient in. You see, distinguished doctors everywhere are a little
+uppish, and so their patients have to come to them. Such doctors are
+usually specialists, noted for a cure of some particular disease, and
+often patients will come to such a man from towns and villages a week's
+journey or more away, and then build their little shantie near his
+residence, and remain there while undergoing the cure.
+
+There is a prevalent Coast notion that white men do not catch small-pox
+from black, but I do not think this is, at any rate, completely true. I
+was informed when in Loanda that during an epidemic of it amongst the
+natives, every white man had had a more or less severe touch, and I have
+known of cases of white men having small-pox in other West Coast places,
+small-pox they must either have caught from natives or have made
+themselves, which is improbable. I fancy it is a matter connected with
+the vaccination state of the white, although there seem to be some
+diseases prevalent among natives from which whites are immune--the Yaws,
+for example.
+
+Less terrible in its ravages than small-pox, because it is far more
+limited in the number of its victims, is leprosy; still you will always
+find a case or so in a district. You will find the victims outcasts from
+society, not from a sense of its being an infectious disease, but
+because it is confounded with another disease, held to be a curse from
+an aggrieved Nature spirit. There was at Ok˙on when I was there a leper
+who lived in a regular house of his own, not a temporary hospital hut,
+but a house with a plantation. He led a lonely life, having no wife or
+family or slave; he was himself a slave, but not called on for
+service--it was just a lonely life. People would drop in on him and
+chat, and so on, but he did not live in town. There was also another one
+there, who had his own people round him, and to whom people would send
+their slaves, because he was regarded as a good doctor; but he also had
+his house in the bush, and not in town.
+
+Undoubtedly the diseases that play the greatest continuous havoc with
+black life in West Africa are small-pox, divers forms of pneumonia,
+heart-disease, and tetanus, the latter being largely responsible for the
+terrible mortality among children; but the two West African native
+diseases most interesting to the European on account of their
+strangeness, are the malignant melancholy and the sleep sickness, and
+strangely enough both these diseases seem to have their head centre in
+one region--the lower Congo. They occur elsewhere, but in this region
+they are constantly present, and now and again seem to take an epidemic
+form. Regarding the first-named, I am still collecting information, for
+I cannot tell whether the malignant melancholy of the lower Congo is one
+and the same with the hystero-hypochondria, the home-sickness of the
+true Negro. In the lower Congo I was informed that this malignant
+melancholy had the native name signifying throwing backwards, from its
+being the habit of the afflicted to throw themselves backwards into
+water when they attempted a drowning form of suicide.[24] They do not,
+however, confine themselves to attempts to drown themselves only, but
+are equally given to hanging, the constant thing about all their
+attempts being a lack of enthusiasm about getting the thing definitely
+done: the patient seems to potter at it, not much caring whether he does
+successfully hang or drown himself or no, but just keeps on, as if he
+could not help doing it. This has probably given rise to the native
+method of treating this disease--namely, holding a meeting of the
+patient's responsible relations, who point out elaborately to him the
+advantages of life over death, and enquire of him his reasons for
+hankering after the latter. If in spite of these representations he
+persists in a course of habitual suicide, he is knocked on the head and
+thrown into the river; for it is a nuisance to have a person about who
+is continually hanging himself to the house ridge pole and pulling the
+roof half off, or requiring a course of sensational rescues from
+drowning.
+
+The sleep disease[25] is also a strange thing. When I first arrived in
+Africa in 1893 there had just been a dreadful epidemic of it in the
+Kakongo and lower Congo region, and I saw a good many cases, and became
+much interested in it, and have ever since been trying to gather further
+information regarding it.
+
+Dr. Patrick Manson in his important paper[26] states that it has never
+been known to affect any one who has not at one time or another been
+resident within this area, and observes on its distribution that "it
+seems probable that as our knowledge of Africa extends, this disease
+will be found endemic here and there throughout the basins of the
+Senegal, the Niger, the Congo, and their affluents. We have no
+information of its existence in the districts drained by the Nile and
+the Zambesi, nor anywhere on the eastern side of the continent." As far
+as my own knowledge goes the centres of this disease are the Senegal and
+the Congo. I never saw a case in the Oil Rivers, nor could I hear of
+any, though I made every inquiry; the cases I heard of from Lagos and
+the Oil Rivers were among people who had been down as labourers, &c., to
+the Congo. What is the reason of this I do not know, but certainly the
+people of the lower Congo are much given to all kinds of diseases, far
+more so than those inhabiting the dense forest regions of Congo
+Franįais, or the much-abused mangrove swamps of the Niger Delta.
+
+Dr. Manson says, "The sleeping sickness has been attributed to such
+things as sunstroke, beriberi, malaria, poison, peculiar foods, such as
+raw bitter manioc, and diseased grain; it is evident, however, that none
+of these things explains all the facts." In regard to this I may say I
+have often heard it ascribed to the manioc when in Kakongo, the idea
+being that when manioc was soaked in water surcharged with the poisonous
+extract, it had a bad effect. Certainly in Kakongo this was frequently
+the case in many districts where water was comparatively scarce. The
+pools used for soaking the root in stank, and the prepared root stank,
+in the peculiar way it can, something like sour paste, with a dash of
+acetic acid, and thereby the villages stank and the market-places ditto,
+in a way that could be of no use to any one except a person anxious to
+find his homestead in the dark; but Dr. Manson's suggestion is far more
+likely to be the correct one. Against it I can only urge that in some
+districts where I am informed by my medical friends that _Filaria
+perstans_ is very prevalent, such as Calabar, the Niger, and the Ogowe,
+sleeping sickness is not prevalent. Dr. Manson says "the fact that the
+disease can be acquired only in a comparatively limited area, suggests
+that the cause is similarly limited; and the fact that the disease may
+develop years after the endemic area has been quitted, suggests that the
+cause is of such a nature that it may be carried away from the endemic
+area and remain latent, as regards its disease-producing qualities for a
+considerable period; even for years." He then goes on to say, "_Filaria
+perstans_, so far as is known, is limited in its geographical
+distribution to Western Equatorial Africa--that is to say, it can be
+acquired there only--and it may continue in active life for many years
+after its human host has left the country in which alone it can be
+acquired. We also know that similar entozoa in their wanderings in the
+tissues by accident of location, or by disease, or injury of their
+organs, not infrequently give rise to grave lesions in their hosts. I
+therefore suggest that possibly _Filiaria perstans_ may in some way be
+responsible for the sleeping sickness. I know that this parasite is
+extremely common in certain sleeping sickness districts, and moreover, I
+have found it in the blood of a considerable number of cases of this
+disease--in six out of ten--including that described by Mackenzie. There
+are many difficulties in the way of establishing this hypothesis, but
+there is a sufficient inherent probability about it to make it well
+worth following up."
+
+The most important statement that I have been able to get regarding it
+so far, has been one sent me by Mr. R. E. Dennett; who says "The
+sleeping sickness though prevalent throughout Kakongo and Loango is most
+common in the north of Loango and the south of Kakongo, that is north of
+the river Quillou and among the Mussorongo.
+
+"What the cause of the sickness is, it is hard to say, but it is one of
+those scourges which is ever with us. The natives say any one may get
+it, that it is not hereditary, and only infectious in certain stages.
+They avoid the _dejecta_ of affected persons, but they do not force the
+native to live in the bush as they do a person affected by small-pox.
+
+"Pains in the head chiefly just above the nose are first experienced,
+and should these continue for a month or so it is to be expected that
+the disease is _Madotchila_, or the first stage of the sleeping
+sickness.
+
+"In the word _Madotchila_ we have the idea of a state of being poisoned
+or bewitched. At this stage the sickness is curable, but as the sick man
+will never admit that he has the sickness and will suffer excruciating
+pain rather than complain, and as it is criminal to suggest to the
+invalid or others that he is suffering from the dreadful disease, it
+often happens that it gets great hold of the afflicted and from time to
+time he falls down overcome by drowsiness.
+
+"Then he swells up and has the appearance of one suffering from dropsy,
+and this stage of the disease is called _Malazi_, literally meaning
+thousands (_Kulazi_ = one thousand, the verb _Koula_ to become great and
+_zi_ the productive fly.)
+
+"This appears to be the acute stage of the disease and death often
+occurs within eight days from the beginning of the swelling.
+
+"Then comes the stage _Ntolotolo_, meaning sleep or mock death.
+
+"The next stage is called _Tchela nxela nbela_, that is the knife
+cutting stage, referring to the operation of bleeding as part of the
+cure; and the last stage of the disease is called _Nlemba Ngombo_.
+_Lemba_ means to cease. The rites of _Lemba_ are those which refer to
+the marriage of a woman who swears to die with her husband or rather to
+cease to live at the same time as he does. _Ngombo_ is the name of the
+native grass cloth in which, before the _Nlele_ or cotton cloth of the
+white man appeared, the dead were wrapped previous to burial. Thus in
+the name _Nlemba Ngombo_ we have the meaning of marriage to the deathly
+winding sheet or shroud.
+
+"I remember how poor Sanda (a favourite servant of Mr. Dennett's, a
+mussorong boy) was taken sick with pains in his head which I at first
+mistook for simple headache. As he was of great service to me I kept him
+in the factory instead of sending him to town (the custom with invalids
+in Kakongo is that they should go to their town to be doctored). I
+purged him and gave him strong and continued doses of quinine and he got
+better; but from time to time he suffered from recurring headache and
+drowsiness, and on one occasion when I was vexed at finding him asleep
+and suspecting him of dissipation, was going to punish him, I was
+informed by another servant that the poor fellow was suffering from the
+sleeping sickness. I at once sent him to town with sufficient goods to
+pay his doctor's bill, and his relations did all in their power to have
+him properly cured, taking him many miles to visit certain Ngangas famed
+for the cure of this fell disease.
+
+"He came back to me well and happy. The next year however, the malady
+returned, and he went to town and gradually wasted away. They told me
+that sores upon one of his arms had caused him to lose a hand, which he
+lived to see buried before him. Sanda was of royal blood, so his body
+was taken across from the north bank to San Antonio or Sonio, on the
+south bank of the Congo, and there he was buried with his fathers.
+
+"Another sad case was that of a woman who lived in the factory.
+
+"As a child, it appeared afterwards, she had suffered from the disease,
+and had been cured by the good French doctor then resident in Landana
+(Dr. Lucan). I knew nothing of this at the time, and put her sickness
+down to drink, but got a doctor to see her. He could not make out what
+was the matter, but thought it might possibly be some nervous disease;
+altogether we were completely puzzled.
+
+"On one occasion during my absence she nearly tortured one of her
+children to death by stabbing her with a needle. On my return, and when
+I heard what she had done, I was very angry with her, and turned her out
+of the factory, and shortly afterwards the poor creature died in the
+swelling state of the disease.
+
+"Joaõ (a more or less civilised native) tells me that one of his wives
+was cured of this sleeping sickness. She was living with him in a white
+man's factory when she had it, and on one occasion fell upon a demijohn
+and cut her back open rather seriously--the white man cured her so far
+as the wound was concerned. A native doctor, a Nganga or Kakamucka,
+later on cured the sleeping sickness. He first gave her an emetic, then
+each day he gave her a kind of Turkish bath; that is, having boiled
+certain herbs in water, he placed her within the boiling decoction under
+a covering of cloth, making her perspire freely. Towards nightfall he
+poured some medicine up her nostrils and into her eyes, so that in the
+morning when she awoke, her eyes and nose were full of matter; at the
+same time he cupped and bled her in the locality of the pain in the
+head. What the medicines were I cannot say, neither will the Nganga tell
+any one save the man he means shall succeed him in his office.
+
+"The native doctors appear to know when the disease has become incurable
+and the life of the patient is merely a question of a few days, for once
+while I was at Chemongoanleo, on the lower Congo I heard the village
+carpenter hammering nails into planks, and asked my servant what they
+were doing. 'Building Buite's coffin,' he said. 'What, is he dead?' said
+I. 'No, but he must die soon,' he answered. This statement was confirmed
+by the relations of Buite who came to me for rum as my share towards his
+funeral expenses. Imagine my feelings when shortly after this Buite,
+swollen out of all likeness to his former self, crawled along to the
+shop and asked me for a gallon of rum to help him pay his doctor's bill.
+
+"A doctor of the Congo Free State began to take an interest in the
+sickness and asked me to persuade some one suffering from the disease to
+come and place himself under his care, promising that he would have a
+place apart made for him at the station, so that he could study the
+sickness and try to cure the poor fellow. After a good deal of trouble I
+got him a patient willing to remain with him, but owing to some red tape
+difficulty as to the supply of food for the sick man this doctor's good
+intentions came to nought. A Portuguese doctor here also gave his
+serious attention to the sleeping sickness, and it was reported that he
+had found a cure for it in some part of a fresh billy-goat. This good
+man wanted a special hospital to be built for him and a subsidy so that
+he might devote himself to the task he had undertaken. His Government,
+however, although its hospitals are far in advance of those of its
+neighbours on the Coast, could not see its way to erect such a place."
+
+All I need add to this is that I was informed that the disease when it
+had once definitely set in ran its fatal course in a year, but that when
+it came as an epidemic it was more rapidly fatal, sometimes only a
+matter of a few weeks, and it was this more acute form that was
+accompanied by wild delirium. Another native informant told me when it
+was bad it usually lasted only from twenty to forty days.
+
+Monteiro says the sleep disease was unknown south of the Congo until it
+suddenly attacked the town of Musserra, where he was told by the natives
+as many as 200 died of it in a few months. This was in 1870, and curious
+to say it did not spread to the neighbouring towns. Monteiro induced the
+natives to remove from the old town and the mortality decreased till the
+disease died out. "There was nothing in the old town to account for this
+sudden singular epidemic. It was beautifully clean and well-built on
+high dry ground, surrounded by mandioca plantations, the last place to
+all appearance to expect such a curious outbreak."[27]
+
+Monteiro also observes that "there is no cure known for it," but he is
+speaking for Angola, and I think this strengthens his statement that it
+is a comparatively recent importation there. For certainly there are
+cures, if not known, at any rate believed in, for the sleeping sickness
+in its own home Kakongo and Loango. There is a great difference in the
+diseases, flora and fauna, of the north and south banks of the
+Congo--whether owing to the difficulty of crossing the terrifically
+rapid and powerful stream of the great river I do not know. Still there
+was--more in former times than now--much intercourse between the natives
+of the two banks when the Portuguese discovered the Congo in 1487. The
+town called now San Antonio was the throne town of the kingdom of Kongo,
+and had nominally as provinces the two districts Kakongo and Loango,
+these provinces that are now the head centres of the sleep disease. Yet
+in the early accounts given of Kongo by the Catholic missionaries, who
+lived in Kongo among the natives, I have so far found no mention of the
+sleep disease. It is impossible to believe that Merolla, for example,
+could have avoided mentioning it if he had seen or heard of it.
+Merolla's style of giving information was, like my own, diffuse.
+Certainly we must remember that these Catholic missionaries were not
+much in Loango and Kakongo as those provinces had broken almost entirely
+away from the Kongo throne prior to the Portuguese arrival, so perhaps
+all we can safely say is that in the 15-17th centuries there was no
+sleep disease in the districts on the south bank of the Congo, and it
+was not anything like so notoriously bad in the districts on the north
+bank.
+
+Before quitting the apothecary part of this affair, I may just remark
+that if you, being white, of a nervous disposition, and merely in
+possession of an ordinary amount of medical knowledge, find yourself
+called in to doctor an African friend or acquaintance, you must be
+careful about hot poultices. I should say, _never_ prescribe hot
+poultices. An esteemed medical friend, since dead, told me that when he
+first commenced practice in West Africa he said to a civilised native
+who was looking after his brother--the patient--"Give him a linseed
+poultice made like this"--demonstration--"and mind he has it hot." The
+man came back shortly afterwards to say his brother had been very sick,
+but was no better, though every bit of the stuff had been swallowed so
+hot it had burnt his mouth. But swallowing the poultice is a minor
+danger to its exhibition. Even if you yourself see it put on outside,
+carefully, exactly where that poultice ought to be, the moment your back
+is turned the patient feeling hot gets into the most awful draught he
+can find, or into cold water, and the consequences are inflammation of
+the lungs and death, and you get the credit of it. The natives
+themselves you will find are very clever at doctoring in their own way,
+by no means entirely depending on magic and spells; and you will also
+find they have a strong predilection for blisters, cupping and bleeding,
+hot water and emetics; in all their ailments and on the whole it suits
+them very well. Therefore I pray you add your medical knowledge and your
+special drugs to theirs and for outside applications stick to blisters
+in place of hot poultices.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [24] An experienced medical man from West Africa informs me that he
+   considers the Africans very liable to hysterical disease, and he
+   attributes the throwing backwards to the patient's desire not to spoil
+   his or her face, a thing ladies are especially careful of, and says
+   that turning a lady face downwards on the sand is as efficacious in
+   breaking up the hysterical fit as throwing water over their clothes
+   is with us.
+
+   [25] Negro lethargy; Maladie du sommeil; Enfermedad del sueno; Nelavane
+   (Oulof); Dadane (Sereres); Toruahebue (Mendi); Ntolo (Fjort).
+
+   [26] _System of Medicine._ Volume II. Edited by Dr. Clifford Allbutt.
+   Macmillan & Co., 1897.
+
+   [27] _Angola and the River Congo._ Macmillan. Vol. i., p. 144.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE WITCH DOCTOR
+
+     African Medicine mainly from the point of view of the Witch Doctor.
+
+
+We will now leave the village apothecary and his methods, and turn to
+the witch doctor, the consulting physician. He of course knows all about
+the therapeutic action of low-grade spirits, such as dwell in herbs and
+so on; but he knows more--namely the actions of higher spirits on the
+human soul, and the disorders of the human soul into the bargain.
+
+The dogma that rules his practice is that in all cases of disease in
+which no blood is showing, the patient is suffering from something wrong
+in the soul. In order to lay this dogma fairly before you, I should here
+discourse on the nature of spirits unallied to the human soul--non-human
+spirits--and the nature of the human spirit itself; but as on the one
+hand, I cannot be hasty on such an important group of subjects, and, on
+the other, I cannot expect you to be anything else in such a matter, I
+forbear, and merely beg to remark that the African does not believe in
+anything being soulless, he regards even matter itself as a form of
+soul, low, because not lively, a thing other spirit forms use as they
+please--practically as the cloth of the spirit that uses it. This
+conception is, as far as I know, constant in both Negro and Bantu. I
+will therefore here deal only with what the African regards as merely
+one class of spirits--an important class truly, but above it there are
+at least two more important classes, while beneath it in grade there
+are, I think, about eleven, and equal to it, but differing in nature,
+several classes--I don't exactly know how many. This class of spirits is
+the human soul--the _Kla_ of the true Negro, the _Manu_ of the Bantu.
+These human souls are also of different grades, for one sort is believed
+to be existent before birth, as well as during life and after death,
+while other classes are not. There is more interesting stuff here, but I
+am determined to stick to my main point now--the medical. Well, the
+number of souls possessed by each individual we call a human being is
+usually held to be four--(1) the soul that survives, (2) the soul that
+lives in an animal away wild in the bush, (3) the shadow cast by the
+body, (4) the soul that acts in dreams. I believe that the more profound
+black thinkers hold that these last-named souls are only functions of
+the true soul, but from the witch doctor's point of view there are four,
+and he acts on this opinion when doctoring the diseases that afflict
+these souls of a man.
+
+The dream-soul is the cause of woes unnumbered to our African friend,
+and the thing that most frequently converts him into that desirable
+state, from a witch doctor's point of view of a patient. It is this way.
+The dream-soul is, to put it very mildly, a silly flighty thing. Off it
+goes when its owner is taking a nap, and gets so taken up with
+sky-larking, fighting, or gossiping with other dream-souls that
+sometimes it does not come home to its owner when he is waking up. So,
+if any one has to wake a man up great care must always be taken that it
+is done softly--softly, namely gradually and quietly, so as to give the
+dream-soul time to come home. For if either of the four souls of a man
+have their intercommunication broken, the human being possessing them
+gets very ill. We will take an example. A man has been suddenly roused
+by some cause or other before that dream-soul has had time to get into
+quarters. That human being feels very ill, and sends for the Witch
+Doctor. The medical man diagnoses the case as one of absence of
+dream-soul, instantly claps a cloth over the mouth and nose, and gets
+his assistant to hold it there until the patient gets hard on
+suffocated; but no matter, it's the proper course of treatment to
+pursue. The witch doctor himself gets ready as rapidly as possible
+another dream-soul, which if he is a careful medical man, he has brought
+with him in a basket. Then the patient is laid on his back and the
+cloths removed from the mouth and nose, and the witch doctor holds over
+them his hands containing the fresh soul, blowing hard at it so as to
+get it well into the patient. If this is successfully accomplished, the
+patient recovers. Occasionally, however, this fresh soul slips through
+the medical man's fingers, and before you can say "Knife" is on top of
+some 100-feet-high or more silk cotton tree, where it chirrups gaily and
+distinctly. This is a great nuisance. The patient has to be promptly
+covered up again. If the doctor has an assistant with him, that
+unfortunate individual has to go up the tree and catch the dream-soul.
+If he has no assistant, he has to send his power up the tree after the
+truant; doctors who are in full practice have generally passed the time
+of life when climbing up trees personally is agreeable. When, however,
+the thing has been re-captured and a second attempt to insert it is
+about to be made, it is held advisable to get the patient's friends and
+relatives to stand round him in a ring and howl lustily, while your
+assistant also howling lustily, but in a professional manner, beats a
+drum. This prevents the soul from bolting again, and tends to frighten
+it into the patient.
+
+In some obstinate cases of loss of dream-soul, however, the most
+experienced medical man will fail to get the fresh soul inserted. It
+clings to his fingers, it whisks back into the basket or into his hair
+or clothes, and it chirrups dismally, and the patient becomes convulsed.
+This is a grave symptom, but the diagnosis is quite clear. The patient
+has got a _sisa_ in him, so there is no room for the fresh soul.
+
+Now, a _sisa_ is a dreadful bad thing for a man to have in him, and an
+expensive thing to get out. It is the surviving soul of a person who has
+not been properly buried--not had his devil made, in fact. And as every
+human surviving soul has a certain allotted time of existence in a human
+body before it can learn the dark and difficult way down to Srahmandazi,
+if by mischance the body gets killed off before the time is up, that
+soul, unless properly buried and sent on the way to Srahmandazi, or any
+other Hades, under expert instruction given as to the path for the dead,
+becomes a _sisa_, and has to hang about for the remaining years of its
+term of bodily life.
+
+These _ensisa_ are held to be so wretchedly uncomfortable in this state
+that their tempers become perfect wrecks, and they grow utterly
+malignant, continually trying to get into a human body, so as to finish
+their term more comfortably. Now, a _sisa's_ chief chance of getting
+into a body is in whipping in when there is a hole in a man's soul
+chamber, from the absence of his own dream-soul. If a _sisa_ were a
+quiet, respectable soul that would settle down, it would not matter
+much, for the dream-soul it supplants is not of much account. But a
+_sisa_ is not. At the best, it would only live out its remaining term,
+and then go off the moment that term was up, and most likely kill the
+souls it had been sheltering with by bolting at an inconvenient moment.
+This was the verdict given on the death of a man I knew who, from what
+you would call faintness, fell down in a swamp and was suffocated.
+Inconvenient as this is, the far greater danger you are exposed to by
+having a _sisa_ in you lies in the chances being 10 to 1 that it is
+stained with blood, for, without being hard on these unfortunate
+unburied souls, I may remark that respectable souls usually get
+respectably buried, and so don't become _ensisa_. This blood which is
+upon it the devils that are around smell and go for, as is the nature of
+devils; and these devils whip in after the _sisa_ soul into his host in
+squads, and the man with such a set inside him is naturally very
+ill--convulsions, delirium, high temperature, &c., and the indications
+to your true witch doctor are that that _sisa_ must be extracted before
+a new dream-soul can be inserted and the man recover.
+
+But getting out a _sisa_ is a most trying operation. Not only does it
+necessitate a witch doctor sending in his power to fetch it _vi et
+armis_, it also places the medical man in a position of grave
+responsibility regarding its disposal when secured. The methods he
+employs to meet this may be regarded as akin to those of antiseptic
+surgery. All the people in the village, particularly babies and old
+people--people whose souls are delicate--must be kept awake during the
+operation, and have a piece of cloth over the nose and mouth, and every
+one must howl so as to scare the _sisa_ off them, if by mischance it
+should escape from the witch doctor. An efficient practitioner, I may
+remark, thinks it a great disgrace to allow a _sisa_ to escape from him;
+and such an accident would be a grave blow to his practice, for people
+would not care to call in a man who was liable to have this occur.
+However, our present medical man having got the _sisa_ out, he has still
+to deal with the question of its disposal before he can do anything
+more. The assistant blows a new dream soul into the patient, and his
+women see to him; but the witch doctor just holds on to the _sisa_ like
+a bulldog.
+
+Sometimes the disposal of the _sisa_ has been decided on prior to its
+extraction. If the patient's family are sufficiently well off, they
+agree to pay the doctor enough to enable him to teach the _sisa_ the way
+to Hades. Indeed, this is the course respectable medical men always
+insist on although it is expensive to the patient's family. But there
+are, I regret to say, a good many unprincipled witch doctors about who
+will undertake a case cheap.
+
+They will carry off with them the extracted _sisa_ for a small fee, then
+shortly afterwards a baby in the village goes off in tetanic
+convulsions. No one takes much notice of that, because it's a way babies
+have. Soon another baby is born in the same family--polygamy being
+prevalent, the event may occur after a short interval--well, after
+giving the usual anxiety and expense, that baby goes off in convulsions.
+Suspicion is aroused. Presently yet another baby appears in the family,
+keeps all right for a week may be, and then also goes off in
+convulsions. Suspicions are confirmed. The worm--the father, I
+mean--turns, and he takes the body of that third baby and smashes one of
+its leg bones before it is thrown away into the bush; for he knows he
+has got a wanderer soul--namely, a _sisa_, which some unprincipled
+practitioner has sent into his family. He just breaks the leg so as to
+warn the soul he is not a man to be trifled with, and will not have his
+family kept in a state of perpetual uproar and expense. It sometimes
+happens, however, in spite of this that, when his fourth baby arrives,
+that too goes off in convulsions. Thoroughly roused now, paterfamilias
+sternly takes a chopper and chops that infant's remains up extremely
+small, and it is scattered broadcast. Then he holds he has eliminated
+that _sisa_ from his family finally.
+
+I am informed, however, that the fourth baby to arrive in a family
+afflicted by a _sisa_ does not usually go off in convulsions, but that
+fairly frequently it is born lame, which shows that it is that wanderer
+soul back with its damaged leg. It is not treated unkindly but not taken
+much care of, and so rarely lives many years--from the fetish point of
+view, of course, only those years remaining of its term of bodily life
+out of which some witchcraft of man or some vengeance of a god cheated
+it.
+
+If I mention the facts that when a man wakes up in the morning feeling
+very stiff and with "that tired feeling" you see mentioned in
+advertisements in the newspapers, he holds that it arises from his own
+dream-soul having been out fighting and got itself bruised; and that if
+he wakes up in a fright, he will jump up and fire off his gun, holding
+that a pack of rag tag devils have been chasing his soul home and
+wishing to scare them off, I think I may leave the complaints of the
+dream-soul connected with physic and pass on to those connected with
+surgery.
+
+Now, devoted as I am to my West African friends, I am bound in the
+interests of Truth to say that many of them are sadly unprincipled.
+There are many witches, not witch doctors, remember, who make it a
+constant practice to set traps for dream-souls. Witches you will find
+from Sierra Leone to Cameroons, but they are extra prevalent on the
+Gold Coast and in Calabar.
+
+These traps are usually pots containing something attractive to the
+soul, and in this bait are concealed knives or fish-hooks--fish-hooks
+when the witch wants to catch the soul to keep, knives when the desire
+is just to injure it.
+
+In the case of the lacerated dream-soul, when it returns to its owner,
+it makes him feel very unwell; but the symptoms are quite different from
+those arising from loss of dream-soul or from a _sisa_.
+
+The reason for catching dream-souls with hooks is usually a low
+mercenary one. You see, many patients insist on having their own
+dream-soul put back into them--they don't want a substitute from the
+doctor's store--so of course the soul has to be bought from the witch
+who has got it. Sometimes, however, the witch is the hireling of some
+one intent on injuring a particular person and keen on capturing the
+soul for this purpose, though too frightened to kill his enemy outright.
+So the soul is not only caught and kept, but tortured, hung up over the
+canoe fire and so on, and thus, even if the patient has another
+dream-soul put in, so long as his original soul is in the hands of a
+torturer, he is uncomfortable.
+
+On one occasion, for example, I heard one of the Kru boys who were with
+me making more row in his sleep, more resounding slaps and snores and
+grunts than even a normal Kru boy does, and, resolving in my mind that
+what that young man really required was one of my pet pills, I went to
+see him. I found him asleep under a thick blanket and with a
+handkerchief tied over his face. It was a hot night, and the man and his
+blanket were as wet with sweat as if they had been dragged through a
+river. I suggested to head-man that the handkerchief muzzle should come
+off, and was informed by him that for several nights previously the man
+had dreamt of that savoury dish, crawfish seasoned with red pepper. He
+had become anxious, and consulted the head-man, who decided that
+undoubtedly some witch was setting a trap for his dream-soul with this
+bait, with intent, &c. Care was now being taken to, as it were, keep the
+dream-soul at home. I of course did not interfere and the patient
+completely recovered.
+
+We will now pass on to diseases arising from disorders in the other
+three souls of a man. The immortal or surviving soul is liable to a
+disease that its body suffered from during its previous time on earth,
+born again with it. Such diseases are quite incurable, and I only
+personally know of them in the Calabar and Niger Delta, where
+reincarnation is strongly believed in.
+
+Then come the diseases that arise from injury to the shadow-soul. It
+strikes one as strange at first to see men who have been walking, say,
+through forest or grass land on a blazing hot morning quite happily, on
+arrival at a piece of clear ground or a village square, most carefully
+go round it, not across, and you will soon notice that they only do this
+at noontime, and learn that they fear losing their shadow. I asked some
+Bakwiri I once came across who were particularly careful in this matter
+why they were not anxious about losing their shadows when night came
+down and they disappeared in the surrounding darkness, and was told that
+that was all right, because at night all shadows lay down in the shadow
+of the Great God, and so got stronger. Had I not seen how strong and
+long a shadow, be it of man or tree or of the great mountain itself, was
+in the early morning time? Ah me! I said, the proverb is true that says
+the turtle can teach the spider. I never thought of that.
+
+Murders are sometimes committed by secretly driving a nail or knife into
+a man's shadow, and so on; but if the murderer be caught red-handed at
+it, he or she would be forthwith killed, for all diseases arising from
+the shadow-soul are incurable. No man's shadow is like that of his own
+brother, says the proverb.
+
+Now we come to that very grave class of diseases which arise from
+disorders of the bush-soul. These diseases are not all incurable,
+nevertheless they are very intractable and expensive to cure. This
+bush-soul is, as I have said, resident in some wild animal in the
+forest. It may be in only an earth pig, or it may be in a leopard, and,
+quite providentially for the medical profession no layman can see his
+own soul--it is not as if it were connected with all earth pigs, or all
+leopards, as the case may be, but it is in one particular earth pig or
+leopard or other animal--so recourse must be had to medical aid when
+anything goes wrong with it. It is usually in the temper that the
+bush-soul suffers. It is liable to get a sort of aggrieved neglected
+feeling, and want things given it. When you wander about the wild gloomy
+forests of the Calabar region, you will now and again come across, far
+away from all human habitation or plantation, tiny huts, under whose
+shelter lies some offering or its remains. Those are offerings
+administered by direction of a witch doctor to appease a bush-soul. For
+not only can a witch doctor see what particular animal a man's bush-soul
+is in, but he can also see whereabouts in the forest that animal is.
+Still, these bush-souls are not easily appeased. The worst of it is that
+a man may be himself a quiet steady man, careful of his diet and
+devoted to a whole skin, and yet his bush-soul be a reckless blade,
+scorning danger, and thereby getting itself shot by some hunter or
+killed in a trap or pit; and if his bush-soul dies, the man it is
+connected with dies. Therefore if the hunter who has killed it can be
+found out--a thing a witch doctor cannot do unless he happens by chance
+to have had his professional eye on that bush-soul at the time of the
+catastrophe; because, as it were, at death the bush-soul ceases to
+exist--that hunter has to pay compensation to the family of the
+deceased. On the other hand, if the man belonging to the bush-soul dies,
+the bush-soul animal has to die too. It rushes to and fro in the
+forest--"can no longer find a good place." If it sees a fire, it rushes
+into that; if it sees a lot of hunters, it rushes among them--anyhow, it
+gets itself killed off.
+
+We will now turn our attention to that other great division of
+diseases--namely such as are caused only and directly by human agency.
+Those I have already detained you too long over are caused by spirits
+acting on their own account, for even in the case of the trapped
+dream-souls they are held themselves to have shown contributory
+negligence in getting hooked or cut in traps.
+
+The others arise from what is called witchcraft. You will often hear it
+said that the general idea among savage races is that death always
+arises from witchcraft; but I think, from what I have said regarding
+diseases arising from bush-souls' bad tempers, from contracting a
+_sisa_, from losing the shadow at high noon, and from, it may be, other
+causes I have not spoken of, that this generalisation is for West Africa
+too sweeping. But undoubtedly sixty per cent of the deaths are believed
+to arise from witchcraft. I would put the percentage higher, were it not
+for the terrible mortality from tetanus among children, which sometimes
+is and sometimes is not put down to witchcraft, and the mortality from
+smallpox and the sleep disease down south in Loango and Kakongo, those
+diseases not being in any case that I have had personal acquaintance
+with imputed to witchcraft at all. Indeed I venture to think that any
+disease that takes an epidemic form is regarded as a scourge sent by
+some great outraged Nature spirit, not a mere human dabbler in devils. I
+have dealt with witchcraft itself elsewhere, therefore now I only speak
+regarding it medically; and I think, roughly speaking, not absolutely,
+mind you, that the witching something _out_ of a man is the most common
+iniquity of witchcraft from Cape Juby to Cameroons, the region of the
+true Negro stock; while from Cameroons to Benguella--the limit of my
+knowledge to the south on the western side of the continent--the most
+common iniquity of witchcraft is witching something into him. As in the
+diseases arising from the loss of the dream-soul I have briefly dealt
+with the witching something out, I now turn to the witching something
+in.
+
+I well remember, in 1893, being then new to and easily alarmed by the
+West Coast, going into a village in Kakongo one afternoon and seeing
+several unpleasant-looking objects stuck on poles. Investigation showed
+they were the lungs, livers, or spleens of human beings; and local
+information stated that they were the powers of witches--witches that
+had been killed and, on examination, found to have inside them these
+things, dangerous to the state and society at large. Wherefrom it was
+the custom to stick up on poles these things as warnings to the general
+public not to harbour in their individual interiors things to use
+against their fellow-creatures. They mutely but firmly said, "See! if
+you turn witch, your inside will be stuck on a pole."
+
+I may remark that in many districts of the South-West coast and middle
+Congo it is customary when a person dies in an unexplainable way, namely
+without shedding blood, to hold a post-mortem. In some cases the
+post-mortem discloses the path of the witch through the victim--usually,
+I am informed, the injected witch feeds on the victim's lungs--in other
+cases the post-mortem discloses the witch power itself, demonstrating
+that the deceased was a keeper of witch power, or, as we should say, a
+witch.
+
+Once when I was at Batanga a woman dropped down on the beach and died.
+The usual post-mortem was held, and local feeling ran high. "She no
+complain, she no say nothing, and then she go die one time." The
+post-mortem disclosed what I think you would term a ruptured aneurism of
+the aorta, but the local verdict was "she done witch herself"--namely
+that she was a witch, who had been eaten by her own power, therefore
+there were great rejoicings over her death.
+
+This dire catastrophe is, however, liable to overtake legitimate medical
+men. All reasonable people in every clime allow a certain latitude to
+doctors. They are supposed to know things other people need not, and to
+do things, like dissections and such, that other people should not, and
+no one thinks any the worse of them. This is the case with the African
+physician, whom we roughly call the witch doctor, but whose full title
+is the combatant of the evils worked by witches and devils on human
+souls and human property. This medical man has, from the exigencies of
+his profession, to keep in his own inside a power, and a good strong one
+at that, which he can employ in his practice by sending it into
+patients to fetch out other witch powers, _sisas_, or any miscellaneous
+kind of devil that may have got into them. His position is totally
+different from that of the layman. He is known to possess a witch power,
+and the knowledge of how to employ it; but instead of this making him an
+object of aversion to his fellow-men, it secures for him esteem and
+honour, and the more terrifically powerful his power is known to be, the
+more respect he gains; for suppose you were taken ill by a real bad
+devil, you would prefer a medical man whose power was at least up to
+that devil's fighting weight.
+
+Nevertheless his having to keep the dangerous devil in his own inside
+exposes the witch doctor to grave personal danger, for if, from a
+particularly healthy season, or some notorious quack coming into his
+district, his practice falls off, and his power is thereby not kept fed,
+that unfortunate man is liable to be attacked by it. This was given me
+as the cause of the death of a great doctor in the Chiloango district,
+and I heard the same thing from the Ncomi district, so it is clear that
+many eminent men are cut off in the midst of their professional career
+in this way.
+
+As for what this power is like in its corporal form, I can only say that
+it is evidently various. One witch doctor I know just to the north of
+Loango always made it a practice to give his patients a brisk emetic as
+soon as he was called in, and he always found young crocodiles in the
+consequences. I remember seeing him in one case secure six lively young
+crocodiles that had apparently been very recently hatched. These were
+witch powers. Again, I was informed of a witch who was killed near the
+Bungo River having had found inside him a thing like a lizard, but with
+wings like a bat. The most peculiar form of witch power I have heard of
+as being found inside a patient was on the Ogowe from two native
+friends, both of them very intelligent, reliable men, one of them a
+Bible reader. They said that about two years previously a relation of
+theirs had been badly witched. A doctor had been called in, who
+administered an emetic, and there appeared upon the scene a strange
+little animal that grew with visible rapidity. An hour after its coming
+to light it crawled and got out of the basin, and finally it flew away.
+It had bat's wings and a body and tail like a lizard. This catawampus,
+my informant held, had been witched into the man when it was "small,
+small"--namely, very small. It might, they thought, have been given to
+their relation in some food or drink by an enemy, but for sure, if it
+had not been disturbed by that emetic, it would have grown up inside the
+man and have eaten its way out through his vitals.
+
+From the whole of the above statements I think I have shown you that if
+as a witch doctor you are called in to a patient who is ill, but who is
+not showing blood anywhere, your diagnosis will be that he has got some
+sort or another of devil the matter with him, and that the first
+indication is to find out who put that devil in, because, in the
+majority of cases, until you know this you can't get it out; the second
+is to get it out; the third is to prevent its getting adrift, and into
+some one else.
+
+I have only briefly sketched the ideas and methods of witch doctors in
+West Africa, in so far as treatment is concerned. The infinite variety
+of methods employed in detecting who has been the witch in a given case;
+the infinite variety of incantations and so on, I have no space to dwell
+on here, and will conclude by giving you a general sketch of the career
+of a witch doctor.
+
+We will start with the medical student stage. Now, every West African
+tribe has a secret society--two, in fact, one for men and one for women.
+Every free man has to pass through the secret society of his tribe. If
+during this education the Elders of this society discover that a boy is
+what is called in Calabar an _ebumtup_--a person who can see
+spirits--the elders of the society advise that he should be brought up
+to the medical profession. Their advice is generally taken, and the boy
+is apprenticed as it were to a witch doctor, who requires a good fee
+with him. This done, he proceeds with his studies, learns the difference
+between the dream-soul basket and the one _sisas_ are kept in--a mistake
+between the two would be on a par with mistaking oxalic acid for Epsom
+salts. He is then taught how to howl in a professional way, and, by
+watching his professor, picks up his bedside manner. If he can acquire a
+showy way of having imitation epileptic fits, so much the better. In
+fact, as a medical student, you have to learn pretty well as much there
+as here. You must know the dispositions, the financial position, little
+scandals, &c., of the inhabitants of the whole district, for these
+things are of undoubted use in divination and the finding of witches,
+and in addition you must be able skilfully to dispense charms, and know
+what babies say before their own mothers can. Then some day your
+professor and instructor dies, his own professional power eats him, or
+he tackles a disease-causing spirit that is one too many for him, and on
+you descend his paraphernalia and his practice.
+
+It is usual for a witch doctor to acquire for his power a member of one
+of the higher grade spirit classes--he does not acquire a human
+soul--and his successor usually, I think, takes the same spirit, or, at
+any rate, a member of the same class. This does not altogether limit
+you as a successor to a certain line of practice, but, as no one spirit
+can do all things, it tends to make you a specialist. I know a district
+where, if any one wanted a canoe charm, they went to one medical man; if
+a charm to keep thieves off their plantation, to another.
+
+This brings us to the practice itself, and it may be divided into two
+divisions. First, prophylactic methods, namely, making charms to protect
+your patient's wives, children, goats, plantations, canoes, &c. from
+damage, houses from fire, &c., &c., and to protect the patient himself
+from wild animals and all danger by land or water. This is a very paying
+part, but full of anxiety. For example, put yourself in the place of a
+Mpangwe medical friend of mine. You have with much trouble got a really
+valuable spirit to come into a paste made of blood and divers things,
+and having made it into a sausage form, and done it round with fibre
+wonderfully neatly, you have painted it red outside to please the
+spirits--because spirits like red, they think it's blood. Well, in a
+week or so the man you administered it to comes back and says "that
+thing's no good." His paddle has broken more often than before he had
+the thing. The amount of rocks, and floating trees, to say nothing of
+snags, is, he should say, about double the normal, whereby he has lost a
+whole canoe load of European goods, and, in short, he doesn't think much
+of you as a charm maker. Then he expectorates and sulks offensively. You
+take the charm, and tell him it was a perfectly good one when you gave
+it him, and you never had any complaints before, but you will see what
+has gone wrong with it. Investigation shows you that the spirit is
+either dead or absent. In the first case it has been killed by a
+stronger spirit of its own class; in the second, lured away by bribery.
+Now this clearly points to your patient's having a dangerous and
+powerful enemy, and you point it out to him and advise him to have a
+fresh and more powerful charm--necessarily more expensive--with as
+little delay as possible. He grumbles, but, realising the danger, pays
+up, and you make him another. The old one can be thrown away, like an
+empty pill-box.
+
+The other part of your practice--the clinical--consists in combating
+those witches who are always up to something--sucking blood of young
+children, putting fearful wild fowl into people to eat up their most
+valued viscera, or stealing souls o' nights, blighting crops, &c.
+
+Therefore you see the witch doctor's life is not an idle one; he has not
+merely to humbug the public and pocket the fees--or I should say "bag,"
+pockets being rare in this region--but he works very hard, and has his
+anxieties just like a white medical man. The souls that get away from
+him are a great worry. The death of every patient is a danger to a
+certain extent, because the patient's soul will be vicious to him until
+it is buried. But I must say I profoundly admire our West African witch
+doctors for their theory of _sisas_ as an explanation of their not
+always being able to insert a new soul into a patient, for by this
+theory they save themselves somewhat, and do not entail on themselves
+the treatment their brother medicos have to go through on the Nass River
+in British Columbia. According to Mr. Fraser, in that benighted Nass
+River district those native American doctors hold it possible that a
+doctor may swallow a patient's soul by mistake. This is their theory to
+account for the strange phenomenon of a patient getting worse instead of
+better when a doctor has been called in, and so the unfortunate doctor
+who has had this accident occur is made to stand over his patient while
+another medical man thrusts his fingers in his throat, another kneads
+him in the abdomen, and a third medical brother slaps him on the back.
+All the doctors present have to go through the same ordeal, and if the
+missing soul does not turn up, the party of doctors go to the head
+doctor's house to see if by chance he has got it in his box. All the
+things are taken out of the box, and if the soul is not there, the head
+doctor, the President of the College of Physicians, the Sir Somebody
+Something of the district, is held by his heels with his learned head in
+a hole in the floor, while the other doctors wash his hair. The water
+used is then taken and poured over the patient's head.
+
+I told this story to all the African witch doctors I knew. I fear, that
+being hazy in geography, they think it is the practice of the English
+medical profession; but, anyhow every one of them regarded the doctors
+of the Nass River as a set of superstitious savages, and imbeciles at
+that. Of course a medical man had to see to souls, but to go about in
+squads, administer rough emetics to themselves, instead of to the
+patients, and as for that head washing--well, people can be fool too
+much! None of them showed the slightest signs of adopting the British
+Columbia method, none of them showed even any signs of adopting my
+suggestion that they should go and teach those benighted brothers of
+theirs the theory of _insisa_.
+
+If you ask me frankly whether I think these African witch doctors
+believe in themselves, I think I must say, Yes; or perhaps it would be
+safer to say they believe in the theory they work by, for of that there
+can be very little doubt. I do not fancy they ever claim invincible
+power over disease; they do their best according to their lights. It
+would be difficult to see why they should doubt their own methods,
+because, remember, all their patients do not die; the majority recover.
+I am not putting this recovery down to their soul-treatment method, but
+to the village apothecary, who has usually been doctoring the patient
+with drugs before the so-called witch doctor is called in. Of course the
+apothecary does not get the credit of the cure in this case, but I fancy
+he deserves it. Another point to be remembered is that the Africans on
+the West Coast, at any rate, are far more liable than white men to many
+strange nervous disorders, especially to delirium, which often occurs in
+a comparatively slight illness. Why I do not pretend to understand; but
+I think in these nervous cases the bedside manners of a witch
+doctor--though strongly resembling that of the physician who attended
+the immortal Why Why's mother--may yet be really useful.
+
+As to the evil these witch doctors do in the matter of getting people
+killed for bewitching it is difficult to speak justly. I fancy that, on
+the whole, they do more good than harm, for remember witchcraft in these
+districts is no parlour game; in the eyes of Allah as well as man it is
+murder, for most of it is poison. Most witchcraft charms I know of among
+people who have not been in contact with Mohammedanism have always had
+that element of mixing something with the food or drink--even in that
+common, true Negro form of killing by witchcraft, putting medicine in
+the path, there is a poisoned spike as well as charm stuff. There can be
+no doubt that the witch doctor's methods of finding out who has poisoned
+a person are effective, and that the knowledge in the public mind of
+this detective power keeps down poisoning to a great extent. Of the
+safeguards against unjust accusation I will speak when treating of law.
+
+As to their using hypnotism, I suppose they do use something of the sort
+at times. West Indians, with whom I was always anxious to talk on the
+differences and agreements between Vodou and Obeah and their parent West
+African religion, certainly, in their description of what they called
+Wanga--and translated as Glamour--seemed to point to this; but for
+myself, save in the case of blood coming before, one case of which I
+witnessed, I have seen nothing beyond an enormously elaborated common
+sense. I dare not call it sound, because it is based on and developed
+out of animism, and of that and our white elaborated view I am not the
+judge, remembering you go the one way, I the other--which is the best,
+God knows.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+EARLY TRADE IN WEST AFRICA
+
+     Concerning the accounts given by classic writers of West Africa,
+     and of the method of barter called the Silent Trade.
+
+
+It is a generally received opinion that there are too many books in the
+world already. I cannot, however, subscribe to any Institution that
+proposes to alter this state of affairs, because I find no consensus of
+opinion as to which are the superfluous books; I have my own opinion on
+the point, but I feel I had better keep it to myself, for I find the
+very books I dislike--almost invariably in one-volume form, as this one
+is, though of a more connected nature than this is likely to be--are the
+well-beloved of thousands of my fellow human beings; and so I will
+restrict my enthusiasms in the matter of books to the cause of
+attempting to incite writers to give us more. If any one wants
+personally to oblige me he will forthwith write a masterly history of
+the inter-relationships--religious, commercial, and cultural--of the
+other races of the earth with the African, and he can put in as an
+appendix a sketch of the war conquest of Africa by the white races. I do
+not ask for a separate volume on this, because there will be so many on
+the others; moreover, it is such a kaleidoscopic affair, and its
+influence alike on both European, Asiatic, and African seems to me
+neither great nor good.
+
+For the past fifteen years I have been reading up Africa; and the effect
+of the study of this literature may best be summarised in Mr. Kipling's
+observation, "For to admire an' for to see, For to be'old this world so
+wide, It's never been no good to me, But I can't drop it if I tried."
+Wherein it has failed to be of good, I hastily remark, is that after all
+this fifteen years' reading, I found I had to go down into the most
+unfashionable part of Africa myself, to try to find out whatever the
+thing was really like, and also to discover which of my authors had been
+doing the heaviest amount of lying. It seemed clear to the meanest
+intelligence that this form of the darkening of counsel was fearfully
+prevalent among them, because of the way they disagreed about things
+among themselves. Of course I have so far only partially succeeded in
+both these matters; for, regarding the first, personal experience taught
+me that things differed with district; regarding the second, that all
+the people who have been to Africa and have written books on it have,
+off and on, told the truth, and that what seemed to the public who have
+not been there to be the most erroneous statements have been true in
+substance and in fact, and that those statements they have accepted
+immediately as true on account of their either flattering their vanity
+or comfortably explaining the reasons of the failure of their
+endeavours, have the most falsehood in them.
+
+There is another point I must mention regarding this material for that
+much wanted colossal work on the history of African relationships with
+the rest of the world--which I do not intend to write, but want written
+for me--and that is the superiority both in quality and quantity of the
+portion which relates to the Early History of the West Coast. Yet very
+little attention has been given in our own times to this. I might say no
+attention, were it not for Sir A. B. Ellis, that very noble man and
+gallant soldier, who did so much good work for England both with sword
+and pen. Just for the sake of the work being worth doing, not in the
+hope of reward; for twenty years' service and the publication of a
+series of books of great interest and importance taught him that West
+Africa was under a ban that it was beyond his power to remove;
+nevertheless he went on with his work unfaltering, if not uncomplaining,
+and died, in 1895, a young man, practically killed by the Warim
+incident--the true history of which has yet to be written. For the
+credit of my country, I must say that just before death he was knighted.
+
+I do not quote Colonel Ellis's works extensively, because, for one
+thing, it is the duty of people to read them first-hand, and as they are
+perfectly accessible there is no excuse for their not doing so; and, for
+another thing, I am in touch with the majority of the works from which
+he gathered his information regarding the early history, and with the
+natives from whom he gathered his ethnological information. There are
+certain points, I grant, on which I am unable to agree with him, such as
+the opinion he formed from his personal prejudices against the traders
+in West Africa; but in the main, regarding the regions with which he was
+personally acquainted and on which he wrote--the Bight of Benin
+regions--I am only too glad that there is Colonel Ellis for me to agree
+with.
+
+The fascination of West Africa's historical record is very great,
+bristling as it does with the deeds of brave men, bad and good, black
+and white. What my German friends would call the Blüth-period of this
+history is decidedly that period which was inaugurated by the great
+Prince Henry the Navigator; and no man who has ever read, as every man
+should read, Mr. Major's book on Prince Henry, can fail to want to know
+more still, and what happened down in those re-discovered Bights of
+Benin and Biafra after this Blüth-period closed. This can be done,
+mainly thanks to a Dutchman named Bosman, who was agent for the great
+Dutch house of the Gold Coast for many years circa 1698, and who wrote
+home to his uncle a series of letters of a most exemplary nature reeking
+with information on native matters and local politics, and suffused with
+a tender fear of shocking his aunt, which did not, however, seem in his
+opinion to justify him in suppressing important ethnological facts.
+
+Regarding the ethnological information we have of the Gold Coast
+natives, the most important works are those by the late Sir A. B. Ellis.
+His books are almost models of what books should be that are written by
+people studying native customs in their native land. We have also the
+results of scientific observers in the works of Buckhardt and Bastian,
+besides a mass of scattered information in the works of travellers,
+Bosman, Barbot, Labat, Mathews, Bowditch, Cruickshank, Winwood Reade, H.
+M. Stanley, Burton, Captain Canot, Captain Binger, and others, and quite
+recently a valuable contribution to our knowledge in Mr. Sarbar's _Fanti
+Customary Laws_.[28] I think that every student of the African form of
+thought should master these works thoroughly, and I fully grant their
+great importance; but, nevertheless, I am quite unable to agree with Mr.
+Jevons (_Introduction to the History of Religion_, p. 164) when he says,
+regarding Fetishism, that "it is certainly amongst the inhabitants of
+the Gold and Slave Coasts that the subject can best be studied." These
+two Coasts are, I grant, the best place for a student who is resident in
+Europe, and therefore dependent on the accounts given by others of the
+things he is dealing with, to draw his information from, because of the
+accuracy and extent of the information he can get from Ellis's work;
+but, apart from Ellis the value of these regions to an ethnologist is
+but small, and for an ethnologist who will go out to West Africa and
+study his material for himself, the whole of the Coast regions of the
+Benin Bight are but of tenth-rate importance, because of the great and
+long-continued infusion of both Mohammedan and European forms of thought
+into the original native thought-form that has taken place in these
+regions. This subject I will refer to later, and I will return now to
+the history, confining myself to the earlier portions of it, and to that
+which bears on the early development of trade.
+
+I sincerely wish I could go into full details regarding the whole
+history of the locality here, because I know my only chance of being
+allowed to do so is on paper, and it would be a great relief to my mind;
+but I forbear, experience having taught me that the subject, to put it
+mildly, is not of general interest. For example, person after person
+have I tried to illuminate and educate in the matter of our
+relationships with the Ashantees; always, alas, in vain. Before I have
+got half through they "hear a voice I cannot hear that's calling them
+away;" or remember something "that must be done at once;" or, worst of
+all, go off straightway to sleep, after once or twice feebly enquiring,
+"Where is that place?" Of course I am glad that my little knowledge has
+been the comfort it has to several people. Once, when I was
+homeward-bound along the Gold Coast, three gentlemen came on board very
+ill from fever, and homeward-bound, too. Their worst symptom was
+agonising insomnia. "Not a wink," they assured my friend the Irish
+purser, had they had "for a couple of months." "We'll soon put that
+right for you on board this boat," he said, in his characteristically
+kind and helpful manner. To my great surprise, that same afternoon he
+deliberately tackled me on the subject of the real reason that induced
+Osai Kwofi Kari Kari to cross the Prah in January, 1873. I was charmed
+at this unwonted display of interest in the subject, and hoped also to
+gain further information on it from those recently shipped Gold Coasters
+in the smoking-room. I was getting on fairly well with it; and my friend
+the purser, instead of having "some manifests to write out," as was
+usual with him, nobly battled with the intricacies of the subject for a
+good half hour and more; and then, just when I was in the middle of some
+topographical elucidation, accompanied by questions, up that purser
+rose, yawned and stretched himself, and hailed the doctor, who happened
+to be passing by. "What do you think of that, doctor?" he said, pointing
+to the settee. "Do them a power of good," says his compatriot the
+medico. Turning round, I saw the three victims of insomnia grouped
+together; the middle man had his head pillowed on the oilclothed top of
+the table, and reclining, more or less gracefully, against him on either
+side were his two companions, their half-smoked pipes fallen from their
+limp fingers--all profoundly, unquestionably asleep. "Oh, yes! of
+course, I was delighted," but not flattered; and, warned by this
+incident, I will here only say that should any one be really interested
+in the eventful history of the long struggle between the English,
+Portuguese, French, Dutch, and Brandenburgers, with each other and with
+the natives, for the possession of the country where the black man's
+gold came from, they will find a good deal about it in the works already
+cited; and should any medical man--the remedy is perhaps a little too
+powerful to be trusted in the hands of the laity--require it for the
+treatment of insomnia as above indicated, I recommend that part of it
+which bears on the Ashantee question in small but regular doses.
+
+Our earliest authorities mentioning Africa with the knowledge in them
+that it is surrounded by the ocean, save at Suez, are Theopompus and
+Herodotus. Unfortunately all Theopompus's works are lost to us,
+voluminous though they were, his history alone being a matter of
+fifty-eight volumes, while before he took up history he had won for
+himself a great reputation as an orator, during the reigns of Philip and
+Alexander the Great. He is perpetually referred to, however, though not
+always praised, by other great classical writers, Cicero, Pliny, the two
+Dionysiuses and others, and was evidently regarded as a great authority;
+one particular fragment of his works that refers to Africa is preserved
+by Ælian, and consists of a conversation between Silenus and Midas, King
+of Phrygia. Silenus says that Europe, Asia, and Africa are surrounded by
+the sea, but that beyond the known world there is an island of immense
+extent containing large animals and men of twice our stature. This
+island Mr. Major thinks, and doubtless rightly, is connected with the
+tradition of our old friend--you know what I mean, as Captain Marryat's
+boatswain says--the Atlantis of Plato. This affair I will no further
+mention or hint at, but hastily pass on to that other early authority,
+Herodotus, who was born 484 years before Christ, and whose works, thanks
+be, have survived. He says: "The Phoenician navigators under command
+of Pharaoh-Necho, King of Egypt, setting sail from the Red Sea, made
+their way to the Southern Sea; when autumn approached they drew their
+vessels to land, sowed a crop, waited until it was ripe for harvest,
+reaped it, and put again to sea." Having spent two years in this manner,
+in the third year they reached the Pillars of Hercules, (Jebu Zatout,
+and Gibraltar), and returned to Egypt, "reporting," says Herodotus,
+"what does not find belief in me, but may perhaps in some other persons,
+for they said in sailing round Africa they had the sun to the right (to
+the North) of them. In this way was Libya first known."[29]
+
+Much has been written regarding the accuracy of these Phoenician
+accounts; for, as frequently happens, their mention of a thing that
+seemed at first to brand their account as a lie remains to brand it as
+the truth--and although I have no doubt those Phoenician gentlemen
+heartily wished they had said nothing about having seen the sun to the
+North, yet it was best for them in the end, as it demonstrates to us
+that they had, at any rate, been South of the Equator; and we owe to
+Herodotus here, as in many other places in his works, a debt of
+gratitude for honestly putting down what he did not believe himself; he
+also has suffered from this habit of accuracy, becoming himself regarded
+by the superficial people of this world as a credulous old romancer,
+which he never was. Good man, he only liked fair play. "Here," he says
+as it were, "is a thing I am told. It's a bit too large for my belief
+hatch, but if you can get it down yours, you're free and welcome to ship
+it." Herodotus, however, accepts the fact that Africa was surrounded by
+water, save at its connection with the great land mass of the earth
+(Europe and Asia) by the Isthmus of Suez.
+
+Several other attempts to circumnavigate Africa were made prior to
+Herodotus's writings. One that we have mention of[30] was made by a
+Persian nobleman named Sataspes, whom Xerxes had, for a then capital
+offence, condemned to impalement. This man's mother persuaded Xerxes
+that if she were allowed to deal with her son she would impose on him a
+more terrible punishment even than this, namely, that he should be
+condemned to sail round Libya. There is no doubt this good lady thought
+thereby to save her son; but, as events turned out, Xerxes, by accepting
+her suggestion, did not cheat justice by granting this as an alternative
+to immediate execution. However, off Sataspes sailed with a ship and
+crew from Egypt, out through the Pillars of Hercules, and doubling the
+Cape of Libya, then named Solois, he steered south, and, says Herodotus,
+"traversed a vast extent of sea for many months, and finding he had
+still more to pass he turned round and returned to Egypt and then back
+to Xerxes, who had him then impaled, because, for one thing he had not
+sailed round Libya, and for another, Xerxes held he lied about those
+regions of it that he had visited; for Sataspes said he had seen a
+nation of little men who wore garments made of palm leaves, who,
+whenever his crew drew their ships ashore, left their cities and flew
+into the mountains, though he did them no injury, only taking some
+cattle from them; and the reason he gave for his not sailing round Libya
+was that his ships could go no further." Sataspes's end was sad, but one
+cannot feel that he was a loss to the class of romancers of travel.
+
+Another and a more determined navigator was Eudoxus of Cyzicus (B.C.
+117). The scanty record we have of his exploration is of great interest.
+While he was making a stay in Alexandria, he met an Indian who was the
+sole survivor of a crew wrecked on the Red Sea coast. He is the Indian
+who persuaded Ptolemy Euergetes to fit out an expedition to sail to
+India, and off they went and succeeded in it greatly, but on their
+return the king seized the cargo; so therefore, as a private enterprise,
+the thing was a failure. However, Eudoxus was a man of great
+determination, and on the death of Ptolemy VII. in the reign of his
+successor, he set out on another expedition to India. On his return
+voyage he was driven down the African Coast, and found there on the
+shore amongst other wreckage the prow of a vessel with the figure of a
+horse carved on it. This relic he took with him as a curiosity, and on
+his successful return to Alexandria exhibited it there in the market
+place, and during its exhibition it was recognised by some pirates from
+Cadiz (Gades) who happened to be in that city, and they testified that
+the small vessels which were employed in the fisheries along the West
+African Coast as far as the River Lixius (Wadi al Knos) always had the
+figure of a horse on their prows, and on this account were called
+"horses." The fact of this wreck of a vessel belonging to Western
+Europe being found on the East Coast of Africa joined with the knowledge
+that these vessels did not pass through the Mediterranean Sea, gave
+Eudoxus the idea that the vessel he had the figure head of must have
+come round Africa from the West Coast, and he then proceeded to Cadiz
+and equipped three vessels, one large and two of smaller size, and
+started out to do the same thing, bar wrecking. He sailed down the known
+West Coast without trouble, but when he came to passing on into the
+unknown seas, he had trouble with the crews, and was compelled to beach
+his vessels. After doing this he succeeded in persuading his crews to
+proceed, but it was then found impossible to float the largest vessel,
+so she was abandoned, and the expedition proceeded in the smaller and in
+a ship constructed from the wreck of the larger on which the cargo was
+shipped with the expedition. Eudoxus reached apparently Senegambia, and
+then another mutiny broke out, and he had to return to Barbary. But
+undaunted he then fitted out another expedition, consisting of two
+smaller vessels, and once again sailed to the South to circumnavigate
+Africa. Nothing since has been heard of Eudoxus of Cyzicus surnamed the
+Brave.[31]
+
+On his second voyage he fell in with natives who, he says, spoke the
+same language that he had previously heard on the Eastern Coast of
+Africa. If he was right in this, some authors hold he must have gone
+down the West Coast, at least as far as Cameroons, because there you
+nowadays first strike the language, which does stretch across the
+continent, namely, the Bantu, and we have no reason to suppose that the
+Bantu border line was ever further North on this Coast than it is at
+present; indeed, the indications are, I think, the other way; but as far
+as the language goes, it seems to me that Eudoxus could have heard the
+same language as on the East African Coast far higher up than Cameroons,
+namely, on the Moroccoan Coast, for in those days, prior to the great
+Arab invasion, most likely the language of the Berber races had
+possession of Northern Africa from East Coast to West. However, there is
+another statement of his which I think points to Eudoxus having gone far
+South, namely, that the reason of his turning back was an inability to
+get provisions, for this catastrophe is not likely to have overtaken so
+brave a man as he was until he reached the great mangrove swamps of the
+Niger. The litoral of the Sahara was in those days, we may presume, from
+the accounts we have far later from Leo Africanus and Arab writers, more
+luxuriant and heavily populated than it is at present.
+
+Of these voyages, however, we have such scant record that we need not
+dwell on them further, and so we will return to about 300 B.C., and
+consider the wonderful voyage made by Hanno of Carthage, of which we
+have more detailed knowledge; although there still remains a certain
+amount of doubt as to who exactly Hanno was, mainly on account of Hanno
+apparently having been to Carthage what Jones is to North Wales--the
+name of a number of individuals with a habit of doing everything and
+frequently distinguishing themselves greatly. The Carthaginians were to
+the classic world much what the English are to the modern, a great
+colonising, commercial people--warlike when wanted. They planted
+colonies in North Africa and elsewhere, and had commercial relationship
+with all the then known nations of the world, including a trans-Sahara
+trade with the people living to the South of the Great Desert. We shall
+never know to the full where those Carthaginians went, from the paucity
+of record; but we have record of the voyage of this Hanno in a
+_Periplus_ originally written in the Punic language and then translated
+into Greek.[32] Hanno, it seems, was a chief magistrate at Carthage, and
+Pliny says his voyage was undertaken when Carthage was in a most
+flourishing condition.[33] From the _Periplus_ we learn that the
+expedition to the West Coast consisted of sixty ships of fifty oars
+each, and 30,000 persons of both sexes, ample provisions and everything
+necessary for so great an undertaking. The object of this expedition was
+to explore, to found colonies, and to increase commerce. The expedition,
+after passing the Pillars of Hercules, sailed two days along the coast
+and founded their first colony, which they called Thymatirum. Just south
+of this place, on a promontory called Soloeis, they built a temple to
+Neptune. A short distance further on they found a beautiful lake, the
+edges of which were bordered with large reeds, the country abounding in
+elephants and other game; a day's sail from this place, they founded
+five small cities near the sea called respectively Cariconticos, Gytte,
+Acra, Millitea, and Arambys. The next most important part of their
+voyage was their discovery of the great River Lixius, on the banks of
+which they found a pastoral people they called the Lixitae. These seem
+to have been a mild people; but there were in the neighbourhood tribes
+of a ferocious character, and they were also told there were Trogloditae
+dwelling in the mountains, where the Lixius took its rise, who were
+fleeter than horses. Unfortunately we are not told how long the
+Carthaginians took in reaching this River Lixius; but if the
+Carthaginians had been keeping close in shore they would not have met
+with a river that looked great until they reached the mouth of the Ouro
+(23°36' N. lat), which is four miles wide, but only an estuary; but as
+the Carthaginians do not seem to have gone up it, they may not have
+noticed its imperfections, and so, pursuing that dangerous method of
+judging a West African river from its mouth, regarded it as a great
+river. However this may have been, they took with them as guides and
+interpreters some of the Lixitae, and continued their voyage for three
+days, when they came to a large bay, an island in it containing a circle
+of five stadia, and proceeded to found another colony on that island,
+calling it Cerne, where they judged they were as far from the Pillars
+of Hercules as these were from Carthage. So it is held now that Cerne is
+the same as the French trading station Arguin (about 240 miles north of
+Senegal River), on to whose shoals the wreck of the French frigate _La
+Méduse_ drifted in 1816, the tragedy of which is familiar to us all from
+Géricault's great painting.
+
+Hanno next called at a place where there was a great lake, which they
+entered by sailing up a river called by them Cheretes. In this they
+found three islands, all larger than the island of Cerne. One day's sail
+then brought them to the extremity of the lake overhung by mountains,
+which were inhabited by savages clad in wild beasts' skins, who
+prevented their landing by pelting them with stones. The next point in
+their voyage was a large and broad river, infested with crocodiles and
+river horses; and from this place they made their way back to Cerne,
+where they rested and repaired and then set forth again, sailing south
+along the African shores for twelve successive days. The language of the
+natives of these regions the Lixitae did not understand, and the
+Carthaginians could not hold any communication with them for another
+reason, that they always fled from them; towards the last day they
+approached some large mountains covered with trees. They went on two
+days further, when they came to a large opening in the sea, on land on
+either side of which was a plain whereon they saw fires in every
+direction. At this place[34] they refilled their water barrels, and
+continued their voyage five days further, when they reached a large bay
+which their interpreters said was called the Western Horn. In this bay
+they found a large island, in the centre of which was a salt lake with a
+small island in it. When they went ashore in the day time they saw no
+inhabitants, but at night time they heard in every direction a confused
+noise of pipes, cymbals, drums and song, which alarmed the crew, while
+the diviners they had with them, equivalent to our naval chaplains,
+strongly advised Hanno to leave that place as speedily as possible.
+Hanno, however, being less alarmed than his companions, pushed on South,
+and they soon found themselves abreast of a country blazing with fires,
+streams of which seemed to be pouring from the mountain tops down into
+the sea. "We sailed quickly thence," says Hanno, "being much terrified."
+Proceeding four days further they found that things did not improve in
+appearance from their point of view, for the whole country seemed ablaze
+at night, a country full of fire, and at one point the fire seemed to
+fly up to the very stars. Hanno says their interpreters told them that
+this great fire was the Chariot of the Gods. Three days more sailing
+South brought them to another bay, called the Southern Horn. In this bay
+they found a large island, in which again there was a lake with another
+island in it, having inhabitants who were savage, and whose bodies were
+covered with hair. These people the interpreters called the
+Gorillae--some were captured and taken aboard, but so savage and
+unmanageable did they prove that they were killed and the skins
+preserved. As most of the inhabitants of the Islands of the Gorillae
+seemed to be females, and as these ladies had made such a gallant fight
+of it with their Carthaginian captors, Hanno kept their skins to hang
+up in the Temple of Juno on his return home, evidently intending to be
+complimentary both to the Goddess and the Gorillae; but it is to be
+feared neither of them took it as it was meant, for Hanno had no luck
+from the Gods after this, having to turn back from shortness of
+provisions, and finally ending his career by, some say, being killed,
+and others say exiled from Carthage on account of his having a lion so
+tame that it would carry baggage for him; Punic public opinion held that
+this demonstrated him to be a man dangerous to the State. The Gorillae
+seem to have worked out their vengeance on white men by making it more
+than any man's character for truth is worth to see one of them--except
+stuffed in a museum, with a label on.
+
+How far Hanno really went down South is not known with any certainty. M.
+Gosselin held he only reached the River Nun, on the Moroccoan coast.
+Major Rennell fixed his furthest point somewhere north of Sierra Leone,
+and held the Island of the Gorillae to be identical with the Island of
+Sherboro'. Bougainville believed that he at any rate went well into the
+Bight of Benin, while others think he went at any rate as far as Gaboon.
+I cannot myself see why he should not have done so, considering the
+winds and tides of the locality and the time taken; indeed, I should be
+quite willing to believe he went down to Congo, and that in the most
+terrific of the fires he witnessed an eruption of the volcanic peak of
+Cameroon, a volcano not yet extinct. Indeed the name given to this high
+fire "that almost reached the stars" by his interpreters--the Chariot of
+the Gods--is not so very unlike the name the Cameroon Peak bears to this
+day, Mungo Mah Lobeh, the Throne or Place of Thunder, and this native
+name is also capable of being translated into "the Place of the Gods" or
+spirits. The thing I do not believe in the affair is that the Lixitae
+interpreters ever called it or any other place "a chariot"; for as Hanno
+was the first white man they had seen, and they had no chariots of their
+own, it is unlikely they could have known anything of chariots; and I
+think this Chariot of the Gods must have been an error of Hanno's in
+translating his interpreter's remarks. It is perfectly excusable in him
+if it is so, because to understand what an interpreter means who does
+not know your language, and whose own language you are not an adept in,
+and who is translating from a language regarding which you are both
+alike ignorant, is a process fraught with difficulty. I have tried it,
+so speak feelingly. It is true it is not an impossibility, as those
+unversed in African may hastily conjecture, because at least one-third
+of an African language consists in gesture, and this gesture part is
+fairly common to all tribes I have met, so that by means of it you can
+get on with daily life; but it breaks down badly when you come to the
+names of places. I myself once went on a long march to a place that
+subsequent knowledge informed me was "I don't know" in my director's
+native tongue. Still, if he did not know, I did not know, and so it was
+all the same. I got there all right, therefore it did not matter to me;
+but I was haunted during my stay in it by a confused feeling that
+perhaps I was flying in the face of Science by being somewhere
+else--being in two places at the same time.
+
+I really, however, cannot help thinking Hanno must have got past the
+Niger Delta; for there is nothing to frighten any one, as far as the
+look of things go, until you go south from Calabar, and find yourself
+facing that magnificent Great Cameroon and Fernando Po; and Hanno's
+people were scared as they were never scared before. Yet, again, there
+are those fires, which were in the main doubtless what that very wise
+and not half-appreciated missionary, the late Rev. J. Leighton Wilson,
+says they were, namely, fires made by the native burning down the high
+grass at the end of a dry season to make his farms. Now Hanno could have
+seen any quantity of these along parts of the shores of the Bight of
+Benin, but is not likely to have seen them to any alarming extent on the
+Biafran Bight, because the shores thereof are deeply fringed with
+mangrove swamps, and the native does not start making farms in them.
+Hanno might have seen what looked like the smoke of innumerable fires on
+the sides of Cameroon Mountain and Fernando Po. I myself have seen the
+whole mighty forest there smoking as if beneath it smouldered the
+infernal regions themselves; but it is only columns and wafts of mist,
+and so gives no blaze at night; if you want to see a real land of flame
+with, over it, a pall of cloud reflecting back its crimson light in a
+really terrifying way, you must go south of Cameroon, south of Congo
+Franįais, south, until you reach the region of the Great Congo itself;
+and there--on the grass-covered hills and plains of the Lower Congo
+lands--you will see a land of fire at the end of the dry season,
+terrific enough to awe any man. Of course, if Hanno passed the Congo and
+went down as far as the fringing sands of the Kalahari desert, he would
+certainly not have been able to get stores; but also down there he would
+not have met with an island on which there were gorillas; for even if we
+grant that there was sufficient dense forest south of the Congo in his
+days for gorillas to have inhabited, and allow that in old days gorillas
+were south of the Congo, which they are not now, still, there is no
+island near the coast. So I am afraid we cannot quite settle Hanno's
+furthest point, and must content ourselves by saying he was a brave man,
+a good sailor, and a credit therefore to his country and the human race.
+
+After Hanno's time I cannot find any record of a regular set of trading
+expeditions down the West Coast by the Carthaginians. From scattered
+observations it is certain the commerce of the Carthaginians with the
+Barbary Coast and the Bight of Benin was long carried on; but it does
+not seem to have been carried on along the coast of the Bight of Biafra;
+and the voyage in 170 B.C. may be cited in support of this, showing that
+the voyage as far south as Eudoxus went was then considered as
+marvellous and new. Still, on the other hand, it must be remembered
+that, prior to our own day, the navigator had no great inducement to
+tell the rest of the world exactly where he had been; indeed, the
+navigator whose main interest is commerce is, to this day, not keen on
+so doing. He would rather keep little geographical facts--such as short
+cuts by creeks, and places where either gold, or quicksilver, and buried
+ivory, is plentiful--to himself, than go explaining about these things
+for the sake of getting an unrepaying honour. One sees this so much in
+studying the next period of this history--the early Portuguese and early
+French discoveries; you will find that one of these nations knew about a
+place years before the other came along, and discovered it, and claimed
+it as its own--with disputes as a natural consequence.
+
+There has, however, been one very interesting point in the dealing of
+the nations of higher culture with the Africans, and that is the way
+their commerce with them has had periods of abeyance. The Egyptians
+have left us record of having been extensively in touch with the
+interior of Africa, _via_ the Nile Valley,--then came a pause. Then came
+the Carthaginian commerce,--then a pause. Then the Portuguese, French,
+English, Dutch, and Dane trading enterprise, say, roughly from 1340 to
+1700,--then a falling off of this enterprise; revived during the
+Slave-trade days, falling off again on its suppression, and reviving in
+our own days. I suppose I ought to say greatly, but--well, we will
+discuss that later. These pauses have always been caused by the nations
+of higher culture getting too busy with wars at home to trouble
+themselves about the African, all the more so because the produce of
+Africa has filtered slowly, whether it was fetched by white man or no,
+into their markets through the hands of the energetic North African
+tribes and the Arabs. Whenever the white man has settled down with his
+home affairs, and has had time to spare, he has always gone and looked
+up the African again, "discovered him," and he has always found him in
+the same state of culture that the pioneers of the previous Blüth-period
+found him in. Hanno does not find down the West Coast another
+Carthage--he finds bush fires, and hears the tom-tom and the horn and
+the shouts. He finds people slightly clad and savage. Then read Aluise
+da Ca da Mostro and the rest of Prince Henry's adventures; well, you
+might--save that the old traveller is more interesting--almost be
+reading a book published yesterday. The only radical change made for
+large quantities of Africans by means of white intercourse was made by
+exporting them to America. How this is going to turn out we do not yet
+know; and whether or no, after the present period of white exploitation
+of Africa, there may not come another pause from our becoming too
+interested in some big fight of our own to keep up our interest in the
+African, we cannot tell; so I will pass on to a very interesting point
+in a method of trade mentioned by the early authorities--the silent
+trade.
+
+Herodotus gives us the first description of it,[35] saying that the
+Carthaginians state that beyond the Pillars of Hercules there is a
+region of Libya, and men who inhabit it. When they arrive among these
+people and have unloaded their merchandise they set it in order on the
+shore, go on board their ships and make a great smoke, and the
+inhabitants seeing the smoke come down to the sea shore, deposit gold in
+exchange for the merchandise, and withdraw to some distance. The
+Carthaginians then going ashore examine the goods, and if the quantity
+seems sufficient for the merchandise they take it and sail away; but if
+it is not sufficient they go on board again and wait; the natives then
+approach and deposit more gold until they have satisfied them: neither
+party ever wrongs the other, for they do not touch the gold before it is
+made adequate to the value of the merchandise, nor do the natives touch
+the merchandise before the Carthaginians have taken the gold.
+
+The next description of this silent trade I have been able to find is
+that given by Aluise da Ca da Mostro, a Venetian gentleman who, allured
+by the accounts of the riches of West Africa given by Prince Henry the
+Navigator, abandoned trading with the Low Countries, entered the
+Prince's service, and went down the Coast in 1455. When in the district
+of Cape Blanco, at a place called by him Hoden, he was told that six
+days' journey from this place there was a place called Tagazza,
+signifying a chest of gold; there large quantities of rock salt were dug
+from the earth every year and carried on camels by the Arabs and the
+Azanaghi, who were tawny Moors,[36] in separate companies to Timbuk, and
+from thence to the Empire of Melli, which belonged to the negroes;
+having arrived there they disposed of their salt in the course of eight
+days, at the rate of two and three hundred mitigals the load (a mitigal
+= a ducat), according to the quantity thereof, after which they returned
+home with the gold they had been paid in. These merchants reckoned it
+forty days' journey on horseback from Tagazza to "Timbuk" as Mostro,
+while from Timbuk to Melli it is thirty days' journey. Ca da Mostro then
+inquired to what use the salt taken to Melli was put; and they said that
+the merchants used a certain quantity of it themselves, for on account
+of their country lying near the Line, where the days and nights are of
+equal length, at certain seasons of the year the heats were excessive,
+and putrefied the blood unless salt was taken; their method of taking it
+was to dissolve a piece in a porringer of water daily and drink it. When
+the remainder of the salt reached Melli, carried thither on camels, each
+camel load was broken up into pieces of a suitable size for one man to
+carry. A large number of what Ca da Mostro calls footmen--whom we
+nowadays call porters--were assembled at Melli to be ready to carry the
+salt from thence further away still into the heart of Africa.
+
+I have dwelt on this salt's wanderings because we have here a very
+definite description of a trade route, and the importance of
+understanding these trade routes is very great. We do not learn,
+however, exactly where the salt goes to beyond Melli; but Melli seems to
+have been, as Timbuctoo was, and to a certain extent still is, a trade
+focus; and from Melli evidently the salt went in many directions, and it
+is interesting to note Ca da Mostro's observations on the salt porters,
+who he says carry in each hand a long forked stick, which when they are
+tired they fix into the ground and rest their loads on; so to-day may
+you see the West African porters doing, save that it is only the porters
+who have to pass over woodless plateaux on their journeys that carry two
+sticks.
+
+     [Illustration: OIL RIVER NATIVES. [_To face page 245._]
+
+Speaking however further on the course of this salt trade Ca da Mostro
+says that some of the merchants of Melli go with it until they come to a
+certain water, whether fresh or salt his informant could not say; but he
+holds it most likely was fresh, or there would be no need of carrying
+salt there; and it is the opinion of the few people who have of late
+years interested themselves in the matter that this great water is the
+Niger Joliba. But be this as it may, when those merchants from Melli
+arrive on the banks of this great water they place their shares of salt
+in heaps in a row, every one setting a mark on his own. This done, the
+merchants retire half a day's journey; then "the negroes, who will not
+be seen or spoken with, and who seem to be the inhabitants of some
+islands, come in large boats," and having viewed the salt lay a sum of
+gold on every heap and then retire. When they are all gone the negro
+merchants who own the salt return, and if the quantity of gold pleases
+them they take it and leave the salt; if not, they leave both and
+withdraw themselves again. The silent people then return, and the heaps
+from which they find the gold has been removed they carry away, and
+either advance more gold to the other heaps or take their gold from them
+and leave the salt. In this manner, says Ca da Mostro, from very ancient
+times these negroes have traded without either speaking to or seeing
+each other, until a few years before, when he was at Cape Blanco among
+the Azanaghi, who supply the negroes of Melli with their salt as
+aforesaid, and who evidently get from them gossip as well as gold. They
+told him that their fellow merchants among the black Moors had told them
+that they had had serious trouble in consequence of the then Emperor of
+Melli, a man who took more general interest in affairs than was common
+in Emperors of Melli, having been fired with a desire to know why these
+customers of his traders did not like being seen; he had commanded the
+salt merchants when they next went to traffic with the silent people to
+capture some of them for him by digging pits near the salt heaps,
+concealing themselves therein and then rushing out and seizing some of
+the strange people when they came to look at the salt heaps. The
+merchants did not at all relish the royal commission, for they knew, as
+any born trader would, that it must be extremely bad for trade to rush
+out and seize customers by the scruff of their necks while they were in
+the midst of their shopping. However, much as the command added to their
+commercial anxieties, the thing had to be done, or there was no doubt
+the Emperor would relieve them both of all commercial anxieties and
+their heads at one and the same time. So they carried out the royal
+command, and captured four of their silent customers. Three they
+immediately liberated, thinking that to keep so many would only increase
+the bad blood, and one specimen would be sufficient to satisfy the
+Imperial curiosity. Unfortunately however the unfortunate captive they
+retained would neither speak nor eat, and in a few days died; and so the
+salt merchants of Melli returned home in very low spirits, feeling
+assured that their Emperor would be actively displeased with them for
+failing to satisfy his curiosity, and that the silent customers would be
+too alarmed and angered with them for their unprovoked attack to deal
+with them again. Subsequent events proved them to be correct in both
+surmises: his Majesty was highly disgusted at not having been able to
+see one of these people; and naturally, for the description given to him
+of those they had captured was at least highly interesting. The
+merchants said they were a span taller than themselves and well shaped,
+but that they made a terrible figure because their under lip was thicker
+than a man's fist and hung down on their breasts; also that it was very
+red, and something like blood dropped from it and from their gums. The
+upper lip was no larger than that of other people, and owing to this
+there were exposed to view both gums and teeth, which were of great
+size, particularly the teeth in the corners of the mouth. Their eyes
+were of great size and blackness. As for the customers, for three years
+went the merchants of Melli to the banks of the great water and arranged
+their salt heaps and looked on them for gold dust in vain: but the
+fourth year it was there; and the merchants of Melli believed that their
+customers' lips had begun to putrefy through the excessive heat and the
+want of salt, so that being unable to bear so grievous a distemper they
+were compelled to return to their trade. Things were then established on
+a fairly reasonable basis; the merchants did not again attempt to see
+their customers, and they knew from their experience with their captive
+that they were by nature dumb; for had there been speech in him, would
+he not have spoken under the treatment to which he was subjected? And as
+for the Emperor of Melli he said right out he did not care whether those
+blacks could speak or no, so long as he had but the profit of their
+gold.
+
+This gold, I may remark, that was collected at Melli was divided into
+three parts: the first was sent by the Melli caravans to Kokhia on the
+caravan route to Syria and Cairo; the other two parts went from Melli to
+Timbuctoo, where it was again divided up, some of it going to Toet,[37]
+and from thence along the coast to Tunis, in Barbary. Some of it went to
+Hoden, not far from Cape Blanco, and from there to Oran and Hona; thence
+it went to Fez, Morocco, Azila-Azasi, and Moosa, towns outside the
+Straits of Gibraltar, whence it went into Europe, through the hands of
+Italians, and other Christians, who exchanged their merchandise for the
+wares of the Barbary moors; and the remainder of the gold went down to
+the West African Coast to the Portuguese at Arguin. This description of
+the gold route is by Ca da Mostro, and is the first description of West
+African trade route I have found.
+
+But I must tear myself from the fascination of gold and its trade routes
+and return to that silent trade. The next person after Ca da Mostro to
+mention it is Captain Richard Jobson, who in 1620-1621 made a voyage
+especially to discover "the golden trade," of what he calls Tombâk,
+which is our last author's Timbuk, by way of the Gambia, then held by
+many to be a mouth of the Niger.
+
+Jobson's inquiries regarding this "golden trade" informed him that the
+great demand for salt in the Gambia trade arose from the desire for it
+among the Arabiks of Barbary; that the natives themselves only consumed
+a small percentage of this import, trading away the main to those
+Arabiks in the hinterland, who in their turn traded it for gold to
+Tombak, where the demand for it was great, because that city, although
+possessing all manner of other riches and commodities, lacked salt, so
+that the Arabiks did a good trade therein. Jobson was also informed that
+the Arabiks had, as well as the market for salt at Timbuctoo, a market
+for it with a strange people who would not be seen, and who lived not
+far from Yaze; that the salt was carried to them, and in exchange they
+gave gold. Asking a native merchant, who was engaged in this trade, why
+they would not be seen, he made a sign to his lips, but would say no
+more. Jobson, however, learnt from other sources that the reason these
+negroes buy salt from the tawny Moors is because of the thickness of
+their lips, which hang down upon their breasts, and, being raw, would
+putrefy if they did not take salt, a thing their country does not
+afford, so that they must traffic for it with the Moors. The manner they
+employ, according to Jobson, is this: the Moors on a fixed day bring
+their goods to a place assigned, where there are certain houses
+appointed for them; herein they deposit their commodities, and, laying
+their salt and other goods in parcels or heaps separately, depart for a
+whole day, during which time their customers come, and to each parcel of
+goods lay down a proportion of gold as they value it, and leave both
+together. The merchants then return, and as they like the bargain take
+the gold and leave their wares, or if they think the price offered too
+little, they divide the merchandise into two parts, leaving near the
+gold as much as they are inclined to give for it, and then again depart.
+At their next return the bargain is finished, for they either find more
+gold added or the whole taken away, and the goods left on their hands.
+
+A further confirmation of the existence of this method of trading we
+find in that most interesting voyage of Claude Jannequin, Sieur de
+Rochfort, 1639. He says, "In this cursed country"--he always speaks of
+West Africa like that--"there is no provision but fish dried in the sun,
+and maize and tobacco." The natives will only trade by the French laying
+down on the ground what they would give for the provisions, and then
+going away, on which the natives came and took the commodities and left
+the fish in exchange. The regions he visited were those of Cape Blanco.
+
+To this day you will find a form of this silent trade still going on in
+Guinea. I have often seen on market roads in many districts, but always
+well away from Europeanised settlements, a little space cleared by the
+wayside, and neatly laid with plantain leaves, whereon were very tidily
+arranged various little articles for sale--a few kola nuts, leaves of
+tobacco, cakes of salt, a few heads of maize, or a pile of yams or sweet
+potatoes. Against each class of articles so many cowrie shells or beans
+are placed, and, always hanging from a branch above, or sedately sitting
+in the middle of the shop, a little fetish. The number of cowrie shells
+or beans indicate the price of the individual articles in the various
+heaps, and the little fetish is there to see that any one who does not
+place in the stead of the articles removed their proper price, or who
+meddles with the till, shall swell up and burst. There is no doubt it
+is a very easy method of carrying on commerce.
+
+In what the silent trade may have originated it is hard to say; but one
+thing is certain, that the dread and fear of the negroes did not result
+from the evil effects of the slave trade, as so many of their terrors
+are said to have done, for we have seen notice of it long before this
+slave trade arose. Nevertheless, there can be but little doubt that it
+arose from a sense of personal insecurity, and has fetish in it, the
+natives holding it safer to leave so dangerous a thing as trafficking
+with unknown beings--white things that were most likely spirits, with
+the smell of death on them--in the hands of their gods. In the cases of
+it that I have seen no doubt it was done mostly for convenience, one
+person being thereby enabled to have several shops open at but little
+working expense; but I have seen it employed as a method of trading
+between tribes at war with each other.[38] We must dismiss, I fear,
+bashfulness regarding lips as being a real cause; but I will not dismiss
+the bleeding lips as a mere traveller's tale, because I have seen quite
+enough to make me understand what those people who told of bleeding
+thick lips meant; several, not all of my African friends, are a bit
+thick about the lower lip, and when they have been passing over
+waterless sun-dried plateaux or bits of desert they are anything but
+decorative. The lips get swollen and black, and Ca da Mostro does not go
+too far in his description of what he was told regarding them.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [28] Clowes and Sons, 1897.
+
+   [29] _Melpomene_, IV. 41.
+
+   [30] _Melpomene_, IV. 43.
+
+   [31] See Ellis's _History of the Gold Coast_, also Tozer's _History of
+   Ancient Geography_, Beazley's _Dawn of Modern Geography_, and _Strabo_,
+   B.C. 25, book xvii, edited by Theodore Jansonius ab Almelooven,
+   Amsterdam, 1707.
+
+   [32] There is doubt as to whether this _Periplus_ is the entire one
+   with which the classic writers were conversant.
+
+   [33] "Et Hanno Carthaginis potentia florente circumvectus a Gabibus ad
+   finem Arabiae navigationem eam prodidit scripto"; (and Hanno, when
+   Carthage flourished, sailed round from Cadiz to the remotest parts of
+   Arabia, and left an account of his voyage in writing) Plinius, lib. ii.
+   cap. lxvii. p.m. 220. See also lib. v. cap. i. p.m. 523, and Pomponius
+   Mela, lib. iii. cap. ix. p. 63, edit. Isaici Vossii.
+
+   There is an English version of the _Periplus_, edited by Falconer,
+   London, 1797; and an Oxford edition of it, and some other works, by Dr.
+   Hudson, 1698. Also there is a work on Hanno's _Periplus_ based on MS.
+   in the Meyer Museum at Liverpool by Simonides, not the Iambic poet,
+   who wrote a ridiculous satire against women, quoted by Ælian; nor
+   yet Simonides who was one of the greatest of the ancient poets, and
+   flourished in the seventy-fifth Olympia; but a modern gentleman
+   connected with America, whose work I am sufficient scholar neither to
+   use nor to criticise.
+
+   [34] Major identifies this place with Cape Verde, pointing out that the
+   inability of the Lixitae interpreters to understand the language accords
+   with the fact that at the Senegal commences the country of the blacks;
+   "the immense opening" he regards as the Gambia.
+
+   [35] _Melpomene_, IV. 96.
+
+   [36] The writers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries commonly
+   divide up the natives of Africa into--1, Moors; 2, Tawny Moors;
+   3, Black Moors, a term that lingers to this day in our word
+   Blackeymoor; 4, Negroes.
+
+   [37] Ato, according to the version given in Grynæus.
+
+   [38] Mr. Ling Roth kindly informs me of further instances of this silent
+   trading to be found in _Lander's Journal_, Lond., 1832, iii. 161-163,
+   and Forbes's _Wanderings of a Naturalist_, Lond. 1886, where it is cited
+   for the Kubus of Sumatra. He says it also occurs among the Veddahs, and
+   that there is in no case any fetish control.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+FRENCH DISCOVERY OF WEST AFRICA
+
+     Concerning the controversy that is between the French and the
+     Portuguese as to which of them first visited West Africa, with
+     special reference to the fort at Elmina.
+
+
+We will now turn our attention to the other pioneers of our present West
+African trade, and commence with the French, for we cannot disassociate
+our own endeavours in this region from those of France, Portugal,
+Holland, and the Brandenburgers; nor are we the earliest discoverers
+here. When we English heard the West African Coast was a region worth
+trading with, those great brick-makers for the architects of England's
+majesty, the traders, went for it and traded, and have made that trading
+pay as no other nation has been able to do. However, from the first we
+got called hard names--pirates, ruffians, interlopers, and such like--in
+fact, every bad name the other nations could spare from the war of abuse
+they chronically waged against each other.
+
+The French claim to have traded with West Africa prior to the
+discoveries made there by the emissaries of Prince Henry the
+Navigator.[39] When on my last voyage out I was in French territory, I
+own the discovery of this claim of my French friends came down on me as
+a shock, because on my previous voyage out I had been in Portuguese
+possessions, and had spent many a pleasant hour listening to the recital
+of the deeds of Diego Caõ and Lopez do Gonsalves, and others of that
+noble brand of man, the fifteenth-century Portugee. I heard then nothing
+of French discoverers, and also had it well knocked out of my mind that
+the English had discovered anything of importance in West Africa save
+the Niger outfalls, and I had a furious war to keep this honour for my
+fellow countrymen. Then when I got into French territory not one word
+did I hear of Diego Caõ or Lopez; and so as a distraction from the
+consideration of the private characters of people still living, I
+started discoursing on what I considered a safer and more interesting
+subject, and began to recount how I had had the honour of being
+personally mixed up in the monument to Diego Caõ at the mouth of the
+Congo, and what fine fellows--I got no farther than that, when, to my
+horror, I heard my heroes called microbes, followed by torrents of
+navigators' names, all French, and all unknown to me. Being out for
+information I never grumble when I get it, let it be what it may. So I
+asked my French friends to write down clearly on paper the names of
+those navigators, and promised as soon as I left the forests of the
+Equator, and reached the book forests of Europe, I would try and find
+out more about them. I have; and I own that I owe profound apologies to
+those truly great Frenchmen for not having made their acquaintance
+sooner; nevertheless I still fail to see why my honoured Portuguese,
+Diego and Lopez, should have been called microbes, and I have no regrets
+about my fights for the honour of the Niger for my own countrymen, nor
+for my constant attempts to take the conceit out of my French and
+Portuguese friends, as a set-off for "the conceit about England" they
+were always trying to take out of me, by holding forth on what those
+Carthaginians had done on the West Coast before France or Portugal were
+so much as dreamt of.
+
+The Portuguese discoveries you can easily read of in Major's great book
+on Prince Henry; and as this book is fully accepted as correct by the
+highest Portuguese authorities, it is safer to do so than to attempt to
+hunt your Portuguese hero for yourself, because of the quantity of names
+each of them possesses, and the airy indifference as to what part of
+that name their national chroniclers use in speaking of them. I have
+tried it, and have several times been in danger of going to my grave
+with the idea that I was investigating the exploits of two separate
+gentlemen, whereas I was only dealing with two parts of one gentleman's
+name; nevertheless, it is a thing worth learning Portuguese for. And, in
+addition to Major's book, we have now, thanks to the Hakluyt Society,
+that superb thing, the Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of
+Guinea, by Gomez Eanes de Zurara--a work completed in 1453. This work is
+one on which we are largely dependent for the details of the early
+Portuguese discoveries, because Gomez Eanes spent the later part of his
+life in tidying up the Torre do Tombo--namely, the national archives, of
+which he was keeper--and his idea of tidying up included the lady-like
+method of destroying old papers. It makes one cold now to think of the
+things De Zurara may have destroyed; but he evidently regarded himself,
+as does the nineteenth century spring-cleaner, as a human benefactor;
+and, strange to say, his contemporaries quite took his view; indeed,
+this job was done at the request of the Cortes, and with the Royal
+sanction. There is also an outstanding accusation of forgery against
+Zurara, but that is a minor offence, and is one we need only take into
+consideration when contemplating the question as to whether a man
+capable of destroying early manuscripts and forgery might not be also
+capable of leaving out of his Chronicle, in honour of the Navigator, any
+mention of there being Frenchmen on the Coast, when he sent out his
+emissaries to discover what might lay hidden from the eye of man down in
+the Southern Seas. I do not, however, think De Zurara left out this
+thing intentionally, but that he had no knowledge of it if it did exist,
+for no man could have written as he wrote, unless he had a heart too
+great for such a meanness. Certain it is Prince Henry never knew, for
+these are the five reasons given by Zurara, in the grave, noble
+splendour of his manner, why the Prince undertook the discoveries with
+which his name will be for ever associated. I give the passage almost in
+full because of its beauty. "And you should note well that the noble
+spirit of this Prince (Henry the Navigator) by a sort of natural
+constraint was ever urging him both to begin and carry out very great
+deeds; for which reason after the taking of Ceuta, he always kept ships
+well armed against the Infidel, both for war and because he also had a
+wish to know the land that lay beyond the Isles of Canary and that Cape
+called Bojador, for that up to his time neither by writings nor by the
+memory of man was known with any certainty the nature of the land beyond
+that Cape. Some said indeed Saint Brandan had passed that way, and
+there was another tale of two galleys rounding the Cape which never
+returned ... and because the said Lord Infant wished to know the truth
+of this--since it seemed to him if he, or some other Lord, did not
+endeavour to gain that knowledge, no mariners or merchants would ever
+dare to attempt it, (for the reason that none of them ever trouble
+themselves to sail to a place where there is not a sure and certain hope
+of profit,) and seeing also that no other prince took any pains in this
+matter, he sent out his own ships against those parts, to have manifest
+certainty of them all, and to this he was stirred up by his zeal for the
+service of God, and of King Dom Duarto, his Lord and brother, who then
+reigned; and this was the first reason of his action."
+
+"The second reason was that if there chanced to be in those lands a
+population of Christians or some havens into which it would be possible
+to sail without peril, many kinds of merchandise might be brought to
+this nation which would find a ready market, and reasonably so because
+no other people of these parts traded with them, nor yet people of any
+other that were known; and also the products of this nation might be
+taken there, which traffic would bring great profit to our countrymen."
+
+"The third reason was that as it was said that the power of the Moors in
+that land of Africa was very much greater than was commonly supposed,
+and that there were no Christians among them nor any other race of men,
+and because every wise man is obliged by natural prudence to wish for a
+knowledge of the power of his enemy; therefore the said Lord Infant
+exerted himself to cause them to be fully discovered to make it known
+determinedly how far the power of those Infidels extended."
+
+"The fourth reason was because during the one and thirty years he had
+warred against the Moors he had never found a Christian King nor a Lord
+outside this land, who for the love of Jesus Christ would aid him in the
+said war; therefore he sought to know if there were in those parts any
+Christian Princes in whom the charity and the love of Christ was so
+ingrained that they would aid him against those enemies of the Faith."
+
+"The fifth reason was the great desire to make increase of the Faith of
+our Lord Jesus Christ, and to bring to Him all the souls that should be
+saved."
+
+According to the Portuguese, Gil Eannes was the first emissary of Prince
+Henry who succeeded in passing Cape Bojador. This feat he accomplished
+in 1434; but on this his first voyage out he contented himself with
+passing the Cape: a thing which previous expeditions of Prince Henry had
+failed to do, and which, so far apparently as Prince Henry knew, had not
+been done before, for it was regarded as a tremendous achievement.
+
+The next year Prince Henry's cupbearer, Affonso Gonsalves Baladaya, set
+out accompanied by Gil Eannes in a caravel; and the coast to the South
+of Bojador was visited; their furthest expedition was to a shallow bay
+called by them Angra des Ruives.[40] They then returned to Portugal, and
+the next year again went down the coast as far as a galley-shaped rock.
+This place they called Pedro de Galli, from its appearance; its present
+name is Pedra de Galla. Their chief achievement was the discovery of the
+Rio do Oura. It is not an important river in itself, but only one of
+those deceptive estuaries common on the West coast. But it was the first
+West African place the Portuguese got gold dust at, hence its name. The
+amount of gold was apparently not considerable, and the chief cargo that
+expedition took home was sea wolves' skins; they reported quantities of
+seals or sea wolves as they called them here, and this report was the
+cause of the next Portuguese expedition; for the Portuguese in those
+days seem to have always been anxious for sea wolves' oil and skins; and
+whether this be a survival or no, it seems to me curious that the ladies
+of Lisbon are to this day very keen on sealskin jackets, which their
+climate can hardly call for imperatively. But, however this may be, it
+is certain that we have no account of the Portuguese having passed south
+of the next important cape South of Bojador, namely, Blanco, before
+1443. The terrible tragedy of Tangiers and political troubles hindered
+their explorations from 1436 to 1441,[41] and the French claim to have
+been down the West Coast trading not only before this date, but before
+Prince Henry sent a single expedition out at all, namely, as early as
+1346.
+
+The French story is that there was a deed of association of the
+merchants of Dieppe and Rouen of the date 1364. This deed was to arrange
+for the carrying on to greater proportions of their already existing
+trade with West Africa. The original of this deed was burnt, according
+to Labat, at Dieppe, in the conflagration of 1694.[42] How long before
+this Association was formed that trade had been carried on, it is a
+little difficult to make out, I find, from the usual hindrance to the
+historical study of West Africa, namely, lack of documentary evidence
+and a profusion of recriminatory lying. This association was under the
+patronage of the Dukes of Normandy, then Kings of England; and its
+ultimate decay is partly attributed to the political difficulties these
+patrons became involved in. The French authorities say the Association
+was an exceedingly flourishing affair; and it is stated that under its
+auspices factories were established at Sierra Leone, and that a fort was
+built at La Mina del Ore, or Del Mina, the place now known as Elmina, as
+early as 1382. Now it is round the subject of this fort that most
+controversy wages, for this French statement does not at all agree with
+the Portuguese account of the fort. The latter claim to have discovered
+the coast--called by them La Mina, by us the Gold--in 1470, with an
+expedition commanded by João de Santarim and Pedro de Escobara. The
+Portuguese, finding this part of the coast rich in gold, and knowing the
+grabbing habits of other nations where this was concerned, determined to
+secure this trade for themselves in a sound practical way, although they
+were already guarded by a Papal Bull. The expedition that discovered La
+Mina was the last one made during the reign of Affonso V.; but his son,
+who succeeded him as João II., rapidly set about acting on the
+information it brought home. This king indeed took an intelligent
+interest in the Guinea trade, and was well versed in it; for a part of
+his revenues before he came to the throne had been derived from it and
+its fisheries. João II. energetically pushed on the enterprise founded
+by his father Affonso V., who had in 1469 rented the trade of the Guinea
+Coast to Fernam Gomez for five years at 500 equizodas a year,[43] on the
+condition that 100 leagues of new coast should be discovered annually,
+starting from Sierra Leone, the then furthest known part, and reserving
+the ivory trade to the Crown. The expedition sent out by King João,
+commanded by the celebrated Diego de Azambuja, took with it, in ten
+caravels and two smaller craft, ready fashioned stones and bricks, and
+materials for building, with the intention of building a fort as near as
+might be to a place called Sama, where the previous expedition had
+reported gold dust to be had from the natives. This fort was to be a
+means of keeping up a constant trade with the natives, instead of
+depending only on the visits of ships to the coast. Azambuja selected
+the place we know now as Elmina as a suitable site for this fort. Having
+obtained a concession of the land from the King Casamanca, on
+representing to him what an advantage it would be to him to have such a
+strong place wherein he and his people could seek security against their
+enemies, and which would act as a constant market place for his trade,
+and a storehouse for the Portuguese goods, Azambuja lost no time in
+building the fort with his ready-fashioned materials, and not only the
+fort, but a church as well. Both were dedicated to San Gorge da Mina,
+and a daily mass was instituted to be said therein for the repose of the
+soul of the great Prince Henry the Navigator, whose body had been laid
+to rest in November, 1460. Indeed, one cannot but be struck with the
+wealth of Portuguese information that we possess, regarding the
+building of the castle at Elmina and by the good taste shown by the
+Portuguese throughout; for, besides establishing this mass--a mass that
+should be said in all Catholic churches on the West African Coast to
+this day in memory of the great man whose enterprise first opened up
+that great, though terrible region, to the civilised world--King João
+granted many franchises and privileges to people who would go and live
+at San Gorge da Mina, and aid in expanding the trade and civilisation of
+the surrounding region, which is as it should be; for people who go and
+live in West Africa for the benefit of their country deserve all these
+things, and money down as well. Having done these, the king evidently
+thought he deserved some honour himself, which he certainly did, so he
+called himself Lord of Guinea, and commanded that all subsequent
+discoverers should take possession of the places they discovered in a
+more substantial way than heretofore; for it had been their custom
+merely to erect wooden crosses or to carve on trees the motto of Prince
+Henry, _Talent de bien faire_. The monuments King João commanded should
+be erected in place of these transient emblems he designed himself; they
+were to be square pillars of stone six feet high, with his arms upon
+them, and two inscriptions on opposite sides, in Latin and Portuguese
+respectively, containing the exact date when the discovery of the place
+was made; by his order the cross that was to be on each was to be of
+iron and cramped into the pedestal. Major says the cross was to surmount
+the structure; but my Portuguese friends tell me it was to be in the
+pedestal, and also that the remains of these old monuments are still to
+be seen in their possessions; so we must presume that the outfit for an
+exploring expedition in King João's days included a considerable cargo
+of ready-dressed stones and materials for monuments, and that from the
+quantity of discoveries these expeditions made, the sixteenth century
+Portuguese homeward bound must have been flying as light as the Cardiff
+bound collier of to-day.
+
+Still it is remarkable that with all the wealth of detail that we have
+of these Portuguese discoveries in the fifteenth century there is no
+mention of the French being on the coast before Pedro do Cintra reaches
+Sierra Leone and calls it by this name because of the thunder on the
+mountains roaring like a lion, and so on; but he says nothing of French
+factories ashore. Azambuja gives quantities of detail regarding the
+building of San Gorge da Mina, but never says a word about there being
+already at this place a French fort; yet Sieur Villault, Escuyer, Sieur
+de Bellfond,[44] speaks of it with detail and certainty. Also M. Robbe
+says that one of the ships sent out by the association of merchants in
+1382 was called the _Virgin_, that she got as far as Kommenda, and
+thence to the place where Mina stands, and that next year they built at
+this place a strong house, in which they kept ten or twelve of their men
+to secure it; and they were so fortunate in this settlement that in 1387
+the colony was considerably enlarged, and did a good trade until 1413,
+when, owing to the wars in France, the store of these adventurers being
+exhausted, they were obliged to quit not only Mina, but their other
+settlements, as Sestro Paris, Cape Mount, Sierra Leone, and Cape Verde.
+
+Villault, who went to West Africa to stir up the French to renew the
+Guinea trade, openly laments the folly of the French in ever having
+abandoned it owing to certain prejudices they had taken against the
+climate. His account of it is that about the year 1346 some adventurers
+of Dieppe, a port in Normandy, who as descendants of the Normans, were
+well used to long voyages, sailed along the coast of the negroes,
+Guinea, and settled several colonies in those parts, particularly about
+Cape Verde, in the Bay of Rio Fesco, and along the Melequeta coast. To
+the Bay, which extends from Cape Ledo to Cape Mount they gave the name
+of the Bay of France; that of Petit Dieppe to the village of Rio Corso
+(between Rio France and Rio Sestro); that of Sestro Paris to Grand
+Sestro, not far from Cape Palmas; while they carried to France great
+quantities of Guinea pepper and elephants' tusks, whence the inhabitants
+of Dieppe set up the trade of turning ivory and making several useful
+works, as combs, for which they grew famous, and still continue so.
+Villault also speaks of "a fair church still in being" at Elmina,
+adorned with the arms of France, and also says that the chief battery to
+the sea is called by the natives La Battarie de France; and he speaks of
+the affection the natives have for France, and says they beat their
+drums in the French manner. Barbot also speaks of the affection of the
+natives for the French, and says that on his last voyage in 1682 the
+king sent him his second son as hostage, if he would come up to Great
+Kommondo, and treat about settling in his country, although he had
+refused the English and the Dutch. Barbot, however, does not agree with
+Villault about the prior rights of France to the discovery of Guinea; he
+thinks that if these facts be true it is strange that there is no
+mention of so important an enterprise in French historians, and
+concludes that it would be unjust to the Portuguese to attribute the
+first discovery of this part of the world to the French. He also thinks
+it evidence against it that the Portuguese historians are silent on the
+point, and that Azambuja, when he began to build his castle at Elmina in
+1484, never mentions there being a castle there that had been built by
+Frenchmen in 1385. This, however, I think is not real evidence against
+the prior right of France. Take, for instance, the examples you get
+constantly when reading the books of Portuguese and Dutch writers on
+Guinea. You cannot fail to be struck how they ignore each other's
+existence as much as possible when credit is to be given; indeed were it
+not for the necessity they feel themselves under of abusing each other,
+I am sure they would do so altogether, but this they cannot resist. Here
+is a sample of what the Portuguese say of the Dutch: "That the rebels
+(meaning the Dutch) gained more from the blacks by drunkenness, giving
+them wine and strong liquors, than by force of arms, and instructing
+them as ministers of the Devil in their wickedness. But that their
+dissolute lives and manners, joined to the advantage which the
+Portuguese at Mina, though inferior in numbers, had gained over them in
+some rencontres, had rendered them as contemptible among the blacks for
+their cowardice as want of virtue. That however the blacks, being a
+barbarous people, susceptible of first impressions, readily enough
+swallowed Calvin's poison (Protestantism), as well as took off the
+merchandise which the Dutch, taking advantage of the Portuguese
+indolence sold along the coast, where they were become absolute
+pirates." Then, again, the same author says, "The quantity of
+merchandises brought by the Dutch and their cheapness, has made the
+barbarians greedy of them, although persons of quality and honour
+assured them that they would willingly pay double for Portuguese goods,
+as suspecting the Dutch to be of less value, buying them only for want
+of better."[45] I could give you also some beautiful examples of what
+the Dutch say of the Portuguese and the English, and of what the French
+say of both, but I have not space; moreover, it is all very like what
+you can read to-day in things about rival nations and traders out in
+West Africa. I myself was commonly called by the Portuguese there a
+pirate because I was English, and that was the proper thing to call the
+English,--there was no personal incivility meant; and I quote the above
+passage just to impress on you that when you are reading about West
+African affairs, either ancient or modern, you must make allowance for
+this habit of speaking of rival nations--it is the climate. And although
+the Portuguese and the Dutch may choose to ignore the French early
+discoveries, yet they both showed a keen dread of the French from their
+being so popular with the natives, and did their utmost to oust them
+from the West Coast, which they succeeded in doing for a long period.
+And then again to this day, when a trader in West Africa finds a place
+where trade is good, he does not cable home to the newspapers about it.
+If it is necessary that any lying should be done about that place he
+does it himself; but what he strives most to do is to keep its existence
+totally unknown to other people; sooner or later some other trader comes
+along and discovers it, and then that place becomes unhealthy for one or
+the other of its discoverers,--and that is the climate again. Thus by
+the light of my own dispassionate observations in West Africa, I am
+quite ready to believe in that early French discovery; and I quite
+agree with Villault about the quantity of words derived from the French
+that you will find to this day among the native tongues, and even in the
+trade English of the Coast, and in districts that have not been under
+French sway in the historical memory of man. One of these words is the
+word "ju ju," always regarded by the natives as a foreign word. Their
+own word for religion, or more properly speaking for sacred beings, is
+"bosum," or "woka." They only say "ju ju" so that you white man may
+understand. The percentage, however, of Portuguese words in trade
+English is higher than that of French.
+
+After the fifteenth century it is not needful now to discuss in detail
+the subject of the French presence in West Africa; for both Dutch and
+Portuguese freely own to the presence there of the Frenchmen, and openly
+state that they were a source of worry and expense to them, owing to the
+way the natives preferred the French to either of themselves.
+
+The whole subject of the French conquests in Africa is an exceedingly
+interesting one, and one I would gladly linger over, for there is in it
+that fascination that always lies in a subject which contains an element
+of mystery. The element of mystery in this affair is, why France should
+have persisted so in the matter--why she should have spent blood and
+money on it to the extent she has, does, and I am sure will continue to
+do, without its ever having paid her in the past, or paying her now, or
+being likely to pay her in the future, as far as one can see. There are
+moments when it seems to me clear enough why she has done it all; but
+these moments only come when I am in an atmosphere reeking of La Gloire
+or La France--a thing I own I much enjoy; but when I am back in the cold
+intellectual greyness of commercial England, France's conduct in Africa
+certainly seems a little strange and curious, and far more inexplicable
+than it was when one was oneself personally risking one's life and
+ruining one's clothes, after a beetle in the African bush. I really
+think it is this sporting instinct in me that enables me to understand
+France in Africa at all; and which gives me a thrill of pleasure when I
+read in the newspapers of her iniquitous conduct in turning up, flag and
+baggage, in places where she had no legal right to be, or, worse still,
+being found in possession of bits of other nations' hinterland when a
+representative of the other arrives there with the intention of
+discovering it, and to his disgust and alarm finds the most prominent
+object in the landscape is the blue to the mast, blood to the last,
+flag of France, with a fire-and-flames Frenchman under it, possessed
+of a pretty gift of writing communications to the real owner of
+that hinterland--a respectable representative of England or
+Germany--communications threatening him with immediate extinction, and
+calling him a filibuster and an assassin, and things like that. For the
+life of me I cannot help a "Go it, Sall, and I'll hold your bonnit"
+feeling towards the Frenchman. It is not my fault entirely. Gladly would
+I hold my own countryman's bonnet, only he won't go it if I do; so I
+have to content myself with the knowledge that England has made the West
+Coast pay, and that she certainly did beat the Dutch and Portuguese off
+the Coast in a commercial war. Still she will never beat France off in
+that way, because the French interest in Africa is not a commercial one.
+France can and will injure our commerce in West Africa, in all
+probability she will ultimately extinguish it, if things go on as they
+are going, while we cannot hit back and injure her commercial prosperity
+there because she has none to injure. There is also another point of
+great interest, and that is the different effect produced by the
+governmental interference of the two nations in expansion of territory.
+That the expansion of trade, and spheres of influence are concurrent in
+this region is now recognised by our own Government;[46] although the
+Government somewhat flippantly remarks "possibly too late." It is, in my
+opinion, certainly too late as regards both Sierra Leone and the Gold
+Coast; but yet we see small evidence of our Government taking themselves
+seriously in the matter, or of their feeling a regret for having failed
+to avail themselves of the work done for England on the West Coast by
+some of the noblest men of our blood. I have often heard it said it was
+a sad thing for an Englishman to contemplate our West African
+possessions, save one, the Royal Niger; but I am sure it is a far sadder
+thing for an Englishwoman who is full of the pride of her race, and who
+well knows that that pride can only be justified by its men, to see on
+the one hand the splendid achievements of Mungo Park, the two Landers,
+the men who held the Gold Coast for England when the Government
+abandoned it after the battle of Katamansu, of Winwood Reade who, in the
+employ of Messrs. Swanzy, won the right to the Niger behind Sierra
+Leone, and many others; and on the other hand to see the map of West
+Africa to-day, which shows only too clearly that the English
+Government's last chance of saving the honour of England lies in their
+supporting the Royal Niger Company.
+
+It seems that as soon as a West Coast region falls under direct
+governmental control with us a process of petrification sets in, and a
+policy of international amiability and Reubenism, for which we have
+Scriptural authority to expect nothing but failure. It was of course
+necessary for our Government to take charge in West Africa when the
+partitioning of that continent took place; but I fail to admire those
+men who at the Council Board of Europe lost for England what had been
+won for her by better, braver men. Still it is no use, in these weird
+un-Shakespearian times, for any one to use strong language, so I'll turn
+to the consideration of the advance made in West Africa by France; for
+any one can understand how a woman must admire the deeds of brave men
+and the backing up of those deeds by a brave Government.
+
+The earlier history of the French occupation of Africa is that of a
+series of commercial companies, who all came to a bad end. Of the
+Association of the Merchants of Dieppe and Rouen in the fourteenth
+century I have already spoken; and whatever may be the difficulty of
+proving its existence in 1364, there is, I believe, no one who doubts
+that it had an existence that terminated in 1664. The French authorities
+ascribe its fall to the wars in France that succeeded the death of
+Charles VI, 1392, and to the death of some of the principal merchants
+belonging to it; but "the greatest cause of all was that many who had
+gotten vast riches began to be ashamed of the name of traders, although
+to that they owed their fortunes, and allying with the nobility set up
+as quality," and neglected business in the usual way, when this happens.
+The most flourishing settlements went into decay, and were abandoned all
+save one, on the Isle of Sanaga, or what Labat calls the Niger, the
+river we now call the Senegal.[47]
+
+This French settlement is to this day one of the main French ports in
+Africa, and it has remained in their possession, with the brief interval
+of falling into the hands of the English for a few months.
+
+The company that took over the enterprise of this Rouen and Dieppe
+Association in 1664 was called the Compagnie des Indes Occidentals; it
+paid for the stock and rights of the previous association the sum of
+150,000 livres, and it had tremendous ambitions, for not only did it buy
+up the West African enterprise, but also the rights of the lords
+proprietors in the isles of Martinique, Guadaloupe, St. Christopher,
+Santa Cruz, and Maria Galanta in the West Indies. This company came to a
+sad end when it had still thirty years of its charter to run; in 1673 it
+sold its remaining term of West African rights to a new company called
+d'Afrique for 7500 livres. Its West Indian possessions the king seized
+in 1674, and united them with the Crown.
+
+Its successor, the Compagnie d'Afrique, started with its thirty years'
+charter, and all the great ambitions of its predecessor. The king gave
+it every assistance in the way of ships and troops to carry out its
+designs; and it availed itself of these, for finding its trade
+incommoded by the Dutch, who were then settled at Anguin and Goree in
+1677, it got the king to remove the Dutch nuisance from Goree by an
+expedition under Count d'Estras, and in 1678, by an expedition of its
+own, under M. de Casse, it cleared the Dutch out of Anguin.
+
+This company also made many treaties with the native chiefs. In 1679, by
+means of treaty with the chiefs of Rio Fresco, nowadays barbarously
+spelt Rufisque, and Portadali, now Portindal, and Joal, whose name is
+still uninjured, it acquired rights over all the territory between Cape
+Verde and the Gambia;[48] an exclusion from there of all other traders,
+and an exemption from all customs; and in addition to these enterprises
+it entered into a contract with the King of France to provide him with
+2,000 negroes per annum for his West Indian Islands, and as many more as
+he might require for use in the galleys. Shortly after this the
+Compagnie d'Afrique expired in bankruptcy, compounding with its
+creditors at the rate of 5_s._ in the Ŗ, which I presume was paid mainly
+out of the 1,010,000 livres for which it sold its claim to its
+successors. The successors were a little difficult to find at first, for
+there seems to have been what one might call distaste for West African
+commercial enterprise among the French public just then. However, a
+company was got together to buy up its rights, accept its
+responsibilities and carry on business in 1681.
+
+In the matter of the company that succeeded the d'Afrique, confusion is
+added to catastrophe, owing to the then Minister of State, M. Seignelay,
+for some private end, having divided up the funds and created two
+separate companies,--one to have the trade from Cape Blanco and the
+Gambia--the Compagnie du Senegal; the other to hold the rest of the
+Guinea trade to the Cape of Good Hope, the Compagnie du Guinea. This
+arrangement, of course, left the Senegal Company with all the
+responsibility of the compagnie d'Afrique, and without sufficient funds
+to deal with them; and the Compagnie du Senegal complained, when, in
+1694, it found its affairs in much confusion, throwing the blame on the
+Government; but, says Astley, "the great are seldom without excuses for
+what they do," and the division of the concession was persisted in, on
+the grounds that when the company that succeeded d'Afrique was intact it
+failed to fulfil the Government contract of sending 2,000 negroes
+annually to the West Indies; and also that it had not imported as much
+gold from Africa as it might have done. Against this the Directors
+remonstrated loudly, saying that, during the two years and a half during
+which they had been responsible for exporting negroes to the West
+Indies, they had supplied 4,560 negroes, that the register of the Mint
+proved they had sent home in three years 400 marks of gold, and that it
+had cost them 400,000 livres to re-establish the trade of the Compagnie
+d'Afrique, for which they had already paid more than it was worth. All
+they got by these complaints was an extension of their trade rights from
+Gambia to Sierra Leone and a confirmation of their monopoly in exporting
+negroes to the French West Indies, and of their rights to Anguin and
+Goree, that is to say, a promise of Government assistance if those Dutch
+should come and attempt to reinstate themselves to the incommodation of
+French commerce.
+
+All this however did not avail to make the Compagnie du Senegal
+flourish, so in 1694 it sold its remaining seventeen years of rights for
+300,000 livres, to Sieur d'Apougny, one of the old Directors; and this
+enterprising man secured the assistance of eighteen new shareholders,
+and obtained from the Crown a new charter, and started afresh under the
+name of the "Compagnie du Senegal, Cap Nord et Coté d'Afrique." It did
+not prosper; nevertheless it may be regarded as having produced the
+founder of modern Senegal, for it sent out to attend to its affairs,
+when things were in a grievous mess, one of the greatest men who have
+ever gone from Europe to Africa--namely, Sieur Brüe.
+
+The name of this company of Sieur d'Apougny was d'Afrique; and the usual
+thing happened to it in 1709, when, for 250,000 livres, it made over its
+rights to a set of Rouen merchants, reserving, however, to itself the
+right of carrying on certain branches of the trade for which it held
+Government contracts; failing to carry these out they were taken from it
+and handed over to the company of Rouen merchants, who succumbed to
+their liabilities in 1717. Their rights were then bought up, for
+1,600,000 livres, by the already established Mississippi Company of
+Paris--a company which survived until 1758.
+
+In 1758 the English again captured St. Louis, the French main post in
+Senegal. In 1779 the French recaptured it, and it was ceded to them by
+England officially in the treaty of 1783. This was merely the usual kind
+of international amenity prevalent on the West Coast in those days.
+Dutch, French, English, Danes, Portuguese, and Courlanders would
+gallantly seize each other's property out there, while their respective
+Governments at home, if the matter were brought before their notice, and
+it was apparently worth their while, disowned all knowledge of their
+representatives' villainies and returned the booty to the prior owner on
+paper. The aggrieved Power then engaged in the difficult undertaking of
+regaining possession; the said original villain knowing little and
+caring less about the arrangements made on the point by his home
+Government. But just at this period England dealt French trade a
+frightful blow. The whole of her iniquity took the form of one John Law,
+a native of Edinburgh,[49] who raised himself to the dignity of
+comptroller-general of the finance of France by a specious scheme for a
+bank, an East India Company and a Mississippi Company, by the profits of
+which the French national debt was to be paid off, a thing then in
+urgent need of doing, and every one connected with the affair was to
+make their fortunes, an undertaking always in need of doing in any
+country. The French Government gave him every encouragement, and in 1716
+he opened the bank; in 1719 the shares of that bank were worth more than
+eighty times the current specie in France; in 1720 that bank burst,
+spreading commercial ruin. To this may be ascribed the period of
+paralysis in the Senegal trade from 1719. The Compagnie de Senegal had
+handed over their interest to the Mississippi Company involved in John
+Law's bank scheme. After this, up to 1817, France like F. M. the Duke of
+Wellington anent playing upon the harp, "had other things to do" than
+attend to West Africa. During the Napoleonic Wars England took all the
+French possessions in West Africa, but by the treaty of Paris of 1814
+she handed back those in Senegal, save the Gambia. The French vessel
+sent out to take over the territory was the ill-starred and
+ill-navigated _Méduse_. Owing to her wreck it was not until 1817 that
+France replaced officially her standard on this Coast. On the 25th of
+January of that year, and represented by Colonel Smaltz, she again
+entered into possession of Goree and St. Louis in the mouth of the
+Senegal, which was practically all she had, and that was in a very
+unsatisfactory state. Colonel Smaltz, in 1819, had to come to an
+agreement with the Oulof chief of the St Louis district to pay him a
+subsidy, but a mere catalogue of the wars between the French and the
+Oulofs is not necessary here; they were mutually unsatisfactory until
+there enters on the scene that second great founder of the French power
+in Africa, General Faidherbe, in 1854. Faidherbe is indeed the founder;
+but had it not been for Sieur Brüe and his travels far into the
+interior, and the evidence he collected regarding the riches therein,
+and of the general value of the country, it is not likely that, as
+things were in 1854, France would have troubled herself so much about
+extending her power in Senegal.
+
+Faidherbe was also one of those men who get possessed by a belief in the
+future of West Africa, regardless of any state of dilapidation they may
+find it in, and who have the power of infusing their enthusiasm into the
+minds of others; and he roused France to the importance of Senegal,
+saying prophetically, "Our possession on the West Coast of Africa is
+possibly the one of all our colonies that has before it the greatest
+future, and it deserves the whole sympathy and attention of the Empire."
+
+These were words more likely to inspire France or any other reasonable
+Power with a desire to give Senegal attention, than those used by the
+previous French visitor there, M. Sanguin, in 1785, who, speaking of
+the island of St. Louis, says it consists entirely of burning sands on
+whose barren surface you sometimes meet with scattered flints thrown out
+among their ballast by ships, and the ruins of buildings formerly
+erected by Europeans; but he remarks it is not surprising the sands are
+barren, for the air is so strongly impregnated with salt, which pervades
+everything and consumes even iron in a very short space of time. The
+heat he reports unpleasant, and rendered thus more so by the reflection
+from the sand. If the island were not all it might be, one might still
+hope for better things ashore on the mainland, but not according to M.
+Sanguin. The mainland is covered with sand and overrun with mangles, not
+the sort, you understand, that vulgar little English boys used to state
+their mothers had sold and invested the money in a barrel organ, but
+what we now call mangroves; then, mentioning that the St. Louis water
+supply was the cause of most of those maladies which carry off the
+Europeans so rapidly, that at the end of every three years the colony
+has a fresh set of inhabitants, M. Sanguin discourses on the charms of
+West African night entertainments in a most feeling and convincing way,
+stating that there was an infinity of gnats called mosquitoes, which
+exist in incredible quantities. He does not mind them himself, oh dear
+no! being a sort of savage, he says, totally indifferent to the
+impression he may create in the fair sex, so that, if you please, he
+smears himself over with butter, which preserves him from the
+mosquitoes' impertinent stings. How he came by a sufficiency of butter
+for this purpose I won't pretend to know; but he knew mosquitoes, for
+impertinent is a perfect word for them. M. Sanguin, however, was not the
+sort of man, with all his ability and enterprise, to advertise Senegal
+successfully to France. Whatever Frenchman would care to go to a land
+where he needs must be sufficiently indifferent to the fair sex to smear
+himself with butter! Dire and awful dangers and miscellaneous horrors,
+even to being carried off by maladies among mangles in an atmosphere
+stiff with mosquitoes, but not that!
+
+Now Faidherbe was different. Remember to the honour of the man he
+started with the above-described environment, but he took the grand tone
+and did not dwell on local imperfections; the burning sands of Senegal
+he mentioned, as all who know them are, by a natural constraint, forced,
+as Azurara would say, to do, but he said our intentions are pure and
+noble, our cause is just, the future cannot fail us;[50] and with such
+words, to his credit and to the credit of La France, he spoke to her
+heart; and he spoke truly, for with all its failures, with all the
+fearful loss of the lives of Frenchmen, Senegal is a grand thing, and it
+is a great thing for France, for from it has risen her masterdom over
+the Western Soudan--a work also inaugurated by Faidherbe, through his
+support of Lieutenant Maze, who reached the Niger. Practical in his
+work, Faidherbe was also--by rebuilding the fort at Medina--the
+annexation of the Oulof country (1856); the institution of a battalion
+of native Tirailleurs (1857); the telegraph line between St. Louis and
+Goree (1862); the construction of the harbour at Darkar and the erection
+of a first-class lighthouse at Cape Verd (1864); and the annexation of
+the kingdom of Cayore (1865). A grand record! and one that would be
+grander for France were it not for the mismanagement that followed
+Faidherbe's rule in commercial and financial matters.
+
+The want of financial success in her enterprise in West Africa is a
+matter that has constantly irritated France. She is continually saying:
+"English possessions on that Coast pay, why should not mine?" It is not
+my business to obtrude on her an answer, I merely dwell on the subject
+because I clearly see there are creeping nowadays into our own methods
+of managing Africa, those very same causes of financial failure that
+have afflicted her, namely, too high tariffs, too exaggerated views of
+the immediate profits to be got from those regions, and certain unfair
+methods of dealing with natives.
+
+In attempting, however, to account for the trade from the French
+possessions in West Africa being proportionately so small to the immense
+area of country, the make of the country and its native inhabitants must
+be taken into consideration. Enormous districts of the French
+possessions are, to put it mildly, not fertile, and capable of producing
+in the way of a marketable commodity only gum, which is gathered from
+the stems of the acacia horrida. It is an excellent gum, and there is
+plenty of this acacia, and other gum-yielding acacias, but pickers are
+not so plentiful, particularly now French authorities object to native
+enterprise taking the form of raiding districts for slaves to employ in
+the industry. Other enormous districts, however, are as fertile as need
+be, and densely forested with forests rich in magnificent timber and
+rubber wealth. The inhabitants, a most important factor in the
+prosperity or otherwise, of West African regions, are varied, but
+roughly speaking, we may say France possesses the whole of the tawny
+Moors, and tawny Moors have their good points and their bad. Their good
+point, from our present point of view, is their commercial enterprise.
+From the earliest historical account we have of them to the present day,
+it has been their habit to suck the trade out of the rich and fertile
+districts, carry it across the desert, and trade it with the white
+Moors, who, in their turn, carried it to the Mediterranean and Red Sea
+ports. The opening of the West Coast seaboard trade, inaugurated by the
+Portuguese, has acted as a commercial loss to the tawny Moors during the
+past 400 years, and must be held, in a measure, accountable for the
+decay of the great towns of Timbuctoo, Jenne, Mele, and so on, though
+only in a measure, for herein comes the bad point of the inhabitants of
+the Western Soudan, from our point of view, namely, their devotion to
+religious differences and politics, which prevents their attending to
+business. As this state of internecine war came on about the same period
+as the opening to the black Moors and negroes of a market direct with
+European traders in the Bight of Benin, it hurried the tawny Moors to
+commercial decay. Timbuctoo never recovered the blow dealt her by the
+Moorish conquest in 1591. At the breaking up of the Empire of Askia the
+Great, revolt and war raged through the region, Jenne revolted in the
+west, an example followed by the Touaregs Fulah and Malinkase tribes.
+Both north and south were thrown into confusion, and Timbuctoo, their
+intermediary, finding her commerce injured, rebelled in her turn. She
+was conquered and brutally repressed by the Moorish conquerors in 1594.
+A terrible dearth provoked by a lack of rain visited the town, and her
+inhabitants were reduced to eating the corpses of animals, and even of
+men. This was followed by the pestilence of 1618,[51] but through this
+arose any quantity of wars and upheavals of political authority among
+the tawny Moors in the early days of European intercourse with the West
+African Coast. They assumed a more acute, religious form in our own
+century, or to be more accurate just at the end of the eighteenth, when
+Shazkh Utham Danfodio arose among the Fulahs as a religious reformer,
+and a warrior missionary. He was a great man at both, but as a disturber
+of traffic still greater, a thing that cannot be urged to so great an
+extent against the other great Muslam missionary Umaru l'Haji. Still his
+gathering together an army of 20,000 men in 1854-55, and going about
+with them on a series of proselytizing expeditions against any tribe in
+the Upper Niger and Senegal region he found to be in an unconverted
+state, was little better than a nuisance to the French authorities at
+that time. Danfodio's affairs have fallen into the hands of England to
+arrange, and very efficiently her great representative in West Africa,
+the Royal Niger Company, has arranged them. But for our Danfodio and his
+consequences, France has had twenty, and she has dealt with them both
+gallantly and patiently. But there will always be, as far as one can
+see, trouble for France with her tawny Moors, now that the sources of
+their support are cut off from them by many of the districts they once
+drew their trade from--the sea-board districts of the Benin Bight, like
+Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast and Lagos, in the English Niger--being in
+the hands of a nation whose commercial instincts enable it to see the
+benefits of lower tariffs than France affects. Even were our tariffs to
+be raised to-morrow, the trade would again begin to drain back into the
+hands of its old owners, the tawny Moors, for the Western Soudan is
+being pacified by France. If some way is not devised of providing the
+tawny Moors with trade sufficient to keep them, things must go badly
+there, owing to the unfertility of the greater part of their country and
+the increase of the population arising from the pacification of the
+Western Soudan, which France is effecting. I will dwell no longer on
+this sketch of the history of the advance of France in Western Africa.
+We in England cannot judge it fairly. Nationally, her honour there is
+our disgrace; commercially, her presence is our ruin.
+
+Two things only stand out from these generalisations. The Royal Niger
+Company shows how great England can be when she is incarnate in a great
+man, for the Royal Niger Company is so far Sir George Taubman-Goldie.
+The other thing that stands out unstained by comatose indifference to
+the worth of West Africa to England is her Commerce as represented by
+her West Coast traders, who have held on to the Coast since the
+sixteenth century with a bulldog grip, facing death and danger, fair
+weather and foul. Fine things both these two things are, but they do not
+understand each other; they would certainly not understand me regarding
+their affairs were I to talk from June to January, so I won't attempt
+to, but speak to the general public, who so far have understood neither
+Sir George Goldie, nor the West Coast trader, nor for the matter of that
+their mutual foe France, and I beg to say that France has not been so
+destructive an enemy to England there as England's own folly has been as
+incarnate in the parliamentary resolution of 1865; that the achievements
+of France in exploration in the Western Soudan make one of the grandest
+pages of all European efforts in Africa; that the influence of France
+over the natives has been, is, and, I believe, will remain good. "Our
+intentions are pure and noble, our cause is just, the future cannot fail
+us," said Faidherbe. So far as the natives are concerned, this has been
+the policy of France in Western Africa. So far as diplomatic relations
+with ourselves, humanly speaking, it has not; but diplomacy is
+diplomacy, and the amount of probity--justice--in diplomacy is a thing
+that would not at any period cover a threepenny-bit. It is a form of war
+that shows no blood, but which has not in it those things which sanctify
+red war, honour and chivalry. Nevertheless, diplomacy is an essential
+thing in this world; it does good work, it saves life, it increases
+prosperity, it advances the cause of religion and knowledge, and
+therefore the World must not be hard on it for its being--what it is.
+Personally, I prefer contemplating other things, and so I turn to
+Commerce.
+
+     Illustration: ST. PAUL DO LOANDA. [_To face page 281._]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [39] See the first edition of _Henry the Navigator_, by R. H. Major,
+   who, with the enormous wealth of his knowledge, vigorously defends the
+   claim to Portuguese priority; although I do not quite agree with him on
+   the value of the absence of evidence in disproving the French claim I am
+   deeply indebted to him for the mention of references on the point.
+
+   [40] This is an interesting case of the alteration that has taken place
+   in Portuguese place names in West Africa. Angra des Ruives in English is
+   Gurnard Bay, and this name was given to it by the Portuguese because of
+   the quantity of this fish found there. In the _West African Pilot_ you
+   find the place called Garnet Bay, and the _Pilot_ says "fish are
+   abundant"; but as it does not say that garnets abound there, nor that it
+   was discovered by Lord Wolseley, I think there is reason to believe that
+   its name is Gurnard Bay, in translation of Angra des Ruives.
+
+   [41] _Prince Henry the Navigator_; Major.
+
+   [42] Labat, _Afrique occidentale_, vol. iv. p. 8. 1724.
+
+   [43] Equal to nearly Ŗ30 English per annum.
+
+   [44] _A Relation of the Coasts of Africa called Guinea collected by
+   Sieur Villault, Escuyer, Sieur de Bellfond, in the years 1666-1667._
+   London: John Starkey, 1670.
+
+   [45] Vas Conselo's _Life of King João_.
+
+   [46] Duke of Devonshire's speech at Liverpool, June, 1897.
+
+   [47] Labat. At present the Isle of St. Louis, and what is called the
+   Niger, is the river Sanaga--or Senega and Senegal, as the French corrupt
+   it.--Astley, 1745.
+
+   [48] An extent of thirty leagues and six leagues within the
+   land.--Labat, p. 19.
+
+   [49] John Law was the eldest son of an Edinburgh goldsmith, born about
+   1681. "Bred to no business, but possessed of great abilities, and a
+   fertile invention," he, when very young, recommended himself to the
+   King's ministers in Scotland to arrange fiscal matters, then in some
+   confusion from the union of the Kingdoms. His scheme, however, was not
+   adopted. Great at giving other people good advice on money matters, he
+   failed to manage his own. After a gay career in Edinburgh, and gaining
+   himself the title of "Beau Law," he got mixed up in a duel, and fled to
+   the Continent. He was banished from Venice and Genoa for draining the
+   youth of those cities of their money, and wandered about Italy, living
+   on gaming and singular bets and wagers. He proposed his scheme to the
+   Duke of Savoy, who saw by this scheme he could soon, by deceiving his
+   subjects in this manner, get the whole of the money of the kingdom into
+   his possession; but as Law could not explain what would happen then, he
+   was repulsed, and proceeded to Paris, where, under the patronage of the
+   Duc d'Orleans, they found favour with Louis XIV. When his crash came he
+   was exiled, and died in Venice in 1729.
+
+   [50] _Notice de Senegal_, Paris, 1859, p. 99.
+
+   [51] For an interesting account of Timbuctoo and its history, see
+   _Timbuctoo the Mysterious_, by M. Felix Dubois. 1897.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+COMMERCE IN WEST AFRICA
+
+     Concerning the reasons that deter this writer from entering here on
+     a general history of the English, Dutch and Portuguese in Western
+     Africa; to which is added some attempt to survey the present state
+     of affairs there.
+
+
+Lack of space, not lack of interest, prevents me from sketching the
+careers of other nations in West Africa even so poorly as I have that of
+France; but the truth is, the material for the history of the other
+nations is so enormous that in order to present it with anything
+approaching clearness or fairness, folio volumes are required. I have a
+theory of the proper way to write the history of all European West
+African enterprises--a theory I shall endeavour to put into practice if
+I am ever cast ashore on an uninhabited island, with a suitable library,
+a hogshead of ink, a few tons of writing paper, accompanied by pens, and
+at least a quarter of a century of uninterrupted calm at my disposal.
+The theory itself is short, so I can state it here. Pay no attention to
+the nasty things they say about each other--it's the climate.
+
+The history of the Portuguese occupation of West Africa is the great
+one. The material for its early geographico-historical side is in our
+hands, owing to the ability of Mr. Major and his devotion to the memory
+of Prince Henry the Navigator. But the history of Portugal in West
+Africa from the days of the Navigator onwards wants writing. Sir A. B.
+Ellis fortunately gives us, in his history of the Gold Coast, an account
+of the part that Portugal played there, but, except for this region, you
+must hunt it up second-hand in the references made to it by prejudiced
+rivals, or in scattered Portuguese books and manuscripts. While as for
+the commercial history of Portugal in West Africa, although it has been
+an unbroken one from the fifteenth century to our own time, it has so
+far not been written at all. This seems to me all the more deplorable,
+because it is full of important lessons for those nations who are now
+attempting to exploit the regions she first brought them into contact
+with.
+
+It must be noted, for one thing, that Portugal was the first European
+nation to tackle Africa in what is now by many people considered the
+legitimate way, namely, by direct governmental control. Other nations
+left West African affairs in the hands of companies of merchant
+adventurers and private individuals for centuries. Nevertheless,
+Portugal is nowadays unpopular among the other nations engaged in
+exploiting Africa. I shrink from embroiling myself in controversy, but I
+am bound to say I think she has become unpopular on account of
+prejudice, coupled with that strange moral phenomenon that makes men
+desirous of persuading themselves that a person they have treated badly
+deserves such treatment.
+
+The more powerful European nations have dealt scandalously, from a moral
+standpoint, with Portugal in Africa. This one could regard calmly, it
+being in the nature of powerful nations to do this sort of thing, were
+it not for the airs they give themselves; and to hear them talking
+nowadays about Portugal's part in African history is enough to make the
+uninitiated imagine that the sweet innocent things have no past of their
+own, and never knew the price of black ivory.
+
+"Oh, but that is all forgiven and forgotten, and Portugal is just what
+she always was at heart," you say. Well, Portugal at heart was never
+bad, as nations go. Her slaving record is, in the point of humanity to
+the cargo, the best that any European nation can show who has a slaving
+West African past at all.
+
+The thing she is taxed with nowadays mainly is that she does not
+develope her possessions. Developing African possessions is the fashion,
+so naturally Portugal, who persists on going about in crinoline and poke
+bonnet style, gets jeered at. This is right in a way, so long as we
+don't call it the high moral view and add to it libel. I own that my own
+knowledge of Portuguese possessions forces me to regard those
+possessions as in an unsatisfactory state from an imperialistic
+standpoint; a grant made by the home government for improvements, say
+roads, has a tendency to--well, not appear as a road. Some one--several
+people possibly--is all the better and happier for that grant; and after
+all if you do not pay your officials regularly, and they are not
+Englishmen, you must take the consequences. Even when an honest
+endeavour is made to tidy things up, a certain malign influence seems to
+dodge its footsteps in a Portuguese possession. For example, when I was
+out in '93, Portugal had been severely reminded by other nations that
+this was the Nineteenth Century. Bom Dios--Bother it, I suppose it
+is--says Portugal--must do something to smarten up dear Angola. She is
+over 400 now, and hasn't had any new frocks since the slave trade days;
+perhaps they are right, and it's time this dear child came out. So
+Loanda, Angola, was ordered street lamps--stylish things street
+lamps!--a telephone, and a water supply. Now, say what you please,
+Loanda is not only the finest, but the only, city in West Africa.
+"Lagos! you ejaculate--you don't know Lagos." I know I have not been
+ashore there; nevertheless I have contemplated that spot from the point
+of view of Lagos bar for more than thirty solid hours, to say nothing of
+seeing photographs of its details galore, and I repeat the above
+statement. Yet for all that, Loanda had no laid-on water supply nor
+public street lamps until she was well on in her 400th year, which was
+just before I first met her. During the past she had had her water
+brought daily in boats from the Bengo River, and for street lighting she
+relied on the private enterprise of her citizens.[52] The reports given
+me on these endeavours to develope were as follows. As for the water in
+its laid-on state, it was held by the more aristocratic citizens to be
+unduly expensive (500 reis per cubic metre), and they grumbled. The
+general public, though holding the same opinion, did not confine their
+attention to grumbling. Stand-pipes had been put up in suitable places
+and an official told off to each stand-pipe to make a charge for water
+drawn. Water in West Africa is woman's palaver, and you may say what you
+please about the down-troddenness of African ladies elsewhere, but I
+maintain that the West African lady in the matter of getting what she
+wants is no discredit to the rest of the sex, black, white, or yellow.
+In this case the ladies wanted that water, but did not go so far as
+wanting to pay for it. In the history given to me it was evident to
+an unprejudiced observer that they first tried kindness to the guardian
+officials of the stand-pipes, but these men were of the St. Anthony
+breed, and it was no good. Checked, but not foiled, in their admirable
+purpose of domestic economy, those dear ladies laid about in their minds
+for other methods, and finally arranged that one of a party visiting a
+stand-pipe every morning should devote her time to scratching the
+official while the rest filled their water pots and hers. This ingenious
+plan was in working order when I was in Loanda, but since leaving it I
+do not know what modification it may have undergone, only I am sure that
+ultimately those ladies will win, for the African lady--at any rate the
+West coast variety--is irresistible; as Livingstone truly remarked,
+"they are worse than the men." In the street lamp matter I grieve to say
+that the story as given to me does not leave my own country blameless.
+Portugal ordered for Loanda a set of street lamps from England. She sent
+out a set of old gas lamp standards. There being no gas in Loanda there
+was a pause until oil lamps to put on them came out. They ultimately
+arrived, but the P.W.D. failed to provide a ladder for the lamplighter.
+Hence that worthy had to swarm each individual lamp-post, a time-taking
+performance which normally landed him in the arms of Aurora before
+Loanda was lit for the night; but however this may be, I must own that
+Loanda's lights at night are a truly lovely sight, and its P.W.D.'s
+chimney a credit to the whole West Coast of Africa, to say nothing of
+its Observatory and the weather reports it so faithfully issues, so
+faithfully and so scientifically that it makes one deeply regret that
+Loanda has not got a climate that deserves them, but only one she might
+write down as dry and have done with it.
+
+     [Illustration: CLIFFS AT LOANDA. [_To face page 285._]
+
+The present position of the Angola trade is interesting, instructive,
+and typical. I only venture to speak on it in so far as I can appeal to
+the statements of Mr. Nightingale, who is an excellent authority, having
+been long resident in Angola, and heir to the traditions of English
+enterprise there, so ably represented by the firm of Newton, Carnegie
+and Co. The trade of Ka Kongo, the dependent province on Angola, I need
+not mention, because its trade is conditioned by that of its neighbours
+Congo Franįais and the Congo Belge.
+
+     [Illustration: DONDO ANGOLA. [_To face page 287._]
+
+The interesting point--painfully interesting--is the supplanting of
+English manufactures, and the way in which the English shipping
+interest[53] at present suffers from the differential duties favouring
+the Portuguese line, the Empreza Nacional de Navigacão a Vapor. This
+line, on which I have had the honour of travelling, and consuming in
+lieu of other foods enough oil and olives for the rest of my natural
+life, is an admirable line. It shows a calm acquiescence in the
+ordinances of Fate, a general courteous gentleness, combined with strong
+smells and the strain of stringed instruments, not to be found on other
+West Coast boats. It runs two steamers a month (6th and 23rd) from
+Lisbon, and they call at Madeira, St. Vincent, Santiago, Principe and
+San Thome Islands, Kabinda, San Antonio (Kongo), Ambriz, Loanda,
+Ambrizzette, Novo Redondo, Benguella, Mossamedes and Port Alexander,
+every alternate steamer calling at Liverpool. The other steamboat
+lines that visit Loanda are the African and British-African of
+Liverpool, which run monthly, in connection with the other South-west
+African ports; and the Woermann line from Hamburg. The French
+Chargeurs-Reunis started a line of steamers from Havre _via_ Lisbon to
+Loanda, Madagascar, Delagoa Bay, touching at Capetown, when so disposed,
+but this line has discontinued calling in on Loanda. The other
+navigation for Angola is done by the Rio Quanza Company, which runs two
+steamers up that river as far as Dondo; but this industry, Dondo
+included, Mr. Nightingale states to be in a parlous state since the
+extension of the Royal Trans-African Railway Company[54] to Cazengo, "as
+all the coffee which previously came _via_ Dondo by means of carriers,
+now comes by rail, the town of Dondo is almost deserted; the house
+property which a few years ago was valued at Ŗ200,000 sterling, to-day
+would not realise Ŗ10,000." I may remark in this connection, however,
+not to raise the British railway-material makers' feelings unduly, that
+all this railway's rolling stock and material is Belgian in origin. This
+seems to be the fate of African railways. I am told it is on account,
+for one thing, of the way in which the boilers of the English
+locomotives are set in, namely, too stiffly, whereby they suffer more
+over rough roads than the more loosely hung together foreign-made
+locomotives; and, for another, that English-made rolling stock is too
+heavy for rough roads, and that roads under the conditions in Africa
+cannot be otherwise than rough, &c. It is not, however, Belgian stuff
+alone that is competing and ousting our own from the markets of Angola.
+American machinery, owing to the personal enterprise of several American
+engineering firms, is supplying steam-engines and centrifugal pumps for
+working salt at Cucuaco, and machinery for dealing with sugar-cane. Mr.
+Nightingale says the cultivation of the sugar-cane is rapidly extending,
+for the sole purpose of making rum. The ambition of every small trader,
+after he has put a few hundreds of milreis together, is to become a
+fazendeiro (planter) and make rum, for which there is ever a ready sale.
+But regarding the machinery, Mr. Nightingale says: "Up to the present
+time no British firm has sent out a representative to this province.
+There is a fair demand for cane-crushing mills, steam engines and
+turbines. A representative of an American firm is out here for the third
+time within four years, and has done good business; and there is no
+reason why the British manufacturers should not do as well. The American
+machinery is inferior to British makes, and cheaper; but it sells well,
+which is the principal thing."
+
+     [Illustration: TRADING STORES. _To face page 289._]
+
+It is the same story throughout the Angola trade. No English matches
+come into its market. The Companhia de Mossemedes, which is only
+nominally Portuguese, and is worked by German capital, has obtained from
+the Government an enormous tract of country stretching to the Zambesi,
+with rights to cure fish and explore mines. Cartridges made in Holland,
+and an iron pier made in Belgium, an extinct trade in soap and a failing
+one in Manchester goods,[55] and gunpowder, are all sad items in Mr.
+Nightingale's lament. Small matters in themselves, you may think, but
+straws show which way the wind blows, and it blows against England's
+trade in every part of Africa not under England's flag. It would not,
+however, be fair to put down to differential tariffs alone our
+failing trade in Angola, because our successful competitors in
+hardware and gunpowder are other nations who have to face the same
+disadvantages--Germany, Holland, and Belgium. Portugal herself is now
+competing with the Manchester goods. She does so with well-made stuffs,
+but she is undoubtedly aided by her tariff. The consular report (1949)
+says: "The falling off in Manchester cotton since 1891 shows a
+diminution of 1,665,710 kilos. Cotton, if coming from Manchester via
+Lisbon, 1,665,710, duties 80 per cent, or 250 reis per kilo, equal
+333,144 milreis (about Ŗ51,250); cotton coming from Portugal, 1,665,710
+kilos, duties 25 reis per kilo, equal to 41,642 dollars, 750 reis (about
+Ŗ6,400), showing a difference in the receipts for one year of Ŗ44,850."
+
+There is in this statement, I own, a certain obscurity, which has
+probably got into it from the editing of the home officials. I do not
+know if the 1,665,710 kilos, representing the difference between what
+England shipped to Angola in 1891 and what she shipped in 1896, was
+supplied in the latter years from Portugal of Portuguese manufacture;
+but assuming such to have been the case, the position from a tariff
+point of view would work out as follows: 1,665,710 kilos of cottons from
+Manchester would pay duty, at 250 reis per kilo, 416,427-1/2 milreis.
+Taking the exchange at 3_s._ sterling per milreis, this amounts to
+Ŗ62,464. If this quantity of Manchester-made cottons had gone to Lisbon,
+and there become nationalised, and sent forward to Angola in Portuguese
+steamers, the duty would have been 80 per cent. of 250 reis per kilo,
+or say 333,142 milreis, equal to Ŗ49,971; but if this quantity were
+manufactured in Portugal, and shipped by Portuguese steamers, the duty
+would be 25 reis per kilo, equal to Ŗ6,246. The premium in favour of
+Portuguese production on this quantity is therefore Ŗ56,218, a terrific
+tax on the Portuguese subjects of Angola, for one year, in one class of
+manufactures only.
+
+The deductions, however, that Mr. Nightingale draws from his figures in
+regard to Portugal and her province are quite clear. He says, "There is
+no doubt that the province of Angola is a very rich one. No advantages
+are held out for merchants to establish here, and thus bring capital
+into the place, which means more business, the opening up of roads, and
+the development of industries and agriculture. Generally the colony
+exists for the benefit of a few manufacturers in Portugal, who reap all
+the profit." Again, he says, "The merchants are much too highly taxed, a
+good fourth part of their capital is paid out in duties, with no
+certainty when it will be realised again. Angola, with plenty of
+capital, moderate taxes and low duties, might in a few years become a
+most flourishing colony."
+
+Now here we come to the general problem of the fiscal arrangements
+suitable for an African colony; and as this is a subject of great
+importance to England in the administration of her colonies, and errors
+committed in it are serious errors, as demonstrated by the late war in
+Sierra Leone,--the most serious even we have had for many years to deal
+with in West Africa,--I must beg to be allowed to become diffuse, humbly
+stating that I do not wish to dogmatise on the matter, but merely to
+attract the attention of busy practical men to the question of the
+proper system to employ in the administration of tropical possessions.
+This seems to me a most important affair to England, now that she has
+taken up great territories and the responsibilities appertaining to them
+in that great tropical continent, Africa. There are other parts of the
+world where the suitability of the system of government to the
+conditions of the governed country is not so important.
+
+     [Illustration: ST. PAUL DO LOANDA. [_To face page 291._]
+
+It seems to me that the deeper down from the surface we can go the
+greater is our chance of understanding any matter; and I humbly ask you
+to make a dive and consider what reason European nations have for
+interfering with Africa at all. There are two distinct classes of
+reasons that justify one race of human beings interfering with another
+race. These classes are pretty nearly inextricably mixed; but if, like
+Mark Twain's horse and myself, you will lean against a wall and think, I
+fancy you will see that primarily two classes of reasons exist--(_a_),
+the religious reason, the rescue of souls--a reason that is a duty to
+the religious man as keen as the rescue of a drowning man is to a brave
+one; (_b_), pressure reasons. These pressure reasons are divisible into
+two sub-classes--(1) external; (2) internal. Now of external pressure
+reasons primarily we have none in Africa. The African hive has so far
+only swarmed on its own continent; it has not sent off swarms to settle
+down in the middle of Civilisation, and terrify, inconvenience, and
+sting it in a way that would justify Civilisation not only in destroying
+the invading swarm, but in hunting up the original hive and smoking it
+out to prevent a recurrence of the nuisance, as the Roman Empire was
+bound to try and do with its Barbarians. Such being the case,[56] we
+can leave this first pressure reason--the war justification--for
+interfering with the African--on one side, and turn to the other
+reason,--the internal pressure reasons acting from within on the
+European nations. These are roughly divisible into three
+sub-classes:--(1) the necessity of supplying restless and ambitious
+spirits with a field for enterprise during such times as they are not
+wanted for the defence of their nation in Europe--France's reason for
+acquiring Africa; (2) population pressure; (3) commercial pressure. The
+two latter have been the chief reason for the Teutonic nations, England
+and Germany, overrunning the lands of other men. This Teutonic race is a
+strong one, with the habit, when in the least encouraged by Peace and
+Prosperity, of producing more men to the acre than the acre can keep.
+Being among themselves a kindly, common-sense race, it seems to them
+more reasonable to go and get more acres elsewhere than to kill
+themselves off down to a level which their own acres could support. The
+essential point about the "elsewhere" is that it should have a climate
+suited to the family. These migrations to other countries made under the
+pressure of population usually take place along the line of least
+resistance, namely, into countries where the resident population is
+least able to resist the invasion, as in America and Australia; but
+occasionally, as in the case of Canada and the Cape, they follow the
+conquest of an European rival who was the pioneer in rescuing the
+country from savagery.
+
+I am aware that this hardly bears out my statement that the Teutonic
+races are kindly, but as I have said "among themselves," we will leave
+it; and to other people, the original inhabitants of the countries they
+overflow, they are on the whole as kindly as you can expect family men
+to be. A distinguished Frenchman has stated that the father of a family
+is capable of anything; and it certainly looks as if he thought no more
+of stamping out the native than of stamping out any other kind of vermin
+that the country possessed to the detriment of his wife and children. I
+do not feel called upon to judge him and condemn, for no doubt the
+father of a family has his feelings; and as it must have been irritating
+to an ancestor of modern America to come home from an afternoon's
+fishing and find merely the remains of his homestead and bits of his
+family, it was more natural for him to go for the murderers than strive
+to start an Aborigines' Protection Society. Though why, caring for wife
+and child so much as he does, the Teuton should have gone and planted
+them, for example, in places reeking with Red Indians is a mystery to
+me. I am inclined to accept my French friend's explanation on this
+point, namely, that it arose from the Teuton being a little thick in the
+head and incapable of considering other factors beyond climate. But this
+may be merely thickness in my own head--a hopelessly Teutonic one.
+
+However, the occupation of territory from population pressure in Europe
+we need not consider here; for it is not this reason that has led Europe
+to take an active interest in tropical Africa. It is a reason that comes
+into African affairs only--if really at all--in the extreme north and
+extreme south of the continent--Algeria and the Cape. The vast regions
+of Africa from 30° N. to 20° S., have long been known not to possess a
+climate suitable for colonising in. "Men's blood rapidly putrifies under
+the tropic zone." "Tropical conditions favour the growth of pathogenic
+bacteria"--a rose called by another name. Anyhow, not the sort of
+country attractive to the father of a family to found a home in. Yet, as
+in spite of this, European nations are possessing themselves of this
+country with as much ardour as if it were a health resort and a gold
+mine in one, it is plain they must have another reason, and this reason
+is in the case of Germany and England primarily commercial pressure.
+
+These two Teutonic nations have the same habit in their commercial
+production that they have in their human production,--the habit of
+overdoing it for their own country; and just as Lancashire, for example,
+turns out more human beings than can comfortably exist there, so does
+she turn out more manufactured articles than can be consumed there; and
+just as the surplus population created by a strong race must find other
+lands to live in, so must the surplus manufactures of a strong race find
+other markets; both forms of surplus are to a strong race wealth.
+
+The main difference between these things is that the surplus
+manufactured article is in no need of considering climate in the matter
+of its expansion. It stands in a relation to the man who goes out into
+the world with it akin to that of the wife and family to the colonist;
+the trader will no more meekly stand having his trade damaged than the
+colonist will stand having his family damaged; but at the same time, the
+mere fact that the climate destroys trade-stuff is, well, all the better
+for trade, and trade, moreover, leads the trader to view the native
+population from a different standpoint to that of the colonist. To that
+family man the native is a nuisance, sometimes a dangerous one, at the
+best an indifferent servant, who does not do his work half so well as in
+a decent climate he can do it himself. To the trader the native is quite
+a different thing, a customer. A dense native population is what the
+trader wants; and on their wealth, prosperity, peace and industry, the
+success of his endeavours depends.
+
+Now it seems to me that there are in this world two classes of regions
+attractive to the great European manufacturing nations, England and
+Germany, wherein they can foster and expand their surplus production of
+manufactured articles. (1) Such regions as India and China. (2) Such
+regions as Africa. The necessity of making this division comes from the
+difference between the native populations. In the first case you are
+dealing with a people who are manufacturers themselves, and you are
+selling your goods mainly against gold. In the second the people are not
+manufacturers themselves except in a very small degree, and you are
+selling your goods against raw material. In a bustling age like this
+there seems to be a tendency here and in Germany to value the first form
+of market above the second. I fail to see that this is a sound
+valuation. The education our commerce gives will in a comparatively
+short time transform the people of the first class of markets into rival
+producers of manufactured articles wherewith to supply the world's
+markets. We by our pacification of India have already made India a
+greater exporter than she was before our rule there. If China is opened
+up, things will be even worse for England and Germany; for the Chinese,
+with their great power of production, will produce manufactured
+articles which will fairly swamp the world's markets; for, sad to say,
+there is little doubt but they can take out of our hands all textile
+trade, and probably several other lines of trade that England, Germany,
+and America now hold. India and China being populated, the one by a set
+of people at sixes and sevens with each other, and the other by a set of
+people who, to put it mildly, are not born warriors, cannot, except
+under the dominion and protection of a powerful European nation,
+commercially prosper. But England and Germany are not everybody. There
+is France. I could quite imagine France, for example, in possession of
+China, managing it on similar lines to those on which she is now
+managing West Africa, but with enormously different results to herself
+and the rest of the world. Her system of differential tariffs, be it
+granted, keeps her African possessions poor, and involves her in heavy
+imperial expenditure; but the Chinaman's industry would support the
+French system, and thrive under her jealous championship. This being the
+case, it is of value to England and Germany to hold as close a grip as
+possible over such regions as India and China, even though by so doing
+they are nourishing vipers in their commercial bosoms.
+
+The case of the second class of markets--the tropical African--is
+different. Such markets are of enormous value to us; they are,
+especially the West African ones, regions of great natural riches in
+rubber, oil, timber, ivory, and minerals from gold to coal. They are in
+most places densely populated with customers for England's manufactured
+goods. The advantages of such a region to a manufacturing nation like
+ourselves are enormous; for not only do we get rid there of our
+manufactured goods, but we get, what is of equal value to our
+manufacturing classes, raw material at a cheap enough rate to enable the
+English manufacturers to turn out into the markets of the civilised
+world articles sufficiently cheap themselves to compete with those of
+other manufacturing nations.
+
+     [Illustration: IN AN ANGOLA MARKET.]
+
+     [Illustration: A MAN OF SOUTH ANGOLA. [_To face page 297._]
+
+The importance to us of such markets as Africa affords us seems to me to
+give us one sufficient reason for taking over these tropical African
+regions. I do not use the word justification in the matter, it is a word
+one has no right to use until we have demonstrated that our interference
+with the native population and our endeavours for our own population
+have ended in unmixed good; but it is a sound reason, as good a reason
+as we had in overrunning Australia and America. Indeed, I venture to
+think it is a better one, for the possession of a great market enables
+thousands of men, women and children to live in comfort and safety in
+England, instead of going away from home and all that home means; and
+this commercial reason,--for all its not having a high falutin sound in
+it,--is the one and only expansion reason we have that in itself desires
+the national peace and prosperity of the native races with whom it
+deals.
+
+It seems to me no disgrace to England that her traders are the expanding
+force for her in Africa. There are three classes of men who are powers
+to a State--the soldier, the trader, and the scientist. Their efforts,
+when co-ordinated and directed by the true statesman--the religious man
+in the guise of philosopher and poet--make a great State. Being English,
+of course modesty prevents my saying that England is a great State. I
+content myself by saying that she is a truly great people, and will
+become a great State when she is led by a line of great
+statesmen--statesmen who are not only capable, as indeed most of our
+statesmen have been, of seeing the importance of India and the colonies,
+but also capable of seeing the equal importance to us of markets.
+
+England's democracy must learn the true value of the markets that our
+fellow-countrymen have so long been striving to give her, and must
+appreciate the heroism those men have displayed, only too often
+unrequited, never half appreciated by the sea-wife, who "breeds a breed
+of rovin' men and casts them over sea." Those who go to make new homes
+for the old country in Australia and America do not feel her want of
+interest keenly; but those heroes of commerce who go to fight and die in
+fever-stricken lands for the sake of the old homes at home, do feel her
+want of interest.
+
+I am not speaking hastily, nor have I only West Africa in my mind in
+this matter; there are other regions where we could have succeeded
+better, with advantage to all concerned--Malaya, British Guiana, New
+Guinea, the West Indies, as well as West Africa. If you examine the
+matter I think you will see that all these regions we have failed in are
+possessed of unhealthy climates, while the regions we have succeeded
+with are those possessed of healthy climates. The reason for this
+difference in our success seems to me to lie mainly in our deficiency of
+statesmanship at home. We really want the humid tropic zone more than
+other nations do; a climate that eats up steel and hardware as a rabbit
+eats lettuces is an excellent customer to a hardware manufacturing town,
+&c. A region densely populated by native populations willing to give raw
+trade stuffs in exchange for cotton goods, which they bury or bang out
+on stones in the course of washing or otherwise actively help their
+local climate to consume, is invaluable to a textile manufacturing town.
+Yet it would be idle to pretend that our Government has realised these
+things. Our superior ability as manufacturers, and the great enterprise
+of our men who have gone out to conquer the markets of the tropics, have
+given us all the advantages we now enjoy from those markets, but they
+could do no more; and now, when we are confronted by the expansion of
+other European nations, those men and their work are being lost to
+England. Our fellow-countrymen will go anywhere and win anywhere to-day
+just as well as yesterday, where the climate of the region allows
+England to throw enough of them in at a time to hold it independent of
+the home government; but in places where we cannot do this, in the
+unhealthy tropical regions where those men want backing up against the
+aggression on their interests of foreign governments, well, up to the
+present they have not had that backing up, and hence we have lost to
+England in England the advantages we so easily might have secured.
+
+An American magazine the other day announced in a shocked way that I
+could evidently "swear like a trooper!" I cannot think where it got the
+idea from; but really!--well, of course I don't naturally wish to, but I
+cannot help feeling that if I could it would be a comfort to me; for
+when I am up in the great manufacturing towns, England properly so
+called, their looms and forges seem to me to sing the same song to the
+great maker of Fate--we must prosper or England dies. And there is but
+one thing they can prosper on--for there is but one feeding ground for
+them and all the thousands of English men, women and children dependent
+on them--the open market of the World. To me the life blood of England
+is her trade. Her soul, her brain is made of other things, but they
+should not neglect or spurn the thing that feeds them--Commerce--any
+more than they should undervalue the thing that guards them--the
+warrior.
+
+But, you will say, we will not be tied down to this commercial reason as
+England's reason for taking over the administration of tropical Africa.
+My friend, I really think on the whole you had better--it's reasonable.
+I grant that it has not been the reason why English missionaries and
+travellers have risked their lives for the good of Africa, or of human
+knowledge, but as a ground from which to develop a policy of
+administering the country this commercial one is good, because it
+requires as aforesaid the prosperity of the African population; and your
+laudable vanities in the matter I cannot respect, when I observe right
+in the middle of the map of Africa an enormous region called the Congo
+Free State. I have reason to believe that that region was opened up by
+Englishmen--Livingstone, Stanley, Speke, Grant and Burton. If you had
+been so truly keen on suppressing Arab slavery and native cannibalism,
+there was a paradise for you! Yet, you hand it over to some one else.
+Was it because you thought some one else could do it better? or--but we
+will leave that affair and turn to the consideration of the possibility
+of administering tropical Africa, governmentally, to the benefit of all
+concerned.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [52] Loanda has now a gas company, and the installation is well under
+   way, under Belgian supervision.
+
+   [53] Referring to cotton goods, the Foreign Office report on the trade
+   of Angola for 1896 (1949) says the same cottons coming from Manchester
+   would pay 250 reis per kilo in foreign bottoms, and 80 per cent of 250
+   reis if coming in Portuguese bottoms and nationalised in Lisbon.
+
+   [54] Angola also has a small railway from Catumbella to Benguella, a
+   distance of 15 kiloms. and is contemplating constructing an important
+   line from either Benguella or Mossamedes up to Caconda.
+
+   [55] The imports in 1896 from England being 978,745 kilos, against
+   2,644,455 in 1891--a difference of 1,665,710 kilos against
+   Manchester.--_Foreign Office Annual Series, Consular Report, No. 1949_.
+
+   [56] In saying this I am aware of the conduct of Carthage and of the
+   Barbary Moors. But neither of these were primarily African. The one was
+   instigated by Greece, the other by the Vandals and the Arabs.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE CROWN COLONY SYSTEM
+
+     Wherein it is set down briefly why it is necessary to enter upon
+     this discussion at all.
+
+
+Now, you will say, Wherefore should the general public in England
+interest itself in this matter? Surely things are now governmentally
+administered in England's West African Colonies for the benefit of all
+parties concerned.
+
+Well, that is just exactly and precisely what they are not. The system
+of Crown Colonies, when it is worked by Portuguese, does, at any rate,
+benefit some of the officials; but English officials are incapable of
+availing themselves of the opportunities this system offers them; and
+therefore, as this form of opportunity is the only benefit the thing can
+give any one, the sooner the Crown Colony system is removed from the
+sphere of practical politics and put under a glass case in the South
+Kensington Museum, labelled "Extinct," the better for every one.
+
+I beg you, before we go further in this matter, to look round the world
+calmly, and then, when you have allowed the natural burst of enthusiasm
+concerning the extent and the magnificence of the British Empire to
+pass, you will observe that in the more unhealthy regions England has
+failed. I say she has failed because of the Crown Colony system--failed
+with them even during days wherein she has had to face nothing like what
+she has to face to-day from the commercial competition of other nations.
+
+In order to justify myself for holding the view that it is possible for
+any system of English administration to fail anywhere, I would draw your
+attention to the fact that the system used by us for governing unhealthy
+regions is the Crown Colony system. The two things go together, and we
+must assign one of them as the reason of our failure. You may, if it
+please you, put it down to the other thing, the unhealthiness. I cannot,
+for I know that no race of men can battle more gallantly with climate
+than the English--no other race of men has shown so great a capacity as
+we have to make the tropics pay. Still to-day we stand face to face with
+financial disaster in tropical regions.
+
+If you will look through a list of England's tropical unhealthy
+possessions, leaving out West Africa, you will see nothing but
+depression. There are the West Indies, British Guiana, and British
+Honduras. All of these are naturally rich regions and accessible to the
+markets of the world. There is not one of them hemmed in by great
+mountain chains or surrounded by arid deserts, across which their
+products must be transported at enormous cost. They are all on our
+highway--the sea; nor are they sparsely populated. Their population,
+according to the latest Government returns, is 1,653,832, and this
+estimate is acknowledged to be necessarily imperfect and insufficient.
+But with all these advantages we find no prosperity there under our
+rule. Nothing but poverty and discontent and now pauperisation in the
+shape of grants from the Imperial Exchequer. You say, "Oh! but that is
+on account of the sugar bounties and the majority of the population not
+being English;" but that argument won't do. Look at the Canary Islands.
+They were just as hard hit by aniline dyes supplanting cochineal. Their
+population is not mainly English; but down on those islands came an
+Englishman, the Spanish Government had the sense to let him have his
+way, and that Englishman, Mr. A. L. Jones, of Liverpool, has, in a space
+of only fifteen years, made those islands a source of wealth to Spain,
+instead of paupers on an Imperial bounty. "But," you say, "we have other
+regions under the Crown Colony system that are not West Indian."
+Granted, but look at them. There are the West African group; a group of
+three in the Mediterranean, Gibraltar, Malta, and Cyprus, two
+fortifications and a failure; away out East another group, which are
+prosperous from the fact that they are surrounded by countries whose
+fiscal arrangements are providentially worse than their own, and this
+seems to be the only condition which can keep a Crown Colony on its
+financial legs at all. For all our Crown Colonies adjacent to countries
+who can compete with them in trade matters are paupers, or their
+efficiency and value to the Empire is in the sphere of military and
+naval affairs, as posts and coaling stations. These possessions of the
+Gibraltar, Malta, and Hong-Kong brand should be regarded as being part
+of our navy and army, and not confused with colonies, though essential
+to them.
+
+"Still," you say, "you are forgetting Ceylon, the Fiji Islands, the
+Falklands, and the Mauritius." I am not. Ceylon is part of India and
+practically an Indian province, so is out of my arguments. I present you
+with the others wherefrom to build up a defence of the Crown Colony
+system. Say, "See the Falklands off Cape Horn, with a population of
+1,789, and heaps of sheep and a satisfactory budget." I can say nothing
+against them, and may possibly be forced to admit that for such a
+region, off Cape Horn, and with a population mainly of sheep, the Crown
+Colony system may be a Heaven-sent form of administration. But I think
+England would be wiser if she looked carefully at the West Indian group
+and recognised how like their conditions are to those of the West
+African group, for in their disastrous state of financial affairs you
+have an object lesson teaching what will be the fate of Crown Colonies
+in West Africa--Gambia, Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast and Lagos--if she
+will be not warned in time to alter the system at present employed for
+governing these possessions. It is an object lesson in miniature of what
+will otherwise be an infinitely greater drain on the resources of
+England, for West Africa is immensely larger, immensely more densely
+populated, and immensely more deadly in climate than the West Indies.
+For one Englishman killed by the West Indies West Africa will want ten;
+for every Ŗ1,000, Ŗ20,000--and all for what? Only for the sake of a
+system--a system intrinsically alien to all English ideals of
+government--a system that doddered along until Mr. Chamberlain expected
+it to work and then burst out all over in rows, and was found to be
+costing some 25 per cent. of the entire bulk of white trade with West
+Africa; a system that, let the land itself be ever so rich, can lead to
+nothing but heart-breaking failure.
+
+Now I own the Crown Colony system looks well on paper. It consists of a
+Governor, appointed by the Colonial Office, supported by an Executive
+and Legislative Council (both nominated), and on the Gold Coast with two
+unofficial members in the legislative body. These Councils, as far as
+the influence they have, are dead letters, and legislation is in the
+hands of the Governor. This is no evil in itself. You will get nothing
+done in tropical Africa except under the influence of individual men;
+but your West African Governor, though not controlled by the Councils
+within the colony, is controlled by a power outside the colony, namely
+the Colonial Office in London. Up to our own day the Colonial Office has
+been, except in the details of domestic colonial affairs, a drag-chain
+on English development in Western Africa. It has not even been
+indifferent, but distinctly, deliberately adverse. In the year 1865 a
+Select Committee of the House of Commons inquired into and reported upon
+the state of British establishments on the western coast of Africa. "It
+was a strong Committee, and the report was brief and decided.
+Recognising that it is not possible to withdraw the British Government
+wholly or immediately from any settlements or engagements on the West
+African Coast, the Committee laid down that all further extension of
+territory or assumption of government, or new treaties offering any
+protection to native tribes, would be inexpedient, and that the object
+of our policy should be to encourage in the natives the exercise of
+those qualities which may render it possible for us more and more to
+transfer to them the administration of all the governments with a view
+to the ultimate withdrawal from all, except, perhaps, Sierra Leone."[57]
+
+Remember also this. This one in 1865 was not the first of those sort of
+fits the Colonial Office had in West African affairs. It was just as bad
+after the Battle of Katamansu in 1827, and had it not been for the
+English traders our honour to the natives we had made treaties with
+would have been destroyed, and the Gold Coast lost whole and entire.
+
+This policy of 1865 has remained the policy of the English Government
+towards West Africa up to 1894. In spite of it, the English have held
+on. Governor after Governor, who, as soon as he became acquainted with
+the nature of the region, has striven to rouse official apathy, has been
+held in, and his spirit of enterprise broken by official snubs, and has
+been taught that keeping quiet was what he was required to do. It broke
+many a man's heart to do it; but doing it worked no active evil on the
+colony under his control, the affairs of which financially prospered in
+the hands of the trading community so well, that not only had no West
+African colony any public debt, except Sierra Leone, which was a
+philanthropic station, but the Gold Coast, for example, had sufficient
+surplus to lend money to colonies in other parts of the world. But at
+last the time came when the aggression on Africa by the Continental
+powers fulfilled all the gloomy prophecies which the merchants of
+Liverpool had long been uttering; and one possession of ours in West
+Africa after another felt the effects of the activity of other nations
+and the apathy of our own. They would have felt it in vain, and have
+utterly succumbed to it, had it not been for two Englishmen. Sir George
+Taubman Goldie, who, when in West Africa on a voyage of exploration,
+recognised the possibilities of the Niger regions, and secured them for
+England in the face of great difficulties; and Mr. Chamberlain.
+Concerning Sir George Goldie's efforts in securing a most important
+section of West Africa for England, I shall have occasion to speak
+later. Concerning Mr. Chamberlain, I may as well speak now; but be it
+understood, both these men, whatever their own ideas on their work may
+be, were men who came up at a critical point to reinforce Liverpool and
+Bristol and London merchants, who had fought for centuries--not to put
+too fine a point on it--from the days of Edward IV. for the richest
+feeding grounds in all the world for England's manufacturing millions.
+The dissensions, distrust and misunderstandings which have raged among
+these three representatives of England's majesty and power, are no
+affair of mine, as a mere general student of the whole affair, beyond
+the due allowance one must make for the grave mischief worked by the
+human factors. Well, as aforesaid, Mr. Chamberlain alone of all our
+statesmen saw the great possibilities and importance of Western Africa,
+and thinking to realise them, forthwith inaugurated a policy which if it
+had had sound ground to go on, would have succeeded. It had not, it had
+the Crown Colony system--and our hope for West Africa is that so
+powerful a man as he has shown himself to be in other political fields,
+may show himself to be yet more powerful, and formulate a totally new
+system suited for the conditions of West Africa, and not content himself
+with the old fallacy of ascribing failure to the individuals, white or
+black, government official or merchant or missionary, who act under the
+system which alone is to blame for England's present position in West
+Africa; but I own that if Mr. Chamberlain does this he will be greater
+than one man can ever be reasonably be expected to be, and again it is,
+I fear, not possible to undo what has been done by the resolution of
+1865.
+
+Possibly the greatest evil worked by this resolution has been the
+separation of sympathy between the Merchants and the Government. Since
+1865 these two English factors have been working really against each
+other. Possibly the greatest touch of irony in modern politics is to be
+found in a despatch dated March 30th, 1892, addressed to the British
+Ambassador at Paris, wherein it is said, "The colonial policy of Great
+Britain and France in West Africa has been widely different. France from
+her basis on the Senegal coast has pursued steadily the aim of
+establishing herself on the Upper Niger and its affluents; this object
+she has attained by a large and constant expenditure, and by a
+succession of military expeditions. Great Britain, on the other hand,
+has adopted the policy of advance by commercial enterprise; she has not
+attempted to compete with the military operations of her neighbour."[58]
+I should rather think she hadn't! Let alone the fact that France did not
+expand mainly by military operations, but through magnificent explorers
+backed up by sound sense. While, as for Great Britain "adopting the
+policy of advance by commercial enterprise"--well, I don't know what the
+writer of that despatch's ideas on "adoption" are, but suppression would
+be the truer word. Had Great Britain given even her countenance to
+"commercial enterprise," she would have given it by now representation
+in her councils for West Africa, a thing it has not yet got. True, there
+is the machinery for this representation ready in the Chambers of
+Commerce, but these Chambers have no real power whatsoever as far as
+West African affairs are concerned; they are graciously permitted to
+send deputations to the Colonial Office and write letters when they feel
+so disposed, but practically that is all.
+
+Truly it is a ridiculous situation, because West Africa matters to no
+party in England so much as it matters to the mercantile. I am aware I
+shall be told that it is impossible that one section of Englishmen can
+have a greater interest in any part of the Empire than another section,
+and, for example, that West Africa matters quite as much to the
+religious party as it does to the mercantile. But, to my mind, neither
+Religion nor Science is truly concerned in the political aspect of West
+Africa. It should not matter, for example, to the missionary whether he
+works under one European Government or another, or a purely native
+Government, so long as he is allowed by that Government to carry on his
+work of evangelisation unhindered; nor, similarly, does it matter to the
+scientific man, so long as he is allowed to carry on his work; but to
+the merchant it matters profoundly whether West Africa is under English
+or foreign rule, and whether our rule there is well ordered. For one
+thing, on the merchants of West Africa falls entirely the duty of
+supplying the revenue which supports the government of our colonies
+there; and for another, it seems to me that whether the Government he is
+under is English or no does matter very much to the English merchant.
+His duty as an Englishman is the support of the population of his own
+country, directly the support of its manufacturing classes. Everything
+that tends to alienate his influence from the service of his
+fellow-countrymen is a degradation to him. He may be individually as
+successful in trading with foreign-made goods, but as a member of the
+English State he is at a lower level when he does so; he becomes a mere
+mercenary in the service of a foreign power engaged in adding to the
+prosperity of an alien nation. Again, in this matter the difference
+between the religious man and the commercial shows up clearly. Let the
+religion of the missionary be what it may, his aim is according to it to
+secure the salvation of the human race. What does it matter to him
+whether the section of the human race he strives to save be black,
+white, or yellow? Nothing; as the noble records of missions will show
+you. Therefore I repeat that West Africa matters to no party in the
+English State so much as it matters to the mercantile. With no other
+party are true English interests so closely bound up.
+
+West Africa probably will never be a pleasant place wherein to spend the
+winter months, a holiday ground that will serve to recuperate the jaded
+energies of our poets and painters, like the Alps or Italy; probably,
+likewise, it will never be a place where we can ship our overflow
+population; and for the same reason--its unhealthiness--it will be of no
+use to us as a military academy, for troops are none the better for
+soaking in malaria and operating against ill-armed antagonists. But West
+Africa is of immense use to us as a feeding-ground for our manufacturing
+classes. It could be of equal value to England as a healthy colony, but
+in a reverse way, for it could supply the wealth which would enable them
+to remain in England in place of leaving it, if it were properly managed
+with this definite end in view. It is idle to imagine that it can be
+properly managed unless commercial experts are represented in the
+Government which controls its administration, as is not the case at
+present. It is no case of abusing the men who at present strive to do
+their best with it. They do not set themselves up as knowing much about
+trade, and they constantly demonstrate that they do not. Armed with
+absolutely no definite policy, subsisting on official and non-expert
+trade opinion, they drift along, with some nebulous sort of notion in
+their heads about "elevating the African in the plane of civilisation."
+
+Now, of course, there exists a passable reason for things being as they
+are in our administration of West Africa. England is never malign in
+intention, and never rushes headlong into a line of policy. Therefore,
+in order to comprehend how it has come about that she should have a
+system so unsuited to the regions to which it is applied, as the Crown
+Colony system is unsuited to West Africa, we must calmly investigate the
+reason that underlies this affair. This reason, which is the cause of
+all the trouble, is a misconception of the nature of West Africa, and it
+must be considered under two heads.
+
+The thing behind the resolution of 1865 is the undoubted fact that West
+Africa is no good for a Colony from its unhealthiness. There is no one
+who knows the Coast but will grant this; but surely there is no one who
+knows, not only the West Coast of Africa but also the necessities of our
+working classes in England, who can fail to recognise that this is only
+half an argument against England holding West Africa; because we want
+something besides regions whereto we can send away from England men and
+women, namely, we want regions that will enable us to keep the very
+backbone of England, our manufacturing classes, in a state of healthy
+comfort and prosperity at home in England, in other words, we want
+markets.
+
+Alas! in England the necessity for things grows up in a dumb way, though
+providentially it is irresistibly powerful; once aroused it forces our
+statesmen to find the required thing, which they with but bad grace and
+grievous groans proceed leisurely to do.
+
+This is pretty much the same as saying that the English are deficient in
+statesmanship, and this is what I mean, and I am convinced that no other
+nation but our own could have prospered with so much of this
+imperfection; but remember it is an imperfection, and is not a thing to
+be proud of any more than a stammer. External conditions have enabled
+England so far barely to feel her drawback, but now external conditions
+are in a different phase, and she must choose between acquiring
+statesmanship competent to cope with this phase, or drift on in her
+present way until the force of her necessities projects her into an
+European war. A perfectly unnecessary conclusion to the pressure of
+commercial competition she is beginning to feel, but none the less
+inevitable with her present lack of statecraft.
+
+The second part of the reason of England's trouble in West Africa is
+that other fallacious half reason which our statesmen have for years
+been using to soothe the minds of those who urged on her in good time
+the necessity for acquiring the hinterlands of West Africa, namely,
+"After all, England holds the key of them in holding the outlets of the
+rivers." And while our statesmen have been saying this, France has been
+industriously changing the lock on the door by diverting trade routes
+from the hinterland she has so gallantly acquired, down into those
+seaboard districts which she possesses.
+
+"Well, well, well," you will say, "we have woke up at last, we can be
+trusted now." I own I do not see why you should expect to be suddenly
+trusted by the men with whose interests you have played so long. I
+remember hearing about a missionary gentleman who was told a long story
+by the father of a bad son, who for years went gallivanting about West
+Africa, bringing the family into disrepute, and running up debts in all
+directions, and finally returned to the paternal roof. "Dear me! how
+interesting," said the missionary; "quite the Parable of the Prodigal
+Son! I trust, My Friend, you remembered it, and killed the fatted calf
+on his return?" "No, Sar," said the parent; "but I dam near kill that ar
+prodigal son."
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [57] See Lucas's _Historical Geography of the British Colonies_, Oxford,
+   1894.
+
+   [58] Parliamentary Paper, C 6701, 92.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+THE CROWN COLONY SYSTEM IN WEST AFRICA
+
+     Wherein is set down briefly in what manner of ways the Crown Colony
+     system works evil in Western Africa.
+
+
+I have attempted to state that the Crown Colony system is unsuited for
+governing Western Africa, and have attributed its malign influence to
+its being a system which primarily expresses the opinions of
+well-intentioned but ill-informed officials at home, instead of being,
+according to the usual English type of institution, representative of
+the interests of the people who are governed, and of those who have the
+largest stake in the countries controlled by it--the merchants and
+manufacturing classes of England. It remains to point out how it acts
+adversely to the prosperity of all concerned; for be it clearly
+understood there is no corruption in it whatsoever: there is waste of
+men's lives, moneys, and careers, but nothing more at present. By-and-by
+it will add to its other charms and functions that of being, in the
+early future, a sort of patent and successful incubator for hatching a
+fine lively brood of little Englanders, who will cry out, "What is the
+good of West Africa?" and so forth; and they will seem sweetly
+reasonable, because by then West Africa will be down on the English
+rates, a pauper.
+
+It may seem inconceivable, however, that the present governing body of
+West Africa, the home officials, and the English public as represented
+in Parliament, can be ill-informed. West Africa has not been just shot
+up out of the ocean by a submarine volcanic explosion; nor are we
+landing on it out of Noah's ark, for the thing has been in touch with
+Europe since the fifteenth century; yet, inconceivable as it may seem
+that there is not by now formulated and in working order a method of
+governing it suitable for its nature, the fact that this is so remains,
+and providentially for us it is quite easy of explanation without
+abusing any one; though no humane person, like myself for example, can
+avoid sincerely hoping that Mr. Kipling is wrong when he sings
+
+    "Deep in all dishonour have we stained our garments' hem.
+    Yet be ye not dismayed, we have stumbled and have strayed.
+    Our leaders went from righteousness, the Lord will deal with them."
+
+For although it is true that we have made a mess of this great feeding
+ground for England's manufacturing millions; yet there are no leaders on
+whom blame alone can fall, whom we can make scapegoats out of, who can
+be driven away into the wilderness carrying the sins of the people. The
+blame lies among all those classes of people who have had personally to
+deal with West Africa and the present system; and the Crown Colony
+system and the resolution of '65 are merely the necessary fungi of
+rotten stuff, for they have arisen from the information that has been,
+and has not been, placed at the disposal of our Government in England by
+the Government officials of West Africa, the Missionaries, and the
+Traders.
+
+We will take the traders' blame first--their contribution to the evil
+dates from about 1827 and consists in omission--frankly, I think that
+they, in their generation, were justified in not telling all they could
+tell about the Coast. They found they could get on with it, keep it
+quiet and manage the natives fairly well under the system of Courts of
+Equity in the Rivers, and the Committee of merchants with a Governor
+approved of by the Home Government, which was working on the Gold Coast
+up to 1843. In 1841 there arose the affair of Governor Maclean, and the
+inauguration of the line of policy which resulted in the resolution of
+1865. The governmental officials having cut themselves off from the
+traders and taken over West Africa, failed to manage West Africa, and so
+resolved that West Africa was not worth managing,--a thing they are
+bound to do again.
+
+The abuse showered on the merchants, and the terrific snubs with which
+the Government peppered them, did not make the traders blossom and
+expand, and shower information on those who criticised them--there are
+some natures that are not sweetened by Adversity. Moreover, the
+Government, when affairs had been taken over by the Offices in London,
+took the abhorrent form of Customs, and displayed a lively love of the
+missionary-made African, as he was then,--you can read about him in
+Burton[59]--and for the rest got up rows with the traders' best
+customers, the untutored African; rows, as the traders held, unnecessary
+in their beginning and feeble-handed in their termination. The whole of
+this sort of thing made the trader section keep all the valuable
+information to itself, and spend its energies in eluding the Customs,
+and talking what Burton terms "Commercial English."
+
+Then we come to the contribution made by the Government officials to the
+formation of an erroneous opinion concerning the state of affairs in
+West Africa. This arose from the conditions that surrounded them there,
+and the way in which they were unable, even if they desired, to expand
+their influence, distrusted naturally enough by the trading community
+since 1865, held in continuously by their home instructions, and
+unprovided with a sufficient supply of men or money on shore to go in
+for empire making, and also villainously badly quartered,--as you can
+see by reading Ellis's _West African Sketches_. It is small wonder and
+small blame to them that their account of West Africa has been a gloomy
+one, and such it must remain until these men are under a different
+system: for all the reasons that during the past have caused them to
+paint the Coast as a place of no value to England, remain still in full
+force,--as you can see by studying the disadvantages that service in a
+West African Crown Colony presents to-day to a civilian official.
+
+Firstly, the climate is unhealthy, so that the usual make of Englishman
+does not like to take his wife out to the Coast with him. This means
+keeping two homes, which is expensive, and it gives a man no chance of
+saving money on an income say of Ŗ600 a year, for the official's life in
+West Africa is necessarily, let him be as economical as he may, an
+expensive one; and, moreover, things are not made more cheerful for him
+by his knowing that if he dies there will be no pension for his wife.
+
+Secondly, there being no regular West African Service, there is no
+security for promotion; owing to the unhealthiness of the climate it is
+very properly ordained that each officer shall serve a year on the
+Coast, and then go home on a six months' furlough. It is a fairly common
+thing for a man to die before his twelve months' term is up, and a
+still more common one for him to have to go on sick leave. Of course,
+the moment he is off, some junior official has to take his place and do
+his work. But in the event of the man whose work he does dying, gaining
+a position in another region, or promotion, the man who has been doing
+the work has no reason to hope he will step into the full emoluments and
+honours of the appointment, although experience will thus have given him
+an insight into the work. On the contrary, it too often happens that
+some new man, either fresh from London or who has already held a
+Government appointment in some totally different region to the West
+African, is placed in the appointment. If this new man is fresh to such
+work as he has to do, the displaced man has to teach him; if he is from
+a different region, he usually won't be taught, and he does not help to
+develop a spirit of general brotherly love and affection in the local
+governmental circles by the frank statement that he considers West
+African officials "jugginses" or "muffs," although he fairly offers to
+"alter this and show them how things ought to be done."
+
+Then again the civilian official frequently complains that he has no
+such recognition given him for his services as is given to the military
+men in West Africa. I have so often heard the complaint, "Oh, if a man
+comes here and burns half a dozen villages he gets honours; while I, who
+keep the villages from wanting burning, get nothing;" and mind you, this
+is true. Like the rest of my sex I suffer from a chronic form of scarlet
+fever, and, from a knowledge of the country there, I hold it rubbish to
+talk of the brutality of mowing down savages with a Maxim gun when it
+comes to talking of West African bush fighting; for your West African is
+not an unarmed savage, he does not assemble in the manner of Dr.
+Watts's ants, but wisely ensconces himself in the pleached arbours of
+his native land, and lets fly at you with a horrid scatter gun. This is
+bound to hit, and when it hits makes wounds worse than those made by a
+Maxim; in fact he quite turns bush fighting into a legitimate sport, let
+alone the service done him by his great ally, the climate. Still, it is
+hard on the civilian, and bad for English interests in West Africa, that
+the man who by his judgment, sympathy, and care, keeps a district at
+peace, should have less recognition than one who, acting under orders,
+doing his duty gallantly, and all that, goes and breaks up all native
+prosperity and white trade.
+
+All these things acting together produce on the local Government
+official a fervid desire to get home to England, and obtain an
+appointment in some other region than the West Coast. I feel sure I am
+well within the mark when I say that two-thirds of the present
+Government officials in the West African English Crown Colonies have
+their names down on the transfer list, or are trying to get them there;
+and this sort of thing simply cannot give them an enthusiasm for their
+work sufficient to ensure its success, and of course leads to their
+painting a dismal picture of West Africa itself.
+
+I am perfectly well aware that the conditions of life of officials in
+West Africa are better than those described by Ellis. Nevertheless, they
+are not yet what they should be: a corrugated iron house may cost a heap
+of money and yet not be a Paradise. I am also aware that the houses and
+general supplies given to our officials are immensely more luxurious
+than those given to German or French officials; but this does not
+compensate for the horrors of boredom suffused with irritation to which
+the English official is subjected. More than half the quarrelling and
+discontent for which English officials are celebrated, and which are
+attributed to drink and the climate, simply arise from the domestic
+arrangements enforced on them in Coast towns, whereby they see far too
+much of each other. If you take any set of men and make them live
+together, day out and day in, without sufficient exercise, without
+interest in outside affairs, without dividing them up into regular
+grades of rank, as men are on board ship or in barracks, you are simply
+bound to have them dividing up into cliques that quarrel; the things
+they quarrel over may seem to an outsider miserably petty, but these
+quarrels are the characteristic eruption of the fever discontent. And
+may I ask you if the opinion of men in such a state is an opinion on
+which a sound policy wherewith to deal with so complex a region can be
+formed? I think not, yet these men and the next class alone are the
+makers of our present policy--the instructors of home official opinion.
+
+The next class is the philanthropic party. It is commonly confused with
+the missionary, but there is this fundamental difference between them.
+The missionary, pure and simple, is a man who loves God more than he
+loves himself, or any man. His service (I am speaking on fundamental
+lines, as far as I can see) is to place in God's charge, for the glory
+of God, souls, that according to his belief, would otherwise go
+elsewhere. The philanthropist is a person who loves man; but he or she
+is frequently no better than people who kill lapdogs by over-feeding, or
+who shut up skylarks in cages, while it is quite conceivable to me, for
+example, that a missionary could kill a man to save his soul, a
+philanthropist kill his soul to save his life, and there is in this a
+difference. I have never been able to get up any respectful enthusiasm
+for the so-called philanthropist, so that I have to speak of him with
+calm care; not as I have spoken of the missionary, feeling he was a
+person I could not really harm by criticising his methods.
+
+It is, however, nowadays hopeless to attempt to separate these two
+species, distinct as I believe them to be; and they together undoubtedly
+constitute what is called the Mission party not only in England but in
+Germany. I believe this alliance has done immense harm to the true
+missionary, for to it I trace that tendency to harp upon horrors and
+general sensationalism which so sharply differentiates the modern from
+the classic missionary reports. Take up that noble story of Dennis de
+Carli and Michael Angelo of Gattina, and read it through, and then turn
+on to wise, clear-headed Merolla da Sorrento, and read him; you find
+there no sensationalism. Now and again, when deeply tried, they will
+say, "These people live after a beastly manner, and converse freely with
+the Devil," but you soon find them saying, "Among these people there are
+some excellent customs," and they give you full details of them, with
+evident satisfaction. You see it did not fundamentally matter to these
+early missionaries whether their prospective converts "had excellent
+customs" or "lived after a beastly manner," from a religious standpoint.
+Not one atom--they were the sort of men who would have gone for Plato,
+Socrates, and all the Classics gaily, holding that they were not
+Christians as they ought to be; but this never caused them to paint a
+distorted portrait of the African. This thing, I believe, the modern
+philanthropist has induced the modern missionary only too frequently to
+do, and the other regrettable element which has induced him to do it
+has been the apathy of the English public, a public which unless it were
+stirred up by horrors would not subscribe. Again the blame is with
+England at home, but the harm done is paid for in West Africa. The
+portrait painted of the African by the majority, not all, but the
+majority of West African mission reports, has been that of a child,
+naturally innocent, led away and cheated by white traders and grievously
+oppressed by his own rulers. I grant you, the African taken as a whole
+is the gentlest kind of real human being that is made. I do not however
+class him with races who carry gentleness to a morbid extent, and for
+governmental purposes you must not with any race rely on their main
+characteristic alone; for example, Englishmen are honest, yet still we
+require the police force.
+
+The evil worked by what we must call the missionary party is almost
+incalculable; from it has arisen the estrangement of English interests,
+as represented by our reason for adding West Africa to our Empire at
+all--the trader--and the English Government as represented by the Crown
+Colony system; and it has also led to our present policy of destroying
+powerful native States and the power of the African ruling classes at
+large. Secondarily it is the cause of our wars in West Africa. That this
+has not been and is not the desire of the mission party it is needless
+to say; that the blame is directly due to the Crown Colony system it is
+as needless to remark; for any reasonable system of its age would long
+ere now have known the African at first hand, not as it knows him, and
+knows him only, at its head-quarters, London, from second-hand vitiated
+reports. It has, nowadays, at its service the common sense and humane
+opinions of the English trade lords as represented by the Chambers of
+Commerce of Liverpool and Manchester; but though just at present it
+listens to what they say--thanks to Mr. Chamberlain--yet it cannot act
+on their statements, but only querulously says, "Your information does
+not agree with our information." Allah forbid that the information of
+the party with whom I have had the honour to be classed should agree
+with that sort of information from other sources; and I would naturally
+desire the rulers of West Africa to recognise the benefit they now enjoy
+of having information of a brand that has not led to such a thing as the
+Sierre Leone outbreak for example, and to remember in this instance that
+six months before the hut tax there was put on, the Chambers had
+strongly advised the Government against it, and had received in reply
+the answer that "The Secretary of State sees no reason to suppose that
+the hut tax will be oppressive, or that it will be less easy to collect
+in Sierra Leone than in Gambia." Why, you could not get a prophetic
+almanac into a second issue if it were not based on truer knowledge than
+that which made it possible for such a thing to be said. Nevertheless,
+no doubt this remarkable sentence was written believing the same to be
+true, and confiding in the information in the hands of the Colonial
+Office from the official and philanthropic sources in which the Office
+believes.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [59] _Wanderings in West Africa_, vol. i., 1863.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+MORE OF THE CROWN COLONY SYSTEM
+
+Wherein is set down the other, or main, reason against this system.
+
+
+Having attempted to explain the internal evils or what one might call
+the domestic rows of the Crown colony system, I will pass on to the
+external evils--which although in a measure consequent on the internal
+are not entirely so, and this point cannot be too clearly borne in mind.
+Tinker it up as you may, the system will remain one pre-eminently
+unsuited for the administration of West Africa.
+
+You might arrange that officials working under it should be treated
+better than the official now is, and the West African service be brought
+into line in honour with the Indian, and afford a man a good sound
+career. You might arrange for the Chambers of Commerce, representing the
+commercial factor, to have a place in Colonial Office councils. But if
+you did these things the Crown colony system would still remain unsuited
+to West Africa, because it is a system intrinsically too expensive in
+men and money, so that the more you develop it the more expensive it
+becomes. Concerning this system as applied to the West Indies a West
+Indian authority the other day said it was putting an elephant to draw a
+goat chaise; concerning the West African application of it, I should
+say it was trying to open a tin case with a tortoise-shell paper knife.
+Of course you will say I am no authority, and you must choose between
+those who will tell you that only a little patience is required and the
+result of the present governmental system in West Africa will blossom
+into philanthropic and financial successes, and me who say it cannot do
+so but must result in making West Africa a debt-ridden curse to England.
+All I can say for myself is that I am animated by no dislike to any set
+of men and without one farthing's financial interest in West Africa. It
+would not affect my income if you were to put 100 per cent. ad valorem
+duty on every trade article in use on the Coast and flood the Coast with
+officials, paid as men should be paid who have to go there, namely, at
+least three times more than they are at present. My dislike to the
+present state of affairs is solely a dislike to seeing my country, to my
+mind, make a fool of herself, wasting men's lives in the process and
+deluding herself with the idea that the performance will repay her.
+
+Personally, I cannot avoid thinking that before you cast yourself in a
+whole-souled way into developing anything you should have a knowledge of
+the nature of the thing as it is on scientific lines. Education and
+development unless backed by this knowledge are liable to be thrown
+away, or to produce results you have no use for. I remember a
+distressing case that occurred in West Africa and supports my opinion. A
+valued friend of mine, a seaman of great knowledge and experience, yet
+lacking in that critical spirit which inquires into the nature of things
+before proceeding with them, confident alone in the rectitude of his own
+intentions, bought a canary bird at a Canary Island. He knew that the
+men who sell canaries down there are up to the sample description of
+deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. So he brought to bear
+upon the transaction a deal of subtlety, but neglected fundamental
+facts, whereby his triumph at having, on the whole, done the canary
+seller brown by getting him to take in part value for the bird a box of
+German colonial-grown cigars, was vanity. For weeks that gallant seaman
+rubbed a wet cork up and down an empty whisky bottle within the hearing
+of the bird, which is the proper thing to do providing things are all
+right in themselves, and yet nothing beyond genial twitterings rewarded
+his exertions. So he rubbed on for another week with even greater
+feeling and persuasive power, and then, to drop a veil upon this tragedy
+of lost endeavour, that canary laid an egg. Now, if that man had only
+attended to the nature of things and seen whether it were a cock or hen
+bird, he would not have been subjected to this grievous disappointment.
+Similarly, it seems to me, we are, from the governmental point of view,
+like that sea captain--swimming about in the West African affair with a
+lot of subtle details, in an atmosphere of good intentions, but not in
+touch with important facts; we are acting logically from faulty
+premises.
+
+Now, let us grant that the Crown Colony system is not fully developed in
+West Africa, for if it were, you may say, it would work all right;
+though this I consider a most dangerous idea. Let us see what it would
+be if it were fully developed.
+
+Mr. St. Loe Strachey[60] thus defines Crown Colonies:--"These are
+possessions which are for the most part peopled by non-European races of
+dark colour, and governed not by persons elected by themselves, but by a
+governor and other officials sent out from England. The reason for this
+difference is a very simple one. Those colonies which are peopled by men
+of English and European races can provide themselves with a better
+government than we can provide them with from here. Hence they are given
+responsible governments.
+
+"Those colonies in which the English or European element is very small
+can best be governed, it is found, by the Crown Colony system. The
+native, dark-skinned population are not fit to govern themselves--they
+are too ignorant and too uncivilised, and if the government is left
+entirely in the hands of the small number of whites who may happen to
+live in the colony, they are apt not to take enough care of the
+interests of the coloured inhabitants. The simplest form of the Crown
+Colony is that found in some of the smaller groups of islands in the
+West Indies. Here a governor is sent out from England, and he--helped by
+a secretary, a judge, and other officials--governs the island, reporting
+his actions to the Colonial Office, and consulting the able officials
+there before he takes important steps. In most cases, however, the
+governor has a council, either nominated from among the principal
+persons in the colony, or else elected by the inhabitants. In some
+cases--Jamaica or Barbadoes, for example--the council has very great
+power, and the type of government may be said to approach that of the
+self-governing colonies."
+
+Now, in West Africa the system is the same as that "found in some of the
+smaller groups of the West Indian islands," although these West African
+colonies have each a nominated council of some kind. I should hesitate
+to say, however, "to assist the governor." Being nominated by him they
+can usually manage to agree with him; it is only another hindrance or
+superfluous affair. Before taking any important steps the West African
+governor is supposed to consult the officials at the Colonial Office;
+but as the Colonial Office is not so well informed as the governor
+himself is, this can be no help to him if he be a really able man, and
+no check on him if he be not an able man. For, be he what he may, he is
+the representative of the Colonial Office; he cannot, it is true,
+persuade the Colonial Office to go and involve itself in rows with
+European continental powers, because the Office knows about them; but if
+he is a strong-minded man with a fad he can persuade the Colonial Office
+to let him try that fad on the natives or the traders, because the
+Colonial Office does not know the natives nor the West African trade.
+
+You see, therefore, you have in the Governor of a West African
+possession a man in a bad position. He is aided by no council worth
+having, no regular set of experts; he is held in by another council
+equally non-expert, except in the direction of continental politics. He
+may keep out of mischief; he could, if he were given either time or
+inducement to study the native languages, laws, and general ethnology of
+his colony, do much good; but how can he do these things, separated from
+the native population as he necessarily is, by his under officials, and
+with his time taken up, just as every official's time is taken up under
+the Crown Colony system, with a mass of red-tape clerkwork that is
+unnecessary and intrinsically valueless? I do not pretend to any
+personal acquaintance with English West African Governors. I only look
+on their affairs from outside, but I have seen some great men among
+them. One of them who is dead would, I believe, had the climate spared
+him, have become a man whom every one interested in West Africa would
+have respected and admired. He came from a totally different region, the
+Straits Settlements. He found his West African domain in a lethargic
+mess, and he hit out right and left, falling, like the rain, on the just
+and the unjust. I do not wish you to take his utterances or his actions
+as representing him; but from the spirit of them it is clear he would
+have become a great blessing to the Coast had he but lived long enough.
+I am aware he was unpopular from his attempts to enforce the ill-drafted
+Land Ordinance, but primarily responsible for this ill-judged thing he
+was not.
+
+In addition to Sir William Maxwell there have been, and are still, other
+Governors representative of what is best in England; but, circumstanced
+as they are under this system, continually interrupted as their work is
+by death or furloughs home, neither England nor West Africa gets
+one-tenth part of the true value of these men.
+
+In addition to the Governor, there are the other officials, medical,
+legal, secretarial, constabulary, and customs. The majority of these are
+engaged in looking after each other and clerking. Clerking is the breath
+of the Crown Colony system, and customs what it feeds on. Owing to the
+climate it is practically necessary to have a double staff in all these
+departments,--that is what the system would have if it were perfect; as
+it is, some official's work is always being done by a subordinate; it
+may be equally well done, but it is not equally well paid for, and there
+is no continuity of policy in any department, except those which are
+entirely clerk, and the expense of this is necessarily great. The main
+evil of this want of continuity is of course in the Governors--a
+Governor goes out, starts a new line of policy, goes home on furlough
+leaving in charge the Colonial Secretary, who does not by all means
+always feel enthusiastic towards that policy; so it languishes. Governor
+comes back, goes at it again like a giant refreshed, but by no means
+better acquainted with local affairs for having been away; then he goes
+home again, or dies, or gets a new appointment; a brand new Governor
+comes out, he starts a new line of policy, perhaps has a new Colonial
+Secretary into the bargain; anyhow the thing goes on wavering, not
+advancing. The only description I have heard of our policy in West
+African Colonies that seems to me to do it justice is that given by a
+medical friend of mine, who said it was a coma accompanied by fits.
+
+Of course this would not be the case if the Colonial Office had a
+definite detailed policy of its own, and merely sent out men to carry it
+out; but this the Colonial Office has not got and cannot have, because
+it has not got the scientific and commercial facts of West Africa in its
+possession. It has therefore to depend on the Governors it sends out;
+and these, as aforesaid, are men of divers minds. One Governor is truly
+great on drains; he spends lots of money on them. Another Governor
+thinks education and a cathedral more important; during his reign drains
+languish. Yet another Governor comes along and says if there are schools
+wanted they should be under non-sectarian control, but what is wanted is
+a railway; and so it goes on, and of course leads to an immense waste of
+money. And this waste of money is a far more serious thing than it
+looks; for it is from it that the policy has arisen, of increasing
+customs dues to a point that seriously hampers trade development, and
+the far more serious evil of attempting directly as well as indirectly
+to tax the native population.
+
+I am bound to say I believe any ordinary Englishman would be fairly
+staggered if he went out to West Africa and saw what there was to show
+for the expenditure of the last few years in our Crown Colonies
+there,[61] and knew that all that money had been honestly expended in
+the main, that none of it had been appropriated by the officials, that
+they had only had their pay, and that none too great.
+
+But, you will say, after all, if West Africa is as rich as it is said to
+be, surely it can stand a little wasteful expenditure, and support an
+even more expensive administration than it now has. All I can say is,
+that it can stand wasteful expenditure, but only up to a certain point,
+which is now passed; it would perhaps be more true to say it could stand
+wasteful expenditure before the factor of the competition of French and
+German colonies alongside came in; and that a wasteful expenditure that
+necessitates unjust methods of raising revenue, such as direct taxation
+on the natives, is a thing West Africa will not stand at all. Of course
+you can do it; you can impose direct taxation on the native population,
+but you cannot make it financially pay to do so; for one thing, the
+collection of that tax will require a considerable multiplication of
+officials black and white, the black section will by their oppressive
+methods engender war, and the joint body will consume more than the
+amount that can be collected. From a fiscal standpoint direct taxation
+of a non-Mohammedanised or non-Christianised community is rank
+foolishness, for reasons known to every ethnologist. As for the natural
+riches of West Africa, I am a profound believer in them, and regard West
+Africa, taken as a whole, as one of the richest regions in the world;
+but, as Sir William Maxwell said, "I am convinced that, from causes
+wholly unpreventable, West Africa is and must remain a place with
+certain peculiar dangers of its own"[62]; therefore it requires most
+careful, expert handling. It is no use your trying to get its riches out
+by a set of hasty amateur experiments; it is no use just dumping down
+capital on it and calling these goings on "Developing the resources," or
+"Raising the African in the plane of civilisation;" because these goings
+on are not these things, they are but sacrifices on the altars of folly
+and idleness.
+
+Properly managed, those parts of West Africa which our past apathy has
+left to us are capable of being made into a group of possessions before
+which the direct value to England, in England, of all the other regions
+that we hold in the world would sink into insignificance.
+
+Sir William Maxwell, when he referred to "causes wholly unpreventable,"
+was referring mainly to the unhealthiness of West Africa. There seems no
+escape from this great drawback. Every other difficulty connected with
+it one can imagine removable by human activity and ingenuity--even the
+labour difficulty--but, I fear, not so the fever. Although this is not a
+thing to discourage England from holding West Africa, it is a thing
+which calls for greater forethought in the administration of it than she
+need give to a healthy region. In a healthy region it does not matter so
+much whether there is an excess over requirements in the number of men
+employed to administer it, but in one with a death rate of at least 35
+per cent. of white men it does matter.
+
+I confess it is this excessive expenditure of men which I dislike most
+in the Crown Colony system, though I know it cannot help it; it is in
+the make of the thing. If these men were even employed in some great
+undertaking it would be less grievous; but they are many of them
+entirely taken up with clerk work, and all of them have to waste a large
+percentage of their time on it. Some of the men undoubtedly get to like
+this, but it is a morbid taste. I know one of our possessions where the
+officials even carry on their personal quarrels with each other on
+government paper in a high official style, when it would be better if
+they put aside an hour a week and went and punched each other's heads,
+and gave the rest of their time to studying native law and languages and
+pottering about the country getting up information on it at large, so
+that the natives would become familiarised with the nature of Englishmen
+first-hand, instead of being dependent for their knowledge of them on
+interpreters and the set of subordinate native officials and native
+police.
+
+I wish that it lay in my power to place before you merely a set of
+figures that would show you the present state of our West African
+affairs, but such figures do not exist. Practically speaking, there are
+no reliable figures for West African affairs. They are not cooked, but
+you know what figures are--unless they be complete and in their proper
+stations, they are valueless.
+
+The figures we have are those which appear in "The Colonial Annual
+Series" of reports. These are not annual; for example, the Gold Coast
+one was not published for three years; but no matter, when they are
+published they are misleading enough, unless you know things not
+mentioned in them but connected with them. However, we will just run
+through the figures published for one West African Crown Colony. For
+many reasons I am sorry to have to take those regarding Sierra Leone,
+but I must, as at present they are the most correct available.
+
+Now the element of error which must be allowed for in these arises from
+the proximity of the French colony of French Guinea, which is next door
+to Sierra Leone. That colony has been really developing its exports.
+Goods have, up to last year, come out through our colony of Sierra
+Leone, and have been included with the exports of Sierra Leone itself,
+though Sierra Leone has not dwelt on this interesting fact. And,
+equally, since 1890 goods going into French Guinea have gone in through
+Sierra Leone, and though traceable with care, have been put in with the
+total of the imports. So you see it is a little difficult to find out
+whether it has been French Guinea or Sierra Leone that has really been
+doing the trade mentioned in the figures.
+
+Nevertheless, it has been customary to take these joint, mixed up
+figures and get happy over "the increase of trade in Sierra Leone during
+the past ten years"; but a little calm consideration will prevent you
+from falling into this idle error.
+
+Personally I think that if you are cautious you will try and estimate
+the trade by the exports; for among the imports there are Government
+stores, railway material, &c., things that will have some day to be paid
+for, because it is the rule not to assist a colony under the system
+until it has been reduced to a West Indian condition; whereas the
+exports give you the buying power of the colony, and show the limits of
+the trade which may be expected to be done under existing conditions.
+Now, the annual total exports during the five years ending--
+
+          1875, amounted in value to, Ŗ396,709
+          1880,     "     "     "     Ŗ368,855
+          1885,     "     "     "     Ŗ386,848
+          1890,     "     "     "     Ŗ333,390
+          1895,     "     "     "     Ŗ435,175
+
+These figures show for the twenty-five years an increase of less than 10
+per cent., or about 1/2 per cent, per annum; and this is not so very
+thrilling when one comes to think that that 10 per cent., and probably
+more, is showing the increase in the trade not of Sierra Leone, but of
+French Guinea, and remembers that in 1874 the exports were Ŗ481,894, an
+amount they have not since touched.
+
+Then again even in error you are never quite sure if your Colonial
+Annual is keeping line; sometimes you will get one by a careful
+conscientious secretary who takes no end of trouble, and tells you lots
+of things which you would like to hear about next year, only next year
+you don't. For example, in Sierra Leone affairs the report for 1887 gave
+you the imports for consumption in the colony, while that of 1896
+represented the total imports, including those afterwards shipped to
+French Guinea and elsewhere; and again, in estimating the value of the
+imports Gambia adds the cost of freight and insurance to the invoice
+value of imports, and the cost of package to the declared value of
+exports. So far, only Gambia does this, but at any moment an equally
+laudable spirit might develop in one of the other colonies, and cause
+further distraction to the student of their figures.
+
+Besides these clerking errors of omission, there is a constant
+unavoidable error arising from the so-called smuggling done by the
+native traders in the hinterland. Remember that colonies which you see
+neatly enough marked on a map of West Africa with French, English,
+German, are not really each surrounded by a set of Great Walls of China.
+For example, under the present arrangement with France, if France keeps
+to that beautiful Article IX. in the Niger Convention and does not tax
+English goods more than she at present taxes French goods on the Ivory
+coast--cottons of English manufacture will be able to be sold 10 per
+cent. cheaper in the French territory than in the adjacent English Gold
+Coast.
+
+Up to the present time it has paid the native hinterland trader to come
+down into the Gold Coast and buy his cotton goods, for English cottons
+suit his West African markets better than other makes, that is to say
+they have a higher buying power; and then he went down into the French
+Ivory Coast and bought his spirits and guns, which were cheaper there
+because of lower duty. Having got his selection together he went off and
+did business with the raw material sellers, and sold the raw material he
+had purchased back to the two Coasts from which he had bought his
+selection, sending the greater part of it to the best market for the
+time being. Now you have changed that, or, rather, you have given France
+the power to change it by selling English cottons cheaper than they can
+be sold in your own possessions, and thereby rendered it unnecessary for
+the hinterland traders to buy on the Gold Coast at all. It will remain
+necessary for him to buy on the Ivory Coast, for spirits and guns he
+must have; and if he can get his cottons at the same place as he gets
+these, so much the better for him. It is doubtful, however, whether
+henceforth it will be worth his while to come down and sell his raw
+material in your possessions at all. He may browse around your interior
+towns and suck the produce out of them, but it will be to the enrichment
+of the French colony next door; and, of course, as things are even now,
+this sort of thing, which goes on throughout all the various colonies of
+France, England, Germany and Portugal, does not tend to give true value
+to the official figures concerning trade published by any one of them.
+
+I have no intention, however, of dwelling on the various methods
+employed by native smugglers with a view to aiding their suppression. It
+may be a hereditary taint contracted by my ancestors while they
+sojourned in Devon, it may be private personal villainy of my own; but
+anyhow, I never feel, as from an official standpoint I ought, towards
+smugglers. I do not ask you to regard the African native trader as a
+sweet innocent who does not realise the villainy of his doings,--he
+knows all about it; but only once did I feel harshly towards him over
+smuggling. A native trader had arranged to give me a lift, as it were,
+in his canoe, and I noticed, with a flattered vanity and a feeling of
+gratitude, how very careful he had been to make me quite comfortable in
+the stern, with a perfect little nest of mats and cloths. When we
+reached our destination and that nest was taken to pieces, I saw that
+what you might call the backbone of the affair was three kegs of
+gunpowder, a case of kerosine, and some packages of lucifer matches.
+That rascal fellow black, as Barbot would call him, had expected we
+should meet the customs patrol boat, and, basely encroaching on the
+chivalry of the white man towards the white woman judged that I and my
+nest would not be overhauled. If there had been a guardian cherub for
+the Brussels Convention or for Customs doubtless I should have been
+blown sky high and have afforded material for a moral tale called "The
+Smuggler's Awful End," but there are no cherubs who watch over Customs
+or the Brussels Convention in West Africa and I have no intention of
+volunteering for such an appointment.
+
+But to return to the Sierra Leone finances and the relationship which
+the expenditure of that colony bears to the revenue. The increase in the
+imports is apparently the thing depended on to justify the idea that as
+the trade has increased the governmental expenditure has a right to do
+so likewise. The imports increase in 1896 is given as Ŗ90,683. From this
+you must deduct for railway material, Ŗ26,000, and for the increased
+specie import, Ŗ19,591, which leaves you an increase of imports of
+Ŗ45,092 from 1887-1896, and remember a good percentage of this remainder
+of Ŗ45,092 belongs to French Guinea.
+
+Now the expenditure on the government of Sierra Leone has increased from
+Ŗ58,534 in 1887 to Ŗ116,183, being an increase at the rate of 99.1 per
+cent., whereas the exports during the same period have increased at the
+rate of 34.8 per cent, or from Ŗ333,157 to Ŗ449,033.
+
+In other words, whereas in 1887 the government expenditure amounted to
+17.5 per cent, the exports in 1896 amounted to 25.4 per cent. The sum of
+Ŗ40,579 of this increase is credited to police, gaols, transport, and
+public works;[63] and if this is to be the normal rate of increase, the
+prospects of the colony are serious; for it contains no rich mineral
+deposit as far as is at present known, nor are there in it any great
+native states. As far as we know, Sierra Leone must for an immense
+period depend on bush products collected by the natives, whose trade
+wants are only a few luxuries. For it must be remembered that in all
+these West African colonies there is not one single thing Europeans can
+sell to the natives that is of the nature of a true necessity, a thing
+the natives must have or starve. There is but one thing that even
+approaches in the West African markets to what wheat is in our own--that
+thing is tobacco. Next in importance to it, but considerably lower, is
+the group of trade articles--gunpowder, guns, and spirits, next again
+salt, and below these four staples come Manchester goods and
+miscellanies; the whole of the rest that lies in the power of
+civilisation to offer to the West African markets are things that are
+luxuries, things that will only be purchased by the native when he is in
+a state of prosperity. This subject I have, however, endeavoured to
+explain elsewhere.[64]
+
+We have for Sierra Leone, fortunately, a scientific authority to refer
+to on this matter of the natural resources of the country, and the
+amount of the natural riches we may presume we can take into account
+when arranging fiscal matters. This authority is the report of Mr.
+Scott-Elliott on the district traversed by the Anglo-French Boundary
+Commission.[65]
+
+Regarding mineral, the report states "that the only mineral of
+importance is iron, of which the country appears to contain a very large
+amount. There is a particularly rich belt of titaniferous iron ore in
+the hills behind Sierra Leone."
+
+Titaniferous iron is an excellent thing in its way, and good for steel
+making; but it exists nearer home and in cheaper worked regions than
+Sierra Leone.
+
+The soil is grouped by the report into three classes:
+
+"1. That of the plateaux and hills above 2,000, or sometimes descending
+to 1,000 feet, which is due to the disintegration of gneiss and granite
+rocks.
+
+"2. The red laterite which covers almost invariably all the lower hills
+from the sea level to 1,000 or 2,000 feet.
+
+"3. The alluvium, due either to the action of the mangroves along the
+coast, or to rivers and streams inland."
+
+These soils are capable of and do produce fine timber, rubber, oil and
+rice, and the general tropical food stuffs, but these, except the three
+first, are not very valuable export articles. Whether it is possible to
+enhance the agricultural value of the alluvium regions by growing
+tobacco, jute, coffee, cocoa, cotton and sugar, for export, is by some
+authorities regarded as doubtful on account of the labour problem; but
+at any rate, if these industries were taken in hand on a large scale, a
+scale sufficient materially to alter the resources of a West African
+colony, they would require many years of fostering, and it would be long
+before they could contribute greatly to the resources of such a colony
+as Sierra Leone, in the face of the organised production and cheaper
+labour, wherewith the supply now in the markets of Europe could be
+competed with.
+
+I have had the advantage of associating with German and Portuguese and
+French planters of coffee and cocoa. These are the planters who up to
+the present have been the most successful in West Africa. I do not say
+because they are better men, but because they have better soils and
+better labour than there is in our colonies. By these gentlemen I have
+been industriously educated in soils, &c.; and from what I have learnt
+about this matter I am bound regretfully to say that most of the soil of
+the English possessions is not really rich, taken in the main. There are
+in places patches of rich soil; and the greater part of our soil will be
+all the better this day 10,000 years hence; but at present the soil is
+mainly sour clay, slime and skin soils, skin soils over rock, skin soils
+over sour clay, skin soils over water-logged soil. We have, alas, not
+got the rich volcanic earth of Cameroon, Fernando Po, and San Thome and
+Principe. The natives who work the soil understand it fairly well, and
+negro agriculture is in a well-developed state, and their farms are most
+carefully tended and well kept. The rule along the Bight of Benin and
+Biafra is to change the soil of the farm at least every third year; this
+they do by cutting down a new bit of bush, burning the bush on the
+ground at the end of the dry season, and planting the crops. The old
+farm is then allowed to grow bush or long grass, whichever the
+particular district goes in for, until the time comes to work back on
+that piece of land again, when the bush which has grown is in its turn
+cut down and the ground replanted. This burning of the trees or grass is
+clearly regarded by the native agriculturist as manuring; it is
+practically the only method of manuring available for them in a country
+where cattle in quantities are not kept. It is a wasteful way with
+timber and rubber growing on the ground of course; but not so wildly
+wasteful as it looks, for your Negro agriculturist does not go to make
+his farm on bits of forest that require very hard clearing work. He
+clears as easily as he can by means of collecting the great fluffy seed
+bunches of a certain tree which are inflammable and adding to them all
+the other inflammable material he can get; he then places these bonfires
+in the bit of forest he wants to clear and sets fire to them on a
+favourable night, when the proper sort of breeze is blowing to fan the
+flames; when the conflagration is over, he fells a few of the trees and
+leaves the rest standing scorched but not killed. Moreover, of course an
+African gentleman cannot go and make his farm anywhere he likes: he has
+to stick to the land which belongs to his family, and work round and
+round on that. This gives a highly untidy aspect to the family estate,
+you might think; considering the extent of it, a very small percentage
+must be kept under cultivation and the rest neglected. But this is not
+really so; if you were to go and take away from him a bit of the
+neglected land, you would be taking his farm, say for the year after
+next and grievously inconvenience him, and he would know it.
+
+The native method of making farms does not, indeed, do so much harm in
+well-watered, densely-populated regions like those of Sierra Leone or
+the Niger Delta; but it does do an immense amount of harm in regions
+that are densely populated and require to make extensive farms, more
+particularly in the regions of Lagos and the Gold Coast, where the
+fertile belt is only a narrow ribbon, edged on the one side by the sand
+sea of the Sahara, and on the other by the salt sea of the South
+Atlantic. You can see the result of it in the district round Accra,
+which has always been heavily populated; for hundreds of years the
+forest has been kept down by agricultural enterprise. Consequences are,
+the rainfall is now diminished to a point that threatens to extinguish
+agriculture, at any rate, a sufficient agriculture to support the local
+population; and it is not too much to say you can read on the face of
+the Accra plain famines to come. There is little reason to doubt that
+both the African deserts, the Sahara and the Kalahari, are advancing
+towards the Equator. Round Loanda you come across a sand-logged region
+of some fifty square miles, where you get the gum shed by forests that
+have gone, humanly speaking, never to return; human agency is largely
+responsible, it is like sawing the branch of a tree partially through,
+and then the wind breaks it off. Forest destruction in lands adjacent to
+deserts is the same thing; the forest is destroyed to a certain extent,
+an extent that diminishes the rainfall and makes it unable to resist the
+desert winds, and then--finis.
+
+In the regions of the double rains in the great forest belt of Africa
+things are different, so you cannot generalise for West Africa at large
+in this matter. It is one thing for forest destruction to go on in the
+Gold Coast, quite another for it to go on in Calabar or Congo Franįais,
+where men fight back the forest as Dutchmen fight the sea.
+
+But I apologise. This, you will say, is not connected with Governmental
+expenditure, &c.; but it is to me a more amusing subject, and indirectly
+has a bearing; for example, Government expenditure in the direction of
+instituting a Forestry Department would be right enough in some regions,
+but unnecessary in others.
+
+To return to this agriculture in Sierra Leone. Well, it is, like all
+West African agriculture, spade husbandry. It is concerned with the
+cultivation of vegetables for human consumption alone. In the interior
+of Sierra Leone and throughout the Western Soudan, for which Sierra
+Leone was once a principal port, there is a fair cattle country, and an
+old established one, as is shown by the exports of hides mentioned in
+the writers of the seventeenth century. Yet it would be idle for the
+most enthusiastic believer in West Africa to pretend that the Western
+Soudan is coming on to compete with Argentina or Australia in the export
+of frozen meat; the climate is against it, and therefore this cattle
+country can only be represented in trade in a hide and horn export.
+Wool--as the sheep won't wear it, preferring hair instead and that of
+poor quality--need not I think be looked forward to from West Africa at
+all.
+
+I have taken the published accounts of Sierra Leone, because, as I have
+said, they are the most complete. They are also, in the main, the most
+typical. It is true that Sierra Leone has not the gold wealth, nor the
+developing timber industry of the Gold Coast; but if you ignore French
+Guinea, and include the things belonging to it with the Sierra Leone
+totals, you will get a fairly equivalent result. Lagos has not yet shown
+a mineral export, but it and the Gold Coast have shown of late years an
+immensely increased export of rubber. Rubber, oil, and timber are the
+three great riches of our West African possessions, the things that may
+be relied on, as being now of great value and capable of immense
+expansion. But these things can only be made serviceable to the markets
+of the world and a source of riches to England by the co-operation of
+the natives of the country. In other words, you must solve the labour
+problem on the one hand, and increase the prosperity of the native
+population on the other, in order to make West Africa pay you back the
+value of the life and money already paid for her. This solution of the
+labour problem and this co-operation of the natives with you, the Crown
+Colony system will never gain for you, because it is too expensive for
+you and unjust to them, not intentionally, not vindictively nor
+wickedly, but just from ignorance. It destroys the native form of
+society, and thereby disorganises labour. It has no power of
+re-organising it. You hear that people are leaving Coomassie and Benin,
+instead of flocking in to those places, as they were expected to after
+the destruction of the local tyrannies. English influence in West
+Africa, represented as it now is by three separate classes of
+Englishmen, with no common object of interest, or aim in policy, is not
+a thing capable of re-organising so difficult a region. I have taken the
+Sierra Leone figures because, as I have said, they are the most complete
+and typical, and the state of the trade and the expenditure on the
+Government are those prior to the hut tax war. So they cannot be
+ascribed to it, nor can the plea be lodged that the expenditure was an
+enforced one. These figures merely show you the thing that led up to the
+hut tax war and the heavy enforced expenditure it has and will entail,
+and my reason for detaining you with them is the conviction that a
+similar policy pursued in our other colonies will lead to the same
+results--the destruction of trade and the imposition on the colonies of
+a debt that their natural resources cannot meet unless we are prepared
+to go in for forced labour and revert to the slave trade policy.
+
+It seems clear enough that our present policy in the Crown Colonies, of
+a rapidly increasing expenditure in the face of a steadily falling
+trade, must necessarily lead our Government to seek for new sources of
+revenue beyond customs dues. New sources under our present system can
+only be found in direct taxation of the native population; the result of
+this is now known.
+
+I will not attempt to deal fully with the figures we possess for our
+remaining Crown Colonies in Western Africa,--Gambia, the Gold Coast, and
+Lagos,--but merely refer to a few points regarding them that have so far
+been published. When the result of the policy pursued in these colonies
+leads to the inevitable row, and the figures are dealt with by competent
+men, there is, to my mind, no doubt that a state equal to that of Sierra
+Leone as a fool's paradise will be discovered; and the deplorable part
+of the thing is, that the trade palavers of the Chambers and the
+Colonial Office will give to hasty politicians the idea that West Africa
+is not worthy of Imperial attention, and large quantities of the blame
+for this failure of our colonies will be put down quite unjustly to
+French interference. That French interference has troubled our colonies
+there, no one will attempt to deny; or that if it had been acting on
+them when they were in a healthy state it would merely have had a tonic
+effect, as it has had on the Royal Niger Company's territories; but,
+acting on the Crown Colonies in their present state, French influence
+has naturally been poisonous. Even I, not given to sweet mouth as I am,
+shrink from saying what has been the true effect on the Crown Colonies
+of England of the policy pursued by us towards French advance. This only
+will I say, that the French policy is no discredit to France. Regarding
+the financial condition of Gambia it is not necessary for us to worry
+ourselves. Gambia is a nuisance to France. She loves to have high dues,
+and she cannot have them round Gambia way. She has had to encyst it, or
+it would be to her Senegal and French Guinea possessions a regular main
+to lay on smuggling. Knowing this she has encysted it; it pays better to
+smuggle from French Guinea into Gambia or Sierra Leone than from Gambia
+or Sierra Leone into the French possessions. This is a grave commercial
+position for us, but to it is largely owing the advance of the
+prosperity of these French possessions during the past three years.
+
+The Gold Coast has on the west a French possession, the Ivory Coast, on
+the east the German Togoland. Togo is a narrow strip, and to its east
+and surrounding it to the north is the French colony of Dahomey, whose
+recent expansion has told heavily on its next-door neighbours, both Togo
+and the English colony to the east, Lagos. I give below the latest
+available figures for the foreign West African possessions.[66]
+
+Unfortunately there are no figures available for the French Sudan which
+would represent the real value of the trade; the total value of trade
+is, however, considerable. You must remember that in dealing with French
+colonies you are dealing with those of a nation not gifted with
+commercial intelligence; and that, in spite of the perpetual hampering
+of trade in French colonies, the granting of concessions to French firms
+who have not the capital to work them, but are only able to prevent any
+one else doing so, the high differential tariffs, in some cases 100 per
+cent., which up to the present time have been levied on English goods,
+&c.; the English traders nevertheless work in the markets of the French
+colonies, and work mainly on French goods. Of the Ŗ117,518 representing
+the Ivory Coast trade for the first quarter of this year, over Ŗ76,000
+was English trade, and of the Dahomey Ŗ156,835 for the same period,
+Ŗ131,705. In reading the imports figures for these French colonies in
+Upper Guinea, you must remember that those imports include material for
+the well directed, unamiable intention of France to cut us off from what
+she regards as her own Western Soudan; it is a form of investment far
+more profitable than our expenditure on railways, gaols, prisons, and
+frontier police. It is one that, presuming this highly unlikely
+thing--France becoming commercially intelligent--would any year now
+enable her entirely to pocket the West African trade down to Lagos from
+Senegal. She may do it at any moment, though it is a very remote
+possibility. So we will return to the Gold Coast finances, though our
+authorities on them are at present meagre.
+
+In 1892 the Gold Coast government was financially in a flourishing
+condition. On the 1st of January, 1891, there was a sum of Ŗ75,181
+4_s._ 4_d._ standing to the credit of the colony, which was increased to
+Ŗ127,796 2_s._ 3_d._ on the 1st of January, 1892, and to Ŗ152,766 16_s._
+7_d._ on the 1st of January, 1893, and the colony had no public debt.
+There was no native direct taxation. The Customs dues were lower than
+they are now. The extremely careful official who drew up the report
+shows evidence of realising that Customs represent an indirect taxation
+on the native population, for he says: "In Sierra Leone and Lagos the
+taxation per head is very much higher (than 2_s._ 5_d._ per head), in
+the former nine times, and in the latter seven times."[67] However, in
+all three colonies, apart from the attempts at direct taxation, the
+indirect taxation on the native has considerably increased by now.
+
+The report for 1894 shows the colony still progressing rapidly, the
+trade of it amounting in value to Ŗ1,663,173 19_s._ 9_d._, of which
+Ŗ812,830 8_s._ 10_d._ represented the imports, and Ŗ850,343 10_s._
+11_d._ the exports. The expenditure showed a large increase as compared
+with previous years. It amounted to Ŗ226,931 19_s._ 4_d._, being Ŗ8,670
+13_s._ 7_d._ in excess of the revenue for the year, and Ŗ47,997 7_s._
+11_d._ more than in 1893. The principal items of increase were public
+works, upon which the sum of Ŗ54,163 0_s._ 3_d._ was spent, and the
+expedition in defence of the protected district of Attabubu against an
+Ashanti invasion, which cost Ŗ10,778 11_s._ The Gold Coast assets on
+31st of December, 1894, stood at Ŗ166,944 8_s._ 7_d._[68] Then came the
+last Ashanti war, regarding which I beg to refer you to Dr. Freeman's
+book.[69] No one can deny that he has both experience and intelligence
+enough to justify him in offering his opinion on the matter. I entirely
+accept his statements from my knowledge of native affairs elsewhere in
+West Africa. Anyhow, the last Ashanti war absorbed a good deal of the
+assets of the Gold Coast. There is no published authority to cite, but I
+do not think there is an asset now standing to the credit of the Gold
+Coast Colony, unless it be a loan.
+
+The income for the Gold Coast Colony in 1896 was Ŗ237,460 6_s._ 7_d._,
+the expenditure Ŗ282,277 15_s._ 9_d._ The exports Ŗ792,111, against
+Ŗ877,804 in 1895; but the imports were Ŗ910,000, against Ŗ981,537. Since
+1896 the Customs dues have risen; but, _per contra_, the expenditure has
+also risen, in consequence of the expenses arising from the occupation
+of Ashanti, and the Gold Coast railway. The occupation of Ashanti and
+the railway must be looked on in the light of investments--investments
+that will be profitable or unprofitable, according to their
+administration, which one must trust will be careful, for they are both
+things you cannot just dump your money down on and be done with, for the
+up-keep expenses of both are necessarily large.
+
+The subject of West African railways is one that all who are interested
+in the future of our possessions there should study most carefully, for
+two main reasons. Firstly, that there is possibly no other way in which
+money can be spent so unprofitably and extensively as on railways in
+such a region. Secondly, because railways are in several districts
+there--districts with no water carriage possibilities--simply essential
+to the expansion of trade. In other words, if you make your railway
+through the right district, in the right way, it is a thing worth
+having, a sound investment. If you do not, it is a thing you are better
+without; not an investment, but an extravagance. The cost of its
+construction must fall on the colony, alike in money and the
+distraction, from ordinary trade, of the local labour supply. In both
+countries the cost of a railway out there is necessarily great. I
+hastily beg to observe I am not aiming at a rivalry with Martin Tupper
+in saying this, but am only driven to it by so many people in their
+haste saying "Oh, for goodness gracious sake! let the Government make a
+railway anywhere; it's done little enough for us, and any railway is
+better than none."
+
+There has been considerable difficulty over the Gold Coast Railway
+already, though it is only just now entering on the phase of actual
+existence. Surveys have been made for it in all directions. Surveys are
+expensive things out there. But the general idea the Government gave the
+Chambers of Commerce was that, at any rate, this railway was to run up
+into Ashanti, and be a great general trade artery for the Colony. The
+other day Manchester found out, quite unexpected like, that the
+Government whose affections Commerce had regarded as safely and properly
+set on the hinterland trade was off, if you please, flirting round the
+corner with a group of gold mines at Tarquah, and intended, nay, was
+even then proceeding with the undertaking of running the one and only
+Gold Coast railway just up to Tarquah, and no further, until this
+section paid. Manchester, very properly shocked at this fickleness in
+the Government and its heartless abandonment of the hinterland trade,
+said things, interesting and excited things, in its _Guardian_; but,
+beyond illustrating the truth of the old adage that it's "well to be off
+with the old love before you are on with the new," things of no avail.
+
+This Tarquah railway is estimated to cost Ŗ5,000 per mile. It is to be
+financed by a loan, raised by the Crown Colony Agents, of Ŗ250,000. We
+have ample reason to believe that this Ŗ5,000 per mile will not
+represent one-third of its final cost from demonstrations by the Uganda,
+Congo Belge, and Senegal railways; more particularly are we so assured
+from the knowledge that the railway's construction will be in the hands
+of nominees of the Crown Agents, whose method of arranging for the
+construction of these railways is curious. They do not invite tenders
+for material or freight in the open market, and they do not give the
+taxed people in the country itself any opportunity for contracting for
+the supply of as much local material as possible--things it would be
+alike fair and business-like to do. Exceedingly curious, moreover, is
+the fact that the nominees of the Crown Agents' employers are not
+subject to the control of the local governmental authorities on the
+Coast, their sole connection with the affair apparently being confined
+to the passing of ordinances, as per instruction from the Colonial
+Office, authorising loans for the payment of the debt incurred by making
+the railway.
+
+There is no doubt that any Gold Coast railway which is ever to pay even
+for its coal must run through a rich bit of the local gold reefs.
+Similarly, there is no doubt that the gold mines of the Gold Coast have
+been terribly kept back by lack of transport facilities for the
+machinery necessary to work them; but there is, nevertheless, evidently
+much that is unsound in the present railway scheme. If the charge for
+it, as some suggest, were to be thrown on the gold mines, it would be as
+heavy a charge as the old bad transport was, and they would be no less
+hampered. If, as is most likely, the charge for the railway be thrown
+on the general finance of the colony, it will be a drain on other forms
+of trade, without in any way improving them; in fact, during its
+construction, it will absorb labour from the general trade--oil, rubber,
+and timber--and, if it extensively increases the gold-mining industry,
+it will keep the labour tied to it chronically, to the disadvantage of
+other trades.
+
+Lagos, our next Crown Colony, is a very rich possession, and under Sir
+Alfred Moloney, who discovered the use of the Kicksia Africana as a
+rubber tree, and Sir Gilbert Carter, who fostered the industry and
+opened the trade roads, sprang in a few years into a phenomenal
+prosperity. Then came the French aggression on its hinterland, the
+seizing of Nikki, which was one of those _foci_ of trade routes, though
+possibly, as many have said, a non-fertile bit of country in itself. To
+give you some idea of the bound up in prosperity made by Lagos, the
+exports in 1892 were Ŗ577,083; in 1895, Ŗ985,595. The main advance has
+been in rubber, which in 1896 was exported from Lagos to the value of
+Ŗ347,721. Early in this year, however, the state of the Lagos trade was
+considered so unsatisfactory that a local commission to inquire into the
+causes of this state of affairs was appointed.
+
+The publication of the Government Trade Returns for 1897 supported the
+long grumble that had been going on about the bad state of trade in
+Lagos, the imports for 1897 showing a decrease on those of 1895 by
+Ŗ67,474. The _Board of Trade Journal_, quoting from the _Lagos Weekly
+Record_ of February 28th, 1898, says, "An examination of the export
+returns affords a clue to the direction of such decrease. It is to be
+noted that notwithstanding that the export of rubber in 1897 shows an
+excess of Ŗ13,367 above that exported in 1895, yet in the aggregate of
+the total exports of the two years that of 1897 shows a decrease of
+Ŗ193,745; this is due to the great falling off which is perceptible in
+the palm oil and kernel trade, which together show a decrease in 1897 of
+Ŗ162,580 as compared with the quantities exported in 1895; while as
+compared with the exports in 1896 the decrease amounts to Ŗ114,773. The
+returns show a steady and increasing decline in the exports of these
+products, for while the decrease in 1896 as compared with 1895 was only
+Ŗ47,807, the decrease had risen in 1897 as compared with the previous
+year to Ŗ114,773, as already intimated, which implies that there has
+been a further falling off of the trade to the extent of nearly Ŗ67,000.
+This manifest excessive diminution in what must be regarded as the
+staple commodities of the trade is undoubtedly a serious indication, for
+though these commodities come under the classification of jungle
+products they are not liable to exhaustion as are the rubber or timber
+industries, and hence they form the only reliable commodities upon which
+the trade must expand. The dislocation of the labour system in the
+hinterland is no doubt responsible in a large measure for the falling
+off in the yield of these products, while in many instances they have
+been abandoned for the more remunerative rubber business. But, be the
+circumstances what they may, it is evident that there has been an actual
+decrease of trade to the extent of over Ŗ114,000."
+
+This was the state of affairs the local committee was appointed to deal
+with. Its discussions were long and careful. I will not attempt to drag
+you through its final report, which a grossly ungrateful public in Lagos
+sniffed at because it merely seemed carefully to reproduce every one's
+opinion on the causes of the falling off of trade and to agree with it
+solemnly; but, like the rest of the local world, it made no sweeping
+suggestion of means whereby things could be altered. Since the
+committee, however, was formed, there has been a greater interest taken
+in expenditure, healthy in its way, but too often ignoring the fact,
+that it is not so much the amount of money that is spent governmentally
+that constitutes waste, but the things on which it is expended. Large
+sums have been spent in Lagos, I am informed, on building a Government
+House that every valuable Governor ought to be paid to keep out of, so
+unhealthy is its situation, and again on bridging a lagoon that has no
+particular sound bottom to it worth mentioning.
+
+That such forms of expenditure are not the necessary grooves into which
+a place like Lagos is driven in order to get rid of its money is
+undoubted. The local press at any rate indicates other grooves; for
+example here is a cheerful little paragraph:
+
+"_A propos_ of what was said in your last issue about the grave-diggers,
+there is no doubt that something should be done to relieve the men from
+the strain of work to which they are continuously subjected. The demands
+of a constantly increasing death rate, which has caused the cemeteries
+to be enlarged, make it necessary that the number of grave-diggers
+should be increased. Besides, these men are poorly paid for the work
+they do. Of the twenty grave-diggers, six are paid at the rate of 1_s._
+per diem, and the rest at the rate of 10_d._ They have no holidays,
+either, like other people. While the Government labourers, of whom there
+is a host, may skulk half their time, the hard-working grave-digger is
+at it from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day, Sundays included, for the Grim
+Reaper is ever busy. The Keeper of the graveyards, also, has much to do
+for the paltry salary he receives. I would earnestly appeal to the
+authorities to do something to raise the burden of this overworked
+staff."[70] So would I, but rather in the direction of giving the "Grim
+Reaper" and the grave-diggers fewer people to bury. I must also give you
+another beautiful little bit of local colour, although it suggests
+further expenditure. "It is satisfactory to note that the Chamber of
+Commerce intends to take up the question of the swamp near the petroleum
+magazine. Since the Government made the causeway leading to the
+dead-house and cut off the tidal inflow, the upper portion of the swamp
+has been formed into a most noxious disease-breeding sink, into which
+refuse of all kinds is thrown, the stagnant waters and refuse combining,
+under the effects of the sun, to emit a most formidable pestilential
+effluvia. In the interests of humanity something should be done to abate
+this nuisance."[71]
+
+However, I leave these local questions of Lagos town. They just present
+a pretty picture of the difficulties that surround dealing with a place
+that has by nature swamps, that must have dead-houses, grave-diggers,
+and extensive cemetery accommodation, and that is peopled by natives who
+will instinctively throw refuse into any hole; with evidently a large
+death rate in the native population and a published death rate in whites
+of 153 per thousand. Let us now return to the higher finance.
+
+"The total expenditure of Lagos in 1888 amounted to Ŗ62,735 15_s._
+11_d._ The expenditure has risen in 1898 to Ŗ192,760, which gives an
+excess of Ŗ130,025. The total cost of the staff in 1888 was Ŗ15,932,
+while the present cost amounts to Ŗ41,604, which is an increase of
+Ŗ25,672. This increase, apart from the augmentation in the Governor's
+salary, is mainly in respect to the following departments:--Secretariat,
+Harbour Department, Constabulary and Police, and the Public Works
+Department. The cost of working the secretariat has been increased by
+Ŗ1,074, due to the following additional officers:--Two assistant
+colonial secretaries, a chief clerk, and a first clerk. It is well known
+that in 1888, when the department cost the colony about one-half its
+present expenses as regards the European staff, the work was performed
+with efficiency and despatch; while at present it is not only difficult
+to get business got through, but, what is more, if the business is not
+followed up with watchful care, it will become lost in the
+superabundance of assistants and clerks who crowd the department, and
+the practical expression of whose work is more discernible on the public
+revenue than anything else."[72] The _Lagos Record_ goes on to say,
+"There is room for retrenchment in the matter of expenditure on account
+of the European official staff." I do not follow it here. It is room for
+retrenchment in mere routine workers, black and white, that is wanted,
+and the liberation of the Europeans to do work worth their risking their
+lives in West Africa for. The percentage of black officials, mainly
+clerks--excellent and faithful to their duties--is increasing in all our
+colonies there too rapidly; and the existence of poorly paid but
+numerous posts under Government with a certain amount of prestige, is a
+dangerous allurement to native young men, tempting them from nobler
+careers, and forming them into a sort of wall-class between the English
+official and the main body of the native population. Take, for example,
+the number of Government servants at the Gold Coast, according to Sir
+William Maxwell, 1897;--
+
+                     European   Native            Civil
+                     officers.  clerks.  Hausas.  police.
+
+          Accra         35       206      432      105
+          Cape Coast     8        69        0       47
+          Elmina         5        36       50       19
+
+An awful percentage of clerks is 311 for such a country, more clerks
+than police, only 121 less Government native clerks than soldiers in the
+army; and you may depend upon it the white officials are clerking away,
+more or less, too. I always think how very apposite the answer of an
+official was to the criticism of excessive expenditure: "Sir, there is
+no reckless expenditure; every J pen has to be accounted for!"
+
+No, I am quite unable to agree that anything but the Crown Colony system
+is to blame, and that because it is engaged in administering a district
+with no possibilities in it for England save commercial matters, in
+which the Crown Colony system is not well informed. I have only quoted
+these figures to show you that Lagos and the Gold Coast are merely
+keeping line with Sierra Leone--increasing their expenditure in the face
+of a falling trade, with a dark trade future before them, on account of
+French activity in cutting them off from their inland markets, and of
+their own mismanagement of the native races.
+
+The trade and the prosperity of West Africa depend on jungle products.
+There is no more solid reason to fear the extinction of West Africa's
+jungle products of oil, timber, fibre, rubber, than there is to worry
+about the extinction of our own coal-fields--probably not so much--for
+they rapidly renew themselves. Yes, even rubber, though that is slower
+at it than palm oil and kernel; and at present not one-tenth part of the
+jungle products are in touch with commerce; and save gold, and that to a
+very small extent, the mineral wealth of West Africa is untouched. It is
+not in all regions only titaniferous iron; there are silver, lead,
+copper, antimony, quicksilver, and tin ores there unexploited, and which
+it would not be advisable to attempt to exploit until the so-called
+labour problem is solved. This problem is really that of the
+co-operation for mutual benefit of the African and the Englishman. In
+the solution of this problem alone lies the success of England in West
+Africa, not of England herself, for England could survive the loss of
+West Africa whole, though doing so would cost her dear alike in honour
+and in profit. The Crown Colony system which now represents England in
+West Africa will never give this solution. It necessarily destroys
+native society, that is to say, it disorganises it, and has not in it
+the power to reorganise. As I have already endeavoured to show, English
+influence in West Africa, as represented by the Crown Colony system,
+consists of three separate classes of Englishmen with no common object
+of interest, and is not a thing capable of organising so difficult a
+region. All these three classes, be it granted, each represent things
+for the organisation of a State. No State can exist without having the
+governmental, the religious, and the mercantile factors, working
+together in it; but in West Africa these representatives of the English
+State are things apart and opposed to each other, and do not constitute
+a State. You might as well expect to get the functions of a State, good
+government, out of these three disconnected classes of Englishmen in
+Africa, as expect to know the hour of day from the parts of a watch
+before they were put together.
+
+You will see I have humbly attempted to place this affair before you
+from no sensational point of view, but from the commercial one--the
+value of West Africa to England's commerce--and have attempted to show
+you how this is suffering from the adherence of England to a form of
+government that is essentially un-English. I have made no attack on the
+form of government for such regions formulated in England's more
+intellectual though earlier period of Elizabeth, the Chartered Company
+system as represented by the Royal Niger Company. I have neither shares
+in, nor reason to attack the Royal Niger Company, which has in a few
+years, and during the period of the hottest French enterprise, acquired
+a territory in West Africa immensely greater than the territory acquired
+during centuries under the Crown Colony system; it has also fought its
+necessary wars with energy and despatch, and no call upon Imperial
+resources; it has not only paid its way, but paid its shareholders their
+6 per cent., and its bitterest enemies say darkly, far more. I know from
+my knowledge of West Africa that this can only have been effected by its
+wise native policy. I know that this policy owes its wisdom and its
+success to one man, Sir George Taubman Goldie, a man who, had he been
+under the Crown Colony system, could have done no more than other men
+have done who have been Governors under it; but, not being under it, the
+territories he won for England have not been subjected to the jerky
+amateur policy of those which are under the Crown Colony system. For
+nearly twenty years the natives under the Royal Niger Company have had
+the firm, wise, sympathetic friendship of a great Englishman, who
+understood them, and knew them personally. It is the continuous
+influence of one great Englishman, unhampered by non-expert control,
+that has caused England's exceedingly strange success in the Niger;
+coupled with the identity of trade and governmental interest, and the
+encouragement of religion given by the constitution and administration
+of the Niger Company. This is a thing not given by all Chartered
+Companies; indeed, I think I am right in saying that the Niger and the
+North Borneo Companies stand alone in controlling territories that have
+been essentially trading during recent years. This association of trade
+and government is, to my mind, an _absolutely necessary restraint_ on
+the Charter Company form of government;[73] but there is another element
+you must have to justify Charters, and that is that they are in the
+hands of an Englishman of the old type.
+
+I am perfectly aware that the natives of Lagos and other Crown Colonies
+in West Africa are, and have long been, anxious for the Chartered
+Company of the Niger to be taken over by the Government, as they
+pathetically and frankly say, "so that now the trade in their own
+district is so bad, it may get a stimulus by a freer trade in the
+Niger," and the native traders not connected with the Company may rush
+in; while officials in the Crown Colonies have been equally anxious, as
+they say with frankness no less pathetic, so that they may have chances
+of higher appointments. I am equally aware that the merchants of England
+not connected with the Niger Company, which is really an association of
+African merchants, desire its downfall; yet they all perfectly well
+know, though they do not choose to advertise the fact, that three months
+Crown Colony form of government in the Niger territories will bring war,
+far greater and more destructive than any war we have yet had in West
+Africa, and will end in the formation of a debt far greater than any
+debt we now have in West Africa, because of the greater extent of
+territory and the greater power of the native States, now living
+peacefully enough under England, but not under England as misrepresented
+by the Crown Colony system. I am not saying that Chartered Companies are
+good; I am only saying they are better than the Crown Colony plan; and
+that if the Crown Colony system is substituted for the Chartered
+Company, which is directly a trading company, England will have to pay a
+very heavy bill. There would be, of course, a temporary spurt in trade,
+but it would be a flash in the pan, and in the end, an end that would
+come in a few years' time, the British taxpayer would be cursing West
+Africa at large, and the Niger territories in particular. Personally, I
+entirely fail to see why England should be tied to either of these
+plans, the Crown Colony or the Chartered Company, for governing tropical
+regions. Have we quite run out of constructive ability in Statecraft? Is
+it not possible to formulate some new plan to mark the age of Victoria?
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [60] _Industrial and Social Life of the Empire._ Macmillan and Co.
+
+   [61] For Lagos, Gold Coast, Sierra Leone and Gambia from 1892 to 1896,
+   Ŗ2,364,266.
+
+   [62] Forty-eighth annual report Liverpool Chamber of Commerce, 1898.
+
+   [63]                                            Ŗ       Increase.
+         Expenditure on police and gaols, 1896   31,504       Ŗ
+           "             "        "       1887    3,037     28,467
+
+         Expenditure on transport         1896   10,091
+           "             "        "       1887    3,298      6,793
+
+         Expenditure on public works      1896    6,736
+           "            "        "        1887    1,417      5,319
+                                                            ------
+                   Aggregate increase                       40,579
+
+
+   [64] "The Liquor Traffic in West Africa," _Fortnightly Review_, April,
+   1898.
+
+   [65] _Colonial Reports, Miscellaneous, No. 3, 1893._ G. F. Scott Elliott
+        M.A., F.L.S., and C. A. Raisin, B.Sc.
+
+   [66] French colonies--
+
+                            Imports.             Exports
+                         1896.     1897.      1896.    1897.
+                           Ŗ         Ŗ          Ŗ        Ŗ
+        Senegal        1,047,000 1,167,000   783,000  845,000
+        French Guinea    185,000   240,000*  231,000  201,000*
+        Ivory Coast      186,000   188,000   176,000  189,000
+        Dahomey          389,000   330,000   364,000  231,000
+        French Congo     192,000     **     190,000    **
+
+        * For nine months only.
+        ** No statistics.
+
+        Trade of Dahomey and the Ivory Coast for the first three months
+        of 1898--
+
+                      Imports.    Exports.      Total trade.
+                         Ŗ           Ŗ               Ŗ
+        Ivory Coast    58,658      58,560         117,518
+        Dahomey        84,064      72,771         156,835
+
+        German possessions--
+
+                        Imports.                Exports.
+                  1895.   1896.  1897.   1895.   1896.  1897.
+                    Ŗ       Ŗ      Ŗ       Ŗ       Ŗ      Ŗ
+        Togoland 117,000  94,000 99,000 152,000  83,000 39,000
+        Cameroon 283,000 268,000   *    204,000 198,000   *
+                 ---------------------------------------------
+        Total    400,000 362,000   *    356,000 281,000   *
+
+        * No figures for calendar year. _Board of Trade Journal_,
+          September, 1898.
+
+
+   [67] _Colonial Annual_, No. 88, Gold Coast for 1892, published 1893.
+
+   [68] Ditto, No. 188.
+
+   [69] _Ashanti and Jaman._ Constable, 1898.
+
+   [70] _Lagos Standard_, September 7, 1898.
+
+   [71] _Lagos Weekly Record_, September 10, 1898.
+
+   [72] _Lagos Weekly Record_, August 27, 1898.
+
+   [73] See Introduction to _Folk Lore of the Fjort_. R. E. Dennett. David
+   Nutt, 1898.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE CLASH OF CULTURES
+
+     Wherein this student, realising as usual, when too late, that the
+     environment of such opinions as are expressed above is boiling hot
+     water, calls to memory the excellent saying, "As well be hung for a
+     sheep as a lamb," and goes on.
+
+
+I have no intention, however, of starting a sort of open-air steam
+laundry for West African washing. I have only gone into the
+unsatisfactory-to-all-parties-concerned state of affairs there not with
+the hope, but with the desire, that things may be improved and further
+disgrace avoided. It would be no good my merely stating that, if England
+wishes to make her possessions there morally and commercially pay her
+for the loss of life that holding them entails, she must abolish her
+present policy of amateur experiments backed by good intentions, for you
+would naturally not pay the least attention to a bald statement made by
+merely me. So I have had to place before you the opinions of others who
+are more worthy of your attention. I must, however, for myself disclaim
+any right to be regarded as the mouthpiece of any party concerned,
+though Major Lugard has done me the honour to place me amongst the
+Liverpool merchants. I can claim no right to speak as one of them. I
+should be only too glad if I had this honour, but I have not. There was
+early this year a distressing split between Liverpool and myself--whom
+I am aware they call behind my back "Our Aunt"--and I know they regard
+me as a vexing, if even a valued, form of relative.
+
+This split, I may say (remembering Mr. Mark Twain's axiom, that people
+always like to know what a row is about), arose from my frank admiration
+of both the Royal Niger Company and France, neither of which Liverpool
+at that time regarded as worthy of even the admiration of the most
+insignificant; so its _Journal of Commerce_ went for me. The natural
+sweetness of my disposition is most clearly visible to the naked eye
+when I am quietly having my own way, so naturally I went for its
+_Journal of Commerce_. Providentially no one outside saw this deplorable
+family row, and Mr. John Holt put a stop to it by saying to me, "Say
+what you like, you cannot please all of us;" had it not been for this I
+should not have written another line on the maladministration of West
+Africa beyond saying, "Call that Crown Colony system you are working
+there a Government! England, at your age, you ought to be ashamed of
+yourself!" But you see, as things are, I am not speaking for any one,
+only off on a little lone fight of my own against a state of affairs
+which I regard as a disgrace to my country.
+
+Well but, you may say, after all what you have said points to nothing
+disgraceful. You have expressly said that there is no corruption in the
+government there, and the rest of the things--the change of policy
+arising from the necessity for white men to come home at the least every
+twelve months, the waste of money necessary to local exigencies, and the
+fact that officers and gentlemen cannot be expected to understand and
+look after what one might call domestic expenses--may be things
+unavoidable and peculiar to the climate. To this I can only say, Given
+the climate, why do you persist in ignoring the solid mass of expert
+knowledge of the region that is in the hands of the mercantile party,
+and go on working your Governors from a non-expert base? You have in
+England an unused but great mass of knowledge among men of all classes
+who have personally dealt with West Africa--yet you do not work from
+that, organise it, and place it at the service of the brand new
+Governors who go out; far from it. I know hardly any more pathetic sight
+than the new official suddenly appointed to West Africa buzzing round
+trying to find out "what the place is really like, you know." I know
+personally one of the greatest of our Governors who have been down
+there, a man with iron determination and courage, who was not content
+with the information derivable from a list of requisites for a tropical
+climate, the shorter Hausa grammar and a nice cheery-covered little work
+on diseases--the usual fillets with which England binds the brows of her
+Sacrifices to the Coast--but went and read about West Africa, all by
+himself, alone in the British Museum. He was a success, but still he
+always declares that the only book he found about this particular part
+was a work by a Belgian, with a frontispiece depicting the author, on an
+awful river, in the act, as per inscription, of shouting, "Row on, brave
+men of Kru!" which, as subsequent knowledge showed him that bravery was
+not one of the main qualities of the Kru men, shook him up about all his
+British Museum education. So in the end he, like the rest, had to learn
+for himself, out there. Of course, if the Governors were carefully
+pegged down to a West African place and lived long enough, and were not
+by nature faddists, doubtless they would learn, and in the course of a
+few years things would go well; but they are not pegged down. No sooner
+does one of them begin to know about the country he is in charge of than
+off he is whisked and deposited again, in a brand new region for which
+West Africa has not been a fitting introduction.
+
+Then, as for the domestic finance, why expect officers and lawyers,
+doctors and gentlemen from clubland to manage fiscal matters? Of course
+they naturally don't know about trade affairs, or whether the Public
+Works Department is spending money, or merely wasting it. You require
+professional men in West Africa, but not to do half the work they are
+now engaged on in connection with red tape and things they do not
+understand. Of course, errors of this kind may be merely Folly, you may
+have plenty more men as good as these to replace them with, so it may
+matter more to their relations than to England if they are wasted alike
+in life and death, and you are so rich that the gradual extinction of
+your tropical trade will not matter to your generation. But as a
+necessary consequent to this amateurism, or young gentlemen's academy
+system, the Crown Colony system, there is disgrace in the injustice to
+and disintegration of the native races it deals with.
+
+Now when I say England is behaving badly to the African, I beg you not
+to think that the philanthropic party has increased. I come of a
+generation of Danes who when the sun went down on the Wulpensand were
+the men to make light enough to fight by with their Morning Stars; and
+who, later on, were soldiers in the Low Countries and slave owners in
+the West Indies, and I am proud of my ancestors; for, whatever else they
+were, they were not humbugs; and the generation that is round me now
+seems to me in its utterances at any rate tainted with humbug. I own
+that I hate the humbug in England's policy towards weaker races for the
+sake of all the misery on white and black it brings; and I think as I
+see you wasting lives and money, sowing debt and difficulties all over
+West Africa by a hut tax war in Sierra Leone, fighting for the sake of
+getting a few shillings you have no right to whatsoever out of the
+African,--who are you that you should point your finger in scorn at my
+tribe? I as one of that tribe blush for you, from the basis that you are
+a humbug and not scientific, which, I presume you will agree is not the
+same thing as my being a philanthropist.
+
+I had the honour of meeting in West Africa an English officer who had
+previously been doing some fighting in South Africa. He said he "didn't
+like being a butterman's nigger butcher." "Oh! you're all right here
+then," I said; "you're out now for Exeter Hall, the plane of
+civilisation, the plough, and the piano." I will not report his remarks
+further; likely enough it was the mosquitoes that made him say things,
+and of course I knew with him, as I know with you, butchery of any sort
+is not to your liking, though war when it's wanted is; the distinction I
+draw between them is a hard and fast one. There is just the same
+difference to my mind between an unnecessary war on an unarmed race and
+a necessary war on the same race, as there is between killing game that
+you want to support yourself with or game that is destructive to your
+interests, and on the other hand the killing of game just to say that
+you have done it. This will seem a deplorably low view to take, but it
+is one supported by our history. We have killed down native races in
+Australasia and America, and it is no use slurring over the fact that we
+have profited by so doing. This argument, however, cannot be used in
+favour of killing down the African in tropical Africa, more particularly
+in Western Tropical Africa. If you were to-morrow to kill every native
+there, what use would the country be to you? No one else but the native
+can work its resources; you cannot live in it and colonise it. It would
+therefore be only an extremely interesting place for the zoologist,
+geologist, mineralogist, &c., but a place of no good to any one else in
+England.
+
+This view, however, of the profit derivable from and justifying war you
+will refuse to discuss; stating that such profit in your wars you do not
+seek; that they have been made for the benefit of the African himself,
+to free him from his native oppressors in the way of tyrannical chiefs
+and bloody superstitions, and to elevate him in the plane of
+civilisation. That this has been the intention of our West African wars
+up to the Sierra Leone war, which was forced on you for fiscal reasons,
+I have no doubt: but that any of them advanced you in your mission to
+elevate the African, I should hesitate to say. I beg to refer you to Dr.
+Freeman's opinions on the Ashantee wars on this point,[74] but for
+myself I should say that the blame of the failure of these wars to
+effect their desired end has been due to the want of power to
+re-organise native society after a war; for example, had the 1873
+Ashantee war been followed by the taking over of Ashantee and the strong
+handling of it, there would not have been an 1895 Ashantee war; or, to
+take it the other way, if you had followed up the battle of Katamansu in
+1827, you need not have had an 1874 war even. Dr. Freeman holds, that if
+you had let the Ashantis have a sea-port and generally behaved fairly
+reasonably, you need hardly have had Ashantee wars at all. But, however
+this may be, I think that a good many of the West African wars of the
+past ten years have been the result of the humbug of the previous sixty,
+during which we have proclaimed that we are only in Africa for peaceful
+reasons of commerce, and religion, and education, not with any desire
+for the African's land or property: that, of course, it is not possible
+for us to extend our friendship or our toleration to people who go in
+for cannibalism, slave-raiding, or human sacrifices, but apart from
+these matters we have no desire to meddle with African domestic affairs,
+or take away their land. This, I own, I believe to have honestly been
+our intention, and to be our intention still, but with our stiff Crown
+Colony system of representing ourselves to the African, this intention
+has been and will be impossible to carry out, because between the true
+spirit of England and the spirit of Africa it interposes a distorting
+medium. It is, remember, not composed of Englishmen alone, it includes
+educated natives, and yet it knows the true native only through
+interpreters.
+
+But why call this humbug? you say. Well, the present policy in Africa
+makes it look so. Frankly, I do not see how you could work your original
+policy out unless it were in the hands of extremely expert men, patient
+and powerful at that. Too many times in old days have you allowed white
+men to be bullied, to give the African the idea that you, as a nation,
+meant to have your way. Too many times have you allowed them to violate
+parts of their treaties under your nose, until they got out of the way
+of thinking you would hold them to their treaties at all, and then
+suddenly down you came on them, not only holding them to their side of
+the treaties, but not holding to your own, imposing on them
+restrictions and domestic interference which those treaties made no
+mention of at all. I have before me now copies of treaties with chiefs
+in the hinterland of our Crown Colonies, wherein there is not even the
+anti-slavery clause--treaties merely of friendship and trade, with the
+undertaking on the native chief's part to hand over no part or right in
+his territories to a foreign power without English Government consent.
+Yet, in the districts we hold from the natives under such treaties, we
+are contemplating direct taxation, which to the African means the
+confiscation of the property taxed. We have, in fact, by our previous
+policy placed ourselves to the African with whom we have made treaties,
+in the position of a friend. "Big friend," it is true, but not conqueror
+or owner. Our departure now from the "big friend" attitude into the
+position of owner, hurts his feelings very much; and coupled with the
+feeling that he cannot get at England, who used to talk so nicely to
+him, and whom he did his best to please, as far as local circumstances
+and his limited power would allow, by giving up customs she had an
+incomprehensible aversion to, it causes the African chief to say "God is
+up," by which I expect he means the Devil, and give way to war, or
+sickness, or distraction, or a wild, hopeless, helpless, combination of
+all three; and then, poor fellow, when he is only naturally suffering
+from the dazzles your West African policy would give to an iron post,
+you go about sagely referring to "a general antipathy to civilisation
+among the natives of West Africa," "anti-white-man's leagues," "horrible
+secret societies," and such like figments of your imagination; and
+likely enough throw in as a dash for top the statement that the chief is
+"a drunken slave-raider," which as the captain of the late s.s.
+_Sparrow_ would say, "It may be so, and again, it mayn't." Anyhow it
+seems to occur to you as an argument only after the war is begun, though
+you have known the man some years; and it has not been the ostensible
+reason for any West African war save those in the Niger Company's
+territories, which run far enough inland to touch the slave-raiding
+zone, and which are entirely excluded from my arguments because they
+have been in the hands of experts on West Africa in war-making and in
+war-healing.
+
+Our past wars in West Africa, I mean all our wars prior to the hut-tax
+war, have been wars in order to suppress human sacrifice, to protect one
+tribe from the aggression of another, and to prevent the stopping of
+trade by middlemen tribes. These things are things worth fighting for.
+The necessity we have been under to fight them has largely arisen from
+our ancestors shirking a little firm-handedness in their generation.
+
+There is very little doubt that, owing to a want of reconstruction after
+destruction, these wars have not been worth to the Empire the loss of
+life and money they have cost; but this is nothing against us as
+fighters nor any real disgrace to our honour, but merely a slur on our
+intellectual powers in the direction of statecraft. They are wars of a
+totally different character to those of the hut-tax kind, that arise
+from aggressions on native property: the only thing in common between
+them is the strain of poor statecraft. This imperfection, however,
+exists to a far greater extent in hut-tax war, for to it we owe that
+general feeling of dislike to the advance of civilisation you now hear
+referred to. That, to a certain extent, this dislike already exists as
+the necessary outcome of our policy of late years, and that it will
+increase yearly, I fear there is very little doubt. It is the toxin
+produced by the microbe. It is the consequence of our attempt to
+introduce direct taxation, which seems to me to be an affair identical
+with your greased cartridges for India. Doubtless, such people ought not
+to object to greased cartridges; but, doubtless, such people as we are
+ought not to give them, and commit, over again, a worthless blunder,
+with no bad intention be it granted, but with no common sense.
+
+It has been said that the Sierra Leone hut-tax war is "a little Indian
+mutiny"; those who have said it do not seem to have known how true the
+statement is, for these attacks on property in the form of direct
+taxation are, to the African, treachery on the part of England, who,
+from the first, has kept on assuring the African that she does not mean
+to take his country from him, and then, as soon as she is strong enough,
+in his eyes, deliberately starts doing it. When you once get between two
+races the feeling of treachery, the face of their relationship is
+altered for ever, altered in a way that no wholesome war, no brutality
+of individuals, can alter. Black and white men for ever after a national
+breach of faith tax each other with treachery, and never really trust
+each other again.
+
+The African, however, must not be confounded with the Indian.
+Externally, in his habits he is in a lower culture state; he has no
+fanatical religion that really resents the incursions of other religions
+on his mind; Fetish can live in and among all sorts and kinds of
+religions without quarrelling with them in the least, grievously as they
+quarrel with Fetish; he has no written literature to keep before his
+eyes a glorious and mythical past, which, getting mixed up with his
+religious ideas, is liable in the Indian to make him take at times
+lobster-like backward springs in the direction of that past, though it
+was never there, and he would not have relished it if it had been.
+Nevertheless, the true Negro is, I believe, by far the better man than
+the Asiatic; he is physically superior, and he is more like an
+Englishman than the Asiatic; he is a logical, practical man, with
+feelings that are a credit to him, and are particularly strong in the
+direction of property; he has a way of thinking he has rights, whether
+he likes to use them or no, and will fight for them when he is driven to
+it. Fight you for a religious idea the African will not. He is not the
+stuff you make martyrs out of, nor does he desire to shake off the
+shackles of the flesh and swoon into Nirvana; and although he will sit
+under a tree to any extent, provided he gets enough to eat and a
+little tobacco, he won't sit under trees on iron spikes, or hold
+a leg up all the time, or fakirise in any fashion for the benefit
+of his soul or yours. His make of mind is exceedingly like the make
+of mind of thousands of Englishmen of the stand-no-nonsense,
+Englishman's-house-is-his-castle type. Yet, withal, a law-abiding man,
+loving a live lord, holding loudly that women should be kept in their
+place, yet often grievously henpecked by his wives, and little better
+than a slave to his mother, whom he loves with a love he gives to none
+other. This love of his mother is so dominant a factor in his life that
+it must be taken into consideration in attempting to understand the true
+Negro. Concerning it I can do no better than give you the Reverend
+Leighton Wilson's words; for this great missionary knew, as probably
+none since have known, the true Negro, having laboured for many years
+amongst the most unaltered Negro tribes--the Grain coast tribes--and his
+words are as true to-day of the unaltered Negro as on the day he wrote
+them thirty-eight years ago, and Leighton Wilson, mind you, was no blind
+admirer of the African.
+
+"Whatever other estimate we may form of the African, we may not doubt
+his love for his mother. Her name, whether dead or alive, is always on
+his lips and in his heart. She is the first being he thinks of when
+awakening from his slumbers and the last he remembers when closing his
+eyes in sleep; to her he confides secrets which he would reveal to no
+other human being on the face of the earth. He cares for no one else in
+time of sickness, she alone must prepare his food, administer his
+medicine, perform his ablutions, and spread his mat for him. He flies to
+her in the hour of his distress, for he well knows if all the rest of
+the world turn against him she will be steadfast in her love, whether he
+be right or wrong.
+
+"If there be any cause which justifies a man in using violence towards
+one of his fellow men it would be to resent an insult offered to his
+mother. More fights are occasioned among boys by hearing something said
+in disparagement of their mothers than all other causes put together. It
+is a common saying among them, if a man's mother and his wife are both
+on the point of being drowned, and he can save only one of them, he must
+save his mother, for the avowed reason if the wife is lost he may marry
+another, but he will never find a second mother."[75]
+
+Among the tribes of whom Wilson is speaking above, it is the man's true
+mother. Among the Niger Delta tribes it is often the adopted mother, the
+woman who has taken him when, as a child, he has been left motherless,
+or, if he is a boughten child, the woman who has taken care of him.
+Among both, and throughout all the bushmen tribes in West Africa,
+however, this deep affection is the same; next to the mother comes the
+sister to the African, and this matter has a bearing politically.
+
+There is little doubt that there exists a distrustful feeling towards
+white culture. Up to our attempt to enforce direct taxation it was only
+a distrustful feeling that a few years careful, honest handling would
+have disposed of. Since our attempt there is no doubt there is something
+approaching a panicky terror of white civilisation in all the native
+aristocracies and property owners. It is not, I repeat, to be attributed
+to Fetish priests. Certainly, on the whole, it is not attributable to a
+dislike of European customs or costumes; it is the reasonable dislike to
+being dispossessed alike of power and property in what they regard as
+their own country. A considerable factor in this matter is undoubtedly
+the influence of the women--the mothers of Africa. Just as your African
+man is the normal man, so is your African woman the normal woman. I
+openly own that if I have a soft spot in my feelings it is towards
+African women; and the close contact I have lived in with them has given
+rise to this, and, I venture to think, made me understand them. I know
+they have their faults. For one thing they are not so religiously minded
+as the men. I have met many African men who were philosophers, thinking
+in the terms of Fetish, but never a woman so doing. Be it granted that
+on the whole they know more about the details of Fetish procedure than
+the men do. Yet though frightened of them all, a blind faith in any
+mortal Ju Ju they do not possess. Your African lady is artful with them,
+not philosophic, possibly because she has other things to do--what with
+attending to the children, the farm, and the market--than go mooning
+about as those men can. For another thing they go in for husband
+poisoning in a way I am unable to approve of.
+
+Well, it may be interesting to inquire into the reasons that make the
+West African woman a factor against white civilisation. These reasons
+are--firstly, that she does not know practically anything about it; and,
+secondly, she has the normal feminine dislike to innovations. Missionary
+and other forms of white education have not been given to the African
+women to anything like the same extent that they have been given to the
+men. I do not say that there are not any African women who are not
+thoroughly educated in white education, for there are, and they can
+compare very favourably from the standpoint of their education with our
+normal women; but these have, I think I may safely say, been the
+daughters of educated African men, or have been the women who have been
+immediately attached to some mission station. I have no hesitation in
+saying that, considering the very little attention that has been given
+to the white education of the African women, they give evidence of an
+ability in due keeping with that of the African men. But all I mean to
+say is, that our white culture has not had a grasp over the womankind of
+Africa that can compare with that it has had over the men; for one woman
+who has been brought home to England and educated in our schools, and
+who has been surrounded by English culture, &c., there are 500 men. But
+into the possibilities of the African woman in the white education
+department I do not mean to go; I am getting into a snaggy channel by
+speaking on woman at all. It is to the mass of African women, untouched
+by white culture, but with an enormous influence over their sons and
+brothers, that I am now referring as a factor in the dislike to the
+advance of white civilisation; and I have said they do not like it
+because, for one thing, they do not know it; that is to say, they do not
+know it from the inside and at its best, but only from the outside.
+Viewed from the outside in West Africa white civilisation, to a shrewd
+mind like hers, is an evil thing for her boys and girls. She sees it
+taking away from them the restraints of their native culture, and in all
+too many cases leading them into a life of dissipation, disgrace, and
+decay; or, if it does not do this, yet separating the men from their
+people.
+
+The whole of this affair requires a whole mass of elaborate explanations
+to place it fairly before you, but I will merely sketch the leading
+points now. (1) The law of mütterrecht makes the tie between the mother
+and the children far closer than that between the father and them: white
+culture reverses this, she does not like that. (2) Between husband and
+wife there is no community in goods under native law; each keeps his and
+her separate estate. White culture says the husband shall endow his wife
+with all his worldly goods; this she knows usually means, that if he has
+any he does not endow her with them, but whether he has or has not he
+endows himself with hers as far as any law permits. Similarly he does
+not like it either. These two white culture things, saddling him with
+the support of the children and endowing his wife with all his property,
+presents a repulsive situation to the logical African. Moreover, white
+culture expects him to think more of his wife and children than he does
+of his mother and sisters, which to the uncultured African is absurd.
+
+Then again both he and his mother see the fearful effects of white
+culture on the young women, who cannot be prevented in districts under
+white control from going down to the coast towns and to the Devil:
+neither he nor the respectable old ladies of his tribe approve of this.
+Then again they know that the young men of their people who have
+thoroughly allied themselves to white culture look down on their
+relations in the African culture state. They call the ancestors of their
+tribe "polygamists," as if it were a swear-word, though they are a
+thousand times worse than polygamists themselves: and they are ashamed
+of their mothers. It is a whole seething mass of stuff all through and I
+would not mention it were it not that it is a factor in the formation of
+anti-white-culture opinion among the mass of the West Africans, and that
+it causes your West African bush chief to listen to the old woman whom
+you may see crouching behind him, or you may not see at all, but who is
+with him all the same, when she says, "Do not listen to the white man,
+it is bad for you." He knows that the interpreter talking to him for the
+white man may be a boughten man, paid to advertise the advantages of
+white ways; and he knows that the old woman, his mother, cannot be
+bought where his interest is concerned: so he listens to her, and she
+distrusts white ways.
+
+I am aware that there is now in West Africa a handful of Africans who
+have mastered white culture, who know it too well to misunderstand the
+inner spirit of it, who are men too true to have let it cut them off in
+either love or sympathy from Africa,--men that, had England another
+system that would allow her to see them as they are, would be of greater
+use to her and Africa than they now are; but I will not name them: I
+fight a lone fight, and wish to mix no man, white or black, up in it, or
+my heretical opinions. That handful of African men are now fighting a
+hard enough fight to prevent the distracted, uninformed Africans from
+rising against what looks so like white treachery, though it is only
+white want of knowledge; and also against those "water flies" who are
+neither Africans nor Europeans, but who are the curse of the Coast--the
+men who mislead the white man and betray the black.
+
+Next to this there is another factor almost equally powerful, with which
+I presume you cannot sympathise, and which I should make a mess of if I
+trusted myself to explain. Therefore I call in the aid of a better
+writer, speaking on another race, but talking of the identical same
+thing. "In these days the boot of the ubiquitous white man leaves its
+mark on all the fair places of the earth, and scores thereon an even
+more gigantic track than that which affrighted Robinson Crusoe in his
+solitude. It crushes down the forest, beats out roads, strides across
+the rivers, kicks down native institutions, and generally tramples on
+the growths of natives and the works of primitive man, reducing all
+things to that dead level of conventionality which we call civilisation.
+
+"Incidentally it stamps out much of what is best in the customs and
+characteristics of the native races against which it brushes; and though
+it relieves him of many things which hurt or oppressed him ere it came,
+it injures him morally almost as much as it benefits him materially. We
+who are white men admire our work not a little--which is natural, and
+many are found willing to wear out their souls in efforts to convert the
+thirteenth century into the nineteenth in a score of years. The natives,
+who for the most part are frank Vandals, also admire efforts of which
+they are aware that they are themselves incapable, and even the
+_laudator temporis acti_ has his mouth stopped by the cheap and often
+tawdry luxury which the coming of the white man has placed within his
+reach. So effectually has the heel of the white man been ground into the
+face of Pérak and Selangor, that these native states are now only
+nominally what their name implies. The white population outnumbers the
+people of the land in most of the principal districts, and it is
+possible for a European to spend weeks in either of these states without
+coming into contact with any Asiatics save those who wait at table,
+clean his shirts, or drive his cab. It is possible, I am told, for a
+European to spend years in Pérak or Selangor without acquiring any
+profound knowledge of the natives of the country or of the language
+which is their special medium. This being so, most of the white men who
+live in the protected native states are somewhat apt to disregard the
+effect their actions have upon the natives and labour under the common
+European inability to view natives from a native standpoint. Moreover,
+we have become accustomed to existing conditions; and thus it is that
+few perhaps realise the precise nature of the work which the British in
+the Peninsula have set themselves to accomplish. What we are really
+attempting, however, is nothing less than to crush into twenty years the
+revolution in facts and in ideas, which, even in energetic Europe, six
+long centuries have been needed to accomplish. No one will, of course,
+be found to dispute that the strides made in our knowledge of the art of
+government since the thirteenth century are prodigious and vast, nor
+that the general condition of the people of Europe has been immensely
+improved since that day; but nevertheless one cannot but sympathise with
+the Malays who are suddenly and violently translated from the point to
+which they have attained in the natural development of their race, and
+are required to live up to the standard of a people who are six
+centuries in advance of them in national progress. If a plant is made
+to blossom or bear fruit three months before its time it is regarded as
+a triumph of the gardener's art; but what then are we to say of this
+huge moral forcing system we call 'protection'? Forced plants we know
+suffer in the process; and the Malay, whose proper place is amidst the
+conditions of the thirteenth century, is apt to become morally weak and
+seedy and lose something of his robust self respect when he is forced to
+bear Nineteenth century fruit."[76]
+
+Now, the above represents the state of affairs caused by the clash of
+different culture levels in the true Negro States, as well as it does in
+the Malay. These two sets of men, widely different in breed, have from
+the many points of agreement in their State-form, evidently both arrived
+in our thirteenth century. The African peoples in the central East, and
+East, and South, except where they are true Negroes, have not arrived in
+the Thirteenth century, or, to put it in other words, the true Negro
+stem in Africa has arrived at a political state akin to that of our own
+Thirteenth century, whereas the Bantu stem has not; this point, however,
+I need not enter into here.
+
+There are, of course, local differences between the Malay Peninsula and
+West Africa, but the main characteristics as regards the State-form
+among the natives are singularly alike. They are both what Mr. Clifford
+aptly likens to our own European State-form in the Thirteenth century;
+and the effect of the white culture on the morals of the natives is also
+alike. The main difference between them results from the Malay Peninsula
+being but a narrow strip of land and thinly peopled, compared to the
+densely populated section of a continent we call West Africa. Therefore,
+although the Malay in his native state is a superior individual warrior
+to the West African, yet there are not so many of him; and as he is less
+guarded from whites by a pestilential climate, his resistance to the
+white culture of the Nineteenth century is inferior to the resistance
+which the West African can give.
+
+The destruction of what is good in the Thirteenth century culture level,
+and the fact that when the Nineteenth century has had its way the main
+result is seedy demoralised natives, is the thing that must make all
+thinking men wonder if, after all, such work is from a high moral point
+of view worth the Nineteenth century doing. I so often think when I hear
+the progress of civilisation, our duty towards the lower races, &c.,
+talked of, as if those words were in themselves Ju Ju, of that improving
+fable of the kind-hearted she-elephant, who, while out walking one day,
+inadvertently trod upon a partridge and killed it, and observing close
+at hand the bird's nest full of callow fledglings, dropped a tear, and
+saying "I have the feelings of a mother myself," sat down upon the
+brood. This is precisely what England representing the Nineteenth
+century is doing in Thirteenth century West Africa. She destroys the
+guardian institution, drops a tear and sits upon the brood with motherly
+intentions; and pesky warm sitting she finds it, what with the nature of
+the brood and the surrounding climate, let alone the expense of it. And
+what profit she is going to get out of such proceedings there, I own I
+don't know. "Ah!" you say, "yes, it is sad, but it is inevitable." I do
+not think it is inevitable, unless you have no intellectual constructive
+Statecraft, and are merely in that line an automaton. If you will try
+Science, all the evils of the clash between the two culture periods
+could be avoided, and you could assist these West Africans in their
+Thirteenth century state to rise into their Nineteenth century state
+without their having the hard fight for it that you yourself had. This
+would be a grand humanitarian bit of work; by doing it you would raise a
+monument before God to the honour of England such as no nation has ever
+yet raised to Him on Earth.
+
+There is absolutely no perceivable sound reason why you should not do it
+if you will try Science and master the knowledge of the nature of the
+native and his country. The knowledge of native laws, religion,
+institutions, and State-form would give you the knowledge of what is
+good in these things, so that you might develop and encourage them; and
+the West African, having reached a Thirteenth century state, has
+institutions and laws which with a strengthening from the European hand
+would by their operation now stamp out the evil that exists under the
+native state. What you are doing now, however, is the direct contrary to
+this: you are destroying the good portion and thereby allowing what is
+evil, or imperfect, in it as in all things human, to flourish under your
+protection far more rankly than under the purely native Thirteenth
+century State-form, with Fetish as a state religion, it could possibly
+do.
+
+I know, however, there is one great objection to your taking up a
+different line towards native races to that which you are at present
+following. It is one of those strange things that are in men's minds
+almost without their knowing they are there, yet which, nevertheless,
+rule them. This is the idea that those Africans are, as one party would
+say, steeped in sin, or, as another party would say, a lower or degraded
+race. While you think these things, you must act as you are acting. They
+really are the same idea in different clothes. They both presuppose all
+mankind to have sprung from a single pair of human beings, and the
+condition of a race to-day therefore to be to its own credit or blame. I
+remember one day in Cameroons coming across a young African lady, of the
+age of twelve, who I knew was enjoying the advantages of white tuition
+at a school. So, in order to open up conversation, I asked her what she
+had been learning. "Ebberyting," she observed with a genial smile. I
+asked her then what she knew, so as to approach the subject from a
+different standpoint for purposes of comparison. "Ebberyting," she said.
+This hurt my vanity, for though I am a good deal more than twelve years
+of age, I am far below this state of knowledge; so I said, "Well, my
+dear, and if you do, you're the person I have long wished to meet, for
+you can tell me why you are black." "Oh yes," she said, with a perfect
+beam of satisfaction, "one of my pa's pa's saw dem Patriark Noah wivout
+his clothes." I handed over to her a crimson silk necktie that I was
+wearing, and slunk away, humbled by superior knowledge. This, of course,
+was the result of white training direct on the African mind; the story
+which you will often be told to account for the blackness and whiteness
+of men by Africans who have not been in direct touch with European, but
+who have been in touch with Muhammedan, tradition--which in the main has
+the same Semitic source--is that when Cain killed Abel, he was horrified
+at himself, and terrified of God; and so he carried the body away from
+beside the altar where it lay, and carried it about for years trying to
+hide it, but not knowing how, growing white the while with the horror
+and the fear; until one day he saw a crow scratching a hole in the
+desert sand, and it struck him that if he made a hole in the sand and
+put the body in, he could hide it from God, so he did; but all his
+children were white, and from Cain came the white races, while Abel's
+children are black, as all men were before the first murder. The present
+way of contemplating different races, though expressed in finer
+language, is practically identical with these; not only the religious
+view, but the view of the suburban agnostic. The religious European
+cannot avoid regarding the races in a different and inferior culture
+state to his own as more deeply steeped in sin than himself, and the
+suburban agnostic regards them as "degraded" or "retarded" either by
+environment, or microbes, or both.
+
+I openly and honestly own I sincerely detest touching on this race
+question. For one thing, Science has not finished with it; for another,
+it belongs to a group of subjects of enormous magnitude, upon which I
+have no opinion, but merely feelings, and those of a nature which I am
+informed by superior people would barely be a credit to a cave man of
+the palæolithic period. My feelings classify the world's inhabitants
+into Englishmen, by which I mean Teutons at large, Foreigners, and
+Blacks. Blacks I subdivide into two classes, English Blacks and Foreign
+Blacks. English Blacks are Africans. Foreign Blacks are Indians,
+Chinese, and the rest. Of course, everything that is not Teutonic is, to
+put it mildly, not up to what is; and equally, of course, I feel more at
+home with and hold in greater esteem the English Black: a great, strong
+Kruman, for example, with his front teeth filed, nothing much on but
+oil, half a dozen wives, and half a hundred jujus, is a sort of person
+whom I hold higher than any other form of native, let the other form
+dress in silk, satin, or cashmere, and make what pretty things he
+pleases. This is, of course, a general view; but I am often cornered
+for the detail view, whether I can reconcile my admiration for Africans
+with my statement that they are a different kind of human being to white
+men. Naturally I can, to my own satisfaction, just as I can admire an
+oak tree or a palm; but it is an uncommonly difficult thing to explain.
+All I can say is, that when I come back from a spell in Africa, the
+thing that makes me proud of being one of the English is not the manners
+or customs up here, certainly not the houses or the climate; but it is
+the thing embodied in a great railway engine. I once came home on a ship
+with an Englishman who had been in South West Africa for seven unbroken
+years; he was sane, and in his right mind. But no sooner did we get
+ashore at Liverpool, than he rushed at and threw his arms round a
+postman, to that official's embarrassment and surprise. Well, that is
+just how I feel about the first magnificent bit of machinery I come
+across: it is the manifestation of the superiority of my race.
+
+In philosophic moments I call superiority difference, from a feeling
+that it is not mine to judge the grade in these things. Careful
+scientific study has enforced on me, as it has on other students, the
+recognition that the African mind naturally approaches all things from a
+spiritual point of view. Low down in culture or high up, his mind works
+along the line that things happen because of the action of spirit upon
+spirit; it is an effort for him to think in terms of matter. We think
+along the line that things happen from the action of matter upon matter.
+If it were not for the Asiatic religion we have accepted, it is, I
+think, doubtful whether we should not be far more materialistic in
+thought-form than we are. This steady sticking to the material side of
+things, I think, has given our race its dominion over matter; the want
+of it has caused the African to be notably behind us in this, and far
+behind those Asiatic races who regard matter and spirit as separate in
+essence, a thing that is not in the mind either of the Englishman or the
+African. The Englishman is constrained by circumstances to perceive the
+existence of an extra material world. The African regards spirit and
+matter as undivided in kind, matter being only the extreme low form of
+spirit. There must be in the facts of the case behind things, something
+to account for the high perception of justice you will find in the
+African, combined with an inability to think out a pulley or a lever
+except under white tuition. Similarly, taking the true Negro States,
+which are in its equivalent to our Thirteenth century, it accounts for
+the higher level of morals in them than you would find in our Thirteenth
+century; and I fancy this want of interest and inferiority in
+materialism in the true Negro constitutes a reason why they will not
+come into our Nineteenth century, but, under proper guidance could
+attain to a Nineteenth century state of their own, which would show a
+proportionate advance. The simile of the influence of the culture of
+Rome, or rather let us say the culture of Greece spread by the force of
+Rome, upon Barbarian culture is one often used to justify the hope that
+English culture will have a similar effect on the African. This I do not
+think is so. It is true the culture of Rome lifted the barbarians from
+what one might call culture 9 to culture 17, but the Romans and the
+barbarians were both white races. But you see now a similar lift in
+culture in Africa by the influence of Mohammedan culture, for example in
+the Hausa States and again in the Western Soudan, where there is no
+fundamental race difference.
+
+In both English and Mohammedan Berber influence on the African there is
+another factor, apart from race difference; namely, that the two higher
+cultures are in a healthier state than that of Rome was at the time it
+mastered the barbarian mind; in both cases the higher culture has the
+superior war force.
+
+This seems to me simply to lay upon us English for the sake of our
+honour that we keep clean hands and a cool head, and be careful of
+Justice; to do this we must know what there is we wish to wipe out of
+the African, and what there is we wish to put in, and so we must not
+content ourselves by relying materially on our superior wealth and
+power, and morally on catch phrases. All we need look to is justice.
+Love for our fellow-man, pity, charity, mercy, we need not bother our
+heads about, so long as we are just. These things are of value only when
+they are used as means whereby we can attain justice. It is no use
+saying that it matters to a Teuton whether the other race he deals with
+is black, white, yellow--I can quite conceive that we should look down
+on a pea-green form of humanity if we had the chance. Naturally, I think
+this shows a very proper spirit. I should be the last to alter any of
+our Teutonic institutions to please any race; but when it comes to
+altering the institutions of another race, not for the reason even of
+pleasing ourselves but merely on the plea that we don't understand them,
+we are on different ground. If those ideas and institutions stand in the
+way of our universal right to go anywhere we choose and live as honest
+gentlemen, we have the power-right to alter them; but if they do not we
+must judge them from as near a standard of pure Justice as we can attain
+to.
+
+There are many who hold murder the most awful crime a man can commit,
+saying that thereby he destroys the image of his Maker; I hold that one
+of the most awful crimes one nation can commit on another is destroying
+the image of Justice, which in an institution is represented more truly
+to the people by whom the institution has been developed, than in any
+alien institution of Justice; it is a thing adapted to its environment.
+This form of murder by a nation I see being done in the destruction of
+what is good in the laws and institutions of native races. In some parts
+of the world, this murder, judged from certain reasonable standpoints,
+gives you an advantage; in West Africa, judged from any standpoint you
+choose to take, it gives you no advantage. By destroying native
+institutions there, you merely lower the moral of the African race, stop
+trade, and the culture advantages it brings both to England and West
+Africa. I again refer you to the object lesson before you now, the hut
+tax war in Sierra Leone. Awful accusations have been made against the
+officers and men who had the collecting of this tax. In the matter of
+the native soldiery, there is no doubt these accusations are only too
+well founded, but the root thing was the murder of institutions. The
+worst of the whole of this miserable affair is that a precisely similar
+miserable affair may occur at any time in any of our West African Crown
+Colonies--to-morrow, any day,--until you choose to remove the Crown
+Colony system of government.
+
+It has naturally been exceedingly hard for men who know the colony and
+the natives, with the experience of years in an unsentimental commercial
+way, to keep civil tongues in their heads while their interests were
+being wrecked by the action of the government; but whether or no the
+white officers were or were not brutal in their methods we must presume
+will be shown by Sir David Chalmers's report. I am unable to believe
+they were. But there is no manner of doubt that outrages have been
+committed, disgraceful to England, by the set of riff-raff rascal
+Blacks, who had been turned out by, or who had run away from, the
+hinterland tribes down into Sierra Leone Colony, and there been turned,
+by an ill-informed government, into police, and sent back with power
+into the very districts from which they had, shortly before, fled for
+their crimes. I entirely sympathise, therefore, with the rage of
+Liverpool and Manchester, and of every clear-minded common-sense
+Englishman who knows what a thing the hut tax war has been. And I want
+common-sense Englishmen to recognise that a system capable of such
+folly, and under which such a thing could happen in an English
+possession, is a system that must go. For a system that gets short of
+money, from its own want of business-like ability, and then against all
+expert advice goes and does the most unscientific thing conceivable
+under the circumstances, to get more, is a thing that is a disgrace to
+England. Yet the Sierra Leone Colony was capable of this folly, and the
+people in London were capable of saying to Liverpool and Manchester,
+that no difficulty was expected from the collection of the tax. If this
+is so in our oldest colony, what reason have we to believe that in the
+others we are safer? Any of them, in combination with London, may
+to-morrow go and do the most unscientific thing conceivable, and
+disgrace England, in order to procure more local revenue, and fail at
+that.
+
+The desire to develop our West African possessions is a worthy one in
+its way, but better leave it totally alone than attempt it with your
+present machinery; which the moment it is called upon to deal with the
+administration of the mass of the native inhabitants gives such a
+trouble. And remember it is not the only trouble your Crown colony
+system can give; it has a few glorious opportunities left of further
+supporting everything I have said about it, and more. But I will say no
+more. You have got a grand rich region there, populated by an uncommon
+fine sort of human being. You have been trying your present set of ideas
+on it for over 400 years; they have failed in a heart-breaking drizzling
+sort of way to perform any single solitary one of the things you say you
+want done there. West Africa to-day is just a quarry of paving-stones
+for Hell, and those stones were cemented in place with men's blood mixed
+with wasted gold.
+
+Prove it! you say. Prove it to yourself by going there--I don't mean to
+Blazes--but to West Africa.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [74] _Ashantee and Jaman_, Freeman (Constable and Co., 1898).
+
+   [75] _Western Africa_, Wilson, 1856, p. 116.
+
+   [76] _East Coast Etchings._ H. Clifford, Singapore, 1896.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+AN ALTERNATIVE PLAN
+
+     Wherein the student, having said divers harsh things of those who
+     destroy but do not reconstruct, recognises that, having attempted
+     destruction, it is but seemly to set forth some other way whereby
+     the West African colonies could be managed.
+
+
+West Africa, I own, is a make of country difficult for a power with
+a different kind of culture, climate and set of institutions, and
+so on, to manage from Europe satisfactorily. But, as things go,
+I venture to think it presents no especial difficulty; that all the
+difficulties that exist in this matter are difficulties arising from
+misunderstandings,--things removable, not things of essence, barring
+only fever.
+
+Also I feel convinced that no one of our English governmental methods at
+present existing is suitable for its administration. It is no use
+saying, Look at our Indian system, why not just introduce that into West
+Africa? I have the greatest admiration for our Indian system; it is the
+right thing in the right place, thanks to its having healthily grown up,
+fostered by experts, military and civil. Nevertheless it would not do
+for West Africa to-day. What we want there is the sowing of a similar
+system, not the transplanting of the Indian in its perfect form, for
+that is to-day for West Africa infinitely too expensive. If a man
+before his fortune is made spends a fortune, he ends badly; if he
+measures his expenditure with his income and develops his opportunities,
+he ends as a millionaire; and we must never forget that great dictum
+that the State is the perfection of the individual man, and should mould
+our politics accordingly.
+
+I hold it to be a sound and healthy idea of ours that our possessions
+over-sea should pay their own way, and I therefore distrust the
+cucumber-frame form of financial politics that at present holds the
+field in West African affairs. It has been the pride and boast of the
+West African colonies that they have paid their way; let it remain so.
+It seems to me unsound that our colonies there should receive loans
+wherewith to carry on; for, for one thing, it makes them carry on more
+than is good for them, and merely means a piling up of debt; and, for
+another, it gives West Africa the notion that it is England's business
+to support her, which to my mind it distinctly is not; for if we wanted
+a lapdog set of colonies we could get healthier ones elsewhere.
+Moreover, it pauperises instead of fostering the proper pride, without
+which nothing can flourish.
+
+Apart from our Indian system, we have, for governing those regions where
+our race cannot locally produce a sufficient population of its own to
+take the reins of government out of the hands of officialdom in England,
+only two other systems, namely, the Chartered Company and the Crown
+Colony. I beg to urge that it is high time we had a third system.
+Concerning the Crown Colony system for Africa, I have spoken as
+tolerantly as I believe it is possible for any one acquainted with its
+working in West Africa to speak. If I were to say any more I might say
+something uncivil, which, of course, I do not wish to do. Concerning
+the Chartered Company system, I need only remark that there are two
+distinct breeds of Chartered Companies--the one whose attention is
+turned to the trade, the other whose attention is turned to the lands
+over which its charter gives it dominion. The first kind is represented
+in Africa by the Royal Niger Company, the second by the South African.
+
+The second form of Chartered Company, that interested in land, we have
+not in West Africa under the name of a Company; but the present Crown
+Colony system represents it, and I feel certain that whatever good the
+South African Company may have done for the empire in South Africa, it
+has done an immense amount of harm in Western Africa. For some, to me
+unknown, reason the South African Company has found favour in the sight
+of officialdom in London; and, fascinated by its success in South
+Africa, yet recognising its drawbacks, officialdom has attempted to
+introduce what they regard as best in the South African system into West
+Africa. I do not think any student can avoid coming to the conclusion
+that the policy which is now driving the Crown Colonies in West Africa
+is one and the same with that of Mr. Rhodes. I do not mean that Mr.
+Rhodes, had he had the handling of West Africa, would himself have used
+this form of policy. He formulated it for South Africa; but, with his
+careful study of such things as local needs, he would have formulated
+another form for West Africa, which is a totally different region.
+
+To take only two of the differences, and state them brutally. First, in
+West Africa the most valuable asset you have is the native: the more
+heavily the district there is populated with Africans, and the more
+prosperous those natives are, the better for you; for it means more
+trade. All the gold, ivory, oil, rubber, and timber in West Africa are
+useless to you without the African to work them; you can get no other
+race that can replace him, and work them; the thing has now been tried,
+and it has failed. Whereas in South Africa the converse is true: you can
+do without the African there, you can replace him with pretty nearly any
+other kind of man you like, or do the work yourself. The second
+difference is, that the land in South Africa is worth your having, you
+can go and domesticate on it; whereas in West Africa you cannot. A
+failure to recognise these differences is at the root of our present
+ill-judged West African policy, outside the Royal Niger Company's
+domain; by introducing South African methods we are trying to get what
+is of no use to us, the _Landes Hoheit_, and thereby devastating what is
+of use to us, the trade.
+
+However, I will not detain you over this interesting question of
+Chartered Company government. I merely wish to draw your attention to
+the two breeds, the Land Company, and the Trade Company; and to urge
+that they are things to be applied in their respective proper
+environments. I can honestly assure you, I know every blessed, single,
+mortal thing that can be said against the trade form which I admire, for
+I have lived under a hail of this sort of information since I was
+discovered by my big juju, Liverpool, to be such an admirer of what I
+called a co-ordinate system of government and trade, and Liverpool
+called divers things.
+
+I shall go to my grave believing that Liverpool had reasons for
+attacking the Company, but neglected fundamental facts in its
+controversy with the Trade Company, which, to it, was "a little more
+than kith, and less than kind." The Royal Niger Company has
+demonstrated its adaptation to its environment. Without any forced
+labour, without any direct taxation, it has paid. I venture to think,
+though I have no doubt it would severely hurt the feelings of the
+R.N.C., that we may regard the Royal Niger Company as representing the
+perfected system of native government in West Africa plus English
+courage and activity. I believe that on this foundation has been built
+its success. For say what you like, if the Royal Niger had not got on
+well with the natives in its territories--dealt cleanly, honestly,
+rationally with them--it would never have extended its influence in the
+grand way it has, represented only by a mere handful of white men, in
+what is, as far as we know, the most densely populated region with the
+highest and most organised form of native power in all tropical Africa.
+Had it not been to the natives it ruled a just, honourable, and
+desirable form of government, it would long ago have been stamped out by
+them, or would have been compelled to call in England's armed support to
+maintain it, as the Crown Colony system has been compelled to do in
+Sierra Leone and on the Gold Coast. It has not had to call in Imperial
+assistance, and it has paid its shareholders--a sound, healthy conduct;
+but, nevertheless, remember that all the great debt of gratitude you and
+every one of the English owe the Royal Niger Company for defending the
+honour of England against Continental enterprise, for maintaining the
+honour of England in the eyes of the native races with whom it had made
+treaties, you do not owe to the Chartered Company _system_, but to Sir
+George Goldie, the man who had to use it because it was the _best_
+existing system available for such a region. You have too much sense to
+give all the honour to Lord Kitchener of Khartoum's sword, though a
+sword is an excellent thing. I trust, therefore, you have too much sense
+to give all honour to the Chartered Company, even when it is a trading
+company. Trade is an excellent thing, but, in the case of the Royal
+Niger, this very factor, trade, restricts the man who uses the Chartered
+Company to a set of white men and a set of black. Therefore, never can I
+feel that either Liverpool or the Brass men have profited by the R.N.C.
+as they would have done if there had been a better system available for
+dealing with what Mr. St. Loe Strachey delicately calls "a dark-skinned
+population" with an insufficient local white population at hand.
+Briefly, I should say that the Chartered Company system keeps its "ain
+fish-guts for its ain sea-maws" too much. Therefore now, when, like many
+before me who have laboured strenuously to reform, I have given up the
+idea that reformation is possible for the individual on whom they have
+expended their powers, and have decided that there are some people whom
+you can only reform with a gun, I will start reforming myself, and say
+the Chartered Company system is not good enough, taken all round as
+things are, for West Africa for these reasons.
+
+First, a Chartered Company consists of a band of merchants, ruling
+through, and by, a great man. If that great man who expands the
+influence and power of the Company lives long enough to establish a form
+of policy, well and good. I have sufficient trust in the common sense of
+a band of English merchants, provided their interest is common, to
+believe they will adhere to the policy; but suppose he does not, or
+suppose you do not start with a good man, you will merely have a mess,
+as has been demonstrated by the perpetual failures of our French
+friends' Chartered Companies. By the way, I may remark that although
+France is no great admirer of the chartered system with us, she is
+devoted to it for herself, sprinkling all her West African possessions
+with them freely, only unfortunately, as their names are usually far
+longer than their banking accounts, they do not grow conspicuous; even
+apart from these private and subsidised Chartered Companies in French
+possessions, France follows the chartered system imperially in West
+Africa by keeping out non-French trade with differential tariffs, and so
+on. But, after all, in this matter she is no worse than English critics
+of the Royal Niger; and it is a common trait of all West African
+palavers that those who criticise are amply well provided themselves
+with the very faults they find so repulsive in others--it's the climate.
+
+Secondly, the Chartered Company represents English trade interests in
+sections, instead of completely; English honour, common sense, military
+ability, and so on, the Royal Niger under Sir George Goldie has
+represented more perfectly than these things have ever been represented
+in West--or, I may safely say, Africa at large; but the trade interests
+of England it has only represented partially, or in other words, it has
+only represented the trade interests of its shareholders and the natives
+it has made treaties with, and what we want is something that will
+represent our trade interests there completely. Therefore, I do not
+advocate it as the general system for West Africa, for under another
+sort of man it might mean merely a more rapid crash than we are in for
+with the Crown Colony system. To my dying day I shall honour that great
+Trade Company, the Royal Niger, for representing England, that is,
+England properly so-called, to the world at large, during one of the
+darkest ages we have ever had since Charles II.; and, I believe that it,
+with the Committee of Merchants who held the Gold Coast for England
+after the battle of Katamansu, when her officials would have abandoned
+alike the Gold Coast and her honour in West Africa, will stand out in
+our history as grand things, but yet I say we want another system.
+
+"Du binst der Geist der stets verneint!" you ejaculate. You do not like
+Crown Colonies. You won't grovel to Chartered Companies, however good.
+You prove, on your own showing, that there is not in West Africa a
+sufficiently large, or a sufficiently long resident, local English
+population--what with their constantly leaving for home or for the
+cemetery--to form an independent colony. What else remains?
+
+Well, I humbly beg to say that there is another system--a system that
+pays in all round peace and prosperity--a system whereby a region with a
+native population--a lively one in a Thirteenth century culture
+state--of about 30,000,000, is ruled. The total value of exports from
+the regions I refer to averages Ŗ14,000,000, out of a country of very
+much the same make as West Africa; the floating capital in its trade is
+some Ŗ25,000,000; its actual land area is 562,540 square miles; yet its
+trade with its European country amounts, nevertheless, to at least one
+half of that carried on between India and England. If you apply the
+system that has built this thing up, practically since 1830, to West
+Africa, you will not get the above figures out in forty years; but you
+will get at least two-thirds of them; and that would be a grand rise on
+your present West African figures, and in time you could surpass these
+figures, for West Africa is far larger, and far nearer European markets,
+and you have the advantage of superior shipping.
+
+The region I am citing is not so unhealthy for whites as West Africa.
+Still, it has a stiff death-rate of its own; even nowadays, when it has
+pulled that death-rate down by Science--a thing, I may remark, you never
+trouble your head about in West Africa, or think worthy of your serious
+attention.
+
+I will not insult your knowledge by telling you where this system is
+working to-day, or who works it, and all that. The same consideration
+also bars me from applying for a patent for this system; for although I
+lay it before you altered to what I think suitable for West Africa, the
+main lines of the system remain. The only thing I confess that makes me
+shaky about its being applied to West Africa is, that this system
+requires and must have experts black and white to work it, both at home
+in England and out in West Africa. Still, you have a sufficient supply
+of such experts, if only you would not leave things so largely in the
+hands of clerks and amateurs; who, with the assistance of faddists and
+renegade Africans, break up the native true Negro culture state, leaving
+you little sound stuff to work on in the regions now under the Crown
+Colony system.
+
+Before I proceed to sketch the skeleton of the other system, I must lay
+before you briefly the present political state of West Africa in the
+words of the greatest living expert on the subject, as they are given in
+a remarkable article in the _Edinburgh Review_ for October, 1898.
+
+"The weighty utterance of Sir George Goldie should never be forgotten,
+'Central African races and tribes have, broadly speaking, no sentiment
+of patriotism as understood in Europe.' There is, therefore, little
+difficulty in inducing them to accept what German jurisconsults term
+'Ober Hoheit,' which corresponds with our interpretation of our vague
+term 'Protectorate.' But when complete sovereignty or 'Landes Hoheit,'
+is conceded, they invariably stipulate that their local customs and
+systems of government shall be respected. On this point they are,
+perhaps, more tenacious than most subject races with whom the British
+Empire has had to deal; while their views and ideas of life are
+extremely difficult for an Englishman to understand. It is therefore
+certain that even an imperfect and tyrannical native African
+administration, if its extreme excesses were controlled by European
+supervision, would be in the early stages productive of far less
+discomfort to its subjects than well-intentioned but ill-directed
+efforts of European magistrates, often young and headstrong, and not
+invariably gifted with sympathy and introspective powers. If the welfare
+of the native races is to be considered, if dangerous revolts are to be
+obviated, the general policy of ruling on African principles through
+native rulers must be followed for the present. Yet it is desirable that
+considerable districts in suitable localities should be administered on
+European principles by European officials, partly to serve as types to
+which the native governments may gradually approximate, but principally
+as cities of refuge in which individuals of more advanced views may find
+a living if native government presses unduly upon them, just as in
+Europe of the Middle Ages men whose love of freedom found the iron-bound
+system of feudalism intolerable, sought eagerly the comparative liberty
+of cities."[77]
+
+There are a good many points in the above classic passage on which I
+would fain become diffuse, but I forbear; merely begging you to note
+carefully the wording of that part concerning government by natives
+ruling on African principles, because here is a pitfall for the hasty.
+You will be told that this is the present policy in Crown Colonies--but
+it is not. What they are doing is ruling on European principles through
+natives, which is a horse of another colour entirely and makes it hot
+work for the unfortunate native catspaw chief, and so all round
+unsatisfactory that no really self-respecting native chief will take it
+on.
+
+Well, to return to that other system: what it has got to do is to unite
+English interests--administrative, commercial and educational--into one
+solid whole, and combine these with native interests; briefly, to be a
+system where the Englishman and the African co-operate together for
+their mutual benefit and advancement, and therefore it must be a
+representative system, and one of those groups of representative systems
+which form the British Empire.
+
+For reasons I need not discuss here it must be a duplicate system, with
+an English and an African side, these two united and responsible to the
+English Crown, but both having as great a share of individual freedom in
+Africa as possible. By and by the necessity for the duplicate system may
+disappear, but at present it is necessary.
+
+I will take the English side first. There should be in England an
+African Council, in whose hands is the power of voting supplies and of
+appointing the Governor-General, subject to the approval of the Crown,
+and to whom firms trading in Africa should be answerable for the actions
+of their representatives. This council should be of nominated members,
+from the Chambers of Commerce of Liverpool, Manchester, London, Bristol,
+and Glasgow. Of course, they should not be paid members. This council
+would occupy a similar position in West African administration to that
+which the House of Commons occupies in English.
+
+Under this Grand Council there should be two sub-councils reporting to
+it, one a joint committee of English lawyers and medical men, the other
+a committee of the native chiefs. Neither of these councils should be
+paid, but sufficient should be granted them to pay their working
+expenses. The members of these sub-councils of the Grand Council should
+be appointed--the medical and legal committee by say, the Lord
+Chancellor and the College of Physicians respectively, and the committee
+of African chiefs by the chiefs in West Africa.
+
+I make no pretence at believing that either of these sub-councils for
+the first few years of their existence will be dove-cots--lawyers and
+doctors will always fight each other: but the lawyers will hold the
+doctors in and _vice versa_, and the common sense of the Grand Council
+will hold them both well down to practical politics. With the council of
+chiefs there will probably be less trouble, and this council will be an
+ambassador to the white government at headquarters capable of
+representing to it native opinion and native requirements.
+
+Representing the Grand Council and nominated by it, subject to the
+approval of the Crown, as represented by the Chief Secretary for the
+Colonies and the Privy Council, there must be one Governor-General for
+West Africa: he must be supreme commander of the land and sea forces,
+with the right of declaring peace and war, and concluding treaties with
+the native chiefs; he must be a proved expert in West African affairs;
+he must be paid, say, Ŗ5,000 a year; he must spend six months on the
+Coast on a tour of inspection, during which he must be accessible alike
+to the European and native. He may, if he sees fit, spend more than six
+months out there; but it is not advisable he should reside there
+permanently, for if he does so, he will assuredly get out of touch with
+the Grand Council, of which he should _ex officio_ be chairman or
+president. This grand council with its sub-councils is all that is
+required in England for the government of West Africa. It is not, as you
+see, an expensive system _per se_: with its power to raise supplies, it
+could vote itself sufficient to carry on its out-of-pocket expenses in
+the matter of clerks and goods inspectors. The connecting link between
+it and Africa is the Governor-General; between it and England, the Chief
+Secretary for the Colonies--not the Colonial, or Foreign, or any other
+existing Office: things it should be equal with, not subject to.
+
+Out in Africa, the Governor-General should be the representative of the
+English _raj_--the Ober Hoheit of England--and the head of the system of
+Landes Hoheit, represented by the African chiefs; in him the two must
+join. Under his control, on the European side, must be the few European
+officials required to administer the country locally. These must be
+carefully picked, experienced men, provided with sufficient power to
+enforce their rule with promptitude when it comes to details; but the
+policy of the Ober Hoheit should be the policy of the Governor and Grand
+Council, not of the individual official.
+
+Immediately in grade under the Governor-General should come a set of
+district commissioners or governors, one for each of the present
+colonies. These men should be the resident representatives of the
+Governor-General, and responsible to him for the affairs, trade and
+political, of their districts. These district commissioners should be
+paid Ŗ2,000 a year each, and have a term of residence on the Coast of
+twelve months, with six months' furlough at home on half pay, the other
+half of the pay going to the men who represent them during their absence
+at home--the senior sub-commissioners of their districts.[78]
+
+The next grade are the sub-commissioners. These are only required in the
+districts now termed Protectorates; the Europeanised coast towns to be
+under a different system I will sketch later. Well, these Protectorate
+districts should be divided up among sub-commissioners, who should each
+reside in his allotted district. They should be responsible directly to
+the district commissioner, and they should represent to him constantly
+the chiefs' council of the sub-district and the trade, and on the other
+hand represent trade and the Ober Hoheit things to the native chiefs.
+These men, therefore, will be the backbone of the system, and primarily
+on them will depend its success; so they must be expert men--well
+acquainted with the native culture state, and with the trade. Each of
+these sub-commissioners should have in his district, his own town, from
+which he should frequently make tours of inspection round his district
+at large; but this town should be what Sir George Goldie calls "a town
+of refuge." English law should rule in it absolutely, administered by an
+official, one of the class of men approved by the legal sub-council of
+the Grand Council. The sub-commissioner should also have in his town a
+medical staff of three men, nominated by the medical side of the
+sub-council of the Grand Council. These three (chief medical, assistant
+medical, and dispenser) should have a hospital provided, where they can
+carry on their work properly. Also in this town should be the military
+force sufficient to enforce rule in the district--either to go and
+prevent one chief bagging another chiefs belongings, or to assist a
+chief in a domestic crisis. It is impossible to say how large a military
+staff a sub-commissioner would require; some districts would require no
+more than fifty soldiers, while another might require 200. Details of
+this kind the Governor-General must decide; but whatever size this force
+may be, it should be composed of troops under efficient military
+control. I believe the West Indian troops to be the best for this
+service; but here again you will meet, if you take the trouble to
+inquire of people who ought to know, the greatest haziness of mind
+combined with an enormous difference of opinion. Some will tell you that
+the West Indians are no good, that they are cowardly and unfit for bush
+work, and require as many carriers as a white regiment. Others say the
+opposite, and hold forth on the evil of using raw savages as troops in
+such a country, and placing men who have been cast out on account of
+crime into positions of power and authority in the very districts
+wherein all the power they should have by rights would be to swing at
+the end of a rope.
+
+There is much to be said on both sides; the only thing I will say is
+that military affairs in West Africa are in much the same scrappy mess
+as civil, and require reorganisation. There is, no doubt, excellent
+fighting material in many West African tribes, and turbulent native
+spirits are all the better for military organisation and discipline; it
+is certain, however, that such men should be deported from districts
+wherein they have private scores to settle, and used elsewhere after
+they have been disciplined. If it were possible for the native regiments
+now being drilled in the hinterlands of our colonies out there to be
+used actively to guard our people from foreign aggression, there would
+be a good reason for having them, but recent events have demonstrated,
+in the Gold Coast hinterland for example, that they cannot, according to
+Government notions, be so employed. Therefore they are worse than
+useless, for they merely add to the unjustifiable aggressions on the
+native residents by aggressions of their own; such things as native
+police under the white Government side for the districts of the
+protectorate should not exist. They are a sort of wild fowl who will get
+you and themselves into more rows than they will ever get any one out
+of, and they will squeeze you and the native population into the
+bargain. The chiefs of the district should be responsible for the
+internal administration of justice among their own people. If a chief
+fails in this he should be removed, with the assistance of the military
+force at the command of the sub-commissioner. When, in fact, a chief is
+found to be going astray, the fact should be promptly brought before the
+council of chiefs; a definite short time, say a month, should be
+allowed them to bring him to his bearings, and if at the expiration of
+this time they fail to do so, without any further delay the
+sub-commissioner should step in. In a very short time the chiefs'
+council would see the advisability of keeping this from happening, and
+also see that it can only be prevented by enforcing good government
+among themselves.
+
+Well, this West Indian guard should of course be under its proper
+military officers, and at the disposal of the sub-commissioner, and well
+installed in barracks, and made generally as happy as circumstances will
+permit.
+
+Then again in each town which forms the centre of a sub-commissioner's
+district there should be representatives of any firms who may wish to
+trade there. They can each have their separate factories, or form a
+local association for working the trade of the district as it pleases
+them. I think it would be advisable that in each of these towns away in
+the interior there should be a warehouse, whereto all goods coming up
+for the separate trading firms should be delivered, and wherein all
+exports ready for transport to the coast should be lodged, and the
+figures concerning these things ascertained. This should be the business
+of the sub-commissioner's secretary, and he can be aided in it by a
+black clerk. But it would not be a custom-house, because customs, like
+native regiments, do not exist out there under this system.
+
+If any of the firms like to establish sub-factories in the district
+outside the town, they should have every facility impartially afforded
+them to do so. Any attack made on them by the natives should be promptly
+revenged, but outside the town in all trade matters the native law
+should rule under the administration of the local chief, with a power
+(in important cases--say, over Ŗ20 involved) of appeal to the chiefs'
+council, and from that, if need be to the sub-commissioner.
+
+Now in this town, acting with and directing the council of chiefs, you
+will have all that the hinterland districts in West Africa at present
+require for their administration and development, except, you will say,
+religion and education. As for the first, as represented by the
+missions, I think they will do best away from the rest, as I will
+presently attempt to explain. As for education, that will be in their
+hands too, and with them. The missionary stations about the district,
+however, will be under the direct control and protection of the
+sub-commissioner and his town. No gaol will be required there or
+elsewhere in West Africa; the sort of thing a gaol represents is better
+represented by a halter and convict labour gang. So much, as old Peter
+Heylin would say, for the sub-commission.
+
+The district commissioner for a colony and its hinterland should have a
+residence at one of the chief towns on the coast, making tours round to
+his sub-commissioners as occasion requires; and he should always be
+accessible both to his sub-commissioners and to the district chiefs. At
+his head town should be the headquarters of the military force required
+by his colony, and the headquarters of the labour service.
+
+We will now turn to the administration of the coast towns, places that
+have been long in our possession and have a sufficient white and
+Europeanised African population to justify us in regarding them as
+English possessions in the Landes Hoheit sense. These towns should be
+governed by municipality, and should be under English law, having
+accredited magistrates approved of by the Grand Council and paid, not
+by the municipalities, but by the Grand Council.
+
+Each municipality should occupy in the system an identical position to
+that occupied by the sub-commissioner in his town, and communicate with
+the district commissioner direct, receive all goods, and make returns of
+them to him. They should each have and be responsible for hospitals and
+schools within the town, and for its police, lighting, and sanitary
+affairs. Each municipality should be paid by the Government the same pay
+as a sub-commissioner, Ŗ1,000 a year. They should get their extra
+resources from a charge on the trade of the town at a fixed rate made by
+the Grand Council for all municipalities under the system.
+
+This system would do away with the division of our possessions, at
+present so misleading and vexatious and unnecessary, into Colonies and
+Protectorates, and substitute for that division the just division into
+regions under our Landes Ober Hoheit (municipalities), and those under
+our Ober Hoheit--(sub-commissioners' districts). Both alike would be
+under the Governor-General as representing the Grand Council.
+
+There still remains one important new development in our West African
+methods--the organisation of native labour. The institution of a regular
+and reliable labour supply seems to me one of the most vital things for
+the progress of West Africa. There is undoubtedly in West Africa an
+enormous supply of labour, and that the true negro can work and work
+well the Krumen have amply demonstrated. All that is required is method
+and organisation. This you could easily supply. If, for example, you
+were to direct those energies of yours which are now employed in raising
+native regiments in the hinterland to raising and regulating a native
+labour army, it would be better. A native regiment of soldiers is a
+thing you do not want in any hinterland district, whereas the native
+regiment of labourers is a thing you do want very badly.
+
+There is also in this connection another fact: while, under the present
+state of affairs, one colony will be choked with men anxious for work,
+and another colony will be starving for labour, if all the English
+colonies were united under one system, and a regular labour department
+were instituted, this would be obviated.
+
+There exist in West Africa two sources of labour supply, but I think the
+Labour Department had better deal with only one of them--the free paid
+labour--the other, the convict, would be better placed under the kind
+care of the municipalities.
+
+All persons convicted of offences other than capital, should be, at the
+discretion of the magistrates, sentenced to a fine, or so many weeks'
+labour. The whole of this labour should be devoted to the Public Works
+Department of the Municipality, not of the State, and above all, should
+not be sent away up into the hinterland, where there will be no one to
+look after it as convict labour requires. Quite apart from this, there
+should be the State Labour Department, whose jurisdiction would extend
+over both colony and hinterland, and whose white officials should be a
+distinct line in the service; one or more of these officials should be
+in every hinterland sub-commissioner's town. They would be recruiters
+and drillers of labourers, just as you now have recruiters and drillers
+of soldiers there; and a requisition should be made to all the chiefs,
+to draft into this labour army any person, under their rule, who might
+be anxious to serve as a labourer; and they should also have power to
+enrol any labour volunteer recruits that might come into the town,
+provided the chiefs could not show a satisfactory reason against their
+so doing. This labour army should be divided up into suitably sized
+gangs, with a head man elected by his gang, and be employed in the
+transport work required by the Government, or let out by the Government
+to private individuals requiring labour within the district, or drafted
+to other English colonies on the Coast, if occasion required, to do
+certain jobs--I do not say for certain spaces of time, because piecework
+is the best system for West Africa. An attempt should be made gradually
+to induce the hinterland chiefs to adopt the Kru social system, wherein
+every man serves so many years as a labourer, then, about the age of
+thirty, joins the army and becomes a compound soldier-policeman, ending
+up in honour and glory as a local magistrate. But it must be remembered
+that domestic slavery is not a great institution among the Kru tribes,
+as it is amongst the hinterland tribes in our colonies; the Kru system
+could not, therefore, be immediately introduced.
+
+We now come to the question of where the revenue is to come from to
+support this system. There is no difficulty about that in itself; the
+difficulty comes in in the method to be employed in its collection. When
+one has a chartered trading company it is, of course, a simple matter;
+when you have a Crown Colony it is done by means of the custom-house
+system. The alternative system, however, is not a chartered company;
+under it individual firms, so long as they can show sufficient capital
+and good faith, would work the details of their trade out there as
+freely and privately as in England. I think every effort should be made
+to do away in West Africa with the custom-house system as it exists in
+English Crown Colonies. In Cameroon it is better, but in our Crown
+Colonies and also in the Niger Coast Protectorate it is ruinous to the
+tempers of ship masters and shippers, and the cause of a great waste of
+time--decidedly one of the main causes of the undue length of voyages to
+and from the Coast.
+
+It seems to me that the revenue of our West African possessions must be
+a charge on the trade; and that this charge should, as much as possible,
+be collected in Europe from the shippers instead of from their
+representatives on the Coast. If I were king in Babylon, I would make
+all the trade to West Africa pass through Liverpool, and pay its customs
+there to a custom-house of the Grand Council, or through the English
+ports of the other chambers represented on the Grand Council--each
+chamber being responsible for the trade of its port. I am aware that
+this would cause difficulty with the increasing continental trade; but
+this would be obviated by affiliating Hamburg and Havre to the Council
+and giving into their hands the collections of the dues at those ports.
+The Grand Council should fix annually the amount of the trade tax, and
+it should have at its disposal for this matter the figures sent home by
+the separate district commissioners in West Africa. The sub-commissioner
+of a district should know the amount of trade his district was doing,
+and be paid a commission on it to stimulate his interest. If the goods
+used in his district were delivered at one warehouse in his town, he
+would have little difficulty in getting the figures, which he should
+pass on to the district commissioner, who should forward them to the
+Grand Council with report in duplicate to the Governor-General, so that
+that officer might keep his finger on the pulse of the prosperity of
+each district; similarly, the municipalities should report to him the
+trade done in the towns under their control.
+
+In addition, the Government, that is to say, the Grand Council, should
+take over the monopoly of the tobacco import and the timber export. By
+using tobacco in the same way as European governments use coinage, an
+immense revenue could be very cheaply obtained. The Grand Council should
+sell the tobacco to the individual traders who work the West African
+markets, allowing no other tobacco to be used in the trade; this revenue
+also could be collected in Europe.
+
+The timber industry should, I think, be under governmental control, both
+for the sake of providing the Government with revenue and for the sake
+of protecting the forests from destruction in those districts where
+forest destruction is a danger to the common weal, by weakening the
+forest barriers against the Sahara.
+
+The return that the Government should make for these monopolies to the
+independent trader should be, among other things, transport. In the
+course of a few years the Government would have in hand a sufficient
+surplus to build a pier across the Gold Coast surf. It is possible to
+build piers across the West Coast surf, for the French have done it. I
+would not advocate one great and mighty pier, that ocean-going steamers
+could go alongside, for all the Gold Coast ports, but a set of
+=T=-headed piers where surf boats or lighters could discharge, and the
+employment of stout steam tugs to tow surf boats and lighters to and fro
+between the lighters and the pier.
+
+Then again, every mile of available waterway inland should be utilised,
+and patrolled by Government cargo boats of the lawn-mower or flat-iron
+brand, as the Chargeurs-Reunis are subsidised to patrol the Ogowé. On
+the Gold Coast you have the Volta and the Ancobra available for this; in
+Sierra Leone and Lagos you have many waterways penetrating inland.
+
+Land transport should also be in the hands of the Government, and goods
+delivered free of extra charge at the towns of the sub-commissioners;
+this could be done by the Labour Department. When sufficient surplus
+revenue was in hand, light railways on the French system should be
+built, similarly delivering, free of freight, the goods belonging to the
+inland registered traders, but charging freight for passengers and local
+goods traffic. A telegraph and postal service should also be another
+source of revenue, if thrown open at a low charge to the general public.
+If there is a telegraph office in West Africa, where telegrams can be
+sent at a reasonable rate, the general public will throw away a lot of
+money on it in a fiscally fascinating way.
+
+These various sources of revenue will place in the hands of the Grand
+Council a sufficient revenue, and if that revenue is expended by them in
+developing methods of transport, I am confident that the trade of the
+district, in the hands of the private firms, will healthily expand,
+alike rapidly and continuously, and thereby supply more revenue, which,
+expended with equal wisdom, will again increase the trade and prosperity
+of the region, and make West Africa into a truly great possession.
+
+The things I depend on for the development of West Africa, are mainly
+two. First, the sub-commissioner's town, acting in fellowship with the
+chiefs' council of the district. The example of that town will stimulate
+the best of the chiefs to emulation; it will by every self-respecting
+chief, be regarded as stylish to have clean wide streets and shops, a
+telegraph and post-office, and things like that. Seeing that his elder
+brother, the sub-commissioner, has a line of telegraph connecting him
+with the district commission town, he will want a line of telegraph too.
+By all means let him have it; let him have the electric light and a
+telephone, if he feels he wants it, and will pay for it; but don't force
+these things, let them come, natural like. The great thing, however, in
+the sub-commissioner's town is that it should be so ruled and governed
+that it does not become a thing like our Coast towns now, sink-holes of
+moral iniquity, that stink in the nose of a respectable African--things
+he hates to see his sons and daughters and people go down into.
+
+Secondly, I depend on municipal Government on the lines I have laid down
+for the Coast towns. The Government of these municipalities would be in
+the hands of the representatives of the trading firms, and the more
+important native traders--people, as I hold, perfectly capable of
+dealing with affairs, and having a community of interests.
+
+The great difficulty in arranging any system for the government of West
+Africa lies not in the true difficulties this region presents, but in
+the fictitious difficulties that are the growth of years of mutual
+misunderstanding and misrepresentation. That great mass of mutual
+distrust, so that to-day down there white man distrusts white man and
+black, black man distrusts black man and white, may seem on a
+superficial review to be justified. But if you go deeper you will find
+that this distrust is the mere product of folly and ignorance, and is
+therefore removable.
+
+The great practical difficulty lies in arranging a system whereby the
+white trader can work on every legitimate line absolutely free from
+governmental hindrance. I have too great a respect for the West Coast
+traders to publish any criticism on them. I hold that the competition
+among them is too severe for them to face the present state of West
+Africa and prosper as men should who run so great a risk of early death
+as the West Coast trader runs. I should like to know who profits by
+their internecine war; I think no one but the native buyers of their
+goods. Again now, under the present Crown Colony system, the traders,
+knowing they are the people who have paid for the Government for years,
+who have given it the money it lives on, naturally ask for something
+back in the way of local improvements. The Government has now no money
+to carry out these improvements, unless it borrows it. The Government as
+at present existing must necessarily waste that borrowed money just as
+it has wasted the money the traders have paid it; therefore the
+consequences of improvements under the present system must be debt,
+which the traders must pay in the end. I would therefore urge the
+traders to abandon a policy of demanding improvements and protection in
+their trade relationships with the natives, such as ordinances against
+adulteration of produce, &c., and to realise that by gaining these
+things they are but enslaving themselves in the future. Let them rather
+adopt the policy of altering the form of government before they proceed
+to urge further governmental expenditure.
+
+If the traders require a dry-nurse system, let them formulate one in
+place of the one sketched above. I do not, however, think they want
+anything of the kind, unless they are indeed degenerate; but, if they
+do, I beg them to bear in mind that you cannot have an Alexandra
+feeding bottle and a latch key; they must choose one or the other. At
+present, the Crown Colony system gives neither. Under it the trader is
+treated like a child, a neglected child, one of those interesting but
+unfortunate children who have to support an elderly relative, who would
+be all the better for a cheap funeral.
+
+Upon the missionary and educational side of the system I have advocated
+I need not enlarge. Just as trade should go on under it free, so should
+mission effort; there should be no governmental forcing of either, but
+it should be steadily borne in mind that the regeneration of the
+considerable amount of broken up stuff which exists in the Coast town
+regions--the Africans who have lost their old culture and their old
+Fetish regulation or conduct without being completely Europeanised--is a
+work that can only be effected by the missionary, and therefore in the
+hands of the missions should be placed the whole education department,
+with the one demand on it from the Government that in their schools
+every scholar should have the opportunity of acquiring a sound education
+in the rudiments of English reading, writing and arithmetic. Give him
+this knowledge, and your brilliant young African has demonstrated that
+he can rise to any examination such as an European university offers
+him. Under the system I advocate there need be no limitation as to
+colour in the officials employed in the municipalities. In the
+sub-commissioners' towns the head officials must be Englishmen, but
+among the regions under the Landes Hoheit in the hinterland, Africans
+educated as doctors or as traders could have grand careers provided they
+did honest work.
+
+The consideration of the African side of this system of administration
+is a thing into which--after all the long recitation I have inflicted on
+you concerning African religion and law--I am not justified in plunging
+here. I will merely, therefore, lay before you a statement of African
+Common Law, so that you may see the African principle through which the
+Landes Hoheit--the government of Africa by Africans--would work. I am
+confident that the thing--the African principle--is so sound that it
+could work; there is no need for us to put our Commerce under it, any
+more than there is need that we should attempt to put the African's
+private property under our own law; but a healthy Commerce and a healthy
+Law should co-operate, and can co-operate.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [77] Preface by Sir George Goldie to Vandeleur's _Campaigning on the
+   Upper Nile and Niger_, 1898.
+
+   [78] The time which a man ought to be expected to remain in West Africa
+   is difficult to determine--representatives of trading firms are expected
+   to remain out two years, and the mortality among them is certainly no
+   higher than among the officials with their twelve months' service. It is
+   contended by the commercial party that it takes a man several months
+   after returning from furlough to get into working order again, that
+   under the twelve months' system no sooner has he done this than he is
+   off on furlough again, in short that the system is foolish and wasteful
+   in the extreme. On the other hand the advocates of the short service
+   plan contend that a man is not fit for work at all after twelve months
+   in West Africa, and that if he is not definitely ill, he has at any rate
+   lost all energy. Personally, I fancy it depends on the individual, and
+   that with a definite policy the short service plan will be quite safe.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+AFRICAN PROPERTY
+
+     Wherein some attempt is made to set down the divers kinds of
+     property that exist among the people of the true Negro race in
+     Western Africa, and the law whereby it is governed.
+
+
+In speaking on the subject of African property and the laws which guard
+it in its native state, I must, in the space at my disposal here,
+confine myself to speaking of these things as they are in one division
+of the many different races of human beings that inhabit that vast
+continent of Africa; and, in order to present the affair more clearly, I
+must take them as they exist in their most highly developed state,
+namely, among the people of the true Negro stock, for it is among these
+people that pure African culture has reached so far its fullest state of
+development.
+
+The distribution zone of this true Negro stock cannot yet be fixed with
+any approach to accuracy, but we know that the seaboard of the regions
+inhabited by the true Negro is that vast stretch of the African West
+Coast from a point south of the Gambia River to a point just north of
+Cameroon River, in the region of the Rio del Rey. We can safely say,
+within this region you will find the true Negro, but we cannot safely
+say how far inland, or how far down south of the Rio del Rey we shall
+find him. That this stock extends through up to the Nile regions;
+that it stretches far away south of the Nile in the interior of the
+Upper Congo regions, appearing in the Azenghi; that it stretches south
+on the coast line below the Rio del Rey, appearing as the so-called
+noble tribes of the Bight of Panavia, the Ajumba, Mpongwe, Igalwa, and
+also as Osheba, Befangh, will be demonstrated I believe when we have a
+sufficient supply of ethnological observers in Africa. But it must be
+remembered that you can only get the true Negro unadulterated in the
+coast regions of Western Africa between the Rivers Gambia and Cameroon.
+
+     [Illustration: A HOUSA. [_To face page 420._]
+
+In the fringe regions of the West Soudan you have an adulterated form of
+him--adulterated in idea with Mohammedanism, and the Berber races; to
+the east and to the south with that other great African race division,
+the Bantu. I venture to think that Bantu adulteration mainly takes the
+form of language. We have in our own continent many instances of races
+of greater strength and conquering power adopting the language of the
+weaker peoples whom they have conquered, when the language has been one
+more adapted to the needs of life and more widely diffused than their
+own, and therefore more suited to commercial intercourse.
+
+The Negro languages are poor, and, moreover, they differ among
+themselves so gravely that one tribe cannot understand another tribe
+that lives even next door to it. I know 147 such languages in the region
+of the Niger Delta alone. Now this sort of thing means interpreters, and
+is hindersome to commercial intercourse, and therefore you always find
+the true Negro, when he is in a district where he has opportunities of
+trading with other peoples, adopting their language, and making for use
+in public life a corrupt English, Portuguese, or Arabic lingo.
+Similarly, it seems to me, he has in the regions he has conquered in
+Southern and Central Africa, adopted Bantu, and much the same thing has
+happened, and is still happening, there, as happened in Southern and
+Central Europe. Just as the powerful barbarian stocks adopted Latin in a
+way that must keep Priscian's head still in bandages and to this day
+seriously mar his happiness in the Elysian fields, so have the true
+Negroes adopted the flexible Bantu languages. But it would be as
+unscientific to regard a Spaniard or a Frenchman as a full-blooded
+ancient Roman, as to regard many of the Negro tribes now speaking Bantu
+language as Bantu men.
+
+The Negro has, moreover, not only adopted Bantu languages in some
+regions, such as the Mpongwe, for example, but he has also adopted to a
+certain extent Bantu culture. I am sure those of you who have lived
+among the true Negroes and true Bantu, will agree with me that these
+cultures differ materially. Africa, so far as I know it, namely, from
+Sierra Leone to Benguela, smells generally rather strong, but
+particularly so in those districts inhabited by the true Negro. This
+pre-eminence the true Negroes attain to by leaving the sanitary matters
+of villages and towns in the hands of Providence. The Bantu culture
+looks after the cleaning and tidying of the village streets to a
+remarkable degree, though by no means more clean in the houses, which,
+in both cultures, are quite as clean and tidy as you will find in
+England. Again, in the Bantu culture you will find the slaves living in
+villages apart: inside the true Negro they live with their owners; and
+there are other points which mark the domestic cultures of these people
+as being different from each other, which I need not detain you with
+now. All these points in Bantu domestic culture the true Negro will
+adopt, as well as language; but there seem to be two points he does not
+readily adopt, or rather two points in his own culture to which he
+clings. One is the religious: in Bantu you find a great female god, who,
+for practical purposes, is more important than the great male god, in so
+far as she rules mundane affairs. In the true Negro the great gods are
+male. There are great female gods, but none of them occupy a position
+equal to that occupied by Nzambi, as you find the Bantu great female god
+called among the people who are undoubtedly true Bantu, the Fjort. The
+other, is the form of the State, and one important part of that form is
+the institution in the Negro tribes of a regular military organisation,
+with a regular War Lord, not one and the same with the Peace Lord.
+
+     [Illustration: HOUSE PROPERTY IN KACONGO.]
+
+     [Illustration: BUBIES OF FERNANDO PO. [_To face page 423._]
+
+This, I am aware, is not the customary or fashionable view of race
+distribution in Africa, but allow me to recall to your remembrance one
+of the most fascinating books ever written, _The Adventures of Andrew
+Battel, of Leigh in Essex_, who for eighteen years lived among the
+districts of the Lower Congo.
+
+I do this in order to show that I am not theorising in this matter.
+Andrew Battel left London on a ship sweetly named _The May Morning_, and
+having a consort named the _Dolphin_--they were pinnaces of fifty tons
+each--on the 20th of April, 1589. With very little delay they fell into
+divers disasters, and Andrew became a prisoner in the hands of the
+Portuguese at Loanda. He had a very bad time of it, the Portuguese then
+regarding all Englishmen as pirates and nothing more, except heretics
+and vermin. Andrew, with the enterprise and common sense of our race,
+escaped several times from captivity, and, with the stupidity of our
+race fell into it again, but his great escape was when he fell in with
+the Ghagas. Well, these Ghagas, Andrew Battel and the Portuguese
+historians say, were a fearful people, who came from behind Sierra
+Leone, and when the Kingdom of Congo was discovered by Diego Caõ in
+1484, the Ghagas were attacking it so severely that, but for the timely
+arrival of the Portuguese and the help they gave Congo, there would in a
+very short time have been no Kingdom of Congo left to discover; and to
+this day Dr. Blyden, who went there on a Government mission, says that
+up by Fallaba, in the Sierra Leone hinterland, you will now and then see
+a Ghaga--a man feared, a man of whom the country people do not know
+where his home is, nor what he eats or how he lives, but from whom they
+shrink as from a superior terrible form of human being--a remnant, or
+remainder over, of those people whose very name struck terror throughout
+Central Equatorial Africa in the 15th century, when, for some reason we
+do not know, they made a warlike migration down among the peaceful
+feeble Bantu.
+
+If you will carefully study the account given of the organisation of the
+Ghagas and also of the organisation of the Kingdom of Congo, I think you
+will see that in the Ghagas you have a true Negro State form, while in
+the Congo Kingdom you have something different; something that is
+nowadays called Bantu. What became of the Ghagas when foiled by the
+Portuguese in destroying the Kingdom of Congo is not exactly known, but
+there is a definite ground for thinking that, modified by intermarriage
+and a different environment, they split up, and are now represented by
+the warlike South African tribes and East African tribes, such as the
+Matabele, and the Massai, and so on. The modification of this portion of
+the true Negro stem in the south and the east is akin to the
+modification the stem has undergone nearer to its true home on the West
+Coast of Africa, where to the north of Sierra Leone and behind the coast
+regions of the Ivory, Gold, and Slave Coasts it has, by admixture with
+the Berber tribes of the Western Soudan, produced the Black Moors,
+namely the Mandingo, the Hausa, and Oullaf. These Black Moors of the
+Western Soudan have attained to a high pitch of barbaric culture; it
+appears to be a further development of the true Negro culture, but it is
+so suffused with the Mohammedan idea and law that it is not in this
+state that we can best study the native culture of the pure Negro.
+Neither can we study it well in those south and east regions where it
+has adopted Bantu language and culture to a certain extent.
+
+I will not, however, attempt to enter here upon the question of the
+continental distribution of the Negro and Bantu stocks; I will merely
+beg observers of African tribes to note carefully whether their tribe is
+given to street-cleaning, to keeping slaves in separate villages, or to
+venerating a great female god. If it is, it has got a Bantu culture; if,
+in addition, it has a regular military organisation, or a keen
+commercial spirit, or a certain ability to rule over the tribes round
+it, I beg they will suspect Negro blood and do their best to give us
+that tribe's migration history; and then we may in future times be able
+to settle the question of race distribution on better lines than our
+present state of knowledge allows of. Having said that the law and
+institutions of the true Negro stock cannot best be studied in those
+regions where they are adulterated by alien cultures, it remains to say
+where they can best be studied. I think that undoubtedly this region is
+that of the Oil Rivers.
+
+The thing you must always bear in mind when observing institutions and
+so on from Sierra Leone down to Lagos, is that the fertile belt between
+the salt sea of the Bight of Benin and the sand sea of Sahara is but a
+narrow band of forest and fertile country, while, when you get below
+Lagos--Lagos itself is a tongue of the Western Soudan coming down to the
+sea--you are in the true heart of Africa, the Equatorial Forest Belt;
+and that it is in this belt that you will get your materials at their
+purest. Therefore take the regions inhabited by the true Negro. In the
+regions from Sierra Leone to the Gold Coast, you have, it is true, not
+much white influence or adulteration, mainly because of the rock-reefed
+shore being dangerous to navigators. There is in this region undoubtedly
+a great and yearly increasing so-called Arab, but really Mohammedanised
+Berber, influence working on the true Negro. The natives themselves have
+their State-form in a state of wreckage from the destruction of the old
+Empire of Meli, which fell, from reasons we do not know, some time in
+the 16th century. We have, however, miserably little information on this
+particular region of Sierra Leone, the Pepper and Ivory Coasts, owing to
+its never having been worked at by a competent ethnologist; but the
+accounts we have of it show that the secret societies have here got the
+upper hand to an abnormal extent for the Negro state. Then we come to
+the Gold Coast region which has been so excellently worked at by the
+late Sir A. B. Ellis. Here you have a heavy amount of adulteration in
+idea, and, moreover, the long-continued white influence--1435-1898--has
+decidedly tended to a disorganisation of the Negro State-form, and to an
+undue development of the individual chief; nevertheless the law-form now
+existent on the Gold Coast is, when tested against a knowledge of the
+pure Negro law-form as found in the Oil Rivers, almost unaltered, and I
+think if you will carefully study that valuable book, Sarbar's _Fanti
+Customary Law_, you will also see that the State-form is identical in
+essence with that of the Oil Rivers--the House system.
+
+The House is a collection of individuals; I should hesitate to call it a
+developed family. I cannot say it is a collection of human beings,
+because the very dogs and canoes and so on that belong to it are part of
+it in the eye of the law, and capable therefore alike of embroiling it
+and advancing its interests. These Houses are bound together into groups
+by the Long ju-ju proper to the so-called secret society, common to the
+groups of houses. The House itself is presided over by what is called,
+in white parlance, a king, and beneath him there are four classes of
+human beings in regular rank, that is to say, influence in council:
+firstly, the free relations of the king, if he be a free man himself,
+which is frequently not the case; if he be a slave, the free people of
+the family he is trustee for; secondly, the free small people who have
+placed themselves under the protection of the House, rendering it in
+return for the assistance and protection it affords them service on
+demand; the third and fourth classes are true slave classes, the higher
+one in rank being that called the Winnaboes or Trade boys, the lower the
+pull-away boys and the plantation hands.[79] The best point in it, as a
+system, is that it gives to the poorest boy who paddles an oil canoe a
+chance of becoming a king.
+
+Property itself in West Africa, and as I have reason to believe from
+reports in other parts of tropical Africa that I am acquainted with, is
+firmly governed and is divisible into three kinds. Firstly, ancestral
+property connected with the office of headmanship, the Stool, as this
+office is called in the true Negro state, the Cap, as it is called down
+in Bas Congo; secondly, family property, in which every member of the
+family has a certain share, and on which he, she, or it has a claim;
+thirdly, private property, that which is acquired or made by a man or
+woman by their personal exertions, over and above that which is earned
+by them in co-operation with other members of their family which becomes
+family property, and that which is gained by gifts or made in trade by
+the exercise of a superior trading ability.
+
+Every one of these forms of property is equally sacred in the eye of the
+African law. The property of the Stool must be worked for the Stool;
+working it well, increasing it, adds to the importance of the Stool, and
+makes the king who does so popular; but he is trustee, not owner, of the
+Stool property, and his family don't come in for that property on his
+death, for every profit made by the working of Stool property is like
+this itself the property of the Stool, and during the king's life he
+cannot legally alienate it for his own personal advantage, but can only
+administer it for the benefit of the Stool.
+
+The king's power over the property of the family and the private
+property of the people under his rule, consists in the right of Ban, but
+not arričre Ban. Family property is much the same as regards the laws
+concerning it as Stool property. The head of the family is the trustee
+of it. If he is a spendthrift, or unlucky in its management, he is
+removed from his position. Any profit he may make with the assistance of
+a member of his own family becomes family property; but of course any
+profit he may make with the assistance of his free wives or wife, a
+person who does not belong to his family, or with the assistance of an
+outsider, may become his own. Private property acquired in the ways I
+have mentioned is equally sacred in the eyes of the law. I do not
+suppose you could find a single human being, slave or free, who had not
+some private property of his or her very own. Amongst that very
+interesting and valuable tribe, the Kru, where the family organisation
+is at its strictest, you can see the anxiety of the individual Kruman to
+secure for himself a little portion of his hard-earned wages and save it
+from the hands of his family elders. The Kruman's wages are paid to him,
+or changed by him, into cloths and sundry merchandise, and he is not
+paid off until the end of his term of work. So he has to hurry up in
+order to appropriate to himself as much as he can on the boat that takes
+him back to his beloved "We" country, and industriously make for himself
+garments out of as much of his cotton goods as he can; for even a man's
+family, even in Kru country, will not take away his shirt and trousers,
+but I am afraid there is precious little else that the Kruman can save
+from their rapacity. What he can save in addition to these, he informs
+me, he gives to his mother, or failing his mother, to a favourite
+sister, who looks after it and keeps it for him, she being, woman-like,
+more fit to quarrel if need be with the family elders than he is
+himself. But all private property once secured is sacred, very sacred,
+in the African State-form. I do not know from my own investigations, nor
+have I been able to find evidence in the investigations of other
+observers, of any king, priesthood, or man, who would openly dare
+interfere with the private property of the veriest slave in his
+district, diocese, or household. I know this seems a risky thing to
+say, and I do not like to say it because I feel that if I were a betting
+man I could make a good thing over betting on it, for experience has
+taught me that every time an African's property is taken by a fellow
+African under native law, and in times of peace, it is taken after it is
+confiscated by its original owner, either in bankruptcy or crime. You
+will hear dozens of accounts of how everything an African possessed was
+seized on, etc., but if you look into them you will find in every case
+that the individual so cleaned out owed it all, and frequently far more,
+before he or she fell into the hands of the Official Receiver, the local
+chief.
+
+One of the most common causes of an individual's entire estate being
+seized upon is a conviction for witchcraft. Every form of property in
+Africa is liable to be called on to meet its owner's debts, and the
+witch's is too heavy a debt for any individual's private estate to meet
+and leave a surplus. For not only does the witch owe to the family of
+the person, of whose murder he or she is convicted, the price of that
+life, but it is felt by the Community that the witch has not been found
+out in the first offence, and so every miscellaneous affliction that has
+recently happened is put down to the convicted witch's account. Mind
+you, I do not say _all_ these claims are _satisfied_ out of the estate
+of the witch deceased, (witches are always deceased by the authorities
+with the utmost despatch after conviction) because the said property has
+during the course of the trial got into the hands of Officialdom and has
+a natural tendency to stop there. But one thing is certain, there is no
+residuary estate for the witch's own relations. Not that for the matter
+of that they would dare claim it in any case, lest they should be
+involved with the witch and accused as accomplices.
+
+Still, legally, the witch's relations have the consolation of knowing
+that, if things go smoothly and they evade being accused of a share in
+the crime, they cannot be called on to meet the debts incurred by the
+witch. From a family point of view better a dead witch than a live
+speculative trader.
+
+The reason of this delicate little point of law I confess gave me more
+trouble to discover than it ought to have done, for the explanation was
+quite simple, namely, the witch's body had been taken over by the
+creditors.
+
+Now, according to African law, if you take a man's life, or, for the
+matter of that, his body, dead or alive, in settlement of a debt, your
+claim is satisfied. You have got legal tender for it. I remember coming
+across an amusing demonstration of this law in the colony of Cameroon.
+There was, and still is, a windy-headed native trader there who for
+years has hung by the hair of loans over the abyss of bankruptcy. All
+the local native traders knew that man, but there arrived a new trader
+across from Calabar district who did not. Like the needle to the pole,
+our friend turned to him for a loan in goods and got it, with the usual
+result namely, excuses, delays, promises--in fact anything but payment;
+enraged at this, and determined to show the Cameroon traders at large
+how to carry on business on modern lines, the young Calabar trader
+called in the Government and the debtor was gently but firmly confined
+to the Government grounds. Of course he was not put in the chain-gang,
+not being a serious criminal, but provided with a palm-mat broom he
+proceeded to do as little as possible with it, and lead a contented,
+cheerful existence.
+
+It rather worried the Calabar man to see this, and also that his drastic
+measure caused no wild rush to him of remonstrating relations of the
+imprisoned debtor; indeed they did not even turn up to supply the said
+debtor with food, let alone attempt to buy him off by discharging his
+debt. In place of them, however, one by one the Cameroon traders came to
+call on the Calabar merchant, all in an exceedingly amiable state of
+mind and very civil. They said it gave them pleasure to observe his
+brisk method of dealing with that man, and it was a great relief to
+their minds to see a reliable man of wealth like himself taking charge
+of that debtor's affairs, for now they saw the chance of seeing the
+money they had years ago advanced, and of which they had not, so far,
+seen a fraction back, neither capital nor interest. The Calabar man grew
+pale and anxious as the accounts of the debts he had made himself
+responsible for came in, and he knew that if the debtor died on his
+hands, that is to say in the imprisonment he had consigned him to, he
+would be obliged to pay back all those debts of the Cameroon man, for
+the German Government have an intelligent knowledge of native law and
+carry it out in Cameroon. Still the Calabar man did not like climbing
+down and letting the man go, so he supplied him with food and worried
+about his state of health severely. This that villainous Cameroon fellow
+found out, and was therefore forthwith smitten with an obscure abdominal
+complaint, a fairly safe thing to have as my esteemed friend Dr. Plehn
+was absent from that station, and therefore not able to descend on the
+malingerer with nauseous drugs. It is needless to say that at this
+juncture the Calabar man gave in, and let the prisoner out, freeing
+himself thereby from responsibility beyond his own loss, but returning a
+poorer and a wiser man to his own markets, and more assured than ever of
+the villainy of the whole Dualla tribe.
+
+In any case legally the relatives of a debtor seized or pawned can
+redeem, if they choose, the person or the body by paying off the debt
+with the interest, 33-1/2 per cent. per annum, to the common rate. Great
+sacrifices and exertions are made by his family to redeem almost every
+debtor, and the family property is strained to its utmost on his or her
+behalf; but in the case of a witch it is different, no set of relatives
+wish to redeem a convicted witch, who, reduced by the authorities to a
+body, and that mostly in bits and badly damaged, is not a thing
+desirable. No! they say Society has got him and we are morally certain
+he must have been illegitimate, for such a thing as a witch never
+happened in our family before, and if we show the least interest in the
+remains we shall get accused ourselves. Of course if a man or woman's
+life is taken on any other kind of accusation save witchcraft, the
+affair is on a different footing. The family then forms a higher
+estimate of the deceased's value than they showed signs of to him or her
+when living, and they try to screw that value to the uttermost farthing
+out of the person who has killed their kinsman. Society at large only
+regards you for doing this as a fool man to think so highly of the
+departed, whose true value it knows to be far below that set on him. In
+the case of a living man taken for debt, he is a slave to his creditor,
+a pawn slave, but not on the same footing as a boughten slave; he has
+not the advantages of a true slave in the matter of succeeding to the
+wealth or position of the house, but against that he can be a free man
+the moment his debts are paid. This may be a theoretical possibility
+only, just as it would be theoretical for me to expect my family to bail
+me out if the bail were a question of a million sterling, but in legal
+principle the redemption is practicable.
+
+In the case of taking a dead body another factor is introduced. By
+taking charge of and interring a body, you become the executor to the
+deceased man's estate. I have known three sets of relatives arrive with
+three coffins for one body, and a consequential row, for a good deal can
+be made by an executor; but if you make yourself liable for the body's
+liabilities care is needed, and there is no reckless buying of bodies
+with whose private affairs you are not conversant, in West Africa. It is
+far too wild a speculation for such quiet commercial men as my African
+friends are. Hence it comes that a Negro merchant on a trading tour away
+from his home, overtaken by death in a town where he is not known, is
+not buried, but dried and carefully put outside the town, or on the road
+to the market, the road he came by, so that any one of his friends or
+relations, who may perchance come some time that way, can recognise the
+remains. If they do they can take the remains home and bury them if they
+like, or bury them there, free and welcome, but the local County Council
+will do nothing of the kind. A nice thing a set of respectable elders,
+or as their Fanti, name goes Paynim, would let themselves in for by
+burying the body of a gentleman who happened to have four murders, ten
+adultery cases, a crushing mass of debt, and no earthly assets save a
+few dilapidated women, bad ones at that, and a whole pack of children
+with the Kraw Kraw, or the Guinea worm, or both together and including
+the Yaws.
+
+This brings us to another way besides witchcraft whereby a gentleman in
+West Africa can throw away a fine fortune by paying his debts, namely,
+the so-called adultery. Adultery out there, I hastily beg to remark, may
+be only brushing against a woman in a crowded market place or bush path,
+or raising a hand in defence against a virago. It's the wrong word, but
+the customary one to use for touching women, and it is exceedingly
+expensive and a constant source of danger to the most respectable of
+men, the demands made on its account being exorbitant: sometimes so
+exorbitant that I have known of several men who, in order to save their
+family from ruin--for if their own private property were insufficient to
+meet it the family property would be liable for the balance--have given
+themselves up as pawn-slaves to their accusers.
+
+There is but one check on this evil of frivolous and false accusation,
+and that is that when there have been many cases of it in a district,
+the cult of the Law God of that region gets a high moral fit on and
+comes down on that district and eats the adultery. I need not say that
+this is to the private benefit of no layman in the district, for
+notoriously it is an expensive thing to have the Law God down, and a
+thing every district tries to avoid. There is undoubtedly great evil in
+this law, which presses harder on private and family property than
+anything else, harder even than accusations of witchcraft; but it
+safeguards the women, enabling them to go to and fro about the forest
+paths, and in the villages and market places at home, and far from home,
+without fear of molestation or insult, bar that which they get up
+amongst themselves.
+
+The methods employed in enforcing the payment of a debt are appeal to
+the village headman or village elders; or, after giving warning, the
+seizure of property belonging to the debtor if possible, or if not, that
+of any other person belonging to his village will do. This procedure
+usually leads to palaver, and the elders decide whether the amount
+seized is equal to the debt or whether it is excessive; if excessive the
+excess has to be returned, and there is also the appeal to the Law
+Society. In the regions of the Benin Bight we have also, as in India,
+the custom of collecting debts by Dharna. In West Africa the creditor
+who sits at the debtor's door is bound to bring with him food for one
+day, this is equivalent to giving notice; after the first day the debtor
+has to supply him with food, for were he to die he would be answerable
+for his life and the worth thereof in addition to the original debt. If
+I mention that there is no community of goods between a man and his wife
+(women owning and holding property under identical conditions to men in
+the eye of the law), I think I shall have detained you more than long
+enough on the subject of the laws of property in West Africa. You will
+see that the thing that underlies them is the conception that every
+person is the member of some family, and all the other members of the
+family are responsible for him and to him and he to them; and every
+family is a member of some house, and all the other members of the house
+are responsible for and to the families of which it is composed.
+
+The natural tendency of this is for property to become joint property,
+family property, or to be absorbed into family property. A man by his
+superior ability acquires, it may be, a considerable amount of private
+property, but at his death it passes into the hands of the family. There
+are Wills, but they are not the rule, and they more often refer to an
+appointment of a successor in position than to a disposal of effects.
+The common practice of gifts there supplies the place of Wills with us;
+a rich man gives his friend or his favourite wife, child, or slave,
+things during his life, while he can see that they get it, and does not
+leave the matter till after his death. The good point about the African
+system is that it leaves no person uncared for; there are no unemployed
+starving poor, every individual is responsible for and to his fellow
+men and women who belong to the same community, and the naturally strong
+instinct of hospitality, joined with the knowledge that the stranger
+within the gates belongs to a whole set of people who will make palaver
+if anything happens to him, looks well after the safety of wanderers in
+Negro land. The bad point is, of course that the system is cumbersome,
+and, moreover, it tends, with the operation of the general African law
+of _mutterrecht_, the tracing of descent through females, to prevent the
+building up of great families. For example, you have a great man, wise,
+learned, just, and so on; he is esteemed in his generation, but at his
+death his property does not go to the sons born to him by one of his
+wives, who is a great woman of a princely line, but to the eldest son of
+his sister by the same mother as his own. This sister's mother and his
+own mother was a slave wife of his father's; this, you see, keeps good
+blood in a continual state of dilution with slave blood. The son he has
+by his aristocratic wife may come in for the property of her brother,
+but her brother belongs to a different family, so he does not take up
+his father's greatness and carry it on with the help his father's wealth
+could give him in the father's family. I do not say the system is unjust
+or anything like that, mind; I merely say that it does not tend to the
+production of a series of great men in one family.
+
+Nevertheless, when once you have mastered the simple fundamental rules
+that underlie the native African idea of property they must strike you
+as just, elaborately just; and there is another element of simplicity in
+the thing, and that is that all forms of property are subject to the
+same law, land, women, china basons, canoes, slaves, it matters not
+what, there is the law.
+
+You will ofter hear of the vast stretches of country in Africa unowned,
+and open to all who choose to cultivate them or possess them. Well,
+those stretches of unowned land are not in West Africa. I do not pretend
+to know other parts of the continent. In West Africa there is not one
+acre of land that does not belong to some one, who is trustee of it, for
+a set of people who are themselves only life tenants, the real owner
+being the tribe in its past, present, and future state, away into
+eternity at both ends. But as West African land is a thing I should not
+feel, even if I had the money, anxious to acquire as freehold, and as
+you can get under native law a safe possession of mining and cultivation
+rights from the representatives living of the tribe they belong to, I do
+not think that any interference is urgently needed with a system
+fundamentally just.
+
+After having said so much on African native property, it may be as well
+to say what African property consists of. It is not necessary for me to
+go into the affair very fully, but you will remember, I am sure, the old
+statement of "women and slaves constitute the wealth of an African." The
+African himself would tell you nine times in ten that women and slaves
+caused him the lack of it. Still they are undoubtedly a factor in the
+true Negro's wealth, but to consider them property it is necessary to
+consider them as property in different classes. Here and now I need only
+divide them into two classes--wives properly so-called, and male and
+female slaves. The duty of the slave is to increase directly the wealth
+of his or her owner--that of the wife to increase it also, but in a
+different manner, namely, by bringing her influence to bear for his
+advantage among her own family and among the people of the district she
+lives in. A big chief will have three or more of these wives, each of
+them living in her own house, or in the culture state of Calabar, in her
+own yard in his house, having her own farm away in the country, where
+she goes at planting and harvest times. She possesses her own slaves and
+miscellaneous property, which includes her children, and the main part
+of this property is really the property of her family, just as most
+people's property is in West Africa. The husband will reside with each
+of these wives in turn, yet he has a home of his own, with his slave
+wives, and his children properly so called, similarly having his own
+farm and miscellaneous property, which similarly belongs mainly to his
+family, and this house is usually presided over by his mother, or
+failing her a favourite sister.
+
+The immediate rule of a husband over his wife may be likened to that of
+a constitutional monarch, that of a man or woman over a slave to that of
+an absolute monarch, though true absolutism is in the Negro State-form
+not to be found in any individual man. The nearest approach to it is,
+very properly, in the hands of the cult of the Law God, the tribal
+secret society, but even from that society the individual can appeal, if
+he dare, to Long Ju Ju.
+
+The other forms of wealth possessed by an African, his true wealth, are
+market rights, utensils, canoes, arms, furniture, land, and trade goods.
+It is in his capacity to command these things in large quantities that
+his wealth lies, it is his wives and slaves who enable and assist him to
+do this thing. So take the whole together and you will see how you can
+have a very rich African, rich in the only way it is worth while being
+rich in, power, yet a man who possibly could not pay you down Ŗ20, but a
+real millionaire for all that.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [79] See "Lecture on African Religion and Law," published by leave of
+   the Hibbert Trustees in the _National Review_. September, 1897.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDICES
+
+     [Illustration: JA JA, KING OF OPOBO. [_To face page 443._]
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX I
+
+     A SHORT DESCRIPTION OF THE NATIVES OF THE NIGER COAST PROTECTORATE,
+     WITH SOME ACCOUNT OF THEIR CUSTOMS, RELIGION, TRADE, &c. BY M. LE
+     COMTE C. N. DE CARDI.
+
+
+It is with some diffidence I attempt this task, because many more able
+men have written about this country, with whom occasionally I shall most
+likely be found not quite in accord; but if a long residence in and
+connection with a country entitles one to be heard, then I am fully
+qualified, for I first went to Western Africa in 1862, and my last
+voyage was in 1896.
+
+Previous to 1891, the date at which this Coast (Benin to Old Calabar)
+was formed into a British Protectorate under the name of the Oil Rivers
+Protectorate, now the Niger Coast Protectorate, each of the rivers
+frequented by Europeans for the purpose of trade was ruled over more or
+less intelligently by one, and in some cases by two, sable potentates,
+who were responsible to Her Britannic Majesty's Consul for the safety
+and well-being of the white traders; also for the fostering of trade in
+the hinterlands of their district, for which good offices they were paid
+by the white traders a duty called "comey," which amounted to about 2s.
+6d. per ton on the palm oil exported. When the palm kernel trade
+commenced it was generally arranged that two tons of palm kernels should
+be counted to equal one ton of palm oil so far as regards fiscal
+arrangements. The day this duty was paid was looked upon by the king, or
+kings if there were two of them, as a festival; in earlier years a
+certain amount of ceremony was also observed.
+
+The king would arrive on board the trader's hulk or sailing ship (some
+firms doing their trade without the assistance of a hulk) to an
+accompaniment of war horns, drums, and other savage music. With the king
+would generally come one or two of his chiefs and his Ju-Ju man, but
+before mounting the gangway ladder a bottle of spirit or palm wine would
+be produced from some hidden receptacle, one of the small boys, who
+always follow the kings or chiefs to carry their handkerchiefs and
+snuff-boxes, would then draw the cork and hand a wine-glass and the
+bottle to the Ju-Ju man, who would pour himself out a glass, saying a
+few words to the Ju-Ju of the river, at the same time spilling a little
+of the liquor into the water; he would then drink up what remained in
+the glass, hand glass and bottle to the king, who would then proceed as
+the Ju-Ju man had done, being followed on the same lines by the chiefs
+who were with him.
+
+Their devotions having thus been duly attended to, the king, Ju-Ju man
+and his attendant chiefs would mount the ladder to the deck of the
+vessel. The European trader would, as a rule, be there to receive him
+and escort him on to the poop, where the king would be asked to sit down
+to a sumptuous repast of pickled pork, salt beef, tinned salmon, pickles
+and cabin biscuits. There would be also roast fowls and goat for the
+trader and his assistants, and for vegetables yams and potatoes, the
+latter a great treat for the white men, but not thought much of by the
+natives.
+
+The king with his friends making terrific onslaughts on the pork, beef
+and tinned salmon, after having eaten all they could would ask for more,
+and pile up a plate of beef, pork and salmon, if there was any left, to
+pass out to their attendants on the main deck, at the same time begging
+some biscuits for their pull-away boys in the canoe, a request always
+acceded to.
+
+Drinkables, you will observe, so far have had no part in the feed; it is
+because these untutored natives follow Nature's laws much closer than
+Europeans, and never drink until they have finished eating. The king,
+having done justice to the victuals, now politely intimates to the
+European trader that "he be time for wash mouth." Being asked what his
+sable majesty would like to do it in, he generally elects "port win," as
+the natives call port wine. His chiefs, not being such connoisseurs as
+his majesty, are, as a rule, satisfied with a bottle or two of beer or
+gin, carefully sticking to the empty bottles.
+
+In the meantime, had you looked over the side of the ship, you would
+have wondered what his majesty's forty or fifty canoe boys were doing,
+so carefully divesting themselves of every rag of cloth and hiding it by
+folding it up as small as possible and sitting on it. This was so as to
+point out to the trader, when he came to the gangway to see the king
+away, that "he no be proper for king's boys no have cloth."
+
+The king, having duly washed his mouth, is now ready to proceed with the
+business of his visit. The payment of the comey is very soon arranged,
+it being a settled sum and the different goods having their recognised
+value in pawns, bars, coppers or crues according to the currency of the
+particular river.
+
+But the "shake hand"[80] is now to be got through, and the "dashing"[81]
+to the king; his friends who are with him want their part, and it would
+surprise a stranger the number of wants that seem to keep cropping up in
+a West African king's mind as he wobbles about your ship, until, finding
+he has begged every mortal thing that he can, he suddenly makes up his
+mind that further importunity will be useless; he decides to order his
+people into his canoe, which in most cases they obey with surprising
+alacrity, brought about, I have no doubt, by the thought that now comes
+their turn.
+
+Arrived at the gangway, his majesty, in the most natural way imaginable,
+notices for the first time (?) that his boys are all naked, and turning
+with an appealing look to the trader, he points out the bareness of the
+royal pull-away boys, and intimates that no white trader who respects
+himself could think of allowing such a state of things to continue a
+moment longer. This meant at least a further dash of four dozen
+fishermen's striped caps and about twelve pieces of Manchester cloth.
+
+One would suppose that this was the last straw, but before his majesty
+gets into his canoe several more little wants crop up, amongst others a
+tot of rum each for his canoe boys, and perchance a few fathoms of rope
+to make a new painter for his canoe, until sometimes the white trader
+almost loses his temper. I have heard of one (?) who did on one
+occasion, and being an Irishman, he thus apostrophised one of these
+sable kings, "Be jabers, king, I am thinking if I dashed you my ship you
+would be after wanting me to dash you the boats belonging to her, and
+after that to supply you with paint to paint them with for the next ten
+years." There was a glare in that Irishman's eye, and that king noticed
+it, and decided the time had come for him to scoot, and history says he
+scooted. In the early days of the palm oil trade, the custom inaugurated
+by the slave traders of receiving the king on his visit to the ship was
+by a salute of six or seven guns, and another of equal number on his
+departure, the latter being an intimation to all whom it might concern
+that his majesty had duly received his comey, and that trade was open
+with the said ship. This was continued for some years, but as the
+security of the seas became greater in those parts the trading ships
+gave up the custom of carrying guns, and the intimation that the king
+"done broke trade" with the last arrival was effected by his majesty
+sending off a canoe of oil to the ship, and the sending round of a
+verbal message by one of the king's men.
+
+Since the year 1891 the kings of the Oil Rivers have been relieved of
+the duty of collecting comey, as a regular government of these rivers
+has been inaugurated by H.B.M. Government, comey being replaced by
+import duties.
+
+
+NATIVE SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT IN BENIN, AND RELIGION
+
+Though there is a great similarity in the native form of government in
+these parts, it would be impossible to convey a true description of the
+manners and customs of the various places if I did not treat of each
+river and its people separately; I shall therefore commence by
+describing the people of Benin.
+
+The Benin kingdom, so far as this account of it will go, was said to
+extend from the boundaries of the Mahin country (a district between the
+British Colony of Lagos and the Benin River) and the river Ramos; thus
+on the coast line embracing the rivers Benin, Escravos, and Forcados,
+also the hinterland, taking in Warri up to the Yoruba States.
+
+For the purpose of the work I have set myself, I shall treat of that
+part of the kingdom that may be embraced by a line drawn from the mouth
+of the river Ramos up to the town of Warri, thence to Benin City, and
+brought down to the coast a little to the north of the Benin River. This
+tract of country is inhabited by four tribes, viz., the Jakri tribe, the
+dominant people on the coast line; the Sobo tribe, a very timid but most
+industrious people, great producers of palm oil, as well as being great
+agriculturists; an unfortunate people placed as they were between the
+extortions of the Jakris and the slave raiding of the Benin City king
+for his various sacrificial purposes; the third tribe are the Ijos,
+inhabiting the lower parts of the Escravos, Forcados, and Ramos rivers;
+this latter tribe are great canoe builders and agriculturists in a small
+way, produce a little palm oil, and by some people are accused of being
+cannibals; this latter accusation I don't think they deserve, in the
+full acceptation of the word, for thirty-three years ago I passed more
+than a week in one of their towns, when I was quite at their mercy,
+being accompanied by no armed men and carrying only a small revolver
+myself, which never came out of my pocket. Since when I have visited
+some of their towns on the Bassa Creek outside the boundary I have drawn
+for the purpose of this narrative, and never was I treated with the
+least disrespect.
+
+The fourth tribe is the Benin people proper, whose territory is supposed
+to extend as far back as the boundaries of the Yoruba nation, starting
+from the right bank of the Benin River. In this territory is the once
+far-famed city of Benin, where lived the king, to whom the Jakri, the
+Sobo, and the Ijo tribes paid tribute.
+
+These people have at all times since their first intercourse with
+Europeans, now some four hundred years, been renowned for their barbaric
+customs.
+
+The earlier travellers who visited Benin City do not mention human
+sacrifices among these customs, but I have no doubt they took place; as
+these travellers were generally traders and wanted to return to Benin
+for trade purposes, they most likely thought the less said on the
+subject the best. I find, however, that in the last century more than
+one traveller mentions the sacrifice of human beings by the king of
+Benin, but do not lead one to imagine that it was carried to the
+frightful extent it has been carried on in later years.
+
+I think myself that the custom of sacrificing human beings has been
+steadily increasing of late years, as the city of Benin became more and
+more a kind of holy city amongst the pagan tribes.
+
+Their religion, like that of all the neighbouring pagans, admits of a
+Supreme Being, maker of all things, but as he is supposed to be always
+doing good, there is no necessity to sacrifice to him.
+
+They, however, implicitly believe in a malignant spirit, to whom they
+sacrifice men and animals to satiate its thirst for blood and prevent it
+from doing them any harm.
+
+Some of the pagan customs are of a sanitary character. Take, for
+instance, the yam custom. This custom is more or less observed all along
+the West Coast of Africa, and where it is unattended by any sacrificing
+of human or animal life, except the latter be to make a feast, it should
+be encouraged as a kind of harvest festival. When I say this was a
+sanitary law, I must explain that the new yams are a most dangerous
+article of food if eaten before the yam custom has been made, which
+takes place a certain time after the yams are found to be fit for taking
+out of the ground.
+
+The new yams are often offered for sale to the Europeans at the earliest
+moment that they can be dug up, some weeks in many cases before the
+custom is made; the consequence is that many Europeans contract severe
+attacks of dysentery and fever about this time.
+
+The well-to-do native never touches them before the proper time, but the
+poorer classes find it difficult to keep from eating them, as they are
+not only very sweet, but generally very cheap when they first come on
+the market.
+
+The king of Benin was assisted in the government of his country and his
+tributaries by four principal officers; three of these were civil
+officers; these officers and the Ju-Ju men were the real governors of
+the country, the king being little more than a puppet in their hands.
+
+It was these three officers who decided who should be appointed governor
+of the lower river, generally called New Benin.
+
+Their choice as a rule fell upon the most influential chief of the
+district, their last choice being Nana, the son of the late chief
+Alumah, the most powerful and richest chief that had ever been known
+amongst the Jakri men. I shall have more to say about Nana when I am
+dealing with the Jakri tribe.
+
+Amongst the principal annual customs held by the king of Old Benin, were
+the customs to his predecessors, generally called "making father" by the
+English-speaking native of the coast.
+
+The coral custom was another great festival; besides these there were
+many occasional minor customs held to propitiate the spirit of the sun,
+the moon, the sky, and the earth. At most of these, if not all, human
+sacrifices were made.
+
+Kings of Benin did not inherit by right of birth; the reigning king
+feeling that his time to leave this earth was approaching, would select
+his successor from amongst his sons, and calling his chief civil officer
+would confide to him the name of the one he had selected to follow him.
+
+Upon the king's death this officer would take into his own charge the
+property of the late king, and receive the homage of all the expectant
+heirs; after enjoying the position of regent for some few days he would
+confide his secret to the chief war minister, and the chosen prince
+would be sent for and made to kneel, while they declared to him the will
+of his father. The prince thereupon would thank these two officers for
+their faithful services, and then he was immediately proclaimed king of
+Benin.
+
+Now commences trouble for the non-successful claimants; the king's
+throne must be secure, so they and their sons must be suppressed. As it
+was not allowed to shed royal blood, they were quietly suffocated by
+having their noses, mouths and ears stuffed with cloth. To somewhat take
+the sting out of this cruel proceeding they were given a most pompous
+funeral.
+
+Whilst on the subject of funerals I think I had better tell you
+something about the funeral customs of the Benineese.
+
+When a king dies, it is said, his domestics solicit the honour of being
+buried with him, but this is only accorded to a few of his greatest
+favourites (I quite believe this to have been true, for I have seen
+myself slaves of defunct chiefs appealing to be allowed to join their
+late master); these slaves are let down into the grave alive, after the
+corpse has been placed therein. Graves of kings and chiefs in Western
+Africa being nice roomy apartments, generally about 12 feet by 8 by 14,
+but in Benin, I am told, the graves have a floor about 16 feet by 12,
+with sides tapering to an aperture that can be closed by a single
+flag-stone. On the morning following the interment, this flag-stone was
+removed, and the people down below asked if they had found the King.
+This question was put to them every successive morning, until no answer
+being returned it was concluded that the slaves had found their master.
+Meat was then roasted on the grave-stone and distributed amongst the
+people with a plentiful supply of drink, after which frightful orgies
+took place and great licence allowed to the populace--murders taking
+place and the bodies of the murdered people being brought as offerings
+to the departed, though at any other time murder was severely punished.
+Chiefs and women of distinction are also entitled to pompous funerals,
+with the usual accompaniment of massacred slaves. If a native of Benin
+City died in a distant part of the kingdom, the corpse used to be dried
+over a gentle fire and conveyed to this city for interment. Cases have
+been known where a body having been buried with all due honours and
+ceremonies, it has been afterwards taken up and the same ceremonies as
+before gone through a second time.
+
+The usual funeral ceremonies for a person of distinction last about
+seven or eight days, and consist, besides the human sacrifices, of
+lamentations, dancing, singing and considerable drinking.
+
+The near relatives mourn during several months--some with half their
+heads shaved, others completely shaven.
+
+The law of inheritance for people of distinction differs from that of
+the kings in the fact that the eldest son inherits by right of
+primogeniture, and succeeds to all his father's property, wives and
+slaves. He generally allows his mother a separate establishment and
+maintenance and finds employment and maintenance for his father's other
+wives in the family residence. He is expected to act liberally with his
+younger brothers, but there is no law on this question. Before entering
+into full possession of his father's property he must petition the king
+to allow him to do so, accompanying the said petition with a present to
+the king of a slave, as also one to each of the three great officers of
+the king. This petition is invariably granted. A widow cannot marry
+again without the permission of her son, if she have a son; or if he be
+too young, the man who marries her must supply a female slave to wait
+upon him instead of his mother.
+
+Theft was punished by fine only, if the stolen property was restored,
+but by flogging if the thief was unable to make restitution.
+
+Murder was of rare occurrence. When detected it was punished with death
+by decapitation, and the body of the culprit was quartered and exposed
+to the beasts and birds of prey.
+
+If the murderer be a man of some considerable position he was not
+executed, but escorted out of the country and never allowed to return.
+
+In case of a murder committed in the heat of passion, the culprit could
+arrange matters by giving the dead person a suitable funeral, paying a
+heavy fine to the three chief officers of the king and supplying a slave
+to suffer in his place. In this case he was bound to kneel and keep his
+forehead touching the slave during his execution.
+
+In all cases where an accusation was not clearly proved, the accused
+would have to undergo an ordeal to prove his guilt or innocence. To
+fully describe the whole of these would fill several hundred pages, and
+as most of them could be managed by the Ju-Ju men in such a way, that
+they could prove a man guilty or innocent according to the amount of
+present they had received from the accused's friends, I will pass on to
+other subjects.
+
+Adultery was very severely punished in whatever class it took place; in
+the lower classes all the property of the guilty man passed at once to
+the injured husband, the woman being severely flogged and expelled from
+her husband's house.
+
+Amongst the middle class this crime could be atoned for by the friends
+of the guilty woman making a money present to the injured husband; and
+the lady would be restored to her outraged lord's favour.
+
+The upper classes revenged themselves by having the two culprits
+instantly put to death, except when the male culprit belonged to the
+upper classes; then the punishment was generally reduced to banishment
+from the kingdom of Benin for life.
+
+Amongst these people one finds some peculiar customs concerning
+children. Amongst others, a child is supposed to be under great danger
+from evil spirits until it has passed its seventh day. On this day a
+small feast is provided by the parents; still it is thought well to
+propitiate the evil spirits by strewing a portion of the feast round the
+house where the child is.
+
+Twin children, according to some accounts, were not looked upon with the
+same horror in Benin as they are in other parts of the Niger Delta; as a
+fact, they were looked upon with favour, except in one town of the
+kingdom, the name of which I have never been able to get, nor have I
+been able to locate the spot; but wherever it is, I am informed both
+mother and children were sacrificed to a demon, who resided in a wood in
+the neighbourhood of this town.
+
+This law of killing twin children, like most Ju-Ju laws, could be got
+over if the father was himself not too deeply steeped in Ju-Juism, and
+was sufficiently wealthy to bribe the Ju-Ju priests. The law was always
+mercilessly carried out in the case of the poorer class of natives--the
+above refers solely to the part of Benin kingdom directly under the king
+of Old Benin, and does not hold good with regard to the Sobos, Jakris,
+or Ijos.
+
+
+ORIGIN OF THE BENIN CITY PEOPLE
+
+According to Clapperton the Benin people are descendants of the Yoruba
+tribes, the Yoruba tribes being descended from six brothers, all the
+sons of one mother. Their names were Ikelu, Egba, Ijebu, Ifé, Ibini
+(Benin), and Yoruba.
+
+According to the late Sultan Bello (the Foulah chief of Sokoto at the
+time of Captain Clapperton's visit to that city), the Yoruba tribes are
+descended from the children of Canaan, who were of the tribe of Nimrod.
+
+In my opinion there is room for much speculation on this statement of
+the Sultan Bello.
+
+It is a very curious fact that the people of Benin City have been, from
+the earliest accounts we have of them, great workers in brass. Might not
+the ancestors of this people have brought the art of working in brass
+with them from the far distant land of Canaan? Moses, when speaking of
+the land of Canaan, says, "out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass"
+(Deut. viii. 9). Here we must understand copper to be meant; because
+brass is not dug out of the earth, but copper is, and found in abundance
+in that part of the world.
+
+Yet another curious subject for reflection, from the first information
+that European travellers give us (_circa_ 1485) in their descriptions of
+the city of Benin, mention has invariably made of towers, from the
+summits of which monster brass serpents were suspended. Upon the entry
+of the punitive expedition into Benin City in the month of February,
+1897, Benin City still possessed one of these serpents in brass, not
+hanging from a tower, but laid upon the roof of one of the king's
+houses.
+
+Might not these brazen serpents be a remnant of some tradition handed
+down from the time of Moses? for do we not read in the Scriptures, that
+the people of Israel had sinned; and God to punish them sent fiery
+serpents, which bit the people, and many died. Then Moses cried to God,
+and God told him to make a serpent of brass, and set it on a pole.
+(Numbers xxi. 9.)
+
+While on the subject of serpents, I may mention that in the
+neighbourhood of Benin, there is a Ju-Ju ordeal pond or river, said to
+be infested with dangerous and poisonous snakes and alligators, through
+which a man accused of any crime passing unscathed proves his innocence.
+
+There are some other customs connected with the position of the king of
+Benin, as the head of the Ju-Juism of his country, which seem to have
+some trace of a Biblical origin, but which I will not discuss here, but
+leave to the ethnologists to unravel, if they can.
+
+That they were a superior people to the surrounding tribes is amply
+demonstrated by their being workers in brass and iron; displaying
+considerable art in some of their castings in brass, iron, copper and
+bronze, their carving in ivory, and their manufacture of cotton
+cloth--no other people in the Delta showing any such ability.
+
+The Jakri tribe, who inhabit that part of the country lying between the
+Sobo country and the Ijo country, were the dominant tribe in the lower
+or New Benin country. Being themselves tributary to the Benin king, they
+dare not make the Sobo or Ijo men pay a direct tribute to them for the
+right to live, but they indirectly took a much larger tribute from them
+than ever they paid the king of Benin.
+
+The Jakris were the brokers, and would not allow either of the
+above-named tribes to trade direct with the white men.
+
+The principal towns of the Jakri men were:--Brohemie[82] (destroyed by
+the English in 1894): this town was generally called Nana's town of late
+years. Nana was Governor of the whole of the country lying between a
+line drawn from the Gwato Creek to Wari and the sea-coast; his
+governorship extending a little beyond the Benin River, and running down
+the coast to the Ramos River. This appointment he held from the king of
+Benin, and was officially recognised by the British Consul as the
+head-man of the Jakri tribe, and for any official business in connection
+with the country over which he was Governor. Jeboo or Chief Peggy's
+town, situated on the waterway to Lagos; Jaquah town or Chief Ogrie's
+town. The above towns are all on the right bank of the river.
+
+On the left bank of the river are found the following towns:--Bateri, or
+Chief Numa's town, lying about half an hour's pull in a boat from Déli
+Creek. Chief Numa, was the son of the late Chief Chinomé, a rival in his
+day to Allumah, the father of Nana, the late Governor; Chinomé was the
+son of Queen Doto of Wari, who years ago was most anxious to see the
+white man at her town, and repeatedly advised the white men to use the
+Forcados for their principal trading station; but the old Chief Allumah
+was against any such exodus, and as he was a very big trader in
+palm-oil, he of course carried the day, and the white men stuck to their
+swamp at the mouth of the river Benin.
+
+Close to Numa's town his brother Fragoni has established a small town.
+At some little distance from Bateri is Booboo, or the late Chief
+Bregbi's town. Galey, the eldest son of the late Chinomé, has a small
+town in the Déli Creek. This man, though the eldest son of the late
+Chief Chinomé, is not a chief, though his younger brother Numa is. Here
+is a knotty point in Jakri law of inheritance, which differs from the
+Benin City law on the subject.
+
+Wari, the capital of Jakri, though almost if not actually as old a town
+as Benin City, has never had the bad reputation that the latter city has
+always had. I attribute this to the fact that the ladies of Warri have
+always been a power in the land.
+
+Sapele is a place that has come very much into notice since the country
+has been under the jurisdiction of the Niger Coast Protectorate, and is
+without doubt one of the best stations on the Benin territory. I am glad
+to say that the Europeans have at last deserted to a great extent their
+factories at the mouth of the Benin River, and are now principally
+located at Sapele and Wari.
+
+The Jakri tribe claim to be of the same race as the people of Benin City
+and kingdom. This I am inclined to dispute; I think they were a coast
+tribe like the Ijos. Tradition says that Wari was founded by people from
+Benin kingdom and for many years was tributary to the king of Benin, but
+in 1778 Wari was reported to be quite independent. They may have become
+almost the same race by intermarriage with the Benin people that went
+to Wari; but that they were originally the same race I say no.
+
+The religion of the Jakri tribe and the native laws and system of
+ordeals were, as far as I have been able to ascertain, identical with
+those of the Benin kingdom; with the exception of the human sacrifices
+and their law of inheritance which does not admit the right of
+primogeniture--following in this respect, the laws of the Bonny men and
+their neighbours. Twin children are usually killed by the Jakris, and
+the mother driven into the bush to die.
+
+The Jakri tribe are, without doubt, one of the finest in the Niger Coast
+Protectorate; many of their present chiefs are very honest and
+intelligent men, also excellent traders. Their women are noted as being
+the finest and best looking for miles round.
+
+The Jakri women have already made great strides towards their complete
+emancipation from the low state in which the women of neighbouring
+tribes still find themselves, many of them being very rich and great
+traders.
+
+The Sobo tribe have been kept so much in the background by the Jakris
+that little is known about them. What little is known of them is to
+their credit.
+
+We now come to the Ijo tribe, or at least, that portion of them that
+live within the Niger Coast Protectorate; these men are reported by some
+travellers to be cannibals, and a very turbulent people; this character
+has been given them by interested parties. Their looks are very much
+against them as they disfigure their faces by heavy cuts as tribal
+marks, and some pick up the flesh between their eyes making a kind of
+ridge, that gives them a savage expression. Though I have put the limit
+of these people at the river Ramos, they really extend along the coast
+as far as the western bank of the Akassa river. They have never had a
+chance and, with the exception of large timber for making canoes, their
+country does not produce much. Though I have seen considerable numbers
+of rubber-producing trees in their country, I never was able to induce
+them to work it. No doubt they asked the advice of their Ju-Ju as to
+taking my advice, and he followed the usual rule laid down by the
+priesthood of Ju-Ju-ism, no innovations.
+
+Whilst I was in the Ijo country I carefully studied their Ju-Ju, as I
+had been told they were great believers in, and practisers of Ju-Ju-ism.
+I found little in their system differing from that practised in most of
+the rivers of the Delta.
+
+In all these practices human agency plays a very large part, and this
+seems to be known even to the lower orders of the people; as an
+instance, I must here relate an experience I once had amongst the Ijos.
+I had arranged with a chief living on the Bassa Creek to lend me his
+fastest canoe and twenty-five of his people, to take me to the Brass
+river; the bargain was that his canoe should be ready at Cock-Crow Peak
+the following morning. I was ready at the water-side by the time
+appointed, but only about six of the smallest boys had put in an
+appearance; the old chief was there in a most furious rage, sending off
+messengers in all directions to find the canoe boys. After about two
+hours' work and the expenditure of much bad language on the part of the
+old chief, also some hard knocks administered to the canoe boys by the
+men who had been sent after them, as evidenced by the wales I saw on
+their backs, the canoe was at last manned, and I took my seat in it
+under a very good mat awning which nearly covered the canoe from end to
+end, and thanking my stars that now my troubles had come to an end I
+hoped at least for a time. I was, however, a very big bit too premature,
+for before the old chief would let the canoe start, he informed me he
+must make Ju-Ju for the safety of his canoe and the safe return of it
+and all his boys, to say nothing of my individual safety.
+
+One of the first requirements of that particular Ju-Ju cost me further
+delay, for a bottle of gin had to be procured, and as the daily market
+in that town had not yet opened, and no public house had yet been
+established by any enterprising Ijo, it took some time to procure.
+
+On the arrival of the article, however, my friend the old chief
+proceeded in a most impressive manner to repeat a short prayer, the
+principal portion I was able to understand and which was as follows: "I
+beg you, I beg you, don't capsize my canoe. If you do, don't drown any
+of my boys and don't do any harm to my friend the white man." This was
+addressed to the spirit of the water; having finished this little
+prayer, he next sprinkled a little gin about the bows of the canoe and
+in the river, afterwards taking a drink himself. He then produced a leaf
+with about an ounce of broken-up cooked yam mixed with a little palm
+oil, which he carefully fixed in the extreme foremost point of the
+canoe.
+
+At last this ceremony was at an end and we started off, but alas! my
+troubles were only just beginning. We had been started about half an
+hour, and I had quietly dozed off into a pleasant sleep, when I was
+awakened by feeling the canoe rolling from side to side as if we were
+in rough water; just then the boys all stopped pulling, and on my
+remonstrance they informed me Ju-Ju "no will," _id est_, that the Ju-ju
+had told them they must go back. I used gentle persuasion in the form of
+offers of extra pay at first, then I stormed and used strong language,
+or at least, what little Ijo strong language I knew, but all to no
+avail. I then began to inquire what Ju-Ju had spoken, and they pointed
+out a small bird that just then flew away into the bush; it looked to me
+something like a kingfisher. The head boy of the canoe then explained to
+me that this Ju-ju bird having spoken, _id est_, chirped on the
+right-hand side of the canoe, and the goat's skull hanging up to the
+foremost awning stanchion having fallen the same way (this ornament I
+had not previously noticed), signified that we must turn back. So turn
+back we did, though I thought at the time the boys did not want to go
+the journey, owing to the almost continual state of quarrelling that had
+been going on for years between the Ijos and the Brassmen. I was not far
+wrong, for when we eventually did arrive at Brass, I had to hide these
+Ijo people in the hold of my ship, as the very sight of a Brassman made
+them shiver.
+
+The following morning the same performance was gone through; we started,
+and at about the same point Ju-Ju spoke again; again we returned. My old
+friend the chief was very sorry he said, but he could not blame his boys
+for acting as they had done, Ju-Ju having told them to return. He would
+not listen when I told him I felt confident his boys had assisted the
+Ju-Ju by making the canoe roll about from side to side.
+
+However, I thought the matter over to myself during that second day, and
+decided I would make sure one part of that Ju-ju should not speak
+against me the next morning, and that was the goat's skull, so during
+that night after every Ijo was fast asleep, I visited that skull and
+carefully secured it to its post by a few turns of very fine fishing
+line in such a manner that no one could notice what I had done, if they
+did not specially examine it. I dare not fix it to the left, that being
+the favourable side, for fear of it being noticed, but I fixed it
+straight up and down, so that it could not demonstrate against my
+journey.
+
+I retired to my sleeping quarters and slept the sleep of the just, and
+next morning started in the best of spirits, though continually haunted
+by the fear that my little stratagem might be discovered. We had got
+about the same distance from the town that we had on the two previous
+mornings when the canoe began to oscillate as usual, caused by a
+combined movement of all the boys in the canoe, I was perfectly
+convinced, for the creek we were in was as smooth as a mill pond. Many
+anxious glances were cast at the skull, and the canoe was made to roll
+more and more until the water slopped over into her, but the skull did
+not budge, and, strange to relate, the bird of ill omen did not show
+itself or chirp this morning, so the boys gave up making the canoe
+oscillate and commenced to paddle for all they were worth, and the
+following evening we arrived at my ship in Brass. We could have arrived
+much earlier, but the Ijos did not wish to meet with any Brassmen, so we
+waited until the shades of night came on, and thus passed unobserved
+several Brass canoes, arriving safely at my ship in time for dinner.
+
+I carefully questioned the head boy of the Ijo boys all about this bird
+that had given me so much trouble. He explained to me that once having
+passed a certain point in the creek, the bird not having spoken and the
+skull not having demonstrated either, it was quite safe to continue on
+our journey, conveying to me the idea that this bird was a regular
+inhabitant of a certain portion of the bush, which was also their sacred
+bush wherein the Ju-Ju priests practised their most private devotions.
+The same species of bird showed itself several times both on the right
+of us and on the left of us as we passed through other creeks on our way
+to Brass, but the canoe boys took no notice of it.
+
+In dealing with the Benin Kingdom I have allowed myself somewhat to
+encroach upon the Royal Niger Company's territory, which commences on
+the left bank of the river Forcados and takes in all the rivers down to
+the Nun (Akassa), and the sea-shore to leeward of this river as far as a
+point midway between the latter river and the mouth of the Brass river,
+thence a straight line is drawn to a place called Idu, on the Niger
+River, forming the eastern boundary between the Royal Niger Company's
+territory and the Niger Coast Protectorate. I have not defined the
+western boundary between the Royal Niger Company's territory and the
+other portion of the Niger Coast Protectorate otherwise than stating
+that it commences on the seashore at the eastern point of the Forcados.
+
+Benin Kingdom, as a kingdom, may now be numbered with the past. For
+years the cruelties known to be enacted in the city of Benin have been
+such that it was only a question of ways and means that deterred the
+Protectorate officials from smashing up the place several years ago.
+
+It is a very curious trait in the character of these savage kinglets of
+Western Africa how little they seem to have been impressed by the
+downfall of their brethren in neighbouring districts. Though they were
+well acquainted with all that was passing around them. Thus the fall of
+Ashantee in 1873 was well known to the King of Dahomey, yet he continued
+on his way and could not believe the French could ever upset him. Nana,
+the governor of the lower Benin or Jakri, could not see in the downfall
+of Ja Ja that the British Government were not to be trifled with by any
+petty king or governor of these rivers; though Nana was a most
+intelligent native, he had the temerity to show fight against the
+Protectorate officials, and of course he quickly found out his mistake,
+but alas! too late for his peace of mind and happiness; he is now a
+prisoner at large far away from his own country, stripped of all his
+riches and position. Here was an object lesson for Abu Bini, the King of
+Benin, right at his own door, every detail of which he must have heard
+of, or at least his Ju-Ju priests must have heard of the disaster that
+had happened to Nana, his satrap.
+
+Nothing daunted Abu Bini and his Ju-Ju priests continued their evil
+practices; then came the frightful Benin massacre of Protectorate
+officials and European traders, besides a number of Jakris and Kruboys
+in the employment of the Protectorate.
+
+The first shot that was fired that January morning, 1897, by the
+emissaries of King Abu Bini, sounded the downfall of the City of Benin
+and the end of all its atrocious and disgusting sacrificial rites, for
+scarcely three months after the punitive expedition camped in the King's
+Palace at old Benin.
+
+The two expeditions that have had to be sent to Benin River within the
+last few years have been two unique specimens of what British sailors
+and soldiers have to cope with whilst protecting British subjects and
+their interests, no matter where situated.
+
+I do not suppose that there are in England to-day one hundred people who
+know, and can therefore appreciate at its true value, the risk that each
+man in those two expeditions ran. In the attack on Nana's town the
+British sailors had to walk through a dirty, disgusting, slimy mangrove
+swamp, often sinking in the mud half way up their thighs, and this in
+the face of a sharp musketry fire coming from unseen enemies carefully
+hidden away, in some cases not five yards off, in dense bush, with
+occasional discharges of grape and canister. But nothing stopped them,
+and Nana's town was soon numbered with the things that had been.
+
+It was the same to a great extent in the attack on Benin, only varied by
+the swamps not being quite so bad as at Nana's town, but the distance
+from the water side was much farther; in the former case one might say
+it was only a matter of minutes once in touch with the enemy; in the
+attack on Benin city it was a matter of several days marching through
+dense bush, where an enemy could get within five yards of you without
+being seen, and in some places nearer. Almost constantly under fire,
+besides a sun beating down on you so hot that where the soil was sandy
+you felt the heat almost unbearable through the soles of your boots, to
+say nothing of the minor troubles of being very short of drinking water,
+and at night not being able to sleep owing to the myriads of sand-flies
+and mosquitoes; getting now and again a perfume wafted under your
+nostrils, in comparison with which a London sewer would be eau de
+Cologne.
+
+I was once under fire for twelve hours against European trained troops,
+so know something about a soldier's work, and for choice I would prefer
+a week's similar work in Europe to two hours' West African bush and
+swamp fighting, with its aids, fever and dysentery.
+
+Before I quit Benin I want to mention one thing more about Ju-Ju. When
+the attack was made on Benin city, the first day's march had scarcely
+begun when two white men were killed and buried. After the column passed
+on, the natives came and dug the bodies up, cut their heads and hands
+off, and carried them up to Benin city to the Ju-Ju priests, who showed
+them to the king to prove to him that his Ju-Ju, managed by them, was
+greater than the white man's; in fact, the king, I am told, was being
+shown these heads and hands at the moment when the first rockets fell in
+Benin city. Those rockets proved to him the contrary, and he left the
+city quicker than he had ever done in his life before.
+
+To point out to my readers how all the natives of the Delta believed in
+the power of the Benin Ju-Ju, I must tell you none of them believed the
+English had really captured the King until he was taken round and shown
+to them, the belief being that, on the approach of danger, he would be
+able to change himself into a bird and thus fly away and escape.
+
+
+BRASS RIVER
+
+Brass River is then the first river we have to deal with on the Niger
+Coast Protectorate, to the eastward of the Royal Niger Company's
+boundary.
+
+The inhabitants of Brass call their country Nimbé and themselves Nimbé
+nungos, the latter word meaning people. Their principal towns were
+Obulambri and Basambri, divided only by a narrow creek dry at low water.
+In each of these towns resided a king, each having jurisdiction over
+separate districts of the Nimbé territory; thus the King of Obulambri
+was supposed to look after the district on the left hand of the River
+Brass, his jurisdiction extending as far as the River St. Barbara. The
+King of Basambri's district extended from the right bank of the Brass
+River, westward as far as the Middleton outfalls; included in this
+district was the Nun mouth of the River Niger. These two kinglets had a
+very prosperous time during the closing days of the slave trade, as most
+of the contraband was carried on through the Brass and the Nun River
+both by Bonnymen and New Calabar men after they had signed treaties with
+Her Majesty's Government to discontinue the slave trade in their
+dominions. When eventually the trade in slaves was finally put down
+their prosperity was not at an end, for they went largely into the palm
+oil trade, and did a most prosperous trade along the banks of the Niger
+as far as Onitsa.
+
+Though these two kings always objected to the white men opening up the
+Niger, and did their utmost to retard the first expeditions, they were
+not slow in demanding comey from the early traders who established
+factories in the Nun mouth of the Niger; this part of the Niger is also
+called the Akassa.
+
+These people are a very mixed race, and to describe them as any
+particular tribe would be an error. I believe the original inhabitants
+of the mouths of these rivers were the Ijos, and that the towns of
+Obulambri and Bassambri were founded by some of the more adventurous
+spirits amongst the men from the neighbourhood of Sabogrega, a town on
+the Niger; being afterwards joined by some similar adventurers from
+Bonny River. The three people are closely connected by family ties at
+this day.
+
+As a rule these people have always had the character of being a well
+behaved set of men; it is a notable fact in their favour that they were
+the only people that, once having signed the treaty with Her Majesty's
+Government to put down slavery, honestly stuck to the terms of the
+treaty; unlike their neighbours, they did so, though they were the only
+people who did not receive any indemnity.
+
+They, however, have occasionally lost their heads and gone to excesses
+unworthy of a people with such a good reputation as they have generally
+enjoyed.
+
+Their last escapade was the attack on the factory of the Royal Niger
+Company at Akassa some few years ago, and for which they were duly
+punished; their dual mud and thatch capital was blown down, and one
+small town called Fishtown destroyed.
+
+Impartial observers must have pitied these poor people driven to despair
+by being cut off from their trading markets by the fiscal arrangements
+of the Royal Niger Company. The latter I don't blame very much, they are
+traders; but the line drawn from Idu to a point midway between the Brass
+River and the Nun entrance to the Niger River, as being the boundary
+line for fiscal purposes between the Royal Niger Company and the Niger
+Coast Protectorate, was drawn by some one at Downing Street who
+evidently looked upon this part of the world as a cheesemonger would a
+cheese.
+
+In 1830 it was at Abo on the Niger where Lander the traveller met with
+the Brassmen, who took him down to Obulambri, but no ship being in Brass
+River, they took him and his people over to Akassa, at the Nun mouth of
+the Niger, to an English ship lying there. History says he was anything
+but well received by the captain of this vessel, and that the Brassmen
+did not treat him as well as they might; however, they did not eat him,
+as they no doubt would have done could they have looked into the future.
+Whatever their treatment of Lander was, it could not have been very bad,
+as they received some reward for what assistance they had given him some
+time after.
+
+It was amongst these people that I was enabled to study more closely the
+inner working of the domestic slavery of this part of Western Africa,
+and where it was carried on with less hardship to the slaves themselves
+than any place else in the Delta, until the Niger Company's boundary
+line threw most of the labouring population on the rates, at least they
+would have gone on the rates if there had been any to go on, but
+unfortunately the municipal arrangements of these African kingdomlets
+had not arrived at such a pitch of civilisation; the consequence was
+many died from starvation, others hired themselves out as labourers, but
+the demand for their services was limited, as they compared badly with
+the fine, athletic Krumen, who monopolise all the labour in these parts.
+Then came the punitive expedition for the attack on Akassa that wiped
+off a few more of the population, so that to-day the Brassmen may be
+described as a vanishing people.
+
+The various grades of the people in Brass were the kings, next came
+the chiefs and their sons who had by their own industry, and assisted
+in their first endeavours by their parents, worked themselves into
+a position of wealth, then came the Winna-boes, a grade mostly
+supplied by the favourite slave of a chief, who had been his constant
+attendant for years, commencing his career by carrying his master's
+pocket-handkerchief and snuff-box, pockets not having yet been
+introduced into the native costume; after some years of this duty he
+would be promoted to going down to the European traders to superintend
+the delivery of a canoe of oil, seeing to its being tried, gauged, &c.
+This first duty, if properly performed, would lead to his being often
+sent on the same errand. This duty required a certain amount of _savez_,
+as the natives call intelligence, for he had to so look after his
+master's interests that the pull-away boys that were with him in the
+canoe did not secrete any few gallons of oil that there might be left
+over after filling up all the casks he had been sent to deliver; nor
+must he allow the white trader to under-gauge his master's casks by
+carelessness or otherwise. If he was able to do the latter part of his
+errand in such a diplomatic manner that he did not raise the bile of the
+trader, that day marked the commencement of his upward career, if he was
+possessed of the bump of saving. All having gone off to the satisfaction
+of both parties, the trader would make this boy some small present
+according to the number of puncheons of oil he had brought down, seldom
+less than a piece of cloth worth about 2s. 6d., and, in the case of
+canoes containing ten to fifteen puncheons, the trader would often dash
+him two pieces of cloth and a bunch or two of beads. This present he
+would, on his return to his master's house, hand over to his mother (_id
+est_, the woman who had taken care of him from the time when he was
+first bought by his Brass master). She would carefully hoard this and
+all subsequent bits of miscellaneous property until he had in his
+foster-mother's hands sufficient goods to buy an angbar of oil--a
+measure containing thirty gallons. Then he would approach his master
+(always called "father" by his slaves) and beg permission to send his
+few goods to the Niger markets the next time his master had a canoe
+starting--which permission was always accorded. He had next to arrange
+terms with the head man or trader of his master's canoe as to what
+commission he had to get for trading off the goods in the far market. In
+this discussion, which may occupy many days before it is finally
+arranged, the foster-mother figures largely; and it depends a great deal
+upon her standing in the household of the chief as to the amount of
+commission the trade boy will demand for his services. If the
+foster-mother should happen to be a favourite wife of the chief, well,
+then things are settled very easily, the trade boy most likely saying he
+was quite willing to leff-em to be settled any way she liked; if, on the
+contrary, it was one of the poorer women of the chiefs house, Mr.
+Trade-boy would demand at least the quarter of the trade to commence
+with, and end up by accepting about an eighth. As the winnabo could
+easily double his property twice a year--and he was always adding to his
+store in his foster-mother's hands from presents received each time he
+went down to the white trader with his father's oil--it did not take
+many years for him to become a man of means, and own canoes and slaves
+himself. Many times have I known cases where the winnabo has repeatedly
+paid up the debts of his master to the white man.
+
+According to the law of the country, the master has the right to sell
+the very man who is paying his debts off for him; but I must say I never
+heard a case of such rank ingratitude, though cases have occurred where
+the master has got into such low water and such desperate difficulties
+that his creditors under country law have seized everything he was
+possessed of, including any wealthy winnaboes he might have.
+
+Some writers have said this class could purchase their freedom; with
+this I don't agree. The only chance a winnabo had of getting his freedom
+was, supposing his master died and left no sons behind him old enough or
+capable enough to take the place of their father, then the winnabo might
+be elected to take the place of his defunct master: he would then become
+_ipso facto_ a chief, and be reckoned a free man. If he was a man of
+strong character, he would hold until his death all the property of the
+house; but if one of the sons of his late master should grow up an
+intelligent man, and amass sufficient riches to gather round him some of
+the other chief men in the town, then the question was liable to be
+re-opened, and the winnabo might have to part out some of the property
+and the people he had received upon his appointment to the headship of
+the house, together with a certain sum in goods or oil, which the elders
+of the town would decide should represent the increment on the portion
+handed over. I have never known of a case where the whole of the
+property and people have been taken away from a winnabo in Brass; but I
+have known it occur in other rivers, but only for absolute misuse,
+misrule, and misconduct of the party.
+
+Egbo-boes are the niggers or absolute lower rank of slaves, who are
+employed as pull-away boys in the oil canoes and gigs of the chiefs, and
+do all the menial work or hard labour of the towns that is not done by
+the lower ranks of the women slaves.
+
+The lot of these egbo-boes is a very hard one at times, especially when
+their masters have no use for them in their oil canoes. At the best of
+times their masters don't provide them with more food then is about
+sufficient for one good square meal a day; but, when trade is dull and
+they have no use for them in any way, their lot is deplorable indeed.
+This class has suffered terribly during the last ten years owing to the
+complete stoppage of the Brassmen's trade in the Niger markets.
+
+This class had few chances of rising in the social scale, but it was
+from this class that sprang some of the best trade boys who took their
+masters' goods away up to Abo and occasionally as far as Onitsa, on the
+Niger.
+
+Cases have occurred of boys from this class rising to as good a position
+as the more favoured winnaboes; but for this they have had to thank some
+white trader, who has taken a fancy to here and there one of them, and
+getting his master to lend him to him as a cabin boy--a position
+generally sought after by the sons of chiefs, so as to learn "white
+man's mouth," otherwise English.
+
+The succession laws are similar to those of the other Coast tribes one
+meets with in the Delta, but to understand them it requires some little
+explanation. A tribe is composed of a king and a number of chiefs. Each
+chief has a number of petty chiefs under him. Perhaps a better
+definition for the latter would be, a number of men who own a few slaves
+and a few canoes of their own, and do an independent trade with the
+white men, but who pay to their chiefs a tribute of from 20 to 25 per
+cent, on their trade with the white man. In many cases the white man
+stops this tribute from the petty chiefs and holds it on behalf of the
+chief. This collection of petty chiefs with their chief forms what in
+Coast parlance is denominated a House.
+
+The House may own a portion of the principal town, say Obulambri, and
+also a portion in any of the small towns in the neighbouring creeks,
+and it may own here and there isolated pieces of ground where some petty
+chief has squatted and made a clearance either as a farm or to place a
+few of his family there as fishermen; in the same way the chief of the
+house may have squatted on various plots of ground in any part of the
+district admitted by the neighbouring tribes to belong to his tribe. All
+these parcels and portions of land belong in common to the House--that
+is, supposing a petty chief having a farm in any part of the district
+was to die leaving no male heirs and no one fit to take his place, the
+chief as head of the house would take possession, but would most likely
+leave the slaves of the dead man undisturbed in charge of the farm they
+had been working on, only expecting them to deliver him a portion of the
+produce equivalent to what they had been in the habit of delivering to
+their late master, who was a petty chief of the house.
+
+The head of the house would have the right of disposal of all the dead
+man's wives, generally speaking the younger ones would be taken by the
+chief, the others he would dispose of amongst his petty chiefs; if, as
+generally happens, there were a few aged ones amongst them for whom
+there was no demand he would take them into his own establishment and
+see they were provided for.
+
+As a matter of fact, all the people belonging to a defunct petty chief
+become the property of the head of the house under any circumstances;
+but if the defunct had left any man capable of succeeding him, the head
+chief would allow this man to succeed without interfering with him in
+any way, provided he never had had the misfortune to raise the chief's
+bile; in the latter case, if the chief was a very powerful chief, whose
+actions no one dare question, the chances are that he would either be
+suppressed or have to go to Long Ju-Ju to prosecute his claim, the
+expenses of which journey would most likely eat up the whole of the
+inheritance, or at least cripple him for life as far as his commercial
+transactions were concerned. It is of course to the interest of the head
+of a house to surround himself with as many petty chiefs as he possibly
+can, as their success in trade, and in amassing riches whether in slaves
+or goods, always benefits him; even in those rivers where no heavy
+"topside" is paid to the head of the house by the white traders, the
+small men or petty chiefs are called upon from time to time to help to
+uphold the dignity of the head chief, either by voluntary offerings or
+forced payments. Public opinion has a good deal to say on the subject of
+succession; and though a chief may be so powerful during his lifetime
+that he may ride roughshod over custom or public opinion, after his
+death his successor may find so many cases of malversation brought
+against the late chief by people who would not have dared to open their
+mouths during the late chief's lifetime, that by the time they are all
+settled he finds that a chief's life is not a happy one at all times.
+Claims of various kinds may be brought up during the lifetime of a
+chief, and three or four of his successors may have the same claim
+brought against them, each party may think he has settled the matter for
+ever; but unless he has taken worst, the descendants of the original
+claimants will keep attacking each successor until they strike one who
+is not strong enough to hold his own against them, and they succeed in
+getting their claim settled. This settlement does not interfere with the
+losing side turning round and becoming the claimants in their turn. Some
+of these family disputes are very curious; take for instance a case of
+a claim for five female slaves that may have been wrongfully taken
+possession of by some former chief of a house, this case perhaps is kept
+warm, waiting the right moment to put it forward, for thirty years, the
+claim then becomes not only for the original five women, but for their
+children's children and so on.
+
+
+RELIGION
+
+The Brass natives to-day are divided into two camps as far as religion
+is concerned: the missionary would no doubt say the greater number of
+them are Christians, the ordinary observer would make exactly the
+opposite observation, and judging from what we know has taken place in
+their towns within the last few years, I am afraid the latter would be
+right.
+
+The Church Missionary Society started a mission here in 1868; it is
+still working under another name, and is under the superintendence of
+the Rev. Archdeacon Crowther, a son of the late Bishop Crowther.
+
+Their success, as far as numbers of attendants at church, has been very
+considerable; and I have known cases amongst the women who were
+thoroughly imbued with the Christian religion, and acted up to its
+teaching as conscientiously as their white sisters; these however are
+few.
+
+With regard to the men converts I have not met with one of whom I could
+speak in the same terms as I have done of the women.
+
+Whilst fully recognising the efforts that the missionaries have put
+forth in this part of the world, I regret I can't bear witness to any
+great good they have done.
+
+This mission has been worked on the usual lines that English missions
+have been worked in the past, so I must attribute any want of success
+here as much to the system as anything.
+
+One of the great obstacles to the spread of Christianity in these parts
+is in my opinion the custom of polygamy, together with which are mixed
+up certain domestic customs that are much more difficult to eradicate
+than the teachings of Ju-Ju, and require a special mission for them
+alone.
+
+Almost equal to the above as an obstacle in the way of Christianity is
+what is called domestic slavery; Europeans who have visited Western
+Africa speak of this as a kind of slavery wherein there is no hardship
+for the slave; they point to cases where slaves have risen to be kings
+and chiefs, and many others who have been able to arrive at the position
+of petty chief in some big man's house. I grant all this, but all these
+people forget to mention that until these slaves are chiefs they are not
+safe; that any grade less than that of a chief that a slave may arrive
+to does not secure him from being sold if his master so wished.
+
+Further, domestic slavery gives a chief power of life and death over his
+slave; and how often have I known cases where promising young slaves
+have done something to vex their chief their heads have paid the
+penalty, though these young men had already amassed some wealth, having
+also several wives and children.
+
+People who condone domestic slavery, and I have heard many
+kindly-hearted people do so, forget that however mild the slavery of the
+domestic slave is on the coast, even under the mildest native it is
+still slavery; further, these slaves are not made out of wood, they are
+flesh and blood, they in their own country have had fathers and mothers.
+During my lengthened stay on the coast of Africa I never questioned a
+slave about his or her own country that I did not find they much
+preferred their own country far away in the interior to their new home.
+Some have told me that they had been travelling upwards of two months
+and had been handed from one slave dealer to another, in some cases
+changing their owner three or four times before reaching the coast. On
+questioning them how they became slaves, I have only been told by one
+that her father sold her because he was in debt; several times I have
+been told that their elder brothers have sold them, but these cases
+would not represent one per cent. of the slaves I have questioned; the
+almost general reply I have received has been that they had been stolen
+when they had gone to fetch water from the river or the spring, as the
+case might be, or while they have been straying a little in the bush
+paths between their village and another. Sometimes they would describe
+how the slave-catchers had enticed them into the bush by showing them
+some gaudy piece of cloth or offered them a few beads or negro bells,
+others had been captured in some raid by one town or village on another.
+
+Therefore domestic slavery in its effect on the interior tribes is doing
+very near the same amount of harm now that it did in days gone by. It
+keeps up a constant fear of strangers, and causes terrible feuds between
+the villages in the interior.
+
+What is the use of all the missionaries' teaching to the young girl
+slaves so long as they are only chattels, and are forced to do the
+bidding of their masters or mistresses, however degrading or filthy that
+bidding may be?
+
+The Ju-Juism of Brass is a sturdy plant, that takes a great deal of
+uprooting. A few years ago a casual observer would have been inclined
+to say the missionaries are making giant strides amongst these people. I
+remember, as evidence of how keenly these people seemed to take to
+Christianity up to a certain point, a little anecdote that the late
+Bishop Crowther once told me about the Brass men. I think it must have
+been a very few years before his death. I saw the worthy bishop
+staggering along my wharf with an old rice bag full of some heavy
+articles. On arriving on my verandah he threw the bag down, and after
+passing the usual compliments, he said, "You can't guess what I have got
+in that bag." I replied I was only good at guessing the contents of a
+bag when the bag was opened; but judging from the weight and the
+peculiar lumpy look of the outside of the bag, I should be inclined to
+guess yams. "Had he brought me a present of yams?" I continued. "No," he
+replied; "the contents of that bag are my new church seats in the town
+of Nimbé; the church was only finished during the week, and I decided to
+hold a service in it on Sunday last; and, do you believe me, those logs
+of wood are a sample of all we had for seats for most part of the
+congregation! I have therefore brought them down to show you white
+gentlemen our poverty, and to beg some planks to make forms for the
+church." I promised to assist him, and he left, carefully walking off
+with his bag of fire-wood, for that was all it was, cut in lengths of
+about fifteen inches, and about four inches in diameter. Here ends my
+anecdote, so far as the bishop was concerned, for he never came back to
+claim the fulfilment of my promise; but later on one of my clerks
+reported to me that there had been a great run on inch planks during the
+week, and that the purchasers were mostly women, and the poorest natives
+in the place. This fact, coupled with the fact that the bishop never
+came back for the planks he had begged of me, caused me to make some
+inquiries, and I found that the church had been plentifully supplied
+with benches by the poorer portion of the congregation.
+
+Yet how many of these earnest people could one guarantee to have
+completely cast out all their belief in Ju-Juism? If I were put upon my
+oath to answer truthfully according to my own individual belief, I am
+afraid my answer would be _not one_.
+
+What an awful injustice the missionary preaches in the estimation of the
+average native woman, when he advises the native of West Africa to put
+away all his wives but one. Supposing, for instance, it is the case of a
+big chief with a moderate number of wives, say only twenty or thirty, he
+may have had children by all of them, or he may have had children by a
+half dozen of them,--what is to become of those wives he discards? are
+they to be condemned to single blessedness for the remainder of their
+days? Native custom or etiquette would not allow these women to marry
+the other men in the chief's house; they can't marry into other houses,
+because they would find the same condition of things there as in their
+own husband's house, always supposing Christianity was becoming general.
+These difficulties in the way of the missionary are the Ju-Ju priests'
+levers, which they know well how to use against Christianity, and which
+accounts for the frequent slide back to Ju-Juism, and in some cases
+cannibalism of otherwise apparently semi-civilized Africans.
+
+The Pagan portion of the inhabitants of the Brass district have still
+their old belief in the Ju-Ju priests and animal worship.
+
+The python is the Brass natives' titular guardian angel. So great was
+the veneration of this Ju-Ju snake in former times, that the native
+kings would sign no treaties with her Britannic Majesty's Government
+that did not include a clause subjecting any European to a heavy fine
+for killing or molesting in any way this hideous reptile. When one
+appeared in any European's compound, the latter was bound to send for
+the nearest Ju-Ju priest to come and remove it, for which service the
+priest expected a dash, _id est_, a present; if he did not get it, the
+chances were the priest would take good care to see that that European
+found more pythons visited him than his neighbours; and as a rule these
+snakes were not found until they had made a good meal of one of the
+white man's goats or turkeys, it came cheaper in the long run to make
+the usual present.
+
+It is now some twenty years ago that the then agent of Messrs. Hatton
+and Cookson in Brass River found a large python in his house, and killed
+it. This coming to the ears of the natives and the Ju-Ju priests, caused
+no little excitement; the latter saw their opportunity, worked up the
+people to a state of frenzy, and eventually led them in an attack on the
+factory of Messrs. Hatton and Cookson, seized the agent and dragged him
+out of his house on to the beach, tied him up by his thumbs, each Ju-Ju
+priest present spat in his mouth, afterwards they stripped him naked and
+otherwise ill treated him, besides breaking into his store and robbing
+him of twenty pounds worth of goods. The British Consul was appealed to
+for redress, and upon his next visit to the river inquired into the
+case, but, _mirabile dictu_, decided that he was unable to afford the
+agent any redress, as he had brought the punishment on himself. I don't
+mention the name of this Consul, as it would be a pity to hand down to
+posterity the fact that England was ever represented by such an idiot.
+
+Besides the python the Brass men had several other secondary Ju-Jus;
+amongst others may be mentioned the grey and white kingfisher, also
+another small bird like a water-wagtail, besides which, in common with
+their neighbours, they believed in a spirit of the water who was
+supposed to dwell down by the Bar, and to which they occasionally made
+offerings in the shape of a young slave-girl of the lightest complexion
+they could buy.
+
+The burial customs of this people differed little from others in the
+Niger Delta, but as I was present at the burial of two of their
+kings--viz. King Keya and King Arishima, at which I saw identically the
+same ceremonial take place, I will describe what I saw as far as my
+memory will serve me, for the last of these took place about thirty
+years ago.
+
+The grave in this instance was not dug in a house, but on a piece of
+open ground close to the king's house, but was afterwards roofed over
+and joined on to the king's houses. The size of the grave was about
+fourteen by twelve feet, and about eight feet deep. At the end where the
+defunct's head would be, was a small table with a cloth laid over it,
+upon this were several bottles of different liquors, a large piece of
+cooked salt beef and sundry other cooked meats, ship's biscuits, &c. The
+ceiling of this chamber was supported by stout beams being laid across
+the opening, upon which would be placed planks after the body had been
+lowered into position, then the whole would be covered over with a part
+of the clay that had been taken out of the hole, the rest of the clay
+being afterwards used to form the walls of the house, that was
+eventually constructed over the grave; a small round hole about three
+inches in diameter being made in the ceiling of the grave, apparently
+about over the place where the head of the corpse would lay. Down this
+would be poured palm wine and spirits on the anniversaries of the king's
+death, by his successor and by the Ju-Ju priests. This part of the
+ceremony would be called "making his father," if it was a son who
+succeeded; if it was not a son, he would describe it as "making his big
+father"; though he was perhaps no blood relation at all.
+
+Previous to the burial the body of the king lay in state for two days in
+a small hut scarcely five feet high, with very open trellis work sides.
+I believe they would have kept the body unburied longer if they could
+have done so, but at the end of the second day his Highness commenced to
+be very objectionable. The king's body was dressed for this ceremony in
+his most expensive robes, having round the neck several necklaces of
+valuable coral, to which his chiefs would add a string more or less
+valuable according to their means, as they arrived for the final
+ceremony. The Europeans were expected to contribute something towards
+the funeral expenses, which contribution generally consisted of a cask
+of beef, a barrel of rum, a hundredweight of ship's biscuits, and from
+twenty to thirty pieces of cloth. Even in this there was a certain
+amount of rivalry shown by the Europeans, to their loss and the natives'
+gain. One knowing trader amongst them on this occasion had just received
+a consignment of imitation coral, an article at that time quite unknown
+in the river, either to European trader or to natives; so he decided to
+place one of these strings of imitation coral round the king's neck
+himself, and thus create a great sensation, for had it been real coral
+its value would have been one hundred pounds. He had, however, not
+counted on the king's very objectionable state, and when he proceeded to
+place his offering round the king's neck, he nearly came to grief, and
+did not seem quite himself until he had had a good stiff glass of brandy
+and water. The news spread like wildfire of this man's munificence, and
+soon the principal chiefs waited upon him to thank him for his present
+to their dead king; the other Europeans were green with jealousy, though
+each had in his turn tried to outdo his neighbour; unfortunately, there
+was a Scotchman there "takin' notes," and faith he guessed a ruse, but
+he was a good fellow and friend of the donor, and kept the secret for
+some years, and did not tell the tale until it could do his friend no
+harm.
+
+The cannons had been going off at intervals for the last two days.
+Towards ten o'clock of the second night after death the king was placed
+in a very open-work wicker casket, and carried shoulder high round the
+town, and then finally deposited in his grave. During this time the
+cannons were being continually fired off, and individuals were assisting
+in the din by firing off the ordinary trade gun. I and another European
+concealed ourselves near the grave, and carefully watched all night to
+see if they sacrificed any slaves on the king's grave, or put any poor
+creatures down into the grave to die a lingering death; but we saw
+nothing of this done, though we had been informed that no king or chief
+of Brass was ever buried without some of his slaves being sent with him
+into the next world; as our informant explained, how would they know he
+had been a big man in this life if he did not go accompanied by some of
+his niggers into the next?
+
+The firing of cannon is kept up at intervals for an indefinite number of
+days after the final interment; but there is no hard and fast rule as
+to its duration as far as I have been able to ascertain, and I think
+myself it is ruled by the greater or less liberality of the successors,
+who are the ones who have to pay for the gunpowder.
+
+Amongst other customs that are common to all these rivers and this river
+is the killing of twin children; but since the mission has been
+established here the missionaries have done their utmost to wean the
+people from this remnant of savagery.
+
+A curious custom that I have heard of in most of these rivers is the
+throwing into the bush, to be devoured by the wild beasts, any children
+that may be born with their front teeth cut. I found this custom in
+Brass, but with an exception, _id est_, I knew a pilot in Twon Town who
+had had the misfortune to be born with his upper front teeth through;
+whether it was because it was only the upper teeth that were through, or
+whether it was that the law is not so strictly carried out in the case
+of a male, I was never able to make sure of; however, he had been
+allowed to live, but it appears in his case some part of the law had to
+be carried out at his death, viz. he was not allowed to be buried, but
+was thrown into the bush, to fall a prey to the wild beasts, and any
+property he might die possessed of could not be inherited by any one,
+but must be dissipated or thrown into the bush to rot. I believe the
+Venerable Archdeacon Crowther has been instrumental in saving several of
+these kind of children in Bonny.
+
+The women of Brass are, like their sisters in Benin river, moving on
+towards women's rights; for though they have been for many generations
+the hewers of wood and drawers of water, and made to do most of the hard
+work of the country, they had commenced some years ago to enjoy more
+freedom than their sisters in the leeward rivers. They still do most of
+the fishing, and the fishing girls of Twon Town used to present a pretty
+sight as some fifteen or twenty of their tiny canoes used to sweep past
+the European factories, each canoe propelled by two or three graceful,
+laughing, chattering girls; with them would generally be seen a canoe or
+two paddled by some dames of a maturer age. Though _passée_ as far as
+their looks were concerned, they could still ply their paddle as well as
+the best amongst the younger ones, as they forced their frail canoes
+through water to some favourite quiet blind creek where the currentless
+water allowed them to use their preparation[83] for stupefying the fish,
+and in little over three hours you might see them come paddling back,
+each tiny canoe with from fifty to a hundred small grey mullet,
+sometimes with more and occasionally with a few small river soles.
+
+The Brass man, like his neighbours, had his public Ju-Ju house as well
+as his private little Ju-Ju chamber, the latter was to be found in any
+Brass man's establishment which boasted of more than one room; those who
+could not afford a separate chamber used to devote a corner of their own
+room, where might be seen sundry odds and ends bespattered with some
+yellow clay, and occasionally a white fowl hung by the leg to remain
+there and die of starvation and drop gradually to pieces as it
+decomposed.
+
+The public Ju-Ju house at Obulambri was not a very pretentious affair;
+it consisted of a native hut of wattle and daub, the walls not being
+carried more than half way up to the eaves, roofed with palm mats; in
+the centre was an iron staff about five feet high, surrounded by eight
+bent spear heads; this was called a tokoi, at the foot of it was a hole
+about three inches in diameter, down which the Ju-Ju priests would pour
+libations of tombo or palm wine, as a sacrifice to the Ju-Ju. I was
+informed that this Ju-Ju house was built over the grave of the original
+founder of Obulambri town. Behind the tokoi, on a kind of altar raised
+about eighteen inches from the ground, were displayed about a dozen
+human skulls; at the time I visited it the Ju-Ju man explained to me
+that the greater part of these had belonged to New Calabar prisoners
+taken in their last war with those people; besides the skulls were
+sundry odds and ends of native pottery, as also a few bowls and jugs of
+European manufacture. What part this pottery played in their devotions I
+could never get a Ju-Ju man to explain, some of them appeared to have
+held human blood. Stacked up in one corner were a few human bones,
+principally thigh and shin bones.
+
+The Brassmen do not often sacrifice human beings to their Ju-Jus, except
+in time of war, when all prisoners without exception were sacrificed.
+
+Their Ju-Ju snake occasionally secured a small child by crawling
+unobserved into a house when the elders were absent or asleep. I once
+was passing through a small fishing village in the St. Nicholas river,
+when most of the inhabitants were away fishing, and hearing terrible
+screams went to see what was the cause of the trouble, and found several
+women wringing their hands and running to and fro in front of a small
+hut. For several minutes I could not get them to tell me what was the
+cause of their trouble; at last one of them trembling, with the most
+abject fear and quite unable to speak, pointed to the door of the hut.
+I went and looked in, but it was so dark I could see nothing at first,
+so stepped inside; when, getting accustomed to the semi-darkness, I saw
+a large python, some ten or twelve feet long, hanging from the ridge
+pole of the hut immediately over a child about two years old that was
+calmly sleeping. To snatch up the child and walk out was the work of a
+moment. I then found that the woman who had pointed to the door of the
+hut was the mother of the child--her gratitude to me for delivering her
+child from certain death can be more easily imagined than described.
+Upon asking why she had not acted as I had done, she replied she dare
+not have interfered with the snake in the way I had done. I afterwards
+asked several of the more intelligent natives of Brass if the Ju-Ju law
+did not allow a mother to save her child in such a case. Some said she
+was a fool woman, and that she could have taken her child away the
+moment she saw it in danger; but others said had she done so, she would
+have been liable to be killed herself or pay a heavy fine to the Ju-Ju
+priests; and I am inclined to believe the latter version to be
+correct.[84]
+
+Amongst other curious customs these people make use of the feather
+ordeal, to find out robbery, witchcraft, and adultery, &c. In this
+ordeal it rests a great deal with the Ju-Ju man who performs it whether
+it proves the party guilty or not. This ordeal is performed as
+follows:--The Ju-Ju man takes a feather from the underpart of a fowl's
+wing, making choice of a stronger or weaker one, according to how he
+intends the ordeal shall demonstrate, then, drawing the tongue of the
+accused as far out of his mouth as he can, forces the quill of the
+feather through from the upper side and draws it out by grasping the
+point of the feather from the under side of the tongue; if the feather
+is unbroken the accused person is proved guilty, if on the contrary the
+feather breaks in the attempt to pass it through the tongue it proves
+the innocence of the person. It may be seen from this description how
+very easy it was to prove a person innocent, the mere fact of the
+feather breaking in the attempt to push it through the tongue being
+sufficient; thus, when suitably approached, the Ju-Ju man could not only
+prove a person's innocence, but also save him any inconvenience in
+eating his mess of foo foo and palaver sauce that evening.
+
+
+NEW CALABAR
+
+The intervening rivers between the Brass and New Calabar Rivers are the
+St. Nicholas, the St. Barbara, the St. Bartholomew, and the Sombrero;
+the influence of the king of New Calabar may be said to commence at the
+St. Bartholomew River, extending inland to about five or ten miles
+beyond the town of Bugama. The lower parts of the St. Bartholomew and
+the numerous creeks, running between that river and New Calabar are
+mostly inhabited by fishermen and their families, their towns and
+villages being without exception the most squalid and dirty of any to be
+found in the Delta. Beyond fishing, the males seem to do little else
+than sleep; occasionally the men assist their wives and children in
+making palm-leaf mats, used generally all over the Delta in place of
+thatch--not a very profitable employment, as the demand varies
+considerably according to the seasons. After a very rough and
+boisterous rainy season, the price may be two shillings and sixpence, or
+its equivalent, for four hundred of these mats, each mat being a little
+over two feet in length, but falling in bad times to two shillings and
+sixpence for five to six hundred. A roof made with these mats threefold
+thick will last for three years.
+
+These people call themselves Calabar men simply because they live within
+the influence of the Calabarese. In the upper part of these small
+rivers, about a day's journey by canoe from the mouth of St.
+Bartholomew, is the chief town of a small tribe of people called the
+Billa tribe, connected by marriage with the Bonny men, several of the
+kings of Bonny having married Billa women. These people are producers in
+a small way of palm-oil, and though they are located so close to the New
+Calabar people, prefer to sell their produce to the Bonny men, who send
+their canoes over to the Billa country to fetch the oil, the latter
+people not having canoes large enough for carrying the large puncheons
+which the Bonny men send over to collect their produce in.
+
+The New Calabar men are now split up into three towns called Bugama,
+where the king lives; Abonema, of which Bob Manuel is the principal
+chief; and Backana, where the Barboy House reside. Besides they have
+numerous small towns scattered about in the network of creeks connecting
+the Calabar River with the Sombrero River. Previous to 1880 these people
+all dwelt together in one large town on the right bank of the Calabar
+River, nearly opposite to where the creek, now called the Cawthorne
+Channel,[85] branches off from the main river.
+
+For some few years previous the chief of the Barboy House, Will Braid,
+had incurred the displeasure of the Amachree house, which was the king's
+house. For certain private reasons the king, with whom sided most of the
+other chiefs, had decided to break down the Barboy house, which had
+been a very powerful house in days anterior to the present king's
+father, and tradition says that the Barboys had some right to be the
+reigning house. Will Braid, the head of the house at this time, had by
+his industry and honourable conduct raised the position of the house to
+very near its former influence. This was one of the private reasons that
+caused the king to look on him with disfavour.
+
+When one of these West African kinglets decides that one of their chiefs
+is getting too rich, and by that means too powerful, he calls his more
+immediate supporters together, and they discuss the means that are to be
+used to compass the doomed one's fall. If he be a man of mettle, with
+many sub-chiefs and aspiring trade boys, the system resorted to is to
+trump up charges against him of breaches of agreement as to prices paid
+by him or his people in the Ibo markets for produce, and fine him
+heavily. If he pays without murmur, they leave him alone for a time; but
+very soon another case is brought against him either on the same lines
+or for some breach of native etiquette, such as sending his people into
+some market to trade where, perchance, he has been sending his people
+for years; but the king and his friendly chiefs dish up some old custom,
+long allowed to drop in abeyance, by which his house was debarred from
+trading in that particular market. The plea of long usance would avail
+him little; another fine would be imposed. This injustice would
+generally have the effect desired, the doomed one would refuse to pay,
+then down the king would come on him for disregarding the orders of
+himself and chiefs; fine would follow fine, until the man lost his head
+and did some rash act, which assisted his enemies to more certainly
+compass his ruin. Or he does what I have seen a persecuted chief do in
+these rivers on more than one occasion: that is, he gathers all his
+wives and children about him, together with his most trusted followers
+and slaves, also any of his family who are willing to follow him into
+the next world, lays a double tier of kegs of gunpowder on the floor of
+the principal room in his dwelling-house and knocks in the heads of the
+top tier of kegs. Placing all his people on this funeral pile, he seats
+himself in the middle with a fire-stick grasped in his hand, then sends
+a message to the king and chiefs to come and fetch the fines they have
+imposed on him. The king and chiefs generally shrewdly guessed what this
+message meant, and took good care not to get too near, stopping at a
+convenient distance to parley with him by means of messengers. The
+victim finding there was no chance of blowing up his enemies along with
+himself and people, would plunge the fire-stick into the nearest keg,
+and the next moment the air would be filled with the shattered remains
+of himself and his not unwilling companions.
+
+Having digressed somewhat to explain how chiefs are undone, I must
+continue my account of the New Calabar people and the cause of their
+deserting their original town. This was brought about by Will Braid, on
+whom the squeezing operation had been some time at work. He turned at
+bay and defied the king and chiefs; this led to a civil war, in which he
+was getting the worst of the game, so one dark night he quietly slipped
+away with most of his retainers and took refuge in Bonny. This led to
+complications, for Bonny espoused the cause of W. Braid and declared war
+against New Calabar; thus in place of suppressing Will Braid they came
+near to being suppressed themselves, the Bonny men very pluckily
+establishing themselves opposite New Calabar town, where they threw up
+a sand battery, in which they placed several rifled cannon, and did
+considerable damage to the New Calabar town, from whence a feeble return
+fire was kept up for several days, during which time the Calabar men
+occupied themselves in placing their valuables and people in security,
+and eventually, unknown to the Bonny men, clearing out all their war
+canoes and fighting men through creeks at the back of their town to the
+almost inaccessible positions of Bugama and Abonema. The Bonny men
+continued the bombardment, but finding there was no reply from the town,
+despatched, during the night, some scouts to find out what was the
+position of things in the New Calabar town; on their return they
+reported the town deserted. The Bonny men lost no time in following the
+New Calabar men to their new position, but found Bugama inaccessible, so
+turned their attention to Abonema, which they very pluckily assaulted,
+but were repulsed with considerable loss, losing one of their best war
+canoes, in which was a fine rifled cannon; at the same time the Bonny
+chief, Waribo, who had most energetically led the assault, barely
+escaped with his life, as he was in the war canoe that had been sunk by
+the New Calabar men. This victory was very pluckily gained by Chief Bob
+Manuel and his people, who were greatly assisted in the defence of their
+position by having been supplied at an opportune moment with a
+mitrailleuse by one of the European traders in the New Calabar river.
+This defeat somewhat cooled the courage of the Bonny men; the war
+however continued to be carried on in a desultory manner for several
+months, until both sides were tired of the game, and at last all the
+questions in dispute between the king and chiefs of New Calabar and Will
+Braid, and the matters in dispute between the New Calabar men and the
+Bonny men were by mutual agreement left to the arbitration of the king
+and chiefs of Okrika, and King Ja Ja and the chiefs of Opobo. The
+arbitrators met on board one of Her Majesty's vessels in Bonny River in
+1881, King Ja Ja being represented by Chief Cookey Gam and several other
+chiefs, the king and chiefs of Okrika being in full force. The result of
+the arbitration did not give complete satisfaction to any party, owing
+to the advice of Ja Ja on the affair not having been listened to in its
+entirety. However, W. Braid returned to New Calabar territory and
+founded a town of his own, assisted by his very faithful Chief Yellow of
+Young Town. Thus ended the last war between the old rivals Bonny and New
+Calabar. It is on record that these two countries had been scarcely ever
+at peace for any length of time since New Calabar was first founded some
+two hundred and fifty years ago, when, tradition says, one of the
+Ephraim Duke family left Old Calabar and settled at the spot from whence
+they retired in 1880.
+
+Old traders I met with in the early sixties informed me that during one
+of these wars, between the years 1820 and 1830, the king Pepple, then
+reigning in Bonny succeeded in capturing the king of Calabar of that
+time (the grandfather of the last king Amachree), and to celebrate his
+victory and royal capture, made a great feast to which he invited all
+the European slave traders then in his country. The feast was a right
+royal one, the king had a special dish prepared for himself which was
+nothing less than the heart of his royal captive, torn from his scarcely
+lifeless body.
+
+The New Calabar people, though said to be descended from the Old Calabar
+race, have not retained any of the characteristics of the latter,
+neither in their language nor dress, nor have they retained the
+elaborate form of secret society or native freemasonry peculiar to the
+Efik[86] race called Egbo.
+
+Their religion is the same animistic form of Ju-Juism and belief in the
+oracle they call Long Ju-Ju situated in the vicinity of Bende in the
+hinterland of Opobo, common to all the inhabitants of the Delta; besides
+the latter, they are believers in the power of a Ju-Ju in some mystic
+grove in the Oru country. The peculiar test at this latter place is said
+to have been established by some ancient dame having uttered some
+fearful curse or wish at the spot where the ordeal is administered. The
+descriptions of this are rather vague, as no one who has undergone it
+has ever been known to return, that is, if he has really seen the oracle
+work, for if it works it is a sign of his guilt and drowns him; if he is
+innocent it does not work, so on his return he is not in a position to
+describe it. But the proprietors of this interesting Ju-Ju have for very
+many years found that a nigger fetches a better price alive than when
+turned into butcher's meat; they have therefore been in the habit of
+selling the guilty victim into slavery in as far distant a country as
+possible; but occasionally one of these men have drifted down to the
+coast again, but dare not return to his own country as no one would
+believe he was anything else but a spirit. One of these "spirits" I had
+the pleasure to interview on one occasion, and he told me that the only
+ones who were actually drowned were the old or unsaleable men; when two
+men went to this Ju-Ju or ordeal well, to decide some vital question
+between them, the party taking best would want to see his dead or
+drowned opponent; for this purpose the Ju-Ju priests always kept a few
+of the old and decrepit votaries on hand to be drowned as required, but
+the opponent was never allowed to stand by and see the oracle work, but
+was taken up to the well and allowed to see a dead body lying at the
+bottom, and after he had glanced in and satisfied himself there was a
+drowned person there, he would be hurried away by the Ju-Ju priests and
+their assistants. That these priests had the supernatural power to make
+the water rise up in the well, this "spirit" thoroughly believed, and
+when I offered the suggestion of an underground water supply brought
+from some higher elevation, he scouted the idea and gave me his private
+opinion thus: "White man he no be fit savey all dem debly ting Ju-Ju
+priest fit to do; he fit to change man him face so him own mudder no fit
+savey him; he fit make dem tree he live for water side, bob him head
+down and drink water all same man; he fit make himself alsame bird and
+fly away; you fit to look him lib for one place and you keep you eye for
+him, he gone, you no fit see him when he go."
+
+Which little speech turned into ordinary English meant to say that white
+people could not understand the devilish tricks the Ju-Ju priests were
+able to do, they could so disguise a person that his own mother would
+not recognise him, this without the assistance of any make-up but simply
+from their devilish science; that they could cause a tree on the banks
+of a river to bend its stem and imbibe water through its topmost
+branches; that they could change themselves into birds and fly away; and
+lastly, that they could make themselves invisible before your eyes and
+so suddenly that you could not tell when they had done so.
+
+I asked him why the Ju-Ju man had not altered him, so that when he sold
+him it would be impossible for any one who had known him in his own
+country ever to recognise him if they saw him in another. His reply was:
+"Ju-Ju man savey them man what believe in Ju-Ju no will believe me dem
+time I go tell dem I be dem Os[=u]k[=u] of Young Town come back from
+Long Ju-Ju. He savey all man go run away from me in my own country."
+"Well," I said, "how about the people amongst whom you now are? they
+believe in very nearly the same Ju-Jus that your own people do, what do
+they say about you?" "Oh! they say I be silly fellow and no savey I done
+die one time, and been born again in some other country." I then asked
+him how they accounted for his knowing about the people who were still
+alive in his own country and to be able to talk about matters which had
+taken place there within the previous five or six years. Then I got the
+word the inquirer in this part of the world generally gets when he
+wishes to dive into the inner circles of native occultism, viz.,
+"Anemia," which means "I don't know."
+
+The chiefs in New Calabar in the days of the last king's father were an
+extremely fine body of men, both physically and commercially; the latter
+quality they owed to the strong hand the king kept over them, and the
+excellent law he inaugurated when he became the king with regard to
+trade, viz., that no New Calabar chief or other native was allowed to
+take any goods on credit from the Europeans. His power was absolute, and
+considering that he inherited his father's place at a time when the
+country was in the throes of war with Bonny--his father being the king
+captured by the king of Bonny mentioned previously--the success of his
+rule was wonderful, for he pulled his country together and carried on
+the war with such ability that Bonny ultimately was glad to come to
+terms; a peace was agreed upon which lasted many years, until the old
+king of Bonny died, and his son wishing to emulate his father re-opened
+hostilities, but with such ill-success and loss to his country that it
+eventually led to his being deposed and exiled from his country for some
+years.
+
+The New Calabar people are and have been always great believers in
+Ju-Juism, the head Ju-Ju priest being styled the Ju-Ju king and ranking
+higher than the king in any matters relating to purely native affairs.
+
+The shark is their principal animal deity, to which they were in the
+habit of sacrificing a light-coloured child every seven years. This used
+to be openly and ostentatiously performed by a procession of a
+half-dozen large canoes being formed up at the town of New Calabar, each
+canoe being manned by forty to fifty paddlers; in the midships of each
+canoe a deck some ten feet long would be placed on which the Ju-Ju
+priests and a number of the younger chiefs and the grown-up sons of the
+chief men would huddle together and keep up a continuous howling and
+dancing, accompanied with the waving of their hands and handkerchiefs,
+until they arrived down near the mouth of the river. When the water
+began to be so rough that the singers and dancers could not keep their
+feet, it was a sign the offering must be cast into the sea; the Ju-Ju
+men and their assistants all supplicating their friend the shark to
+intercede with the Spirit of the Water to keep open the entrance to
+their river and cause plenty of ships to come to their river to trade.
+
+Their Ju-Ju house in their original town was a much larger and more
+pretentious edifice than that of Bonny, garnished with human and goats'
+skulls in a somewhat similar manner, unlike the Bonny Ju-Ju house in the
+fact that it was roofed over, the eaves of which were brought down
+almost to the ground, thus excluding the light and prying eyes at the
+same time; at either side of the main entrance, extending some few feet
+from the eaves, was a miscellaneous collection of iron three-legged
+pots, various plates, bowls and dishes of Staffordshire make, all of
+which had some flower pattern on them, hence were Ju-Ju and not
+available for use or trade--the old-fashioned lustre jug, being also
+Ju-Ju, was only to be seen in the Ju-Ju house, though a great favourite
+in Bonny and Brass as a trade article--at this time all printed goods or
+cloth with a flower or leaf pattern on them were Ju-Ju. Any goods of
+these kinds falling into the hands of a true believer had to be
+presented to the Ju-Ju house. As traders took good care not to import
+any such goods, people often wondered where all these things came from.
+Had they arrived shortly after a vessel bound to some other port had had
+the misfortune to be wrecked off New Calabar, they would have solved the
+problem at once, for anything picked up from a wreck which is Ju-Ju has
+to be carried off at once to the Ju-Ju house. I remember on one occasion
+visiting this Ju-Ju house just after a large ship called the _Clan
+Gregor_ bound into Bonny had been wrecked off New Calabar, and found the
+Ju-Ju house decked both inside and out with yards of coloured cottons
+from roof to floor; but the Ju-Ju priests did not get all their rights,
+for some tricky natives on salving a bale of goods would carefully slit
+the bale just sufficiently to see what were the goods inside, and
+should they be Ju-Ju would not open them, but take them to their
+particular friend amongst the European traders, and get him to send them
+away to some other river for sale on joint account.
+
+Every eighth day is called Calabar Sunday, the day following being
+formerly the market day or principal receiving day for the white traders
+of the native produce, which consisted principally, and still does, of
+palm oil. The native Sunday was passed in olden days by the chief in
+receiving visits from the white men and jamming[87] with them for any
+produce he had the intention of selling the following day, or clearing
+up any little Ju-Ju matters that he had been putting off for the want of
+a slack day, not because it was his Sunday, but because that was a day
+on which by custom he could not visit the ships. I remember it was on
+paying a visit to old King Amachree, the father of the late king of the
+same name, I saw for the first time a native sacrifice. I was then
+little more than a boy as a matter of fact, I was under seventeen years
+of age, but filling a man's place in New Calabar who had been invalided
+home. The old king had taken me under his special protection and gave me
+much good advice and counsel, which was of great use to me in my novel
+position. My employers ought to have been very thankful to him, for
+though I was the youngest trader in the river by some twelve years, I
+held my own with them and got a larger share of the produce of the river
+than my predecessor had done, all owing to the old brick of a king, who
+would come and see how I was doing on the big trade days, and if he
+thought I was not doing as well as my neighbours he would send off a
+message to a small creek close to the shipping, where the natives used
+to wait with their oil until it was jammed for, _id est_, agreed for,
+and order three or four canoes of oil to be sent off to me, though I had
+not seen its owner to agree with him as to what he was to get for it. I
+held this appointment for a little over six months, when, my senior
+having returned, I had to go back to my duties in Bonny under the chief
+agent of the firm, a Captain Peter Thompson, one of the kindest-hearted
+skippers that ever entered Bonny river. In those days we all had some
+nickname that we were known by amongst the natives, and another amongst
+the white men. Amongst the former he was called Calla Thompson, because
+he was short, in contradistinction to another Thompson who was tall,
+called Opo Thompson; but his name amongst the white men was Panter
+Thompson, owing to his inability to pronounce the "th" in panther during
+a discussion as to whether we had tigers or only panthers on the West
+Coast of Africa. Poor Panter, after a most successful voyage of a little
+over two years, was preparing to return home, and had only a few more
+weeks to remain in Bonny, when in stepping into his boat his foot
+slipped and he fell into the river at a point known to be infested with
+sharks. A brother skipper jumped into the boat, and actually clutched
+him by his cap at the same moment poor Panter said "I am gone, Ned!" no
+doubt feeling himself being drawn down by some hungry shark.
+
+His son now commands one of the finest steamers of the African Steamship
+Company, and seems to have inherited in a marked degree all the good
+qualities of his father; so, travellers to West Africa, if you want a
+comfortable ship and a thorough good fellow to travel with, take your
+passage in the ship commanded by Captain Willie Thompson, R.N.R.
+
+But this is digressing. I must get back to New Calabar and tell you what
+I saw at my introduction to Ju-Juism under the auspices of dear old King
+Amachree. The occasion was the swearing Ju-Ju with some people in the
+interior, with whom they had only lately opened up commercial relations,
+and they wanted them to swear they would trade with no other people but
+them. The deputation, who represented the market people, looked as wild
+a lot as one could wish to see, and, as far as I could make out, the
+ceremony I was watching was a kind of preliminary canter to a more
+impressive, and most likely more diabolical one to be carried out at
+some future date in the stranger folks' country. On this occasion the
+officiating Ju-Ju priest did not seem to address any of his words to the
+strangers, who looked on with a certain amount of fear depicted in their
+countenance.
+
+The Ju-Ju priest was clothed (?) in a superb dark-coloured and
+greasy-looking rag about his loins, barely sufficient to satisfy the
+easiest going of European Lord Chamberlains; but from the expressive
+grunts of satisfaction which greeted his appearance in the Ju-Ju house,
+I was led to suppose his dress was quite correct and proper for the
+occasion. His head was shaved on the right side, and all down his right
+side and leg he had been dusted over with some greyish-white native
+chalk. He said a few words in an undertone to one of his assistants, who
+went out of sight for a moment or so and quickly returned with a very
+fine almost milk-white goat, the poor beast seeming to anticipate its
+fate from its fearfully loud bleating. The Ju-Ju priest seized the poor
+beast by its muzzle with his left hand, and dexterously tossing its body
+under his left arm, forced its head back towards his left shoulder until
+the neck of the beast formed an arc, his assistant handing him at this
+moment a very sharp white-handled spear-pointed knife, which he drew
+across the animal's throat, almost severing its head from its body.
+Quick as lightning he dropped on one knee and held the bleeding animal
+over a receptacle, having the appearance of a large soup plate,
+fashioned in the clay of the ground immediately in front of the altar
+arrangement. In the centre of this plate was a hole down which the
+quickly coagulating blood slowly trickled; after the interval of what
+appeared to me minutes, but was in fact most likely less than a minute,
+the Ju-Ju man laid the lifeless body of the goat down with its neck over
+the opening in the plate, leaving it there to drain. At the moment of
+the sacrifice various gongs and old ship bells were struck by young men
+stationed near them for that purpose--a wrecked ship's bell being
+generally presented to the Ju-Ju house, though not as in the case of
+Ju-Ju goods by law prescribed. New Calabar people had been fairly well
+observant of this custom, and the wrecks numerous, judging from the
+number of ships' bells in the Ju-Ju house. At every movement of the
+Ju-Ju priest the king and chief would grunt out a noise very much
+resembling that auld Scotch word "ahum."
+
+The Ju-Ju house had amongst its possessions several ill-shapen wooden
+idols, and scattered about the affair that represented an altar were
+various small idols looking very much like children's dolls; also
+several large elephant's tusks, and two or three very well carved ones,
+with the usual procession of coated and naked figures winding round
+them.
+
+The present king of New Calabar[88] is a son of my old friend King
+Amachree, and is called King Amachree also, but has shown little of the
+ability of his late father, being completely led by the nose by his
+brother George Amachree, who practically rules both king and people.
+
+The former is a small, quiet, and rather amiable man, but of a
+vacillating and unreliable character; his brother and prime minister is,
+on the contrary, a tall and very fine specimen of the negro race,
+endowed by nature with a very suave and not unmusical voice, a very able
+speaker, clear and logical reasoner, but of a very grasping nature--an
+excellent and successful trader and exceedingly nice man to deal with,
+as long as he has got things moving the way that suits him and his
+policy; but when thwarted in his designs, trading or political, he
+becomes a difficult customer to deal with, and a very unpleasant and
+objectionable type of negro "big man." Nevertheless, had he had the
+fortune to have been born in a civilised Africa, I feel confident his
+natural abilities, assisted by education, would have made him a man of
+eminence in whatever country his lot might have been cast.
+
+Most of the New Calabar chiefs bear a very favourable repute amongst the
+white traders, and compare very favourably intellectually with the
+neighbouring chiefs of the Niger Delta.
+
+Another chief of no mean capacity is Bob Manuel, of Abonema, exceedingly
+neat, almost a dandy in appearance, a very shrewd trader, clear and
+concise in his speech, honourable in all his dealings, of a very
+reserved temperament; but a charming man to talk with, once started on
+any topic that interests him or his visitor.
+
+Owing to some peculiarities in their dress, the New Calabar chiefs are
+very different to the chiefs in other parts of the Delta. They never
+appear outside of their houses unless robed in long shirts (made of real
+india madras of bold check patterns, in which no other colour but red,
+blue and white is ever allowed to be used) reaching down to their heels;
+under this they wear a singlet and a flowing loin cloth of the same
+material as their shirts. Of late years, during the rainy season, some
+of them have added elastic-side boots and white socks, but the most
+curious part of their get-up is their head-gear, for since about 1866
+they have taken to wearing wigs. These are only worn on high days and
+holidays and at special functions, but the effect sometimes is so
+utterly ridiculous as to be more than strangers can look at without
+laughing. Imagine an immensely stout and somewhat podgy negro with
+elastic-side boots, white stockings, long shirt, several strings of
+coral hung round his neck and hanging in festoons down as far as where
+his waistcoat would end, did he wear one, a Charles II. light flaxen
+wig, the latter topped up by an ordinary stove-pipe black silk hat!
+
+This fashion of wearing wigs, I am afraid, was unconsciously inaugurated
+by me, having taken with me in 1865 to New Calabar some wigs that I had
+used in some private theatricals in England. A chief named Tom Fouché
+saw them, and was enchanted with a nigger's trick wig, the top of which
+could be raised by pulling a hidden silk cord, and eventually he became
+the proud possessor of my stock, and produced a great sensation the
+first public festival he appeared at. Previous to this I never saw a wig
+in New Calabar; as a matter of fact, they have no excuse for them, a
+bald-headed native being an almost unheard-of curiosity, and grey or
+white heads are very scarce. Alas! like all pioneers, I did not reap the
+reward I should have done, as I left the New Calabar river before the
+fashion had caught on, and Messrs. Thomas Harrison and Co., of
+Liverpool, became the principal purveyors of wigs to the Court of New
+Calabar.
+
+These people are remarkable for the bold stand they have made against
+the persecution of their neighbours almost from the day their founder
+planted his foot on the New Calabar soil, or mud rather, I should say;
+besides their wars with the Bonny men, they were often attacked by the
+Brass men, allies of Bonny. With the Okrika men they were almost
+constantly at war. This latter was a kind of guerilla warfare carried on
+in the creeks, and consisted in seizing any unprotected small canoe with
+its crew of two or three men or women and cargo, the latter generally
+being yams or Indian corn, the custom being on both sides to eat these
+prisoners.
+
+The Church Missionary Society established a mission here in 1875, but
+during the war of 1879 and 1880 the missionary had to leave. Their
+success had not been brilliant up to this date, owing, no doubt, in some
+measure, to the immense power wielded by the Ju-Ju priests in New
+Calabar.
+
+It was not until 1887-8 that the missionaries were able to again
+commence their labours amongst these people, and then not in the
+principal town. Archdeacon Crowther, however, succeeded about this time
+in getting a plot of ground in Bob Manuel's town, Abonema, for the
+purpose of building a mission station. As to the success of this last
+effort I can't speak from personal observation, as I left this river
+shortly afterwards myself; in fact, it was on my last visit to Abonema
+that I conveyed in my steamer, the _Quorra_, the missionary and his wife
+to their new home from Brass. They were a young couple of very well
+educated and most intelligent Sierra Leone natives.
+
+
+BONNY AND THE PEPPLE FAMILY
+
+This river was the most important slave market in the Delta, as a matter
+of fact surpassing in numbers of slaves exported any other single
+slave-dealing station on the West or South-West Coast of Africa.
+
+According to Mr. Clarkson, the historian of the abolition of the
+slave-trade, this river and Old Calabar exported more slaves than all
+the other slave-dealing centres on the West and South-West Coasts of
+Africa combined.
+
+It is a well-known fact that for about two hundred years the average
+annual output of slaves through the Bonny River was about 16,000 (this
+included the shipments from New Calabar), totalling up to the immense
+number of 3,200,000 souls taken out of this part of Africa during two
+centuries.
+
+The above figures do not represent the total depletion this part of
+Africa suffered during this time. To the above immense number of slaves
+exported must be added the number of lives lost in the raids made on the
+Ibo villages for the purpose of capturing the people to sell as slaves;
+we must also add the number that died on their way down from the
+interior to the coast, and to these again must be added the slaves
+refused by the European trader by reason of any defect, malformation,
+or incipient signs of disease. The fate of these poor souls was sad; but
+perhaps many of their brethren envied them their quick release from the
+cares of this world. The native slave-dealer was too practical a man to
+burden himself with mouths to fill that he could not immediately turn
+into cloth, rum, gunpowder or coral, so oftener than otherwise he would
+simply tell his own niggers to drop their canoe astern of the slave
+ship, cut the rejected slaves heads off, and cast their bodies into the
+river to feed the sharks, this often taking place within sight of the
+European slaver.
+
+A very moderate allowance for loss of life between the interior and the
+slave-ship from the above-mentioned causes would be at the least 40 per
+cent.; thus totalling the immense number of 4,480,000 souls sent out of
+this one district in about two centuries. The greater number of these
+were Ibos, a slave much sought after in the olden days by planters in
+the West Indies and the Southern States of America.
+
+I have mentioned these latter facts here to point out to my readers that
+the so-called benevolent domestic slavery as practised on the coast of
+Western Africa and tolerated in Her Britannic Majesty's West African
+Colonies, must, as a natural consequence, lead to a deplorable loss of
+life, though not in so wholesale a manner as the export of slaves led to
+in former days.
+
+The Bonny people claim to be descended from the Ibo tribe, but I should
+be inclined to think that their proper description to-day would be a
+mixture of Ibos, Kwos, Billa, and sundry infusions of blood from
+inter-marriage with the female slaves brought down by the slave-dealers
+from places lying beyond and at the back of the Ibo people.
+
+Whatever their origin may have been, a commercial spirit is, and has
+been since their first intercourse with Europeans, a very highly
+developed trait in their character. As I have already shown, they were
+the greatest slave traders in Western Africa, and when that, for them,
+lucrative trade was finally put a stop to by the treaty signed on the
+21st of November, 1848, between Her Britannic Majesty's Consul and King
+Pepple, whereby King Pepple was to receive an annual present of $2,000
+for six years--[previous to this, one, if not two treaties had been
+signed by King Pepple, with Her Britannic Majesty's representatives,
+with the same object; but the greed of gain had been too much for his
+dusky Majesty, combined with the continued presence on the coast of the
+Spanish slave-dealers; one of the latter being established at Brass as
+late as 1844]--they then turned their whole attention to the legitimate
+trade of palm oil, and soon became the largest exporters of that article
+on the West Coast of Africa. Their trade in this article had not been
+inconsiderable since 1825, at which date the Liverpool merchants had
+seriously turned their attention to legitimate trade.
+
+In 1837-38, the export of palm oil was already about 14,200 tons, all
+carried in sailing vessels principally owned in Liverpool, and mostly by
+firms that had been in the slave trade.
+
+Like the natives of Brass, many of these people have embraced the
+Christian faith, the Church Missionary Society having placed one of
+their stations here in 1866, some two years earlier than the Brass
+Mission was commenced.
+
+Their endeavours have certainly met with considerable success in
+prevailing upon a large number of the natives to give up many of their
+Ju-Ju practices; amongst others, the worship of the iguana, an immense
+lizard, which from time immemorial had been the Bonny man's titular
+guardian angel. They not only got them to give up worshipping this
+saurian, but also, to mark a new departure in their religious ideas, the
+missionaries prevailed upon the people to organise a general iguana
+hunt; so, following the old saying of "the better the day, the better
+the deed," one Easter Sunday, about the year 1883 or 1884, or about
+twenty-two years after the establishment of the mission, the bells of
+the mission church rang out the signal for the wholesale slaughter of
+these reptiles. To such an extent and with such good will did the people
+work that day, that by evening time not one was left alive in the town.
+That day it was everybody's job to kill these reptiles, but it was
+nobody's job to clear away the dead bodies, there being no County
+Council in Bonny to see to the scavenger work after this animal St.
+Bartholomew; the consequence was the stench was so great from the
+decaying bodies that every European predicted a general sickness would
+be the natural outcome of it all; but no such unlucky event happened,
+and the natives did not seem to notice the extra strong perfume very
+much--one of them observing, to a growl about it by a white man, that
+"it be all same them trade beef you sell we people for chop."
+
+The Bonny men until late years were steeped in all the most vile
+practices of Ju-Juism--sacrificing human beings to their various Ju-Jus,
+and eating all their prisoners captured in war, certain of their Ju-Ju
+practices demanding an annual human sacrifice. If at this time they
+happened to be at peace with their neighbours, and consequently without
+any prisoner to be sacrificed, the Ju-Ju men would disguise themselves
+in some fantastic dress (some Europeans have said they disguise
+themselves as leopards; I have never seen this disguise used, and doubt
+it very much), and prowl about the town and its byeways, seizing for
+their purpose in preference some stray stranger that might be staying in
+the town; failing a stranger, some noted bad character belonging to the
+town in whose fate no one would be greatly interested would be seized
+upon. To say these practices are completely stamped out would be,
+perhaps, not quite the truth; but that they are being stamped out I feel
+convinced, and considering what believers in Ju-Ju these people have
+been, I think I may say fairly quick.
+
+The common sense of the people is assisting very much, and the women are
+showing themselves capable of something better than what their former
+state condemned them to. The final decision to slaughter the iguana some
+years ago was brought about by them in a great measure on solid common
+sense grounds, for had not the iguana been their mortal enemy for years
+by eating their fowls and chickens before their eyes, thus destroying
+about the only means a woman of the lower class, or one who had ceased
+to please her lord and master, had of making a little pin money.
+
+The Ju-Ju house of Bonny, once the great show place of the town, has now
+completely disappeared and its hideous contents are scattered; strange
+to say, I saw, only a few weeks ago, in the house of a lady in London,
+one of the sacrificial pots of native earthenware that had done duty for
+many generations in the Bonny Ju-Ju House.
+
+A description of this Ju-Ju house may be interesting to some of my
+readers. It was an oblong building of about forty feet long by thirty
+broad, surrounded by mud walls about eight or ten feet high; one portion
+over where the altar stood had had sticks arranged, as if the intention
+had been at some time to roof it over; at the end behind the altar the
+wall had been built in a semicircle; the altar looked very much like an
+ordinary kitchen plate rack with the edges of the plate shelves picked
+out with goat skulls. There were three rows of these, and on the three
+plate shelves a row of grinning human skulls; under the bottom shelf,
+and between it and the top of what would be in a kitchen the dresser,
+were eight uprights garnished with rows of goats' skulls, the two middle
+uprights being supplied with a double row; below the top of the dresser,
+which was garnished with a board painted blue and white, was arranged a
+kind of drapery of filaments of palm fronds, drawn asunder from the
+centre, exposing a round hole with a raised rim of clay surrounding it,
+ostensibly to receive the blood of the victims and libations of palm
+wine.
+
+To one side, and near the altar, was a kind of roughly made table fixed
+on four straight legs; upon this was displayed a number of human bones
+and several skulls; leaning against this table was a frame looking very
+like a chicken walk on to the table; this also was garnished with
+horizontal rows of human skulls--here and there were to be seen human
+skulls lying about; outside the Ju-Ju house, upon a kind of trellis
+work, were a number of shrivelled portions of human flesh.
+
+Whilst writing about the wholesale slaughter of iguanas I forgot to
+mention that this was not the first time an animal that was Ju-Ju and
+held in high veneration had had a general battue arranged for it. The
+monkey used to hold a place in Bonny equal with the iguana, but for some
+reason or another it fell from its high estate, and was as ruthlessly
+slaughtered by its quondam worshippers.
+
+Other Ju-Jus were the shark and the Spirit of the Water, or supposed
+guardian angel of the Bar. The bull was at one time worshipped, but not
+of late years; but still fresh beef was Ju-Ju, and twenty years ago no
+Bonny gentleman would touch it.
+
+Like fresh beef, milk of cows or goats was never used by natives,
+neither were eggs eaten by Bonny men or any of the neighbouring coast
+tribes.
+
+Native houses in Bonny are very little different to the general run of
+native houses along this coast, as far as the external appearance goes;
+but inside they are perfect Hampton Court mazes to the uninitiated. A
+noticeable peculiarity is that the entrance door and all the other
+doorways in a native house have a fixed barrier about eighteen inches
+high between each room from whence start the doorways proper. This forms
+a very favourite seat of the master of the house or his wife, but one
+must never step over them while any one is sitting on them; a man
+stepping over one while a man is sitting there means "poison for eye,"
+as the natives express it, which means to say your action will cause
+them sickness. A man doing the same when a female is sitting in this
+position has a much more significant meaning, and for a slave would
+entail a good flogging.
+
+No community of natives demonstrates the peculiar workings of domestic
+slavery so well as these people, for in no other place on the coast can
+any one find so many instances of the rapid rise of a bought slave from
+the lowest rung of the slave ladder to the topmost.
+
+The bought slave was quite a different class to the son of a slave born
+in Bonny of slave parents; for outside the direct descendants of the
+Pepple family, the freemen of Bonny could be counted on one hand;
+therefore, a slave born in Bonny was looked upon as being almost equal
+with a freeman. These were called Bonny free; and the Bonny free, though
+they boast of their birth, can't boast of the most brains, for the most
+intelligent men of these people--especially during the last fifty
+years--have been bought slaves, with few exceptions.
+
+In 1837, the then reigning King Pepple had to get Captain Craigie of
+H.M. Navy to assist him in asserting his rights, a slave of his having
+usurped his place. A few years after, in 1854, this same King Pepple was
+deposed by his chiefs for making continuous war on New Calabar, and thus
+draining the wealth of the country, as well as for his cruelties to his
+own people; they, at the same time, found out another charge against him
+that he was an usurper, as there was a young man named Dapho Pepple, a
+son of his elder brother, who was entitled to the throne, and, with the
+assistance of the late Consul Beecroft, the change was made and the
+fighting King Pepple was taken away to Fernando Po, and eventually found
+his way to England in 1857; there he resided four years, was carefully
+looked after by the temperance party, and eventually became a convert to
+Christianity. Several sets of verses were strung together for and about
+him by the goody goody papers of the time. He made strong appeals to the
+British public for Ŗ20,000 to establish a mission in his country; but in
+this matter I am afraid he was not successful, as the mission was never
+started by him, and on his arrival home in Bonny River, in August, 1861,
+there was a dearth of current coin in the royal pockets.
+
+The following is King Pepple's address in verse, which, he asserted, he
+spoke when seeking funds to establish a mission in his country. He only
+asked for a modest Ŗ20,000. I never heard what he got, but one thing I
+do know, whatever he did get, he never expended a shilling of it for the
+purpose it was given him:--
+
+          Beloved bretheren,
+                      Young and old,
+            I come to day to ask for gold
+            To help the missionary Coons
+            Who brave Bonny's hot simoons.
+              Tooralooral! Rich and poor,
+              A pewter plate is at the door!
+
+            Now why must each of you decide
+            Your heart and purse to open wide?
+            It is because the imbued sin
+            That e'en now lurks each heart within
+              Tooralooral! with all its might
+              Is prompting you to close them tight.
+
+            And then it must not be forgot
+            That Hell is wide and awful hot,
+            And gibbering fiends around us grin
+            With joy to see us tumble in.
+              Tooralooral! don't forget
+              The Devil he may have you yet.
+
+            But would you from destruction turn,
+            Nor 'mid sulphurous vapours burn,
+            But each become a blessed spirit,
+            And kingdom come with joy inherit.
+              Tooralooral! tip us a bob,
+              To help us on our holy job.
+
+            Remember, friends, we are but dust,
+            And die in course of time we must.
+            To show the seeds have taken root
+            By yielding up the proper fruit,
+              Tooralooral! are you willing
+              To subscribe another shilling?
+
+            If you will help to save the nigger
+            Your crown of glory shall be bigger,
+            More white your robes, your sandals smarter,
+            When we shall meet above herear'ter
+              Tooralooral! Psalms and Hymns,
+              Cherubs sweet and Seraphims.
+
+            Fields of glory, floods of light,
+            Sweet effulgence, Angels bright,
+            Sounds symphoneous, jewels rare,
+            Sheets of gold and perfumed air.
+              Tooralooral! fellow men,
+              Hallelujah! and Amen.
+
+By what specious reasoning he succeeded in prevailing upon the
+authorities at the Foreign Office to countenance his return to Bonny, or
+what he described as his dominions, I know not. The fact, however, is on
+record that he did get this permission, and that he found some good
+friends in London to assist him with sufficient cash to pay Ŗ900 down on
+account of the charter of the _Bewley_, a small vessel of only about 180
+tons register, which was to carry him and his consort, the Queen
+Eleanor, better known in Bonny as Allaputa, and their royal suite, which
+consisted of nine English men and two English women; amongst the former
+he had nominated the following officials, viz., premier, secretary, an
+assistant secretary, three clerks, and one doctor, a farmer, and a valet
+for himself. Mrs. Wood, the gardener's wife, was to be schoolmistress,
+and the other English woman was to act as a maid of honour to the Queen
+Eleanor. All these people had agreements for salaries varying from Ŗ60
+to Ŗ600 per annum, some of them with an allowance of Ŗ15 for uniform;
+several of the agreements contained a clause that stipulated that the
+king was to supply them with suitable apartments in the royal palace.
+On arriving in the Bonny river, these poor people had a rude awakening,
+for they found that the king was not wanted by his people, had no royal
+palace, and no revenues. However, they did not immediately quit the
+service of the dusky monarch, but held on in the hope of getting
+sufficient arrears of pay out of him to pay their passages home; they
+had some reason for their action, for the old king still had a strong
+party friendly to him in the town. The king funked landing amongst his
+late subjects, and he remained on board the _Bewley_, until the 15th of
+October, landing at last with many misgivings. Strange to relate, the
+same day the walls of the Bonny Ju-Ju house crumbled to bits, caused, no
+doubt, by the heavy rains, but the king looked upon it as an omen boding
+no good to him.
+
+When the king landed, the captain of the _Bewley_ gave the European
+suite notice that he could not supply them with food any longer, as the
+king was not able to pay him what he owed the ship.
+
+These poor people now found themselves in a sad plight, but the
+Liverpool supercargoes in the river gave them quarters in their
+different sailing vessels and hulks. Those who wished to try their luck
+in some other place on the coast had their passages paid by the
+supercargoes of the river; Miss Mary, the queen's maid of honour, was
+about the first to be sent home, the gardener and his wife left in
+November, and by the end of December the last of the king's white suite
+left the river. None were ever paid their arrears of wages, the king
+being with difficulty made to find Ŗ10 towards the passage money of the
+doctor. Strange to relate, though these eleven white people could not be
+said to have passed their time in Bonny river under the best conditions
+for health, being cooped up on board a vessel of only 180 tons
+register, yet only one of them died, that one being the king's valet.
+All had remained more than two months in the river, some four months, at
+a time, when, according to some authorities, the coast climate is most
+to be dreaded.
+
+King Pepple never regained his ancient sway over the Bonny people, and
+after lingering in very indifferent health a few years, during which
+time he was every now and again springing some new intrigue on his
+people, he passed away at Ju-Ju Town, where he had been living almost
+ever since his return to his native land, for his health's sake, he
+asserted, but rumour had it that he felt himself safer away from the
+vicinity of his more powerful chiefs.
+
+After his death, the affairs of Bonny went back into the hands of the
+four regents, as they had been since the death of King Dapho up to the
+time of King Pepple's return in 1861, and in a great measure remained
+during the few years Pepple lived.
+
+These regents had originally been appointed by the late Acting Consul
+Lynslager on the 1st of September, 1855, and were the heads of the
+following houses:--
+
+  _Name of House._    _Native Name of Chief in_  _Name of Chief in_
+                      _Possession in 1855._      _Possession in 1869._
+
+   Annie Pepple        Elolly Pepple              Ja Ja.
+
+   Captain Hart        Apho Dappa                 Still alive.
+
+   Adda Allison        Generally called Addah.      "     "
+
+   Manilla Pepple      Erinashaboo                Warrabo.
+
+   Oko Jumbo  }        Advisers to the regents,   Still alive.
+   Jim Banago }        both wealthy men.          Squeeze Banago.
+
+The above lists show in a very marked manner the favourable side of
+domestic slavery; every one of the above chiefs were bought slaves or
+the sons of bought slaves, and in that case would be Bonny free. Ja Ja
+was bought by Adda Allison, and by him presented to Elolly Pepple, the
+name Ja Ja signifying a present in some native language in the
+hinterland of Bonny. Oko Jumbo was a slave bought by Manilla Pepple.
+Captain Hart was a slave bought from the Okrika people, and had been
+head slave of the late King Dapho. The others I am not sure about, but
+Squeeze Banago and Warrabo may have been Bonny free, though I have my
+doubts, but in no case from 1855 up to this date, 1869, had a son
+inherited from his father. I don't wish to be understood never did;
+because cases have occurred, and did occur during this time, where the
+son followed the father, but in these six principal Houses the chief was
+not the son of the former head of the House. A House, in native
+parlance, meant a number of petty chiefs congregated together for mutual
+protection, owning allegiance generally to the richest and most
+intelligent one amongst them, whom they called their father, and the
+Europeans called a chief. A House could be formed as Oko Jumbo formed
+his. He, as I have said above, was a bought slave, yet, by his superior
+intelligence and industry, he amassed, in early life, great wealth, was
+able to buy numerous slaves, some of whom showed similar aptitude to
+himself, to whom he showed the same encouragement that his master had
+shown him, and allowed them to trade on their own account. These men in
+their turn bought slaves, and allowed them similar privileges. This kind
+of evolution went on with uninterrupted success until Oko Jumbo, after
+twenty years' trading, found himself at the head of five or six hundred
+slaves; for, according to country law, all the slaves bought by his
+favoured slaves (now become petty chiefs or head boys) belonged to him
+as he belonged to Manilla Pepple; but owing to his accumulated riches
+and numerous followers he was beginning to take rank as a chief and head
+of a House. One must not think that the assistance given by an owner of
+slaves to here and there one, as described above, is all pure
+philanthropy; it is nothing of the kind, for for every hundred pounds
+worth of trade the slave does on his own account nowadays means Ŗ25 into
+the coffers of his master. In the early sixties this profit was not so
+great, but it represented in those days a ten to fifteen per cent.
+commission to the head of the House.
+
+There were five kinds of commission paid by the European traders to the
+heads of Houses. There were Ex Bar, Custom Bar, Work Bar, Gentlemen's
+Dash and Boys' Dash, and as a slave who had been allowed to trade by his
+master rose in the social scale he marked the different stages he passed
+through by being allowed gradually to claim these various commissions on
+his own oil from the Europeans; thus at first he would get only the
+boys' dash, = 1 pes of small Manchester cloth, value about 2s., and a
+fisherman's red cap, worth about 3d. The latter was supposed to go to
+his pull-away boys to buy palm wine. The second stage in his progress
+would be marked by his being allowed to take the gentlemen's dash,
+consisting of two pes of cloth, value 2s. 6d. each. The third he would
+be allowed to receive a portion of the work bar on his oil, sometimes
+only a third, gradually increasing until he would be allowed to claim
+the whole work bar. On arriving at this latter stage he would be
+expected to provide a war canoe and men and arms for the same, ready at
+any moment to turn out and fight for the general good of the country or
+to take part in any quarrel between his master and any other chief in
+Bonny, or to attend his master with it when he wished to visit any small
+country and make a little naval demonstration if these people had been a
+little slack in paying their debts. In course of time, this man, having
+supplied a war canoe, would aspire to being recognised as a chief, and
+thus be entitled to wear an eagle's feather in his hat. To arrive at
+this stage he would have to make some payments to the principal Ju-Ju
+men of the town, and if he never had been at war, and thus missed the
+opportunity of cutting an enemy's head off, he must purchase a slave for
+this purpose and cut the poor creature's head off in cold blood in the
+Ju-Ju house. This function was rigorously insisted upon by the Ju-Ju
+men, and under no circumstances would they allow a man to become a chief
+who had not cut a man's head off, either in war or in cold blood. After
+this ceremony, the new-made chief would be duly introduced, at a public
+meeting, to all the other chiefs, and the next day several brother
+chiefs would accompany him round to the various trading ships in the
+port, to intimate to the Europeans that he was a full chief, and
+entitled to receive all the work bar, ex bar, gentlemen's dash and boys'
+dash that a chief was entitled to. I have previously mentioned custom
+bar; this originally was paid only to the king, and consisted of one
+iron bar upon every puncheon of oil bought by the European trader; in
+early days the king used to put a boy on board each ship to collect this
+toll, but in course of time found that he was more sure to be honestly
+dealt with if he left the white man to pay him occasionally what was due
+to him, than to receive it daily through his bar-boy. On the deposition
+of King Pepple, the custom bar was collected by the four regents, whose
+descendants demanded it as a right, even after the return of the king,
+and continued to get it, until a few years ago, when all these bars were
+abolished in Bonny by mutual consent, and in their place was paid
+"topping," varying from time to time, according to the saneness of the
+white traders, from twenty to thirty per cent. on the price of the oil,
+gentlemen's and boys' dash still being continued.
+
+Referring back to the head-cutting ceremony, I must here mention a
+curious fact, when one remembers the savage state of these people, that
+I have known many Bonny men who were in a position to be made chiefs,
+and had conformed to all the preliminary forms, but who shirked the head
+cutting in cold blood, preferring thus to continue head boys only, until
+forced by the chiefs (generally instigated by the Ju-Ju men) to complete
+the ceremony. One in particular, named Jungo, I remember, who at the
+time of the civil war in Bonny in 1869 had been for some time eligible
+to become a chief, yet shirked the head cutting; he was amongst those
+who followed Ja Ja in his retreat to the Ekomtoro, afterwards called the
+Opobo; it was not until some years after arriving in the Opobo that some
+Ju-Ju priest remembered that Jungo had not distinguished himself during
+the war, and that he had yet to perform his head cutting. Poor Jungo was
+one of the mildest natured black men I have ever known, and tried all
+kinds of schemes to get out of the ordeal, even offering to give up some
+of his acquired rights, but public opinion and the Ju-Ju priests were
+too much for him, and the slave to be sacrificed was bought, and the
+ceremony carried out by Jungo; but he was such a poor performer that he
+unintentionally caused considerably more pain to his victim than
+necessary, for Jungo tried to do the terrible deed by striking with his
+face turned the other way, the victim absolutely cursing him for his
+bungling. This latter episode may, perhaps, be put down as a traveller's
+yarn, but it is not at all to be wondered at, when it is known that
+these poor wretches are made drunk previous to being decapitated.
+
+Having described how a slave might become a chief, I will now describe
+how one became the head of a House or chief, and afterwards made himself
+a king, and one of the most powerful in this part of Africa.
+
+When Elolly Pepple died (some say he was poisoned), shortly after the
+return of King Pepple in 1861, the Annie Pepple House was for some time
+left without a head. The various chiefs held repeated meetings, and the
+generally coveted honour did not seem to tempt any of them; by right of
+seniority a chief named Uranta (about the freest man in the House, some
+asserted he was absolutely free), was offered the place, but he, for
+private reasons of his own, refused. After Uranta there were Annie
+Stuart, Black Foobra and Warrasoo, all men of some considerable riches
+and consideration, but they also shirked the responsibility, for Elolly
+had been a very big trader, and owed the white men, it was said, at the
+time of his death, a thousand or fifteen hundred puncheons of oil,
+equivalent to between ten and fifteen thousand pounds sterling, and none
+of the foremost men of the house dare tackle the settlement of such a
+large debit account, fearing that the late chief had not left sufficient
+behind him to settle up with, without supplementing it with their own
+savings, which might end in bankruptcy for them, and their final
+downfall from the headship. At this time there was in the House a young
+man who had not very long been made a chief, though he had, for a
+considerable number of years, been a very good trader, and was much
+respected by the white traders for his honesty and the dependence they
+could place in him to strictly adhere to any promise he made in trade
+matters. This young chief was Ja Ja, and though he was one of the
+youngest chiefs in the house, he was unanimously elected to fill the
+office. He, however, did not immediately accept, though his being
+unanimously elected amounted almost to his being forced to accept.
+
+He first visited _seriatim_ each white trader, counted book (as they
+call going through the accounts of a House), and found that though there
+was a very large debit against the late chief, there was also a large
+credit, as a set off, in the way of sub-chief's work bars and the late
+Elolly's own work bars. At the same time, he arranged with each
+supercargo the order in which he would pay them off, commencing with
+those who were nearing the end of their voyage, and getting a promise
+from each that if he settled according to promise they would get their
+successor to give him an equal amount of credit that they themselves had
+given the late Elolly. A few days after, at a public meeting of the
+chiefs of the Annie Pepple House, he intimated his readiness to accept
+the headship of the House, distinctly informing them that, as they had
+elected him themselves, they must assist him in upholding his authority
+over them as a body, which would be no easy task for him when there were
+so many older and richer chiefs in the House who were more entitled than
+he was to the post. The older chiefs, only too delighted to have found
+in Ja Ja some one to take the responsibility of the late chief's debts
+and the troubles of chieftainship off their shoulders, were prepared,
+and did solemnly swear, to assist him with their moral support, taking
+care not to pledge themselves to assist him in any of the financial
+affairs of the House.
+
+Ja Ja had not been many months head of the Annie Pepple House before he
+began to show the old chiefs what kind of metal he was made of; for
+during the first twelve months he had selected from amongst the late
+Elolly's slaves no less than eighteen or twenty young men, who had
+already amassed a little wealth, and whom he thought capable of being
+trusted to trade on their own account, bought canoes for them, took them
+to the European traders, got them to advance each of these young men
+from five to ten puncheons worth of goods, he himself standing guarantee
+for them. This operation had the effect of making Ja Ja immediately
+popular amongst all classes of the slaves of the late chief. At the same
+time, the slaves of the old chief of the House began to see that there
+was a man at the head of the House who would set a good example to their
+immediate masters. Some of these young men are now wealthy chiefs in
+Opobo, and as evidence that they had been well chosen, Ja Ja was never
+called upon to fulfil his guarantee.
+
+Two years after Ja Ja was placed at the head of the House the late
+Elolly's debts were all cleared off, no white trader having been
+detained beyond the date Ja Ja had promised the late chief's debts
+should be paid by. In consideration for the prompt manner in which Ja Ja
+had paid up, he received from each supercargo whom the late chief had
+dealt with a present varying from five to ten per cent. on the amount
+paid.
+
+From this date Ja Ja never looked back, becoming the most popular chief
+in Bonny amongst the white men, and the idol of his own people, but
+looked upon with jealousy by the Manilla Pepple House, to which belonged
+the successful slave, Oko Jumbo, who was now, both in riches and power,
+the equal of Ja Ja, though never his equal in popularity amongst the
+Europeans. Though there was a king in Bonny, and Warribo was the head of
+the Manilla House, _id est_, the king's House, Oko Jumbo and Ja Ja were
+looked upon by every one as being the rulers of Bonny. The demon of
+jealousy was at work, and in the private councils of the Manilla House
+it was decided that Ja Ja must be pulled down, but the only means of
+doing it was a civil war. The risks of this Oko Jumbo, Warribo and the
+king did not care to face, as though the Oko Jumbo party was most
+numerous, each side was equally supplied with big guns and rifles up to
+a short time before the end of 1868, when two European traders, on their
+way home, picked up a number of old 32 lb. carronades at Sierra Leone,
+and shipped the same down to Oko Jumbo. This sudden accession of war
+material, of course, put him in a position to provoke Ja Ja, and he cast
+about for a _causus belli_, but Ja Ja was an astute diplomatist, and
+managed to steer clear of all his opponent's pitfalls. A very small
+matter is often seized upon by natives as a means to provoke a war, and
+in this case the cause of quarrel was found in "that a woman of the
+Annie Pepple House had drawn water from some pond belonging to the
+Manilla Pepple House." This was thought quite sufficient. A most
+insulting message was sent to Ja Ja, intimating that the time had come
+when nothing but a fight could settle their differences. His reply was
+characteristic of the man; he reminded them that he had no wish to
+fight, was not prepared, and, furthermore, that neither he, nor they,
+had paid their debts to the Europeans. The latter part of the message
+was too much for an irascible, one-eyed old fighting chief named Jack
+Wilson Pepple, so off he marched to his own house, and fired the first
+round shot into the Annie Pepple part of the town, and civil war was
+commenced. It was a bit overdue, the last having taken place in 1855. As
+a rule, they come round about every ten years, like the epidemics of
+malignant bilious fever of the coast.
+
+The Annie Pepple House was not slow to reply, but Ja Ja knew he was
+over-matched, both in guns and numbers of fighting men, so he only kept
+up a semblance of a fight sufficiently long to allow him to make a
+retreat to a small town called Tombo, in the next creek to the Bonny
+creek, only about three miles from Bonny by water, less by land.
+
+From here he was in a better position to parley with his opponents, and
+make terms if possible, but he soon saw that no arrangement less than
+the complete humiliation of himself and people was going to satisfy his
+enemies, for besides the jealousy of Oko Jumbo, the young King George
+Pepple, son of the gentleman who had been to England and brought out the
+European suite, had not forgotten that the Annie Pepple house,
+represented by the late Elolly, had been the chief opponents of his late
+father when he returned to Bonny in 1861 after his exile.
+
+This young man had been educated in England, and I must say did credit
+to whoever had had charge of his education. He both spoke and wrote
+English correctly, and had his father been able to hand over to him the
+kingship as he had received it in 1837, he might have blossomed into a
+model king in West Africa; but, alas! the only thing he inherited from
+his father beyond the kingship was debt--king only in name, receiving
+only so much of his dues as the principal chiefs liked to allow him, not
+having the means of being a large trader, looked upon with scant favour
+by the Europeans, and owing to his English education lacking the rude
+ability of such men as Oko Jumbo and Ja Ja to make a position for
+himself, he became but a puppet in the hands of his principal chiefs; a
+fate, I am afraid, which has generally befallen the native of these
+parts who has attempted to retain any of the teachings of Christianity
+on his return amongst his pagan brethren.
+
+Few people can understand the reason of this. It is simply another proof
+of the wonderful power of Ju-Ju amongst these people, for it is to that
+occult influence that I trace the general ill-success of the educated
+native of the Delta in his own country,--unless he returns to all the
+pagan gods of his forefathers, and until he does so many channels of
+prosperity are completely closed to him.
+
+I am afraid I have wandered a little from my subject, but in doing so I
+hope I have made some things clear that otherwise might have appeared a
+little mixed from an European point of view, so will now return to Ja
+Ja.
+
+From Tombo Town Ja Ja communicated with the Bonny Court of Equity, and a
+truce was arranged, native meetings followed, and after several weeks of
+palavering, no better terms were offered Ja Ja than had before been
+offered to him. The white men interested themselves in the matter, and
+held meetings innumerable, until at last they were as divided as the
+natives. With the exception of one or two at the outside, they
+understood so little of the occult workings of native squabbles that
+they could do little to smooth matters over. In the meantime, Ja Ja had
+been studying a masterly plan of retreat from Tombo Town to a river
+called the Ekomtoro, also called the Rio Condé in ancient maps.
+
+Once in this river, by fortifying two or three points he would be able
+to completely turn the tables on his enemies by barring their way to the
+Eboe markets, but to get there he would have to pass one, if not two,
+fortified points held by the Manilla Pepple people. Besides this, what
+would his position be when there, if he could not get any white men
+there to trade with? Luckily for him, there dropped from the clouds the
+very man he wanted. This was a trader named Charley, who had been in the
+Bonny River some years before, and was now established at Brass on his
+own account. At an interview with Ja Ja, that did not last half an hour,
+the whole plan of campaign was arranged. Charley returned to Brass and
+confided the scheme to his friend, Archie McEachan, who decided to join
+him. Thus Ja Ja had the certainty of support in his new home if he could
+only get there, and get there he did.
+
+Being shortly after joined by these two white traders trade was opened
+in the Ekomtoro, and on Christmas Day, 1870, Ekomtoro was named the
+[)O]p[)o]b[=o] River, after [)O]p[)o]b[=o], the founder of the town of
+"Grand Bonny," as Bonny men delight to call their mud and thatch
+capital.
+
+The name of [)O]p[)o]b[=o] was chosen by Ja Ja himself. To students of
+the peculiar relationship existing between a bought slave and his
+master, the latter looked up to and called father by his slave, this
+choice of the name of a man who had been a great man in his father's
+house, _id est_, his master's, demonstrates in a striking manner the
+veneration a bought slave, under the system of domestic slavery in these
+parts, in many cases displays, equalling in every respect that of the
+free-born direct descendant.
+
+The tables were now turned with a vengeance, and Ja Ja remained the
+master of the position, and for several years kept the Bonny men out of
+the Eboe and Qua markets; eventually agreeing to have the differences
+between himself and the Manilla Pepple people settled by the arbitration
+of the New Calabar and the Okrika chiefs with Commodore Commerell and
+Mr. Charles Livingstone, Her Britannic Majesty's Consul for the Bights
+of Benin and Biafra, as referees.
+
+Evidently the arbitrators considered that Ja Ja was in no way to blame
+for the civil war that had taken place in Bonny, for in the division of
+the markets that had been common property when Ja Ja and his people had
+formed an integral part of the Bonny nation, the greater part was given
+to Ja Ja and his right to remain where he had established himself fully
+recognised.
+
+Immediately on this settlement being come to, Her Britannic Majesty's
+Consul entered into a commercial treaty with Ja Ja recognising him as
+King of Opobo. This treaty was signed January 4th, 1873, the deed of
+arbitration having been signed the day previous.
+
+In giving my readers the history of this man up to this point, I have
+always had in my mind the question of domestic slavery, being anxious to
+give its most favourable side as fair an exposition as its unfavourable.
+
+I have in previous pages mentioned some of the latter, but those remarks
+only dealt with the early stages of the slave's condition after capture
+in the interior and his risks of arriving alive at his destination. I
+have now to deal with him as a chattel of one of the petty chiefs,
+chiefs or kings of Western Africa, admitting that his chances of
+improving his condition are manifold, his life until he gets his foot on
+the first rung of the ladder of advancement is terrible; he never knows
+from one moment to another when he may be re-sold, he is badly fed, in
+fact, some masters never feed their slaves at all when they are not
+actually employed pulling a canoe or doing other labour such as making
+farm, cutting sticks for house-building, &c. Failing these employments,
+the slave has all his time to himself. His chances of putting this time
+to any profit are very few in the Oil Rivers; and should he by chance
+get some employment from a white man, his owner takes good care to
+receive his pay, the only thing the slave getting out of it being three
+full meals a day for a few days, making the starvation fare he is
+accustomed to the harder to bear afterwards. Were it not for their
+adopted mother, _id est_, the woman they are given to on being bought,
+their state would be absolutely unbearable in times of forced idleness;
+but these women almost invariably have considerable affection for their
+numerous adopted children, and though their means may be very limited,
+they generally manage to supply them with at least one meal a day in
+return for the many little services they perform for them, such as
+fetching water, carrying firewood in from the bush, selling their few
+fowls and eggs to the white men, and doing any other little matter of
+trade for them.
+
+Even those slaves who have been lucky enough to fall into the hands of a
+master who sees that they at least do not starve, have along with their
+less lucky brethren to put up with the ungovernable fits of temper which
+some of these black slave owners display at times, in many cases
+inflicting the most terrible punishment for trivial offences, as often
+as not only on suspicion that the slave was guilty. Amongst the numerous
+punishments I have known inflicted are the following.
+
+Ear cutting in its various stages, from clipping to total dismemberment;
+crucifixion round a large cask; extraction of teeth; suspension by the
+thumbs; Chilli peppers pounded and stuffed up the nostrils, and forced
+into the eyes and ears; fastening the victim to a post driven into the
+beach at low water and leaving him there to be drowned with the rising
+tide, or to be eaten by the sharks or crocodiles piecemeal; heavily
+ironed and chained to a post in their master's compound, without any
+covering over their heads, kept in this state for weeks, with so little
+food allowed them that cases have been known where the irons have
+dropped off them, but they, poor wretches, were too weak to escape, as
+they had been reduced to living skeletons; impaling on stakes; forcing a
+long steel ram rod through the body until it appeared through the top of
+the skull. The above are a few of the punishments that even to this day
+are practised, not only in the Niger Delta, but in the outlying
+districts of the West African colonies. It is very rare that the
+Government officials get to know anything about them; and when they do,
+it is difficult to procure a conviction owing to the fear natives have
+to come forward and act as witnesses.
+
+Besides the punishments enumerated above, there are many others, some of
+which are too horrible to be described here.
+
+One often hears people who know a little about West Africa talk about
+native law, but they forget to mention, if they happen to know it, that
+in a powerful chief's house there is only one exponent of the law, and
+that is the chief; for him native law only begins to have effect when it
+is a matter between himself and some other chief, or a combination of
+chiefs, whose power is equal or superior to his own.
+
+As an instance of the form which native justice (?) sometimes takes, I
+will relate what took place some years ago in one of the oil rivers. An
+old and very powerful chief had a young wife of whom he was immoderately
+jealous. Amongst his favourite attendants was a young male slave, a mere
+boy, to whom he had given many tokens of his favour; but the demon of
+jealousy whispered to him that his young slave boy was looked upon with
+too much favour by his young wife--herself little more than a child.
+That a slave of his should dare to cast his eyes on his wife was more
+than this terrible old chief could stand, so he decided to put an end at
+once to the love dreams of his slave, and at the same time point out to
+any other enterprising slave of his how dangerous it was to aspire to
+the forbidden favours of a chief's wife. So he ordered his young wife to
+cook him a specially good palm oil chop, a native dish of great repute,
+for his breakfast the following morning. The next morning when he sat
+down to his breakfast his favourite slave was behind his chair in
+attendance; his young wife was present to see her lord and master was
+properly served--the wives do not sit at table with their husbands--when
+suddenly the chief turned in his chair and ordered his young slave to
+sit at table with him. Naturally the slave hesitated to accept such an
+unheard-of honour as to sit at table with his master; quickly scenting
+something terrible was going to befall him, he attempted to leave the
+apartment, but other slaves quickly barred his way, and he was brought
+back trembling with fright, the beads of perspiration rolling down his
+face and body in little rivulets, and placed in a chair opposite his
+master, who, all this time had not displayed any signs of anger;
+gradually the boy began to regain somewhat his scattered senses. Finding
+his master displayed no signs of anger, he began to do as he was
+ordered, the chief at the same time plied him with repeated doses of
+spirits, till at last the boy began to chatter, and attacked the food
+with a will. At length, having eaten and drunk till he could scarcely
+stand, his master asked him had he enjoyed his young mistress's cooking.
+On his replying yes, the chief called for a revolver, and telling him it
+was the last thing he ever would enjoy of his young mistress, he emptied
+the six chambers of the revolver into the poor lad's head; then having
+ordered his body to be thrown into the river, went on with the usual
+occupations of the day, never having once mentioned the reason of his
+act to his people nor explaining his meaning to his young wife.
+
+To the native mind the chief's actions spoke as plainly as possible; but
+not having spoken, his wife's family could not, had they wished, have
+made a palaver about his wife's good fame; for though the chief was
+originally a bought slave or nigger himself, his young wife was country
+free, her family being sufficiently powerful to have made things
+uncomfortable for him if he had accused her without proof of guilt. Had
+she been a slave, the chances are she would have been slaughtered.
+
+I do not wish to convey to my readers the idea that all chiefs in the
+Niger Delta are cruel monsters, but they all have power of life and
+death over their slaves; the mildest of them occasionally may find
+themselves so placed that they are compelled in conformity with some
+Ju-Ju right to sacrifice a slave or two. The ordinary punishments for
+theft and insubordination practised amongst these people are often
+terribly cruel and unnecessarily severe.
+
+Of course the Government of the Niger Coast Protectorate is steadily
+breaking down these savage customs, wherever and whenever they hear of
+them being practised within their jurisdiction; but the formation of the
+country, the dense forests, and the superstition of the people, all
+assist in keeping most cases from coming to their knowledge.
+
+Before taking leave of the Bonny people, I must not omit to mention that
+the custom of destroying twin children and children who had the
+misfortune to be born with teeth was, and is, a custom still observed
+amongst them. Another custom prevalent amongst these people, and common
+more or less to all other natives in the Delta, was the destroying of
+any woman if she became the mother of more than four children.
+
+
+ANDONI RIVER AND ITS INHABITANTS.
+
+This river lies a few miles to the east of Bonny River. The inhabitants
+of the lower part of the river are called Andoni men, and during the
+slave-dealing days these people were as well known to Europeans as the
+Bonny men, but, owing in a great measure to the much deeper water at the
+entrance to Bonny River than was to be found on the Andoni bar, the
+former river offering thus more facilities for deep-draughted ships,
+the traders gradually deserted the Andoni altogether, though these
+people were, I believe, the original owners of the land now claimed by
+the Bonny people as forming the Bonny kingdom. The Andoni men, being
+deserted by the European traders, gradually became a race of fishermen
+and small farmers. The Bonny men, having become the dominant race, and
+not allowing the Andonis any intercourse with the white traders in their
+river, the Andoni men protested against this treatment, and waged war
+against the Bonny men on many occasions in the early part of this
+century. The last war between these two peoples continued for some
+years; the Bonny men not always getting the best of these encounters,
+were very glad to come to terms with them in 1846, a treaty being then
+signed between the two tribes, wherein the Andoni men were secured equal
+rights with the Bonny men, but the commercial enterprise of these people
+seems to have died out. Yet the King of Doni Town, as their principal
+town is called in old maps, was reported by traders, who visited him in
+1699, as being a man of some intelligence, speaking the Portuguese
+language fluently, and having some knowledge of the Roman Catholic
+faith, yet still adhering to all the customs of Ju-Juism, furthermore
+describing the people as being such implicit believers in their Ju-Ju
+that they would kill any one who touched any of the idols in their Ju-Ju
+house.
+
+This may have been true at the time, but about five and twenty years ago
+I visited the town of Doni, as also their Ju-Ju house, and handled some
+of their idols, and they showed no irritation at my so doing. I had, of
+course, asked permission to do so of the Ju-Ju man who was showing me
+round. I have no doubt they would resent any one interfering with them
+without their permission. When I visited these people they gave me the
+idea that they had never seen a white man, or had any communication with
+him, for I vainly searched for any evidence that the white man had ever
+been established in their river. From all I was able to gather of their
+manners and customs I found that they differed little from any of their
+neighbours, though they are always described by interested parties as
+being inveterate cannibals and dangerous people for strangers to visit.
+
+
+OPOBO RIVER.
+
+After leaving Andoni, and continuing down the coast some ten or fifteen
+miles, the Opobo discharges itself into the sea. This river, marked in
+ancient maps as the Rio Condé and Ekomtoro, is the most direct way to
+the Ibo palm-oil-producing country.
+
+This river was well known to the Portuguese and Spanish slave traders,
+but as Bonny became the great centre for the slave trade, this river was
+completely deserted and forgotten to such an extent that, though an
+opening in the coast line was shown on the English charts where this
+river was supposed to be, it was never thought worth the trouble of
+naming, and remained quite unknown to the English traders until it came
+suddenly into repute, owing to Ja Ja establishing himself here in 1870.
+
+The people here are the Bonny men and their descendants who followed Ja
+Ja's fortunes, therefore their manners and customs are identical with
+those of Bonny.
+
+The physical appearance of these people is somewhat better than that of
+the Bonny men, owing, I think, to the position of their town, which is
+built on a better soil, and raised a few feet higher than that of Bonny
+from the level of the river, also their uninterrupted successful trade
+since their arrival in this country has doubtless not a little
+contributed to their improved condition, while, on the other hand, the
+Bonny men suffered severely during the years from 1869 to 1873, owing to
+Ja Ja barring their way to the markets, and they seem never to have
+recovered themselves.
+
+Trading stations of the white men are at the mouth of the river and at
+Eguanga, the latter a station a few miles above Opobo town.
+
+Opobo became, under King Ja Ja's firm rule, one of the largest exporting
+centres of palm oil in the Delta, and for years King Ja Ja enjoyed a not
+undeserved popularity amongst the white traders who visited his river,
+but a time came when the price of palm oil fell to such a low figure in
+England that the European firms established in Opobo could not make both
+ends meet, so they intimated to King Ja Ja that they were going to
+reduce the price paid in the river, to which he replied by shipping
+large quantities of his oil to England, allowing his people only to sell
+a portion of their produce to the white men. The latter now formulated a
+scheme amongst themselves to divide equally whatever produce came into
+the river, and thus do away with competition amongst themselves. Ja Ja
+found that sending his oil to England was not quite so lucrative as he
+could wish, owing to the length of time it took to get his returns back,
+namely, about three months at the earliest, whilst by selling in the
+river he could turn over his money three or four times during that
+period. He therefore tried several means to break the white men's
+combination, at last hitting upon the bright idea of offering the whole
+of the river's trade to one English house. The mere fact of his being
+able to make this offer shows the absolute power to which he had arrived
+amongst his own people. His bait took with one of the European traders;
+the latter could not resist the golden vision of the yellow grease thus
+displayed before him by the astute Ja Ja, who metaphorically dangled
+before his eyes hundreds of canoes laden with the coveted palm oil. A
+bargain was struck, and one fine morning the other white traders in the
+river woke up to the fact that their combination was at an end, for on
+taking their morning spy round the river through their binoculars (no
+palm oil trader that respects himself being without a pair of these and
+a tripod telescope, for more minute observation of his opponents'
+doings) they saw a fleet of over a hundred canoes round the renegade's
+wharf, and for nearly two years this trader scooped all the trade. The
+fat was fairly in the fire now, and the other white traders sent a
+notice to Ja Ja that they intended to go to his markets. Ja Ja replied
+that he held a treaty, signed in 1873, by Mr. Consul Charles
+Livingstone, Her Britannic Majesty's Consul, that empowered him to stop
+any white traders from establishing factories anywhere above
+Hippopotamus Creek, and under which he was empowered to stop and hold
+any vessel for a fine of one hundred puncheons of oil. In June, 1885,
+the traders applied to Mr. Consul White, who informed King Ja Ja that
+the Protectorate treaty meant freedom of navigation and trade.
+
+So the traders finding their occupation gone, decided amongst themselves
+to take a trip to Ja Ja's markets, the only sensible thing they had done
+since the trouble commenced. This was a step in the right direction,
+namely, by attempting to break down the curse of Western Africa _id
+est_, the power of the middle-man.
+
+The names of the four traders who first attempted to trade in the Ibo
+markets of King Ja Ja deserve to be recorded, for their action was not
+without great risk to themselves. They were:
+
+          Mr. S. B. Hall         }
+          Mr. Thomas Wright      } English
+          Mr. Richard Foster     }
+          Mr. A. E. Brunschweiler--Swiss.
+
+To these must be added the name of Mr. F. D. Mitchell, who, though not
+in the first trip to the markets, joined in the subsequent attempt to
+establish business amongst the interior tribes. Their reception at the
+markets was not altogether a success, owing to the reception committee,
+or whatever represented it in those parts, being packed with either Ja
+Ja's own people or Ibos favourable to him.
+
+This good beginning was continued under great difficulties by these
+first traders with little profit or success for about two years, owing
+to the great power of Ja Ja amongst the interior tribes and the pressure
+he was able to bring to bear on the Ibo and Kwo natives.
+
+In the meantime, clouds had been gathering round the head of King Ja Ja.
+His wonderful success since 1870 had gradually obscured his former keen
+perception of how far his rights as a petty African king would be
+recognised by the English Government under the new order of things just
+being inaugurated in the Oil Rivers; honestly believing that in signing
+the Protectorate treaty of December 19th, 1884, with the _sixth_ clause
+crossed out, he had retained the right given him by the commercial
+treaty of 1873 to keep white men from proceeding to his markets, he got
+himself entangled in a number of disputes which culminated in his being
+taken out of the Opobo River in September, 1887, by Her Britannic
+Majesty's Consul, Mr. H. H. Johnston, C.B., now Sir Harry Johnston, and
+conveyed to Accra, where he was tried before Admiral Sir Hunt Grubbe,
+who condemned him to five years' deportation to the West Indies, making
+him an allowance of about Ŗ800 per annum and returning a fine of thirty
+puncheons of palm oil, value about Ŗ450 in those days, which the late
+Consul Hewett had imposed upon him, a fine that the Admiral did not
+think the Consul was warranted in having imposed.
+
+Poor Ja Ja did not live to return to his country and his people whom he
+loved so well, and whose condition he had done so much to improve,
+though at times his rule often became despotic. One trait of his
+character may interest the public just now, as the Liquor Question in
+West Africa is so much _en evidence_, and that is, that he was a strict
+teetotaler himself and inculcated the same principles in all his chiefs.
+In his eighteen years' rule as a king in Opobo he reduced two of his
+chiefs for drunkenness--one he sent to live in exile in a small fishing
+village for the rest of his life, the other, who had aggravated his
+offence by assaulting a white trader, he had deprived of all outward
+signs of a chief and put in a canoe to paddle as a pull-away boy within
+an hour of his committing the offence.
+
+During the Ashantee campaign of 1873 Sir Garnet Wolseley sent Captain
+Nicol to the Oil Rivers to raise a contingent of friendly natives; on
+his arrival in Bonny he was not immediately successful, so continued on
+to Opobo, where he was the guest of the writer. Upon Captain Nicol
+explaining his errand, Ja Ja furnished him with over sixty of his
+war-boys, most of whom had seen considerable fighting in the late war
+between Bonny and Opobo. The news reaching Bonny of what Ja Ja had done,
+put the Bonny men upon their mettle, and when Captain Nicol reached
+Bonny on his way back to Ashantee, he found a further contingent waiting
+for him from the Bonny chiefs.
+
+This combined contingent did good work against the Ashantees, being
+favourably mentioned in despatches. Poor Captain Nicol, who raised them,
+and commanded them in most of their engagements with the enemy, was, I
+regret to say, killed whilst gallantly leading them on in one of the
+final rushes just before Coomassie was taken.
+
+In recognition of the above services of his men, Her Most Gracious
+Majesty Queen Victoria presented King Ja Ja with a sword of honour, the
+King of Bonny receiving one at the same time.
+
+Shipwrecked people were always sure of kindly treatment if they fell
+into the hands of Ja Ja's subjects, for he had given strict orders to
+his people dwelling on the sea-shore to assist vessels in distress and
+convey any one cast on shore to the European factories, warning them at
+the same time on no account to touch any of their property. He was also
+the first king in the Delta to restrain his people from plundering a
+wrecked ship, though the custom had been from time immemorial that a
+vessel wrecked upon their shores belonged to them by rights as being a
+gift from their Ju-Ju--an idea held by savage people in many other parts
+of the world.
+
+It seems a pity that a man who had so many good qualities should have
+ended as he did. He was a man who, properly handled, could have been
+made of much use in the opening up of his country. Unfortunately, the
+late Consul Hewett was prejudiced against Ja Ja from his first interview
+with him, finding in this nigger king a man of superior natural
+abilities to his own.
+
+Had the late Mr. Consul Hewett had the fiftieth part of the ability in
+dealing with the natives his sub and successor, Mr. H. H. Johnston,
+showed, there would never have been any necessity to deport Ja Ja.
+Unfortunately, between Ja Ja's stubbornness and the late Consul Hewett's
+bungling, matters had come to such a pass that some decisive measures
+were actually necessary to uphold the dignity of the Consular Office.
+
+When Mr. H. H. Johnston succeeded the late Mr. Consul Hewett, the Opobo
+palaver was in about as muddled a state as it was possible for it to
+have got into. Matters had been in an unsatisfactory state for some
+years between King Ja Ja and the late Consul. Ja Ja had over-stepped the
+bounds of propriety in more ways than one. He tried the same tactics
+with Mr. Johnston, who to look at, is the mildest-looking little man you
+can imagine, and therefore did not fill the native's eye as a ruler of
+men; but Mr. Johnston very soon let Ja Ja and the natives generally see
+he was made of different stuff to his predecessor, and the first
+attempts on Ja Ja's part not to act up to the lines he laid down for him
+settled his fate. Mr. Johnston offered him the choice of delivering
+himself up quietly as a prisoner or being treated as an enemy of the
+Queen, his town destroyed and himself eventually captured and exiled for
+ever. He elected to give himself up, was taken to Accra and there tried
+and condemned after a fair hearing. I was present myself at the trial,
+and old friend as I was to him, I don't think the verdict would have
+been otherwise had I been in the judge's place, though there were many
+extenuating circumstances in his case, all of which were fully
+considered by Admiral Hunt Grubbe in his final sentence.
+
+I feel confident that had Mr. Consul Johnston had the management of
+affairs in the Opobo a few years earlier, Ja Ja would never have been
+deported, and instead of having to censure him, he would have handled
+him in such a manner as to make use of his influence in furthering
+British interests. I do not think I can describe the late King Ja Ja
+better than Mr. Consul Johnston did in a letter he addressed to Lord
+Salisbury under date of September 24th, 1887, wherein he writes as
+follows:--"Ja Ja's chief friends and supporters for years past have been
+the naval officers on the coast. His generous hospitality, his frank,
+engaging manner, his naīf discourse, and amusing crudities of diction
+have gained the ready sympathy of these gentlemen; no doubt Ja Ja is no
+common man, though he is in origin a runaway slave,[89] he was cut out
+by nature for a king, and he has the instinct of rule, though it not
+unfrequently degenerates into cruel tyranny.
+
+"His demeanour is marked by quiet dignity, and his appearance and
+conversation are impressive.
+
+"Nevertheless, I know Ja Ja to be a deliberate liar,[90] who exhibits
+little shame or confusion when his falsehoods are exposed. He is a
+bitter and unscrupulous enemy[91] of all who attempt to dispute his
+trade monopolies, and the five British firms whose trade he has almost
+ruined during the past two years."
+
+A complaint often made against the Government by merchants established
+on the West Coast of Africa is want of official protection and
+assistance; in many cases in the past this has been the case; but they
+certainly could not make this complaint during the few months that Mr.
+Consul Johnston was at the head of the Consular service in the Oil
+Rivers. I will here give a summary of what exertions were made by the
+Government to assist the merchants in their praiseworthy attempts to get
+behind the middlemen in this one river, where Ja Ja was always given the
+credit of being the head and front of the obstruction, nothing ever
+being said about the king and chiefs of Bonny, who were equally
+interested with Ja Ja in keeping the white men out of the markets, their
+principal markets being on the River Opobo.
+
+Owing to the energetic representations of Mr. Consul H. H. Johnston, the
+British Government placed at his disposal for the settlement of the
+market question and the Ja Ja palaver the following Government vessels,
+viz., the _Watchful_, the _Goshawk_, the _Alecto_, the _Acorn_, the
+_Royalist_, and the _Raleigh_, the latter bringing Admiral Sir Hunt
+Grubbe up from the Cape of Good Hope for the trial of King Ja Ja.
+
+Result: Within a very short time after the deportation of Ja Ja, all the
+firms who had been so anxious to establish in the interior markets and
+thus get behind the middlemen (without doubt the curse of the Oil Rivers
+and every part of Africa where they are tolerated) gave up trading at
+the interior markets that had caused the Government so much trouble to
+open for them, and made an agreement with the middlemen, represented in
+this case by the Bonny men and Opobo men, that they would not attempt to
+trade any more in the interior markets if the middlemen would promise to
+trade with no European firm that attempted to trade in the interior
+markets. On the writer's last visit to the Opobo in 1896 there was only
+one firm trading in the interior markets, and that firm was not one of
+those that were in the river at the time of the clamour for the removal
+of Ja Ja and the opening of the interior in 1887.
+
+
+KWO IBO.
+
+This river was first visited in modern days in 1871 by the late Mr.
+Archie McEachan, who found the people very troublesome to deal with, and
+did not long remain there. No doubt the people were not so easy to deal
+with as those natives that have been for some hundreds of years dealing
+with Europeans; but as he was at the same time posing as a friend and
+supporter of Ja Ja, and the oil he got in Kwo Ibo was being diverted
+from Ja Ja's markets, the latter no doubt exerted a certain amount of
+pressure on his friend, and aided, if he did not actually cause him to
+decide to withdraw from Kwo Ibo.
+
+Kwo Ibo lay fallow for some time, then one or two Sierra Leone men
+attempted to trade there, but with little success, owing to the
+influence King Ja Ja had in the country. It was not until 1880-1 that
+any sustained effort was made to trade in this river; but about this
+time a Mr. Watts established a small trading station there, and
+succeeded in creating a trade, though he had a very difficult task to
+combat the opposition of King Ja Ja, who considered he was being
+defrauded of some of his supposed just rights. Had Mr. Watts pushed his
+way into the interior markets and dealt direct with the producers, he
+would deserve the united thanks of every merchant connected with the
+trade in the Niger Delta; but he did not, and contented himself with
+buying his produce on a little better terms than he could have done in
+Opobo or Old Calabar, and created another set of middlemen, who to-day
+consider they, like their neighbours, are justified in doing their
+utmost in keeping the European out of the interior. Mr. Watts eventually
+sold out his interest in the trade of this river to the combination of
+river firms now known under the name of the African Association of
+Liverpool.
+
+A mission has been established here for some years and I had the
+pleasure of meeting the missionary in charge, some two years ago, on his
+way home after a long sojourn in the Kwo Ibo; his description of the
+people and of the success of his mission work was most interesting. If
+he has returned to the seat of his labours and is still alive, I can
+only wish him every success in the work in which evidently his whole
+heart was centred.
+
+The name Kwo Ibo, which has been given to this river, gives one the idea
+that the inhabitants are a mixture of Kwos and Ibos. This to a certain
+extent may be a very good description as regards the inhabitants of the
+upper reaches of the river, which takes its rise, so it is supposed, in
+a lake in the Ibo country, afterwards passing through the Kwo, and
+discharges itself into the sea about half-way between the east point of
+the Opobo River and the Tom Shotts Point.
+
+The lower part of the river is inhabited principally by Andoni men by
+origin, but calling themselves Ibenos or Ibrons.
+
+These people deserve a great deal of credit for the plucky manner in
+which they withstood the numerous attacks the late King Ja Ja made upon
+them, and their stubborn refusal to discontinue trading with the white
+men established in their river, though they were but ill-provided with
+arms to defend themselves. During several years they must have suffered
+severely from the repeated raids the late King Ja Ja made upon them, not
+only from losses in battle, but also in having their towns destroyed and
+many of their people carried off as prisoners. Some of the earlier raids
+made by Ja Ja, I must in fairness to him say, were to a great extent
+brought on by the actions of the Ibrons themselves, who were not slow to
+attack and slay any Opobo men they caught wandering about, if the latter
+were not in sufficient numbers to defend themselves.
+
+In language, these people are closely allied to the old Calabar people,
+and many of their customs show them to have had more communication with
+those people than they have had with the Andoni people, at any rate for
+many years. I find no mention amongst the writings of the early
+travellers to Western Africa of their having visited this river, nor is
+it even named on any old chart that I have consulted, though on some I
+have seen a river indicated at the spot where the Kwo Ibo enters the
+sea.
+
+Needless to mention, they were, and the majority are to-day, steeped in
+Ju-Juism, witchcraft, and their attendant horrors.
+
+The Kwo people, whose country lies on both sides of the Kwo Ibo, and
+behind the Ibenos, are the tribe from whom were drawn the supplies of
+Kwo or Kwa slaves known under the name of the Mocoes in the West Indies.
+
+
+OLD CALABAR.
+
+
+I now come to the last river in the Niger Coast Protectorate, both banks
+of which belong to England, the next river being the Rio del Rey, of
+which England now only claims the right bank, Germany claiming the left
+and all the territory south to the river Campo, a territory almost as
+large as, if not equal to, the whole of the Niger Coast Protectorate,
+which ought to have been English, for was it not English by right of
+commercial conquest, if by no other, and for years had been looked upon
+by the commanders of foreign naval vessels as under English influence?
+
+Owing to some one blundering, this nice slice of African territory was
+allowed to slip into the hands of the Germans, hence my account of the
+Oil Rivers ought to be called an account of the Oil Rivers reduced by
+Germany.
+
+In speaking of the inhabitants of this river, I must also include the
+people who inhabit the lower part of the Cross River. This explanation
+would not have been necessary some few years ago, but I notice the more
+recent hydrographers make the Cross River the main river and the Old
+Calabar only a tributary of that river, which is, without doubt, the
+most correct.
+
+The principal towns are Duke Town (where are to be found nowadays the
+headquarters of the Niger Coast Protectorate, the Presbyterian Mission,
+and the principal trading factories of the Europeans), Henshaw Town,
+Creek and Town; besides these, the various kings and chiefs have
+numberless small towns and villages in the environs. In the lower part
+of the Cross river are many fishing villages, the inhabitants of which
+are looked upon as Old Calabar people, and owing to the latter being the
+dominant race they have to-day lost, or very nearly so, any trace of
+their forefathers, who I believe to have been Kwos with a strong strain
+of Andoni blood.
+
+These villages did, in days anterior to the advent of the European
+traders, an immense business with the interior in dried shrimps, the
+latter being used by the natives, not only as a flavouring to their
+stews and ragouts, but as a substitute for the all necessary salt.
+
+The original inhabitants of the district now occupied by the Old Calabar
+people were the Akpas, whom the Calabarese drove out, and to a great
+extent afterwards absorbed. This immigration of the Calabarese is said
+to have taken place very little over one hundred and fifty years ago.
+Originally coming from the upper Ibibio district of the Cross River,
+they belong to the Efik race, and speak that language, though nowadays,
+owing to numerous intermarriages with Cameroon natives and the great
+number of slaves bought from the Cameroons district, they are of very
+mixed blood. Most of the kings and chiefs of Old Calabar owe their rank
+and position to direct descent, some of them being of ancient lineage, a
+fact of which they are very proud. In this respect they differ in a
+great measure from their neighbours in Bonny and Opobo, where, oftener
+than otherwise, the succession falls to the most influential man in the
+House, slave or free-born.
+
+The principal town of these people boasted, some few years ago, of many
+very nice villa residences, belonging to the chiefs, built of wood, and
+roofed with corrugated iron, mostly erected by a Scotch carpenter, who
+had established himself in Old Calabar, and who was in great request
+amongst the chiefs as an architect and builder. Unfortunately, these
+houses being erected haphazard amongst the surrounding native-built
+houses did not lend that air of improvement to the town they might
+otherwise have done if the chiefs had studied more uniformity in the
+building of the town, and arranged for wide streets in place of alley
+ways, many of which are not wide enough to let two Calabar ladies of the
+higher rank pass one another without the risk of their finery being
+daubed with streaks of yellow mud from the adjacent walls.
+
+The native houses of the better classes are certainly an improvement
+upon any others in the Protectorate, showing as they do some artistic
+taste in their embellishments. They are generally built in the form of a
+square or several squares, more or less exact, according to the extent
+of ground the builder has to deal with and the number of apartments the
+owner has need for. In some cases, I have seen a native commence his
+building operations by marking out two or three squares or oblongs,
+about twenty feet by fifteen, round which he would build his various
+apartments or rooms. In the centre of the inner squares, which are
+always left open to the sky, you almost invariably find a tree growing,
+either left there purposely when clearing the ground, or planted by the
+owner; occasionally you will find a fine crop of charms and Ju-Jus
+hanging from the branches of these trees.
+
+The inner walls, especially of the courtyards, are in most cases
+tastefully decorated with paintings, somewhat resembling the arabesque
+designs one sees amongst the Moors. No doubt this art and that of
+designing fantastic figures on brass dishes, which they buy from the
+Europeans and afterwards embellish with the aid of a big-headed nail and
+a hammer, comes to them from the Mohammedans of the Niger, of whom they
+used to see a good deal in former days.
+
+With regard to the dress of these people, I have not anything so
+interesting to relate about them as I had of the New Calabar gentlemen.
+Except on high days and holidays, there is little to distinguish the
+upper classes here from the same classes in any of the other rivers of
+the Protectorate, except that it might be in the peculiar way they knot
+the loin cloth on, leaving it to trail a little on the ground on one
+side, and their great liking for scarlet and other bright coloured
+stove-pipe hats. On their high festivals the kings appear in crowns and
+silk garments; the chiefs, who do not stick to the native gala garments
+of many-hued silks, generally appear in European clothes, not always of
+irreproachable fit, their queen, as every chief calls his head wife,
+appearing in a gorgeous silk costume that may have been worn several
+seasons before at Ascot or Goodwood by a London belle. Sometimes you may
+be treated to the sight of a dusky queen gaily displaying her ample
+charms in a low-cut secondhand dinner or ball dress that may have
+created a sensation when first worn at some swagger function in London
+or Paris. As the native ladies do not wear stays, and one of the
+greatest attributes of female beauty in Calabar is plumpness, and plenty
+of it, you may imagine that the local _modiste_ has her wits greatly
+exercised in devising means to fill up the gaping space between the
+hooks and eyes. I once heard a captain of one of the mail steamers
+describe this job as "letting in a graving piece down the back."
+
+One of the customs peculiar to the Old Calabar people, practised
+generally amongst all classes, but most strictly observed by the
+wealthier people, is for a girl about to become a bride to go into
+retirement for several weeks just previous to her marriage, during which
+time she undergoes a fattening treatment, similar to that practised in
+Tunis. The fatter the bride the more she is admired. It is said that
+during this seclusion the future bride is initiated into the mysteries
+of some female secret society. Many of the chiefs are very stout, and
+given to _embonpoint_, a fact of which they are very proud.
+
+The lower-class women are not troubled with too much clothing, but still
+ample enough for the country and decency's sake. As one strolls through
+the town to see the market or pay a visit to some chief, one often
+encounters young girls, and sometimes women, in long, loose, flowing
+robes, fitting tight round the neck, and on inquiring who these are, the
+reply generally comes, "Dem young gal be mission gal, dem tother one he
+be Saleone woman."
+
+The mission here is the United Presbyterian Mission of Scotland,[92] and
+a great deal of good has been done by it for these people, and is being
+done now, and great hopes are expected from their industrial mission,
+started only a few years ago, therefore, it would be unfair to make
+further comment on the latter; it is a step in the right direction.
+
+Some of the missionaries to Old Calabar have put in about forty years of
+active service, most of it passed on the coast. Amongst others who have
+lived to a great age in this mission should be mentioned the Rev. Mr.
+Anderson, who lived to the advanced age of between eighty and ninety
+years, greatly respected by both the European and native population.
+Amongst the lady missionaries the name of Miss Slessor stands out very
+prominently, and, considering the task she has set herself, viz., the
+saving of twin children and protection of their mothers, her success has
+been marvellous, for the Calabarese is, like his neighbours, still a
+great believer in the custom that says twin children are not to be
+allowed to live. This lady has passed about twenty years in Old Calabar,
+a greater part of the last ten years all alone at Ok˙on, a district
+which the people of Duke Town and the surrounding towns preferred not to
+visit, if they could manage any business they had with the people of
+Ok˙on without going amongst them. Many of these old customs will now be
+much more quickly stamped out than in the past, owing to the fact that
+it is in the power of the Consul-General to punish the natives severely
+who practise them. The preaching and exhortation of the missionaries to
+the people in the past was met by the very powerful argument, in a
+native's mind, that "it was a custom his father had kept from time
+immemorial, and he did not see why he should not continue it," the Ju-Ju
+priests being clever enough to point out to the natives that, though the
+missionaries preached against Ju-Juism, they could not punish its
+votaries. But that is all changed now, and even the Ju-Ju priests begin
+to feel that the power of the Consul-General is much greater than that
+of their grinning idols and trickery.
+
+Though these people have been in communication with Europeans for at
+least two centuries, and under British influence for upwards of sixty
+years, and a mission has been established in their principal town for
+the best part of fifty years, it was a common thing to see human flesh
+offered for sale in the market within a very few years of the
+establishment of the British Protectorate.
+
+In judging the result of missionary effort in this river, or, in fact,
+any other part of Western Africa, one is apt to exclaim, "What poor
+results for so much expenditure in lives and money!" The cause is not
+far to seek if one knows the native, and has sufficiently studied his
+ways and customs as to be able to understand or read what is working in
+his brain.
+
+The upper or dominant classes, consisting of the kings, the chiefs, the
+petty chiefs and the trade boys (the latter being the traders sent into
+the far distant markets to buy the produce for their masters, and it is
+from this class that many of the chiefs in most of these rivers spring)
+are all, to a man, working either openly or secretly against the
+missionaries. Even when they have become converts and communicants, in
+very many cases they are as much an opponent as ever of the missionary.
+I can fancy I see some enthusiastic missionary jumping up with
+indignation depicted in every feature to tell me I am not telling the
+truth about his particular converts. Well, as I expect to be called a
+liar, I have taken care to admit that a very few converts are not
+opposed to the missionary, in order that I may say to any missionary
+that particularly wishes to wipe the floor with me that perchance his
+special converts are included in the minority that is represented by the
+very few cases where the convert is wholly and solely for the mission.
+
+What are the causes that lead these people to work against the missions?
+First and foremost is Ju-Ju and its multifarious ramifications,
+consisting of Ju-Ju priests of the district, the Ju-Ju priests of the
+surrounding country, and the travelling Ju-Ju men, described by the
+natives as witch doctors, who keep up a communication of ideas and
+thought from end to end of the pagan countries of West and South-West
+Africa.
+
+Secondly, not only is the teaching of Christianity opposed to Ju-Juism,
+but it is also opposed to the whole fabric of native customs other than
+Ju-Juism. Polygamy, for example, is an actual necessity, according to
+native custom, thus a wife after the birth of an infant retires from the
+companionship of her husband and devotes herself for the following two
+years to the cares of nursing. Then, again, at certain times, according
+to native custom, a woman is not allowed to prepare food that has to be
+eaten by others than herself. This would place the man with only one
+wife in a peculiar position, as it is a general custom in all these
+rivers, from the kings downwards, to have their food cooked by one of
+their wives. This custom arises from the fact that poisoning is known to
+be very much practised amongst all the Pagan tribes, and experience has
+taught the men that their greatest safety lies in the faithfulness of
+their wives, for the wives are aware that they have all to lose and
+nothing to gain by the death of their husbands.
+
+Many people who have visited Western Africa will say that the reports of
+secret poisoning on the coast are travellers' yarns; but to refute that
+I will here describe a custom met with still in many places on the
+coast, and invariably practised amongst all natives in the purely native
+towns in the immediate vicinity of the coast towns. Even the coast towns
+people practise it still in every case amongst themselves and in some
+cases with the Europeans. Of course, I don't say that the educated negro
+or coloured missionary will do it with Europeans, but many of the
+educated natives will do it with the uneducated native, and this custom
+is that your native host will never offer you food or drink without
+first tasting it to show you it is not poisoned. While I am on this
+topic, let me give any would-be travellers amongst the Pagans a bit of
+advice. Once they strike in amongst the purely native, always follow
+this custom; it will do no harm and may save them from unpleasant
+experiences.
+
+Thirdly, the native instinct of self-preservation is as much the first
+law of nature to the negro as it is to the rest of mankind. At first
+sight it might be said, "Where is the link between self-preservation and
+missionary effort, and how comes it to work against the missions?" I
+will try to explain this point as clearly as possible.
+
+Naturally the first people the missionary came in contact with were the
+coast tribes. These people, in almost if not every case, are
+non-producers, being simply the brokers between the white man and the
+interior; in not a few cases behind the coast tribes are other tribes
+who are again non-producers and are the brokers of the coast brokers, or
+make the coast brokers pay a tribute to them for passing through their
+country. No place so well illustrated this system as the trade on the
+lower Niger as it used to be conducted by the Brass, New Calabar and
+Bonny men. Previous to the advent of the Royal Niger Company in that
+river, these people paid a small tribute to perhaps a dozen different
+towns on their way up to Abo on the Niger--some of the Brass men used
+even to get as far as Onicha or Onitsha. Now that the Royal Niger
+Company is trading on the Niger, none of these people can go to the
+Niger to trade. Well, there you have one of the great objections to
+mission effort. Each of these small tribes who were non-producers have
+lost the tribute they used to exact from the Brass, Bonny and New
+Calabar native brokers, therefore all the non-producers are averse to
+the white man passing beyond them, be he missionary or trader. Of
+course, the greatest objectors to the white man penetrating into the
+interior are the coast middlemen, for it strikes at once at the source
+of all their riches, all the grandeur of their chieftainship, and for
+the rising generation all hope of their ever arriving to be a chief like
+their father or their masters, and have a large retinue of slaves, for
+the favourite slaves are in no way anxious to see slavery abolished,
+because with its abolition they only foresee ruin to their ambitious
+views.
+
+Thus you will understand me when I point out to you the weak spot in
+nine-tenths of the mission effort. They have been trying to look after
+the negro's soul and teaching him Christianity, which in the native mind
+is cutting at the root, not only of all their ancient customs, but
+actually aims at taking away their living without attempting to teach
+them any industrial pursuit which may help them in the struggle for
+life, which is daily getting harder for our African brethren as it is
+here in England.
+
+When I am speaking of mission effort I ought to include Government
+effort in the older colonies. No attempt has been made, as far as I am
+aware of, to open technical schools or to assist the natives to learn
+how to earn their living other than by being clerks or petty traders.
+
+
+SECRET SOCIETIES AND FESTIVALS IN OLD CALABAR--AND THE COUNTRIES UP THE
+CROSS RIVER
+
+To describe all the customs of the Old Calabar people would take up more
+space than I am allowed to monopolise in this work.
+
+They have numerous plays or festivals, in which they delight to disguise
+themselves in masks of the most grotesque ugliness. These masks are, in
+most cases, of native manufacture, and seem always to aim at being as
+ugly as possible. I never have seen any attempt on the part of a native
+manufacturer of masks to produce anything passably good looking.
+
+Egbo, the great secret society of these people, is a sort of
+freemasonry, having, I believe, seven or nine grades. To attempt to
+describe the inner working of this society would be impossible for me,
+as I do not belong to it. Though several Europeans have been admitted to
+some of the grades, none have ever, to my knowledge, succeeded in being
+initiated to the higher grades. The uses of this society are manifold,
+but the abuses more than outweigh any use it may have been to the
+people. As an example, I may mention the use which a European would make
+of his having Egbo, viz., if any native owed him money or its
+equivalent, and was in no hurry to pay, the European would blow[93] Egbo
+on the debtor, and that man could not leave his house until he had paid
+up. Egbo could be, and was, used for matters of a much more serious
+nature than the above, such as the ruin of a man if a working majority
+could be got together against him. This society could work much more
+swiftly than the course adopted in other rivers to compass a man's
+downfall; _vide_ Will Braid's trouble with his brother chiefs in New
+Calabar.
+
+The country up the Cross River, which is the main stream into the
+interior, improves a very few miles after leaving Old Calabar; in fact,
+the mangrove disappears altogether within twenty miles of Duke Town,
+being replaced by splendid forest trees and many clearings, the latter
+being, in some instances, the farms of Old Calabar chiefs. On arriving
+at Ikorofiong, which is on the right bank of the river, you find
+yourself on the edge of the Ikpa plain, which extends away towards Opobo
+as far as the eye can see. I visited this place thirty-five years ago,
+and stayed for a couple of days in the mission house, the gentleman then
+in charge being a Dr. Bailey. At that time this was the farthest station
+of the Old Calabar mission; since then they have established themselves
+in Umon, and have done great service amongst these people, who were
+previously to the advent of the mission terribly in the toils of their
+Ju-ju priests. The people of Umon speak a language quite different from
+the Calabarese. Umon is about one hundred miles by water from Old
+Calabar.
+
+Twenty or thirty miles further up the Cross River you come to the
+Akuna-Kuna country, inhabited by a very industrious race of people,
+great producers and agriculturists, and having abundance of cattle,
+sheep, goats and poultry. These people received one of Her Majesty's
+consuls with such joy and good feeling, and so loaded him with presents
+of farm produce, that his Kroo boatmen suffered severely from
+indigestion while they remained in the Akuna-Kuna country. A little
+farther up the river is the town of Ungwana, a mile or so beyond which
+is now to be found a mission station. This district is called Iku-Morut,
+and a few years ago the inhabitants were never happy unless they were at
+war with the Akuna-Kuna people. This state of things has been much
+modified by the presence in the country of protectorate officials.
+
+About sixty miles by river beyond Iku-Morut is the town Ofurekpe, in the
+Apiapam district. This place, its chief and people are everything to be
+desired, the town is clean, the houses are commodious, the inhabitants
+are friendly, and their country is delightful. They are a little given
+to cannibalism, but, I am very credibly informed, only practise this
+custom on their prisoners of war.
+
+Beyond this point the river passes through the Atam district, a country
+inhabited, so I was informed, by the most inveterate of cannibals. Not
+having visited these people, I am not able to speak from personal
+experience; but as I have generally found in Western Africa that a
+country bearing a very bad character does not always deserve all that is
+said against it, I shall give this country the benefit of the doubt, and
+say that once the natives get accustomed to having white people visit
+them, and have got over the fearful tales told them by the interested
+middlemen about the ability of the white men to witch them by only
+looking at them, then they will be as easy to deal with, if not easier,
+than the knowing non-producers.
+
+I know of one interior town, not in Old Calabar, where the principal
+chief had given a warm welcome to a white man and allotted him a piece
+of ground to build a factory on, which he was to return and build the
+following dry season. Before the time had elapsed the chief died,
+without doubt poisoned by some interested middleman. When the white man
+went up to the country according to his agreement, the new chief would
+not allow him to land, and accused him of having bewitched the late
+chief. The white trader was an old bird and not easily put off any
+object he had in view, so stuck to his right of starting trade in the
+country, and by liberal presents to the new chief at last succeeded in
+commencing operations, with the result that the new chief died in a very
+short time and the white man, who was put in charge of the factory, was
+shot dead whilst passing through a narrow creek on his way to see his
+senior agent, this being done in the interior country so as to throw the
+blame upon the people he was trading with. No one saw who fired the
+fatal shot, and the body was never recovered, as the boys who were with
+him were natives belonging to the coast people and in their fright
+capsized the small canoe he was travelling in, so they reported; but
+some months after the white man's ring mysteriously turned up, the tale
+being it was found in the stomach of a fish.
+
+I will here describe one other very practical custom that used to be
+observed all over the Old Calabar and Cross River district, but which
+has disappeared in the lower parts of the river, owing no doubt to the
+efforts of the missionaries having been successful in instilling into
+the native mind a greater respect for their aged relatives than formerly
+existed. If it ever occurs nowadays in the Calabar district it can only
+take place in some out of the way village far away in the bush, from
+whence news of a little matter of this kind might take months to reach
+the ears of the Government or the missionary; but this custom is still
+carried on in the Upper Cross River, and consists in helping the old and
+useless members of the village or community out of this world by a tap
+on the head, their bodies are then carefully smoke-dried, afterwards
+pulverised, then formed into small balls by the addition of water in
+which Indian corn has been boiled for hours--this mixture is allowed to
+dry in the sun or over fires, then put away for future use as an
+addition to the family stew.
+
+With all the cannibalistic tastes that these people have been credited
+with, I have only heard of them once ever going in for eating white men,
+and this occurred previous to the arrival in the Old Calabar river of
+the Efik race, if we are to trust to what tradition tells us. It appears
+that in 1668-9 four English sailors were captured by the then
+inhabitants of the Old Calabar River; three of them were immediately
+killed and eaten, the fourth being kept for a future occasion. Whether
+it was that being sailors, and thus being strongly impregnated with salt
+horse, tobacco and rum, their flesh did not suit the palate of these
+natives I know not, but it is on record that the fourth man was not
+eaten, but kindly treated, and some years after, when another English
+ship visited the river, he was allowed to return to England in her.
+Since that date, as far as I know, no white men have ever been molested
+by the Old Calabar people.
+
+There has been occasionally a little friction between traders and
+natives, but nothing very serious, though it is said some queer
+transactions were carried on by the white men during the slave-dealing
+days.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [80] "Shake-hand" was a present given by a trader each voyage on his
+   arrival on the coast to the king and the chiefs who traded with him; the
+   Europeans themselves gradually increased this to such an extent that
+   some of the kings began to look upon it as a right, which led to endless
+   palavers; if it is not completely abolished by now, it ought to be.
+
+   [81] "Dashing"--native word for making presents. This word is a
+   corruption of a Portuguese word.
+
+   [82] Brohemie, founded by the late chief Alluma between fifty and sixty
+   years ago. Chinomé, a powerful chief, fought with Allumah in 1864-5 for
+   supremacy; the former was conquered, and died some few years after.
+   Chief Dudu, not mentioned in the text, founded in 1890 Dudu town, and is
+   to-day a most loyal and respected chief. Chief Peggy died in 1889. Chief
+   Ogrie died in 1892, Chief Bregbi also died some years ago.
+
+   [83] This preparation is made from the pericarp of the Raphia Vinifera
+   pounded up into a pulplike mass, which they mix in the water in their
+   canoes and then bale out into the water in the creek.
+
+   [84] One good thing the missionaries have done since they have been in
+   Brass, and that is, that, of persuading the natives, or at least the
+   greater part of them, to give up the worship of this snake; and this
+   part must have included the most influential portion of Brass society,
+   for since about the year 1884 the Ju-Ju snake is killed wherever seen
+   without any disastrous consequences to the killer.
+
+   [85] As an evidence of how secret the natives of these parts have always
+   tried to keep, and have to a great extent kept, the knowledge of the
+   various various creeks from the white men since the abolition of the
+   slave trade, I may point to this creek, which is clearly marked and the
+   soundings given in the old charts, _circa_ 1698, but was quite unknown
+   to the present generation of traders, until Capt. Cawthorne, of the
+   African Steamship Company rediscovered it about 1882-4. I well remember
+   this creek being carefully described to me by Bonny men in 1862 as the
+   haunt of lawless outcasts from Bonny and the surrounding countries,
+   cannibals and pirates. About this time I was stationed in New Calabar,
+   and in roaming about the creeks looking for something to shoot, I came
+   across this beautiful wide creek and followed it until I sighted Breaker
+   Island; but being only in a small shooting canoe I was forced to turn
+   back the way I had come. The next morning I was favoured by the visit of
+   King Amachree, the father of the present king, who said he had heard
+   from his people that I had been down this creek, and he had come to warn
+   me of the danger I ran in visiting that creek, giving me the same
+   description that the Bonny men had done some months earlier. I laughed
+   and told him I had heard the same yarn from the Bonny men. Later in the
+   same year I mentioned my visit to an old freeman in Bonny, named Bess
+   Pepple. He being a little inebriated at the time, let his tongue wag
+   freely, and informed me that it was a creek often used by the slavers
+   during the time the preventive squadron was on the coast, to take in
+   their cargo. In one instance that he remembered he said there were five
+   slavers up that creek when two of Her Majesty's gunboats were in Bonny,
+   about the year 1837. About this time (1862) a mate of a ship who was in
+   charge of a small schooner running between New Calabar and Bonny was
+   forced by stress of weather to anchor inside the seaward mouth of this
+   creek, and was attacked during the night by some natives, carried on
+   shore, tied to a tree and flogged, the cargo of the schooner plundered,
+   and the Kroomen also flogged. Complaint being made to the kings of New
+   Calabar and Bonny, they both replied with the same tale: "We no done
+   tell you we no fit be responsible for dem men who live for dem creek; he
+   be dam pirate." This was true they had, but the mate swore he recognised
+   some Bonny men amongst his assailants.
+
+   [86] Efik race--the inhabitants of Old Calabar, said to have come from
+   the Ibibio country, a district lying between Kwo country and the Cross
+   River.
+
+   [87] Jamming, a trade term, meaning making an agreement to buy or sell
+   anything at an agreed price.
+
+   [88] This king is now dead, he was the last of the kings of New Calabar,
+   the country being now ruled over by a native council under the direction
+   of the Niger Coast Protectorate officials.
+
+   [89] This is an error into which the late Consul Hewett no doubt led Mr.
+   Johnston, as Ja Ja had been since 1861-2 a chief in Bonny and recognised
+   as one of the regents of that place; originally a slave, I will admit,
+   but not a runaway one.
+
+   [90] This failing is called diplomacy in civilised nations.
+
+   [91] Monopolies have led Europeans on the West Coast of Africa to be
+   equally as unscrupulous and bitter enemies of any one, white or black,
+   who have attempted to dispute their trade monopolies.
+
+   [92] Established in Old Calabar in 1846.
+
+   [93] It is called blowing Egbo because notice is given of the Egbo law
+   being set in motion against any one by one of the myrmidons of Egbo
+   blowing the Egbo horn before the party's house.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX II
+
+PART I
+
+A VOYAGE TO THE AFRICAN OIL RIVERS TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO. BY JOHN
+HARFORD
+
+
+It was in the month of December, 1872, when I with seventeen others left
+our good old port of Bristol bound for one of the West African oil
+rivers on a trading voyage. It was a splendid morning for the time of
+year: bright, fine, and clear, when we were towed through our old lock
+gates, with the hearty cheers, good-byes, and God-speed-yous from our
+friends ringing in the air; and although there were some of us made sad
+by the parting kiss, which to many was the last on this earth, there was
+one whose heart felt so glad that he has often described the day as
+being one of the happiest in his life, and that one was your humble
+servant, the writer. Our first start was soon delayed, as we had to
+anchor in King Road and wait a fair wind. And now a word to any hearers
+who may be about to start on a new venture. Always wait for a fair
+wind--when that comes make the best use you can of it. Our fair wind
+came after some two weeks, and lasted long enough for us to get clear of
+the English land; but before we were clear of the Irish, we encountered
+head winds again. Being too far out to return, we had to beat our ship
+about under close reefed topsails for another week. This was a rough
+time for all on board. At last the wind changed, and we this time
+succeeded in clearing the Bay of Biscay and then had a fairly fine run
+until we reached St. Antonia, one of the Cape de Verde Islands. This we
+sighted early one morning, and in the brilliant tropical sunshine it
+appeared to me almost a heavenly sight. We soon passed on, the little
+island disappeared, and once more our bark seemed to be alone on the
+mighty ocean. After a week or so we sighted the mainland of that great
+and wonderful continent Africa--wonderful, I say, because it has been
+left as if it were unknown for centuries, while countries not nearly its
+equal in any way have had millions spent upon them. Our first land fall
+was a port of Liberia. Liberia, I must tell you, is part of the western
+continent with a seaboard of some miles. It was taken over by the
+American Republic and made a free country for all those slaves that were
+liberated in the time of the great emancipation brought about by that
+good man William E. Channing. Here, on their own land, these people, who
+years before had been kidnapped from their homes, were once more free.
+
+After a week's buffeting about with cross currents and very little wind
+we at last reached the noted headland of Cape Palmas, a port of Liberia;
+we anchored here for one night and next morning were under way again.
+This time, having a fair wind and the currents with us, we soon made our
+next stopping place, which was a little village on the coast-line called
+Beraby. Here we had our first glimpse of African life. Directly we
+dropped anchor a sight almost indescribable met the eye of what appeared
+to be hundreds of large blackbirds in the water. We had not long to wait
+before we knew it was something more than blackbirds, for soon the ship
+was crowded from stem to stern with natives from the shore jabbering
+away in such a manner very alarming to a new-comer. I am not ashamed to
+confess that I was anything but sorry when the ship was cleared and we
+were off once more; this was soon done as we had only to take on board
+our Kroo men, or boys, as they are always called, although some of them
+are as finely built as ever a man could wish to be. We took about twenty
+of these boys, who engage for the voyage and become, like ourselves,
+part of the ship's crew. After each one had received one month's pay
+from our captain, and duly handed it over to their friends, and said
+their good-byes, general good-wishes were given, and we again up anchor,
+and set sail for the well-known port of Half Jack, which ought to be
+called the Bristol port of Half Jack, for here we met some half-dozen
+Bristol ships, who gave our captain a regular good old Bristol welcome.
+
+A few words about this important port may be of interest, although I am
+sorry to say we have managed to let it, valuable as it is, get into the
+hands of the French, like many more in that part. Half Jack is a very
+low-lying country with a large lagoon, as it is called running, between
+it and the mainland. Along the sides of this lagoon the country villages
+are situated, which produce that great product palm oil; this is sold to
+the Half Jack men, who in turn sell to our Bristol men and they ship it
+to all parts of Europe. We now leave Half Jack to its traders and
+natives, and after our captain has paid his complimentary visits, we set
+sail for the Gold Coast town of Accra; but before reaching that, we have
+to pass many fine ports and splendid headlands. Axim, in particular, I
+must mention, as it has recently come very much to the fore, owing to
+the great quantity of mahogany that is now being exported from there, a
+wood that has revolutionised the furniture industries of this
+country--it has also enabled the thrifty men and women of England to
+make their homes more bright and cheerful by giving them the very cheap
+and beautiful furniture they could not have dreamed of years ago, when
+the only mahogany procurable was the black Spanish, which was far too
+expensive for ordinary persons to think about. Axim, in addition to this
+great export of wood, is the port of departure for the West African gold
+mines, and they will I have no doubt, in time prove of great value. The
+Ancobra River empties itself here. Axim being at its mouth, this river
+would be very useful in helping to develop the interior of this part,
+were it not that the mouth was so shallow and dangerous, two obstacles
+that the science of the future will, I expect, remove. We are now
+passing some of the finest specimens of coast scenery it is possible to
+see. I can better describe it by comparing it somewhat to our North
+Devon and Cornwall coasts, such splendid rocks and headlands and land
+that I venture to say will eventually prove very valuable.
+
+We next come to the important town of Elmina, one of the departure ports
+of the Ashantee country, and also where all noted prisoners are kept.
+King Prempeh, late of Ashantee, is now awaiting her Majesty's pleasure
+there; many others have found Elmina their home of detention after
+attempting to disobey our gracious Queen's commands.
+
+Cape Coast Castle is our next noted place. This is the chief departure
+port for the Ashantee country, and was at one time the Government seat
+for the Gold Coast Colony. It is a very fine rock-bound port, and from
+the sea its square-topped, white-washed houses, and its Castle on the
+higher promontory, form an imposing-looking picture. It is second to
+Accra for importance in this part; much gold comes from here. It is also
+a celebrated place for the African-made gold jewellery, some of which is
+very beautiful in design and workmanship. The grey parrots form a great
+article of barter here. Hundreds of these birds are brought to Liverpool
+every week, I may almost say all from this place. The people are chiefly
+of the Fantee tribe, and a fine and intelligent race they are. They have
+good schools, and many of the younger men ship off to other parts of the
+coast as clerks, &c. Good cooks may be engaged from here, which is a
+fact I think well worth mentioning.
+
+And now we sail on to the present seat of Government for the Gold Coast
+Colony, Accra. This is a fine country, a flat, table-like land along the
+front, with the hills of the hinterland rising in the background. The
+landing here is somewhat dangerous in the rough season, and great care
+has to be taken by the men handling the surf-boats to avoid them
+capsizing. Many lives have been lost here in days gone by.
+
+I told you before why we called at the Kroo village Beraby, and the port
+of Half Jack. We now anchored at Accra to engage our black mechanics,
+for which the place is noted. Here you may procure any kind of mechanic
+you may mention--coopers, carpenters, gold-and silver-smiths,
+blacksmiths, &c. In those early days the coopers and carpenters were
+engaged to assist our Bristol men, but to-day the whole of the work is
+done by the natives themselves. I do not think you would find a white
+cooper or carpenter in any of the lower ports, some of the natives
+being very clever with their tools. We also engaged our cooks, steward,
+and laundry men, which any establishment of any size in these parts must
+keep. For all these trades the natives have to thank chiefly the Basel
+Mission, which is, I believe, of Swiss origin. This mission started
+years ago to not only teach the boys the word of God, but to teach them
+at the same time to use their hands and brains in such a way that they
+were bound to become of some use to their fellow men, and command ready
+employment. This mission, I cannot help feeling, has been one of the
+greatest blessings they have ever had on that great continent. It has
+sent out hundreds of men to all parts, and to-day the whole of the West
+Coast is dependent upon Accra for its skilled labour. This way of
+instructing the natives is now, I am pleased to say, being followed by
+nearly all our missionary societies, and it is certainly one of the best
+means of civilising a great people like the Africans are.
+
+Not to take powder and shot and shoot them down because they don't
+understand our Christian law, but teach them how to make and construct,
+that they in time may become useful citizens, and that they may be
+better able to learn the value of the many valuable products growing in
+their midst, they will be ever thankful to us and bless our advent among
+them. These Accra people are a very fine race, clean, and distinctly
+above the ordinary type of negro, clearer cut features, well-built men
+and women. The women, especially, are superior to any of the West
+Africans I have met with up to the present. They, like their husbands,
+are fond of dress, and, like their husbands too, are hard-working and
+industrious; this was shown by the readiness of these people to
+undertake the porterage in the prompt manner they did for the late
+Ashantee Expedition, and which must have done a great deal towards
+bringing about the success of the same. You will be better able to
+understand this if you will suppose, we will say, six thousand men were
+landed at Land's End, their destination being Bristol, and with no train
+or horse to carry the food supply and ammunition, let alone the heavy
+guns. For this work some thousands of porters are required, each one of
+which must carry from 60 to 100 pounds in weight. This is carried on the
+head, and when I tell you these people think nothing of doing twenty
+miles a day, day after day, you will realise how physically strong they
+must be. The manner in which they rallied round the Government--men,
+women, and children--as soon as it was decided an expedition should be
+sent, must have been very encouraging to those in command.
+
+One thing, however, about these Accra people, while they have very much
+improved themselves in their dress they have not improved their villages
+as much as we would wish to see, but this will all come in time. Our old
+towns used to abound in narrow courts and lanes, while we to-day like to
+see open spaces, broad streets, &c., with plenty of fresh air, knowing
+it is an absolute necessity to us, and it should be the first care of
+our councillors to do away as far as possible with all dens and alleys,
+so that if the cottage is small, the cottager can breathe pure, fresh
+air; for, as you all know, the working man's stock-in-trade is his
+health--when that goes, the cupboard is often bare.
+
+Now, I think it is about time we hove anchor and said good-bye to Accra.
+Our coopers and carpenters are engaged, and our crew being completed we
+set sail for our destination.
+
+After being some four or five days crossing the Bight of Biafra, we
+sighted the island of Fernando Po. Here our captain having to do a
+little business, we anchor for the night in the harbour of Santa Isabel.
+The little island of Fernando Po once belonged to us, but we exchanged
+it some years ago with the Spanish Government for another island in the
+West Indies, which our Government thought of more value. This, as far as
+the West Coast was concerned, was a pity, because at the time I am
+speaking of the island was a flourishing place, with about half-a-dozen
+or so English merchants, and a fairly good hotel; but not so now, for
+while there is still business going on, the place is not advancing, and
+a place that does not advance must go back. The chief merchants there
+to-day are English. This the Spanish would not have if they could help
+it, but being under certain obligations to them they suffer them to
+remain.
+
+The first view of Fernando Po when you arrive in the bay is a perfect
+picture; it makes one almost feel they would never like to leave there;
+its white houses all round the front on the higher level, its wharves
+and warehouses at the bottom, and its beautiful mountain rising
+magnificently in the background. Its whole appearance is very similar to
+the island of Teneriffe. It seems strange that here, almost in the
+middle of the tropics, if you have any desire to feel an English winter,
+you have only to go to the top of the Fernando Po mountain, which can
+easily be done in two days, or even less, for while at the foot the
+thermometer is registering 85° or 90° in the shade, on the top there is
+always winter cold and snow.
+
+Now, I think we had better continue our journey. We took a few
+passengers on board, and then set sail for the Cameroon River. This
+being only fifty or sixty miles distant, we were not long before we came
+to anchor off what is called the Dogs' Heads. Here we had to wait the
+flood, and almost three-quarter tide, to enable our ship to pass safely
+over a shallow part of the river called the flats. Now we come in sight
+of the then noted King Bell's Town, called after a king of that name.
+Here our ship is moored with two anchors, and here she has to remain
+until the whole of her cargo has been purchased. This was done, and is
+even to-day, by barter, that is exchanging the goods our ship has
+brought out for the products of the country, which at that time
+consisted only of palm oil, ivory, and cocoa-nuts; but before we
+commence to trade the ship has to be dismantled--top spars and yards
+taken down, and carefully put away with the rigging and running gear;
+spars are then run from mast to mast, and bow to stern, forming a ridge
+pole; then rafters are fastened to these coming down each side,
+supported by a plate running along the side, supported by upright posts
+or stanchions; the rafters are then covered with split-bamboos, over
+these are placed mats made from the bamboo and palm trees. It takes, of
+course, some thousands of mats to cover the ship all over, but this is
+done in about a month, and all by natives who are engaged for that
+particular work and belonging to that place. Our ship now being housed
+in, all hands who have not been sent to assist in taking another ship to
+England are given their different duties to assist the captain in
+carrying on the trade.
+
+
+TRADING IN THE CAMEROONS
+
+Each ship in those days had what was then called a cask house, that was
+a piece of land as nearly opposite as possible to where the ship lay
+moored. This land was always kept fenced round with young mangrove props
+or sticks, forming a compound; inside this compound would be two,
+perhaps three, fairly good sized stores or warehouses, and also an open
+shed for empty casks which had to be filled with palm oil and stowed in
+the ship for the homeward voyage. Now the first work to be done after
+the ship was made ready for trading, was to land as much of her cargo as
+was not immediately required for trading purposes, such as salt,
+caskage, earthenware, and all heavy goods. Salt in those days, as in the
+present, formed one of the staple articles of trade, therefore a ship
+would generally have from 200 to 300 tons of this on board, all of which
+would have to be landed into one of these store houses. At that time
+that meant a lot of labour, as every pound had to be carried by the
+natives from the boats to the store in baskets upon the head, over a
+long flat beach. To-day all this is altered, the salt is sent out in
+bags, and each store has a good iron wharf running out into the river
+with trolly lines laid upon it, which runs the goods right into the
+store, and so saves an immense amount of labour. After the salt came the
+casks, packed in what are called shooks; that is, the cask when emptied
+at home here, is knocked down and made into a small close package and in
+that condition only taking up an eighth part of the room it would take
+when filled with the palm oil, thus enabling the ship to carry, in
+addition to her cargo, enough casks to fill her up again completely
+when filled with oil. To carry on this work the crew of the ship was
+divided into two parts, one to work on board, the other on shore. The
+shore work was generally allotted to the Kroo boys we engaged up the
+coast, with one of the white men in charge, while the white crew with
+three or four natives would work the ship. In addition to all this work,
+trade would be going on every day, which meant 100 or so natives coming
+and going constantly from half-past five in the morning until three or
+four in the afternoon, when trade would cease for the day. This release,
+I need scarcely tell you, was most welcome to us all, for during the
+whole of this time the ship was nothing but a continual babel, which not
+unfrequently ended in a free fight all round, when, of course, a little
+force had to be used to restore quiet.
+
+The trading would be carried on in this way. The after end of the ship
+was partitioned off and made to resemble a shop as nearly as possible,
+in this were displayed goods of all kinds and descriptions too numerous
+to mention here. In front of this shop, at a small table, the captain
+sat, while an assistant would be in the shop ready to pass any goods
+that were required out to the purchasers, who first had to take their
+produce, whatever it might be, to the mate, who would be on the main
+deck to examine the oil and see that it was clean and free from dirt of
+any kind; he would also measure whatever was brought by the natives,
+then give them a receipt, or what was commonly called a book. This book
+was taken to the captain, who would ask what they required. All that
+could be paid for from the shop was handed over, while for the heavy
+goods another receipt or book was given which had to be handed to the
+man in charge of the store on the beach, who gave the native his
+requirements there. So the work would go on from day to day, and month
+to month, until the whole of the ship's cargo had been bought, then the
+mat roof was taken off, masts and spars rigged up, sails bent and the
+ship made ready to sail for Old England. This, I must tell you, was a
+happy time for all on board, after lying, as we often did, some fourteen
+or fifteen months in the manner I have described. During these long
+months many changes took place; some of our crew fell ill with fever,
+and worst of all dysentery, one of the most terrible diseases that had
+to be contended with at that time. Three of our number, one after the
+other, we had to follow to the grave, while others were brought down to
+a shadow.
+
+Here I experienced my first attack of African fever, which laid me low
+for some two weeks. I remember quite well getting out of my bed for the
+first time; I had no idea I had been so ill; I could not stand, so had
+to return to my berth again. This was a rough time for us--we had no
+doctor, and very little waiting upon, I can tell you. If the
+constitution of the sufferer was not strong enough to withstand the
+attack he generally had to go under, as it was impossible for the
+captain to look after the sick and do his trade as well, and as he was
+the only one supposed to know anything about medicine, it was a poor
+look out. (I have known, after a ship had been out a few months, not a
+white man able to do duty out of the whole of the crew.) These were our
+hard times, as, in addition to working all day, the white crew had to
+keep the watch on board through the night, while the Kroo boys did the
+same on shore. So that when any of our men were ill, the watch had to be
+kept by the two or three that were able. Many a night after a hard day's
+work I have fallen fast asleep as soon as I had received my
+instructions from the man I relieved. I fear my old captain got to know
+this, for he used to come on deck almost always in my watch, and
+sometimes ask me the time, which I very rarely could tell him. One night
+he caught me nicely. I was fast asleep, when suddenly I felt something
+very peculiar on my face. I put my hands up to rub my eyes as one does
+when just awakening, and, to my horror, my face was covered with palm
+oil, our captain standing at the cabin door laughing away. "What is the
+matter?" he said; "has anything happened?" "Yes," I replied; "you have
+given me the contents of the oil-can." I need scarcely tell you I did
+not sleep much on watch after that. The wonder to me now is that we did
+not lose more lives during that trying time.
+
+Rumours of wars, as they were called, amongst the natives occasionally
+reached us, but we were left pretty much unmolested. One day the captain
+and I had a free fight with fifty or sixty natives, some of whom had
+stolen a cask from our store, which I happened to discover. We got our
+cask back and a few of them had more than they bargained for. Another
+time while I was on board a ship fitting out for home, the captain of
+her saw a native chief coming alongside who was heavily in his debt, so
+he made up his mind, without saying a word to any one, to make him a
+prisoner, so he invited him downstairs to have a glass of wine, leaving
+the forty or so people who had accompanied their chief in his canoe on
+deck. The captain then quietly locked him up, the chief shouted for
+assistance, his people rushed down and the tables were soon turned, for
+they took the captain prisoner and nearly killed him into the bargain,
+one man striking him with a sword nearly severed his hand from his arm,
+the two or three whites on board were powerless. The natives having
+taken complete charge of the ship, we managed to hoist our flag for
+assistance, which was soon at hand, but too late to be of any use, for
+as soon as they had liberated their chief from his imprisonment, they
+all made off as quickly as they could to their own village. The captain
+was of course greatly to blame for not saying a word to any of us of his
+intention and for so underrating the strength of the chief's people. The
+chief was eventually brought to justice, however, by our own Consul.
+
+One other little break occurred to me to vary the monotony of those long
+months. Attached to our ship was a small cutter which used to run down
+to small villages outside the Cameroon River. To one called Victoria I
+journeyed once with the mate and our little craft on a small trading
+venture. Victoria is situated at the foot of the splendid Cameroon
+mountain, which, like its neighbour at Fernando Po, always has snow at
+the peak; it is over 13,000 feet high and at that time only one or two
+men had ventured to the summit--one was, I believe, the late Sir Richard
+Burton. Since then several others have succeeded, amongst them the
+present Sir Harry Johnston, who did a lot of travelling when he was
+Vice-Consul, in those parts. Victoria is a snug little place. It was
+founded some years ago by a very old missionary, a Mr. Seagar, a man who
+did a great work in his time and whose name will never be forgotten in
+the Cameroon River. It lies in what is called Ambas Bay, which is
+sheltered somewhat from the south-west winds by two small islands. On
+one of these a British Consulate was erected a few years ago. The whole
+of this part as well as the Cameroon River is now a portion of the
+German Colony. We soon completed our business here and returned once
+more to our duties in the river. Between Victoria and Cameroon is the
+village of Bimbia, said to be one of the most noted slave depots in the
+district. Hundreds of slaves used to be shipped from here in the days
+when the trade was allowed, and it is said that some time after the
+trade was prohibited one of these slave ships was just about to embark
+her human freight, when a British man-o'-war hove in sight. The captain,
+thinking his ship would be taken--and it was, I believe--and wanting to
+secure the golden dollars he had, took them to the shore and buried
+them. This is said to be thousands and thousands of pounds and is still
+unfound, so goes the tale. I tell it to you as it was told to me.
+
+Our daily routine in the river was so similar that we will now consider
+the whole of the ship's cargo had been bought, and she is getting ready
+to make a start for home, which we were all very glad of; but our joy
+did not last long, for the mail arriving just at that time with letters
+from England, the captain received communication from our owners that
+they were sending out another ship, which he was instructed was for our
+chief mate to take charge of. That meant that the mate would have to
+remain to lay the cargo of her, while our old ship went home; but the
+poor man had been very ill for some time previous to this news, and was
+totally unfit to take charge; so under the circumstances there was only
+one thing to be done, and that was for the captain to remain and send
+the mate home. As soon as this was decided upon, two of us were asked to
+stay behind and help to work the newly-arrived vessel. I was one, the
+cook was the other (our skipper liked to be looked after in the eating
+department). Well, we soon settled down in our new quarters, and in a
+week or so said good-bye to our old ship and shipmates, who were jolly
+glad to get out of the river, and did not envy us poor fellows who had
+to go through all the old duties over again without a bit of change.
+However, we entered upon our work with cheerful hearts. We had a good
+captain, and had no intention of leaving him as long as he remained out.
+Perhaps a word or two about the natives' trade tricks might interest
+you, then you will see a mate's life on an African trading ship was not
+altogether a "bed of roses"; and he had to be pretty sharp to catch
+them, otherwise our wily friends would be sure to have him. For
+instance, they had a happy knack of half-filling their casks with thick
+wood, secured in such a way to the inside of the heads that, instead of
+there being fifty gallons of oil in the cask which it would measure by
+the gauging rod, it would possibly not contain more than twenty-five;
+water, too, was very often introduced to make up a deficiency, and if
+you happened to tell our friend his oil contained water, you were told
+not water, it is rain. Another dodge was to mix a certain kind of herb
+with the oil, which caused it to ferment, so that half casks could very
+easily be made to look full ones. Dirt as well was freely used by the
+natives when they thought they could get it passed, so one had to keep
+one's eyes open.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX II
+
+PART II
+
+PIONEERING IN WEST AFRICA; OR, "THE OPENING UP OF THE QUA IBOE RIVER"
+
+
+In the year 1880, I was asked by a Liverpool firm to undertake certain
+work in connection with one of the trading establishments on the Old
+Calabar River. The offer came at a very opportune time. Being anxious to
+improve my position, like most young fellows, I accepted, and was soon
+on the way to my new undertaking. My first business was to take an old
+ship, that had seen the best of her days, and had been lying there in
+the stream for many years as a trading hulk, now being considered unsafe
+to remain longer afloat. I had to place her on the beach in such a way
+that she could still be used as a trading establishment. This was not a
+small matter, as the beach upon which she had to be placed was not a
+good one for the purpose. However, I found that if I could get her to
+lie on a certain spot I had carefully marked out, there was every
+possibility of a success; but I fear I was the only one that thought so,
+as it was fully twelve months before my senior would let me undertake
+the venture; at last I got his consent, and in a very short time the
+vessel was landed safely, and, I am pleased to say, did duty for over
+ten years. It was while waiting for this consent that the beginning of
+the events I am going to narrate took place.
+
+Business was somewhat quiet in the Old Calabar, so our senior thought he
+would go for a bit of an excursion to a place called Qua Iboe, which was
+supposed to be a small tributary of the great river of Old Calabar, but
+which he found to his astonishment was some twenty-five miles westward
+of the mouth of the Old Calabar, and ninety miles from our main station
+at Calabar; however, he did not like to return without seeing the place,
+so he and his crew went, and after two or three days' journey, they
+suddenly found themselves in the midst of breakers, and it was only by
+luck they got washed into the mouth of the river Qua Iboe, half-dead
+with fright, so much so that our senior would not venture back in the
+boat, but preferred walking overland.
+
+After being absent seven or eight days, he returned to headquarters with
+a very lively recollection of what he had gone through. Not being
+accustomed to the sea, the knocking about of the small boat very much
+upset him, then the long overland journey back took all the pleasure out
+of what he had intended to be a little holiday. Consequently, on his
+return he had but little to say about the river he had gone to see; and
+not being of a talkative disposition, had I not pressed him on the
+subject, I think, as far as our establishment was concerned, the Qua
+Iboe would have been a blank space on the map to-day, as many more fine
+places are in that great continent.
+
+So while we were at dinner, an evening or so after his return, feeling
+very anxious to hear something about his excursion, I remarked that we
+had not heard him say much about the new river. "No," said he; "for the
+simple reason is that I know but very little about it, except that I
+nearly got capsized in the breakers." "Well," I said, "is it a river of
+any size? Would it not be a good place to open up a new business?" "Oh,
+yes!" he said; "the river is a fair size, and it may or may not be a
+good place for business. We can't go there, we have not the means; we
+could not go without a vessel of some sort." "Well," said I, "would you
+go if you could? Or, in other words, will you give me all the support I
+need if I undertake to go?" "Yes, certainly," he said; "I shall be only
+too pleased to give you anything we have here."
+
+That night I got to work and laid out all my plans. First I had to find
+a vessel. We had attached to our hulk a good large boat that would carry
+about ten tons. This boat I soon got rigged up with mast and sails. This
+done, I had a house constructed about sixty or seventy feet long by
+twenty wide, made ready to be put up on whatever spot I should pitch
+upon when I reached my new destination. This work, of course, took some
+little time. However, the eighth day after I had my senior's consent to
+go, I was sailing away from the Old Calabar, with my little craft and
+sixteen people besides myself.
+
+It took some four or five days to get to the long-looked-for Qua Iboe.
+At last we were rewarded with a glimpse of the bar and its breakers,
+which we had to pass before we could get into the river. We, however,
+reached it safely, and with thankful hearts I can tell you, as our
+journey had been anything but a pleasant one--so many of us in such a
+small craft. I felt bound to take this number, as in addition to wanting
+these people for the building of the establishment, I wished to make as
+big a show as I could to the, at that time, unknown natives, who had
+the reputation of being as bad a lot as were to be met with anywhere on
+the West Coast. Anyhow, I thought they would have to be pretty bad if I
+could not make something of them, so I sailed my boat flying up the
+river to the first village, which was supposed to be the senior one in
+the river, and was always called Big Town. It was just dusk when we
+arrived. We dropped anchor, and decided to rest for the night; but I
+found the villagers very excited, and not liking at all my advent among
+them, as they had just had news from the up-country informing them that
+if they allowed a white man to remain in their river, King Ja Ja, who
+was the very terror not only of this place, but of some fifty or sixty
+miles all round, had threatened to burn their towns down; he laying
+claim to all this country, allowed no one to trade there but himself.
+
+The advice I had from these people was that I had better go back and
+leave them and their river to themselves. But I said, No, I am not going
+back. I have come to open a trading station and to remain with you, and
+that King Ja Ja, or any one else but our British Consul, would never
+drive me from that river alive. I saw, though, it was useless taking any
+notice of these frightened people, so I up anchor the next morning, and
+sailed up the river; near the next village I saw a suitable spot for our
+establishment. I at once anchored our boat, landed our people with house
+and everything we had brought, put up a bit of a shanty to sleep under
+for the time, and set to work to build our house; this, I may tell you,
+did not take long, for by the end of the week we had a fine-looking
+place up, such a one had never been seen in that part before. The house
+complete, my next work was to get goods for the natives to buy from us.
+This meant a journey for me.
+
+Ten days after our first arrival, our house and store were up and built,
+and I was away to the Old Calabar in our boat with some of my people to
+get goods to start our trade with; the remainder stayed to put the
+finishing touches to our building and to clear the land near.
+
+I was soon back at my post again and trade started. After this I had to
+make several journeys to keep our supply good, and all went well for
+about three months, with the exception of continuous rumours as to what
+King Ja Ja intended to do; these I took no notice of, as I did not
+anticipate he would molest me or my people. However, my peaceful
+occupation was not to last for long; for while I was away at Old Calabar
+replenishing our stock, a day or two previous to my return King Ja Ja,
+with about a thousand of his men, pounced down unexpectedly on these Qua
+Iboe people, burnt down seven villages, took one hundred prisoners, and
+drove the remainder of the population into the woods, cutting down every
+plantain tree, and destroying everything in the way of food stuff that
+was growing in the place. I arrived off the bar the day after this
+terrible business had taken place. When I left the river I left twelve
+of my people there. The head man had instructions that as soon as they
+saw me off the bar, when the tide was right for me to come in, to hoist
+a white flag.
+
+The day I arrived, after waiting until I knew high water must have
+passed, I took my glasses, but there was not a soul visible. Not caring
+to risk our little vessel without the signal, I took a small boat we had
+with us and started over the bar into the river. What my surprise was
+you will readily understand when, arriving at the store, I found only
+one man, half-dead with fright, and crying like a child; all I could get
+out of him was that Ja Ja had been there and killed every one in the
+place. The first thing I did was to at once return to the vessel, and
+bring her in with the remainder of my people. We landed all our stores,
+then I immediately hoisted our English ensign on the flag-staff. I
+prayed to the Almighty to defend us and the country from the tyranny of
+these dreadful men who had caused so much misery for these poor people.
+Their wretchedness I was soon brought face to face with.
+
+The morning after my arrival, if ever a man's heart was softened mine
+was, and the tears came to my eyes when I saw crawling into the house
+from the woods a poor, half-starved cripple child, covered with sores,
+and in a dreadful state. We took it in at once and cared for it. Then I
+sent my people into the woods to see if they chanced to come across any
+one, and to tell them to come in under our flag, and I would see that no
+harm again befell them. In this we were very successful, for one after
+the other they arrived, more dead than alive, until some 700 of them
+were in and around our house. The next thing to be thought about was
+food for them. My last cargo fortunately was all rice and biscuits. This
+relieved me somewhat, and I felt we could at least manage for a short
+time.
+
+To find food for such a great number gave me, as you may suppose,
+serious thought, for there was not a scrap left in the district; the
+land in this particular part being of a poor nature, the food grown at
+the best of times was very small, and this little had all been
+destroyed. But we had not to wait long before witnessing one of the
+greatest blessings that could have happened. As soon as the men had
+somewhat recovered from their fright, they began to go out into the
+river to fish, when such quantities were caught that never in the
+remembrance of any person in that country had such an amount of fish
+been seen. Load after load was brought to the shore, in fact, some had
+to spoil before it could be cured.
+
+What did all this wonderful catch bring about? While a short time before
+these people had been in the greatest poverty and distress, now they are
+rejoicing and thankful for this abundance of food and wealth. I say
+wealth because fish in this part of Africa is more precious than gold
+with us. With fish anything can be bought in the market, from the
+smallest article to the largest slave. So you see here was our relief
+brought about by the ever bountiful Providence, whose all-seeing eye is
+ever near those who are in want and need and ask His aid, whether it be
+the poorest slave in Africa or the orphan child in England.
+
+From this time we began to gather strength day by day. New arrivals came
+in who had managed to get away to some place of safety until they felt
+they could return to their native place with security.
+
+As soon as Ja Ja and his men had destroyed the villages they returned to
+their town of Opobo, with the hundred prisoners, the whole of whom they
+massacred in cold blood, and exhibited to their townspeople, and, I am
+sorry to say, to some Europeans, for days. While this fearful murdering
+was going on twenty-five miles away from us I, with a few of the most
+courageous Ibunos, or Qua Iboe people, made a tour of the principal
+villages in the Ibuno country to let the inhabitants know of the deadly
+onslaught that had been committed on the people at the mouth of the
+river. They all swore to stand by us to a man, and to keep themselves
+free from Ja Ja's tyrannical rule. After making this round we returned
+to the mouth of the river and turned our attention to the defence of the
+new villages that were about to be built.
+
+A little accident occurred to us while leaving the last village, called
+Ikoropata, that may be worth mentioning as a warning to others who might
+be placed in a similar situation. We had just started after having a
+long palaver with the chiefs, our men, about twenty, marching in single
+file, I near the leading man. All at once I noticed he was carrying his
+gun in a very alarming and unsuitable way. Had it gone off by accident,
+which is not an unusual occurrence, the man behind him was bound to
+receive the contents, with perhaps fatal results. Having stopped them
+and explained the danger of carrying guns in this position, we started
+off again, every man with his weapon to his shoulder. Strange to say, a
+few minutes after the very man's gun I had noticed at first blew off
+into the air with a tremendous report. Had this happened before, I fear
+we might have had to take one of our comrades back more dead than alive.
+The escape was a marvellous one, and not easily forgotten by any of us.
+
+Now being back amongst our own people, we set about to get all the guns
+we could together, and all able bodied men I told off for gun practice
+and defence drill. This I carried on day after day, until we had quite a
+little band of well-trained men. All this time we were continually
+receiving rumours from the Opobo side as to what Ja Ja's next intentions
+were, and to keep up the excitement he sent about 200 men as near the
+mouth of the river as he dared. They settled themselves in a creek two
+or three miles away from us, and here they used to amuse themselves by
+letting off now and again a regular fusilade of guns. This generally
+occurred in the middle of the night when every one but the watchmen had
+gone to sleep, and had such an effect on the frightened Ibunos that
+often two-thirds of them would rush off to the woods under the
+impression that the Opobos were again making a raid upon them. This went
+on for weeks, so much so that I was almost losing heart, and sometimes
+thought I should never get confidence in the people. At last, to my
+great surprise one evening in walked to my house the whole of the
+chiefs, who had just held a meeting in the village and passed a law that
+no person should again leave the town. They said they had come to tell
+me they felt ashamed of themselves for running away so many times and
+leaving me alone and unprotected in their country, and had decided to
+leave me no more, but that every man should stand and die if needs be
+for the defence of their towns. Whether Ja Ja's people heard of this
+resolution I don't know, but they soon dropped their gun firing at
+night, and eventually left their camping ground. Their next move was to
+get into the Ibunos' markets, and worry them there. This I was
+determined should not be done if I could help it. It was a long time
+before there was any real disturbance, although I could see that the
+Ibunos were daily getting more frightened that the Opobo people would
+monopolise their markets, and in that case they knew there would be very
+little chance for them.
+
+At last news came down the river that the Opobos had that afternoon sent
+a canoe to a market or town called Okot for the purpose of starting a
+trade with the natives. Now Okot was at that time one of the best
+markets the Ibunos had, and for them to be suddenly deprived of this
+trading station would be a terrible calamity to us all. I did not know
+what was to be done. The Ibunos would not go to the market to face the
+Opobos, neither would they go further up the river for fear of being
+molested by them. The only thing to do was to go myself and start a
+station at the same place, and which would enable me to keep an eye on
+their movements, so I at once made ready to start the same evening, and
+by five o'clock next morning I landed at Okot, and found the Opobo canoe
+there also, but like all Africans, time not being an object to them,
+they had not gone to the king or the owner of the land at the landing
+place. We did not wake the Opobos up on our arrival, but I immediately
+started for the village, and at daylight walked into the presence of the
+king of that part, who was so surprised to see a white man in his
+village that it took him some time to believe his eyes. Poor old chap! I
+fear he must have wished several times afterwards that he had never seen
+a white man, for he was taken prisoner by the Government in 1896 or 1897
+for insisting, I believe, in carrying out some human sacrifice at one of
+the feast times, and died in prison. But to return to my mission. I soon
+made him understand that I had come to start a trading station at his
+beach, but before doing this I had to secure the land at the landing
+place for the purpose. This he readily consented to, telling me at the
+same time that although the land at that particular spot did not belong
+to him he would instruct the owner of it to sell me all I wanted. So
+after paying the usual compliments to the old king, I started back for
+the landing place with the owner, who had already sold his right to me,
+and was now only coming to show us the extent, which was the whole of
+the land of any use on this spot. Just as we got back we found our
+Opobo friends preparing to go to the village to see the king and also
+get permission to build on this land, but their surprise on being told
+by him that he had no land on the spot to give them I will leave you to
+imagine. But the Opobos at that time took a lot of beating, and they
+decided to build a house without getting the permission of any one, and
+an iron roofed house too, which was considered by the natives then a
+great thing. After the house had stood for some time, our consul being
+in the river, we had the disputed land brought before him and thoroughly
+discussed. After hearing evidence on both sides for two days, it was
+decided that it belonged to us, and the Opobos were ordered to remove
+their house. But before this settlement occurred we had a lot to contend
+with from them. They did all in their power to debar us from keeping our
+establishments open there, and for two or three years we had continual
+trouble with them, occasionally firing at our people; luckily they
+seldom hit any one. Then they tried competing with us in trading. This I
+did not mind, as I considered it a fair means of testing who was who. Ja
+Ja, I knew, was a very rich man, and if we attempted to follow them in
+their extravagant prices we should soon be ruined. My policy was to let
+them go ahead, which they did, paying almost twice as much for their
+produce as we could possibly afford to pay. This lasted a great deal
+longer than I anticipated, and I feel sure Ja Ja must have lost a deal
+of money. After about twelve months of this reckless trading we were
+left pretty much to ourselves at Okot, and being fairly well settled
+down I began to look about for a good beach to start my next
+establishment. I had not to look far. On the left bank of the river,
+about two and a half miles down from Okot, was the landing beach of
+Eket. Here there is a rising cliff about fifty feet high, and I had
+often remarked when passing this spot, "If I were going to build a house
+to live in here I should like to build it on this hill." The situation
+was so good, as it was right in an elbow of the river, and from the top
+of the hill you had a view of the river branching off both up and down
+at right angles. An opportunity occurring for me to start a house at
+Eket, I went and saw the people, who were very pleased for me to come
+among them. So a little house was built, and a young coloured assistant
+named William Sawyer placed in charge, who proved to be one of the best
+men I ever had in the country. He needed to be, too, for the Ekets were
+the most trying of any of the peoples we had to deal with. I never left
+my stations for any length of time. Once or twice a week I visited them,
+but no matter how short a time I was away there was always a grievance
+to be settled at Eket. Poor Sawyer had a terrible time; the people had
+an idea they could do as they liked with the factory keeper, and would
+often walk off with the goods without paying for them, which Mr. Sawyer
+naturally objected to, usually ending in a free fight, sometimes my
+people coming off second best. The trade at that time at Eket was not
+large, although it was a good one, and I did not want to give it up if
+it could be helped. But my patience came to an end when I arrived upon
+the scene one day and found Mr. Sawyer had been terribly handled the day
+before. There had been a big row, and I could see by his face he had had
+very much the worst of the fight. I felt I could not allow this any
+longer, so summoned a meeting of all the chiefs and people. We had a
+very large meeting, one of the largest I ever remember, and after
+explaining to them my reason for calling them together, told them it was
+my intention to close the little house and go to some people higher up
+the river, who would be pleased for us to come among them, and would not
+ill-use my people as the Ekets were doing, and showing them how badly
+they had treated Mr. Sawyer, who had done nothing more than his duty in
+trying to protect the property that was under his care, and which they
+seemed to think they had a better right to than he. When they had heard
+my complaint and warning to close the house, the old and ever respected
+chief of all the Ekets rose to his feet. The people seeing this, there
+was silence in a moment (which every one knows who has happened to have
+been present at an African palaver is indeed a rarity), he being much
+loved and reverenced in his own town. As soon as he started I felt we
+were going to hear something worth hearing, and we did, for if ever
+there was a born statesman this was one. He said, "We have heard with
+sorrow of the way in which your people have been so ill-used by our
+people, and it is a shame to us a stranger should be so treated who is
+trying to do his best to bring business among us. Not only have you
+brought a business to us, where we can come and exchange our produce for
+our requirements, but you have opened our eyes to the light, as it were,
+and we have no intention that you should leave us. You have been sent to
+us by Abassy (which means God), and he will never let you leave us. Your
+trade will grow in such a way that you will see here on this beach far
+more trade than you will be able to cope with, so cast away from your
+mind the thought of leaving us. The disturbances that have been going on
+we will stop. It is not our wish that it has been so; it is the young
+boys of the village who know no better. We will put a stop to it in
+such a way that you will find your people from this time will have but
+little to complain about." After such a speech you may be sure I gave up
+all thought of leaving the Eket people, and I need scarcely tell you
+that this same spot has become the centre of the whole of the trade of
+this river. The words spoken by the venerable and, I believe, good old
+chief came as true as the day. We did see often and often more trade
+than we could cope with, and the establishment grew in such a way that
+the natives themselves often used to wonder. I never had anything to do
+with a more prosperous undertaking in Africa, and to-day there are few
+establishments on the West Coast that can surpass it, either in its
+quiet, steady trade or healthy climate. I used to say one could live as
+long as they liked. On the hill there is a very fine house, with acres
+and acres of good land at the back of it, while at the foot of the hill
+are all the stores and the shop where the daily work and trade goes on
+year in year out.
+
+Several very remarkable incidents happened here. One evening, just as we
+were going to dinner, a woman came and stood a little way from the
+house. I could see that she was crying bitterly and evidently in great
+distress. "What is the matter?" I said. "Affya (that is her brother) is
+dying, and I want you to come and see him before it is too late." Now
+Affya was one of the finest young fellows at Eket, and one whom I felt
+would be a sad loss to a people who wanted so much leading and
+governing, as it were. So I lost no time, but went off at once with the
+woman to see if I could do anything. On our arrival at the house things
+looked bad enough, and I feared the worst when I saw him laid out, as
+every one there thought, for dead--the finest young fellow at Eket. I
+fell on my knees by his side and prayed as earnestly as man could to
+our Heavenly Father, and begged for this life to be spared to us. All at
+once he moved as though suddenly aroused from sleep, and in a moment I
+had him up and on the back of one of my boys, and away to Eket House as
+fast as possible, and laid him on the verandah to sleep and rest free
+from the close and stuffy hut he had been in before. After a little
+nourishment he slept all night. I kept watch near him, and next morning
+what was my surprise when he told me he was feeling quite strong and
+able to walk back to the village. This I allowed him to do after the sun
+had got well high, as I could plainly see the lad was out of all danger.
+Should these lines ever get into the hands of that lad, for lad he will
+always be to me, I feel very sure he will say, "Yes, this wonderful
+returning to life did indeed happen to me, Affya, son of Uso, at Eket,
+at the village of Usoniyong, in the month of July, 1892." This is one of
+the many incidents that occurred whilst I was in charge at Eket and the
+Qua Iboe River. Another evening, just after dinner, my steward came to
+me saying there was a rat under the house (our house stood on iron
+columns). "A rat," I said; "what do you mean?" "Well, a small woman."
+
+"Go and bring her up; do not be afraid." He looked at me as much as to
+say you will be afraid when I do bring her up. Presently he appeared
+with a child in his arms, such a sight I never shall forget--almost
+starved to death, and covered with marks where she had been burnt with
+fire-sticks. This poor little thing, after wandering many days in the
+wood, at last found her way to our house. She was too ill to have
+anything done to her that evening, so I had a bed made for her in the
+sitting-room, close to my door, so that I could hear should she get
+frightened in the night. The little thing woke up many times, but was
+soon off to sleep again when I had patted and spoken to it. The next day
+we had her seen to, the steward boy set about and made her some dresses,
+and after a warm bath and plenty of food, in a few days the little girl
+was the life of our house. The poor little thing had been left without
+father or mother, and had become dependent upon an uncle, or some other
+relative, who had ill-used her in such a terrible manner that he had
+left her for dead. How she ever found strength to get to our house was
+almost a mystery.
+
+After being with us for twelve months, some other relatives laid claim
+to her, and as I was just leaving for England, I allowed them to take
+her, but not without making four or five of the principal chiefs
+responsible for her welfare. She will now be a grown woman, but will
+look back upon those happy months with pleasure, I feel sure.
+
+Another incident may be of interest--quite a change of scene--showing
+you how you may be as kind and as good to a people as it is possible to
+be, yet you must always be ready to defend yourself at a moment's
+notice, which will be seen from the following circumstances. We had been
+troubled for some time past with night robberies, not very serious at
+first, but they became more frequent than I cared about. I gave the
+matter serious attention, but we could not trace the thieves, do what we
+would; the strange thing was, that as soon as a robbery had been
+committed, a native, a sort of half slave, was sure to be seen about the
+beach putting on what seemed to me a sort of bravado manner; but, of
+course, he never knew anything about the people who had been tampering
+with the premises, and he always appeared to be surprised to think that
+any one should do such a thing, but at last matters came to a climax;
+our plantain trees had been cut down, and a whole lot of fine plantains
+stolen, as well as a lot of wire fencing. I was vexed to the extreme
+when this dastardly work was brought to my notice. But what was my
+surprise, no sooner had my lad reported the matter to me, when along
+walked the very man I have just described, looking as bold as brass.
+Said I to myself, "If you have not done this stealing you know something
+about it, and you will have to give an account of your movements before
+you leave these premises." So I sent orders to have him immediately put
+under arrest, which was done, and he was given to understand that until
+the thieves, whoever they were, had been brought to justice, he would
+have to remain under arrest.
+
+This was an unexpected blow for my friend, but he proved one too many
+for my people. He managed to get the best side of his keeper, and
+slipped; next morning we had no prisoner, the bird had flown. I knew he
+would work no good for us in the villages, neither did he; he went from
+village to village, right through the Eket country, telling the people
+the most dreadful things, and the most abominable lies, of what had been
+done to him the short time he was our prisoner; so much so, that he got
+the people quite furious against me and my people. Just as an agitator
+will work up strife in England if he is not checked, so it was with this
+man; he got every village to declare war against me. This went on for
+three or four days, until he got them all to concentrate themselves.
+They were all brought one night to within a quarter of a mile of our
+establishment; here they had their war dances all night, yet I did not
+think there was any likelihood of their attacking us. Still, for a
+couple of days things did not appear right, the people seemed strange in
+their manner; so I thought it not wise to be caught napping, and I made
+some preparations for an attack if we were to have one, and had the
+Gatling gun placed in position at the rear of the house. This I felt was
+quite enough to defend the house, if I could but get a fair chance to
+use it, although I was in hope I should not be called upon to do so.
+
+We had not long to wait, for at 5.30 in the morning after a continuous
+beating of drums all night, I got up and walked out on the verandah,
+which was my usual custom, not thinking we were going to be attacked,
+but when I looked round, the wood and bush seemed to be alive with
+people, and some of them were already advancing towards the house, while
+one chief, more daring than the others, came on near enough for me to
+speak to him. Seeing this unexpected development of affairs, and the
+suspicious look of my friend near at hand, I called to my boy, who was
+near, to bring my revolver, and no sooner had the chief got within
+twenty paces or so of the house, when I called upon him to stop and tell
+me what was their mission so early in the morning. He said they had come
+to talk over the matter of the man I had imprisoned. But I said this is
+not the time of day we usually talk over matters we may have in
+dispute--the afternoon being always the recognised time. "Yes," said my
+friend, "but we want to settle matters now." "All right," I said, and
+with that I held my revolver at his head, and ordered him to stand, and
+not move an inch, or I would shoot him dead on the spot. The people at
+the back, seeing what was taking place, began to move towards the
+house. I said to my boy, "run to the beach and tell Mr. Sawyer to come
+up." This was my coloured assistant, whom I knew I could trust. The lad
+was away, and Mr. Sawyer at my side before the people had got too near.
+"What am I to do, sir?" "Take this revolver and hold it to that man's
+head, whilst I jump to the Gatling; if he moves, shoot him down." There
+was not half a move in him, and in a moment I was at the Gatling. By
+this time there was a general move forward from all parts of the bush,
+but no sooner did this black mass see I was at the gun, and determined
+to fight or die, quicker than I can write these words, I saw the whole
+body fall back in dismay. There was my opportunity. I jumped from the
+Gatling, went straight to the people, and demanded of them what they
+wanted to do. Their answer was--"We don't know; we are a lot of fools,
+and we have lost our heads; send us back, we have no business to come to
+fight against you, and we don't want to."
+
+By seven o'clock that morning the trade was going on in our
+establishment as though nothing had happened. This little incident I
+have always described as a bloodless battle, won in a few moments; yes,
+in almost less time than it has taken me to write its description. This
+matter we finally settled, after holding a large meeting with all the
+chiefs and people. The laws of these people are very definite; you must
+have absolute proof of a person's guilt, before you can even accuse him.
+I had to sit as judge over my own case, which was rather an unfair
+position for one to be placed in. But as the laws are definite it was
+simple enough to decide. The question was--"Had I any proof that this
+man was one of the thieves, or in any way connected with the affair?" I
+had not; my evidence was purely suppositional. This ended the matter. I
+was in the wrong, therefore I had no alternative but to put a fine upon
+myself, which I did, and was very pleased to end what had nearly cost me
+my life, and probably also a number of my people. After this affairs
+went on merrily at Eket.
+
+There was a place called Okon some few miles up the river from Eket, and
+here I proposed to start another establishment, so had made all
+preparations at Ibuno for that purpose, and left the latter place with
+my boat, people, provisions and materials. We arrived at Okot overnight,
+intending to sleep there, as it was the nearest beach to Okon. All went
+well until the next morning, when we were preparing to start. My factory
+keeper at Okot came to me in the most serious manner possible, wanting
+to know if I really meant going to Okon. I said "Certainly, we have come
+up for the purpose." "Well," he said, "I think you had better not go;
+there are very nasty rumours about here that it is intended to do you
+some harm if you should attempt to open up at Okon; in other words, men
+have been appointed to take your life." "All right," I said; "we must
+take our chance; we shall not turn back until we have tried." So away we
+went, I in a small boat with a few boys, the others in another boat with
+the etceteras. We arrived at Okon and landed our goods, but we found a
+number of Ja Ja's people had arrived before us. I took no notice of them
+any more than passing the time of day. However, I must confess I did not
+like their demeanour. Nothing was said and our provisions were safely
+housed in a native shanty. Here I intended to remain while building our
+own house. The timber, iron and other goods were placed on the spot we
+intended to occupy. This done, I started off with a couple of boys to
+acquaint the king and the people of the village of our arrival, and to
+get the king or some of his chiefs to come down and allot me the land I
+required. We had been in the village some little time, and matters were
+well-nigh settled, when all at once there was a general stampede from
+the meeting house, and just at that moment I heard a regular fusilade of
+guns, and in came running one of my people from the beach, nearly
+frightened to death. "Massa, massa, come quick to the beach; Ja Ja's men
+have burnt down the house and want to shoot us all, and all our goods
+are in their hands." By this time a lot of Ja Ja's men were in the
+village, and I was left absolutely alone with the exception of my own
+boys and the one that had run up from the beach. Every native had rushed
+to his compound as soon as the firing had commenced. I turned to my
+boys, told them not to fire, but to keep cool, do as I told them, and be
+ready to protect themselves if any one attacked them, not else. So down
+we slowly walked to the beach. Here was a sight for me! All my goods
+thrown to the four winds, my house burnt to the ground, and about a
+hundred or more of Ja Ja's or Opobo men arranged up in line, every man
+with his rifle and cutlass, ready to fight, which they evidently
+anticipated I should do as soon as I appeared on the scene; but this I
+had no intention of doing. To attempt to show fight against such odds
+would have been simply suicidal, so I made up my mind to show the best
+front possible under the circumstances, called my boys, placed them in
+equal numbers on either side of me, with our backs to the bush and
+facing our would-be enemies. I then inquired what they wished to do.
+Drawing my revolver, which was a six chambered one, I held it up. "If
+you want my life you may have it, but, FIRST, _let me tell you, inside
+this small gun I hold six men's lives; those six men I_ WILL _have_,
+then you may have me." Not a word was uttered. Then I said, "If you do
+not want that, I and my people will leave you here in possession of
+these goods and the house that you have already partly destroyed." With
+this I ordered my boys to the boats, to which we went quietly and in
+order, leaving our Opobo friends dumbfounded and baulked of the main
+object of their mission.
+
+When we had got well clear of the beach I was thankful indeed, for never
+was a man nearer death than I was at that time, I think. We went down to
+Ibuno as fast as our boats could go, our boys singing as Kroo boys can
+sing when they feel themselves free from danger. I only stayed a few
+hours at Ibuno. As soon as the tide served I made right away to Old
+Calabar to lay the whole affair before H.M. Consul. After this I felt I
+had done my duty in the matter of the Opobo business. The affair was, of
+course, settled against the Opobos, and they had to leave the Okon beach
+to us absolutely.
+
+I must not deal with the rough side only of pioneer life in West Africa,
+so I think I will just touch upon one of the many kindnesses shown to me
+by the Ibunos during these troublous times. The Qua Iboe bar, like many
+others along the coast, more so in this particular part, is very
+treacherous, being composed of quicksand. It is always on the move, so
+the channel changes from place to place. Sometimes you go in and out at
+one side, sometimes at the other, and sometimes straight through the
+centre. These moving sands require a great deal of careful watching and
+constant surveying, which I used to invariably see to and do myself
+about once a fortnight. While out on this work one day, with four boys
+and Mr. Williams, who at that time had a small establishment at Ibuno,
+and was as anxious as I was to know the true position of the channel, we
+were both working small sailing craft--we had not risen to a steamer
+then--(now there is, and has been for a considerable time, one working
+the same river), and started off, the weather being fairly fine, and to
+all appearances the sea very quiet. All went well with us going out. I
+got soundings right through the channel, and after passing safely we
+turned our boat about to come back into the river again. Along we came
+until we got right into the centre of the bar, then suddenly a sea took
+us, and before any one could speak the boat was over. We were under
+water and the boat on top of us. Being a good swimmer, I was not afraid,
+but immediately dived down and came up alongside the boat. My boys were
+round me like a swarm of fish, not knowing whether I could swim or not.
+I soon put their minds at rest and told them not to trouble about me,
+but to get everything together belonging to the boat and get her
+righted. This done, "Now," I said, "if you will all keep your heads and
+do as you are told, we shall get the boat and ourselves through all
+right." So we divided, three on one side, three on the other, and swam
+with the boat until we reached the beach, which was about a mile and a
+half distant, and I can tell you took us some considerable time. Before
+we landed we had been something like three hours in the water, which is
+no small matter anywhere, much less in West Africa, where one is not
+always in the best of condition. Mr. Williams got very frightened and, I
+think, was in doubt once or twice as to whether we should reach the
+shore; but we did, and were truly thankful, and although we did not
+openly show it, we gave none the less hearty thanks from our inmost
+hearts. After landing we righted our boat and paddled off up river to
+our factory. Here we arrived before any of the natives knew what had
+happened. Our boys soon put the news about, as they felt they had had a
+marvellous escape. Mr. Williams and I drank as much brandy as we could
+manage, then I jumped into bed and remained until the next morning. I
+believe he did the same too. At daylight I awoke and felt, to my
+surprise, as well as I ever felt in my life. Being so long in the water,
+I fully anticipated a severe attack of fever next day, but it wasn't so,
+and I was about my business as though nothing had happened. I don't
+think I should have thought any more about it had not the Ibunos so
+forcibly reminded me of the danger we really had passed through. After
+having so many narrow escapes this one appeared to pass as a matter of
+ordinary occurrence. Not so to them; the afternoon of the day after the
+accident, while I was out about the work, I saw an unusual number of
+natives going to the house, each little contingent carrying baskets of
+yams and fish. I had not long to wait before one of my boys came to tell
+me the Ibuno people wished to speak with me at the house. I went to them
+at once. Here was my dining room full of natives, and in the centre a
+pile of yams two or three feet high, and fish, the very finest that had
+been caught that day, as well as some very beautiful dried fish, enough
+to last me and my people, I should think, a month or more. This sight
+took me rather by surprise, not quite knowing what was about to take
+place. I took the chair which was placed for me and waited. All being
+quiet, one of the chiefs rose up and said, "We know you are somewhat
+surprised to see all us villagers here to-day, and also the food we
+have brought with us which is now in front of you, but we have come to
+tell you how sorry we all were, men, women and children throughout our
+villages, when we heard you had been thrown into the sea, and all had
+such a narrow escape of losing your lives. We are all the more sorry to
+think that not one of our people were able to render you the slightest
+assistance. Had we seen you or known what was taking place every canoe
+would have come to your aid, but we did not, and while we were sitting
+comfortably in our houses you were struggling in the water. To us this
+has been a grief, and to show you how thankful we are to think you have
+been preserved to us through this danger and many others, we have
+brought for your acceptance the best we can offer you. We are but poor,
+as you know, but these gifts come from our hearts as a present to you
+and a thank-offering to our Father in Heaven who has been pleased to
+restore you to us unhurt. We are, we must tell you, thankful in more
+ways than one for your deliverance, because had you been lost our great
+enemy Ja Ja would at once have said his Ju Ju had worked that it should
+be so." With this he sat down.
+
+For me to attempt to express what I felt at that moment would be
+impossible; I must say I felt a very unpleasant feeling in my throat,
+and I don't know but that some of the water I had had too much of the
+day before was having a good try to assert itself. If it had, it was not
+to be wondered at; for any one would have to have been hard indeed if
+such kindness did not touch them; even the strongest of us are bound
+sometimes to give way for a moment. I did not attempt to hide from them
+the fulness of my heart, and the gratitude I felt for such kindness,
+where I least expected it. I told them I had not thought much of the
+accident, but I was thankful to think my life and my people had been
+spared, and I only hoped I should live to show them how their great
+kindness would ever be remembered by me, and would not be forgotten as
+long as life lasted. After general thanks our meeting broke up and
+ended, but has never been forgotten.
+
+After we had got fairly well established and our trade began to develop
+itself, our firm at Liverpool chartered a small brig, with a general
+cargo of goods for us, which in due time I was notified of. Now this was
+a great event, not only for us, but for the river, as this would be the
+first sailing ship that had ever entered the Qua Iboe to bring in and
+take out a cargo direct. Everything that had been done before this was
+by small craft, and transhipped at one of the main rivers; so I was very
+anxious that the arrival of this ship should be made as complete a
+success as possible. I knew it would be next to impossible to bring her
+in right over the bar, as deeply laden as she would be from England, as
+our depth of water was not more than 8 ft. 6 in. to 9 ft. at spring
+tides, and this vessel would draw from 10 to 11 ft. at the very least.
+
+In due time the little ship was sighted off the bar. As soon as the tide
+made, I put off to her to receive her letters, and to give the captain
+instructions as to what I wished him to do. On arriving alongside, the
+first thing I found was that her draft of water was 11 ft., so I told
+the captain he could not possibly go into the river with that draft, so
+we decided to lighten her all we could; I left again for the shore to
+make all the necessary arrangements to this end. The next morning our
+boats were started off out; the day being fine they all got alongside
+without much trouble, and brought away as much as they could carry,
+which was not more than about twenty tons; this from 200 did not make
+much impression on the ship's draught. Next day all the boats were again
+despatched; this time the weather was anything but favourable, and, to
+my dismay, while all the boats crossed the bar in safety, not one could
+get to the ship; the wind and current being so strong down from the
+westward against them, they all fell away to leeward. When night came on
+they anchored, as they could neither get to the ship nor back to the
+river; here they were without food or fire. All remained until the next
+day, when the weather, if anything, was worse; so when evening came and
+they all found it was useless trying to get back into the river or to
+the ship, and being without food, they all ran before the wind for the
+Old Calabar River, which was some twenty-five miles to the mouth, then
+about thirty-five miles more of river, until they got to our
+establishment there; here they eventually arrived nearly starved; while
+I, with only one boy, was left at the Ibuno factory in a dreadful state
+of mind, as you may imagine, wondering what had happened to our people,
+and also what was to be done with the ship and cargo. The spring tides
+were upon us, and the vessel either had to come in at once, or remain
+out another fortnight, and be under demurrage, which meant a very
+serious matter for us. Being our first ship, it was most unfortunate.
+The only thing to do was to bring her in as she stood. This had to be
+done at all costs; so I at once got Mr. Williams, who, by-the-bye, was
+generally to the fore in time of need, to lend me his boat, with three
+of his boys; these, with my one, made up some sort of a crew. Away we
+went, and got safely out. On the way I had a good survey of the bar, so
+as to get every inch of the water it was possible. This carefully done,
+we arrived alongside the ship, and no one was more surprised than the
+captain, when I told him I had come out to take his ship into the river,
+if he was ready. "Yes," he said; "if you will undertake to do it." "I
+will," I said. "You work your ship as I tell you, and we shall get in
+all right, I feel confident."
+
+The order was given to loose all sails and heave anchor, which was done
+in a very short time. As the tide was near to being high, there was no
+time to be lost. We were soon under way, and our little craft, with all
+sails set, bounding for the bar. I had my channel to a nicety; over we
+went, to my astonishment, without a touch. The relief I felt when this
+was passed, I am unable to describe. In a short time the first ship that
+had ever entered Qua Iboe River from England direct was anchored off our
+factory. The natives crowded down to see this, to them, wonderful sight,
+and when I landed I was immediately carried on the shoulders of some of
+the crowd up to my house. The delight in the river that evening was
+great indeed; so much so, that I shall not easily forget that event.
+
+Still, my troubles were not quite at an end, for while we had the ship
+in, we had no one to discharge her cargo; but "necessity being the
+mother of invention," I called the chiefs of the village together, and
+told them of my position. One boy was all I had, and the cargo must come
+out of the ship. "All right," they said, "show our people what has to be
+done; we will discharge the ship." Next morning our beach was alive with
+people, and by the evening of the next day she was completely
+discharged and ready for homeward cargo. We could now afford to take
+more time. The next thing was to commence loading; this we had got well
+on with, when our people returned. After this we were not long in
+getting our ship ready for going out over the bar again, which was done
+as successfully as she was brought in. After getting her clear we ran
+her to Old Calabar to complete her loading for England. This ended our
+first ship, others followed after, one of which got left on the bar a
+wreck, and another turned back and was condemned in the river. We soon
+gave up the idea of working sailing ships. A small steamer was bought,
+and after this things went fairly well.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX III
+
+TRADE GOODS USED IN THE EARLY TRADE WITH AFRICA AS GIVEN BY BARBOT AND
+OTHER WRITERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. BY M. H. KINGSLEY
+
+
+"Those used in trade by the Senga Company of Senegal at St. Lewis and
+Goree and their dependent factories of Rufisco, Camina, Juala, Gamboa
+(Gambia), _circa_ 1677.
+
+"For the convenience of trade between the French at the Senega and the
+natives, all European goods are reduced to a certain standard, viz.,
+hides, bars, and slaves, for the better understanding whereof I give
+some instances. One bar of iron is reckoned as worth 8 hides, 1 cutlace
+the same, 1 cluster of bugles weighing 4-1/4 lbs. as 3 hides, 1 bunch of
+false pearls 20 hides, 1 bunch of Gallet 4 hides, 1 hogshead of brandy
+from 150 to 160 hides. Bugles are very small glass beads, and mostly
+made at Venice, and sold in strings and clusters. At Goree the same
+goods bear not quite so good a rate, as, for example, a hogshead of
+brandy brings but 140 hides, 1 lb. of gunpowder 2 hides, 1 piece of
+eight 5 hides, 1 oz. of coral 7 or 8 hides, 1 oz. of crystal 1 hide, an
+ounce of yellow amber 2 hides.
+
+"A slave costs from 12 to 14 bars of iron, and sometimes 16, at Porto
+d'Ali 18 to 20, and much more at Gamboa, according to the number of
+ships, French, English, Portuguese, and Dutch, which happen to be there
+at the same time. The bar of iron is rated at 6 hides.
+
+"Besides these, which are the most staple commodities, the French import
+common red, blue, and scarlet cloth, silver and brass rings or
+bracelets, chains, little bells, false crystal, ordinary and coarse
+hats, _Dutch_ pointed knives, pewter dishes, silk sashes with false gold
+and silver fringes, blue serges, _French_ paper, steels to strike fire,
+_English_ sayes, _Roan_ linen, salamporis, platillies, blue callicoes,
+taffeties, chintzs, cawris or shells, by the French called _bouges_,
+coarse north, red cords called _Bure_, lines, shoes, fustian, red
+worsted caps, worsted fringe of all colours, worsted of all kinds in
+skeins, basons of several sizes, brass kettles, yellow amber, maccatons,
+that is, beads of two sorts, pieces of eight of the old stamp, some
+pieces of 28 sols value, either plain or gilt, Dutch cutlaces, straight
+and bow'd, and clouts, galet, martosdes, two other sorts of beads of
+which the blacks make necklaces for women, white sugar, musket balls,
+iron nails, shot, white and red frize, looking-glasses in plain and gilt
+frames, cloves, cinnamon, scissors, needles, coarse thread of sundry
+colours, but chiefly red, yellow, and white, copper bars of a pound
+weight, ferrit, men's shirts, coarse and fine, some of them with bone
+lace about the neck, breast, and sleeves, _Haerlem_ cloths, _Coasveld_
+linen, _Dutch_ mugs, white and blue, _Leyden_ rugs or blankets,
+_Spanish_ leather shoes, brass trumpets, round padlocks, glass bottles
+with a tin rim at the mouth, empty trunks or chests, and a sort of bugle
+called Pezant, but above all, as was said above, great quantities of
+brandy, and iron in bars; particularly at Goree the company imports
+10,000 or more every year of those which are made in their province of
+_Brittany_, all short and thin, which is called in London narrow flat
+iron, or half flat iron in Sweden, but each bar shortened or cut off at
+one end to about 16 to 18 inches, so that about 80 of these bars weigh a
+ton English. It is to be observed that such voyage-iron, as it is called
+in London, is the only sort and size used throughout all Nigritia,
+Guinea, and West Ethiopia in the way of trade. Lastly, a good quantity
+of Cognac brandy, both in hogsheads and rundlets, single and double, the
+double being 8, the single 4 gallons.
+
+"The principal goods the French have in return for these commodities
+from the _Moors_ and _Blacks_ are slaves, gold dust, elephants' teeth,
+beeswax, dry and green hides, gum-arabic, ostrich feathers, and several
+other odd things, as ambergris, cods of musk, tygers' and goats' skins,
+provisions, bullocks, sheep, and teeth of sea-horses (hippopotamus)."
+
+The main trade of the Senga or Senegal Company seems to have been gum
+and slaves in these regions. Gold dust they got but little of in
+Senegal, the Portuguese seeming to have been the best people to work
+that trade. The ivory was, according to Barbot, here mainly that picked
+up in woods, and scurfy and hollow, or, as we should call it, kraw kraw
+ivory, the better ivory coming from the Qua Qua Ivory Coast. Hides,
+however, were in the seventeenth century, as they are now, a regular
+line in the trade of Senegambia, and the best hides came from the
+Senegal River, the inferior from Rufisco and Porto d'Ali. Barbot says:
+"They soak or dye these hides as soon as they are flayed from the beast,
+and presently expose them to the air to dry; which, in my opinion, is
+the reason why, wanting the true first seasoning, they are apt to
+corrupt and breed worms if not looked after and often beaten with a
+stick or wand, and then laid up in very dry store houses." I have no
+doubt Barbot is right, and that there is not enough looking after done
+to them now a days, so that the worms have their own way too much.
+
+The African hides were held in old days inferior to those shipped from
+South America, both in thickness and size, and were used in France
+chiefly to cover boxes with; but in later times, I am informed, they
+were sought after and split carefully into two slices, serving to make
+kid for French boots.
+
+"The French reckoned the trade of the Senga Company to yield 700 or 800
+per cent, advance upon invoice of their goods, and yet their Senga
+Company, instead of thriving, has often brought a noble to ninepence.
+Nay, it has broken twice in less than thirty years, which must be
+occasioned by the vast expense they are at in Europe, Africa, and
+America, besides ill-management of their business; but this is no more
+than the common fate of Dutch and English African Companies, as well as
+that to make rather loss than profit, because their charges are greater
+than the trade can bear, in maintaining so many ports and other forts
+and factories in Africa, which devour all the profits." I quote this of
+Barbot as an interesting thing, considering the present state of West
+Coast Colonial finance.
+
+
+GAMBIA TRADE, 1678.
+
+"The factors of the English Company at James Fort, and those of the
+French at Albreda and other places, drive a very great trade in that
+country all along the river in brigantines, sloops, and canoes,
+purchasing--
+
+Elephants' teeth, beeswax, slaves, pagnos (country-made clothes),
+hides, gold and silver, and goods also found in the Sengal trade.
+
+In exchange they give the _Blacks_--
+
+Bars of iron, drapery of several sorts, woollen stuffs and cloth, linen
+of several sorts, coral and pearl, brandy or rum in anchors, firelocks,
+powder, ball and shot, Sleysiger linen, painted callicoes of gay
+colours, shirts, gilded swords, ordinary looking-glasses, salt, hats,
+_Roan_ caps, all sorts and sizes of bugles, yellow amber, rock crystal,
+brass pans and kettles, paper, brass and pewter rings, some of them
+gilt, box and other combs, _Dutch_ earthen cans, false ear-rings,
+satalaes, and sabres or cutlaces, small iron and copper kettles, _Dutch_
+knives called _Bosmans_, hooks, brass trumpets, bills, needles, thread
+and worsted of several colours." This selection practically covered the
+trade up to Sierra Leone.
+
+
+SIERRA LEONE, 1678.
+
+"Exports.--Elephants' teeth, slaves, santalum wood, a little gold, much
+beeswax with some pearls, crystal, long peppers, ambergris, &c. The
+ivory here was considered the best on the West Coast, being, says
+Barbot, very white and large, have had some weighing 80 to 100 lbs., at
+a very modest rate 80 lbs. of ivory for the value of five livres
+_French_ money, in coarse knives and other such toys. The gold purchased
+in Sierra Leone, the same authority states, comes from Mandinga and
+other remote countries towards the Niger or from South Guinea by the
+River Mitomba. The trade selection was: French brandy or rum, iron bars,
+white callicoes, Sleysiger linen, brass kettles, earthen cans, all sorts
+of glass buttons, brass rings or bracelets, bugles and glass beads of
+sundry colours, brass medals, earrings, _Dutch_ knives, _Bosmans_, first
+and second size, hedging bills and axes, coarse laces, crystal beads,
+painted callicoes (red) called chintz, oil of olive, small duffels,
+ordinary guns, muskets and fuzils, gunpowder, musket balls and shot, old
+sheets, paper, red caps, men's shirts, all sorts of counterfeit pearls,
+red cotton, narrow bands of silk stuffs or worsted, about half a yard
+broad for women, used about their waists.
+
+The proper goods to purchase, the cam wood and elephants' teeth in
+Sherboro' River, are chiefly these:--
+
+Brass basons and kettles, pewter basons, and tankards, iron bars,
+bugles, painted callicoes, _Guinea_ stuffs or cloths, _Holland_ linen or
+cloth, muskets, powder, and ball. A ship may in two months time out and
+home purchase here fifty-six tons of cam wood and four tons of
+elephants' teeth or more."
+
+The trade selection for the Pepper Coast was practically the same as for
+Sierra Leone, only less extensive and cheaper in make, and had a special
+line in white and blue large beads. The main export was Manequette
+pepper and rice, the latter of which was to be had in great quantity but
+poor quality at about a halfpenny a pound; and there was also ivory to
+be had, but not to so profitable an extent as on the next coast, the
+Ivory. The same selection of goods was used for the Ivory Coast trade as
+those above-named, with the addition of Contaccarbe or Contabrode,
+namely, iron rings, about the thickness of a finger which the blacks
+wear about their legs with brass bells, as they do the brass rings or
+bracelets about their arms in the same manner. The natives here also
+sold country-made cloths, which were bought by the factors to use in
+trade in other districts, mainly the Gold Coast; the Ivory Coast cloths
+come from inland districts, those sold at Cape La Hou are of six
+stripes, three French ells and a half long, and very fine; those from
+Corby La Hou of five stripes, about three ells long, and coarser. They
+also made "clouts" of a sort of hemp, or plant like it, which they dye
+handsomely, and weave very artificially.
+
+
+THE GOLD COAST.
+
+This coast has, from its discovery in the 15th century to our own day,
+been the chief trade region in the Bight of Benin; and Barbot states
+that the amount of gold sent from it to Europe in his day was Ŗ240,000
+value per annum.
+
+The trade selection for the Gold Coast trade in the 17th and 18th
+centuries is therefore very interesting, as it gives us an insight into
+the manufactures exported by European traders at that time, and of a
+good many different kinds; for English, French, Portuguese, Dutch, Danes
+and Brandenburghers were all engaged in the Gold Coast trade, and each
+took out for barter those things he could get cheapest in his own
+country.
+
+"The _French_ commonly," says Barbot, "carry more brandy, wine, iron,
+paper, firelocks, &c., than the _English_ or _Dutch_ can do, those
+commodities being cheaper in _France_, as, on the other hand, they (the
+_English_ and _Dutch_) supply the Guinea trade with greater quantities
+of linen, cloth, bugles, copper basons and kettles, wrought pewter,
+gunpowder, sayes, perpetuanas, chintzs, cawris, old sheets, &c., because
+they can get these wares from _England_ or _Holland_.
+
+"The _French_ commonly compose their cargo for the Gold Coast trade to
+purchase slaves and gold dust; of brandy, white and red wine, ros solis,
+firelocks, muskets, flints, iron in bars, white and red contecarbe, red
+frize, looking glasses, fine coral, sarsaparilla, bugles of sundry sorts
+and colours and glass beads, powder, sheets, tobacco, taffeties, and
+many other sorts of silks wrought as brocardels, velvets, shirts, black
+hats, linen, paper, laces of many sorts, shot, lead, musket balls,
+callicoes, serges, stuffs, &c., besides the other goods for a true
+assortment, which they have commonly from _Holland_.
+
+"The _Dutch_ have _Coesveld_ linen, Slezsiger lywat, old sheets,
+_Leyden_ serges, dyed indigo-blue, perpetuanas, green, blue and purple,
+_Konings-Kleederen_, annabas, large and narrow, made at _Haerlem_;
+_Cyprus_ and _Turkey_ stuffs, _Turkey_ carpets, red, blue and yellow
+cloths, green, red and white _Leyden_ rugs, silk stuffs blue and white,
+brass kettles of all sizes, copper basons, _Scotch_ pans, barbers'
+basons, some wrought, others hammered, copper pots, brass locks, brass
+trumpets, pewter, brass and iron rings, hair trunks, pewter dishes and
+plates (of a narrow brim), deep porringers, all sorts and sizes of
+fishing hooks and lines, lead in sheets and in pipes, 3 sorts of _Dutch_
+knives, _Venice_ bugles and glass beads of sundry colours and sizes,
+sheep skins, iron bars, brass pins long and short, brass bells, iron
+hammers, powder, muskets, cutlaces, cawris, chintz, lead balls and shot,
+brass cups with handles, cloths of _Cabo Verdo_, _Qua Qua_, _Ardra_ and
+_Rio Forcada_, blue coral, _alias_ akory from Benin, strong waters and
+abundance of other wares, being near 160 sorts, as a _Dutchman_ told
+me."
+
+I am sorry Barbot broke down just when he seemed going strong with this
+list, and I was out of breath checking the indent, and said "other
+wares," but I cannot help it, and beg to say that this is the true
+assortment for the Gold Coast trade in 1678. The English selection
+"besides many of the same goods above mentioned have tapseils, broad and
+narrow, nicanees fine and coarse, many sorts of chintz or _Indian_
+callicoes printed, tallow, red painting colours, _Canary_ wine, sayes,
+perpetuanas inferior to the _Dutch_ and sacked up in painted tillets
+with the _English_ arms, many sorts of white callicoes, blue and white
+linen, _China_ satins, _Barbadoes_ rum, other strong waters and spirits,
+beads of all sorts, buckshaws, _Welsh_ plain, boy-sades, romberges,
+clouts, gingarus, taffeties, amber, brandy, flower, _Hamburgh_ brawls,
+and white, blue and red chequered linen, narrow _Guinea_ stuffs
+chequered, ditto broad, old hats, purple beads. The _Danes_,
+_Brandenburghers_ and _Portuguese_ provide their cargoes in _Holland_
+commonly consisting of very near the same sort of wares as I have
+observed the _Dutch_ make up theirs, the two former having hardly
+anything of their own proper to the trade of the Gold Coast besides
+copper and silver, either wrought or in bullion or in pieces of eight,
+which are a commodity also there.
+
+"The _Portuguese_ have most of their cargoes from _Holland_ under the
+name of _Jews_ residing there, and they add some things of the product
+of _Brazil_, as tobacco, rum, tame cattle, _St. Tome_ cloth, others from
+_Rio Forcado_ and other circumjacent places in the Gulf of Guinea."
+
+
+USE MADE OF EUROPEAN GOODS BY THE NATIVES OF THE GOLD COAST. BARBOT.
+
+"The broad linen serves to adorn themselves and their dead men's
+sepulchers within, they also make clouts thereof. The narrow cloth to
+press palm oil; in old sheets they wrap themselves at night from head
+to foot. The copper basons to wash and shave. The _Scotch_ pans serve in
+lieu of butchers' tubs when they kill hogs or sheep, from the iron bars
+the smiths forge out all their weapons, country and household tools and
+utensils; of frize and perpetuanas, they make girts 4 fingers broad to
+wear about their waists and hang their sword, dagger, knife and purse of
+money or gold, which purse they commonly thrust between the girdle and
+their body. They break _Venice_ coral into 4 or 5 parts, which
+afterwards they mould into any form on whetstones and make strings or
+necklaces which yield a considerable profit; of 4 or 5 ells of _English_
+or _Leyden_ serges, they make a kind of cloak to wrap about their
+shoulders and stomachs. Of chintz, perpetuanas, printed callicoes,
+tapsiels and nicanees, are made clouts to wear round their middles. The
+wrought pewter, as dishes, basons, porringers, &c., serve to eat their
+victuals out of, muskets, firelocks and cutlaces they use in war; brandy
+is more commonly spent at their feasts, knives to the same purposes as
+we use them. With tallow they anoint their bodies from head to toe and
+even use it to shave their beards instead of soap. Fishing hooks for the
+same purpose as with us. _Venice_ bugles, glass beads and contacarbe,
+serve all ages and sexes to adorn their heads, necks, arms and legs very
+extravagantly, being made into strings; and sarsaparilla."--Well, I
+think I have followed Barbot enough for the present on this point, and
+turn to his description of the dues the natives have to pay to native
+authorities on goods bought of Europeans, which amounted to 3 per cent.
+paid to the proper officers; the kings of the land have at each port
+town, and even fishes, if it exceeds a certain quantity pays 1 in 5;
+these duties are paid either in coin or value. Up the inland they pay no
+duty on river fish, but are liable to pay a capitation fee of one
+shilling per head for the liberty of passing down to the sea-shore
+either to traffic or attend the markets with their provisions or other
+sorts of the product of the land, and pay nothing at their return home,
+goods or no goods, unless they by chance leave their arms in the
+village, then the person so doing is to pay one shilling.
+
+The collectors account quarterly with their kings, and deliver up what
+each has received in gold at his respective post, but the fifth part of
+the fish they collect is sent to the king as they have it, and serves to
+feed his family.
+
+No fisherman is allowed to dispose of the first fish he has caught till
+the duty is paid, but are free to do it aboard ships, which perhaps may
+be one reason why so many of them daily sell such quantities of their
+fish to the seafaring men.
+
+Barbot, remarking on this Gold Coast trade, says: "The Blacks of the
+Gold Coast, having traded with Europeans ever since the 14th century,
+are very well skilled in the nature and proper qualities of all European
+wares and merchandize vended there; but in a more particular manner
+since they have so often been imposed on by the Europeans, who in former
+ages made no scruple to cheat them in the quality, weight and measures
+of their goods which at first they received upon content, because they
+say it would never enter into their thoughts that white men, as they
+call the Europeans, were so base as to abuse their credulity and good
+opinion of us. But now they are perpetually on their guard in that
+particular, examine and search very narrowly all our merchandize, piece
+by piece, to see each the quality and measure contracted for by samples;
+for instance, if the cloth is well made and strong, whether dyed at
+_Haerlem_ or _Leyden_--if the knives be not rusty--if the basons,
+kettles, and other utensils of brass and pewter are not cracked or
+otherwise faulty, or strong enough at the bottom. They measure iron bars
+with the sole of the foot--they tell over the strings of contacarbel,
+taste and prove brandy, rum or other liquors, and will presently
+discover whether it is not adulterated with fresh or salt water or any
+other mixture, and in point of French brandy will prefer the brown
+colour in it. In short they examine everything with as much prudence and
+ability as any European can do."
+
+"The goods sold by _English_ and _Dutch_, _Danes_, _Brandenburghers_,
+&c., ashore, out of these settlements are generally about 25 per cent.
+dearer to the Blacks than they get aboard ships in the Roads; the
+supercargoes of the ships commonly falling low to get the more customers
+and make a quicker voyage, for which reason the forts have very little
+trade with the Blacks during the summer season, which fills the coast
+with goods by the great concourse of ships at that time from several
+ports of Europe; and as the winter season approaches most of them
+withdraw from the coast, and so leave elbow room for the fort factors to
+trade in their turn during that bad season.
+
+"In the year 1682 the gold trade yielded hardly 45 per cent. to our
+French ships, clear of any charges; but that might be imputed to the
+great number of trading ships of several European nations which happened
+to be at that time on the coast, whereof I counted 42 in less than a
+month's time: had the number been half as great that trade would have
+appeared 60 per cent. or more, and if a cargo were properly composed it
+might well clear 70 per cent. in a small ship sailing with little
+charge, and the voyage directly home from this coast not to exceed 7 or
+8 months out and home, if well managed."
+
+These observations of Barbot's are alike interesting and instructive,
+and in principle applicable to the trade to-day. Do not imagine that
+Barbot was an early member of the Aborigines' Protection Society when he
+holds forth on the way in which Europeans "in former ages" basely dealt
+with the angelic confidence of the Blacks. One of his great charms is
+the different opinions on general principles, &c., he can hold without
+noticing it himself: of course this necessitates your reading Barbot
+right through, and that means 668 pages folio in double column, or
+something like 2,772 pages of a modern book; but that's no matter, for
+he is uniformly charming and reeks with information.
+
+Well, there are other places in Barbot where he speaks, evidently with
+convictions, of "this rascal fellow Black," &c. and gives long accounts
+of the way in which the black man cheats with false weights and
+measures, and adulterates; and if you absorb the whole of his
+information and test it against your own knowledge, and combine it with
+that of others, I think you will come to the conclusion that it is not
+necessary for the philanthropist to fidget about the way the European
+does his side to the trade; the moralist may drop a large and heavy tear
+on both white and black, but that is all that is required from him.
+Unfortunately this is not all that is done nowadays: the black has got
+hold of Governmental opinion, and just when he is more than keeping his
+end up in commercial transactions, he has got the Government to handicap
+his white fellow-trader with a mass of heavy dues and irritating
+restrictions, which will end most certainly in stifling trade. My firm
+conviction is that black and white traders should be left to settle
+their own affairs among themselves.
+
+
+SELECTION OF GOODS FOR FIDA OR ONIDAH, CALLED BY THE FRENCH JUIDA, NOW
+KNOWN AS DAHOMEY, WITH MAIN SEAPORT WHYDAH.
+
+The French opened trade in this district in 1669, when the Dutch were
+already there.
+
+"The main export of this coast was 'slaves, cotton cloth, and blue
+stones, called agoy or accory, very valuable on the Gold Coast.'
+
+"The best commodity the Europeans can carry thither to purchase is
+Boejies or cawries, so much valued by the natives, being the current
+coin there and at Popo, Fida, Benin and other countries further east,
+without which it is scarcely possible to traffic there. Near to Boejies
+the flat iron bars for the round or square will not do, and again next
+to iron, fine long coral, _China_ sarcenets, gilt leather, white damask
+and red, red cloth with large lists, copper bowls or cups, brass rings,
+_Venice_ beads or bugles of several colours, agalis, gilded looking
+glasses, _Leyden_ serges, platilles, linen morees, salampores, red
+chints, broad and narrow tapsiels, blue canequins, broad gunez and
+narrow (a sort of linen), double canequins, French brandy in ankers or
+half-ankers (the anker being a 16 gallon rundlet), canary and malmsey,
+black caudebec hats, Italian taffeties, white or red cloth of gold or
+silver, _Dutch_ knives, _Bosmans_, striped armoizins, with white or
+flowered, gold and silver brocadel, firelocks, muskets, gunpowder, large
+beads from _Rouen_, white flowered sarcenets, _Indian_ armorzins and
+damask napkins, large coral earrings, cutlaces gilded and broad, silk
+scarfs large umbrellors, pieces of eight, long pyramidal bells."
+
+All the above-mentioned goods are also proper for the trade in _Benin_,
+_Rio Lagos_ and all along the coast to _Rio Gabon_.
+
+
+BENIN TRADE GOODS.
+
+"Exports, 1678: cotton cloths like those of _Rio Lagos_, women slaves,
+for men slaves (though they be all foreigners, for none of the natives
+can be sold as such) are not allowed to be exported, but must stay
+there; jasper stones, a few tigers' or leopards' skins, acory or blue
+coral, elephants' teeth, some pieminto, or pepper. The blue coral grows
+in branching bushes like the red coral at the bottom of the rivers and
+lakes in Benin, which the natives have a peculiar art to grind or work
+into beads like olives, and is a very profitable merchandise at the Gold
+Coast, as has been observed.
+
+"The Benin cloths are of 4 bands striped blue and white, an ell and a
+half long, only proper for the trade at _Sabou river_ and at _Angola_,
+and called by the blacks _monponoqua_ and the blue narrow cloths
+_ambasis_; the latter are much inferior to the former every way, and
+both sorts made in the inland country.
+
+"The European goods are these: cloths of gold and silver, scarlet and
+red cloth, all sorts of calicoes and fine linen, _Haerlem_ stuffs with
+large flowers and well starched, iron bars, strong spirits, rum and
+brandy, beads or bugles of several colours, red velvet, and a good
+quantity of Boejies, cawries as much as for the Ardra (Fida) trade being
+the money of the natives, as well as them; false pearls, Dutch cans
+with red streaks at one end, bright brass large rings from 5 to 5-1/2
+ounces weight each, earrings of red glass or crystal, gilt looking
+glasses, crystal, &c."
+
+
+OUWERE (NOW CALLED WARRI) TRADE, AND THE NEW CALABAR TRADE, 1678.
+
+"Exports mainly slaves and fine cloths from New Calabar district and
+Ouwere. 'The principal thing that passes in Calabar as current money
+among the natives is brass rings for the arms or legs, which they call
+_bochie_, and they are so nice in the choice of them, that they will
+often turn over a whole cask before they find 2 to please their fancy.'
+
+"The _English_ and _Dutch_ import there a great deal of copper in small
+bars, round and equal, about 3 feet long, weighing about 1-1/4 lbs.,
+which the blacks of Calabary work with much art, splitting the bar into
+3 parts from one end to the other, which they polish as fine as gold,
+and twist the 3 pieces together very ingeniously into cords to make what
+form of arm rings they please."
+
+
+OLD CALABAR TRADE, 1678.
+
+"The most current goods of Europe for the trade of Old Calabar to
+purchase slaves and elephants' teeth are iron bars, in quality and
+chiefly, copper bars, blue rags, cloth and striped _Guinea_ clouts of
+many colours, horse bells, hawks' bells, rangoes, pewter basons of 1, 2,
+3 and 4 lbs. weight, tankards of ditto of 1, 2, and 3 lbs. weight, beads
+very small and glazed yellow, green, purple and blue, purple copper
+armlets or arm rings of _Angola_ make, but this last sort of goods is
+peculiar to the _Portuguese_."
+
+The blacks there reckon by copper bars, reducing all sorts of goods to
+such bars; for example, 1 bar of iron, 4 copper bars; a man slave for 38
+and a woman slave for 37 or 36 copper bars.
+
+
+TRADE OF RIO DEL REY, AMBOZES COUNTRY, CAMARONES RIVER, AND DOWN TO RIO
+GABON.
+
+"The _Dutch_ have the greatest share in the trade here in yachts sent
+from Mina on the Gold Coast, whose cargo consists mostly of small copper
+bars of the same sort as mentioned at Old Calabar, iron bars, coral,
+brass basons, of the refuse goods of the Gold Coast, bloom coloured
+beads or bugles and purple copper armlets or rings made at _Loanda_ in
+_Angola_, and presses for lemons and oranges. In exchange for which they
+yearly export from thence 400 or 500 slaves, and about 10 or 12 tons
+weight of fine large teeth, 2 or 3 of which commonly weigh above a
+hundredweight, besides accory, javelins and some sorts of knives which
+the blacks there make to perfection, and are proper for the trade of the
+Gold Coast."
+
+"_Ambozes_ country, situated between the _Rio del Rey_ and _Rio
+Camarones_, is very remarkable for the immense height of the mountains
+it has near the sea-shore, which the Spaniards call _Alta Tierra de
+Ambozi_, and reckon some of them as high as the _Pike of Teneriffe_
+(this refers to the great Camaroon, 13,760 feet). Trade in teeth, accory
+and slaves, for iron and copper bars, brass pots and kettles, hammered
+bugles or beads, bloom colour purple, orange and lemon colour, ox horns,
+steel files, &c."
+
+The trade in the Rio Gabon at this time was inferior to that at Cape
+Lopez. Indeed, the ascendency the Gaboon trade attained to in the middle
+parts of this 19th century was an artificial one, the natural outlet for
+the trade being the districts round the mouth of the Ogowé river, which
+penetrates through a far greater extent of country than the rivers
+Rembwe and Ncomo, which form the Gaboon estuary or _Rio Gabon_ of
+Barbot.
+
+"Great numbers of ships ran to _Cape Lopez Gonzalves_ in the seventeenth
+century, and did a pretty brisk trade in cam wood, beeswax, honey and
+elephants' teeth, of which last a ship may sometimes purchase three or
+four thousand-weight of good large ones and sometimes more, and there is
+always an abundance of wax; all which the Europeans purchase for knives
+called _Bosmans_, iron bars, beads, old sheets, brandy, malt, spirits or
+rum, axes, the shells called cauris, annabas, copper bars, brass basons,
+from eighteen-pence to two shillings apiece, firelocks, muskets, powder,
+ball, small shot, &c."
+
+
+SELECTION OF GOODS FOR THE ISLANDS FERNANDO PO, ST. THOMAS'S, PRINCE'S,
+AND ANNOBON.
+
+There were about 150 ships per annum calling and trading at San Tomé in
+the seventeenth century. The goods in "_French_ ships particularly
+consist in _Holland_ cloth or linen as well as of _Rouen_ and
+_Brittany_, thread of all colours, serges, silk stockings, fustians,
+_Dutch_ knives, iron, salt, olive oil, copper in sheets or plates, brass
+kettles, pitch, tar, cordage, sugar forms (from 20 to 30 lbs. apiece),
+brandy, all kinds of strong liquors and spirits, _Canary_ wines, olives,
+carpets, fine flour, butter, cheese, thin shoes, hats, shirts, and all
+sorts of silks out of fashion in _Europe_, hooks, &c., of each sort a
+little in proportion."
+
+In connection with this now but little considered island of San Tomé, so
+called from having been discovered in the year 1472, under the direction
+of Henry the Navigator, on the feast day of the Apostle Thomas, there is
+an interesting bit of history, which has had considerable bearing on the
+culture of the Lower Congo regions.
+
+The Portuguese, observing the fertility of the soil of this island,
+decided to establish a colony there for the convenience of trading in
+the Guinea regions; but the climate was so unwholesome that an abundance
+of men died before it was well settled and cultivated. "Violent fevers
+and cholicks that drove them away soon after they were set a-shore."
+
+"The first design of settling there was in the year 1486 but perceiving
+how many perished in the attempt, and that they could better agree with
+that of the continent on the coast of Guinea, it was resolved by King
+Jaõ II. of Portugal that all the Jews within his dominions, which were
+vastly numerous, should be obliged to receive baptism, or upon refusal
+be transported to the coast of Guinea, where the Portuguese had already
+several considerable settlements and a good trade, considering the time
+since its first discovery.
+
+"A few years after such of those Jews as had escaped the malignant air,
+were forced away to this Isle of San Tomé; these married to black women,
+fetched from Angola in great numbers, with near 3,000 men of the same
+country.
+
+"From these Jews married to black women in process of time proceeded
+mostly that brood of mulattos at this day inhabiting the island. Most of
+them boast of being descended from the Portuguese; and their
+constitution is by nature much fitter to bear with the malignity of the
+air." (For a full account of this matter see the _History of Portugal_
+by Faria y Sousa, p. 304.)
+
+San Tomé is now very flourishing, on account of its soil being suited to
+cocoa and coffee, and there are to-day there plenty of full-blooded
+Portuguese; but the old strain of Jewish mulattos still exists and is
+represented by individuals throughout all the coast regions of West
+Africa. Moreover, these mulattos secured in the seventeenth century a
+monopoly for Portugal of the slave trade in the Lower Congo, and I
+largely ascribe the prevalence of customs identical with those mentioned
+in the Old Testament that you find among the Fjort tribes to their
+influence, although you always find such customs represented in all the
+native cultures in West Africa (presumably because the West African
+culture is what the Germans would call the _urstuff_), but I fancy in no
+culture are they so developed as among the Fjorts.[94]
+
+
+TRADE GOODS FOR CONGO AND CABENDA, 1700.
+
+"Blue bafts, a piece containing 6 yards and of a deep almost black
+colour, and is measured either with a stick of 27 inches, of which 8
+sticks make a piece, or by a lesser stick, 18 inches long, 12 of which
+are accounted a piece, _Guinea_ stuffs, 2 pieces to make a piece,
+tapseils have the same measure as blue bafts.
+
+Nicanees, the same measure.
+
+Black bays, 2-1/2 yards for a piece, measured by 5 sticks of 18 inches
+each.
+
+Annabasses, 10 to the piece.
+
+Painted callicoes, 6 yards to the piece.
+
+Blue paper Slesia, 1 piece for a piece. Scarlet, 1 stick of 18 inches or
+1/2 a yard is accounted a piece.
+
+Muskets, 1 for a piece.
+
+Powder, the barrel or rundlet of 7 lbs. goes for a piece.
+
+Brass basons, 10 for a piece. We carry thither the largest.
+
+Pewter basons of 4, 3, 2 and 1 lb. The No. 4 goes 4 to the piece, and
+those of 1 lb. 8 to a piece.
+
+Blue perpetuanas have become but of late in great demand, they are
+measured as blue bafts, 6 yards making the piece.
+
+Dutch cutlaces are the most valued because they have 2 edges, 2 such go
+for a piece.
+
+Coral, the biggest and largest is much more acceptable here than small
+coral, which the Blacks value so little that they will hardly look on
+it, usually 1-1/2 oz. is computed a piece.
+
+_Memorandum._ A whole piece of blue bafts contains commonly 18-1/2
+yards, however some are shorter and others exceed.
+
+_Pentadoes._ Commonly contain 9 or 9-1/2 to the piece.
+
+_Tapseils._ The piece usually holds 15 yards.
+
+_Nicanees._ The piece is 9 or 9-1/2 yards long."
+
+The main export of Congo was slaves and elephants' teeth and grass
+clothes called Tibonges, were used by the Portuguese as at Loando in
+Angola. Some of them single marked with the arms of Portugal, and others
+double marked, and some unmarked.
+
+The single marked cloth was equal in value to 4 unmarked, equal to about
+8 pence.
+
+
+TRADE GOODS FOR SAN PAUL DO LOANDA.
+
+"Cloths with red lists, great ticking with long stripes and fine wrought
+red kerseys, _Silesia_ and other fine linen, fine velvet, small and
+great gold and silver laces, broad black bays, _Turkish_ tapestry or
+carpets, white and all sorts of coloured yarns, blue and black beads,
+stitching and sewing silk, _Canary_ wines, brandy, linseed oil, seamen's
+knives, all sorts of spices, white sugar and many other commodities and
+trifles as great fish-hooks, pins a finger long, ordinary pins, needles
+and great and small hawks' bells.
+
+"The _English_ compose their cargoes generally of brass, basons,
+annabasses, blue bafts, paper, brawls, _Guinea_ stuffs, muskets, powder,
+nicanees, tapseils, scarlet, _Slesia's_, coral, bags, wrought pewter,
+beads, pentedoes, knives, spirits, &c., all sorts of haberdashery,
+silks, linens, shirts, hats, shoes, &c., wrought pewter plates, dishes,
+porringers, spoons of each a little assortment are also very probably
+vended among the _Portuguese_, and also all manner of native made cloths
+from other parts of _Guinea_ fetch good prices in _Angola_."
+
+     [Illustration: _Miss Kingsley's "Studies in West Africa"_ TROPICAL
+                     WEST AFRICA.]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [94] For the reasons for the unhealthiness of this island see _Travels
+   in West Africa_ (Macmillan), p. 46.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+   A
+
+   ABIABOK, 163, 180-184
+
+   Abiadiong, 180
+
+   Abonema (_see_ New Calabar)
+
+   Abrah, oracle at, 172
+
+   Administration (_see_ Crown Colony)
+
+   Adultery laws, 434, 454, 536
+
+   African--
+     acclimatisation of, West Indians, 53-54
+     agriculture, 341
+     nature of, 63, 124, 168, 177-178, 373
+
+   Alemba rapid fetish, 177
+
+   Alumah, King, 458
+
+   Amachree, King, 500, 503, 505
+
+   _Amomum_, 56
+
+   Anamaquoa, 82
+
+   Ancestor Worship, 131-135
+
+   Andoni, 538-540, 553
+
+   Angola, 196, 283
+
+   Animal deities, 513, 515 (_see_ Snake and Shark)
+
+   Ants--
+     Driver, 25-33
+     _Myriaica molesta_, 33, 34
+
+   Apothecary, 180-184
+
+   Ashantee, 115, 144, 368
+
+   Assini, 73, 83
+
+   Atlantis, 227
+
+   Ayzingo, 108
+
+   Azambuja, 258
+
+
+   B
+
+   BAFANGH, 152
+
+   Bakele, 186
+
+   Bantu, 231 (_see_ Negro)
+
+   Bar, custom, 523
+
+   Barbot, 46, 69, and Appendix III.
+
+   Basel mission, 110
+
+   Bastian, 137, 154
+
+   Baths, medical, 182, 183
+
+   Bence Island, 36
+
+   Benga, 90, 153
+
+   Benguella, 210, 286-287
+
+   Benin, Bight of, 4
+     fetish of, 141-144 (_see_ Appendix I)
+     natives of kingdom, 448-468
+
+   Binger, 83
+
+   Bob Manuel, King, 507, 509
+
+   Bonny, 142, 495-509, 510, "free," 516, 540
+
+   Brahmanism, 119
+
+   Brass River, 140, 468-491
+
+   Bristol, 83
+
+   Brohemie, 458
+
+   Brüe Sieur, 271-273
+
+   Burial Customs, 144-150, 452-455
+
+   Bush fighting, 319
+     soul, 208, 209
+
+
+   C
+
+   CABINDA, 11, 186
+
+   Calabar, 54, 140-142
+     fetish, 144
+     history, 552-561
+     New, 491
+
+   Cameroons, 81, 231, 236, 238
+
+   Canoes, 99-101
+
+   Catfish, 96, 97
+
+   Centipedes, 81
+
+   Chamberlain, Rt. Honble. J., 307
+
+   Chambers of Commerce, 323
+
+   Charms, 163-169
+
+   Chiloango, 108-112
+   Clerks, 329, 357
+
+   Coinage, native, 82
+
+   Colonial Office, 305, 324-330
+
+   Comey, 444, 447, 523
+
+   Competition, 417
+
+   Comte, 115
+
+   Congo--
+     Belge, 54
+     River, 102, 238
+
+   Cookey Gam, King, 497
+
+   Corisco, 89-90
+
+   Crabs, 105
+
+   Crocodiles, 2
+     worship of, 140
+
+   Crown Colony, 317, 319, 326, 361, 366, 390, 417-418
+     statistics, 348, 357
+
+   Crowther--
+     Bishop, 481
+     Archdeacon, 487, 509
+
+   "Customs," native, 451 (_see_ Fetish)
+     fiscal, 408, 410, 413, 444, 447
+
+
+   D
+
+   DAHOMEY--
+     fetish, 144
+     fiscal, 347-348
+
+   Danfodio, 278
+
+   Dash, 446
+
+   De Brosses, 114
+
+   Debtors, 431, 433
+
+   Dennett, R. E., 154, 183, 186, 192
+
+   De Zurara, 252, 253
+
+   Dieppe, 256, 261-263
+
+   Diplomacy, 280
+
+   Direct taxation, 331
+
+   Disease (_see_ Doctor)
+     ague, 184
+     boisi, 184
+     fvuma, 184
+     hysteria, 188
+     leprosy, 184
+     malignant melancholy, 188
+     pneumonia, 188
+     small-pox, 184-188
+     soul, diseases of, 199, 209, 213
+     worms, 184
+     yaws, 187
+
+   Doctor (_see_ Apothecary)
+     clinical, 199-219
+     witch, 163, 169, 180, 182, 213
+
+   Dream-soul, 205, 207
+
+   Drum fish, 108
+
+   Duppy, 68
+
+   Dutch, 262, 268
+
+   Dye wood, 78
+
+
+   E
+
+   EBOES, 138 (_see_ Ibo)
+
+   Ebony, 78
+
+   Ebumtup, 214
+
+   _Edinburgh Review_, 157
+
+   Egbo (_see_ Law God)
+
+   Electrical fish, 107
+
+   Ellis, Sir A. B., 115-116, 132, 134-139
+
+   Elmina, 257
+
+   Emanequetta, 57
+
+   Expenditure (_see_ Crown Colony)
+
+   Exports, 334
+
+
+   F
+
+   FACE, throwing the, 165-167
+
+   Familiar spirits, 161
+
+   Fangaree charms, 164
+
+   Father, making, 146-148, 451
+
+   Fetish, 112-179
+     "customs," 173, 176, 450
+     days, 171, 174
+     definitions of, 113, 116, 119, 171
+     derivation of the word, 114
+     gods and goddesses--
+       Abassi-boom, 155
+       Mbuiri, 118
+       Nkala, 118
+       Nyankupong, 155
+       Nzambi 118, 137, 154
+       Nzambi Mpungu, 155
+       Sasabonsum, 117
+       Srahmantin, 137
+     House, description of, 170, 514
+     Man, 168, 171
+     Schools of, 137
+       Calabar, 144, 151, 160
+       Mpongwe, 151, 154, 160
+       Nkissism, 154-163
+       Tshi and Ewe and Yoruba, 139
+
+   Fiscal arrangements, 290 (_see_ Crown Colony)
+
+   Fish, quality of, 95, 106-109
+   Fishing, appliances, 101-106
+       canoes, 99
+     Native methods of, 99-109, 488
+
+   Floating Islands, 103
+
+   French, early exploration by the, 250, 264
+     Statistics, Colonial, 347
+
+   Frogs, 66
+
+   Funerals, 145, 452-484
+
+
+   G
+
+   GA, 138
+
+   Gesture, 237
+
+   Ghagas, 424
+
+   Glamour, 219
+
+   Gods (_see_ Fetish), 141
+
+   Goethe, 121-123
+
+   Gorillae, 235, 236
+
+   Governor, 305, 328, 365
+     native, 450
+
+   Grain Coast, 56-61
+     of Paradise, 56-61
+
+   Guineamen, 83
+
+   Günther, Dr., 108
+
+
+   H
+
+   HANNO, 231-240
+
+   Head cutting, 525
+
+   Hero worship, 131-134
+
+   Hoheit, Landes and Ober, 400-405, 410
+
+   House system, 427, 475-478
+
+   Human sacrifices, 142-148
+
+
+   I
+
+   IBBIBIOS, 138
+
+   Igalwa, 153
+
+   Ijos, 448, 460
+
+   Immortal soul, 200, 207
+
+   Imports, 334
+
+   Inheritance, 453-475
+
+   Insects, 10-11
+
+   Islam and Fetish, 127
+
+   Ivory Coast, 68-73
+     trade of, 81-83, 347
+
+
+   J
+
+   JA JA, KING, 497, 522, 527, 540-552
+
+   Jakris, 448-457, 459-460
+
+   Jam, 503
+
+   Jannequin, 248
+
+   Jews, 630
+
+   Jobson, 246-247
+
+   Ju Ju, 114 (_see_ Fetish)
+     Long, 439, 444, 461, 480, 498
+     trade, 503
+
+
+   K
+
+   KITTY-KATTY, 64
+
+   Kla, 200
+
+   Koromantin slaves, 140
+
+   Krumen, 52, 54, 56, 412, 429
+
+   Kufong, 163, 165
+
+   Kwo Ibo, 549, 552, and Appendix II
+
+
+   L
+
+   LABAT, 131
+
+   Lagos, colony, 353
+
+   Land, 438
+
+   Landana, 194
+
+   Law, John, 271
+
+   Law, native--
+     adultery, 434, 536
+     god society, 160
+     property, 371, 427, 439, 475-478.
+
+   Leo Africanus, 231
+
+   Leopard worship, 140, 165
+
+   Liberia, 46, 52-54 (_see_ Grain Coast)
+
+   Loanda, 108, 284
+
+   Loango, 212
+
+   Lucan, Dr., 194
+
+   Lyall, Sir Alfred, on witchcraft, 156, 158
+
+
+   M
+
+   MACHINERY, 288
+
+   Maine, Sir Henry, 153
+
+   Malagens, 69
+
+   Malignant melancholy, 188-189
+
+   Manchester, 288, 351
+
+   Manilla, 82
+
+   Manioc, 190
+
+   Markets, 310
+
+   Maxwell, Sir Wm., 329
+
+   Meleguetta Coast, 51-61
+
+   Melli, 244-245, 426
+
+   Mendi, 164
+
+   Merolla, 197, 321
+
+   Minstrels, 149
+
+   Missionary, 320, 478, 509, 512, 556
+
+   Mohammedanism and Fetish, 126-127, 141
+
+   Monrovia, 46
+
+   Monteiro, 196
+
+   Mpongwe, 151
+
+   Mungo Mah Lobeh, 236
+
+   Murder, 454
+
+   Music, 64-66
+
+   _Mutterrecht_, 437
+
+
+   N
+
+   NASSAU, Dr., 89, 130, 152-153, 159
+
+   Nana, 451, 458
+
+   Negro, 420-423
+
+   Nganga bilongo (_see_ Apothecary)
+
+   Niger Company, 279, 306, 360, 394
+
+   Nkala, 118
+
+   Nkissism, 154-155, 163
+
+   Nyankupong, 155
+
+   Nzambi, 118, 137, 154-155, 159
+
+   Nzambi Mpungu, 118, 155
+
+
+   O
+
+   OBEAH, 139, 140, 219
+
+   Ogi, 138
+
+   Ogowé, 45, 79, 102
+
+   Oko Jumbo, King, 522, 529-532
+
+   Ombuiri, 116
+
+   Opobo, 142, 532, 540-549
+
+   Ordeal, 160, 161, 490
+
+   Oru, 160
+
+   Oulof, 273
+
+   Ouwere, 143, 630
+
+
+   P
+
+   PALM oil, 15 (_see_ Appendix I)
+
+   Panavia, 152
+
+   Paradise grains, 56-57
+
+   Parliamentary resolution (1865), 305, 307, 311
+
+   Pepple, King, 497, 510, 512, 517-521, 526
+
+   Pepper coast (_see_ Grain)
+
+   Phoenicians, 227 (_see_ Hanno)
+
+   Police, 333, 407
+
+   Poorah, 139
+
+   Portuguese, 114, 252-256, 281, 290
+     stone monuments, 259
+
+   Post-mortem, 211
+
+   Priests, 140-141, 160, 169-170, 499, 505 (_see_ Fetish Man)
+
+   Property--
+     ancestral, 428
+     family, 428
+     private, 428-429
+     Stool, 428
+
+
+   R
+
+   RAILWAYS, 287, 350
+
+   Religion, native (_see_ Fetish)
+
+   Revenue, 309, 413 (_see_ Crown Colony)
+     native, 444-447, 523
+
+
+   S
+
+   SAILS, 100-101
+
+   Sataspes, 228
+
+   San Andrew, Rio, 58, 70, 73
+
+   Sanguin, 274
+
+   Sasabonsum, 116-117
+
+   Scorpion, 80, 81, 185
+
+   Senegal, 273, 275
+
+   Shadow-soul, 200, 207-208
+
+   Shake hand, 446
+
+   Shark, 501
+
+   Sierra Leone, 36, 139, 149, 344
+     resources of, 339
+
+   Sisa, 202-205
+
+   Sleep disease, 189-193
+     stages of, 192-193
+
+   Small-pox, 186-188
+
+   Smaltz, 273
+
+   Snake worship, 140, 483-490, 456
+
+   Sobo, 457
+
+   Societies, Secret, 139, 170, 556-566
+     (_see_ Law God)
+
+   Song-net, 149-150
+
+   Soul, 199-200
+     Fetish view of the, 129-131
+     Division of the Human, 200-204
+   South Africa, 394
+
+   Spiders, 140
+
+   Spinoza 112-113, 120
+
+   Spirit and Matter, Native view of, 129-130
+
+   Spirits, Classes of, 130
+     Familiar, 161
+     Touch of, 133
+
+   Srahmandazi, 146, 151, 202
+
+   Srahmantin, 137
+
+   Statesmanship, 311
+
+   Statistics, 348-357
+
+
+   T
+
+   TCHANGA (Voudou), 139
+
+   "Them," 132
+
+   Theopompus, 226
+
+   Timber, 73-80
+
+   Timbuctoo, 277
+
+   Tom-toms, 64
+
+   Topping, 525
+
+   Tornadoes, 18-19, 47-48
+
+   Trade (_see_ Crown Colony)
+     gold, 241-246, 257
+     palm oil, 354-359
+     rubber, 353
+     salt, 242-248, 339
+     timber, 78
+     tobacco, 248, 339
+
+   Tshi, 115, 137
+
+   Twins, treatment of, 148
+
+   Tylor, Professor, 115
+
+
+   U
+
+   UKUKIWE, 160
+
+   Umaru l'Haji, 278
+
+
+   V
+
+   VEGETATION, 32-33
+
+   Virtue, Native idea of, 178
+
+   Volta, 96
+
+   Voudou, 139-140
+
+
+   W
+
+   WANGA (Obeah), 139-140, 219
+
+   War, 371
+
+   Warri, 143, 459, 630
+
+   Wealth, 438
+
+   "Well-disposed ones," 132
+
+   West Africa, Political aspect of, 310
+
+   West Indies, 302, 324
+
+   Will Braid, 493-497
+
+   Wills, 436
+
+   Winnebah, 175
+
+   Winnaboes, 471-474
+
+   Witchcraft, 157-168
+     law, 430 (_see_ Fetish)
+
+
+   X
+
+   XYLOPHONIC instruments, 65
+
+
+   Y
+
+   YAM custom, 174-175, 450
+
+   Yaws, 187
+
+
+   Z
+
+   ZAIRE, 102
+
+
+
+                                THE END
+
+
+             RICHARD CLAY AND SONS, LIMITED: LONDON AND BUNGAY.
+
+        [Illustration: _Miss Kingsley's "Studies in West Africa"_
+
+                       MAP OF THE NIGER DELTA.]
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Notes:
+
+
+The following typographical errors/spelling errors have been corrected.
+The pages refer to the original printed text.
+
+   p.  38  The town be took by locusts!["] : added closing quote
+
+   p.  42  You remember D----?["] : added closing quote.
+
+   p.  75  regarding this affair[.] : repaired
+
+   p.  86  ar[r]ives : corrected.
+
+   p. 246  Timbucto[o],  added, to match other instances.
+
+   p. 255  Bodajor --> Bojador : corrected
+
+   p. 287  The footnote is unnumbered, and [54] has been provided.
+
+   p. 289  about Ŗ6,400[)]: added missing right parenthesis]
+
+   p. 416  sink--holes --> sink-holes : corrected
+
+   p. 485  an[n]iversaries : corrected
+
+   p. 495  on the floor [fo] --> of : corrected
+
+   p. 510  number of 3,200,00[0] souls : added
+
+   p. 548n Monopolies[,] have led : removed
+
+   p. 602  I did not like their demeanour[.] : added
+
+   p. 603  our goods are in their hands.["] : added
+
+   p. 615  own way too much[.] : repaired
+
+   p. 622  perpetually on[,] their guard : removed
+
+   p. 623  to the great [m/n]umber : typo corrected
+
+   p. 625  being a 16 gallon rundlet[)] : closing parenthesis added
+
+   p. 636  Clerks, 329, 357[,] : removed
+
+The following words appear as variants and have been left as printed:
+
+   Ogowe (3) / Ogowé (11)
+   Filiaria perstans (1) / Filaria perstans (1)
+   mütterrecht (1) / mutterrecht (1)
+   Bassambri (1) / Basambri (1)
+
+The following words appear with and without hyphens. The various
+spellings are left as printed. Where the printed text introduces
+a hyphen at end-of-line, the hyphen is retained only if that variant
+is otherwise predominant.
+
+   Scott-Elliott/Scott Elliot--(In the literature the name is
+                                uniformly hyphenated.)
+   Sea-shore/seashore
+   headquarters/headquarters
+   ashore / a-shore            (hyphenated only in a quoted passage)
+   craw-fish / crawfish
+   ear-rings / earrings
+   firewood / fire-wood
+   headman / head-man
+   inter-marriage / intermarriage
+   ju-ju / juju
+   re-captured / recaptured
+   re-organized / reorganized
+   sand-flies / sandflies
+   middleman / middle-man
+   sandbanks / sand-banks
+   Winna-boes / Winnaboes
+   small-pox / smallpox
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's West African studies, by Mary Henrietta Kingsley
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WEST AFRICAN STUDIES ***
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+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's West African studies, by Mary Henrietta Kingsley
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: West African studies
+
+Author: Mary Henrietta Kingsley
+
+Release Date: February 13, 2012 [EBook #38870]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WEST AFRICAN STUDIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Clare Boothby, KD Weeks and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<div class="transnote">
+    <p class="titlepage"><b>Transcriber&rsquo;s&nbsp;Note</b></p>
+
+    <p>Footnotes have been located at the end of each chapter.</p>
+
+    <p>A number of punctuation errors and apparent typos have been
+    corrected, and are noted in detail in the <a href="#trans_note">Notes</a> at the end
+    of this text. The original versions of any corrections may be viewed as you read
+    <ins class="correction" title="original: the original text">as mouseover
+    text</ins>.</p>
+
+    <p>There are two large maps, which have been collected at the end of the volume.
+    The full-size maps can be opened by clicking on the smaller image.</p>
+
+    <p>Consult the Transcriber&rsquo;s Notes at the end of this text
+    for detailed corrections.</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<p><br /><br /><br /></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width:650px;" id="FRONTISPIECE">
+<img src="images/frontispiece.jpg" width="650" height="408" alt="Sarimba Players" title="Sarimba Players" />
+<a name="Illustration_Frontispiece" id="Illustration_Frontispiece"><span class="caption"><i>Sarimba Players, Congo.</i></span></a>
+</div>
+
+<p class="titlepage" style="font-size: 200%; margin-top: 2em;">WEST AFRICAN STUDIES</p>
+<p class="titlepage" style="font-size: 70%; margin-top: 2em;">BY</p>
+<p class="titlepage" style="font-size: 140%; margin-top: 2em;">MARY H. KINGSLEY</p>
+<p class="titlepage" style="font-size: 60%; margin-top: 2em;">AUTHOR OF &ldquo;TRAVELS IN WEST AFRICA&rdquo;</p>
+<p><br /><br /></p>
+<p class="titlepage" style="font-size: 100%; margin-top: 2em;"><i>WITH ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAPS</i></p>
+<p><br /><br /></p>
+<p class="titlepage" style="font-size: 100%; margin-top: 2em;">LONDON</p>
+<p class="titlepage" style="font-size: 100%; margin-top: 2em;">MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED</p>
+<p class="titlepage" style="font-size:  80%; margin-top: 2em;">NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY</p>
+<p class="titlepage" style="font-size: 100%; margin-top: 2em;">1899</p>
+<p class="titlepage" style="font-size: 60%; margin-top: 2em;"><i>All rights reserved</i></p>
+<p><br /><br /></p>
+<p class="titlepage" style="font-size: 70%; margin-top: 2em;">RICHARD CLAY AND SONS, LIMITED</p>
+<p class="titlepage" style="font-size: 60%; margin-top: 2em;">LONDON AND BUNGAY.</p>
+<p><br /><br /></p>
+<p class="titlepage" style="font-size: 80%; margin-top: 2em;">TO MY BROTHER</p>
+<p class="titlepage" style="font-size: 80%; margin-top: 2em;">MR. C.G. KINGSLEY</p>
+<p class="titlepage" style="font-size: 80%; margin-top: 2em;">AND TO MY FRIEND WHO IS DEAD</p>
+<p class="titlepage" style="font-size: 80%; margin-top: 2em;">THIS BOOK IS</p>
+<p class="titlepage" style="font-size: 100%; margin-top: 2em;">Dedicated</p>
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+<h2>PREFACE TO THE READER</h2>
+
+<p>I pray you who may come across this book to distinguish carefully
+between the part of it written by others and that written by me.</p>
+
+<p>Anything concerning West Africa written by M. le Comte C. de Cardi or
+Mr. John Harford, of Bristol, does not require apology and explanation;
+while anything written by me on this, or any subject, does. M. le Comte
+de Cardi possesses an unrivalled knowledge of the natives of the Niger
+Delta, gained, as all West Coasters know, by personal experience, and
+gained in a way whereby he had to test the truth of his ideas about
+these natives, not against things said concerning them in books, but
+against the facts themselves, for years; and depending on the accuracy
+of his knowledge was not a theory, but his own life and property. I have
+always wished that men having this kind of first-hand, well-tested
+knowledge regarding West Africa could be induced to publish it for the
+benefit of students, and for the foundation of a true knowledge
+concerning the natives of West Africa in the minds of the general
+public, feeling assured that if we had this class of knowledge
+available, the student of ethnology would be saved from many fantastic
+theories, and the general public enabled to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">[Pg viii]</a></span> bring its influence to bear
+in the cause of justice, instead of in the cause of fads. I need say
+nothing more regarding Appendix I.; it is a mine of knowledge concerning
+a highly developed set of natives of the true Negro stem, particularly
+valuable because, during recent years, we have been singularly badly off
+for information on the true Negro. It would not be too much to say that,
+with the exception of the important series of works by the late Sir A.
+B. Ellis, and a few others, so few that you can count them on the
+fingers of one hand, and Dr. Freeman&rsquo;s <i>Ashanti and Jaman</i>, published
+this year, we have practically had no reliable information on these, the
+most important of the races of Africa, since the eighteenth century. The
+general public have been dependent on the work of great East and Central
+African geographical explorers, like Dr. Livingstone, Mr. H. M. Stanley,
+Dr. Gregory, Mr. Scott Elliott, and Sir H. H. Johnston, men whose work
+we cannot value too highly, and whom we cannot sufficiently admire; but
+who, nevertheless, were not when describing Africans describing Negroes,
+but that great mixture of races existing in Central and East Africa
+whose main ingredient is Bantu. To argue from what you know about Bantus
+when you are dealing with Negroes is about as safe and sound as to argue
+from what you may know about Eastern Europeans when you are dealing with
+Western Europeans. Nevertheless, this fallacious method has been
+followed in the domain of ethnology and politics with, as might be
+expected, bad results. I am, therefore, very proud at being permitted by
+M. le Comte de Cardi to publish his statements on true Negroes; and I
+need not say I have in no way altered them, and that he is in no way
+responsible for any errors that there may be in the portions of this
+book written by me.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix">[Pg ix]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Mr. John Harford, the man who first<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> opened up that still little-known
+Qua Ibo river, another region of Negroes, also requires no apology. I am
+confident that the quite unconscious picture of a West Coast trader&rsquo;s
+life given by him in Appendix II. will do much to remove the fantastic
+notions held concerning West Coast traders and the manner of life they
+lead out there; and I am convinced that if the English public had more
+of this sort of material it would recognise, as I, from a fairly
+extensive knowledge of West Coast traders, have been forced to
+recognise, that they are the class of white men out there who can be
+trusted to manage West Africa.</p>
+
+<p>I most sincerely wish that the whole of this book had been written by
+such men as the authors of Appendices I. and II. We are seriously in
+want of reliable information on West African affairs. It is a sort of
+information you can only get from resident white men, those who live in
+close touch with the natives, and who are forced to know the truth about
+them in order to live and prosper, and from scientific trained
+observers. The transient traveller, passing rapidly through such a
+region as West Africa, is not so valuable an informant as he may be in
+other regions of the Earth, where his observations can be checked by
+those of acknowledged authorities, and supplemented by the literature of
+the natives to whom he refers. For on West Africa, outside Ellis&rsquo;s
+region, there is no authority newer than the eighteenth century, and the
+natives have no written literature. You must, therefore, go down to
+<i>Urstuff</i> and rely only on expert observers, whose lives and property
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_x" id="Page_x">[Pg x]</a></span>depend on their observing well, or whose science trains them to observe
+carefully.</p>
+
+<p>Now of course I regard myself as one of the second class of these
+observers: did I not do so I would not dare speak about West Africa at
+all, especially in such company; but whatever I am or whatever I do,
+requires explanation, apology, and thanks.</p>
+
+<p>You may remember that after my return from a second sojourn in West
+Africa, when I had been to work at fetish and fresh-water fishes, I
+published a word-swamp of a book about the size of Norie&rsquo;s <i>Navigation</i>.
+Mr. George Macmillan lured me into so doing by stating that if I gave my
+own version of the affair I should remove misconceptions; and if I did
+not it was useless to object to such things as paragraphs in American
+papers to the effect that &ldquo;Miss Kingsley, having crossed the continent
+of Africa, ascended the Niger to Victoria, and then climbed the Peak of
+Cameroon; she is shortly to return to England, when she will deliver a
+series of lectures on French art, which she has had great opportunities
+of studying.&rdquo; Well, thanks to Mr. Macmillan&rsquo;s kindness, I did publish a
+sort of interim report, called <i>Travels in West Africa</i>. It did not work
+out in the way he prophesied. It has led to my being referred to as &ldquo;an
+intrepid explorer,&rdquo; a thing there is not the making of in me, who am
+ever the prey of frights, worries, and alarms; and its main effect, as
+far as I am personally concerned, has been to plunge me further still in
+debt for kindness from my fellow creatures, who, though capable of doing
+all I have done and more capable of writing about it in really good
+English, have tolerated that book and frequently me also, with
+half-a-dozen colds in my head and a dingy temper. Chief among all these
+creditors of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xi" id="Page_xi">[Pg xi]</a></span> mine I must name Mrs. J. R. Green, Mrs. George Macmillan,
+and Miss Lucy Toulmin Smith; but don&rsquo;t imagine that they or any other of
+my creditors approve of any single solitary opinion I express, or the
+way in which I express it. It is merely that I have the power of
+bringing out in my fellow-creatures, white or black, their virtues, in a
+way honourable to them and fortunate for me.</p>
+
+<p>I must here also acknowledge the great debt of gratitude I owe to Mr.
+John Holt, of Liverpool. A part of my work lies in the affairs of the
+so-called Bubies of Fernando Po, and no one knows so much about Fernando
+Po as Mr. Holt. He has also been of the greatest help to me in other
+ethnological questions, and has permitted me to go through his
+collections of African things most generously. It is, however, idle for
+me to attempt to chronicle my debt to Mr. Holt, for in every part of my
+work I owe him much. I do not wish you to think he is responsible for
+any of it, but his counsels have ever been on the side of moderation and
+generosity in adverse criticism. I honestly confess I believe I am by
+nature the very mildest of critics; but Mr. Holt and others think
+otherwise; and so, although I have not altered my opinions, I have
+restrained from publishing several developments of them, in deference to
+superior knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>I am also under a debt of gratitude to Professor Tylor. He also is not
+involved in my opinions, but he kindly ermits me to tell him things
+that I can only &ldquo;tell Tylor&rdquo;; and now and again, as you will see in the
+Fetish question, he comes down on me with a refreshing firmness; in
+fact, I feel that any attempt at fantastic explanations of West African
+culture will not receive any encouragement from him; and it is a great
+comfort to a mere drudge like myself<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xii" id="Page_xii">[Pg xii]</a></span> to know there is some one who
+cares for facts, without theories draping them.</p>
+
+<p>I will merely add that to all my own West Coast friends I remain
+indebted; and that if you ever come across any one who says I owe them
+much, you may take it as a rule that I do, though in all my written
+stuff I have most carefully ticketed its source.</p>
+
+<p>I now turn to the explanation and apology for this book, briefly.
+Apology for its literary style I do not make. I am not a literary man,
+only a student of West Africa. I am not proud of my imperfections in
+English. I would write better if I could, but I cannot. I find when I
+try to write like other people that I do not say what seems to me true,
+and thereby lose all right to say anything; and I am more convinced, the
+more I know of West Africa&mdash;my education is continuous and unbroken by
+holidays,&mdash;that it is a difficult thing to write about, particularly
+when you are a student hampered on all sides by masses of inchoate
+material, unaided by a set of great authors to whose opinions you can
+refer, and addressing a public that is not interested in the things that
+interest you so keenly and that you regard as so deeply important.</p>
+
+<p>In my previous book I most carefully confined myself to facts and
+arranged those facts on as thin a line of connecting opinion as
+possible. I was anxious to see what manner of opinion they would give
+rise to in the minds of the educated experts up here; not from a mere
+feminine curiosity, but from a distrust in my own ability to construct
+theories. On the whole this method has worked well. Ethnologists of
+different theories have been enabled to use such facts as they saw fit;
+but one of the greatest of ethnologists has grumbled at me, not for not
+giving a theory, but for omitting<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xiii" id="Page_xiii">[Pg xiii]</a></span> to show the inter-relationship of
+certain groups of facts, an inter-relationship his acuteness enabled him
+to know existed. Therefore I here give the key to a good deal of this
+inter-relationship by dividing the different classes of Fetishism into
+four schools. In order to do this I have now to place before you a good
+deal of material that was either crowded out of the other work or
+considered by me to require further investigation and comparison. As for
+the new statements I make, I have been enabled to give them this from
+the constant information and answers to questions I receive from West
+Africa. For the rest of the Fetish I remain a mere photographic plate.</p>
+
+<p>Regarding the other sections of this book, they are to me all subsidiary
+in importance to the Fetish, but they belong to it. They refer to its
+environment, without a knowledge of which you cannot know the thing.
+What Mr. Macmillan has ticketed as Introductory&mdash;I could not find a name
+for it at all&mdash;has a certain bearing on West African affairs, as showing
+the life on a West Coast boat. I may remark it is a section crowded out
+of my previous book; so, though you may not be glad to see it here, you
+must be glad it was not there.</p>
+
+<p>The fishing chapter was also cast out of <i>Travels in West Africa</i>.
+Critics whom I respect said it was wrong of me not to have explained how
+I came by my fishes. This made me fear that they thought I had stolen
+them, so I published the article promptly in the <i>National Review</i>, and,
+by the kindness of its editor, Mr. Maxse, I reprint it. It is the only
+reprint in this book.</p>
+
+<p>The chapter on Law contains all the material I have been so far able to
+arrange on this important study. The material on Criminal Law I must
+keep until I can go out again to West Africa, and read further in the
+minds of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xiv" id="Page_xiv">[Pg xiv]</a></span> men in the African Forest Belt region; for in them, in that
+region, is the original text. The connection between Religion and Law I
+have not reprinted here, it being available, thanks to the courtesy of
+the Hibbert Trustees, in the <i>National Review</i>, September, 1897.</p>
+
+<p>I have left my stiffest bit of explanation and apology till the last,
+namely, that relating to the Crown Colony system, which is the thing
+that makes me beg you to disassociate from me every friend I have, and
+deal with me alone. I am alone responsible for it, the only thing for
+which I may be regarded as sharing the responsibility with others being
+the statistics from Government sources.</p>
+
+<p>It has been the most difficult thing I have ever had to do. I would have
+given my right hand to have done it well, for I know what it means if
+things go on as they are. Alas! I am hampered with my bad method of
+expression. I cannot show you anything clearly and neatly. I have to
+show you a series of pictures of things, and hope you will get from
+those pictures the impression which is the truth. I dare not set myself
+up to tell you the truth. I only say, look at it; and to the best of my
+ability faithfully give you, not an artist&rsquo;s picture, but a photograph,
+an overladen with detail, colourless version; all the time wishing to
+Heaven there was some one else doing it who could do it better, and then
+I know you would understand, and all would be well. I know there are
+people who tax me with a brutality in statement, I feel unjustly; and it
+makes me wonder what they would say if they had to speak about West
+Africa. It is a repetition of the difficulty a friend of mine and myself
+had over a steam launch called the Dragon Fly, whose internal health was
+chronically poor, and subject to bad attacks. Well, one afternoon, he
+and I had to take her out to the home-going steamer, and she had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xv" id="Page_xv">[Pg xv]</a></span>
+suffered that afternoon in the engines, and when she suffered anywhere
+she let you know it. We did what we could for her, in the interests of
+humanity and ourselves; we gave her lots of oil, and fed her with
+delicately-chopped wood; but all to but little avail. So both our
+tempers being strained when we got to the steamer, we told her what the
+other one of us had been saying about the Dragon Fly. The purser of the
+steamer thereon said &ldquo;that people who said things like those about a
+poor inanimate steam launch were fools with a flaming hot future, and
+lost souls entirely.&rdquo; We realised that our observations had been
+imperfect; and so, being ever desirous of improving ourselves, we
+offered to put the purser on shore in the Dragon Fly. We knew she was
+feeling still much the same, and we wanted to know what he would say
+when jets of superheated steam played on him. He came, and they did; and
+when they did, you know, he said things I cannot repeat. Nevertheless,
+things of the nature of our own remarks, but so much finer of the kind,
+that we regarded him with awe when he was returning thanks to the &ldquo;poor
+inanimate steam launch&rdquo;; but it was when it came to his going ashore,
+gladly to leave us and her, that we found out what that man could say;
+and we morally fainted at his remarks made on discovering that he had
+been sitting in a pool of smutty oil, which she had insidiously treated
+him to, in order to take some of the stuffing out of him about the
+superior snowwhiteness of his trousers. Well, that purser went off the
+scene in a blue flame; and I said to my companion, &ldquo;Sir! we cannot say
+things like that.&rdquo; &ldquo;Right you are, Miss Kingsley,&rdquo; he said sadly; &ldquo;you
+and I are only fit for Sunday school entertainments.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>It is thus with me about this Crown Colony affair. I know<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xvi" id="Page_xvi">[Pg xvi]</a></span> I have not
+risen to the height other people&mdash;my superiors, like the purser&mdash;would
+rise to, if they knew it; but at the same time, I may seem to those who
+do not know it, who only know the good intentions of England, and who
+regard systems as inanimate things, to be speaking harshly. I would not
+have mentioned this affair at all, did I not clearly see that our
+present method of dealing with tropical possessions under the Crown
+Colony system was dangerous financially, and brought with it suffering
+to the native races and disgrace to English gentlemen, who are bound to
+obey and carry out the orders given them by the system.</p>
+
+<p>Plotinus very properly said that the proper thing to do was to
+superimpose the idea upon the actual. I am not one of those who will
+ever tell you things are impossible, but I am particularly hopeful in
+this matter. England has an excellent idea regarding her duty to native
+races in West Africa. She has an excellent actual in the West African
+native to superimpose her idea upon. All that is wanted is the proper
+method; and this method I assure you that Science, true knowledge, that
+which Spinoza termed the inward aid of God, can give you. I am not
+Science, but only one of her brick-makers, and I beg you to turn to her.
+Remember you have tried to do without her in African matters for 400
+years, and on the road to civilisation and advance there you have
+travelled on a cabbage leaf.</p>
+
+<p>I have now only the pleasant duty of remarking that in this book I have
+said nothing regarding missionary questions. I do not think it will ever
+be necessary for me to mention those questions again except to
+Nonconformist missionaries. I say this advisedly, because, though I have
+not one word to retract of what I have said, the saying of it has
+demonstrated<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xvii" id="Page_xvii">[Pg xvii]</a></span> to me the fearless honesty and the perfect chivalry in
+controversy of the Nonconformist missions in England. As they are the
+most extensively interested in West Africa, if on my next stay out in
+West Africa I find anything I regard as rather wrong in missionary
+affairs I intend to have it out within doors; for I know that the
+Nonconformists will be clear-headed, and fight fair, and stick to the
+point.</p>
+
+<p style="text-align: right;">
+MARY H. KINGSLEY.<br />
+</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Mr. McEachen first traded there in a hulk, but, after about
+two years, withdrew in 1873. No trade was done in this river by white
+men until Mr. Harford went in, since then it has continued.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xviii" id="Page_xviii">[Pg xviii]</a></span></p>
+<h2><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<table width="60%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="TOC">
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td align="right"><small>PAGE</small></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdcp" colspan="2">CHAPTER I</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdlp2"><a href="#CHAPTER_I">INTRODUCTORY</a></td>
+    <td class="tdrp2">1</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdcp" colspan="2">CHAPTER II</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdlp2"><a href="#CHAPTER_II">SIERRA LEONE AND ITS SURROUNDINGS</a></td>
+    <td class="tdrp2">35</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdcp" colspan="2">CHAPTER III</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdlp2"><a href="#CHAPTER_III">AFRICAN CHARACTERISTICS</a></td>
+    <td class="tdrp2">62</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdcp" colspan="2">CHAPTER IV</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdlp2"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">FISHING IN WEST AFRICA</a></td>
+    <td class="tdrp2">88</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdcp" colspan="2">CHAPTER V</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdlp2"><a href="#CHAPTER_V">FETISH</a></td>
+    <td class="tdrp2">112</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdcp" colspan="2">CHAPTER VI</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdlp2"><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">SCHOOLS OF FETISH</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xx" id="Page_xx">[Pg xx]</a></span></td>
+    <td class="tdrp2">136</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdcp" colspan="2">CHAPTER VII</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdlp2"><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">FETISH AND WITCHCRAFT</a></td>
+    <td class="tdrp2">156</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdcp" colspan="2">CHAPTER VIII</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdlp2"><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII">AFRICAN MEDICINE</a></td>
+    <td class="tdrp2">180</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdcp" colspan="2">CHAPTER IX</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdlp2"><a href="#CHAPTER_IX">THE WITCH DOCTOR</a></td>
+    <td class="tdrp2">199</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdcp" colspan="2">CHAPTER X</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdlp2"><a href="#CHAPTER_X">EARLY TRADE IN WEST AFRICA</a></td>
+    <td class="tdrp2">220</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdcp" colspan="2">CHAPTER XI</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdlp2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XI">FRENCH DISCOVERY OF WEST AFRICA</a></td>
+    <td class="tdrp2">250</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdcp" colspan="2">CHAPTER XII</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdlp2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XII">COMMERCE IN WEST AFRICA</a></td>
+    <td class="tdrp2">281</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdcp" colspan="2">CHAPTER XIII</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdlp2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIII">THE CROWN COLONY SYSTEM</a></td>
+    <td class="tdrp2">301</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdcp" colspan="2">CHAPTER XIV</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdlp2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XIV">THE CROWN COLONY SYSTEM IN WEST AFRICA</a></td>
+    <td class="tdrp2">314</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdcp" colspan="2">CHAPTER XV</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdlp2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XV">MORE OF THE CROWN COLONY SYSTEM</a></td>
+    <td class="tdrp2">324</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdcp" colspan="2">CHAPTER XVI</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdlp2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVI">THE CLASH OF CULTURES</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xxi" id="Page_xxi">[Pg xxi]</a></span></td>
+    <td class="tdrp2">363</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdcp" colspan="2">CHAPTER XVII</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdlp2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVII">AN ALTERNATIVE PLAN</a></td>
+    <td class="tdrp2">392</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdcp" colspan="2">CHAPTER XVIII</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdlp2"><a href="#CHAPTER_XVIII">AFRICAN PROPERTY</a></td>
+    <td class="tdrp2">420</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdcp" colspan="2">APPENDIX</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdlp"><a href="#APPENDIX_I">I.</a> A SHORT DESCRIPTION OF THE NATIVES OF THE NIGER<br />
+COAST PROTECTORATE, WITH SOME ACCOUNT OF THEIR<br />
+CUSTOMS, RELIGION, TRADE, ETC. BY M. LE COMTE<br />
+C. N. DE CARDI</td>
+    <td class="tdrp2">443</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdlp"><a href="#APPENDIX_II">II.</a> A VOYAGE TO THE AFRICAN OIL RIVERS TWENTY-FIVE<br />
+YEARS AGO. BY JOHN HARFORD</td>
+    <td class="tdrp2">567</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdlp"><a href="#APPENDIX_III">III.</a> TRADE GOODS USED IN THE EARLY TRADE WITH AFRICA<br />
+AS GIVEN BY BARBOT AND OTHER WRITERS OF THE<br />
+SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. BY M. H. KINGSLEY.</td>
+  <td class="tdrp2">615<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xxii" id="Page_xxii">[Pg xxii]</a></span></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdlp"><a href="#INDEX">INDEX</a></td>
+    <td class="tdrp">635</td></tr>
+</table>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xxiii" id="Page_xxiii">[Pg xxiii]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+<h2><a name="LIST_OF_ILLUSTRATIONS" id="LIST_OF_ILLUSTRATIONS"></a>LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS<a name="toi" id="toi"></a></h2>
+
+<table width="60%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="TOI">
+<tr>
+	<td class="tdlp2"><a href="#FRONTISPIECE">SIRIMBA PLAYERS, CONGO</a></td>
+        <td class="tdcp2"><i>Frontispiece</i>.</td>
+        <td class="tdrp2">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+        <td class="tdlp2"><a  href="#IMG031A">SANTA CRUZ, TENERIFFE</a></td>
+        <td class="tdcp2"><i>To face page</i> </td>
+        <td class="tdrp2"><a href="#IMG031A">12</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+        <td class="tdlp2"><a  href="#IMG081A">FOR PALM WINE</a></td>
+        <td class="tdcp2">"</td>
+        <td class="tdrp2"><a href="#IMG081A">63</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+        <td class="tdlp2"><a  href="#IMG087A">SECRET SOCIETY LEAVING THE SACRED GROVE</a></td>
+        <td class="tdcp2">"</td>
+        <td class="tdrp2"><a href="#IMG087A">69</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+        <td class="tdlp2"><a  href="#IMG087A1">JENGU DEVIL DANCE OF KING WILLIAM&rsquo;S SLAVES<br />
+                                               SETTE CAMMA, NOVEMBER 9, 1888</a><a name="FNanchor_A_2" id="FNanchor_A_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_A_2" class="fnanchor">[A]</a></td>
+        <td class="tdcp2">"</td>
+        <td class="tdrp2"><a href="#IMG087A1">69</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+        <td class="tdlp2"><a  href="#IMG107A">BATANGA CANOES</a></td>
+        <td class="tdcp2">"</td>
+        <td class="tdrp2"><a href="#IMG107A">89</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+        <td class="tdlp2"><a  href="#IMG119A">FALLS ON THE TONGUE RIVER</a></td>
+        <td class="tdcp2">"</td>
+        <td class="tdrp2"><a href="#IMG119A">101</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+        <td class="tdlp2"><a  href="#IMG119A1">LOANDA CANOE WITH MAT SAILS.</a></td>
+        <td class="tdcp2">"</td>
+        <td class="tdrp2"><a href="#IMG119A1">101</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+        <td class="tdlp2"><a  href="#IMG120A">ST. PAUL DO LOANDA</a></td>
+        <td class="tdcp2">"</td>
+        <td class="tdrp2"><a href="#IMG120A">102</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+        <td class="tdlp2"><a  href="#IMG123A">ROUND A KACONGO CAMP FIRE</a></td>
+        <td class="tdcp2">"</td>
+        <td class="tdrp2"><a href="#IMG123A">105</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+        <td class="tdlp2"><a  href="#IMG155A">FANTEE NATIVES OF THE GOLD COAST</a></td>
+        <td class="tdcp2">"</td>
+        <td class="tdrp2"><a href="#IMG155A">137</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+        <td class="tdlp2"><a  href="#IMG159A">YORUBA</a></td>
+        <td class="tdcp2">"</td>
+        <td class="tdrp2"><a href="#IMG159A">141</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+        <td class="tdlp2"><a  href="#IMG163A">A CALABAR CHIEF</a></td>
+        <td class="tdcp2">"</td>
+        <td class="tdrp2"><a href="#IMG163A">145</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+        <td class="tdlp2"><a  href="#IMG169A">NATIVES OF GABOON</a></td>
+        <td class="tdcp2">"</td>
+        <td class="tdrp2"><a href="#IMG169A">151</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+        <td class="tdlp2"><a  href="#IMG173A1">FJORT NATIVES OF KACONGO AND LOANGO</a></td>
+        <td class="tdcp2">"</td>
+        <td class="tdrp2"><a href="#IMG173A1">155</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+        <td class="tdlp2"><a  href="#IMG263A">OIL RIVER NATIVES</a></td>
+        <td class="tdcp2">"</td>
+        <td class="tdrp2"><a href="#IMG263A">245</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+        <td class="tdlp2"><a  href="#IMG299A">ST. PAUL DO LOANDA</a></td>
+        <td class="tdcp2">"</td>
+        <td class="tdrp2"><a href="#IMG299A">281</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+        <td class="tdlp2"><a  href="#IMG303A1">CLIFFS AT LOANDA</a></td>
+        <td class="tdcp2">"</td>
+        <td class="tdrp2"><a href="#IMG303A1">285</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+        <td class="tdlp2"><a  href="#IMG305A">DONDO ANGOLA</a></td>
+        <td class="tdcp2">"</td>
+        <td class="tdrp2"><a href="#IMG305A">287</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+        <td class="tdlp2"><a  href="#IMG307A1">TRADING STORES</a></td>
+        <td class="tdcp2">"</td>
+        <td class="tdrp2"><a href="#IMG307A1">289</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+        <td class="tdlp2"><a  href="#IMG309A">ST. PAUL DO LOANDA</a></td>
+        <td class="tdcp2">"</td>
+        <td class="tdrp2"><a href="#IMG309A">291</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xxiv" id="Page_xxiv">[Pg xxiv]</a></span></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+        <td class="tdlp2"><a  href="#IMG316A1">IN AN ANGOLA MARKET</a></td>
+        <td class="tdcp2">"</td>
+        <td class="tdrp2"><a href="#IMG316A1">297</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+        <td class="tdlp2"><a  href="#IMG316A2">A MAN OF SOUTH ANGOLA</a></td>
+        <td class="tdcp2">"</td>
+        <td class="tdrp2"><a href="#IMG316A2">297</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+        <td class="tdlp2"><a  href="#IMG438A">A HOUSA</a></td>
+        <td class="tdcp2">"</td>
+        <td class="tdrp2"><a href="#IMG438A">420</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+        <td class="tdlp2"><a  href="#IMG441A1">HOUSE PROPERTY IN KACONGO</a></td>
+        <td class="tdcp2">"</td>
+        <td class="tdrp2"><a href="#IMG441A1">423</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+        <td class="tdlp2"><a  href="#IMG441A2">BUBIES OF FERNANDO PO</a></td>
+        <td class="tdcp2">"</td>
+        <td class="tdrp2"><a href="#IMG441A2">423</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+        <td class="tdlp2"><a  href="#IMG459A">JA JA, KING OF OPOBO</a></td>
+        <td class="tdcp2">"</td>
+        <td class="tdrp2"><a href="#IMG459A">443</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+        <td class="tdlp2"><a  href="#IMG556A">JA JA MAKING JU JU </a></td>
+        <td class="tdcp2">"</td>
+        <td class="tdrp2"><a href="#IMG556A">540</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+</table>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_A_2" id="Footnote_A_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_A_2"><span class="label">[A]</span></a> By permission of R. B. N. Walker, Esq.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<h1><a name="WEST_AFRICAN_STUDIES" id="WEST_AFRICAN_STUDIES"></a>WEST AFRICAN STUDIES</h1><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I</h2>
+
+<h2>INTRODUCTORY</h2>
+
+<p class="pblock">Regarding a voyage on a West Coast boat, with some observations on
+the natural history of mariners never before published; to which is
+added some description of the habits and nature of the ant and
+other insects, to the end that the new-comer be informed concerning
+these things before he lands in Afrik.</p>
+
+<p>There are some people who will tell you that the labour problem is the
+most difficult affair that Africa presents to the student; others give
+the first place to the influence of civilisation on native races, or to
+the interaction of the interests of the various white Powers on that
+continent, or to the successful sanitation of the said continent, or
+some other high-sounding thing; but I, who have an acquaintance with all
+these matters, and think them well enough, as intellectual exercises,
+yet look upon them as slight compared to the problem of the West Coast
+Boat.</p>
+
+<p>Now life on board a West Coast steamer is an important factor in West
+African affairs, and its influence is far reaching. It is, indeed, akin
+to what the Press is in England, in that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span> it forms an immense amount of
+public opinion. It is on board the steamer that men from one part of
+West Africa meet men from another part of West Africa&mdash;parts of West
+Africa are different. These men talk things over together without
+explaining them, and the consequence is confusion in idea and the
+darkening of counsel from the ideas so formed being handed over to
+people at home who practically know no part of the West Coast
+whatsoever.</p>
+
+<p>I had an example of this the other day, when a lady said to me in an
+aggrieved tone, after I had been saying a few words on swamps, &ldquo;Oh, Miss
+Kingsley, but I thought it was wrong to talk about swamps nowadays, and
+that Africa was really quite dry. I have a cousin who has been to Accra
+and he says,&rdquo; &amp;c. That&rsquo;s the way the formation of an erroneous opinion
+on West Africa gets started. Many a time have I with a scientific
+interest watched those erroneous opinions coming out of the egg on a
+West Coast boat. Say, for example, a Gold Coaster meets on the boat a
+River-man. River-man in course of conversation, states how, &ldquo;hearing a
+fillaloo in the yard one night I got up and found the watchman going to
+sleep on the top of the ladder had just lost a leg by means of one
+crocodile, while another crocodile was kicking up a deuce of a row
+climbing up the crane.&rdquo; Gold Coaster says, &ldquo;Tell that to the Marines.&rdquo;
+River-man says, &ldquo;Perfect fact, Sir, my place swarms with crocodiles.
+Why, once, when I was,&rdquo; &amp;c., &amp;c. Anyhow it ends in a row. The Gold
+Coaster says, &ldquo;Sir, I have been 7 years&rdquo; (or 13 or some impressive
+number of years) &ldquo;on the West Coast of Africa, Sir, and I have never
+seen a crocodile.&rdquo; River-man makes remarks on the existence of a toxic
+state wherein a man can&rsquo;t see the holes in a ladder, for he knows he&rsquo;s
+seen hundreds of crocodiles.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I know Gold Coasters say in a trying way when any terrific account of
+anything comes before them, &ldquo;Oh, that was down in the Rivers,&rdquo; and one
+knows what they mean. But don&rsquo;t you go away with the idea that a Gold
+Coaster cannot turn out a very decent tale; indeed, considering the
+paucity of their material, they often display the artistic spirit to a
+most noteworthy degree, but the net result of the conversation on a West
+African steamboat is error. Parts of it, like the curate&rsquo;s egg, are
+quite excellent, but unless you have an acquaintance with the various
+regions of the Coast to which your various informants refer, you cannot
+know which is which. Take the above case and analyse it, and you will
+find it is almost all, on both sides, quite true. I won&rsquo;t go bail for
+the crocodile up the crane, but for the watchman&rsquo;s leg and the watchman
+being asleep on the top of the ladder I will, for watchmen will sleep
+anywhere; and once when I was, &amp;c., I myself saw certainly not less than
+70 crocodiles at one time, let alone smelling them, for they do swarm in
+places and stink always. But on the other hand the Gold Coaster might
+have remained 7, 13, or any other number of centuries instead of years,
+in a teetotal state, and yet have never seen a crocodile.</p>
+
+<p>It may seem a reckless thing to say, but I believe that the great
+percentage of steamboat talk is true; only you must remember that it is
+not stuff that you can in any way use or rely on unless you know
+yourself the district from which the information comes, and it must,
+like all information&mdash;like all specimens of any kind&mdash;be very carefully
+ticketed, then and there, as to its giver and its district. In this it
+is again like the English Press, wherein you may see a statement one day
+that everything is quite satisfactory, say in Uganda, and in the next
+issue that there has been a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span> massacre or some unpleasantness. The two
+statements have in them the connecting thread of truth, that truth that,
+according to Fichte, is in all things. The first shows that it is the
+desire in the official mind that everything should be quite satisfactory
+to every one; the second, that practically this blessed state has not
+yet arrived&mdash;that is all.</p>
+
+<p>I need not, however, further dwell on this complex phase, and will turn
+to the high educational value of the West African steamboat to the young
+Coaster, holding that on the conditions under which the Coaster makes
+his first voyage out to West Africa largely depends whether or no he
+takes to the Coast. Strange as it is to me, who love West Africa, there
+are people who have really been there who have not even liked it in the
+least. These people, I fancy, have not been properly brought up in a
+suitable academy as I was.</p>
+
+<p>Doubtless a P. &amp; O. is a good preparatory school for India, or a Union,
+or Castle liner for the Cape, or an Empereza Nacioņal simply superb for
+a Portuguese West Coast Possession, but for the Bights, especially for
+the terrible Bight of Benin, &ldquo;where for one that comes out there are
+forty stay in,&rdquo; I have no hesitation in recommending the West Coast
+cargo boat. Not one of the best ships in the fleet, mind you; they are
+well enough to come home in, and so on, but you must go on a steamer
+that has her saloon aft on your first trip out or you will never
+understand West Africa.</p>
+
+<p>It was on such a steamer that I made my first voyage out in &rsquo;93, when,
+acting under the advice of most eminent men, before whose names European
+Science trembles, I resolved that the best place to study early religion
+and law, and collect fishes, was the West Coast of Africa.</p>
+
+<p>On reaching Liverpool, where I knew no one and of which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span> I knew nothing
+in &rsquo;93, I found the boat I was to go by was a veteran of the fleet. She
+had her saloon aft, and I am bound to say her appearance was anything
+but reassuring to the uninitiated and alarmed young Coaster, depressed
+by the direful prophecies of deserted friends concerning all things West
+African. Dirt and greed were that vessel&rsquo;s most obvious attributes. The
+dirt rapidly disappeared, and by the time she reached the end of her
+trip out, at Loanda, she was as neat as a new pin, for during the voyage
+every inch of paint work was scraped and re-painted, from the red below
+her Plimsoll mark to the uttermost top of her black funnel. But on the
+day when first we met these things were yet to be. As for her greed, her
+owners had evidently then done all they could to satisfy her. She was
+heavily laden, her holds more full than many a better ship&rsquo;s; but no,
+she was not content, she did not even pretend to be, and shamelessly
+whistled and squarked for more. So, evidently just to gratify her, they
+sent her a lighter laden with kegs of gunpowder, and she grunted
+contentedly as she saw it come alongside. But she was not really
+entirely content even then, or satisfied. I don&rsquo;t suppose, between
+ourselves, any South West Coast boat ever is, and during the whole time
+I was on her, devoted to her as I rapidly became, I saw only too clearly
+that the one thing she really cared for was cargo. It was the criterion
+by which she measured the importance, nay the very excuse for existence,
+of a port. If she is ever sold to other owners and sent up the
+Mediterranean, she will anathematise Malta and scorn Naples. &ldquo;What! no
+palm oil!&rdquo; she&rsquo;ll say; &ldquo;no rubber? Call yourself a port!&rdquo; and tie her
+whistle string to a stanchion until the authorities bring off her papers
+and let her clear away. Every one on board her she infected with a
+com<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span>mercial spirit. I am not by nature a commercial man myself, yet
+under her influence I found myself selling paraffin oil in cases in the
+Bights: and even to missionaries and Government officials travelling on
+her in between ports, she suggested the advisability of having out
+churches, houses, &amp;c., in sections carefully marked with her name.</p>
+
+<p>As we ran down the Irish Channel and into the Bay of Biscay, the weather
+was what the mariners termed &ldquo;a bit fresh.&rdquo; Our craft was evidently a
+wet ship, either because she was nervous and femininely flurried when
+she saw a large wave coming, or, as I am myself inclined to believe,
+because of her insatiable mania for shipping cargo. Anyhow, she
+habitually sat down in the rise of those waves, whereby, from whatever
+motive, she managed to ship a good deal of the Atlantic Ocean in various
+sized sections.</p>
+
+<p>Her saloon, as aforesaid, was aft, and I observed it was the duty, in
+order to keep it dry, of any one near the main door who might notice a
+ton or so of the fourth element coming aboard, to seize up three
+cocoa-fibre mats, shut three cabin doors and yell &ldquo;Bill!&rdquo; After doing
+this they were seemingly at full liberty to retire into the saloon and
+dam the Atlantic Ocean, and remark, &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a dog&rsquo;s life at sea.&rdquo; I never
+noticed &ldquo;Bill&rdquo; come in answer to this performance, so I was getting to
+regard &ldquo;Bill&rdquo; as an invocation to a weather Ju Ju; but this was hasty,
+for one night in the Bay I was roused by a new noise, and on going into
+the saloon to see what it was, found the stewardess similarly engaged;
+mutually we discovered, in the dim light&mdash;she wasn&rsquo;t the boat to go and
+throw away money on electric&mdash;that it was the piano adrift off its daīs,
+and we steered for it. Very cleverly we fielded <i>en route</i> a palm in pot
+complete, but shipped some beer and Worcester sauce bottles that came at
+us from the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span> rack over the table, whereby we got a bit messy and sticky
+about the hair and a trifle cut; nevertheless, undaunted we held our
+course and seized the instrument, instinctively shouting &ldquo;Bill,&rdquo; and
+&ldquo;Bill&rdquo; came, in the form of a sandy-haired steward, amiable in nature
+and striking in costume.</p>
+
+<p>After the first three or four days, a calm despair regarding the fate of
+my various lost belongings and myself having come on me, and the weather
+having moderated, I began to make observations on what manner of men my
+fellow-passengers were. I found only two species of the genus Coaster,
+the Government official and the trading Agent, were represented; so far
+we had no Missionaries. I decided to observe those species we had
+quietly, having heard awful accounts of them before leaving England, but
+to reserve final judgment on them until they had quite recovered from
+sea-sickness and had had a night ashore. Some of the Agents soon revived
+sufficiently to give copious information on the dangers and mortality of
+West Africa to those on board who were going down Coast for the first
+time, and the captain and doctor chipped in ever and anon with a
+particularly convincing tale of horror in support of their statements.
+This used to be the sort of thing. One of the Agents would look at the
+Captain during a meal-time, and say, &ldquo;You remember J., Captain?&rdquo; &ldquo;Knew
+him well,&rdquo; says the Captain; &ldquo;why I brought him out his last time, poor
+chap!&rdquo; then follows full details of the pegging-out of J., and his
+funeral, &amp;c. Then a Government official who had been out before, would
+kindly turn to a colleague out for the first time, and say, &ldquo;Brought any
+dress clothes with you?&rdquo; The unfortunate new comer, scenting an allusion
+to a more cheerful phase of Coast life, gladly answers in the
+affirmative.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;That&rsquo;s right,&rdquo; says the interlocutor; &ldquo;you want them to wear at
+funerals. Do you know,&rdquo; he remarks, turning to another old Coaster, &ldquo;my
+dress trousers did not get mouldy once last wet season.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Get along,&rdquo; says his friend, &ldquo;you can&rsquo;t hang a thing up twenty-four
+hours without its being fit to graze a cow on.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Do you get anything else but fever down there?&rdquo; asks a new comer,
+nervously.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Haven&rsquo;t time as a general rule, but I have known some fellows get kraw
+kraw.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;And the Portuguese itch, abscesses, ulcers, the Guinea worm and the
+smallpox,&rdquo; observe the chorus calmly.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Well,&rdquo; says the first answerer, kindly but regretfully, as if it pained
+him to admit this wealth of disease was denied his particular locality;
+&ldquo;they are mostly on the South-west Coast.&rdquo; And then a gentleman says
+parasites are, as far as he knows, everywhere on the Coast, and some of
+them several yards long. &ldquo;Do you remember poor C.?&rdquo; says he to the
+Captain, who gives his usual answer, &ldquo;Knew him well. Ah! poor chap,
+there was quite a quantity of him eaten away, inside and out, with
+parasites, and a quieter, better living man than C. there never was.&rdquo;
+&ldquo;Never,&rdquo; says the chorus, sweeping away the hope that by taking care you
+may keep clear of such things&mdash;the new Coaster&rsquo;s great hope. &ldquo;Where do
+you call&mdash;?&rdquo; says a young victim consigned to that port. Some say it is
+on the South-west, but opinions differ, still the victim is left assured
+that it is just about the best place on the seaboard of the continent
+for a man to go to who wants to make himself into a sort of complete
+hospital course for a set of medical students.</p>
+
+<p>This instruction of the young in the charms of Coast life is the
+faithfully discharged mission of the old Coasters<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span> on steamboats,
+especially, as aforesaid, at meal times. Desperate victims sometimes
+determine to keep the conversation off fever, but to no avail. It is in
+the air you breath, mentally and physically; one will mention a lively
+and amusing work, some one cuts in and observes &ldquo;Poor D. was found dead
+in bed at C. with that book alongside him.&rdquo; With all subjects it is the
+same. Keep clear of it in conversation, for even a half hour, you
+cannot. Far better is it for the young Coaster not to try, but just to
+collect all the anecdotes and information you can referring to it, and
+then lie low for a new Coaster of your own to tell them to, and when
+your own turn comes, as come it will if you haunt the West Coast long
+enough, to peg out and be poor so and so yourself. For goodness sake die
+somewhere where they haven&rsquo;t got the cemetery on a hill, because going
+up a hill in shirt collars, &amp;c., will cause your mourners to peg out
+too, at least this is the lesson I was taught in that excellent West
+Coast school.</p>
+
+<p>When, however, there is no new Coaster to instruct on hand, or he is
+tired for ten minutes of doing it, the old Coaster discourses with his
+fellow old Coasters on trade products and insects. Every attention
+should be given to him on these points. On trade products I will
+discourse elsewhere; but insects it is well that the new comer should
+know about before he sets foot on Africa. On some West Coast boats
+excellent training is afforded by the supply of cockroaches on board,
+and there is nothing like getting used to cockroaches early when your
+life is going to be spent on the Coast&mdash;but I need not detain you with
+them now, merely remarking that they have none of the modest reticence
+of the European variety. They are very companionable, seeking<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span> rather
+than shunning human society, nestling in the bunk with you if the
+weather is the least chilly, and I fancy not averse to light; it is true
+they come out most at night, but then they distinctly like a bright
+light, and you can watch them in a tight packed circle round the lamp
+with their heads towards it, twirling their antennæ at it with evident
+satisfaction; in fact it&rsquo;s the lively nights those cockroaches have that
+keep them abed during the day. They are sometimes of great magnitude; I
+have been assured by observers of them in factories ashore and on moored
+hulks that they can stand on their hind legs and drink out of a quart
+jug, but the most common steamer kind is smaller, as far as my own
+observations go. But what I do object to in them is, that they fly and
+feed on your hair and nails and disturb your sleep by so doing; and you
+mayn&rsquo;t smash them&mdash;they make an awful mess if you do. As for insect
+powder, well, I&rsquo;d like to see the insect powder that would disturb the
+digestion of a West African insect.</p>
+
+<p>But it&rsquo;s against the insects ashore that you have to be specially
+warned. During my first few weeks of Africa I took a general natural
+historical interest in them with enthusiasm as of natural history; it
+soon became a mere sporting one, though equally enthusiastic at first.
+Afterwards a nearly complete indifference set in, unless some wretch
+aroused a vengeful spirit in me by stinging or biting. I should say,
+looking back calmly upon the matter, that 75 per cent. of West African
+insects sting, 5 per cent. bite, and the rest are either permanently or
+temporarily parasitic on the human race. And undoubtedly one of the many
+worst things you can do in West Africa is to take any notice of an
+insect. If you see a thing that looks like a cross between a flying
+lobster and the figure of Abraxas on<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span> a Gnostic gem, do not pay it the
+least attention, never mind where it is; just keep quiet and hope it
+will go away&mdash;for that&rsquo;s your best chance; you have none in a stand-up
+fight with a good thorough-going African insect. Well do I remember, at
+Cabinda, the way insects used to come in round the hanging lamp at
+dinner time. Mosquitoes were pretty bad there, not so bad as in some
+other places, but sufficient, and after them hawking came a cloud of
+dragon-flies, swishing in front of every one&rsquo;s face, which was worrying
+till you got used to it. Ever and anon a big beetle, with a terrific
+boom on, would sweep in, go two or three times round the room and then
+flop into the soup plate, out of that, shake himself like a retriever
+and bang into some one&rsquo;s face, then flop on the floor. Orders were then
+calmly but firmly given to the steward boys to &ldquo;catch &rsquo;em;&rdquo; down on the
+floor went the boys, and an exciting hunt took place which sometimes
+ended in a capture of the offender, but always seemed to irritate a
+previously quiet insect population who forthwith declared war on the
+human species, and fastened on to the nearest leg. It is best, as I have
+said, to leave insects alone. Of course you cannot ignore driver ants,
+they won&rsquo;t go away, but the same principle reversed is best for them,
+namely, your going away yourself.</p>
+
+<p>One way and another we talked a good deal of insects as well as fever on
+the &mdash;&mdash;, but she herself was fairly free from these until she got a
+chance of shipping; then, of course, she did her best&mdash;with the flea
+line at Canary, mixed assortment at Sierra Leone, scorpions and
+centipedes in the Timber ports, heavy cargo of the beetle and
+mangrove-fly line, with mosquitoes for dunnage, in the Oil Rivers; it
+was not till she reached Congo&mdash;but of that anon.</p>
+
+<p>We duly reached Canary. This port I had been to the pre<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span>vious year on a
+Castle liner, having, in those remote and dark ages, been taught to
+believe that Liverpool boats were to be avoided; I was, so far, in a
+state of mere transition of opinion from this view to the one I at
+present hold, namely, that Liverpool West African boats are quite the
+most perfect things in their way, and, at any rate, good enough for me.</p>
+
+<p>I need not discourse on the Grand Canary; there are many better
+descriptions of that lovely island, and likewise of its sister,
+Teneriffe, than I could give you. I could, indeed give you an account of
+these islands, particularly &ldquo;when a West Coast boat is in from South,&rdquo;
+that would show another side of the island life; but I forbear, because
+it would, perhaps, cause you to think ill of the West Coaster unjustly;
+for the West Coaster, when he lands on the island of the Grand Canary,
+homeward bound, and realises he has a good reasonable chance to see his
+home and England again, is not in a normal state, and prone to fall
+under the influence of excitement, and display emotions that he would
+not dream of either on the West Coast itself or in England. Indeed, it
+is not too much to say that on the Canary Islands a good deal of the
+erroneous prejudice against West Africa is formed; but this is not the
+place to go into details on the subject.</p>
+
+<p>It was not until we left Canary that my fellow passengers on the &mdash;&mdash;
+realised that I was going to &ldquo;the Coast.&rdquo; They had most civilly bidden
+me good-bye when they were ashore on the morning of our arrival at Las
+Palmas; and they were surprised at my presence on board at dinner, as
+attentive to their conversation as ever. They explained that they had
+regarded me at first as a lady missionary, until my failure, during a
+Sunday service in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span> the Bay of Biscay, to rescue it from the dire
+confusion into which it had been thrown by an esteemed and able officer
+and a dutiful but inexperienced Purser caused them to regard me as only
+a very early visitor to Canary. Now they required explanation. I said I
+was interested in Natural History. &ldquo;Botany,&rdquo; they said, &ldquo;They had known
+some men who had come out from Kew, but they were all dead now.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 650px;" id="IMG031A"><span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span>
+<img src="images/ill-031a.jpg" width="650" height="462" alt="ill-031a.jpg" title="Santa Cruz, Teneriffe" />
+<p><span class="facingleft">[<i>To face page 12.</i></span></p>
+<span class="caption"><span class="smcap">Santa Cruz, Teneriffe.</span></span>
+</div>
+
+<p>I denied a connection with Kew, and in order to give an air of
+definiteness to my intentions, remembering I had been instructed that
+&ldquo;one of the worst things you can do in West Africa is to be indefinite,&rdquo;
+I said I was interested in the South Antarctic Drift&mdash;I was in those
+days.</p>
+
+<p>They promptly fell into the pit of error that this was a gold mine
+speculation, and said they had &ldquo;never heard of such a mine.&rdquo; I attempted
+to extricate them from this idea, and succeeded, except with a deaf
+gentleman who kept on sweeping into the conversation with yarns and
+opinions on gold mines in West Africa and the awful mortality among
+people who attended to such things, which naturally led to a prolonged
+discussion ending in a general resolution that people who had anything
+to do with gold mines generally died rather quicker even than men from
+Kew. Indeed, it took me days to get myself explained, and when it was
+accomplished I found I had nearly got myself regarded as a lunatic to go
+to West Africa for such reasons. But fortunately for me, and for many
+others who have ventured into this kingdom, the West African merchants
+are good-hearted, hospitable English gentlemen, who seem to feel it
+their duty that no harm they can prevent should happen to any one; and
+my first friends, among them my fellow passengers on the &mdash;&mdash;, failing
+in inducing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span> me to return from Sierra Leone, which they strongly
+advised, did their best to save me by means of education. The things
+they thought I &ldquo;really ought to know&rdquo; would make wild reading if
+published in extenso. Led by the kindest and most helpful of captains,
+they poured in information, and I acquired a taste for &ldquo;facts&rdquo;&mdash;any sort
+of facts about anything&mdash;a taste when applied to West African facts,
+that I fancy ranks with that for collecting venomous serpents; but to my
+listening to everything that was told me by my first instructors, and
+believing in it, undoubtedly I have often owed my life, and countless
+times have been enabled to steer neatly through shoaly circumstances
+ashore.</p>
+
+<p>Our captain was not a man who would deliberately alarm a new comer, or
+shock any one, particularly a lady; indeed, he deliberately attempted to
+avoid so doing. He held it wrong to dwell on the dark side of Coast
+life, he said, &ldquo;because youngsters going out were frequently so
+frightened on board the boats that they died as soon as they got on
+shore of the first cold they got in the head, thinking it was Yellow
+Jack&rdquo;; so he always started conversation at meal times with anecdotes of
+his early years on an ancestral ranch in America. One great charm about
+&ldquo;facts&rdquo; is that you never know but what they may come in useful; so I
+eagerly got up a quantity of very strange information on the conduct of
+the American cow. He would then wander away among the China Seas or the
+Indian Ocean, and I could pass an examination on the social habits of
+captains of sailing vessels that ran to Bombay in old days. Sometimes
+the discourse visited the South American ports, and I took on
+information that will come in very handy should I ever find myself
+wander<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span>ing about the streets of Callao after dark, searching for a
+tavern. But the turn that serious conversation always drifted into was
+the one that interested me most, that relating to the Coast.
+Particularly interesting were those tales of the old times and the men
+who first established the palm oil trade. They were, many of them, men
+who had been engaged in the slave trade, and on the suppression thereof
+they turned their attention to palm oil, to which end their knowledge of
+the locality and of the native chiefs and their commercial methods was
+of the greatest help. Their ideas were possibly not those at present in
+fashion, but the courage and enterprise those men displayed under the
+most depressing and deadly conditions made me proud of being a woman of
+the nation that turned out the &ldquo;Palm oil ruffians&rdquo;&mdash;Drake, Hawkins, the
+two Roberts, Frobisher, and Hudson&mdash;it is as good as being born a
+foreign gentleman.</p>
+
+<p>There was one of these old coasters of the palm oil ruffian type who
+especially interested me. He is dead now. For the matter of that he died
+at a mature age the year I was born, and I am in hopes of collecting
+facts sufficient to enable me to publish his complete biography. He
+lived up a creek, threw boots at leopards, and &ldquo;had really swell
+spittoons, you know, shaped like puncheons, and bound with brass.&rdquo; I am
+sure it is unnecessary for me to mention his name.</p>
+
+<p>Two of the old Coasters never spoke unless they had something useful and
+improving to say. They were Scotch; indeed, most of us were that trip,
+and I often used to wonder if the South Atlantic Ocean were broad enough
+for the accent of the &ldquo;a,&rdquo; or whether strange sounds would ever worry
+and alarm Central America and the Brazils.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span> For general social purposes
+these silent ones used coughs, and the one whose seat was always next to
+mine at table kept me in a state of much anxiety, for I used to turn
+round, after having been riveted to the captain&rsquo;s conversation for
+minutes, and find him holding some dish for me to help myself from; he
+never took the least notice of my apologies, and I felt he had made up
+his mind that, if I did it again, he should take me by the scruff of my
+neck some night and drop me overboard. He was an alarmingly powerfully
+built man, and I quite understood the local African tribe wishing to
+have him for a specimen. Some short time before he had left for home
+last trip, they had attempted to acquire his head for their local ju ju
+house, from mixed æsthetic and religious reasons. In a way, it was
+creditable of them, I suppose, for it would have caused them grave
+domestic inconvenience to have removed thereby at one fell swoop, their
+complete set of tradesmen; and as a fellow collector of specimens I am
+bound to admit the soundness of their methods of collecting! Wishing for
+this gentleman&rsquo;s head they shot him in the legs. I have never gone in
+for collecting specimens of hominidae but still a recital of the
+incident did not fire me with a desire to repeat their performance;
+indeed, so discouraged was I by their failure that I hesitated about
+asking him for his skeleton when he had quite done with it, though it
+was gall and wormwood to think of a really fine thing like that falling
+into the hands of another collector.</p>
+
+<p>The run from Canary to Sierra Leone takes about a week. That part of it
+which lies in the track of the N.E. Trade Winds, <i>i.e.</i>, from Canary to
+Cape Verde, makes you believe Mr. Kipling when he sang<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">&ldquo;There are many ways to take</span><br />
+<span class="i4">Of the eagle and the snake,</span><br />
+<span class="i4">And the way of a man with a maid;</span><br />
+<span class="i4">But the sweetest way for me</span><br />
+<span class="i4">Is a ship upon the sea</span><br />
+<span class="i4">On the track of the North-East trade.&rdquo;</span><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p>was displaying, gracefully, a sensible choice of things; but you only
+feel this outward bound to the West Coast. When you come up from the
+Coast, fever stricken, homeward bound, you think otherwise. I do not
+mean to say that owing to a disintegrating moral effect of West Africa
+you wish to pursue the other ways mentioned in the stanza, but you do
+wish the Powers above would send that wind to the Powers below and get
+it warmed. Alas! it is in this Trade Wind zone that most men die, coming
+up from the Coast sick with fever, and it is to the blame of the Trade
+Wind that you see obituary notices&mdash;&ldquo;of fever after leaving Sierra
+Leone.&rdquo; Nevertheless, outward bound the thing is delightful, and
+dreadfully you feel its loss when you have run through it as you close
+in to the African land by Cape Verde. At any rate I did; and I began to
+believe every bad thing I had ever heard of West Africa, and straightway
+said to myself, what every man has said to himself who has gone there
+since Hanno of Carthage, &ldquo;Why was I such a fool as to come to such an
+awful place?&rdquo; It is the first meeting with the hot breath of the Bights
+that tries one; it is the breath of Death himself to many. You feel when
+first you meet it you have done with all else; not alone is it hot, but
+it smells&mdash;smells like nothing else. It does not smell all it can then;
+by and by, down in the Rivers, you get its perfection, but off Cape
+Verde you have to ask yourself, &ldquo;Can I live in this or no?&rdquo; and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span> you
+have to leave it, like all other such questions, to Allah, and go on.</p>
+
+<p>We passed close in to Cape Verde, which consists of rounded hills having
+steep bases to the sea. From these bases runs out a low, long strip of
+sandy soil, which is the true cape. Beyond, under water, runs out the
+dangerous Almadia reef, on which were still, in &rsquo;93, to be seen the
+remains of the <i>Port Douglas</i>, who was wrecked there on her way to
+Australia in &rsquo;92. Her passengers were got ashore and most kindly treated
+by the French officers of Senegal; and finally, to the great joy and
+relief of their rescuers the said passengers were fetched away by an
+English vessel, and taken to what England said was their destination and
+home, Australia, but what France regarded as merely a stage on their
+journey to hell, to which port they had plainly been consigned.</p>
+
+<p>It was just south of Cape Verde that I met my first tornado. The weather
+had been wet in violent showers all the morning and afternoon. Our old
+Coasters took but little notice of it, resigning themselves to
+saturation without a struggle, previous experience having taught them it
+was the best thing to do, dryness being an unattainable state during the
+wet season, and &ldquo;worrying one&rsquo;s self about anything one of the worst
+things you can do in West Africa.&rdquo; So they sat on deck calmly smoking,
+their new flannel suits, which were donned after leaving the trade
+winds, shrinking, and their colours running on to the other deck,
+uncriticised even by the First officer. He was charging about shouting
+directions and generally making that afternoon such a wild, hurrying
+fuss about &ldquo;getting in awnings,&rdquo; &ldquo;tricing up all loose gear,&rdquo; such as
+deck chairs, and so on, to permanent parts of the &mdash;&mdash;, that, as nothing
+beyond<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span> showers had happened, and there was no wind, I began to feel
+most anxious about his mental state. But I soon saw that this activity
+was the working of a practical prophetic spirit in the man, and these
+alarms and excursions of his arose from a knowledge of what that low
+arch of black cloud coming off the land meant.</p>
+
+<p>We were surrounded by a wild, strange sky. Indeed, there seemed to be
+two skies, one upper, and one lower; for parts of it were showing
+evidences of terrific activity, others of a sublime, utterly indifferent
+calm. At one part of our horizon were great columns of black cloud,
+expanding and coalescing at their capitals. These were mounted on a
+background of most exquisite pale green. Away to leeward was a gigantic
+black cloud-mountain, across whose vast face were bands and wreaths of
+delicate white and silver clouds, and from whose grim depths every few
+seconds flashed palpitating, fitful, livid lightnings. Striding towards
+us came across the sea the tornado, lashing it into spray mist with the
+tremendous artillery of its rain, and shaking the air with its own
+thunder-growls. Away to windward leisurely boomed and grumbled a third
+thunderstorm, apparently not addressing the tornado but the
+cloud-mountain, while in between these phenomena wandered strange, wild
+winds, made out of lost souls frightened and wailing to be let back into
+Hell, or taken care of somehow by some one. This sort of thing naturally
+excited the sea, and all together excited the &mdash;&mdash;, who, not being built
+so much for the open and deep sea as for the shoal bars of West African
+rivers, made the most of it.</p>
+
+<p>In a few seconds the wind of the tornado struck us, screaming through
+the rigging, eager for awnings or any loose gear, but foiled of its prey
+by the First officer, who<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> stood triumphantly on a heap of them, like a
+defiant hen guarding her chickens.</p>
+
+<p>Some one really ought to write a monograph on the natural history of
+mariners. They are valuable beings, and their habits are exceedingly
+interesting. I myself, being already engaged in the study of other
+organisms, cannot undertake the work; however, I place my observations
+at the disposal of any fellow naturalist who may have more time, and
+certainly will have more ability.</p>
+
+<p>The sailor officer (<i>Nauta pelagius vel officinalis</i>) is metamorphic.
+The stage at which the specimen you may be observing has arrived is
+easily determined by the band of galoon round his coat cuff; in the
+English form the number of gold stripes increasing in direct ratio with
+rank. The galoon markings of the foreign species are frequently merely
+decorative, and in many foreign varieties only conditioned by the extent
+of surface available to display them and the ability of the individual
+to acquire the galoon wherewith to decorate himself.</p>
+
+<p>The English third officer, you will find, has one stripe, the second
+two, the first three, and the <i>imago</i>, or captain, four, the upper one
+having a triumphant twist at the top.</p>
+
+<p>You may observe, perhaps, about the ship sub-varieties, having a red
+velvet, or a white or blue velvet band on the coat cuff; these are
+respectively the Doctor, Purser, and Chief engineer; but with these
+sub-varieties I will not deal now, they are not essentially marine
+organisms, but akin to the amphibia.</p>
+
+<p>The metamorphosis is as clearly marked in the individual as in the
+physical characteristics. A third officer is a hard-working individual
+who has to do any<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span> thing that the other officers do not feel inclined
+to, and therefore rarely has time to wash. He in course of time becomes
+second officer, and the slave of the hatch. During this period of his
+metamorphosis he feels no compunction whatever in hauling out and
+dumping on the deck burst bacon barrels or leaking lime casks, actions
+which, when he reaches the next stage of development, he will regard as
+undistinguishable in a moral point of view from a compound commission of
+the seven deadly sins. For the deck, be it known, is to the First
+officer the most important thing in the cosmogony, and there is probably
+nothing he would not sacrifice to its complexion. One that I had the
+pleasure of knowing once lamented to me that he was not allowed by his
+then owners to spread a layer of ripe pineapples upon his precious idol,
+and let them be well trampled in and then lie a few hours, for this he
+assured me gave a most satisfactory bloom to a deck&rsquo;s complexion. Yet
+when this same man becomes a captain and grows another stripe round his
+cuffs, he no longer takes an active part in the ship&rsquo;s household
+affairs, that is his First officer&rsquo;s business, the ship&rsquo;s husband&rsquo;s
+affair; and should he have an inefficient First the captain expects Men
+and Nations to sympathise with him, just as a lady expects to be
+sympathised with over a bad housemaid.</p>
+
+<p>There are, however, two habits which are constant to all the species
+through each stage of transformation from roustabout to captain. One is
+a love of painting. I have never known an officer or captain who could
+pass a paint-pot, with the brush sticking temptingly out, without
+emotion. While, as for Jack, the happiest hours he knows seemingly are
+those he spends sitting on a slung plank over the side of his ocean
+home, with his bare feet dangling a few feet above<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span> the water as
+tempting bait for sharks, and the tropical sun blazing down on him and
+reflected back at him from the iron ship&rsquo;s side and from the oily ocean
+beneath. Then he carols forth his amorous lay, and shouts, &ldquo;Bill, pass
+that paint-pot&rdquo; in his jolliest tones. It is very rarely that a black
+seaman is treated to a paint-pot; all they are allowed to do is to knock
+off the old stuff, which they do in the nerveless way the African does
+most handicraft. The greatest dissipation of the black hands department
+consists in being allowed to knock the old stuff off the steam-pipe
+covers, donkey, and funnel. This is a delicious occupation, because,
+firstly, you can usually sit while doing it, and secondly, you can make
+a deafening din and sing to it.</p>
+
+<p>The other habit and the more widely known is the animistic view your
+seaman takes of Nature. Every article that is to a landsman an article
+and nothing more, is to him an individual with a will and mind of his
+own. I myself believe there is something in it. I feel sure that a
+certain hawser on board the &mdash;&mdash; had a weird influence on the minds of
+all men who associated with it. It was used at Liverpool coming out of
+dock, but owing to the absence of harbours on the Coast it was not
+required again until it tied our ocean liner up to a tree stump at Boma,
+on the Congo. Nevertheless it didn&rsquo;t suit that hawser&rsquo;s views to be down
+below in the run and see nothing of life. It insisted on remaining on
+deck, and the officers gave in to it and said &ldquo;Well, perhaps it was
+better so, it would rot if it went down below,&rdquo; so some days it abode on
+the quarter-deck, some days on the main, and now and again it would
+condescend to lie on the fo&rsquo;castle, head in the sun. It had too its
+varying moods of tidiness, now neat and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span> dandy coiled, now dishevelled
+and slummocky after association with the Kru boys.</p>
+
+<p>It is almost unnecessary to remark that the relationship between the
+First officer and the Chief engineer is rarely amicable. I certainly did
+once hear a First officer pray especially for a Chief engineer all to
+himself under his breath at a Sunday service; but I do not feel certain
+that this was a display of true affection. I am bound to admit that &ldquo;the
+engineer is messy,&rdquo; which is magnanimous of me, because I had almost
+always a row of some kind on with the First officer, owing to other
+people upsetting my ink on his deck, whereas I have never fallen out
+with an engineer&mdash;on the contrary, two Chief engineers are amongst the
+most valued friends I possess.</p>
+
+<p>The worst of it is that no amount of experience will drive it into the
+head of the First officer that the engineer will want coal&mdash;particularly
+and exactly when the ship has just been thoroughly scrubbed and painted
+to go into port. I have not been at sea so long as many officers, yet I
+know that you might as well try and get a confirmed dipsomaniac past a
+grog shop as the engineer past, say the Canary Coaling Company; indeed
+he seems to smell the Dakar coal, and hankers after it when passing it
+miles out to sea. Then, again, if the engineer is allowed to have a coal
+deposit in the forehold it is a fresh blow and grief to the First
+officer to find he likes to take them as Mrs. Gamp did her stimulant,
+when she &ldquo;feels dispoged,&rdquo; whether the deck has just been washed down or
+no.</p>
+
+<p>The cook, although he always has a blood feud on with the engineer
+concerning coals for the galley fire, which should endear him to the
+First officer, is morally a greater trial to the First than he is to his
+other victims. You<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span> see the cook has a grease tub, and what that means
+to the deck in a high sea is too painful to describe. So I leave the
+First officer with his pathetic and powerful appeals to the immortal
+gods to be told why it is his fate to be condemned to this &ldquo;dog&rsquo;s life
+on a floating Hanwell lunatic asylum,&rdquo; commending him to the sympathetic
+consideration of all good housewives, for only they can understand what
+that dear good man goes through.</p>
+
+<p>After we passed Cape Verde we ran into the West African wet season rain
+sheet. There ought to be some other word than rain for that sort of
+thing. We have to stiffen this poor substantive up with adjectives, even
+for use with our own thunderstorms, and as is the morning dew to our
+heaviest thunder &ldquo;torrential downpour of rain,&rdquo; so is that to the rain
+of the wet season in West Africa. For weeks it came down on us that
+voyage in one swishing, rushing cataract of water. The interspaces
+between the pipes of water&mdash;for it did not go into details with
+drops&mdash;were filled with gray mist, and as this rain struck the sea it
+kicked up such a water dust that you saw not the surface of the sea
+round you, but only a mist sea gliding by. It seemed as though we had
+left the clear cut world and entered into a mist universe. Sky, air, and
+sea were all the same, as our vessel swept on in one plane, just because
+she capriciously preferred it. Many days we could not see twenty yards
+from the ship. Once or twice another vessel would come out of the mist
+ahead, slogging past us into the mist behind, visible in our little
+water world for a few minutes only as a misty thing, and then we
+leisurely tramped on alone &ldquo;o&rsquo;er the viewless, hueless deep,&rdquo; with our
+horizon alongside.</p>
+
+<p>If you cleared your mind of all prejudice the thing was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span> really not
+uncomfortable, and it seemed restful to the mind. As I used to be
+sitting on deck every one who came across me would say, &ldquo;Wet, isn&rsquo;t it?
+Well, you see this is the wet season on the Coast&rdquo;&mdash;or, &ldquo;Damp, isn&rsquo;t it?
+Well, you see this is the wet season on the Coast&rdquo;&mdash;and then they went
+away, and, I believe slept for hours exhausted by their educational
+efforts. After this they would come on deck and sit in their respective
+chairs, smoking, save that irrepressible deaf gentleman, who spent his
+time squirrel like between vivid activity and complete quiescence. You
+might pass the smoking room door and observe the soles of his shoes
+sticking out off the end of the settee with an air of perfect restful
+calm hovering over them, as if the owner were hibernating for the next
+six months. Within two minutes after this an uproar on the poop would
+inform the experienced ear that he was up and about again, and had found
+some one asleep on a chair and attacked him.</p>
+
+<p>It was during one of these days, furnishing reminiscences of Noah&rsquo;s
+flood, that conversation turned suddenly on Driver ants. One of the
+silent men, who had been sitting for an hour or so, with a countenance
+indicative of a contemplative acceptance of the penitential psalms,
+roused by one of the deaf man&rsquo;s rows, observed, &ldquo;Paraffin is good for
+Driver ants.&rdquo; &ldquo;Oh,&rdquo; said the deaf gentleman as he sat suddenly down on
+my ink-pot, which, for my convenience, was on a chair, &ldquo;you wait till
+you get them up your legs, or sit down among them, as I saw Smith, when
+he was tired clearing bush. They took the tire out of him, he live for
+scratch one time. Smith was a pocket circus. You should have seen him
+get clear of his divided skirt. Oh lor! what price paraffin?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The conversation on the Driver ant now became general.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span> As far as I
+remember, Mr. Burnand, who in <i>Happy Thoughts</i> and <i>My Health</i>, gave
+much information, curious and interesting, on earwigs and wasps, omitted
+this interesting insect. So, perhaps, a <i>précis</i> of the information I
+obtained may be interesting. I learnt that the only thing to do when you
+have got them on you is to adopt the course of action pursued by Brer
+Fox on that occasion when he was left to himself enough to go and buy
+ointment from Brer Rabbit, namely, make &ldquo;a burst for the creek,&rdquo; water
+being the quickest thing to make them leave go. Unfortunately, the first
+time I had occasion to apply this short and easy method with the ant was
+when I was strolling about by Bell-Town with a white gentleman and his
+wife, and we strolled into Drivers. There were only two water-barrels in
+the vicinity, and my companions, being more active than myself, occupied
+them.</p>
+
+<p>While in West Africa you should always keep an eye lifting for Drivers.
+You can start doing it as soon as you land, which will postpone the
+catastrophe, not avoid it; for the song of the West Coaster to his enemy
+is truly, &ldquo;Some day, some day, some day I shall meet you; Love, I know
+not when nor how.&rdquo; Perhaps, therefore, this being so, and watchfulness a
+strain when done deliberately, and worrying one of the worst things you
+can do in West Africa, it may be just as well for you to let things
+slide down the time-stream until Fate sends a column of the wretches up
+your legs. This experience will remain &ldquo;indelibly limned on the tablets
+of your mind when a yesterday has faded from its page,&rdquo; or, as the
+modern school of psychologists would have it, &ldquo;The affair will be
+brought to the notice of your sublimated consciousness, and that part of
+your mind will watch for Drivers without<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> worrying you, and an automatic
+habit will be induced that will cause you never to let more than one eye
+roam spell-bound over the beauties of the African landscape; the other
+will keep fixed, turned to the soil at your feet.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The Driver is of the species <i>Ponera</i>, and is generally referred to the
+species <i>anomma arcens</i>. The females and workers of these ants are
+provided with stings as well as well-developed jaws. They work both for
+all they are worth, driving the latter into your flesh, enthusiastically
+up to the hilt; they then remain therein, keeping up irritation when you
+have hastily torn their owner off in response to a sensation that is
+like that of red hot pinchers. The full-grown worker is about half an
+inch long, and without ocelli even. Yet one of the most remarkable among
+his many crimes is that he will always first attack the eyes of any
+victim. These creatures seem to have no settled home; no man has seen
+the beginning or end, as far as I know, of one of their long trains. As
+you are watching the ground you see a ribbon of glistening black, one
+portion of it lost in one clump of vegetation, the other in another, and
+on looking closer you see that it is an <i>acies instituta</i> of Driver
+ants. If you stir the column up with a stick they make a peculiar
+fizzing noise, and open out in all directions in search of the enemy,
+which you take care they don&rsquo;t find.</p>
+
+<p>These ants are sometimes also called &ldquo;visiting ants,&rdquo; from their habit
+of calling in quantities at inconvenient hours on humanity. They are
+fond of marching at night, and drop in on your house usually after you
+have gone to bed. I fancy, however, they are about in the daytime as
+well, even in the brightest weather; but it is certain that it is in
+dull, wet weather, and after dusk, that you come<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span> across them most on
+paths and open spaces. At other times and hours they make their way
+among the tangled ground vegetation.</p>
+
+<p>Their migrations are infinite, and they create some of the most
+brilliant sensations that occur in West Africa, replacing to the English
+exile there his lost burst water pipes of winter, and such like things,
+while they enforce healthy and brisk exercise upon the African.</p>
+
+<p>I will not enter into particulars about the customary white man&rsquo;s method
+of receiving a visit of Drivers, those methods being alike ineffective
+and accompanied by dreadful language. Barricading the house with a rim
+of red hot ashes, or a river of burning paraffin, merely adds to the
+inconvenience and endangers the establishment.</p>
+
+<p>The native method with the Driver ant is different: one minute there
+will be peace in the simple African home, the heavy-scented hot night
+air broken only by the rhythmic snores and automatic side slaps of the
+family, accompanied outside by a chorus of cicadas and bull frogs. Enter
+the Driver&mdash;the next moment that night is thick with hurrying black
+forms, little and big, for the family, accompanied by rats, cockroaches,
+snakes, scorpions, centipedes, and huge spiders animated by the one
+desire to get out of the visitors&rsquo; way, fall helter skelter into the
+street, where they are joined by the rest of the inhabitants of the
+village, for the ants when they once start on a village usually make a
+regular house-to-house visitation. I mixed myself up once in a
+delightful knockabout farce near Kabinda, and possibly made the biggest
+fool of myself I ever did. I was in a little village, and out of a hut
+came the owner and his family and all the household parasites pell mell,
+leaving the Drivers in possession; but the mother and father of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span>
+family, when they recovered from this unwonted burst of activity, showed
+such a lively concern, and such unmistakable signs of anguish at having
+left something behind them in the hut, that I thought it must be the
+baby. Although not a family man myself, the idea of that innocent infant
+perishing in such an appalling manner roused me to action, and I joined
+the frenzied group, crying, &ldquo;Where him live?&rdquo; &ldquo;In him far corner for
+floor!&rdquo; shrieked the distracted parents, and into that hut I charged.
+Too true! There in the corner lay the poor little thing, a mere inert
+black mass, with hundreds of cruel Drivers already swarming upon it. To
+seize it and give it to the distracted mother was, as the reporter would
+say, &ldquo;the work of an instant.&rdquo; She gave a cry of joy and dropped it
+instantly into a water barrel, where her husband held it down with a
+hoe, chuckling contentedly. Shiver not, my friend, at the callousness of
+the Ethiopian; that there thing wasn&rsquo;t an infant&mdash;it was a ham!</p>
+
+<p>These ants clear a house completely of all its owner&rsquo;s afflictions in
+the way of vermin, killing and eating all they can get hold of. They
+will also make short work of any meat they come across, but don&rsquo;t care
+about flour or biscuits. Like their patron Mephistopheles, however, they
+do not care for carrion, nor do they destroy furniture or stuffs. Indeed
+they are typically West African, namely, good and bad mixed. In a few
+hours they leave the house again on their march through the Ewigkeit,
+which they enliven with criminal proceedings. Yet in spite of the
+advantage they confer on humanity, I believe if the matter were put to
+the human vote, Africa would decide to do without the Driver ant.
+Mankind has never been sufficiently grateful to its charwomen, like
+these insect equivalents, who<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span> do their tidying up at supremely
+inconvenient times. I remember an incident at one place in the Lower
+Congo where I had been informed that &ldquo;cork fever&rdquo; was epidemic in a
+severe form among the white population. I was returning to quarters from
+a beetle hunt, in pouring rain; it was as it often is, &ldquo;the wet season,&rdquo;
+&amp;c., when I saw a European gentleman about twenty yards from his
+comfortable-looking house seated on a chair, clad in a white cotton
+suit, umbrellaless, and with the water running off him as if he was in a
+douche bath. I had never seen a case of cork fever, but I had heard such
+marvellous and quaint tales of its symptoms that I thought&mdash;well,
+perhaps, anyhow, I would not open up conversation. To my remorse he
+said, as I passed him, &ldquo;Drivers.&rdquo; Inwardly apologising, I outwardly
+commiserated him, and we discoursed. It was on this occasion that I saw
+a mantis, who is by way of being a very pretty pirate on his own
+account, surrounded by a mob of the blind hurrying Drivers who, I may
+remark, always attack like Red Indians in open order. That mantis
+perfectly well knew his danger, but was as cool as a cucumber, keeping
+quite quiet and lifting his legs out of the way of the blind enemies
+around him. But the chances of keeping six legs going clear, for long,
+among such brutes without any of them happening on one, were small, even
+though he only kept three on the ground at one time. So, being a devotee
+of personal courage, I rescued him&mdash;whereupon he bit me for my pains.
+Why didn&rsquo;t he fly? How can you fly, I should like to know, unless you
+have a jumping off place?</p>
+
+<p>Drivers are indeed dreadful. I was at one place where there had been a
+white gentleman and a birthday party in the evening; he stumbled on his
+way home and went<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span> to sleep by the path side, and in the morning there
+was only a white gentleman&rsquo;s skeleton and clothes.</p>
+
+<p>However, I will dwell no more on them now. Wretches that they are, they
+have even in spirit pursued me to England, causing a critic to observe
+that <i>brevi spatio interjecto</i> is my only Latin, whereas the matter is
+this. I was once in distinguished society in West Africa that included
+other ladies. We had a distinguished native gentleman, who had had an
+European education, come to tea with us. The conversation turned on
+Drivers, for one of the ladies had the previous evening had her house
+invaded by them at midnight. She snatched up a blanket, wrapped herself
+round with it, unfortunately allowed one corner thereof to trail,
+whereby it swept up Drivers, and awful scenes followed. Then our visitor
+gave us many reminiscences of his own, winding up with one wherein he
+observed &ldquo;<i>brevi spatio interjecto</i>, ladies; off came my breeches.&rdquo;
+After this we ladies all naturally used this phrase to describe rapid
+action.</p>
+
+<p>There is another ant, which is commonly called the red Driver, but it is
+quite distinct from the above-mentioned black species. It is an
+unwholesome-looking, watery-red thing with long legs, and it abides
+among trees and bushes. An easy way of obtaining specimens of this ant
+is to go under a mango or other fruit tree and throw your cap at the
+fruit. You promptly get as many of these insects as the most ardent
+naturalist could desire, its bite being every bit as bad as that of the
+black Driver.</p>
+
+<p>These red ones build nests with the leaves of the tree they reside on.
+The leaves are stuck together with what looks like spiders&rsquo; webs. I have
+seen these nests the size of an apple, and sent a large one to the
+British Museum,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span> but I have been told of many larger nests than I have
+seen. These ants, unfortunately for me who share the taste, are
+particularly devoted to the fruit of the rubber vine, and also to that
+of a poisonous small-leaved creeping plant that bears the most
+disproportionately-sized spiny, viscid, yellow fruit. It is very
+difficult to come across specimens of either of these fruits that have
+not been eaten away by the red Driver.</p>
+
+<p>It is a very fascinating thing to see the strange devices employed by
+many kinds of young seedlings and saplings to keep off these evidently
+unpopular tenants. They chiefly consist in having a sheath of
+exceedingly slippery surface round the lower part of the stem, which the
+ants slide off when they attempt to climb. I used to spend hours
+watching these affairs. You would see an ant dash for one of these
+protected stems as if he were a City man and his morning train on the
+point of starting from the top of the plant stem. He would get up half
+an inch or so because of the dust round the bottom helping him a bit,
+then, getting no holding-ground, off he would slip, and falling on his
+back, desperately kick himself right side up, and go at it again as if
+he had heard the bell go, only to meet with a similar rebuff. The plants
+are most forbearing teachers, and their behaviour in every way a credit
+to them. I hope that they may in time have a moral and educational
+effect on this overrated insect, enabling him to realise how wrong it is
+for him to force himself where he is not welcome; but a few more
+thousand years, I fear, will elapse before the ant is anything but a
+chuckleheaded, obstinate wretch. Nothing nowadays but his happening to
+fall off with his head in the direction of some other vegetable frees
+the slippery plant from his attempts. To<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span> this other something off he
+rushes, and if it happens to be a plant that does not mind him up he
+goes, and I have no doubt congratulates himself on having carried out
+his original intentions, understanding the world, not being the man to
+put up with nonsense and all that sort of thing, whereas it is the plant
+that manages him. Some plants don&rsquo;t mind ants knocking about among the
+grown-up leaves, but will not have them with the infants, and so cover
+their young stuff with a fur or down wherewith the ant can do nothing.
+Others, again, keep him and feed him with sweetstuff so that he should
+keep off other enemies from its fruit, &amp;c. But I have not space to sing
+in full the high intelligence of West African vegetation, and I am no
+botanist; yet one cannot avoid being struck by it, it is so manifold and
+masterly.</p>
+
+<p>Before closing these observations I must just mention that tiny,
+sandy-coloured abomination <i>Myriaica molesta</i>. In South West Africa it
+swarms, giving a quaint touch to domestic arrangements. No reckless
+putting down of basin, tin, or jam-pot there, least of all of the
+sugar-basin, unless the said sugar-basin is one of those commonly used
+in those parts, of rough, violet-coloured glass, with a similar lid.
+Since I left South West Africa I have read some interesting observations
+of Sir John Lubbock&rsquo;s on the dislike of ants to violet colour. I wonder
+if the Portuguese of Angola observed it long ago and adopted violet
+glass for basins, or was it merely accidental and empirical. I suspect
+the latter, or they would use violet glass for other articles. As it is,
+everything eatable in a house there is completely insulated in
+water&mdash;moats of water with a dash of vinegar in it&mdash;to guard it from the
+ants from below; to guard from the ants from above, the same<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> breed and
+not a bit better. Eatables are kept in swinging safes at the end of coir
+rope recently tarred. But when, in spite of these precautions, or from
+the neglect of them, you find, say your sugar, a brown, busy mass, just
+stand it in the full glare of the sun. Sun is a thing no ant likes, I
+believe, and it is particularly distasteful to ants with pale
+complexions; and so you can see them tear themselves away from their
+beloved sugar and clear off into a Hyde Park meeting smitten by a
+thunderstorm.</p>
+
+<p>This kind of ant, or a nearly allied species, is found in houses in
+England, where it is supposed they have been imported from the Brazils
+or West Indies in 1828. Possibly the Brazils got it from South West
+Africa, with which they have had a trade since the sixteenth century,
+most of the Brazil slaves coming out of Congo. It is unlikely that the
+importation was the other way about; for exotic things, whether plants
+or animals, do not catch on in Western Africa as they do in Australia.
+In the former land everything of the kind requires constant care to keep
+it going at all, and protect it from the terrific local circumstances.
+It is no use saying to animal or vegetable, &ldquo;there is room for all in
+Africa&rdquo;&mdash;for Africa, that is Africa properly so called&mdash;Equatorial West
+Africa, is full up with its own stuff now, crowded and fighting an
+internecine battle with the most marvellous adaptations to its
+environment.</p><hr class="chap" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II</h2>
+
+<h2>SIERRA LEONE AND ITS SURROUNDINGS</h2>
+
+<p class="pblock">Concerning the perils that beset the navigator in the Baixos of St.
+Ann, with some description of the country between the Sierra Leone
+and Cape Palmas and the reasons wherefrom it came to be called the
+Pepper, Grain, or Meleguetta Coast.</p>
+
+<p>It was late evening-time when the &mdash;&mdash; reached that part of the South
+Atlantic Ocean where previous experience and dead reckoning led our
+captain to believe that Sierra Leone existed. The weather was too thick
+to see ten yards from the ship, so he, remembering certain captains who,
+under similar circumstances, failing to pick up the light on Cape Sierra
+Leone, had picked up the Carpenter Rock with their keels instead, let go
+his anchor, and kept us rolling about outside until the morning came.
+Slipperty slop, crash! slipperty slop, crash! went all loose gear on
+board all the night long; and those of the passengers who went in for
+that sort of thing were ill from the change of motion. The mist, our
+world, went gently into grey, and then black, growing into a dense
+darkness filled with palpable, woolly, wet air, thicker far than it had
+been before. This, my instructors informed me, was caused by the
+admixture of the &ldquo;solid malaria coming off the land.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>However, morning came at last, and even I was on deck as it dawned, and
+was rewarded for my unwonted activity by a vision of beautiful, definite
+earth-form dramatically un<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span>veiled. No longer was the &mdash;&mdash; our only
+material world. The mist lifted itself gently off, as it seemed, out of
+the ocean, and then separated before the morning breeze; one great mass
+rolling away before us upwards, over the land, where portions of it
+caught amongst the forests of the mountains and stayed there all day,
+while another mass went leisurely away to the low Bullam shore, from
+whence it came again after sunset to join the mountain and the ocean
+mists as they drew down and in from the sea, helping them to wrap up
+Freetown, Sierra Leone and its lovely harbour for the night.</p>
+
+<p>It was with a thrill of joy that I looked on Freetown harbour for the
+first time in my life. I knew the place so well. Yes; there were all the
+bays, Kru, English and Pirate; and the mountains, whose thunder rumbling
+caused Pedro do Centra to call the place Sierra Leona when he discovered
+it in 1462. And had not my old friend, Charles Johnson, writing in 1724,
+given me all manner of information about it during those delicious hours
+rescued from school books and dedicated to a most contentious study of
+<i>A General History of Robberies and Murders of the most Notorious
+Pyrates</i>? That those bays away now on my right hand &ldquo;were safe and
+convenient for cleaning and watering;&rdquo; and so on and there rose up
+before my eyes a vision of the society ashore here in 1724 that lived
+&ldquo;very friendly with the natives&mdash;being thirty Englishmen in all; men who
+in some part of their lives had been either privateering, buccaneering,
+or pirating, and still retain and have the riots and humours common to
+that sort of life.&rdquo; Hard by, too, was Bence Island, where, according to
+Johnson, &ldquo;there lives an old fellow named <i>Crackers</i> (his true name he
+thinks fit to conceal), and who was formerly a noted buccaneer; he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span>
+keeps the best house in the place, has two or three guns before his door
+with which he salutes his friends the pyrates when they put in, and
+lives a jovial life with them all the while they are there.&rdquo; Alas! no
+use to me was the careful list old Johnson had given me of the
+residents. They were all dead now, and I could not go ashore and hunt up
+&ldquo;Peter Brown&rdquo; or &ldquo;John Jones,&rdquo; who had &ldquo;one long boat and an Irish young
+man.&rdquo; Social things were changed in Freetown, Sierra Leone; but only
+socially, for the old description of it is, as far as scenery goes,
+correct to-day, barring the town. Whether or no everything has changed
+for the better is not my business to discuss here, nor will I detain you
+with any description of the town, as I have already published one after
+several visits, with a better knowledge than I had on my first call
+there.</p>
+
+<p>On one of my subsequent visits I fell in with Sierra Leone receiving a
+shock. We were sitting, after a warm and interesting morning spent going
+about the town talking trade, in the low long pleasant room belonging to
+the Coaling Company whose windows looked out over an eventful warehouse
+yard; for therein abode a large dog-faced baboon, who shied stones and
+sticks at boys and any one who displeased him, pretty nearly as well as
+a Flintshire man. Also in the yard were a large consignment of kola nuts
+packed as usual in native-made baskets, called bilys, lined inside with
+the large leaves of a Ficus and our host was explaining to my mariner
+companions their crimes towards this cargo while they defended
+themselves with spirit. It seemed that this precious product if not kept
+on deck made a point of heating and then going mildewed; while, if you
+did keep it on deck, either the First officer&rsquo;s minions went fooling
+about it with the hose, which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> made it swell up and burst and ruined it,
+or left it in unmitigated sun, which shrivelled it&mdash;and so on. This led,
+naturally, to a general conversation on cargo between the mariners and
+the merchants, during which some dreadful things were said about the way
+matches arrived, in West Africa and other things, shipped at shipper&rsquo;s
+own risk, let alone the way trade suffered by stowing hams next the
+boilers. Of course the other side was a complete denial of these
+accusations, but the affair was too vital for any of us to attend to a
+notorious member of the party who kept bothering us &ldquo;to get up and look
+at something queer over King Tom.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Now it was market day in Freetown; and market day there has got more
+noise to the square inch in it than most things. You feel when you first
+meet it that if it were increased a little more it would pass beyond the
+grasp of human ear, like the screech of that whistle they show off at
+the Royal Society&rsquo;s Conversazione. However, on this occasion the market
+place sent up an entire compound yell, still audible, and we rose as one
+man as the portly housekeeper, followed by the small, but able steward,
+burst into the room, announcing in excited tones, &ldquo;Oh! the town be took
+by locusts! <a name="CORR1a" id="CORR1a"><ins class="correction" title="The town be took by locusts!">The town be took by locusts!&rdquo;</ins></a> (<i>D.C. fortissimo</i>). And we
+attended to the incident; ousting the reporter of &ldquo;the queer thing over
+King Tom&rdquo; from the window, and ignoring his &ldquo;I told you so,&rdquo; because he
+hadn&rsquo;t.</p>
+
+<p>This was the first cloud of locusts that had come right into the town in
+the memory of the oldest inhabitant, though they occasionally raid the
+country away to the North. I am informed that when the chiefs of the
+Western Soudan do not give sufficient gifts to the man who is locust
+king and has charge of them&mdash;keeping them in holes in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> desert of
+Sahara&mdash;he lets them out in revenge. Certainly that year he let them out
+with a vengeance, for when I was next time down Coast in the Oil Rivers
+I was presented with specimens that had been caught in Old Calabar and
+kept as big curios.</p>
+
+<p>This Freetown swarm came up over the wooded hills to the South-West in a
+brown cloud of singular structure, denser in some parts than others,
+continually changing its points of greatest density, like one of
+Thompson&rsquo;s diagrams of the ultimate structure of gases, for you could
+see the component atoms as they swept by. They were swirling round and
+round upwards-downwards like the eddying snowflakes in a winter&rsquo;s storm,
+and the whole air rustled with the beat of the locusts&rsquo; wings. They
+hailed against the steep iron roofs of the store-houses, slid down it,
+many falling feet through the air before they recovered the use of their
+wings&mdash;the gutters were soon full of them&mdash;the ducks in the yard below
+were gobbling and squabbling over the layer now covering the ground, and
+the baboon chattered as he seized handfuls and pulled them to pieces.</p>
+
+<p>Everybody took them with excitement, save the jack crows, who on their
+arrival were sitting sleeping on the roof ridge. They were horribly
+bored and bothered by the affair. Twice they flopped down and tried
+them. There they were lying about in gutters with a tempting garbagey
+look, but evidently the jack crows found them absolutely mawkish; so
+they went back to the roof ridge in a fuming rage, because the locusts
+battered against them and prevented them from sleeping.</p>
+
+<p>We left Sierra Leone on the &mdash;&mdash; late in the afternoon, and ran out
+again into the same misty wet weather. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span> next morning the balance of
+our passengers were neither up early, nor lively when they were up; but
+to my surprise after what I had heard, no one had the
+much-prognosticated attack of fever. All day long we steamed onwards,
+passing the Banana Isles and Sherboro Island and the sound usually
+called Sherboro River.<a name="FNanchor_2_3" id="FNanchor_2_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_3" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> We being a South-West Coast boat, did not call
+at the trading settlements here, but kept on past Cape St. Ann for the
+Kru coast.</p>
+
+<p>All day long the rain came down as if thousands of energetic&mdash;well, let
+us say&mdash;angels were hurriedly baling the waters above the firmament out
+into the ocean. Everything on board was reeking wet.</p>
+
+<p>You could sweep the moisture off the cabin panelling with your hand, and
+our clothes were clammy and musty, and the towels too damp on their own
+account to dry you. Why none of us started specialising branchiae I do
+not know, but feel that would have been the proper sort of breathing
+apparatus for such an atmosphere.</p>
+
+<p>The passengers were all at the tail end of their spirits, for Sierra
+Leone is the definite beginning of the Coast to the out-goer. You are
+down there when you leave it outward bound; it is indeed, the complement
+of Canary. Those going up out of West Africa begin to get excited at
+Sierra Leone; those going down into West Africa, particularly when it is
+the wet season, begin to get depressed. It did not, however, operate in
+this manner on me. I had survived Sierra Leone, I had enjoyed it; why,
+therefore, not survive other places, and enjoy them? Moreover, my
+scientific training, combined with close study of the proper method of
+carrying on the local conversation, had by now enabled me to <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span>understand
+its true spirit,&mdash;never contradict, and, if you can, help it onward.
+When going on deck about 6 o&rsquo;clock that evening, I was alarmed to see
+our gallant captain in red velvet slippers. A few minutes later the
+chief officer burst on my affrighted gaze in red velvet slippers too. On
+my way hurriedly to the saloon I encountered the third officer similarly
+shod. When I recovered from these successive shocks, I carried out my
+mission of alarming the rest of the passengers, who were in the saloon
+enjoying themselves peacefully, and reported what I had seen. The old
+coasters, even including the silent ones, agreed with me that we were as
+good as lost so far as this world went; and the deaf gentleman went
+hurriedly on deck, we think &ldquo;to take the sun,&rdquo;&mdash;it was a way he had at
+any time of day, because &ldquo;he had been studying about how to fix points
+for the Government&mdash;and wished to keep himself in practice.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>My fellow new-comers were perplexed; and one of them, a man who always
+made a point of resisting education, and who thought nothing of calling
+some of our instructor&rsquo;s best information &ldquo;Tommy Rot!&rdquo; said, &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t
+see what can happen; we&rsquo;re right out at sea, and it&rsquo;s as calm as a
+millpond.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you, my young friend? don&rsquo;t you?&rdquo; sadly said an old Coaster.
+&ldquo;Well, I&rsquo;ll just tell you there&rsquo;s precious little that can&rsquo;t happen, for
+we&rsquo;re among the shoals of St. Ann.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The new-comers went on deck &ldquo;just to look round;&rdquo; and as there was
+nothing to be seen but a superb specimen of damp darkness, they returned
+to the saloon, one of them bearing an old chart sheet which he had
+borrowed from the authorities. Now that chart was not reassuring; the
+thing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> looked like an exhibition pattern of a prize shot gun, with the
+quantity of rocks marked down on it.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Look here,&rdquo; said an anxious inquirer; &ldquo;why are some of these rocks
+named after the Company&rsquo;s ships?&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Think,&rdquo; said the calm old Coaster.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, I say! hang it all, you don&rsquo;t mean to say they&rsquo;ve been wrecked
+here? Anyhow, if they have they got off all right. How is it the &lsquo;Yoruba
+Rock&rsquo; and the &lsquo;Gambia Rock?&rsquo; The &lsquo;Yoruba&rsquo; and the &lsquo;Gambia&rsquo; are running
+now.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Those,&rdquo; explains the old Coaster kindly, &ldquo;were the old &lsquo;Yoruba&rsquo; and
+&lsquo;Gambia.&rsquo; The &lsquo;Bonny&rsquo; that runs now isn&rsquo;t the old &lsquo;Bonny.&rsquo; It&rsquo;s the way
+with most of them, isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo; he says, turning to a fellow old Coaster.
+&ldquo;Naturally,&rdquo; says his friend. &ldquo;But this is the old original, you know,
+and it&rsquo;s just about time she wrote up her name on one of these
+tombstones.&rdquo; &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t save ships,&rdquo; he continues, for the instruction
+of the new-comers, attentive enough now; &ldquo;that go on the Kru coast, and
+if you get ashore you don&rsquo;t save the things you stand up in&mdash;the natives
+strip you.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Cannibals!&rdquo; I suggest.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, of course they are cannibals; they are all cannibals, are natives
+down here when they get the chance. But, that does not matter; you see
+what I object to is being brought on board the next steamer that happens
+to call crowded with all sorts of people you know, and with a lady
+missionary or so among them, just with nothing on one but a flyaway
+native cloth. <a name="CORR1b" id="CORR1b"><ins class="correction" title="You remember D&mdash;&mdash;">You remember D&mdash;&mdash;?&rdquo;</ins></a> &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; says his friend. Strengthened
+by this support, he takes his turn at instructing the young critic,
+saying soothingly, &ldquo;there, don&rsquo;t you worry; have a good dinner.&rdquo; (It was
+just being laid.) &ldquo;For if you do get ashore the food is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span> something
+beastly. But, after all, what with the sharks and the surf and the
+cannibals, you know the chances are a thousand to one that the worst
+will come to the worst and you live to miss your trousers.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>After dinner we new-comers went on deck to keep an eye on Providence,
+and I was called on to explain how the alarm had been given me by the
+footgear of the officers. I said, like all great discoveries, &ldquo;it was
+founded on observation made in a scientific spirit.&rdquo; I had noticed that
+whenever a particularly difficult bit of navigation had to be done on
+our boat, red velvet slippers were always worn, as for instance, when
+running through the heavy weather we had met south of the Bay, on going
+in at Puerto de la Luz, and on rounding the Almadia reefs, and on
+entering Freetown harbour in fog. But never before had I seen more than
+one officer wearing them at a time, while tonight they were blazing like
+danger signals at the shore ends of all three.</p>
+
+<p>My opinion as to the importance of these articles to navigation became
+further strengthened by subsequent observations in the Bights of Biafra
+and Benin. We picked up rivers in them, always wore them when crossing
+bars, and did these things on the whole successfully. But once I was on
+a vessel that was rash enough to go into a difficult river&mdash;Rio del
+Rey&mdash;without their aid. That vessel got stuck fast on a bank, and, as
+likely as not, would be sticking there now with her crew and passengers
+mere mosquito-eaten skeletons, had not our First officer rushed to his
+cabin, put on red velvet slippers and gone out in a boat, energetically
+sounding around with a hand lead. Whereupon we got off, for clearly it
+was not by his sounding; it never amounted to more than two fathoms,
+while we required a good three-and-a-half. Yet that First officer, a
+truthful man, always,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span> said nobody did a stroke of work on board that
+vessel bar himself; so I must leave the reader to escape if he can from
+believing it was the red velvet slippers that saved us, merely remarking
+that these invaluable nautical instruments were to be purchased at
+Hamburg, and were possibly only met with on boats that run to Hamburg
+and used by veterans of that fleet.</p>
+
+<p>If you will look on the map, not mine, but one visible to the naked eye,
+you will see that the Coast from Sierra Leone to Cape Palmas is the
+lower bend of the hump of Africa and the turning point into the Bights
+of Benin, Biafra and Panavia.</p>
+
+<p>Its appearance gives the voyager his first sample of those stupendous
+sweeps of monotonous landscapes so characteristic of Africa. From
+Sherboro River to Cape Mount, viewed from the sea, every mile looks as
+like the next as peas in a pod, and should a cruel fate condemn you to
+live ashore here in a factory you get so used to the eternal sameness
+that you automatically believe that nothing else but this sort of world,
+past, present, or future, can ever have existed: and that cities and
+mountains are but the memories of dreams. A more horrible life than a
+life in such a region for a man who never takes to it, it is impossible
+to conceive; for a man who does take to it, it is a kind of dream life,
+I am judging from the few men I have met who have been stationed here in
+the few isolated little factories that are established. Some of them
+look like haunted men, who, when they are among white men again, cling
+to their society: others are lazy, dreamy men, rather bored by it.</p>
+
+<p>The kind of country that produces this effect must be exceedingly simple
+in make: it is not the mere isolation from fellow white men that does
+it&mdash;for example, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span> handful of men who are on the Ogowé do not get
+like this though many of them are equally lone men, yet they are bright
+and lively enough. Anyhow, exceedingly simple in make as is this region
+of Africa from Sherboro to Cape Mount, it consists of four different
+things in four long lines&mdash;lines that go away into eternity for as far
+as eye can see. There is the band of yellow sand on which your little
+factory is built. This band is walled to landwards by a wall of dark
+forest, mounted against the sky to seaward by a wall of white surf;
+beyond that there is the horizon-bounded ocean. Neither the forest wall
+nor surf wall changes enough to give any lively variety; they just run
+up and down a gamut of the same set of variations. In the light of
+brightest noon the forest wall stands dark against the dull blue sky, in
+the depth of the darkest night you can see it stand darker still,
+against the stars; on moonlight nights and on tornado nights, when you
+see the forest wall by the lightning light, it looks as if it had been
+done over with a coat of tar. The surf wall is equally consistent, it
+may be bad, or good as surf, but it&rsquo;s generally the former, which merely
+means it is a higher, broader wall, and more noisy, but it&rsquo;s the same
+sort of wall making the same sort of noise all the time. It is always
+white; in the sunlight, snowy white, suffused with a white mist wherein
+are little broken, quivering bits of rainbows. In the moonlight, it
+gleams with a whiteness there is in nothing else on earth. If you can
+imagine a non-transparent diamond wall, I think you will get some near
+idea to it, and even on the darkest of dark nights you can still see the
+surf wall clearly enough, for it shows like the ghost of its daylight
+self, seeming to have in it a light of its own, and you love or hate it.
+Night and day and season changes pass<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span> over these things, like
+reflections in a mirror, without altering the mirror frame; but nothing
+comes that ever stills for one-half second the thunder of the surf-wall
+or makes it darker, or makes the forest-wall brighter than the rest of
+your world. Mind you, it is intensely beautiful, intensely soothing,
+intensely interesting if you can read it and you like it, but life for a
+man who cannot and does not is a living death.</p>
+
+<p>But if you are seafaring there is no chance for a brooding melancholy to
+seize on you hereabouts, for you soon run along this bit of coast and
+see the sudden, beautiful headland of Cape Mount, which springs aloft in
+several rounded hills a thousand and odd feet above the sea and looking
+like an island. After passing it, the land rapidly sinks again to the
+old level, for a stretch of another 46 miles or so when Cape
+Mesurado,<a name="FNanchor_3_4" id="FNanchor_3_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_4" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> rising about 200 feet, seems from seaward to be another
+island.</p>
+
+<p>The capital of the Liberian Republic, Monrovia, is situated on the
+southern side of the river Mesurado, and right under the high land of
+the Cape, but it is not visible from the roadstead, and then again comes
+the low coast, unrolling its ribbon of sandy beach, walled as before
+with forest wall and surf, but with the difference that between the sand
+beach and the forest are long stretches of lagooned waters. Evil
+looking, mud-fringed things, when I once saw them at the end of a hard,
+dry season, but when the wet season&rsquo;s rains come they are transformed
+into beautiful lakes; communicating with each other and overflowing by
+shallow <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span>channels which they cut here and there through the sand-beach
+ramparts into the sea.</p>
+
+<p>The identification of places from aboard ship along such a coast as this
+is very difficult. Even good sized rivers doubling on themselves sneak
+out between sand banks, and make no obvious break in surf or forest
+wall. The old sailing direction that gave as a landmark the &ldquo;Tree with
+two crows on it&rdquo; is as helpful as any one could get of many places here,
+and when either the smoke season or the wet season is on of course you
+cannot get as good as that. But don&rsquo;t imagine that unless the navigator
+wants to call on business, he can &ldquo;just put up his heels and blissfully
+think o&rsquo; nowt,&rdquo; for this bit of the West Coast of Africa is one of the
+most trying in the world to work. Monotonous as it is ashore, it is
+exciting enough out to sea in the way of the rocks and shoals, and an
+added danger exists at the beginning and end of the wet, and the
+beginning of the dry, in the shape of tornadoes.<a name="FNanchor_4_5" id="FNanchor_4_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_5" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> These are sudden
+storms coming up usually with terrific violence; customarily from the
+S.E. and E., but sometimes towards the end of the season straight from
+S. More slave ships than enough have been lost along this bit of coast
+in their time, let alone decent Bristol Guineamen into the bargain,
+owing to &ldquo;a delusion that occasionally seized inexperienced commanders
+that it was well to heave-to for a tornado, whereas a sailing ship&rsquo;s
+best chance lay in her heels.&rdquo; It was a good chance too, for owing to
+the short duration of this breed of hurricane and their terrific rain,
+there accompanies them no heavy sea, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span>the tornado-rain ironing the ocean
+down; so if, according to one of my eighteenth century friends, you see
+that well-known tornado-cloud arch coming, and you are on a Guineaman,
+for your sins, &ldquo;a dray of a vessel with an Epping Forest of sea growth
+on her keel, and two-thirds of the crew down with fever or dead of it,
+as likely they will be after a spell on this coast,&rdquo; the sooner you get
+her ready to run the better, and with as little on her as you can do
+with. If, however, there be a white cloud inside the cloud-arch you must
+strip her quick and clean, for that tornado is going to be the worst
+tornado you were ever in.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, tornadoes are nothing to the rocks round here. At the
+worst, there are but two tornadoes a day, always at tide turn, only at
+certain seasons of the year, and you can always see them coming; but it
+is not that way with the rocks. There is at least one to each quarter
+hour in the entire twenty-four. They are there all the year round, and
+more than one time in forty you can&rsquo;t see them coming. In case you think
+I am overstating the case, I beg to lay before you the statement
+concerning rocks given me by an old captain, who was used to these seas
+and never lost a ship. I had said something flippant about rocks, and he
+said, &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll write them down for you, missy.&rdquo; This is just his statement
+for the chief rocks between Junk River and Baffu; not a day&rsquo;s steamer
+run. &ldquo;Two and three quarters miles and six cables N.W. by W. from Junk
+River there is &lsquo;Hooper&rsquo;s Patch,&rsquo; irregular in shape, about a mile long
+and carrying in some places only 2&frac12; fathoms of water. There is
+another bad patch about a mile and a-half from Hooper&rsquo;s, so if you have
+to go dodging your way into Marshall, a Liberian settlement, great
+caution and good luck is useful. In Waterhouse Bay there&rsquo;s a cluster of
+pinnacle<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> rocks all under water, with a will-o&rsquo;-the wisp kind of buoy,
+that may be there or not to advertise them. One rock at Tobokanni has
+the civility to show its head above water, and a chum of his, that lies
+about a mile W. by S. from Tobokanni Point, has the seas constantly
+breaking on it.</p>
+
+<p>The coast there is practically reefed for the next eight miles, with a
+boat channel near the shore. But there is a gap in this reef at Young
+Sesters, through which, if you handle her neatly, you can run a ship in.
+In some places this reef of rock is three-quarters of a mile out to sea.
+Trade Town is the next place where you may now call for cargo. Its
+particular rock lies a mile out and shows well with the sea breaking on
+it. After Trade Town the rocks are more scattered, and the bit of coast
+by Kurrau River rises in cliffs 40 to 60 feet high. The sand at their
+base is strewn with fallen blocks on which the surf breaks with great
+force, sending the spray up in columns; and until you come to Sestos
+River the rocks are innumerable, but not far out to sea, so you can keep
+outside them unless you want to run in to the little factory at Tembo.
+Just beyond Sestos River, three-quarters of a mile S.S.W. of Fen River,
+there are those Fen rocks on which the sea breaks, but between these and
+the Manna rocks, which are a little more than a mile from shore N.W. by
+N. from Sestos River, there are any quantity of rocks marked and not
+marked on the chart. These Manna rocks are a jolly bad lot, black, and
+only a few breaking, and there is a shoal bank to the S.E. of these for
+half a mile, then for the next four miles, there are not more than 70
+hull openers to the acre. Most of them are not down on the chart, so
+there&rsquo;s plenty of opportunity now about for you to do a little African
+discovery until you come to Sestos reef, off a point of the same name,
+projecting half a mile to westwards<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span> with a lot of foul ground round it.
+Spence rock which breaks, is W. two-thirds S., distant 1&frac14; miles from
+Sestos Point; within 5 miles of it is the rock which <i>The Corisco</i>
+discovered in 1885. It is not down on the chart yet, all these set of
+rocks round Sestos are sharp too, so the lead gives you no warning, and
+you are safer right-away from them. Then there&rsquo;s a very nasty one called
+Diabolitos, I expect those old Portuguese found it out, it&rsquo;s got a lot
+of little ones which extend 2 miles and more to seaward. There is
+another devil rock off Bruni, called by the natives Ba Ya. It stands 60
+feet above sea-level, and has a towering crown of trees on it. It is a
+bad one is this, for in thick weather, as it is a mile off shore and
+isolated, it is easily mistaken, and so acts as a sort of decoy for the
+lot of sunken devil rocks which are round it. Further along towards
+Baffu there are four more rocks a mile out, and forest ground on the
+way.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>I just give you this bit of information as an example, because I happen
+to have this rough rock list of it; but a little to the east the rocks
+and dangers of the Kru Coast are quite as bad, both in quantity and
+quality, indeed, more so, for there is more need for vessels to call. I
+often think of this bit of coast when I see people unacquainted with the
+little local peculiarities of dear West Africa looking at a map thereof
+and wondering why such and such a Bay is not utilised as a harbour, or
+such and such a river not navigated, or this, that and the other bit of
+Coast so little known of and traded with. Such undeveloped regions have
+generally excellent local reasons, reasons that cast no blame on white
+man&rsquo;s enterprise or black man&rsquo;s savagery. They are rock-reefed coast or
+barred rivers, and therefore not worth the expense to the trader of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span>
+working them, and you must always remember that unless the trader opens
+up bits of West Africa no one else will. It may seem strange to the
+landsman that the navigator should hug such a coast as the shoals (the
+<i>Bainos</i> as the old Portuguese have it) of St. Ann&mdash;but they do. If you
+ask a modern steamboat captain he will usually tell you it is to save
+time, a statement that the majority of the passengers on a West Coast
+boat will receive with open derision and contempt, holding him to be a
+spendthrift thereof; but I myself fancy that hugging this coast is a
+vestigial idea. In the old sailing-ship days, if you ran out to sea far
+from these shoals you lost your wind, and maybe it would take you five
+mortal weeks to go from Sierra Leone to Cape Mount or <i>Wash Congo</i>, as
+the natives called it in the 17th century.</p>
+
+<p>Off the Kru Coast, both West Coast and South-West Coast steamers and
+men-o&rsquo;-war on this station, call to ship or unship Krumen. The character
+of the rocks, of which I have spoken,&mdash;their being submerged for the
+most part, and pinnacles&mdash;increases the danger considerably, for a ship
+may tear a wound in herself that will make short work of her, yet unless
+she remains impaled on the rock, making, as it were, a buoy of herself,
+that rock might not be found again for years.</p>
+
+<p>This sort of thing has happened many times, and the surveying vessels,
+who have been instructed to localise the danger and get it down on the
+chart, have failed to do so in spite of their most elaborate efforts;
+whereby the more uncharitable of the surveying officers are led in their
+wrath to hold that the mercantile marine officers who reported that rock
+and gave its bearings did so under the influence of drink, while the
+more charitable and scientifically inclined have suggested that
+elevation and sub<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span>sidence are energetically and continually at work
+along the Bight of Benin, hoisting up shoals to within a few feet of the
+surface in some places and withdrawing them in others to a greater
+depth.</p>
+
+<p>The people ashore here are commonly spoken of as Liberians and Kruboys.
+The Liberians are colonists in the country, having acquired settlements
+on this coast by purchase from the chiefs of the native tribes. The idea
+of restoring the Africans carried off by the slave trade to Africa
+occurred to America before it did to England, for it was warmly
+advocated by the Rev. Samuel Hoskins, of Newport, Rhode Island, in 1770,
+but it was 1816 before America commenced to act on it, and the first
+emigrants embarked from New York for Liberia in 1820. On the other hand,
+though England did not get the idea until 1787, she took action at once,
+buying from King Tom, through the St George&rsquo;s Bay Company, the land at
+Sierra Leone between the Rochelle and Kitu River. This was done on the
+recommendation of Mr. Smeatham. The same year was shipped off to this
+new colony the first consignment of 460 free negro servants and 60
+whites; out of those 400 arrived and survived their first fortnight, and
+set themselves to build a town called Granville, after Mr. Granville
+Sharpe, whose exertions had resulted in Lord Mansfield&rsquo;s epoch-making
+decision in the case of Somerset <i>v.</i> Mr. J. G. Stewart, his master,
+<i>i.e.</i>, that no slave could be held on English soil.</p>
+
+<p>The Liberians were differently situated from their neighbours at Sierra
+Leone in many ways; in some of these they have been given a better
+chance than the Africans sent to Sierra Leone&mdash;in other ways not so good
+a chance. Neither of the colonies has been completely successful.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I hold the opinion that if those American and English philanthropists
+could not have managed the affair better than they did, they had better
+have confined their attention to talking, a thing they were naturally
+great on, and left the so-called restoration of the African to his
+native soil alone. For they made a direful mess of the affair from a
+practical standpoint, and thereby inflicted an enormous amount of
+suffering and a terrible mortality on the Africans they shipped from
+England, Canada, and America; the tradition whereof still clings to the
+colonies of Liberia and Sierra Leone, and gravely hinders their
+development by the emigration of educated, or at any rate civilised,
+Africans now living in the West Indies and the Southern States of
+America.</p>
+
+<p>I am aware that there are many who advocate the return to Africa of the
+Africans who were exported from the West Coast during the slavery days.
+But I cannot regard this as a good or even necessary policy, for two
+reasons. One is that those Africans were not wanted in West Africa. The
+local supply of African is sufficient to develop the country in every
+way. There are in West Africa now, Africans thoroughly well educated, as
+far as European education goes, and who are quite conversant with the
+nature of their own country and with the language of their
+fellow-countrymen. There are also any quantity of Africans there who,
+though not well educated, are yet past-masters in the particular culture
+which West Africa has produced on its inhabitants.</p>
+
+<p>The second reason is that the descendants of the exported Africans have
+seemingly lost their power of resistance to the malarial West Coast
+climate. This a most interesting subject, which some scientific
+gentleman<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span> ought to attend to, for there is a sufficient quantity of
+evidence ready for his investigation. The mortality among the Africans
+sent to Sierra Leone and Liberia has been excessive, and so also has
+been that amongst the West Indians who went to Congo Belge, while the
+original intention of the United Presbyterian Mission to Calabar had to
+be abandoned from the same cause. In fact it looks as if the second and
+third generation of deported Africans had no greater power of resistance
+to West Africa than the pure white races; and, such being the case, it
+seems to me a pity they should go there. They would do better to bring
+their energies to bear on developing the tropical regions of America and
+leave the undisturbed stock of Africa to develop its own.</p>
+
+<p>However, we will not go into that now. I beg to refer you to Bishop
+Ingram&rsquo;s <i>Sierra Leone after a Hundred Years</i>, for the history of
+England&rsquo;s philanthropic efforts. I may some day, perhaps, in the remote
+future, write myself a book on America&rsquo;s effort, but I cannot write it
+now, because I have in my possession only printed matter&mdash;a wilderness
+of opinion and a mass of abuse on Liberia as it is. No sane student of
+West Africa would proceed to form an opinion on any part of it with such
+stuff and without a careful personal study of the thing as it is.</p>
+
+<p>The natives of this part of the West coast, the aboriginal ones, as Mrs.
+Gault would call them, are a different matter. You can go and live in
+West Africa without seeing a crocodile or a hippopotamus or a mountain,
+but no white man can go there without seeing and experiencing a Kruboy,
+and Kruboys are one of the main tribes here. Kruboys are, indeed, the
+backbone of white effort in West Africa, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span> I think I may say there is
+but one man of all of us who have visited West Africa who has not paid a
+tribute to the Kruboy&rsquo;s sterling qualities. Alas! that one was one of
+England&rsquo;s greatest men. Why he painted that untrue picture of them I do
+not know. I know that on this account the magnificent work he did is
+discredited by all West Coasters. &ldquo;If he said that of Kruboys,&rdquo; say the
+old coasters, &ldquo;how can he have known or understood anything?&rdquo; It is a
+painful subject, and my opinion on Kruboys is entirely with the old
+coasters, who know them with an experience of years, not with the
+experience of any man, however eminent, who only had the chance of
+seeing them for a few weeks, and whose information was so clearly drawn
+from vitiated sources. All I can say in defence of my great fellow
+countryman is that he came to West Africa from the very worst school a
+man can for understanding the Kruboy, or any true Negro, namely, from
+the Bantu African tribes, and that he only fell into the error many
+other great countrymen of mine have since fallen into, whereby there is
+war and misunderstanding and disaffection between our Government and the
+true Negro to-day, and nothing, as far as one can see, but a grievous
+waste of life and gold ahead.</p>
+
+<p>The Kruboy is indeed a sore question to all old coasters. They have
+devoted themselves to us English, and they have suffered, laboured,
+fought, been massacred, and so on with us for generation after
+generation. Many a time Krumen have come to me when we have been
+together in foreign possessions and said, &ldquo;Help us, we are Englishmen.&rdquo;
+They have never asked in vain of me or any Englishman in West Africa,
+but recognition of their services by our Government at home is&mdash;well,
+about as much recognition as most men get from it who do good work in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span>
+West Africa. For such men are a mere handful whom Imperialism can
+neglect with impunity, and, even if it has for the moment to excuse
+itself for so doing, it need only call us &ldquo;traders.&rdquo; I say us, because I
+am vain of having been, since my return, classed among the Liverpool
+traders by a distinguished officer.</p>
+
+<p>This part of Western Africa from Sierra Leone to Cape Palmas was known
+to the geographers amongst the classics as <i>Leuce Æthiopia</i>: to their
+successors as the Grain or Pepper or Meleguetta Coast. I will discourse
+later of the inhabitants, the Kru, from an ethnological standpoint,
+because they are too interesting and important to be got in here. The
+true limits of the Grain coast are from the River Sestros to Growy, two
+leagues east of Cape Palmas according to Barbot, and its name came from
+the fact that it was hereabouts that the Portuguese, on their early
+expeditions in the 15th century, first came across grains of paradise, a
+circumstance that much excited those navigators at the time and
+encouraged them to pursue their expeditions to this region, for grains
+of paradise were in those days much valued and had been long known in
+European markets.</p>
+
+<p>These euphoniously-named spices are the seeds of divers amomums, or in
+lay language, cardamum&mdash;<i>Amomum Meleguetta</i> (Roscoe) or as Pereira has
+it, <i>Amomum granum Paradisi</i>. Their more decorative appellation &ldquo;grains
+of Paradise&rdquo; is of Italian origin, the Italians having known and valued
+this spice, bought it, and sold it to the rest of Europe at awful prices
+long before the Portuguese, under Henry the Navigator, visited the West
+African Coast. The Italians had bought the spice from the tawny Moors,
+who brought it, with other products of West Africa across<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span> the desert to
+the Mediterranean port Monte Barca by Tripoli.</p>
+
+<p>The reason why this African cardamum received either the name of grains
+of Paradise or of Meleguetta pepper is, like most African things, wrapt
+in mystery to a certain extent. Some authorities hold they got the first
+name on their own merits. Others that the Italian merchants gave it them
+to improve prices. Others that the Italians gave it them honestly enough
+on account of their being nice, and no one knowing where on earth
+exactly they came from, said, therefore, why not say Paradise? It is
+certain, however, that before the Portuguese went down into the unknown
+seas and found the Pepper coast that the Italians knew those peppers
+came from the country of Melli, but as they did not know where that was,
+beyond that it was somewhere in Africa, this did not take away the sense
+of romance from the spice.</p>
+
+<p>As for their name Meleguetta, an equal divergence of opinion reigns. I
+myself think the proper word is meneguetta. The old French name was
+maneguilia, and the name they are still called by at Cape Palmas in the
+native tongue is Emanequetta. The French claim to have brought peppers
+and ivory from the River Sestros as early as 1364, and the River Sestros
+was on the seaboard of the kingdom of Mene, but the termination quetta
+is most probably a corruption of the Portuguese name for pepper. But, on
+the other hand, the native name for them among the Sestros people is
+Waizanzag. And therefore, the whole name may well be European, and just
+as well called meleguetta as meneguetta, because the kingdom of Mene was
+a fief of the Empire of Melli when the Portuguese first called at
+Sestros. The other possible derivation is that which says mele is a
+corrup<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span>tion of the Italian name for Turkey millet, <i>Melanga</i>, a thing
+the grains rather resemble. Another very plausible derivation is that
+the whole word is Portuguese in origin, but a corruption of <i>mala gens</i>,
+the Portuguese having found the people they first bought them of a bad
+lot, and so named the pepper in memory thereof. This however is
+interestingly erroneous and an early example of the danger of
+armchairism when dealing with West Africa. For the coast of the
+<i>malegens</i> was not the coast the Portuguese first got the pepper from,
+but it was that coast just to the east of the Meleguetta, where all they
+got was killing and general unpleasantness round by the Rio San Andrew,
+Drewin way, which coast is now included in the Ivory.</p>
+
+<p>The grains themselves are by no means confined to the Grain Coast, but
+are the fruit of a plant common in all West African districts,
+particularly so on Cameroon Mountain, where just above the 3,000 feet
+level on the east and southeast face you come into a belt of them, and
+horrid walking ground they make. I have met with them also in great
+profusion in the Sierra del Crystal; but there is considerable
+difference in the kinds. The grain of Paradise of commerce is, like that
+of the East Indian cardamom, enclosed in a fibrous capsule, and the
+numerous grains in it are surrounded by a pulp having a most pleasant,
+astringent, aromatic taste. This is pleasant eating, particularly if you
+do not manage to chew up with it any of the grains, for they are
+amazingly hot in the mouth, and cause one to wonder why Paradise instead
+of Hades was reported as their &ldquo;country of origin.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The natives are very fond of chewing the capsule and the inner bark of
+the stem of the plant. They are, for the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span> matter of that, fond of
+chewing anything, but the practice in this case seems to me more
+repaying than when carried on with kola or ordinary twigs.</p>
+
+<p>Two kinds of meleguetta pepper come up from Guinea. That from Accra is
+the larger, plumper, and tougher skinned, and commands the higher price.
+The capsule, which is about 2 inches long by 1 inch in breadth, is more
+oval than that of the other kind, and the grains in it are round and
+bluntly angular, bright brown outside, but when broken open showing a
+white inside. The other kind, the ordinary Guinea grain of commerce,
+comes from Sierra Leone and Liberia. They are devoid of the projecting
+tuft on the umbilicus. The capsule is like that of the Accra grain. When
+dry, it is wrinkled, and if soaked does not display the longitudinal
+frill of the Javan <i>Amomum maximum</i>, which it is sometimes used to
+adulterate. This common capsule is only about 1&frac12; inches long and &frac12;
+an inch in diameter, but the grain when broken open is also white like
+the Accra one. There are, however, any quantity on Cameroons of the
+winged Javan variety, but these have so far not been exported.</p>
+
+<p>The plants that produce the grains are zingiberaceous, cane-like in
+appearance, only having broader, blunter leaves than the bamboo. The
+flower is very pretty, in some kinds a violet pink, but in the most
+common a violet purple, and they are worn as marks of submission by
+people in the Oil Rivers suing for peace. These flowers, which grow
+close to the ground, seeming to belong more to the root of the plant
+than the stem, or, more properly speaking, looking as if they had
+nothing to do with the graceful great soft canes round them, but were a
+crop of lovely crocus-like flowers on their own account, are followed by
+crimson-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span>skinned pods enclosing the black and brown seeds wrapped in
+juicy pulp, quite unlike the appearance they present when dried or
+withered.</p>
+
+<p>There is only a small trade done in Guinea grains now, George III. (Cap.
+58) having declared that no brewer or dealer in wine shall be found in
+possession of grains of Paradise without paying a fine of Ŗ200, and that
+if any druggist shall sell them to a brewer that druggist shall pay a
+fine of Ŗ500 for each such offence.</p>
+
+<p>The reason of this enactment was the idea that the grains were
+poisonous, and that the brewers in using them to give fire to their
+liquors were destroying their consumers, His Majesty&rsquo;s lieges. As far as
+poison goes this idea was wrong, for Meleguetta pepper or grains of
+Paradise are quite harmless though hot. Perhaps, however, some
+consignment may have reached Europe with poisonous seeds in it. I once
+saw four entirely different sorts of seeds in a single sample. That is
+the worst of our Ethiopian friends, they adulterate every mortal thing
+that passes through their hands. I will do them the justice to say they
+usually do so with the intellectually comprehensible end in view of
+gaining an equivalent pecuniary advantage by it. Still it is
+commercially unsound of them; for example for years they sent up the
+seeds of the <i>Kickia Africana</i> as an adulteration for <i>Strophantus</i>,
+whereas they would have made more by finding out that the <i>Kickia</i> was a
+great rubber-producing tree. They will often take as much trouble to put
+in foreign matter as to get more legitimate raw material. I really fancy
+if any one were to open up a trade in Kru Coast rocks, adulteration
+would be found in the third shipment. It is their way, and legislation
+is useless. All that is necessary is that the traders who buy of them
+should know their business<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span> and not make infants of themselves by
+regarding the African as one or expecting the government to dry nurse
+them.</p>
+
+<p>In private life the native uses and values these Guinea grains highly,
+using them sometimes internally sometimes externally, pounding them up
+into a paste with which they beplaster their bodies for various aches
+and pains. For headache, not the sequelæ of trade gin, but of malaria,
+the forehead and temples are plastered with a stiff paste made of Guinea
+grain, hard oil, chalk, or some such suitable medium, and it is a most
+efficacious treatment for this fearfully common complaint in West
+Africa. But the careful ethnologist must not mix this medicinal plaster
+up with the sort of prayerful plaster worn by the West Africans at time
+for Ju Ju, and go and mistake a person who is merely attending to his
+body for one who is attending to his soul.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_3" id="Footnote_2_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_3"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> This word is probably a corruption of the old name for this
+district, Cerberos.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_4" id="Footnote_3_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_4"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> The derivation of this name given by Barbot is from
+<i>misericordia</i>. &ldquo;As some pretend on occasion of a Portuguese ship cast
+away near the little river Druro, the men of that ship were assaulted by
+the negroes, which made the Portuguese cry for quarter, using the word
+<i>misericordia</i>, from which by corruption mesurado.&rdquo;</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_5" id="Footnote_4_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_5"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> Tornado is possibly a corruption from the Portuguese
+<i>trovado</i>, a thunderstorm; or from <i>tornado</i>, signifying returned; but
+most likely it comes from the Spanish <i>torneado</i>, signifying thunder.</p></div>
+</div>
+<hr class="chap" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III</h2>
+
+<h2>AFRICAN CHARACTERISTICS</h2>
+
+<p class="pblock">Containing some account of the divers noises of Western Afrik and
+an account of the country east of Cape Palmas, and other things; to
+which is added an account of the manner of shipping timber; of the
+old Bristol trade; and, mercifully for the reader, a leaving off.</p>
+
+<p>When we got our complement of Krumen on board, we proceeded down Coast
+with the intention of calling off Accra. I will spare you the
+description of the scenes which accompany the taking on of Kruboys; they
+have frequently been described, for they always alarm the
+new-comer&mdash;they are the first bit of real Africa he sees if bound for
+the Gold Coast or beyond. Sierra Leone, charming, as it is, has a sort
+of Christy Minstrel air about it for which he is prepared, but the
+Kruboy as he comes on board looks quite the Boys&rsquo; Book of Africa sort of
+thing; though, needless to remark, as innocent as a lamb, bar a tendency
+to acquire portable property. Nevertheless, Kruboys coming on board for
+your first time alarm you; at any rate they did me, and they also
+introduced me to African noise, which like the insects is another most
+excellent thing, that you should get broken into early.</p>
+
+<p>Woe! to the man in Africa who cannot stand perpetual uproar. Few things
+surprised me more than the rarity of silence and the intensity of it
+when you did get it. There <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span>is only that time which comes between
+10.30 <span class="fakesc">A.M.</span> and 4.30 <span class="fakesc">P.M.</span>, in which you can look for anything like the
+usual quiet of an English village. We will give Man the first place in
+the orchestra, he deserves it. I fancy the main body of the lower
+classes of Africa think externally instead of internally. You will hear
+them when they are engaged together on some job&mdash;each man issuing the
+fullest directions and prophecies concerning it, in shouts; no one
+taking the least notice of his neighbours. If the head man really wants
+them to do something definite he fetches those within his reach an
+introductory whack; and even when you are sitting alone in the forest
+you will hear a man or woman coming down the narrow bush path chattering
+away with such energy and expression that you can hardly believe your
+eyes when you learn from them that he has no companion.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 459px;" id="IMG081A"><span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span>
+<img src="images/ill-081a.jpg" width="459" height="650" alt="For Palm Wine" title="For Palm Wine" />
+<p><span class="facingleft">[<i>To face page 63.</i></span></p>
+<span class="caption"><span class="smcap">For Palm Wine.</span></span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Some of this talking is, I fancy, an equivalent to our writing. I know
+many English people who, if they want to gather a clear conception of an
+affair write it down; the African not having writing, first talks it
+out. And again more of it is conversation with spirit guardians and
+familiar spirits, and also with those of their dead relatives and
+friends, and I have often seen a man, sitting at a bush fire or in a
+village palaver house, turn round and say, &ldquo;You remember that, mother?&rdquo;
+to the ghost that to him was there.</p>
+
+<p>I remember mentioning this very touching habit of theirs, as it seemed
+to me, in order to console a sick and irritable friend whose cabin was
+close to a gangway then in possession of a very lively lot of Sierra
+Leone Kruboys, and he said, &ldquo;Oh, I daresay they do, Miss Kingsley; but
+I&rsquo;ll be hanged if Hell is such a damned way off West Africa that they
+need shout so loud.&rdquo;</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The calm of the hot noontide fades towards evening time, and the noise
+of things in general revives and increases. Then do the natives call in
+instrumental aid of diverse and to my ear pleasant kinds. Great is the
+value of the tom-tom, whether it be of pure native origin or constructed
+from an old Devos patent paraffin oil tin. Then there is the
+kitty-katty, so called from its strange scratching-vibrating sound,
+which you hear down South, and on Fernando Po, of the excruciating mouth
+harp, and so on, all accompanied by the voice.</p>
+
+<p>If it be play night, you become the auditor to an orchestra as strange
+and varied as that which played before Shadrach, Meshech, and Abednego.
+I know I am no musician, so I own to loving African music, bar that
+Fernandian harp! Like Benedick, I can say, &ldquo;Give me a horn for my money
+when all is done,&rdquo; unless it be a tom-tom. The African horn, usually
+made of a tooth of ivory, and blown from a hole in the side, is an
+instrument I unfortunately cannot play on. I have not the lung capacity.
+It requires of you to breathe in at one breath a whole S.W. gale of wind
+and then to empty it into the horn, which responds with a preliminary
+root-too-toot before it goes off into its noble dirge bellow. It is a
+fine instrument and should be introduced into European orchestras, for
+it is full of colour. But I think that even the horn, and certainly all
+other instruments, savage and civilised, should bow their heads in
+homage to the tom-tom, for, as a method of getting at the inner soul of
+humanity where are they compared with that noble instrument! You doubt
+it. Well go and hear a military tattoo or any performance on kettle
+drums up here and I feel you will reconsider the affair; but even then,
+remember you have not heard all the African tom<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span>-tom can tell you. I
+don&rsquo;t say it&rsquo;s an instrument suited for serenading your lady-love with,
+but that is a thing I don&rsquo;t require of an instrument. All else the
+tom-tom can do, and do well. It can talk as well as the human tongue. It
+can make you want to dance or fight for no private reason, as nothing
+else can, and be you black or white it calls up in you all your
+Neolithic man.</p>
+
+<p>Many African instruments are, however, sweet and gentle, and as mild as
+sucking doves, notably the xylophonic family. These marimbas, to use
+their most common name, are all over Africa from Senegal to Zambesi.
+Their form varies with various tribes&mdash;the West African varieties almost
+universally have wooden keys instead of iron ones like the East African.
+Personally, I like the West African best; there is something exquisite
+in the sweet, clear, water-like notes produced from the strips of soft
+wood of graduated length that make the West African keyboard. All these
+instruments have the sound magnified and enriched by a hollow wooden
+chamber under their keyboard. In Calabar this chamber is one small
+shallow box, ornamented, as most wooden things are in Calabar, with
+poker work&mdash;but in among the Fan, under the keyboard were a set of
+calabashes, and in the calabashes one hole apiece and that hole covered
+carefully with the skin of a large spider. While down in Angola you met
+the xylophone in the imposing form you can see in the frontispiece to
+this volume. Of the orchid fibre-stringed harp, I have spoken elsewhere,
+and there remains but one more truly great instrument that I need
+mention. I have had a trial at playing every African instrument I have
+come across, under native teachers, and they have assured me that, with
+application, I should<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span> succeed in becoming a rather decent performer on
+the harp and xylophone, and had the makings of a genius for the tom-tom,
+but my greatest and most rapid triumph was achieved on this other
+instrument. I picked up the hang of the thing in about five minutes, and
+then, being vain, when I returned to white society I naturally desired
+to show off my accomplishment, but met with no encouragement
+whatsoever&mdash;indeed my friends said gently, but firmly, that if I did it
+again they should leave, not the settlement merely, but the continent,
+and devote their remaining years to sweeping crossings in their native
+northern towns&mdash;they said they would rather do this than hear that
+instrument played again by any one.</p>
+
+<p>This instrument is made from an old powder keg, with both ends removed;
+a piece of raw hide is tied tightly round it over what one might call a
+bung-hole, while a piece of wood with a lump of rubber or fastening is
+passed through this hole. The performer then wets his hand, inserts it
+into the instrument, and lightly grasps the stick and works it up and
+down for all he is worth; the knob beats the drum skin with a beautiful
+boom, and the stick gives an exquisite screech as it passes through the
+hole in the skin which the performer enhances with an occasional howl or
+wail of his own, according to his taste or feeling. There are other
+varieties of this instrument, some with one end of the cylinder covered
+over and the knob of the stick beating the inside, but in all its forms
+it is impressive.</p>
+
+<p>Next in point of strength to the human vocal and instrumental performers
+come frogs. The small green one, whose note is like that of the
+cricket&rsquo;s magnified, is a part-singer, but the big bull frog, whose
+tones are all his own, sings in Handel Festival sized choruses. I don&rsquo;t
+much mind<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span> either of these, but the one I hate is a solo frog who seems
+eternally engaged at night in winding up a Waterbury watch. Many a night
+have I stocked thick with calamity on that frog&rsquo;s account; many a night
+have I landed myself in hailing distance of Amen Corner from having gone
+out of hut, or house, with my mind too full of the intention of
+flattening him out with a slipper, to think of driver ants, leopards, or
+snakes. Frog hunting is one of the worst things you can do in West
+Africa.</p>
+
+<p>Next to frogs come the crickets with their chorus of &ldquo;she did, she
+didn&rsquo;t,&rdquo; and the cicadas, but they knock off earlier than frogs, and
+when the frogs have done for the night there is quiet for the few hours
+of cool, until it gets too cool and the chill that comes before the dawn
+wakes up the birds, and they wake you with their long, mellow,
+exquisitely beautiful whistles.</p>
+
+<p>The aforesaid are everyday noises in West Africa, and you soon get used
+to them or die of them; but there are myriads of others that you hear
+when in the bush. The grunting sigh of relief of the hippos, the strange
+groaning, whining bark of the crocodiles, the thin cry of the bats, the
+cough of the leopards, and that unearthly yell that sometimes comes out
+of the forest in the depths of dark nights. Yes, my naturalist friends,
+it&rsquo;s all very well to say it is only a love-lorn, innocent little
+marmoset-kind of thing that makes it. I know, poor dear, Softly, Softly,
+and he wouldn&rsquo;t do it. Anyhow, you just wait until you hear it in a
+shaky little native hut, or when you are spending the night, having been
+fool enough to lose yourself, with your back against a tree quite alone
+and that yell comes at you with its agony of anguish and appeal out of
+that dense black world of forest which the moon, be she never so strong,
+can<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span>not enlighten, and which looks all the darker for the contrast of
+the glistening silver mist that shows here and there in the clearings,
+or over lagoon, or river, wavering twining, rising and falling; so full
+of strange motion and beauty, yet, somehow, as sinister in its way as
+the rest of your surroundings, and so deadly silent. I think if you hear
+that yell cutting through this sort of thing like a knife and sinking
+despairingly into the surrounding silence, you will agree with me that
+it seems to favour Duppy, and that, perchance, the strange red patch of
+ground you passed at the foot of the cotton tree before night came down
+on you, was where the yell came from, for it is red and damp and your
+native friends have told you it is so because of the blood whipped off a
+sasa-bonsum and his victims as he goes down through it to his
+under-world home.</p>
+
+<p>Seen from the sea, the Ivory Coast is a relief to the eye after the dead
+level of the Grain Coast, but the attention of the mariner to rocks has
+no practical surcease; and there is that submarine horror for sailing
+ships, the Bottomless pit. They used to have great tragedies with it in
+olden times, and you can still, if you like, for that matter; but the
+French having a station 15 miles to the east of it at Grand Bassam would
+nowadays prevent your experiencing the action of this phenomenon
+thoroughly, and getting not only wrecked but killed by the natives
+ashore, though they are a lively lot still.</p>
+
+<p>Now although this is not a manual of devotion, I must say a few words on
+the Bottomless pit. All along the West Coast of Africa there is a great
+shelving bank, submarine, formed by the deposit of the great mud-laden
+rivers and the earth-wash of the heavy rains. The slope of what the
+scientific term the great West African bank is, on the whole, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span>very
+regular, except opposite Piccaninny Bassam, where it is cut right
+through by a great chasm, presumably the result of volcanic action. This
+chasm commences about 15 miles from land and is shaped like a V, with
+the narrow end shorewards. Nine miles out it is three miles wider and
+2,400 feet deep, at three miles out the sides are opposite each other
+and there is little more than a mile between them, and the depth is
+1,536 feet; at one mile from the beach the chasm is only a quarter of a
+mile wide and the depth 600 feet&mdash;close up beside the beach the depth is
+120 feet. The floor of this chasm is covered with grey mud, and some
+five miles out the surveying vessels got fragments of coral rock.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 650px;" id="IMG087A"><span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span>
+<img src="images/ill-087a.jpg" width="650" height="510" alt="Secret Society Leaving the Sacred Grove" title="Secret Society Leaving the Sacred Grove" />
+<span class="caption"><span class="smcap">Secret Society Leaving the Sacred Grove</span></span>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 650px;" id="IMG087A1"><span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span>
+<img src="images/ill-087a1.jpg" width="650" height="660" alt="Jengu Devil Dance" title="Jengu Devil Dance" />
+<p><span class="facingleft">[<i>To face page 69.</i></span></p>
+<span class="caption"><span class="smcap">Jengu Devil Dance of King William&rsquo;s Slaves, Sette Camma, Nov. 9, 1888.</span></span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The sides of this submarine valley seem almost vertical cliffs, and
+herein lies its danger for the sailing ship. The master thereof, in the
+smoke or fog season (December-February), may not exactly know to a mile
+or so where he is, and being unable to make out Piccaninny Bassam, which
+is only a small native village on the sand ridge between the surf and
+the lagoon, he lets go his anchor on the edge of the cliffs of this
+Bottomless pit. Then the set of the tide and the onshore breeze cause it
+to drag a little, and over it goes down into the abyss, and ashore he is
+bound to go. In old days he and his ship&rsquo;s crew formed a welcome change
+in the limited dietary of the exultant native. Mr. Barbot, who knew them
+well, feelingly remarks, &ldquo;it is from the bloody tempers of these brutes
+that the Portuguese gave them the name of Malagens for they eat human
+flesh,&rdquo; and he cites how &ldquo;recently they have massacred a great number of
+Portuguese, Dutch and English, who came for provisions and water, not
+thinking of any treachery, and not many years since, (that is to say,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span>
+in 1677) an English ship lost three of its men; a Hollander fourteen;
+and, in 1678, a Portuguese, nine, of whom nothing was ever heard since.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>From Cape Palmas until you are past the mouth of the Taka River (St.
+Andrew) the coast is low. Then comes the Cape of the Little Strand
+(Caboda Prazuba), now called, I think, Price&rsquo;s Point. To the east of
+this you will see ranges of dwarf red cliffs rising above the beach and
+gradually increasing in height until they attain their greatest in the
+face of Mount Bedford, where the cliff is 280 feet high. The Portuguese
+called these Barreira Vermelhas; the French, Kalazis Rouges; and the
+Dutch, Roode Kliftin, all meaning Red Cliffs. The sand at their feet is
+strewn with boulders, and the whole country round here looks fascinating
+and interesting. I regret never having had an opportunity of seeing
+whether those cliffs had fossils on them, for they seem to me so like
+those beloved red cliffs of mine in Kacongo which have. The
+investigation, however, of such makes of Africa is messy. Those Kacongo
+cliffs were of a sort of red clay that took on a greasy slipperiness
+when they were wet, which they frequently were on account of the little
+springs of water that came through their faces. When pottering about
+them, after having had my suspicions lulled by twenty or thirty yards of
+crumbly dryness, I would ever and anon come across a water spring, and
+down I used to go&mdash;and lose nothing by it, going home in the evening
+time in what the local natives would have regarded as deep mourning for
+a large family&mdash;red clay being their sign thereof. The fossils I found
+in them were horizontally deposed layers of clam shells with regular
+intervals, or bands, of red clay, four or five feet across; between the
+layers some of the shell<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span> layers were 40 or more feet above the present
+beach level. Identical deposits of shell I also found far inland in Ka
+Congo, but that has nothing to do with the Ivory Coast.</p>
+
+<p>Inland, near Drewin, on the Ivory Coast, you can see from the sea
+curious shaped low hills; the definite range of these near Drewin is
+called the Highland of Drewin; after this place they occur frequently
+close to the shore, usually isolated but now and again two or three
+together, like those called by sailors the Sisters. I am much interested
+in these peculiar-shaped hills that you see on the Ivory and Gold Coast,
+and again, far away down South, rising out of the Ouronuogou swamp, and
+have endeavoured to find out if any theories have been suggested as to
+their formation, but in vain. They look like great bubbles, and run from
+300 to 2,000 feet.</p>
+
+<p>The red cliffs end at Mount Bedford and the estuary of the Fresco River,
+and after passing this the coast is low until you reach what is now
+called the district of Lahu, a native sounding name, but really a
+corruption from its old French name La-Hoe or Hou.</p>
+
+<p>You would not think, when looking at this bit of coast from the sea,
+that the strip of substantial brown sand beach is but a sort of viaduct,
+behind which lies a chain of stagnant lagoons. In the wet season, these
+stretches of dead water cut off the sand beach from the forest for as
+much as 40 miles and more.</p>
+
+<p>Beyond Mount La-Hou on this sand strip there are many native
+villages&mdash;each village a crowded clump of huts, surrounded by a grove of
+coco palm trees, each tree belonging definitely to some native family or
+individual, and having its owner&rsquo;s particular mark on it, and each grove
+of palm trees slanting uniformly at a stiff angle, which gives<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span> you no
+cause to ask which is the prevailing wind here, for they tell you bright
+and clear, as they lean N.E., that the S.W. wind brought them up to do
+so.</p>
+
+<p>Groves of coco palms are no favourites of mine. I don&rsquo;t like them. The
+trees are nice enough to look on, and nice enough to use in the divers
+ways you can use a coco-nut palm; but the noise of the breeze in their
+crowns keeps up a perpetual rattle with their hard leaves that sounds
+like heavy rain day and night, so that you feel you ought to live under
+an umbrella, and your mind gets worried about it when you are not
+looking after it with your common sense.</p>
+
+<p>Then the natives are such a nuisance with coco-nuts. For a truly
+terrific kniff give me even in West Africa a sand beach with coco-nut
+palms and natives. You never get coco-nut palms without natives, because
+they won&rsquo;t grow out of sight of human habitation. I am told also that
+one coco will not grow alone; it must have another coco as well as human
+neighbours, so these things, of course, end in a grove. It&rsquo;s like
+keeping cats with no one to drown the kittens.</p>
+
+<p>Well, the way the smell comes about in this affair is thus. The natives
+bury the coco-nuts in the sand, so as to get the fibre off them. They
+have buried nuts in that sand for ages before you arrive, and the nuts
+have rotted, and crabs have come to see what was going on, a thing crabs
+will do, and they have settled down here and died in their generations,
+and rotted too. The sandflies and all manner of creeping things have
+found that sort of district suits them, and have joined in, and the
+natives, who are great hands at fishing, have flung all the fish offal
+there, and there is usually a lagoon behind this sort of thing which
+contributes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span> its particular aroma, and so between them the smell is a
+good one, even for West Africa.</p>
+
+<p>The ancient geographers called this coast Ajanginal Æthiope, and the
+Dutch and French used to reckon it from Growe, where the Melaguetta
+Coast ends. Just east of Cape Palmas, to the Rio do Sweiro da Costa,
+where they counted the Gold Coast to begin, the Portuguese divided the
+coast thus. The Ivory, or, as the Dutchmen called it, the Tand Kust,
+from Gowe to Rio St. Andrew; the Malaguetta from St. Andrew to the Rio
+Lagos;<a name="FNanchor_5_6" id="FNanchor_5_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_6" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> and the Quaqua from the Rio Lagos to Rio de Sweiro da Costa,
+which is just to the east of what is now called Assini.</p>
+
+<p>It is undoubtedly one of the most interesting and nowadays least known
+bits of the coast of the Bight of Benin; but, taken altogether, with my
+small knowledge of it, I do not feel justified in recommending the Ivory
+Coast as either a sphere for emigration or a pleasure resort.
+Nevertheless, it is a very rich district naturally, and one of the most
+amusing features of West African trade you can see on a steamboat is to
+watch the shipping of timber therefrom.</p>
+
+<p>This region of the Bight of Benin is one of enormous timber wealth, and
+the development of this of late years has been great, adding the name of
+Timber Ports to the many other names this particular bit of West Africa
+bears, the Timber Ports being the main ports of the French Ivory Coast,
+and the English port of Axim on the Gold Coast.</p>
+
+<p>The best way to watch the working of this industry is to stay on board
+the steamer; if by chance you go on shore when this shipping of mahogany
+is going on you may be expected to help, or get out of the way, which is
+hot work, or difficult. The last time I was in Africa we on the &mdash;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span>&mdash;
+shipped 170 enormous bulks of timber. These logs run on an average 20 to
+30 feet long and 3 to 4 feet in diameter. They are towed from the beach
+to the vessel behind the surf boats, seven and eight at a time, tied
+together by a rope running through rings called dogs, which are driven
+into the end of each log, and when alongside, the rope from the donkey
+engine crane is dropped overboard, and passed round the log by the
+negroes swimming about in the water regardless of sharks and as agile as
+fish. Then, with much uproar and advice, the huge logs are slowly heaved
+on board, and either deposited on the deck or forthwith swung over the
+hatch and lowered down. It is almost needless to remark that, with the
+usual foresight of men, the hatch is of a size unsuited to the log, and
+therefore, as it hangs suspended, a chorus of counsel surges up from
+below and from all sides.</p>
+
+<p>The officer in command on this particular hatch presently shouts &ldquo;Lower
+away,&rdquo; waving his hand gracefully from the wrist as though he were
+practising for piano playing, but really to guide Shoo Fly, who is
+driving the donkey engine. The tremendous log hovers over the hatch, and
+then gradually, &ldquo;softly, softly,&rdquo; as Shoo Fly would say, disappears into
+the bowels of the ship, until a heterogeneous yell in English and Kru
+warns the trained intelligence that it is low enough, or more probably
+too low. &ldquo;Heave a link!&rdquo; shouts the officer, and Shoo Fly and the donkey
+engine heaveth. Then the official hand waves, and the crane swings round
+with a whiddle, whiddle, and there is a moment&rsquo;s pause, the rope
+strains, and groans, and waits, and as soon as the most important and
+valuable people on board, such as the Captain, the Doctor, and myself,
+are within its reach to give advice, and look down<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span> the hatch to see
+what is going on, that rope likes to break and comes clawing at us a
+mass of bent and broken wire, and as we scatter, the great log goes with
+a crash into the hold. Fortunately, the particular log I remember as
+indulging in this catastrophe did not go through the ship&rsquo;s bottom, as I
+confidently expected it had at the time, nor was any one killed, such a
+batch of miraculous escapes occurring for the benefit of the officer and
+men below as can only be reasonably accounted for by their having
+expected this sort of thing to happen.</p>
+
+<p>Quaint are the ways of mariners at times. That time they took on
+quantities of great logs at the main gangway, well knowing that they
+would have to go down the hatch aft, and that this would entail hauling
+them along the narrow alley ways. This process was effected by rigging
+the steam winches aft, then two sharp hooks connected together by a
+chain at the end of the wire hawser were fixed into the head of the log,
+and the word passed &ldquo;Haul away,&rdquo; water being thrown on the deck to make
+the logs slip easier over it, and billets of wood put underneath the log
+with the same intention, and the added hope of saving the deck from
+being torn by the rough hewn, hard monster.</p>
+
+<p>Now there are two superstitions rife <a name="CORR1" id="CORR1"><ins class="correction" title="original: regarding this affair,">regarding this affair.</ins></a> The first
+is, that if you hitch the hooks lightly into each side of the log&rsquo;s head
+and then haul hard, the weight of the log will cause the hooks to get
+firmly and safely embedded in it. The second is, that the said weight
+will infallibly keep the billets under it in due position.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing short of getting himself completely and permanently killed
+shakes the mariner&rsquo;s faith in these notions. What often happens is this.
+When the strain is at its highest the hooks slip out of the wood, and
+try and scalp any<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span> one that&rsquo;s handy, and now and again they succeed.
+There was a man helping that day at Axim whom the Doctor said had only
+last voyage fell a victim to the hooks; they slipped out of the head of
+the log and played round his own, laying it open to the bone at the
+back, cutting him over the ears and across the forehead, and if that man
+had not had a phenomenally thick skull he must have died. But no, there
+he was on this voyage as busy as ever with the timber, close to those
+hooks, and evidently with his superstitious trust in the invariable
+embedding of hooks in timber unabated one fraction.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes the performance is varied by the hauling rope itself parting
+and going up the alley way like a boa constrictor in a fit, whisking up
+black passengers and boxes full of screaming parrots in its path from
+places they had placed themselves, or been placed in, well out of its
+legitimate line of march. But the day it succeeds in clawing hold of and
+upsetting the cook&rsquo;s grease tub, which lives in the alley-way, that is
+the day of horror for the First officer and the inauguration of a period
+of ardent holystoning for his minions.</p>
+
+<p>Should, however, the broken rope fail to find, as the fox-hunters would
+say, in the alley-way, it flings itself in a passionate embrace round
+the person of the donkey engine aft, and gives severe trouble there. The
+mariners, with an admirable faith and patience, untwine it, talking
+seriously to it meanwhile, and then fix it up again, may be with more
+care, and the shout, &ldquo;Heave away!&rdquo;&mdash;goes forth again; the rope groans
+and creaks, the hooks go in well on either side of the log, and off it
+moves once more with a graceful, dignified glide towards its
+destination. The Bo&rsquo;sun and Chips with their eyes on the man at the
+winch, and let us<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span> hope their thoughts employed in the penitential
+contemplation of their past sins, so as to be ready for the consequences
+likely to arise for them if the rope parts again, do not observe the
+little white note&mdash;underbill&mdash;as a German would call it, which is
+getting nearer and nearer the end of the log, which has stuck to the
+deck. In a few moments the log is off it, and down on Chips&rsquo; toes, who
+returns thanks with great spontaneity, in language more powerful then
+select. The Bo&rsquo;sun yells, &ldquo;Avast heaving, there!&rdquo; and several other
+things, while his assistant Kruboys, chattering like a rookery when an
+old lady&rsquo;s pet parrot has just joined it, get crowbars and raise up the
+timber, and the Carpenter is a free man again, and the little white
+billet reinstated. &ldquo;Haul away,&rdquo; roars the Bo&rsquo;sun, &ldquo;Abadeo Na nu de um
+oro de Kri Kri,&rdquo; join in the hoarse-voiced Kruboys, &ldquo;Ji na oi,&rdquo; answers
+the excited Shoo Fly, and off goes that log again. The particular log
+whose goings on I am chronicling slewed round at this juncture with the
+force of a Roman battering ram, drove in the panel of my particular
+cabin, causing all sorts of bottles and things inside to cast themselves
+on the floor and smash, whereby I, going in after dark, got cut. But no
+matter, that log, one of the classic sized logs, was in the end safely
+got up the alley-way and duly stowed among its companions. For let West
+Africa send what it may, be it never so large or so difficult, be he
+never so ill-provided with tackle to deal with it, the West Coast
+mariner will have that thing on board, and ship it&mdash;all honour to his
+determination and ability.</p>
+
+<p>The varieties of timber chiefly exported from the West African timber
+ports are <i>Oldfieldia Africana</i>, of splendid size and texture, commonly
+called mahogany, but really<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span> teak, Bar and Camwood and Ebony. Bar and
+Cam are dye-woods, and, before the Anilines came in these woods were in
+great request; invaluable they were for giving the dull rich red to
+bandana handkerchiefs and the warm brown tints to tweed stuffs. Camwood
+was once popular with cabinet makers and wood-turners here, but of late
+years it has only come into this market in roots or twisty bits&mdash;all the
+better these for dyeing, but not for working up, and so it has fallen
+out of demand among cabinet makers in spite of its beautiful grain and
+fine colour, a pinky yellow when fresh cut, deepening rapidly on
+exposure to the air into a rich, dark red brown. Amongst old Spanish
+furniture you will find things made from Camwood that are a joy to the
+eye. There has been some confusion as to whether Bar and Camwood are
+identical&mdash;merely a matter of age in the same tree or no&mdash;but I have
+seen the natives cutting both these timbers, and they are quite
+different trees in the look of them, as any one would expect from seeing
+a billet of Bar and one of Cam; the former is a light porous wood and
+orange colour when fresh cut, while 500 billets of Bar and only 150 to
+200 of Cam go to the ton.</p>
+
+<p>There are many signs of increasing enterprise in the West African timber
+trade, but so far this form of wealth has barely been touched, so vast
+are the West African forests and so varied the trees therein. At present
+it, like most West African industries, is fearfully handicapped by the
+deadly climate, the inferiority and expensiveness of labour, and the
+difficulties of transport.</p>
+
+<p>At present it is useless to fell a tree, be it ever so fine, if it is
+growing at any distance from a river down which you can float it to the
+sea beach, for it would be impossible to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span> drag it far through the
+Liane-tangled West African forest.</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, it is no end of a job to drag a decent-sized log even two
+hundred yards or so to a river. The way it is done is this. When felling
+the tree you arrange that its head shall fall away from the river, then
+trim off the rough stuff and hew the heavy end to a rough point, so that
+when the boys are pully-hauling down the slope&mdash;you must have a
+slope&mdash;to the bank, it may not only be able to pierce the opposing
+undergrowth spearwise more easily than if its end were flat or jagged,
+but also by the fact of its own weight it may help their exertions.</p>
+
+<p>I have seen one or two grand scenes on the Ogowé with trees felled on
+steep mountain sides, wherein you had only got to arrange these
+circumstances, start your log on its downward course to the river, get
+out of the fair way of it, and leave the rest to gravity, which carried
+things through in grand style, with a crashing rush and a glorious
+splash into the river. You had, of course, to take care you had a clear
+bank and not one fringed with dead-trees, into which your mighty spear
+would embed itself and also to have a canoe load of energetic people to
+get hold of the log and keep it out of the current of that lively Ogowé
+river, or it would go off to Kama Country express. But this work on
+timber was far easier than that on the Gold or Ivory Coasts, whence most
+timber comes to Europe, and where the make of the country does not give
+you so fully the assistance of steep gradients.</p>
+
+<p>After what I have told you about the behaviour of these great baulks on
+board ship you will not imagine that the log behaves well during its
+journey on land. Indeed, my belief in the immorality of inanimate nature
+has been<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span> much strengthened by observing the conduct of African timber.
+Nor am I alone in judging it harshly, for an American missionary once
+said to me, &ldquo;Ah! it will be a grand day for Africa when we have driven
+out all the heathen devils; they are everywhere, not only in graven
+images, but just universally scattered around.&rdquo; The remark was made on
+the occasion of a floor that had been laid down by a mission carpenter
+coming up on its own account, as native timber floors laid down by
+native carpenters customarily come, though the native carpenter lays
+Norway boards well enough.</p>
+
+<p>When, after much toil and tribulation and uproar, the log has been got
+down to the river and floated, iron rings are driven into it, and it is
+branded with its owner&rsquo;s mark. Then the owner does not worry himself
+much about it for a month or so, but lets it float its way down and
+soak, and generally lazy about until he gets together sufficient of its
+kind to make a shipment.</p>
+
+<p>One of the many strange and curious things they told me of on the West
+Coast was that old idea that hydrophobia is introduced into Europe by
+means of these logs. There is, they say, on the West Coast of Africa a
+peculiarly venomous scorpion that makes its home on the logs while they
+are floating in the river, three-parts submerged on account of weight,
+and the other part most delightfully damp and cool to the scorpion&rsquo;s
+mind. When the logs get shipped frequently the scorpion gets shipped
+too, and subsequently comes out in the hold and bites the resident rats.
+So far I accept this statement fully, for I have seen more than enough
+rats and scorpions in the hold, and the West Coast scorpions are
+particularly venomous, but feeling that in these days it is the duty of
+every one to keep their belief for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span> religious purposes, I cannot go on
+and in a whole souled way believe that the dogs of Liverpool, Havre,
+Hamburg, and Marseilles worry the said rats when they arrive in dock,
+and, getting bitten by them, breed rabies.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, I do not interrupt and say, &ldquo;Stuff,&rdquo; because if you do
+this to the old coaster he only offers to fight you, or see you
+shrivelled, or bet you half-a-crown, or in some other time-honoured way
+demonstrate the truth of his assertion, and he will, moreover, go on and
+say there is more hydrophobia in the aforesaid towns than elsewhere, and
+as the chances are you have not got hydrophobia statistics with you, you
+are lost. Besides, it&rsquo;s very unkind and unnecessary to make a West
+Coaster go and say or do things which will only make things harder for
+him in the time &ldquo;to come,&rdquo; and anyhow if you are of a cautious, nervous
+disposition you had better search your bunk for scorpions, before
+turning in, when you are on a vessel that has got timber on board, and
+the chances are that your labours will be rewarded by discovering
+specimens of this interesting animal.</p>
+
+<p>Scorpions and centipedes are inferior in worrying power to driver ants,
+but they are a feature in Coast life, particularly in places&mdash;Cameroons,
+for example. If you see a man who seems to you to have a morbid caution
+in the method of dealing with his hat or folded dinner napkin, judge him
+not harshly, for the chances are he is from Cameroon, where there are
+scorpions&mdash;scorpions of great magnitude and tough constitutions, as was
+demonstrated by a little affair up here that occurred in a family I
+know.</p>
+
+<p>The inhabitants of the French Ivory Coast are an exceedingly industrious
+and enterprising set of people in commercial matters, and the export and
+import trade is computed by a recent French authority at ten million<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span>
+francs per annum. No official computation, however, of the trade of a
+Coast district is correct, for reasons I will not enter into now.</p>
+
+<p>The native coinage equivalent here is the manilla&mdash;a bracelet in a state
+of sinking into a more conventional token. These manillas are made of an
+alloy of copper and pewter, manufactured mainly at Birmingham and
+Nantes, the individual value being from 20 to 25 centimes.</p>
+
+<p>Changes for the worse as far as English trade is concerned have passed
+over the trade of the Ivory Coast recently, but the way, even in my
+time, trade was carried on was thus. The native traders deal with the
+captains of the English sailing vessels and the French factories, buying
+palm oil and kernels from the bush people with merchandise, and selling
+it to the native or foreign shippers. They get paid in manillas, which
+they can, when they wish, get changed again into merchandise either at
+the factory or on the trading ship. The manilla is, therefore, a kind of
+bank for the black trader, a something he can put his wealth into when
+he wants to store it for a time.</p>
+
+<p>They have a singular system of commercial correspondence between the
+villages on the beach and the villages on the other side of the great
+lagoon that separates it from the mainland. Each village on the shore
+has its particular village on the other side of the lagoon, thus Alindja
+Badon is the interior commercial centre for Grand Jack on the beach,
+Abia for Anamaquoa, or Half Jack, and so on. Anamaquoa is only separated
+from its sister village by a little lagoon that is fordable, but the
+other towns have to communicate by means of canoes.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Grand Bassam, Assini, and Half Jack are the most important places on the
+Ivory Coast. The main portion of the first-named town is out of sight
+from seaboard, being some five miles up the Costa River, and all you can
+see on the beach are two large but lonesome-looking factories. Half
+Jack, Jack a Jack, or Anamaquoa&mdash;there is nothing like having plenty of
+names for one place in West Africa, because it leads people at home who
+don&rsquo;t know the joke to think there is more of you than there naturally
+is&mdash;gives its name to the bit of coast from Cape Palmas to Grand Bassam,
+this coast being called the Half Jack, or quite as often the Bristol
+Coast, and for many years it was the main point of call for the
+Guineamen, old-fashioned sailing vessels which worked the Bristol trade
+in the Bights.</p>
+
+<p>This trade was established during the last century by Mr. Henry King, of
+Bristol, for supplying labour to the West Indies, and was further
+developed by his two sons, Richard, who hated men-o&rsquo;-war like a quaker,
+and William who loved science, both very worthy gentlemen. After their
+time up till when I was first on the Coast, this firm carried on trade
+both on the Bristol Coast and down in Cameroon, which in old days bore
+the name of Little Bristol-in-Hell, but now the trade is in other hands.</p>
+
+<p>According to Captain Binger, there are now about 30 sailing ships still
+working the Ivory Coast trade, two of them the property of an energetic
+American captain, but the greater part belonging to Bristol. Their
+voyage out from Bristol varies from 60 to 90 days, according as you get
+through the Horse latitudes&mdash;so-called from the number of horses that
+used to die in this region of calms when the sailing vessels bringing
+them across from South America<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> lay week out and week in short alike of
+wind and water.</p>
+
+<p>In old days, when the Bristol ship got to the Coast she would call at
+the first village on it. Then the native chiefs and head men would come
+on board and haggle with the captain as to the quantity of goods he
+would let them have on trust, they covenanting to bring in exchange for
+them in a given time a certain number of slaves or so much produce. This
+arrangement being made, off sailed the Guineaman to his next village,
+where a similar game took place all the way down Coast to Grand Bassam.</p>
+
+<p>When she had paid out the trust goods to the last village, she would
+stand out to sea and work back to her first village of call on the
+Bristol Coast to pick up the promised produce, this arrangement giving
+the native traders time to collect it. In nine cases out of ten,
+however, it was not ready for her, so on she went to the next. By this
+time the Guineaman would present the spectacle of a farmhouse that had
+gone mad, grown masts, and run away to sea; for the decks were protected
+from the burning sun by a well-built thatch roof, and she lounged along
+heavy with the rank sea growth of these seas. Sometimes she would be
+unroofed by a tornado, sometimes seized by a pirate parasitic on the
+Guinea trade, but barring these interruptions to business she called
+regularly on her creditors, from some getting the promised payment, from
+others part of it, from others again only the renewal of the promise,
+and then when she had again reached her last point of call put out to
+sea once more and worked back again to the first creditor village. In
+those days she kept at this weary round until she got in all her debts,
+a process that often took her four or five years, and cost the lives of
+half her crew from fever, and then her consorts<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span> drafted a man or so on
+board her and kept her going until she was full enough of pepper, gold,
+gum, ivory, and native gods to sail for Bristol. There, when the
+Guineaman came in, were grand doings for the small boys, what with
+parrots, oranges, bananas, &amp;c., but sad times for most of those whose
+relatives and friends had left Bristol on her.</p>
+
+<p>In much the same way, and with much the same risks, the Bristol Coast
+trade goes on now, only there is little of it left, owing to the French
+system of suppressing trade. Palm oil is the modern equivalent to
+slaves, and just as in old days the former were transhipped from the
+coasting Guineamen to the transatlantic slavers, so now the palm oil is
+shipped off on to the homeward bound African steamers, while, as for the
+joys and sorrows, century-change affects them not. So long as Western
+Africa remains the deadliest region on earth there will be joy over
+those who come up out of it; heartache and anxiety over those who are
+down there fighting as men fought of old for those things worth the
+fighting, God, Glory and Gold; and grief over those who are dead among
+all of us at home who are ill-advised enough to really care for men who
+have the pluck to go there.</p>
+
+<p>During the smoke season when dense fogs hang over the Bight of Benin,
+the Bristol ships get very considerably sworn at by the steamers. They
+have letters for them, and they want oil off them; between ourselves,
+they want oil off every created thing, and the Bristol boat is not easy
+to find. So the steamer goes dodging and fumbling about after her,
+swearing softly about wasting coal all the time, and more harshly still
+when he finds he has picked up the wrong Guineaman, only modified if she
+has stuff to send home, stuff which he conjures the Bristol captain by
+the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span> love he bears him to keep, and ship by him when he is on his way
+home from windward ports, or to let him have forthwith.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes the Bristolman will signal to a passing steamer for a doctor.
+The doctors of the African and British African boats are much thought of
+all down the Coast, and are only second in importance to the doctor on
+board a telegraph ship, who, being a rare specimen, is regarded as,
+<i>ipso facto</i>, more gifted, so that people will save up their ailments
+for the telegraph ship&rsquo;s medical man, which is not a bad practice, as it
+leads commonly to their getting over those ailments one way or the other
+by the time the telegraph ship <a name="CORR2" id="CORR2"><ins class="correction" title="original: arives">arrives</ins></a>. It is reported that one day one
+of the Bristolmen ran up an urgent signal to a passing mail steamer for
+a doctor, and the captain thereof ran up a signal of assent, and the
+doctor went below to get his medicines ready. Meanwhile, instead of
+displaying a patient gratitude, the Bristolman signalled &ldquo;Repeat
+signal.&rdquo; &ldquo;Give it &rsquo;em again,&rdquo; said the steamboat captain, &ldquo;those
+Bristolmen ain&rsquo;t got no Board schools.&rdquo; Still the Bristolman kept
+bothering, running up her original signal, and in due course off went
+the doctor to her in the gig. When he returned his captain asked him,
+saying, &ldquo;Pills, are they all mad on board that vessel or merely drunk as
+usual?&rdquo; &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; says the doctor, &ldquo;that&rsquo;s curious, for it&rsquo;s the very same
+question Captain N. has asked me about you. He is very anxious about
+your mental health, and wants to know why you keep on signalling &lsquo;Haul
+to, or I will fire into you,&rsquo;&rdquo; and the story goes that an investigation
+of the code and the steamer&rsquo;s signal supported the Bristolman&rsquo;s reading,
+and the subject was dropped in steam circles.</p>
+
+<p>Although the Bristolmen do not carry doctors, they are<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span> provided with
+grand medicine chests, the supply of medicines in West Africa being
+frequently in the inverse ratio with the ability to administer them
+advantageously.</p>
+
+<p>Inside the lid of these medicine chests is a printed paper of
+instructions, each drug having a number before its name, and a hint as
+to the proper dose after it. Thus, we will say, for example, 1 was
+jalap; 2, calomel; 3, croton oil; and 4, quinine. Once upon a time there
+was a Bristol captain, as good a man as need be and with a fine head on
+him for figures. Some of his crew were smitten with fever when he was
+out of number 4, so he argues that 2 and 2 are 4 all the world over, but
+being short of 2, it being a popular drug, he further argues 3 and 1
+make 4 as well, and the dose of 4 being so much he makes that dose up
+out of jalap and croton oil. Some of the patients survived; at least, a
+man I met claimed to have done so. His report is not altogether
+reproducible in full, but, on the whole, the results of the treatment
+went more towards demonstrating the danger of importing raw abstract
+truths into everyday affairs than to encouraging one to repeat the
+experiment of arithmetical therapeutics.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_6" id="Footnote_5_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_6"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> No connection with the Colony of Lagos.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+
+<h2>FISHING IN WEST AFRICA.</h2>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span></p>
+<p>There is one distinctive charm about fishing&mdash;its fascinations will
+stand any climate. You may sit crouching on ice over a hole inside the
+arctic circle, or on a Windsor chair by the side of the River Lea in the
+so-called temperate zone, or you may squat in a canoe on an equatorial
+river, with the surrounding atmosphere 45 per cent. mosquito, and if you
+are fishing you will enjoy yourself; and what is more important than
+this enjoyment, is that you will not embitter your present, nor endanger
+your future, by going home in a bad temper, whether you have caught
+anything or not, provided always that you are a true fisherman.</p>
+
+<p>This is not the case with other sports; I have been assured by
+experienced men that it &ldquo;makes one feel awfully bad&rdquo; when, after
+carrying for hours a very heavy elephant gun, for example, through a
+tangled forest you have got a wretched bad chance of a shot at an
+elephant; and as for football, cricket, &amp;c., well, I need hardly speak
+of the unchristian feelings they engender in the mind towards umpires
+and successful opponents.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 650px;" id="IMG107A"><span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span>
+<img src="images/ill-107a.jpg" width="650" height="408" alt="Batanga Canoes" title="Batanga Canoes" />
+<p><span class="facingleft">[<i>To face page 89.</i></span></p>
+<span class="caption"><span class="smcap">Batanga Canoes.</span></span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Being, as above demonstrated, a humble, but enthusiastic, devotee of
+fishing&mdash;I dare not say, as my great predecessor Dame Juliana Berners
+says, &ldquo;with an angle,&rdquo; because my <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span>conscience tells me I am a born
+poacher,&mdash;I need hardly remark that when I heard, from a reliable
+authority at Gaboon, that there were lakes in the centre of the island
+of Corisco, and that these fresh-water lakes were fished annually by
+representative ladies from the villages on this island, and that their
+annual fishing was just about due, I decided that I must go there
+forthwith. Now, although Corisco is not more than twenty miles out to
+sea from the Continent, it is not a particularly easy place to get at
+nowadays, no vessels ever calling there; so I got, through the kindness
+of Dr. Nassau, a little schooner and a black crew, and, forgetting my
+solemn resolve, formed from the fruits of previous experiences, never to
+go on to an Atlantic island again, off I sailed. I will not go into the
+adventures of that voyage here. My reputation as a navigator was great
+before I left Gaboon. I had a record of having once driven my bowsprit
+through a conservatory, and once taken all the paint off one side of a
+smallpox hospital, to say nothing of repeatedly having made attempts to
+climb trees in boats I commanded, but when I returned, I had surpassed
+these things by having successfully got my main-mast jammed up a tap,
+and I had done sufficient work in discovering new sandbanks, rock
+shoals, &amp;c., in Corisco Bay, and round Cape Esterias, to necessitate, or
+call for, a new edition of <i>The West African Pilot</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Corisco Island is about three miles long by 1&frac34; wide: its latitude
+0°56 N., long. 9°20&frac12; E. Mr. Winwood Reade was about the last
+traveller to give a description of Corisco, and a very interesting
+description it is. He was there in the early sixties, and was evidently
+too fully engaged with a drunken captain and a mad Malay<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span> cook to go
+inland. In his days small trading vessels used to call at Corisco for
+cargo, but they do so no longer, all the trade in the Bay now being
+carried on at Messrs. Holt&rsquo;s factory on Little Eloby Island (an island
+nearer in shore), and on the mainland at Coco Beach, belonging to
+Messrs. Hatton and Cookson.</p>
+
+<p>In Winwood Reade&rsquo;s days, too, there was a settlement of the American
+Presbyterian Society on Corisco, with a staff of white men. This has
+been abandoned to a native minister, because the Society found that
+facts did not support their theory that the island would be more healthy
+than the mainland, the mortality being quite as great as at any
+continental station, so they moved on to the continent to be nearer
+their work. The only white people that are now on Corisco are two
+Spanish priests and three nuns; but of these good people I saw little or
+nothing, as my headquarters were with the Presbyterian native minister,
+Mr. Ibea, and there was war between him and the priests.</p>
+
+<p>The natives are Benga, a coast tribe now rapidly dying out. They were
+once a great tribe, and in the old days, when the slavers and the
+whalers haunted Corisco Bay, these Benga were much in demand as crew
+men, in spite of the reputation they bore for ferocity. Nowadays the
+grown men get their living by going as travelling agents for the white
+merchants into the hinterland behind Corisco Bay, amongst the very
+dangerous and savage tribes there, and when one of them has made enough
+money by this trading, he comes back to Corisco, and rests, and
+luxuriates in the ample bosom of his family until he has spent his
+money&mdash;then he gets trust from the white trader, and goes to the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span> Bush
+again, pretty frequently meeting there the sad fate of the pitcher that
+went too often to the well, and getting killed by the hinterlanders.</p>
+
+<p>On arriving at Corisco Island, I &ldquo;soothed with a gift, and greeted with
+a smile&rdquo; the dusky inhabitants. &ldquo;Have you got any tobacco?&rdquo; said they.
+&ldquo;I have,&rdquo; I responded, and a friendly feeling at once arose. I then
+explained that I wanted to join the fishing party. They were quite
+willing, and said the ladies were just finishing planting their farms
+before the tornado season came on, and that they would make the
+peculiar, necessary baskets at once. They did not do so at once in the
+English sense of the term, but we all know there is no time south of
+40°, and so I waited patiently, walking about the island.</p>
+
+<p>Corisco is locally celebrated for its beauty. Winwood Reade says: &ldquo;It is
+a little world in miniature, with its miniature forests, miniature
+prairies, miniature mountains, miniature rivers, and miniature
+precipices on the sea-shore.&rdquo; In consequence partly of these things, and
+partly of the inhabitants&rsquo; rooted idea that the proper way to any place
+on the island is round by the sea-shore, the paths of Corisco are as
+strange as several other things are in latitude 0, and, like the other
+things, they require understanding to get on with.</p>
+
+<p>They start from the beach with the avowed intention of just going round
+the next headland because the tide happens to be in too much for you to
+go along by the beach; but, once started, their presiding genii might
+sing to the wayfarer Mr. Kipling&rsquo;s &ldquo;The Lord knows where we shall go,
+dear lass, and the Deuce knows what we shall see.&rdquo; You go up a path off
+the beach gladly, because you have been wading in fine white sand over
+your ankles, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span> in banks of rotten and rotting seaweed, on which
+centipedes, and other catamumpuses, crawl in profusion, not to mention
+sand-flies, &amp;c., and the path makes a plunge inland, as much as to say,
+&ldquo;Come and see our noted scenery,&rdquo; and having led you through a miniature
+swamp, a miniature forest, and a miniature prairie, &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a pity,&rdquo; says
+the path, &ldquo;not to call at So-and-so&rsquo;s village now we are so near it,&rdquo;
+and off it goes to the village through a patch of grass or plantation.
+It wanders through the scattered village calling at houses, for some
+time, and then says, &ldquo;Bless me, I had nearly forgotten what I came out
+for; we must hurry back to that beach,&rdquo; and off it goes through more
+scenery, landing you ultimately about fifty yards off the place where
+you first joined it, in consequence of the South Atlantic waves flying
+in foam and fury against a miniature precipice&mdash;the first thing they
+have met that dared stay their lordly course since they left Cape Horn
+or the ice walls of the Antarctic.</p>
+
+<p>At last the fishing baskets were ready, and we set off for the lakes by
+a path that plunged into a little ravine, crossed a dried swamp, went up
+a hill, and on to an open prairie, in the course of about twenty
+minutes. Passing over this prairie, and through a wood, we came to
+another prairie, like most things in Corisco just then (August), dried
+up, for it was the height of the dry season. On this prairie we waited
+for some of the representative ladies from other villages to come up;
+for without their presence our fishing would not have been legal. When
+you wait in West Africa it eats into your lifetime to a considerable
+extent, and we spent half-an-hour or so standing howling, in prolonged,
+intoned howls, for the absent ladies, notably grievously for On-gou-ta,
+and when they came not, we threw<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span> ourselves down on the soft, fine,
+golden-brown grass, in the sun, and all, with the exception of myself,
+went asleep. After about two and a half hours I was aroused from the
+contemplation of the domestic habits of some beetles, by hearing a
+crackle, crackle, interspersed with sounds like small pistols going off,
+and looking round saw a fog of blue-brown smoke surmounting a
+rapidly-advancing wall of red fire.</p>
+
+<p>I rose, and spread the news among my companions, who were sleeping, with
+thumps and kicks. Shouting at a sleeping African is labour lost. And
+then I made a bee-line for the nearest green forest wall of the prairie,
+followed by my companions. Yet, in spite of some very creditable sprint
+performances on their part, three members of the band got scorched.
+Fortunately, however, our activity landed us close to the lakes, so the
+scorched ones spent the rest of the afternoon sitting in mud-holes,
+comforting themselves with the balmy black slime. The other ladies
+turned up soon after this, and said that the fire had arisen from some
+man having set fire to a corner of the prairie some days previously, to
+make a farm; he had thought the fire was out round his patch, whereas it
+was not, but smouldering in the tussocks of grass, and the wind had
+sprung up that afternoon from a quarter that fanned it up. I said,
+&ldquo;People should be very careful of fire,&rdquo; and the scorched ladies
+profoundly agreed with me, and said things I will not repeat here,
+regarding &ldquo;that fool man&rdquo; and his female ancestors.</p>
+
+<p>The lakes are pools of varying extent and depth, in the bed-rock<a name="FNanchor_6_7" id="FNanchor_6_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_7" class="fnanchor">[6]</a> of
+the island, and the fact that they are sur<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span>rounded by thick forests on
+every side, and that the dry season is the cool season on the Equator,
+prevents them from drying up.</p>
+
+<p>Most of these lakes are encircled by a rim of rock, from which you jump
+down into knee-deep black slime, and then, if you are a representative
+lady, you waddle, and squeal, and grunt, and skylark generally on your
+way to the water in the middle. If it is a large lake you are working,
+you and your companions drive in two rows of stakes, cutting each other
+more or less at right angles, more or less in the middle of the lake, so
+as to divide it up into convenient portions. Then some ladies with their
+specially shaped baskets form a line, with their backs to the bank, and
+their faces to the water-space, in the enclosure, holding the baskets
+with one rim under water. The others go into the water, and splash with
+hands, and feet, and sticks, and, needless to say, yell hard all the
+time. The naturally alarmed fish fly from them, intent on getting into
+the mud, and are deftly scooped up by the peck by the ladies in their
+baskets. In little lakes the staking is not necessary, but the rest of
+the proceedings are the same. Some of the smaller lakes are too deep to
+be thus fished at all, being, I expect, clefts in the rock, such as you
+see in other parts of the island, sometimes 30 or 40 feet deep.</p>
+
+<p>The usual result of the day&rsquo;s fishing is from twelve to fifteen bushels
+of a common mud-fish,<a name="FNanchor_7_8" id="FNanchor_7_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_8" class="fnanchor">[7]</a> which is very good eating. The spoils are
+divided among the representative ladies, and they take them back to
+their respective villages and distribute them. Then ensues, that same
+evening, a tremendous fish supper, and the fish left over are smoked
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span>and carefully kept as a delicacy, to make sauce with, &amp;c., until the
+next year&rsquo;s fishing day comes round.</p>
+
+<p>The waters of West Africa, salt, brackish, and fresh abound with fish,
+and many kinds are, if properly cooked, excellent eating. For culinary
+purposes you may divide the fish into sea-fish, lagoon-fish and
+river-fish; the first division, the sea-fish, are excellent eating, and
+are in enormous quantities, particularly along the Windward Coast on the
+Great West African Bank. South of this, at the mouths of the Oil rivers,
+they fall off, from a culinary standpoint, though scientifically they
+increase in charm, as you find hereabouts fishes of extremely early
+types, whose relations have an interesting series of monuments in the
+shape of fossils, in the sandstone; but if primeval man had to live on
+them when they were alive together, I am sorry for him, for he might
+just as well have eaten mud, and better, for then he would not have run
+the risk of getting choked with bones. On the South-West Coast the
+culinary value goes up again; there are found quantities of excellent
+deep-sea fish, and round the mouths of the rivers, shoals of bream and
+grey mullet.</p>
+
+<p>The lagoon-fish are not particularly good, being as a rule supremely
+muddy and bony; they have their uses, however, for I am informed that
+they indicate to Lagos when it may expect an epidemic; to this end they
+die, in an adjacent lagoon, and float about upon its surface, wrong side
+up, until decomposition does its work. Their method of prophecy is a
+sound one, for it demonstrates (<i>a</i>) that the lagoon drinking water is
+worse than usual; (<i>b</i>) if it is not already fatal they will make it so.</p>
+
+<p>The river-fish of the Gold Coast are better than those of the mud-sewers
+of the Niger Delta, because the Gold Coast<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span> rivers are brisk sporting
+streams, with the exception of the Volta, and at a short distance inland
+they come down over rocky rapids with a stiff current. The fish of the
+upper waters of the Delta rivers are better than those down in the
+mangrove-swamp region; and in the South-West Coast rivers, with which I
+am personally well acquainted, the up-river fish are excellent in
+quality, on account of the swift current. I will however leave culinary
+considerations, because cooking is a subject upon which I am liable to
+become diffuse, and we will turn to the consideration of the sporting
+side of fishing.</p>
+
+<p>Now, there is one thing you will always hear the Gold Coaster (white
+variety) grumbling about, &ldquo;There is no sport.&rdquo; He has only got himself
+to blame. Let him try and introduce the Polynesian practice of swimming
+about in the surf, without his clothes, and with a suitable large, sharp
+knife, slaying sharks&mdash;there&rsquo;s no end of sharks on the Gold Coast, and
+no end of surf. The Rivermen have the same complaint, and I may
+recommend that they should try spearing sting-rays, things that run
+sometimes to six feet across the wings, and every inch of them wicked,
+particularly the tail. There is quite enough danger in either sport to
+satisfy a Sir Samuel Baker; for myself, being a nervous, quiet, rational
+individual, a large cat-fish in a small canoe supplies sufficient
+excitement.</p>
+
+<p>The other day I went out for a day&rsquo;s fishing on an African river. I and
+two black men, in a canoe, in company with a round net, three stout
+fishing-lines, three paddles, Dr. Günther&rsquo;s <i>Study of Fishes</i>, some bait
+in an old Morton&rsquo;s boiled-mutton tin, a little manioc, stinking awfully
+(as is its wont), a broken calabash baler, a lot of dirty water to sit
+in, and happy and contented minds. I catalogue these<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span> things because
+they are either essential to, or inseparable from, a good day&rsquo;s sport in
+West Africa. Yes, even <i>I</i>, ask my vict&mdash;&mdash;friends down there, I feel
+sure they will tell you that they never had such experiences before my
+arrival. I fear they will go on and say, &ldquo;Never again!&rdquo; and that it was
+all my fault, which it was not. When things go well they ascribe it, and
+their survival, to Providence or their own precautions; when things are
+merely usual in horror, it&rsquo;s my fault, which is a rank inversion of the
+truth, for it is only when circumstances get beyond my control, and
+Providence takes charge, that accidents happen. I will demonstrate this
+by continuing my narrative. We paddled away, far up a mangrove creek,
+and then went up against the black mud-bank, with its great network of
+grey-white roots, surmounted by the closely-interlaced black-green
+foliage. Absolute silence reigned, as it can only reign in Africa in a
+mangrove swamp. The water-laden air wrapped round us like a warm, wet
+blanket. The big mangrove flies came silently to feed on us and leave
+their progeny behind them in the wounds to do likewise. The stink of the
+mud, strong enough to break a window, mingled fraternally with that of
+the sour manioc.</p>
+
+<p>I was reading, the negroes, always quiet enough when fishing, were
+silently carrying on that great African native industry&mdash;scratching
+themselves&mdash;so, with our lines over side, life slid away like a
+dreamless sleep, until the middle man hooked a cat-fish. It came on
+board with an awful grunt, right in the middle of us; flop, swish,
+scurry and yell followed; I tucked the study of fishes in general under
+my arm and attended to this individual specimen, shouting &ldquo;Lef em, lef
+em; hev em for water one time, you<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span> sons of unsanctified house
+lizards,&rdquo;<a name="FNanchor_8_9" id="FNanchor_8_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_9" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> and such like valuable advice and admonition. The man in
+the more remote end of the canoe made an awful swipe at the 3 ft.-long,
+grunting, flopping, yellow-grey, slimy, thing, but never reached it
+owing to the paddle meeting in mid-air with the flying leg of the man in
+front of him, drawing blood profusely. I really fancy, about this time,
+that, barring the cat-fish and myself, the occupants of the canoe were
+standing on their heads, with a view of removing their lower limbs from
+the terrible pectoral and dorsal fins, with which our prey made such
+lively play.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<i>Brevi spatio interjecto</i>,&rdquo; as Cæsar says, in the middle of a bad
+battle, over went the canoe, while the cat-fish went off home with the
+line and hook. One black man went to the bank, whither, with a blind
+prescience of our fate, I had flung, a second before, the most valuable
+occupant of the canoe, <i>The Study of Fishes</i>. I went personally to
+investigate fluvial deposit <i>in situ</i>. When I returned to the
+surface&mdash;accompanied by great swirls of mud and great bubbles of the
+gases of decomposition I had liberated on my visit to the bottom of the
+river&mdash;I observed the canoe floating bottom upwards, accompanied by
+Morton&rsquo;s tin, the calabash, and the paddles, while on the bank one black
+man was engaged in hauling the other one out by the legs; fortunately
+this one&rsquo;s individual god had seen to it that his toes should become
+entangled in the net, and this floated, and so indicated to his
+companion where he was, when he had dived into the mud and got fairly
+embedded.</p>
+
+<p>Now it&rsquo;s my belief that the most difficult thing in the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span>world is to
+turn over a round-bottomed canoe that is wrong side up, when you are in
+the water with the said canoe. The next most difficult thing is to get
+into the canoe, after accomplishing triumph number one, and had it not
+been for my black friends that afternoon, I should not have done these
+things successfully, and there would be by now another haunted creek in
+West Africa, with a mud and blood bespattered ghost trying for ever to
+turn over the ghost of a little canoe. However, all ended happily. We
+collected all our possessions, except the result of the day&rsquo;s
+fishing&mdash;the cat-fish&mdash;but we had had as much of him as we wanted, and
+so, adding a thankful mind to our contented ones, went home.</p>
+
+<p>None of us gave a verbatim report of the incident. I held my tongue for
+fear of not being allowed out fishing again, and I heard my men giving a
+fine account of a fearful fight, with accompanying prodigies of valour,
+that we had had with a witch crocodile. I fancy that must have been just
+their way of putting it, because it is not good form to be frightened by
+cat-fish on the West Coast, and I cannot for the life of me remember
+even having seen a witch crocodile that afternoon.</p>
+
+<p>I must, however, own that native methods of fishing are usually safe,
+though I fail to see what I had to do in producing the above accident.
+The usual method of dealing with a cat-fish is to bang him on the head
+with a club, and then break the spiny fins off, for they make nasty
+wounds that are difficult to heal, and very painful.</p>
+
+<p>The native fishing-craft is the dug-out canoe in its various local
+forms. The Accra canoe is a very safe and firm canoe for work of any
+sort except heavy cargo, and it is particularly good for surf; it is,
+however, slower than<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span> many other kinds. The canoe that you can get the
+greatest pace out of is undoubtedly the Adooma, which is narrow and
+flat-bottomed, and simply flies over the water. The paddles used vary
+also with locality, and their form is a mere matter of local fashion,
+for they all do their work well. There is the leaf-shaped Kru paddle,
+the trident-shaped Accra, the long-lozenged Niger, and the long-handled,
+small-headed Igalwa paddle; and with each of these forms the native, to
+the manner born, will send his canoe flying along with that unbroken
+sweep I consider the most luxurious and perfect form of motion on earth.</p>
+
+<p>It is when it comes to sailing that the African is inferior. He does not
+sail half as much as he might, but still pretty frequently. The
+materials of which the sails are made vary immensely in different
+places, and the most beautiful are those at Loanda, which are made of
+small grass mats, with fringes, sewn together, and are of a warm, rich
+sand-colour. Next in beauty comes the branch of a palm, or other tree,
+stuck in the bows, and least in beauty is the fisherman&rsquo;s own damaged
+waist-cloth. I remember it used to seem very strange to me at first, to
+see my companion in a canoe take off his clothing and make a sail with
+it, on a wind springing up behind us. The very strangest sail I ever
+sailed under was a black man&rsquo;s blue trousers, they were tied waist
+upwards to a cross-stick, the legs neatly crossed, and secured to the
+thwarts of the canoe. You cannot well tack, or carry out any neat
+sailing evolutions with any of the African sails, particularly with the
+last-named form. The shape of the African sail is almost always in
+appearance a triangle, and fastened to a cross-stick which is secured to
+an upright one. It is not the form, however, that prevents it from being
+handy, but the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span> way it is put up, almost always without sheets, for river and lake work,
+and it is tied together with tie tie&mdash;bush rope. If you should
+personally be managing one, and trouble threatens, take my advice, and
+take the mast out one time, and deal with that tie tie palaver at your
+leisure. Never mind what people say about this method not being
+seaman-like&mdash;you survive.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 650px;" id="IMG119A"><span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span>
+<img src="images/ill-119a.jpg" width="650" height="432" alt="Falls on the Tongue River" title="Falls on the Tongue River" />
+<span class="caption"><span class="smcap">Falls on the Tongue River.</span></span>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 650px;" id="IMG119A1"><span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span>
+<img src="images/ill-119a1.jpg" width="650" height="408" alt="Loanda Canoe with Mat Sails" title="Loanda Canoe with Mat Sails" />
+<p><span class="facingleft">[<i>To face page 101.</i></span></p>
+<span class="caption"><span class="smcap">Loanda Canoe with Mat Sails.</span></span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The mat sails used for sea-work are spread by a bamboo sprit. There is a
+single mast, to the head of which the sail is either hoisted by means of
+a small line run through the mast, or, more frequently, made fast with a
+seizing. Such a sail is worked by means of a sheet and a brace on the
+sprit, usually by one man, whose companion steers by a paddle over the
+stern; sometimes, however, one man performs both duties. Now and again
+you will find the luff of the sail bowlined out with another stick. This
+is most common round Sierra Leone.</p>
+
+<p>The appliances for catching fish are, firstly, fish traps, sometimes
+made of hollow logs of trees, with one end left open and the other
+closed. One of these is just dropped alongside the bank, left for a week
+or so, until a fish family makes a home in it, and then it is removed
+with a jerk. Then there are fish-baskets made from split palm-stems tied
+together with tie tie; they are circular and conical, resembling our
+lobster pots and eel baskets, and they are usually baited with lumps of
+kank soaked in palm-oil. Then there are drag nets made of pineapple
+fibre, one edge weighted with stones tied in bunches at intervals; as a
+rule these run ten to twenty-five feet long, but in some places they are
+much longer. The longest I ever saw was when out fishing in the lovely
+harbour of San Paul de Loanda. This was over thirty feet and was
+weighted with bunches of clam<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span> shells, and made of European yarn, as
+indeed most nets are when this is procurable by the natives, and it was
+worked by three canoes which were being poled about, as is usual in
+Loanda Harbour. Then there is the universal hook and line, the hook
+either of European make or the simple bent pin of our youth.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 650px;" id="IMG120A"><span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span>
+<img src="images/ill-120a.jpg" width="650" height="438" alt="St. Paul do Loanda." title="St. Paul do Loanda." />
+<p class="facingleft">[<i>To face page 102.</i></p>
+<span class="caption"><span class="smcap">St. Paul do Loanda.</span></span>
+</div>
+
+<p>But my favourite method, and the one by which I got most of my fish up
+rivers or in creeks is the stockade trap. These are constructed by
+driving in stakes close together, leaving one opening, not in the middle
+of the stockade, but towards the up river end. In tidal waters these
+stockades are visited daily, at nearly low tide, for the high tide
+carries the fish in behind the stockade, and leaves them there on
+falling. Up river, above tide water, the stockades are left for several
+days, in order to allow the fish to congregate. Then the opening is
+closed up, the fisher-women go inside and throw out the water and
+collect the fish. There is another kind of stockade that gives great
+sport. During the wet season the terrific rush of water tears off bits
+of bank in such rivers as the Congo, and Ogowé, where, owing to the
+continual fierce current of fresh water the brackish tide waters do not
+come far up the river, so that the banks are not shielded by a great
+network of mangrove roots. In the Ogowé a good many of the banks are
+composed of a stout clay, and so the pieces torn off hang together, and
+often go sailing out to sea, on the current, waving their bushes, and
+even trees, gallantly in the broad Atlantic, out of sight of land. Bits
+of the Congo Free State are great at seafaring too, and owing to the
+terrific stream of the great Zaire, which spreads a belt of fresh water
+over the surface of the ocean 200 miles from land, ships fall in with
+these floating islands, with their trees still flourishing. The Ogowé
+is <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span>not so big as the Congo, but it is a very respectable stream even
+for the great continent of rivers, and it pours into the Atlantic, in
+the wet season, about 1,750,000 cubic feet of fresh water per second, on
+which float some of these islands. But by no means every island gets out
+to sea, many of them get into slack water round corners in the Delta
+region of the Ogowé and remain there, collecting all sorts of <i>débris</i>
+that comes down on the flood water, getting matted more and more firm by
+the floating grass, every joint of which grows on the smallest
+opportunity. In many places these floating islands are of considerable
+size; one I heard of was large enough to induce a friend of mine to
+start a coffee plantation on it; unfortunately the wretched thing came
+to pieces when he had cut down its trees and turned the soil up. And one
+I saw in the Karkola river, was a weird affair. It was in the river
+opposite our camp, and very slowly, but perceptibly it went round and
+round in an orbit, although it was about half an acre in extent. A good
+many of these bits of banks do not attain to the honour of becoming
+islands, but get on to sand-banks in their early youth, near a native
+town, to the joy of the inhabitants, who forthwith go off to them, and
+drive round them a stockade of stakes firmly anchoring them. Thousands
+of fishes then congregate round the little island inside the stockade,
+for the rich feeding in among the roots and grass, and the affair is
+left a certain time. Then the entrance to the stockade is firmly closed
+up, and the natives go inside and bale out the water, and catch the fish
+in baskets, tearing the island to pieces, with shouts and squeals of
+exultation. It&rsquo;s messy, but it is amusing, and you get tremendous
+catches.</p>
+
+<p>A very large percentage of fish traps are dedicated to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span> the capture of
+shrimp and craw-fish, which the natives value highly when smoked, using
+them to make a sauce for their kank; among these is the shrimp-basket.
+These baskets are tied on sticks laid out in parallel lines of
+considerable extent. They run about three inches in diameter, and their
+length varies with the place that is being worked. The stakes are driven
+into the mud, and to each stake is tied a basket with a line of tie tie,
+the basket acting as a hat to the stake when the tide is ebbing; as the
+tide comes in, it lowers the basket into the current and carries into
+its open end large quantities of shrimps, which get entangled and packed
+by the force of the current into the tapering end of the basket, which
+is sometimes eight or ten feet from the mouth. You can always tell where
+there is a line of these baskets by seeing the line of attendant
+sea-gulls all solemnly arranged with their heads to win&rsquo;ard, sea-gull
+fashion.</p>
+
+<p>Another device employed in small streams for the capture of either
+craw-fish or small fish is a line of calabashes, or earthen pots with
+narrow mouths; these are tied on to a line, I won&rsquo;t say with tie tie,
+because I have said that irritating word so often, but still you
+understand they are; this line is tied to a tree with more, and carried
+across the stream, sufficiently slack to submerge the pots, and then to
+a tree on the other bank, where it is secured with the same material. A
+fetish charm is then secured to it that will see to it, that any one who
+interferes with the trap, save the rightful owner, will &ldquo;swell up and
+burst,&rdquo; then the trap is left for the night, the catch being collected
+in the morning.</p>
+
+<p>Single pots, well baited with bits of fish and with a suitable stone in
+to keep them steady, are frequently used alongside the bank. These are
+left for a day or more, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span>and then the owner with great care, crawls
+along the edge of the bank and claps on a lid and secures the prey.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 650px;" id="IMG123A"><span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span>
+<img src="images/ill-123a.jpg" width="650" height="411" alt="Round a Kacongo Camp Fire." title="Round a Kacongo Camp Fire." />
+<p class="facingright">[<i>To face page 105.</i></p>
+<p><span class="caption"><span class="smcap">Round a Kacongo Camp Fire.</span></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Hand nets of many kinds are used. The most frequent form is the round
+net, weighted all round its outer edge. This is used by one man, and is
+thrown with great deftness and grace, in shallow waters. I suppose one
+may hardly call the long wreaths of palm and palm branches, used by the
+Loango and Kacongo coast native for fishing the surf with, nets, but
+they are most effective. When the Calemma (the surf) is not too bad, two
+or more men will carry this long thick wreath out into it, and then drop
+it and drag it towards the shore. The fish fly in front of it on to the
+beach, where they fall victims to the awaiting ladies, with their
+baskets. Another very quaint set of devices is employed by the Kruboys
+whenever they go to catch their beloved land and shore crabs. I remember
+once thinking I had providentially lighted on a beautiful bit of ju-ju;
+the whole stretch of mud beach had little lights dotted over it on the
+ground. I investigated. They were crab-traps. &ldquo;Bottle of Beer,&rdquo; &ldquo;The
+Prince of Wales,&rdquo; &ldquo;Jane Ann,&rdquo; and &ldquo;Pancake&rdquo; had become&mdash;by means we will
+not go into here&mdash;possessed of bits of candle, and had cut them up and
+put in front of them pieces of wood in an ingenious way. The crab, a
+creature whose intelligence is not sufficiently appreciated, fired with
+a scientific curiosity, went to see what the light was made of, and then
+could not escape, or perhaps did not try to escape, but stood
+spell-bound at the beauty of the light; anyhow, they fell victims to
+their spirit of inquiry. I have also seen drop-traps put for crabs round
+their holes. In this case the sense of the beauty of light in the crab
+is not relied on, and once in he is shut in, and cannot<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span> go home and
+communicate the result of his investigations to his family.</p>
+
+<p>Yet, in spite of all these advantages and appliances above cited, I
+grieve to say the West African, all along the Coast, decends to the
+unsportsmanlike trick of poisoning. Certain herbs are bruised and thrown
+into the water, chiefly into lagoons and river-pools. The method is
+effective, but I should doubt whether it is wholesome. These herbs cause
+the fish to rise to the surface stupefied, when they are scooped up with
+a calabash. Other herbs cause the fish to lie at the bottom, also
+stupefied, and the water in the pool is thrown out, and they are
+collected.</p>
+
+<p>More as a pastime than a sport I must class the shooting of the peculiar
+hopping mud-fish by the small boys with bows and arrows, but this is the
+only way you can secure them as they go about star-gazing with their
+eyes on the tops of their heads, instead of attending to baited hooks,
+and their hearing (or whatever it is) is so keen that they bury
+themselves in the mud-banks too rapidly for you to net them. Spearing is
+another very common method of fishing. It is carried on at night, a
+bright light being stuck in the bow of the canoe, while the spearer
+crouching, screens his eyes from the glare with a plantain leaf, and
+drops his long-hafted spear into the fish as they come up to look at the
+light. It is usually the big bream that are caught in this way out in
+the sea, and the carp up in fresh water.</p>
+
+<p>The manners and customs of many West African fishes are quaint. I have
+never yet seen that fish the natives often tell me about that is as big
+as a man, only thicker, and which walks about on its fins at night, in
+the forest, so I cannot vouch for it; nor for that other fish that hates
+the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span> crocodile, and follows her up and destroys her eggs, and now and
+again dedicates itself to its hate, and goes down her throat, and then
+spreads out its spiny fins and kills her.</p>
+
+<p>The fish I know personally are interesting in quieter ways. As for
+instance the strange electrical fish, which sometimes have sufficient
+power to kill a duck and which are much given to congregating in sunken
+boats, causing much trouble when the boat has to be floated again,
+because the natives won&rsquo;t go near them, to bail her out.</p>
+
+<p>Then there is that deeply trying creature the Ning Ning fish, who, when
+you are in some rivers in fresh water and want to have a quiet night&rsquo;s
+rest, just as you have tucked in your mosquito bar carefully and
+successfully, comes alongside and serenades you, until you have to get
+up and throw things at it with a prophetic feeling, amply supported by
+subsequent experience, that hordes of mosquitos are busily ensconcing
+themselves inside your mosquito bar. What makes the Ning Ning&mdash;it is
+called after its idiotic song&mdash;so maddening is that it never seems to be
+where you have thrown the things at it. You could swear it was close to
+the bow of the canoe when you shied that empty soda-water bottle or that
+ball of your precious indiarubber at it, but instantly comes &ldquo;ning,
+ning, ning&rdquo; from the stern of the canoe. It is a ventriloquist or goes
+about in shoals, I do not know which, for the latter and easier
+explanation seems debarred by their not singing in chorus; the
+performance is undoubtedly a solo; any one experienced in this fish soon
+finds out that it is not driven away or destroyed by an artillery of
+missiles, but merely lies low until its victim has got under his
+mosquito curtain, and resettled his mosquito palaver,&mdash;and then back it
+comes with its &ldquo;ning ning.&rdquo;</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>A similar affliction is the salt-water drum-fish, with its &ldquo;bum-bum.&rdquo;
+Loanda Harbour abounds with these, and so does Chiloango. In the bright
+moonlight nights I have looked overside and seen these fish in a wreath
+round the canoe, with their silly noses against the side, &ldquo;bum-bumming&rdquo;
+away; whether they admire the canoe, or whether they want it to come on
+and fight it out, I do not know, because my knowledge of the different
+kinds of fishes and of their internal affairs is derived from Dr.
+Günther&rsquo;s great work, and that contains no section on ichthyological
+psychology. The West African natives have, I may say, a great deal of
+very curious information on the thoughts of fishes, but, much as I liked
+those good people, I make it a hard and fast rule to hold on to my
+common-sense and keep my belief for religious purposes when it comes to
+these deductions from natural phenomena&mdash;not that I display this mental
+attitude externally, for there is always in their worst and wildest
+fetish notions an underlying element of truth. The fetish of fish is too
+wide a subject to enter on here, it acts well because it gives a close
+season to river and lagoon fish; the natives round Lake Ayzingo, for
+example, saying that if the first fishes that come up into the lake in
+the great dry season are killed, the rest of the shoal turn back, so on
+the arrival of this vanguard they are treated most carefully, talked to
+with &ldquo;a sweet mouth,&rdquo; and given things. The fishes that form these
+shoals are <i>Hemichromis fasciatus</i> and <i>Chromis ogowensis</i>.</p>
+
+<p>I know no more charming way of spending an afternoon than to leisurely
+paddle alone to the edge of the Ogowé sand bank in the dry season, and
+then lie and watch the ways of the water-world below. If you keep quiet,
+the fishes take no notice of you, and go on with their ordinary<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span>
+avocations, under your eyes, hunting, and feeding, and playing, and
+fighting, happily and cheerily until one of the dreaded raptorial fishes
+appears upon the scene, and then there is a general scurry. Dreadful
+warriors are the little fishes that haunt sand banks (<i>Alestis
+Kingsleyæ</i>) and very bold, for when you put your hand down in the water,
+with some crumbs, they first make two or three attempts to frighten it,
+by sidling up at it and butting, but on finding there&rsquo;s no fight in the
+thing, they swagger into the palm of your hand and take what is to be
+got with an air of conquest; but before the supply is exhausted, there
+always arises a row among themselves, and the gallant bulls, some two
+inches long, will spin round and butt each other for a second or so, and
+then spin round again, and flap each other with their tails, their
+little red-edged fins and gill-covers growing crimson with fury. I never
+made out how you counted points in these fights, because no one ever
+seemed a scale the worse after even the most desperate duels.</p>
+
+<p>Most of the West Coast tribes are inveterate fishermen. The Gold Coast
+native regards fishing as a low pursuit, more particularly
+oyster-fishing, or I should say oyster-gathering, for they are collected
+chiefly from the lower branches of the mangrove-trees; this occupation
+is, indeed, regarded as being only fit for women, and among all tribes
+the villages who turn their entire attention to fishing are regarded as
+low down in the social scale. This may arise from fetish reasons, but
+the idea certainly gains support from the conduct of the individual
+fisherman. Do not imagine Brother Anglers, that I am hinting that the
+Gentle Art is bad for the moral nature of people like you and me, but I
+fear it is bad for the African. You see, the African, like most of us,
+can resist anything but temptation&mdash;he will resist attempts<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span> to reform
+him, attempts to make him tell the truth, attempts to clothe, and keep
+him tidy, &amp;c., and he will resist these powerfully; but give him real
+temptation and he succumbs, without the European preliminary struggle.
+He has by nature a kleptic bias, and you see being out at night fishing,
+he has chances&mdash;temptations, of succumbing to this&mdash;and so you see a man
+who has left his home at evening with only the intention of spearing
+fish, in his mind, goes home in the morning pretty often with his
+missionary&rsquo;s ducks, his neighbours&rsquo; plantains, and a few odd trifles
+from the trader&rsquo;s beaches, in his canoe, and the outer world says &ldquo;Dem
+fisherman, all time, all same for one, with tief man.&rdquo;<a name="FNanchor_9_10" id="FNanchor_9_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_10" class="fnanchor">[9]</a></p>
+
+<p>The Accras, who are employed right down the whole West Coast, thanks to
+the valuable education given them by the Basel Mission as cooks,
+carpenters, and coopers, cannot resist fishing, let their other
+avocations be what they may. A friend of mine the other day had a new
+Accra cook. The man cooked well, and my friend vaunted himself, and was
+content for the first week. At the beginning of the second week the
+cooking was still good, but somehow or other, there was just the
+suspicion of a smell of fish about the house. The next day the suspicion
+merged into certainty. The third day the smell was insupportable, and
+the atmosphere unfit to support human life, but obviously healthy for
+flies.</p>
+
+<p>The cook was summoned, and asked by Her Britannic Majesty&rsquo;s
+representative &ldquo;Where that smell came from?&rdquo; He said he &ldquo;could not smell
+it, and he did not know.&rdquo; Fourth day, thorough investigation of the
+premises revealed the fact that in the back-yard there was a large
+clothes-horse which had been sent out by my friend&rsquo;s wife to air his
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span>clothes; this was literally converted into a screen by strings of fish
+in the process of drying, <i>i.e.</i>, decomposing in the sun.</p>
+
+<p>The affair was eliminated from the domestic circle and cast into the
+Ocean by seasoned natives; and awful torture in this world and the next
+promised to the cook if he should ever again embark in the fish trade.
+The smell gradually faded from the house, but the poor cook, bereaved of
+his beloved pursuit, burst out all over in boils, and took to religious
+mania and drink, and so had to be sent back to Accra, where I hope he
+lives happily, surrounded by his beloved objects.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_7" id="Footnote_6_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_7"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> Specimens of rock identified by the Geological Survey,
+London, as cretaceous, and said by other geologists up here to be
+possibly Jurassic.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_8" id="Footnote_7_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_8"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> <i>Clarias laviaps.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_9" id="Footnote_8_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_9"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> Translation: &ldquo;Leave it alone! Leave it alone! Throw it into
+the water at once! What did you catch it for?&rdquo;</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_10" id="Footnote_9_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_10"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> Translation: &ldquo;All fishermen are thieves.&rdquo;</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V.</h2><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>FETISH.</h2>
+
+<p class="pblock">Wherein the student of Fetish determines to make things quite clear
+this time, with results that any sage knowing the subject and the
+student would have safely prophesied; to which is added some
+remarks concerning the position of ancestor worship in West Africa.</p>
+
+<p>The final object of all human desire is a knowledge of the nature of
+God. The human methods, or religions, employed to gain this object are
+divisible into three main classes, inspired&mdash;</p>
+
+<p><i>Firstly</i>, the submission to and acceptance of a direct divine message.</p>
+
+<p><i>Secondly</i>, the attempt by human intellectual power to separate the
+conception of God from material phenomena, and regard Him as a thing
+apart and unconditioned.</p>
+
+<p><i>Thirdly</i>, the attempt to understand Him as manifest in natural
+phenomena.</p>
+
+<p>I personally am constrained to follow this last and humblest method, and
+accept as its exposition Spinoza&rsquo;s statement of it, &ldquo;Since without God
+nothing can exist or be conceived, it is evident that all natural
+phenomena involve and express the conception of God, as far as their
+essence and perfection extends. So we have a greater and more perfect
+knowledge of God in proportion to our<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span> knowledge of natural phenomena.
+Conversely (since the knowledge of an effect through a cause is the same
+thing as the knowledge of a particular property of a cause), the greater
+our knowledge of natural phenomena the more perfect is our knowledge of
+the essence of God which is the cause of all things.&rdquo;<a name="FNanchor_10_11" id="FNanchor_10_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_11" class="fnanchor">[10]</a> But I have a
+deep respect for all other forms of religion and for all men who truly
+believe, for in them clearly there is this one great desire of the
+knowledge of the nature of God, and &ldquo;<i>Ein guter Mensch in seinem dunkeln
+Drange Ist sich des rechten Weges wohl bewuszt.</i>&rdquo; Nevertheless the most
+tolerant human mind is subject to a feeling of irritation over the
+methods whereby a fellow-creature strives to attain his end,
+particularly if those methods are a sort of heresy to his own, and
+therefore it is a most unpleasant thing for any religious-minded person
+to speak of a religion unless he either profoundly believes or
+disbelieves in it. For, if he does the one, he has the pleasure of
+praise; if he does the other, he has the pleasure of war, but the thing
+in between these is a thing that gives neither pleasure; it is like
+quarrelling with one&rsquo;s own beloved relations. Thus it is with Fetish and
+me. I cannot say I either disbelieve or believe in it, for, on the one
+hand, I clearly see it is a religion of the third class; but, on the
+other, I know that Fetish is a religion that is regarded by my fellow
+white men as the embodiment of all that is lowest and vilest in man&mdash;not
+altogether without cause. Before speaking further on it, however, I must
+say what I mean by Fetish, for &ldquo;the word of late has got ill sorted.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>I mean by Fetish the religion of the natives of the Western Coast of
+Africa, where they have not been influenced either by Christianity or
+Mohammedanism. I sin<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span>cerely wish there were another name than Fetish
+which we could use for it, but the natives have different names for
+their own religion in different districts, and I do not know what other
+general name I could suggest, for I am sure that the other name
+sometimes used in place of Fetish, namely Juju, is, for all the fine
+wild sound of it, only a modification of the French word for toy or
+doll, <i>joujou</i>. The French claim to have visited West Africa in the
+fourteenth century, prior to the Portuguese, and whether this claim can
+be sustained on historic evidence or no, it is certain that the French
+have been on the Coast in considerable numbers since the fifteenth
+century, and no doubt have long called the little objects they saw the
+natives valuing so strangely <i>joujou</i>, just as I have heard many a
+Frenchman do down there in my time. Therefore, believing Juju to mean
+doll or toy, I do not think it is so true a word as Fetish; and, after
+all, West Africa has a prior right to the use of this word Fetish, for
+it has grown up out of the word <i>Feitiįo</i> used by the Portuguese
+navigators who rediscovered West Africa with all its wealth and worries
+for modern Europe. These worthy voyagers, noticing the veneration paid
+by Africans to certain objects, trees, fish, idols, and so on, very
+fairly compared these objects with the amulets, talismans, charms, and
+little images of saints they themselves used, and called those things
+similarly used by the Africans <i>Feitiįo</i>, a word derived from the Latin
+<i>factitius</i>, in the sense magically artful. Modern French and English
+writers have adopted this word from the Portuguese; but it is a modern
+word in its present use. It is not in Johnson, and the term <i>Fétichisme</i>
+was introduced by De Brosses in his remarkable book, <i>Du Culte des Dieux
+fetiches</i>, 1760; but doubtless, as Professor Tylor points out, it has
+obtained a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span> great currency from Comte&rsquo;s use of it to denote a general
+theory of primitive religion. Professor Tylor, most unfortunately for us
+who are interested in West African religion, confines the use of the
+word to one department of his theory of animism only&mdash;namely to the
+doctrine of spirits embodied in, or attached to, or conveying influence
+through certain material objects.<a name="FNanchor_11_12" id="FNanchor_11_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_12" class="fnanchor">[11]</a></p>
+
+<p>I do not in the least deny Professor Tylor&rsquo;s right to use the word
+Fetish<a name="FNanchor_12_13" id="FNanchor_12_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_13" class="fnanchor">[12]</a> in that restricted sense in his general study of comparative
+religion. I merely wish to mention that you cannot use it in this
+restricted sense, but want the whole of his grand theory of animism
+wherewith to describe the religion of the West Africans. For although
+there is in that religion a heavy percentage of embodied spirits, there
+is also a heavier percentage of unembodied spirits&mdash;spirits that have no
+embodiment in matter and spirits that only occasionally embody
+themselves in matter.</p>
+
+<p>Take, for example, the gods of the Ewe and Tshi.<a name="FNanchor_13_14" id="FNanchor_13_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_14" class="fnanchor">[13]</a> There is amongst
+them Tando, the native high god of Ashantee. He appears to his
+priesthood as a giant, tawny skinned, lank haired, and wearing the
+Ashantee robe. But when <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span>visiting the laity, on whom he is exceedingly
+hard, he comes in pestilence and tempest, or, for more individual
+village visitations, as a small and miserable boy, desolate and crying
+for help and kindness, which, when given to him, Tando repays by killing
+off his benefactors and their fellow-villagers with a certain disease.
+This trick, I may remark, is not confined to Tando, for several other
+West African gods use it when sacrifices to them are in arrears; and I
+am certain it is more at the back of outcast children being neglected
+than is either sheer indifference to suffering or cruelty. Because,
+fearing the disease, your native will be far more likely to remember he
+is in debt to the god and go and pay an instalment, than to take in that
+child whom he thinks is the god who has come to punish.</p>
+
+<p>But you have only to look through Ellis&rsquo;s important works, the
+&ldquo;Tshi-speaking, Ewe-speaking, and Yoruba-speaking peoples of the West
+Coast of Africa,&rdquo; to find many instances of the gods of Fetish who do
+not require a material object to manifest themselves in. And I, while in
+West Africa, have often been struck by incidents that have made this
+point clear to me. When I have been out with native companions after
+nightfall, they pretty nearly always saw an apparition of some sort,
+frequently apparitions of different sorts, in our path ahead. Then came
+a pause, and after they had seen the apparition vanish, on we went&mdash;not
+cheerily, however, until we were well past the place where it had been
+seen. This place they closely examined, and decided whether it was an
+Abambo, or Manu, or whatever name these spirit classes had in their
+local language, or whether it was something worse that had been there,
+such as a Sasabonsum or Ombuiri.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>They knew which it was from the physical condition of the spot. Either
+there was nothing there but ordinary path stuff; or there was white ash,
+or there was a log or rock, or tree branch, and the reason for the
+different emotion with which they regarded this latter was very simple,
+for it had been an inferior class spirit, one that their charms and
+howled incantations could guard them against. When there was ash, it had
+been a witch destroyed by the medicine they had thrown at it, or a
+medium class spirit they could get protection from &ldquo;in town.&rdquo; But if &ldquo;he
+left no ash&rdquo; the rest of our march was a gloomy one; it was a bad
+business, and unless the Fetish authorities in town chose to explain
+that it was merely a demand for so much white calico, or a goat, &amp;c.,
+some one of our party would certainly get ill.</p>
+
+<p>Well do I remember our greatest terror when out at night on a forest
+path. I believe him to have been a Sasabonsum, but he was very widely
+distributed&mdash;that is to say we dreaded him on the forest paths round
+Mungo Mah Lobeh; we confidently expected to meet him round Calabar; and,
+to my disgust, for he was a hindrance, when I thought I had got away
+from his distribution zone, down in the Ogowé region, coming home one
+night with a Fan hunter from Fula to Kangwe, I saw some one coming down
+the path towards us, and my friend threw himself into the dense bush
+beside the path so as to give the figure a wide berth. It was the old
+symptom. You see what we object to in this spirit is that one side of
+him is rotting and putrifying, the other sound and healthy, and it all
+depends on which side of him you touch whether you see the dawn again or
+no. Such being the case, and African bush paths being narrow, this
+spirit helps to make<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span> evening walks unpopular, for there are places in
+every bush path where, if you meet him, you must brush against
+him&mdash;places where the wet season&rsquo;s rains have made the path a narrow
+ditch, with clay incurved walls above your head&mdash;places where the path
+turns sharply round a corner&mdash;places where it runs between rock walls.
+Such being the case, the risk of rubbing against his rotting side is
+held to be so great that it is best avoided by staying at home in the
+village with your wives and families, and playing the tom-tom or the
+orchid-fibre-stringed harp, or, if you are a bachelor, sitting in the
+village club-house listening to the old ones talking like retired
+Colonels. Yet however this may be, I should hesitate to call this
+half-rotten individual &ldquo;a material object.&rdquo; Sometimes we had merry
+laughs after these meetings, for he was only So-and-so from the
+village&mdash;it was not him. Sometimes we had cold chills down the back, for
+we lost sight of him; under our eyes he went and he left no ash.</p>
+
+<p>Take again Mbuiri of the Mpongwe, who comes in the form usually of a
+man; or Nkala, who comes as a crab; or the great Nzambi of the
+Fjort&mdash;they leave no ash&mdash;and so on. This subject of apparition-forms is
+a very interesting one, and requires more investigation. For such gods
+as Nzambi Mpungu do not appear to human beings on earth at all, except
+in tempest and pestilence. The great gods next in order leave no ash.
+The witch, if he or she be destroyed, does leave ash, and the ordinary
+middle and lower class spirits leave the thing they have been in, so
+unaltered by their use of it that no one but a witch doctor can tell
+whether or no it has been possessed by a spirit.</p>
+
+<p>You see therefore Fetish is in a way complex and cannot<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span> be got into
+&ldquo;worship of a material object.&rdquo; There is no worship in West Africa of a
+material not so possessed, for material objects are regarded as in
+themselves so low down in the scale of things that nothing of the human
+grade would dream of worshipping them. Moreover, apart from these
+apparitions, I do not think you can accurately use the word Fetish in
+its restricted sense to include the visions seen by witch-doctors, or
+incantations made of words possessing power in themselves, and yet these
+things are part and parcel of Fetish. In fact, not being a comparative
+ethnologist, but a student of West African religion, I wish to goodness
+those comparative ethnologists would get another word of their own,
+instead of using our own old West Coast one.</p>
+
+<p>It is, however, far easier to state what Fetish is not, than to state
+what it is. Although a Darwinian to the core, I doubt if evolution in a
+neat and tidy perpendicular line, with Fetish at the bottom and
+Christianity at the top, represents the true state of things. It seems
+to me&mdash;I have no authority to fortify my position with, so it is only
+me&mdash;that things are otherwise in this matter. That there are lines of
+development in religious ideas, and that no form of religious idea is a
+thing restricted to one race, I will grant; but if you will make a
+scientific use of your imagination, most carefully on the lines laid
+down for that exercise by Professor Tyndall, I think you would see that
+the higher form of the Fetish idea is Brahmanism; and that the highest
+possible form it could attain to is shown by two passages in the works
+of absolutely white people to have already been reached,&mdash;first in that
+passage from a poem by an author, whose name I have never<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span> known, though
+I have known the lines these five-and-twenty years&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">&ldquo;God of the granite and the rose,</span><br />
+<span class="i4">Soul of the lily and the bee,</span><br />
+<span class="i4">The mighty tide of being flows</span><br />
+<span class="i4">In countless channels, Lord, from Thee.</span><br />
+<span class="i4">It springs to life in grass and flowers,</span><br />
+<span class="i4">Through every range of Being runs,</span><br />
+<span class="i4">And from Creation&rsquo;s mighty towers,</span><br />
+<span class="i4">Its glory flames in stars and suns&rdquo;&mdash;</span><br />
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and secondly in this statement by Spinoza&mdash;&ldquo;By the help of God, I mean
+the fixed and unchangeable order of nature, or chain of natural events,
+for I have said before and shown elsewhere that the universal laws of
+nature, according to which all things exist and are determined, are only
+another name for the eternal decrees of God, which always involves
+eternal truth and necessity, so that to say everything happens according
+to natural laws, and to say everything is ordained by the decree and
+ordinance of God, is to say the same thing. Now, since the power in
+nature is identical with the power of God, by which alone all things
+happen and are determined, it follows that whatsoever man as a part of
+nature provides himself with to aid and preserve his existence, or
+whatsoever nature affords him without his help, is given him solely by
+the Divine power acting either through human nature or through external
+circumstances. So whatever human nature can furnish itself with by its
+own efforts to preserve its existence may be fitly termed the inward aid
+of God, whereas whatever else accrues to man&rsquo;s profit from outward
+causes may be called the external aid of God.&rdquo;<a name="FNanchor_14_15" id="FNanchor_14_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_15" class="fnanchor">[14]</a></p>
+
+<p>Now both these utterances are magnificent Fetish, and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span>because I accept
+them as true, I have said I neither believe nor disbelieve in Fetish. I
+could quote many more passages from acknowledged philosophers,
+particularly from Goethe. If you want, for example, to understand the
+position of man in Nature according to Fetish, there is, as far as I
+know, no clearer statement of it made than is made by Goethe in his
+superb <i>Prometheus</i>. By all means read it, for you cannot know how
+things really stand until you do.</p>
+
+<p>This was brought home to me very keenly when I was first out in West
+Africa. I had made friends with a distinguished witch doctor, or, more
+correctly speaking, he had made friends with me. I was then living in a
+deserted house the main charm of which was that it was the house that
+Mr. H. M. Stanley had lived in while he was waiting for a boat home
+after his first crossing Africa. This charm had not kept the house tidy,
+and it was a beetlesome place by day, while after nightfall, if you
+wanted to see some of the best insect society in Africa, and have
+regular Walpurgis all round, you had only got to light a lamp; but these
+things were advantageous to an insect collector like myself, therefore I
+lodge no complaint against the firm of traders to whom that house
+belongs. Well, my friend the witch doctor used to call on me, and I
+apologetically confess I first thought his interest in me arose from
+material objects. I wronged that man in thought, as I have many others,
+for one night, about 11 p.m., I heard a pawing at the shutters&mdash;my
+African friends don&rsquo;t knock. I got up and opened the door, and there he
+was. I made some observations, which I regret now, about tobacco at that
+time of night, and he said, &ldquo;No. You be big man, suppose pusson sick?&rdquo; I
+acknowledged the soft impeachment. &ldquo;Pusson sick too much; pusson live
+for die. You fit for come?&rdquo; &ldquo;Fit,&rdquo; said I. &ldquo;Suppose you come,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span> you no
+fit to talk?&rdquo; said he. &ldquo;No fit,&rdquo; said I, with a shrewd notion it was one
+of my Portuguese friends who was ill and who did not want a blazing
+blister on, a thing that was inevitable if you called in the local
+regular white medical man, so, picking up a medicine-case, I went out
+into the darkness with my darker friend. After getting outside the
+closed ground he led the way towards the forest, and I thought it was
+some one sick at the Roman Catholic mission. On we went down the path
+that might go there; but when we got to where you turn off for it, he
+took no heed, but kept on, and then away up over a low hill and down
+into deeper forest still, I steering by his white cloth. But Africa is
+an alarming place to walk about in at night, both for a witch doctor who
+believes in all his local forest devils, and a lady who believes in all
+the local material ones, so we both got a good deal chipped and frayed
+and frightened one way and another; but nothing worse happened than our
+walking up against a python, which had thoughtfully festooned himself
+across the path, out of the way of ground ants, to sleep off a heavy
+meal. My eminent friend, in the inky darkness and his hurry to reach his
+patient, failed to see this, and went fair up against it. I, being close
+behind, did ditto. Then my leader ducked under the excited festoon and
+went down the path at headlong speed, with me after him, alike terrified
+at losing sight of his guiding cloth and at the python, whom we heard
+going away into the bush with that peculiar-sounding crackle a big snake
+gives when he is badly hurried.</p>
+
+<p>Finally we reached a small bush village, and on the ground before one of
+the huts was the patient extended, surrounded by unavailing, wailing
+women. He was suffering from a disease common in West Africa, but
+amenable<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span> to treatment by European drugs, which I gave to the medical
+man, who gave them to his patient with proper incantations and a few
+little things of his own that apparently did not hinder their action. As
+soon as the patient had got relief, my friend saw me home, and when we
+got in, I said, Why did you do this, that and the other, as is usual
+with me, and he sat down, looked far away, and talked for an hour,
+softly, wordily and gently; and the gist of what that man talked was
+Goethe&rsquo;s <i>Prometheus</i>. I recognised it after half an hour, and when he
+had done, said, &ldquo;You got that stuff from a white man.&rdquo; &ldquo;No, sir,&rdquo; he
+said, &ldquo;that no be white man fash, that be country fash, white man no fit
+to savee our fash.&rdquo; &ldquo;Aren&rsquo;t they, my friend?&rdquo; I said; and we parted for
+the night, I the wiser for it, he the richer.</p>
+
+<p>Now, I pray you, do not think I am saying that there is a &ldquo;wisdom
+religion&rdquo; in Fetish, or anything like that, or that Fetish priests are
+Spinozas and Goethes&mdash;far from it. All that it seems to me to be is a
+perfectly natural view of Nature, and one that, if you take it up with
+no higher form of mind in you than a shrewd, logical one alone, will, if
+you carry it out, lead you necessarily to paint a white chalk rim round
+one eye, eat your captive, use Woka incantations for diseases, and dance
+and howl all night repeatedly, to the awe of your fellow-believers, and
+the scandal of Mohammedan gentlemen who have a revealed religion.</p>
+
+<p>Moreover, the mind-form which gets hold of this truth that is in all
+things, makes a great difference in the form in which the religion works
+out. For instance, to a superficial observer, it would hardly seem
+possible that a Persian and a Mahdist were followers of the same
+religion, or that a Spaniard and an English Broad Churchman were so.
+And<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span> yet it seems to me that it is only this class of difference that
+exists between the African, the Brahmanist, and the Shintoist.</p>
+
+<p>Another and more fundamental point to be considered is the influence of
+physical environment on religions, particularly these Nature religions.</p>
+
+<p>The Semitic mind, which had never been kept quite in its proper place by
+Natural difficulties, gave to man in the scheme of Creation a
+pre-eminence that deeply influences Europeans, who have likewise not
+been kept in their place owing to the environments of the temperate
+zone. On the other hand, the African race has had about the worst set of
+conditions possible to bring out the higher powers of man. He has been
+surrounded by a set of terrific natural phenomena, combined with a good
+food supply and a warm and equable climate. These things are not enough
+in themselves to account for his low-culture condition, but they are
+factors that must be considered. Then, undoubtedly, the nature of the
+African&rsquo;s mind is one of the most important points. It may seem a
+paradox to say of people who are always seeing visions that they are not
+visionaries; but they are not.</p>
+
+<p>The more you know the African, the more you study his laws and
+institutions, the more you must recognise that the main characteristic
+of his intellect is logical, and you see how in all things he uses this
+absolutely sound but narrow thought-form. He is not a dreamer nor a
+doubter; everything is real, very real, horribly real to him. It is
+impossible for me to describe it clearly, but the quality of the African
+mind is strangely uniform. This may seem strange to those who read
+accounts of wild and awful ceremonials, or of the African&rsquo;s terror at
+white man&rsquo;s things; but I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span> believe you will find all people experienced
+in dealing with uncultured Africans will tell you that this alarm and
+brief wave of curiosity is merely external, for the African knows the
+moment he has time to think it over, what that white man&rsquo;s thing really
+is, namely, either a white man&rsquo;s Juju or a devil.</p>
+
+<p>It is this power of being able logically to account for everything that
+is, I believe, at the back of the tremendous permanency of Fetish in
+Africa, and the cause of many of the relapses into it by Africans
+converted to other religions; it is also the explanation of the fact
+that white men who live in districts where death and danger are everyday
+affairs, under a grim pall of boredom, are liable to believe in Fetish,
+though ashamed of so doing. For the African, whose mind has been soaked
+in Fetish during his early most impressionable years, the voice of
+Fetish is almost irresistible when affliction comes on him. Sudden
+dangers or terror he can face with his new religion, because he is not
+quick at thinking. But give him time to think when under the hand of
+adversity, and the old explanation that answered it all comes back. I
+know no more distressing thing than to see an African convert brought
+face to face with that awful thing we are used to, the problem of an
+omnipotent God and a suffering world. This does not worry the African
+convert until it hits him personally in grief and misery. When it does,
+and he turns and calls upon the God he has been taught will listen, pity
+and answer, his use of what the scoffers at the converted African call
+&ldquo;catch phrases&rdquo; is horribly heartrending to me, for I know how real,
+terribly real, the whole thing is to him, and I therefore see the
+temptation to return to those old gods&mdash;gods from whom he never expected
+pity, presided<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span> over by a god that does not care. All that he had to do
+with them was not to irritate them, to propitiate them, to buy their
+services when wanted, and, above all, to dodge and avoid them, while he
+fought it out and managed devils at large. Risky work, but a man is as
+good as a devil any day if he only takes proper care; and even if any
+devil should get him unaware&mdash;kill him bodily&mdash;he has the satisfaction
+of knowing he will have the power to make it warm for that devil when
+they meet on the other side.</p>
+
+<p>There is something alluring in this, I think, to any make of human mind,
+but particularly so to the logical, intensely human one possessed by the
+West African. Therefore, when wearied and worn out by confronting things
+that he cannot reconcile, and disappointed by unanswered prayers, he
+turns back to his old belief entirely, or modifies the religion he has
+been taught until it fits in with Fetish, and is gradually absorbed by
+it.</p>
+
+<p>It is often asked whether Christianity or Mohammedanism is to possess
+Africa&mdash;as if the choice of Fate lay between these two things alone. I
+do not think it is so, at least it is not wise for a mere student to
+ignore the other thing in the affair, Fetish, which is as it were a sea
+wherein all things suffer a sea change. For remember it is not
+Christianity alone that becomes tinged with Fetish, or gets engulfed and
+dominated by it. Islam, when it strikes the true heart of Africa, the
+great Forest Belt region, fares little better though it is more recent
+than Christianity, and though it is preached by men who know the make of
+the African mind. Islam is in its blüth-period now in all the open
+parts, even on the desert regions of Africa from its Mediterranean shore
+to below the Equator, but so far it has beaten up against the Forest
+Belt like a sea on a sand beach. It has<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span> crossed the Forest Belt by the
+Lakes, it has penetrated it in channels, but in those channels the
+waters of Islam are, recent as their inroad there is, brackish.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore I make no pretence at prophesying which of these great
+revealed religions will ultimately possess Africa; but it is an
+interesting point to notice what has been the reason of the great power
+of immediate appeal to the African which they both possess.</p>
+
+<p>The African has a great over-God, and below him lesser spirits,
+including man; but the African has not in West Africa, nor so far as I
+have been able to ascertain elsewhere in the whole Continent, a God-man,
+a thing that directly connects man with the great over-God. This thing
+appeals to the African when it is presented to him by Christianity and
+Islam.</p>
+
+<p>It is, I am quite aware, not doctrinally true to say that Islam offers
+him a God-man, nevertheless in Mohammed practically it does so, and that
+too in a more easily believable form&mdash;by easily I do not mean that it is
+necessarily true. Moreover it minimises the danger of death in a more
+definite way, more in keeping with his own desires, and it is more
+reconcilable with his conscience in the treatment of life as he has to
+live it. Most of the higher class Africans are traders. Islam gives an
+easier, clearer line of rectitude to a trader than its great rival in
+Africa&mdash;under African conditions.</p>
+
+<p>There are many who will question whether conscience is a sufficiently
+large factor in an African mind for us to think of taking it into
+account, but whether you call it conscience, or religious bent, or fear,
+the factor is a large one. An African cannot say, as so many Europeans
+evidently easily can, &ldquo;Oh, that is all right from a religious point of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span>
+view, but one must be practical, you know&rdquo;; and it is this factor that
+makes me respect the African deeply and sympathise with him, for I have
+this same unmanageable hindersome thing in my own mind, which you can
+call anything you like; I myself call it honour. Now conscience when
+conditioned by Christianity is an exceedingly difficult thing for a
+trader to manage satisfactorily to himself. A mass of compromises have
+to be made with the world, and a man who is always making compromises
+gets either sick of them or sick of the thing that keeps on nagging at
+him about them, or he becomes merely gaseous-minded all round. There are
+some few in all races of men who can think comfortably</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<span class="i4">&ldquo;That conscience, like a restive horse,</span><br />
+<span class="i4">Will stumble if you check his course,</span><br />
+<span class="i4">But ride him with an easy rein,</span><br />
+<span class="i4">And rub him down with worldly gain,</span><br />
+<span class="i4">He&rsquo;ll carry you through thick and thin,</span><br />
+<span class="i4">Safe, although dirty, &rsquo;till you win,&rdquo;</span><br />
+</div>
+
+<p>but such men are in Africa a very small minority, and so it falls out
+that most men engaged in trade revert to Fetish, or become lax as Church
+members, or embrace Islam.</p>
+
+<p>I think, if you will consider the case, you will see that the
+workability of Islam is one of the chief reasons of its success in
+Africa. It is, from many African points of view, a most inconvenient
+religion, with its Rahmadhizan, bound every now and again to come in the
+height of the dry season; its restrictions on alcoholic drinks and
+gambling; but, on the whole it is satisfying to the African conscience.
+Moreover, like Christianity, it lifts man into a position of paramount
+importance in Creation. He is the thing God made the rest for. I have
+often heard Africans say, &ldquo;It does a man good to know God loves him; it
+makes him proud too much.&rdquo;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span> Well, at any rate it is pleasanter than
+Fetish, where man, in company with a host of spirits, is fighting for
+his own hand, in an arena before the gods, eternally.</p>
+
+<p>We will now turn to the consideration of the status of the human soul in
+pure Fetish, that is to say in Fetish that is common to all the
+different schools of West African Fetishism.</p>
+
+<p>What strikes a European when studying it is the lack of gaps between
+things. To the African there is perhaps no gap between the conception of
+spirit and matter, animate or inanimate. It is all an affair of
+grade&mdash;not of essential difference in essence. At the head of existence
+are those beings who can work without using matter, either as a constant
+associate or as an occasional tool&mdash;do it all themselves, as an African
+would say. Beneath this grade there are many grades of spirits, who
+occasionally or habitually, as in the case of the human grade, are
+associated with matter, and at the lower end of the scale is what we
+call matter, but which I believe the West African regards as the same
+sort of stuff as the rest, only very low&mdash;so low that practically it
+doesn&rsquo;t matter; but it is spirits, the things that cause all motion, all
+difficulties, dangers and calamities, that do matter and must be thought
+about, for they are <i>real</i> things whether &ldquo;they live for thing&rdquo; or no.</p>
+
+<p>The African and myself are also in a fine fog about form, but I will
+spare you that point, for where that thing comes from, often so quickly
+and silently, and goes, often so quickly and silently, too, under our
+eyes, everlastingly, that thing on which we all so much depend at every
+moment of our lives, that thing we are quite as conscious of as light
+and darkness, heat or cold, yet which makes a thing no heavier<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span> in one
+shape than in another,&mdash;is altogether too large a subject to touch on
+now. Yet, remember it is a most important part of practical Fetish, for
+on it depends divination and heaps of such like matters, that are parts
+of both the witch doctor and the Fetish priest&rsquo;s daily work.</p>
+
+<p>One of the fundamental doctrines of Fetish is that the connection of a
+certain spirit with a certain mass of matter, a material object, is not
+permanent; the African will point out to you a lightning-stricken tree
+and tell you that its spirit has been killed; he will tell you when the
+cooking pot has gone to bits that it has lost its spirit; if his weapon
+fails it is because some one has stolen or made sick its spirit by means
+of witchcraft. In every action of his daily life he shows you how he
+lives with a great, powerful spirit world around him. You will see him
+before starting out to hunt or fight rubbing medicine into his weapons
+to strengthen the spirits within them, talking to them the while;
+telling them what care he has taken of them, reminding them of the gifts
+he has given them, though those gifts were hard for him to give, and
+begging them in the hour of his dire necessity not to fail him. You will
+see him bending over the face of a river talking to its spirit with
+proper incantations, asking it when it meets a man who is an enemy of
+his to upset his canoe or drown him, or asking it to carry down with it
+some curse to the village below which has angered him, and in a thousand
+other ways he shows you what he believes if you will watch him
+patiently.</p>
+
+<p>It is a very important point in the study of pure Fetish to gain a clear
+conception of this arrangement of things in grades. As far as I have
+gone I think I may say fourteen classes of spirits exist in Fetish. Dr.
+Nassau of Gaboon<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span> thinks that the spirits commonly affecting human
+affairs can be classified fairly completely into six classes.<a name="FNanchor_15_16" id="FNanchor_15_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_16" class="fnanchor">[15]</a></p>
+
+<p>Regarding the Fetish view of the state and condition of the human soul
+there are certain ideas that I think I may safely say are common to the
+various cults of Fetish, both Negro and Bantu, in Western Africa.
+Firstly, the class of spirits that are human souls always remain human
+souls. They do not become deified, nor do they sink in grade. I am aware
+that here I am on dangerous ground so I am speaking carefully.<a name="FNanchor_16_17" id="FNanchor_16_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_16_17" class="fnanchor">[16]</a> An
+eminent authority, when criticising my statements,<a name="FNanchor_17_18" id="FNanchor_17_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_17_18" class="fnanchor">[17]</a> dwelt upon their
+heterodoxy on this point, saying however, &ldquo;We may throw out the
+conjecture that in remote and obscure West Africa men do not reach the
+necessary pitch of renown for mighty deeds or sanctity that qualifies
+them in larger countries for elevation after death to high places among
+recognised divinities.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>This conjecture I quite accept as an explanation of the non-deification
+of human beings in West Africa, and I think, taken in conjunction with
+the grade conception, it fairly explains why West Africa has not what
+undoubtedly other regions of the world have in their religions, deified
+ancestors.</p>
+
+<p>After having had my attention drawn to the strangeness of this
+non-deification of ancestors, I did my best to work the subject out in
+order to see if by any chance I had badly observed it. I consulted the
+accounts of West African religions given by Labat, Bosman, Bastian and
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span>Ellis, and to my great pleasure found that the three first said nothing
+against my statements, and that Sir A. B. Ellis had himself said the
+same thing in his <i>Ewe Speaking People</i>. Moreover, I sent a circular
+written on this point to people in West Africa whom I knew had
+opportunities of knowing the facts as at present existing,&mdash;the answers
+were unanimous with Ellis and myself.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, mind, you will find something that looks like worship of
+ancestors in West Africa. Only it is no more worship, properly so
+called, than our own deference to our living, elderly, and influential
+relations.</p>
+
+<p>In almost all Western African districts (it naturally does not show
+clearly in those where reincarnation is believed to be the common and
+immediate lot of all human spirits) is a class of spirits called &ldquo;the
+well disposed ones,&rdquo; and this class is clearly differentiated from
+&ldquo;them,&rdquo; the generic name used for non-human spirits. These &ldquo;well
+disposed ones&rdquo; are ancestors, and they do what they can to benefit their
+particular village or family, acting in conjunction with the village or
+family Fetish, who is not a human spirit, nor an ancestor. But the
+things given to ancestors are gifts, not in the proper sense of the word
+sacrifices, for the well disposed ones are not gods even of the rank of
+a Sasabonsum or an Ombuiri.</p>
+
+<p>In an extremely interesting answer to my inquiries that I received from
+Mr. J. H. Batty, of Cape Coast, who had kindly submitted my questions to
+a native gentleman well versed in affairs, the statement regarding
+ancestors is, &ldquo;The people believe that the spirits of their departed
+relations exercise a guardian care over them, and they will frequently
+stand over the graves of their deceased friends and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span> invoke their
+spirits to protect them and their children from harm. It is imagined
+that the spirit lingers about the house some time after death. If the
+children are ill the illness is ascribed to the spirit of the deceased
+mother having embraced them. Elderly women are often heard to offer up a
+kind of prayer to the spirit of a departed parent, begging it either to
+go to its rest, or to protect the family by keeping off evil spirits,
+instead of injuring the children or other members of the family by its
+touch. The ghosts of departed enemies are considered by the people as
+bad spirits, who have power to injure them.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>In connection with this fear of the ancestor&rsquo;s ghost hurting members of
+its own family, particularly children, I may remark it has several times
+been carefully explained to me that this &ldquo;touching&rdquo; comes not from
+malevolence, but from loneliness and the desire to have their company. A
+sentimental but inconvenient desire that the living human cannot give in
+to perpetually, though big men will accede to their ancestor&rsquo;s desire
+for society by killing off people who may serve or cheer him. This
+desire for companionship is of course immensely greater in the spirit
+that is not definitely settled in the society of spiritdom, and it is
+therefore more dangerous to its own belongings, in fact to all living
+society, while it is hanging about the other side of the grave, but this
+side of Hades. Thus I well remember a delicious row that arose primarily
+out of trade matters, but which caused one family to yell at another
+family divers remarks, ending up with the accusation, &ldquo;You
+good-for-nothing illegitimate offspring of house lizards, you don&rsquo;t bury
+your ditto ditto dead relations, but leave them knocking about anyhow, a
+curse to Calabar.&rdquo; Naturally therefore the spirit of a dead enemy is
+feared because it would touch for the purpose of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span> getting spirit slaves;
+therefore it follows that powerful ancestors are valued when they are on
+the other side, for they can keep off the dead enemies. A great chief&rsquo;s
+spirit is a thoroughly useful thing for a village to keep going, and in
+good order, for it conquered those who are among the dead with it, and
+can keep them under, keep them from aiding their people in the fights
+between its living relations and itself and them, with its slave spirit
+army. I ought to say that it is customary for the living to send the
+dead out ahead of the army, to bear the brunt in the first attack.</p>
+
+<p>Ancestor-esteem you will find at its highest pitch in West Africa under
+the school of Fetish that rules the Tshi and Ewe peoples. Ellis gives
+you a full description of it for Ashanti and Dahomey.<a name="FNanchor_18_19" id="FNanchor_18_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_18_19" class="fnanchor">[18]</a> The next
+district going down coast is the Yoruba one; but Yoruba has been so long
+under the influence of Mahometanism that its Fetish, judging from
+Ellis&rsquo;s statement in his <i>Yoruba Speaking People</i>, is deeply tinged with
+it. I have no personal acquaintance with Yorubaland, but have no
+hesitation for myself in accepting his statements from the accuracy I
+have found them, by personal experience with Tshi and Ewe people, to
+possess. Below Yoruba comes a district, the Oil Rivers, where, alas,
+Ellis did not penetrate, and where no ethnologist, unless you will
+graciously extend the term to me, has ever cautiously worked.</p>
+
+<p>In this district you have a school where reincarnation is strongly
+believed in, a different school of Fetish to that of Tshi and Ewe, a
+class of human ghosts called the well-disposed ones. And these are
+ancestors undoubtedly. They do not show up clearly in those districts
+where reincarna<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span>tion is believed to be the common lot of all human
+souls. Nevertheless, they are clear enough even there, as I will
+presently attempt to explain.</p>
+
+<p>These ancestor spirits have things given to them for their consolation
+and support, and in return they do what they can to benefit and guard
+their own villages and families. Nevertheless, the things given to the
+well-disposed ones are not as things sacrificed to gods. Nor are the
+well-disposed ones gods, even of the grade of a Sasabonsum or an
+Ombuiri. It is a low down thing to dig up your father&mdash;i.e., open his
+grave and take away the things in it that have been given him. It will
+get you cut by respectable people, and rude people when there is a
+market-place row on will mention it freely; but it won&rsquo;t bring on a
+devastating outbreak of small-pox in the whole district.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_11" id="Footnote_10_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_11"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> Of the Divine Law, <i>Tractatus Theologico Politicus</i>,
+Spinoza.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11_12" id="Footnote_11_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_12"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> <i>Primitive Culture</i>, E. B. Tylor, p. 144.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12_13" id="Footnote_12_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_13"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> Professor Tylor kindly allowed me to place this statement
+before him, and he says that as the word Fetish, with the sense of the
+use of bones, claws, stones, and such objects as receptacles of
+spiritual influences, has had nearly two centuries of established usage,
+it would not be easy to set it aside, and he advises me to use the term
+West African religion, or in some way make my meaning clear without
+expecting to upset the established nomenclature of comparative
+ethnology.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_13_14" id="Footnote_13_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_14"><span class="label">[13]</span></a> This word is pronounced by the natives and by people
+knowing them, Cheuwe, as Ellis undoubtedly knew, but presumably he spelt
+it Tshi to please the authorities.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_14_15" id="Footnote_14_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14_15"><span class="label">[14]</span></a> <i>The Vocation of the Hebrews</i>, Spinoza.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_15_16" id="Footnote_15_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15_16"><span class="label">[15]</span></a> See <i>Travels in West Africa</i>, by M. H. Kingsley. Macmillan
+&amp; Co. 1897.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_16_17" id="Footnote_16_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16_17"><span class="label">[16]</span></a> For further details see <i>Travels in West Africa</i>, p. 444.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_17_18" id="Footnote_17_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor_17_18"><span class="label">[17]</span></a> &ldquo;Origins and Interpretations of Primitive Religions.&rdquo;
+<i>Edinburgh Review</i>, July, 1897, p. 219.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_18_19" id="Footnote_18_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor_18_19"><span class="label">[18]</span></a> <i>The Tshi Speaking, Ewe Speaking and Yoruba Speaking
+People of West Africa.</i>&mdash;A. B. Ellis.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER VI</h2><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>SCHOOLS OF FETISH</h2>
+
+<p class="pblock">Wherein the student, thinking things may be made clearer if it be
+perceived that there are divers schools of Fetish, discourses on
+the schools of West African religious thought.</p>
+
+<p>As I have had occasion to refer to schools of Fetish, and as that is a
+term of my own, I must explain why I use it, and what I mean by it, in
+so far as I am able. When travelling from district to district you
+cannot fail to be struck by the difference in character of the native
+religion you are studying. My own range on the West Coast is from Sierra
+Leone to Loanda; and here and there in places such as the Oil Rivers,
+the Ogowe, and the Lower Congo, I have gone inland into the heart of
+what I knew to be particularly rich districts for an ethnologist. I make
+no pretence to a thorough knowledge of African Fetish in all its
+schools, but I feel sure no wandering student of the subject in Western
+Africa can avoid recognising the existence of at least four distinct
+forms of development of the Fetish idea. They have, every one of them,
+the underlying idea I have attempted to sketch as pure Fetish when
+speaking of the position of the human soul; and yet they differ. And I
+believe much of the confusion which is supposed to exist in African
+religious ideas is a confusion <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span>only existing in the minds of cabinet
+ethnologists from a want of recognition of the fact of the existence of
+these schools.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 472px;" id="IMG155A"><span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span>
+<img src="images/ill-155a.jpg" width="472" height="650" alt="Fantee Natives of the Gold Coast" title="Fantee Natives of the Gold Coast." />
+<p><span class="facingleft">[<i>To face page 137.</i></span></p>
+<span class="caption"><span class="smcap">Fantee Natives of the Gold Coast.</span></span>
+</div>
+
+<p>For example, suppose you take a few facts from Ellis and a few from
+Bastian and mix, and call the mixture West African religion, you do much
+the same sort of thing as if you took bits from Mr. Spurgeon&rsquo;s works,
+and from those of some eminent Jesuit and of a sound Greek churchman,
+and mixed them and labelled it European religion. The bits would be all
+right in themselves, but the mixture would be a quaint affair.</p>
+
+<p>As far as my present knowledge of the matter goes, I should state that
+there were four main schools of West African Fetish: (1) the Tshi and
+Ewe school, Ellis&rsquo; school; (2) the Calabar school; (3) the Mpongwe
+school; (4) Nkissism or the Fjort school. Subdivisions of these schools
+can easily be made, but I only make the divisions on the different main
+objects of worship, or more properly speaking, the thing each school
+especially endeavours to secure for man. The Tshi and Ewe school is
+mainly concerned with the preservation of life; the Calabar school with
+attempting to enable the soul successfully to pass through death; the
+Mpongwe school with the attainment of material prosperity; while the
+school of Nkissi is mainly concerned with the worship of the mystery of
+the power of Earth&mdash;Nkissi-nsi. You will find these divers things
+worshipped, or, rather, I would say cultivated, in all the schools of
+Fetish, but in certain schools certain ideas are predominant. Look at
+Srahmantin of the Tshi people, and at Nzambi of the Fjort. Both these
+ladies know where the animals go to drink, what they say to each other,
+where their towns are, and what not; also they both know what<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> the
+forest says to the wind and the rain, and all the forests&rsquo; own small
+talk in the bargain, and, therefore, also the inner nature of all these
+things; and both, like other ladies, I have heard prefer gentlemen&rsquo;s
+society. Women they have a tendency to be hard on, but either Srahmantin
+or Nzambi think nothing of taking up a man&rsquo;s time, making him neglect
+his business or his family affairs, or both together, by keeping him in
+the bush for a month or so at a time, teaching him things about
+medicines, and finally sending him back into town in so addlepated a
+condition that for months he hardly knows who he exactly is. When he
+comes round, however, if he has any sense, he sets up in business as a
+medical man; sometimes, however, he just remains merely crackey. Such a
+man was my esteemed Kefalla.</p>
+
+<p>But look how different under different schools is the position of
+Srahmantin and Nzambi. Srahmantin is only propitiated by doctors and
+hunters; by all respectable, busy, family men forced to go through
+forests, she is simply dreaded, while Nzambi, the great Princess,
+entirely dominates the whole school of Nkissism.</p>
+
+<p>From what cause or what series of causes the predominance of these
+different things has come, I do not know, unless it be from different
+natural environment and different race. It is certainly not a mere
+tribal affair, for there are many different tribes under each school.
+For example, I do not think you need make more than a subdivision
+between the Tshi, the Ga or Ogi and the Ewe peoples&rsquo; Fetish, nor more
+than a subdivision between those of the Eboes and the Ibbibios, or those
+of the Fjort and Mussurongoes; but we want more information before it
+would be quite safe to dogmatise.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It is impossible in the present state of our knowledge to give exact
+geographical limits of the different schools of Fetish, and I therefore
+only sketch their geographical distribution in Western Africa, from
+Sierra Leone to Loanda, hoping thereby to incite further research.</p>
+
+<p>Sierra Leone and its adjacent districts have not been studied by an
+ethnologist. We have only scattered information regarding the religion
+there; and unfortunately the observations we have on it mainly bear on
+the operations of the secret societies, which in these regions have
+attained to much power, and are usually though erroneously grouped under
+the name of Poorah. Poorah, like all secret societies, is intensely
+interesting, for it is the manifestation of the law form of Fetish; but
+secret societies are pure Fetish, and common to all districts. All that
+we can gather from the scattered observations on the rest of the Fetish
+in this region is that it is allied to the Fetish school of the
+Tshi-speaking people.</p>
+
+<p>Next to this unobserved district, we come to the well-observed districts
+of the Tshi, Ewe, and Yoruba-speaking people&mdash;Ellis&rsquo;s region.</p>
+
+<p>It may seem unwise for me to attempt to group these three together and
+call them one school, because from this one district we have two
+distinct cults of Fetish in the West Indies, Voudou and Obeah (Tchanga
+and Wanga). Voudou itself is divided into two sects, the white and the
+red&mdash;the first, a comparatively harmless one, requiring only the
+sacrifice of, at the most, a white cock or a white goat, whereas the red
+cult only uses the human sacrifice&mdash;the goat without horns. Obeah, on
+the other hand, kills only by poison&mdash;does not show the blood at all.
+And there is another important difference between Voudou and Obeah,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span> and
+that is that Voudou requires for the celebration of its rites a
+priestess and a priest. Obeah can be worked by either alone, and is not
+tied to the presence of the snake. Both these cults have sprung from
+slaves imported from Ellis&rsquo;s district, Obeah from slaves bought at
+Koromantin mainly, and Voudou from those bought at Dahomey.
+Nevertheless, it seems to me these good people have differentiated their
+religion in the West Indies considerably; for example, in Obeah the
+spider (<i>anansi</i>) has a position given it equal to that of the snake in
+Voudou. Now the spider is all very well in West Africa; round him there
+has grown a series of most amusing stories, always to be told through
+the nose, and while you crawl about; but to put him on a plane with the
+snake in Dahomey is absurd; his equivalent there is the turtle, also a
+focus for many tales, only more improper tales, and not half so amusing.</p>
+
+<p>The true importance and status of the snake in Dahomey is a thing hard
+to fix. Personally I believe it to be merely a case of especial
+development of a local ju-ju. We all know what the snake signifies, and
+instances of its attaining a local eminence occur elsewhere. At Creek
+Town, in Calabar, and Brass River it is more than respected. It is an
+accidental result of some bit of history we have lost, like the worship
+of the crocodile at Dixcove and in the Lower Congo. Whereas it is clear
+that the general respect, amounting to seeming worship, of the leopard
+is another affair altogether, for the leopard is the great thing in all
+West African forests, and forests and surf are the great things in
+Western Africa&mdash;the lines of perpetual danger to the life of man.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 531px;" id="IMG159A"><span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span>
+<img src="images/ill-159a.jpg" width="531" height="650" alt="Yoruba" title="Yoruba" />
+<p><span class="facingleft">[<i>To face page 141.</i></span></p>
+<span class="caption"><span class="smcap">Yoruba.</span></span>
+</div>
+
+<p>But there is a remarkable point that you cannot fail to notice in the
+Fetish of these three divisions of true Negro <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span>Fetish studied by
+Ellis, namely, that what is one god in Yoruba you get as several gods
+exercising one particular function in Dahomey, as hundreds of gods on
+the Gold Coast. Moreover, all these gods in all these districts have
+regular priests and priestesses in dozens, while below Yoruba regular
+priests and priestesses are rare. There the officials of the law
+societies abound, and there are Fetish men, but these are different
+people to the priests of Bohorwissi and Tando.</p>
+
+<p>I do not know Yoruba land personally, but have had many opportunities of
+inquiring regarding its Fetish from educated and uneducated natives of
+that country whom I have met down Coast as traders and artisans.
+Therefore, having found nothing to militate against Ellis&rsquo;s statements,
+I accept them for Yoruba as for Dahomey and the Gold Coast; and my great
+regret is that his careful researches did not extend down into the
+district below Yoruba&mdash;the district I class under the Calabar
+school&mdash;more particularly so because the districts he worked at are all
+districts where there has been a great and long-continued infusion of
+both European and Mohammedan forms of thought, owing to the
+four-hundred-year-old European intercourse on the seaboard, and the even
+older and greater Mohammedan influence from the Western Soudan; whereas
+below these districts you come to a region of pure Negro Fetish that has
+undergone but little infusion of alien thought.</p>
+
+<p>Whether or no to place Benin with Yoruba or with Calabar is a problem.
+There is, no doubt, a very close connection between it and Yoruba. There
+is also no doubt that Benin was in touch, even as late as the
+seventeenth century, with some kingdom of the higher culture away in the
+interior. It may have been Abyssinia, or it may have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span> been one of the
+cultured states that the chaos produced by the Mohammedan invasion of
+the Soudan destroyed. In our present state of knowledge we can only
+conjecture, I venture to think, idly, until we know more. The only thing
+that is certain is that Benin was influenced as is shown by its art
+development. Benin practically broke up long before Ashantee or Dahomey,
+for, as Proyart<a name="FNanchor_19_20" id="FNanchor_19_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_19_20" class="fnanchor">[19]</a> remarks, &ldquo;many small kingdoms or native states which
+at the present day share Africa among them were originally provinces
+dependent on other kingdoms, the particular governors of which usurped
+the sovereignty.&rdquo; Benin&rsquo;s north-western provinces seem to have done
+this, possibly with the assistance of the Mohammedanised people who came
+down to the seaboard seeking the advantages of white trade; and Benin
+became isolated in its forest swamps, cut off from the stimulating
+influence of successful wars, and out of touch with the expanding
+influence of commerce, and devoted its attention too much to Fetish
+matters to be healthy for itself or any one who fell in with it. It is
+an interesting point in this connection to observe that we do not find
+in the accounts given by the earlier voyagers to Benin city anything
+like the enormous sacrifice of human life described by visitors to it of
+our own time. Other districts round Calabar, Bonny, Opobo, and so on,
+have human sacrifice as well, but they show no signs of being under
+Benin in trade matters, in which Benin used to be very strict when it
+had the chance. In fact, whatever respect they had for Benin was a
+sentimental one, such as the King of Kongo has, and does not take the
+practical form of paying taxes.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The extent of the direct influence of Benin away into the forest belt to
+the east and south I do not think at any time was great. Benin was
+respected because it was regarded as possessing a big Fetish and great
+riches. In recent years it was regarded by people discontented with
+white men as their great hope, from its power to resist these being
+greater than their own. Nevertheless, the adjacent kingdom of Owarie
+(Warri), even in the sixteenth century, was an independent kingdom. So
+different was its Fetish from that of Benin that Warri had not then, and
+has not to this day, human sacrifice in its religious observances, only
+judicial and funeral killings.</p>
+
+<p>Considering how very easily Africans superficially adopt the religious
+ideas of alien people with whom they have commercial intercourse, we
+must presume that the people who imported the art of working in metals
+into Benin also imported some of their religion. The relics of religion,
+alien to Fetish, that show in Benin Fetish are undoubtedly Christian.
+Whether these relics are entirely those of the Portuguese Roman Catholic
+missions, or are not also relics of some earlier Christian intercourse
+with Western Soudan Christianised states existing prior to the
+Mohammedan invasion of Northern Africa, is again a matter on which we
+require more information. But just as I believe some of the metal
+articles found in Benin to be things made in Birmingham, some to be old
+Portuguese, some to be native castings, copies of things imported from
+that unknown inland state, and some to be the original inland state
+articles themselves, so do I believe the relics of Christianity in the
+Fetish to be varied in origin, all alike suffering absorption by the
+native Fetish.</p>
+
+<p>There is no doubt that up to the last twenty years the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span> three great
+Fetish kings in Western Africa were those of Ashantee, Dahomey, and
+Benin. Each of these kings was alike believed by the whole of the people
+to have great Fetish power in his own locality. In the time of which we
+have no historical record&mdash;prior to the visits of the first white
+voyagers in the fifteenth century&mdash;there is traditional record of the
+King of Benin fighting with his cousin of Dahomey. Possibly Dahomey beat
+him badly; anyhow something went seriously wrong with Benin as a
+territorial kingdom, before its discovery by modern Europe.</p>
+
+<p>I now turn to the Fetish of the Oil Rivers which I have called the
+Calabar school. The predominance of the belief there in reincarnation
+seems to me sufficient to separate it from the Gold Coast and Dahomey
+Fetish. Funeral customs, important in all Negro Fetish, become in the
+Calabar school exceedingly so. A certain amount of care anywhere is
+necessary to successfully establish the human soul after death, for the
+human soul strongly objects to leaving material pleasures and
+associations and going to, at best, an uninteresting under-world; but
+when you have not only got to send the soul down, but to bring it back
+into the human form again, and not any human form at that, but one of
+its own social status and family, the thing becomes more complicated
+still; and to do it so engrosses human attention, and so absorbs human
+wealth, that you do not find under the Calabar school a multitude of
+priest-served gods as you do in Dahomey and on the Gold Coast. Mind you,
+so far as I could make out while in the Calabar districts myself, the
+equivalents of those same gods, were quite believed in; but they were
+neglected in a way that would have caused them in Dahomey, where they
+have been taught to fancy themselves to wreck the place. Not only <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span>is
+care taken to send a soul down, but means are taken to see whether or no
+it has duly returned; for keeping a valuable soul, like that of a great
+Fetish proficient who could manage outside spirits, or that of a good
+trader, is a matter of vital importance to the prosperity of the Houses,
+so when such a soul has left the House in consequence of some sad
+accident or another, or some vile witchcraft, the babies that arrive to
+the House are closely watched. Assortments of articles belonging to
+deceased members of the house are presented to it, and then, according
+to the one it picks out, it is decided who that baby really is&mdash;See,
+Uncle so-and-so knows his own pipe, &amp;c.&mdash;and I have often heard a mother
+reproaching a child for some fault say, &ldquo;Oh, we made a big mistake when
+we thought you were so-and-so.&rdquo; I must say I think the absence of the
+idea of the deification of ancestors in West Africa shows up
+particularly strongly in the Calabar school, for herein you see so
+clearly that the dead do not pass into a higher, happier state&mdash;that the
+soul separate from the body is only a part of that thing we call a human
+being, and in West Africa the whole is greater than a part, even in this
+matter.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 389px;" id="IMG163A"><span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span>
+<img src="images/ill-163a.jpg" width="389" height="650" alt="A Calabar Chief" title="A Calabar Chief" />
+<p><span class="facingleft">[<i>To face page 145.</i></span></p>
+<span class="caption"><span class="smcap">A Calabar Chief.</span></span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The pathos of the thing, when you have grasped the underlying idea, is
+so deep that the strangeness of it passes away, and you almost forget to
+hate the horrors of the slaughter that hang round Oil River funeral
+customs, or, at any rate, you understand the tenacity you meet with here
+of the right to carry out killing at funerals, a greater tenacity than
+confronted us in Gold Coast or Dahomey regions, because a different idea
+is involved in the affair. On the Gold Coast, for example, you can
+substitute wealth for the actual human victim, because with wealth the
+dead soul could, after all, make itself comfortable<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span> in Srahmandazi, but
+not so in the Rivers. Without slaves, wives, and funds, how can the dead
+soul you care for speak with the weight of testimony of men as to its
+resting place or position? Rolls of velvet or satin, and piles of
+manillas or doubloons alone cannot speak; besides, they may have been
+stolen stuff, and the soul you care for may be put down by the
+authorities as a mere thieving slave, a sort of mere American gold bug
+trying to pass himself off as a duke&mdash;or a descendant of General
+Washington&mdash;which would lead to that soul being disgraced and sent back
+in a vile form. Think how you yourself, if in comfortable circumstances,
+belonging to a family possessing wealth and power, would like father,
+mother, sister, or brother of yours who by this change of death had just
+left these things, to go down through death, and come back into life in
+a squalid slum!</p>
+
+<p>We meet in this school, however, with a serious problem&mdash;namely, what
+does become of dead chiefs? It is a point I will not dogmatise on, but
+it certainly looks as if the Calabar under-world was a most aristocratic
+spot, peopled entirely by important chiefs and the retinues sent down
+with them&mdash;by no means having the fine mixed society of Srahmandazi.</p>
+
+<p>The Oil River deceased chief is clearly kept as a sort of pensioner. The
+chief who succeeds him in his headship of the House is given to &ldquo;making
+his father&rdquo; annually. It is not necessarily his real father that he
+makes, but his predecessor in the headmanship&mdash;a slave succeeding to a
+free man would &ldquo;make his father&rdquo; to the dead free man, and so on. This
+function undoubtedly consists in sending his predecessor a big subsidy
+for his support, and consolation in the shape of slaves and goods. I may
+as well own I have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span> long had a dark suspicion regarding this matter&mdash;a
+suspicion as to where those goods went. Their proper destination, of
+course, should be the under-world. Thither undoubtedly on the Gold Coast
+they would go; but when sent in the Rivers I do not think they go so
+far. In fact, to make a clean breast of it, I do not believe big chiefs
+are properly buried in the Oil Rivers at all. I think they are, for
+political purposes, kept hanging about outside life, but not inside
+death, by their diplomatic successors. I feel emboldened to say this by
+what my friend, Major Leonard, Vice-Consul of the Niger Coast
+Protectorate, recently told me. When he was appointed Vice-Consul, and
+was introducing himself to his chiefs in this capacity, one chief he
+visited went aside to a deserted house, opened the door, and talked to
+somebody inside; there was not any one in material form inside, only the
+spirit of his deceased predecessor, and all the things left just as they
+were when he died; the live chief was telling the dead chief that the
+new Consul was come, &amp;c.</p>
+
+<p>The reason, that is the excuse, for this seemingly unprincipled conduct
+in not properly burying the chief, so that he may be reincarnated to a
+complete human form, lies in the fact that he would be a political
+nuisance to his successor if he came back promptly; therefore he is kept
+waiting.</p>
+
+<p>From first-class native informants I have had fragments of accounts of
+making-father ceremonies. Particularly interesting have been their
+accounts of what the live chief says to the dead one. Much of it, of
+course, is, for diplomatic reasons, not known outside official circles.
+But the general tone of these communications is well known to be of a
+nature to discourage the dead chief from returning,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span> and to reconcile
+him to his existing state. Things are not what they were here. The price
+of oil is down, women are ten times more frivolous, slaves ten times
+more trying, white Consul men abound, also their guns are more deadly
+than of old, this new Consul looks worse than the last, there is nothing
+but war and worry for a chief nowadays. The whole country is going to
+the dogs financially and domestically, in fact, and you are much better
+off where you are. Then come petitions for such help as the ghost chief
+and his ghost retinue can give.</p>
+
+<p>This, I think, explains why chiefs&rsquo; funeral customs in the Rivers differ
+in kind, not merely in grade, from those of big trade boys or other
+important people, and also accounts for their repetition at intervals.
+Big trade boys, and the slaves and women sent down with them, return to
+a full human form more or less promptly; mere low grade slaves, slaves
+that cannot pull a canoe, <i>i.e.</i>, provide a war canoe for the service of
+the House out of their own private estate, are not buried at all&mdash;they
+are thrown away, unless they have a mother who will bury them. They will
+come back again all right as slaves, but then that is all they are fit
+for.</p>
+
+<p>Then we have left very interesting sections of the community to consider
+from a funeral rite point of view&mdash;namely, those in human form who are
+not, strictly speaking, human beings, and those who, though human, have
+committed adultery with spirits&mdash;women who bear twins or who die in
+child-birth. These sinners, I may briefly remark, are neither buried nor
+just thrown away; they are, as far as possible, destroyed. But with the
+former class the matter is slightly different. Children, for example,
+that arrive with ready cut teeth, will in a strict family be killed or
+thrown away in the bush to die as they please; but the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span> feeling against
+them is not really keen. They may, if the mother chooses to be bothered
+with them, be reared; but the interesting point is that any property
+they may acquire during life has no legal heir whatsoever. It must be
+dissipated, thrown away. This shows clearly that such individuals are
+not human, and, moreover, they are not buried nor destroyed at death;
+they are just thrown away. There is no particular harm in them as there
+is in the sin-stained twins.</p>
+
+<p>The only class in West Africa I have found that are like these spirit
+humans is that strange class, the minstrels. I wish I knew more about
+these people. Were it not that Mr. F. Swanzy possesses material evidence
+of their existence, in the shape of the most superb song-net, I should
+hesitate to mention them at all. Some of my French friends, however,
+tell me they have seen them in Senegal, and I venture to think that
+region must be their headquarters. I have seen one in Accra, one in
+Sierra Leone, two on board steamers, and one in Buana town, Cameroon.
+Briefly, these are minstrels who frequent market towns, and for a fee
+sing stories. Each minstrel has a song-net&mdash;a strongly made net of a
+fishing net sort. On to this net are tied all manner and sorts of
+things, pythons&rsquo; back bones, tobacco pipes, bits of china, feathers,
+bits of hide, birds&rsquo; heads, reptiles&rsquo; heads, bones, &amp;c., &amp;c., and to
+every one of these objects hangs a tale. You see your minstrel&rsquo;s net,
+you select an object and say how much that song. He names an exorbitant
+price; you haggle; no good. He won&rsquo;t be reasonable, say over the python
+bone, so you price the tobacco pipe&mdash;more haggle; finally you settle on
+some object and its price, and sit down on your heels and listen with
+rapt attention to the song, or, rather, chant. You<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span> usually have
+another. You sort of dissipate in novels, in fact. I do not say it&rsquo;s
+quiet reading, because unprincipled people will come headlong and listen
+when you have got your minstrel started, without paying their
+subscription. Hence a row, unless you are, like me, indifferent to other
+people having a little pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>These song-nets, I may remark, are not of a regulation size. I have
+never seen on the West Coast anything like so superb a collection of
+stories as Mr. Swanzy has tied on that song-net of his&mdash;Woe is me!
+without the translating minstrel, a cycle of dead songs that must have
+belonged to a West African Shakespeare. The most impressive song-net
+that I saw was the one at Buana. Its owner I called Homer on the spot,
+because his works were a terrific two. Tied on to his small net were a
+human hand and a human jaw bone. They were his only songs. I heard them
+both regardless of expense. I did not understand them, because I did not
+know his language; but they were fascinating things, and the human hand
+one had a passage in it which caused the singer to crawl on his hands
+and knees, round and round, stealthily looking this side and that,
+giving the peculiar leopard questing cough, and making the leopard mark
+on the earth with his doubled-up fist. Ah! that was something like a
+song! It would have roused a rock to enthusiasm; a civilised audience
+would have smothered its singer with bouquets. I&mdash;well, the headman with
+me had to interfere and counsel moderation in heads of tobacco.</p>
+
+<p>But what I meant to say about these singers was only this. They are not
+buried as other people are; they are put into trees when they are
+dead&mdash;may be because they are &ldquo;all same for one&rdquo; with those singers the
+birds. I do not know, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span>I only hope Homer is still extant, and that
+some more intelligent hearer than I will meet with him.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 650px;" id="IMG169A"><span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span>
+<img src="images/ill-169a.jpg" width="650" height="453" alt="Natives of Gaboon" title="Natives of Gaboon" />
+<p><span class="facingleft">[<i>To face page 151.</i></span></p>
+<span class="caption"><span class="smcap">Natives of Gaboon.</span></span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The southern boundary of the Calabar school of Fetish lies in narrower
+regions than the boundary between it and Ellis&rsquo;s school in the north. I
+venture to think that this may in a measure arise from there being in
+the southern region the additional element of difference of race. For
+immediately below Calabar in the Cameroon territory the true Negro meets
+the Bantu. In Cameroon in the tribes of the Dualla stem we have a people
+speaking a Bantu language, and having a Bantu culture, yet nevertheless
+having a great infusion of pure Negro blood, and largely under the
+dominion of the true Negro thought form.</p>
+
+<p>I own that of all the schools of Fetish that I know, the Calabar school
+is the one that fascinates me most. I like it better than Ellis&rsquo;s
+school, wherein the fate of the soul after death is a life in a shadow
+land, with shadows for friends, lovers, and kinsfolk, with the shadows
+of joys for pleasures, the shadows of quarrels for hate&mdash;a thing that at
+its best is inferior to the wretchedest full-life on earth. Yet this
+settled shadow-land of Srahmandazi or Gboohiadse is a better thing than
+the homeless drifting state of the soul in the school below
+Calabar&mdash;namely, the school I have ventured to term the Mpongwe school.
+To the brief consideration of this school we will now turn.</p>
+
+<p>In between the strongly-marked Calabar school and the strongly-marked
+school of Nkissism of Loango Kacongo, and Bas Congo there exists a
+school plainly differing from both. This region is interesting for many
+reasons, chief amongst which is that it is the sea-board region of the
+great African Forest belt. Tribe after tribe come down into it, flourish
+awhile, and die, uninfluenced by Mohammedan or European<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span> culture. The
+Mohammedans in Africa as aforesaid have never mastered the western
+region of the forest belt; and the Europeans have never, in this region
+between Cameroon and Loango, established themselves in force. It is
+undoubtedly the wildest bit of West Africa.</p>
+
+<p>The dominant tribes here have, for as far back as we can get
+evidence&mdash;some short four hundred years&mdash;been tribes of the Mpongwe
+stem&mdash;the so-called noble tribes. To-day they are dying&mdash;going off the
+face of the earth, leaving behind them nothing to bear testimony in this
+world to their great ability, save the most marvellously beautiful
+language, the Greek of Africa, as Dr. Nassau calls it, and the impress
+of their more elaborate thought-form on the minds of the bush tribes
+that come into contact with them. Their last pupils are the great
+Bafangh, now supplanting them in the regions of the Bight of Panavia.</p>
+
+<p>From their influence I think the school of Fetish of this region is
+perhaps best called the Mpongwe school, though I do not altogether like
+the term, because I believe the Mpongwe stem to be in origin pure Negro,
+and the Fetish school they have elaborated and co-ordinated is Bantu in
+thought-form, just as the language they have raised to so high a pitch
+of existence is in itself a Bantu language. Yet the Mpongwe are rulers
+of both these things, and they will thereby leave imprinted on the minds
+of their supplanters in the land the mark of their intelligence.</p>
+
+<p>I have said the predominant idea in this Mpongwe school is the securing
+of material prosperity. That is to say this is the part of pure Fetish
+that receives more attention than other parts of pure Fetish in this
+school; but it attains to no such definite predominance as funeral rites
+do in the Calabar school, or the preservation of life in Ellis&rsquo;s
+school.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span> One might, however, quite fairly call the Mpongwe school the
+trade-charm school, great as trade charms are in all West African
+Fetish.</p>
+
+<p>This lack of a predominance sufficient to dwarf other parts of pure
+Fetish makes the Mpongwe school particularly interesting and valuable to
+a student; it is a magnificent school to study your pure Fetish in, as
+none of it is here thrown by a predominant factor into the background of
+thought, and left in a neglected state.</p>
+
+<p>It is of this school that you will find Dr. Nassau&rsquo;s classification of
+spirits, and all the other observations of his that I have quoted of
+things absolutely believed in by the natives, and also all the Mpongwe,
+Benga, Igalwa, Ncomi, and Fetish I have attempted to describe.<a name="FNanchor_20_21" id="FNanchor_20_21"></a><a href="#Footnote_20_21" class="fnanchor">[20]</a></p>
+
+<p>It has no gods with proper priests. Human beings are here just doing
+their best to hold their own with the spirit world, getting spirits
+under their control as far as possible, and dealing with the rest of
+them diplomatically. This state I venture to think is Fetish in a very
+early form, a form through which the now elaborate true Negro Fetish
+must have passed before reaching its present co-ordinated state. How
+long ago it was when the true Negro was in this stage I will not venture
+to conjecture. Sir Henry Maine, of whom I am a very humble follower,
+says, &ldquo;Nothing moves that is not Greek.&rdquo; This is a hard saying to
+accept, but the truth of it grows on you when you are studying things
+such as these, and you are forced to acknowledge that they at any rate
+have a slow rate of development&mdash;sometimes indeed it seems that there is
+a mere wave motion of thought among all men rising here and there when
+in the hands of superior tribes, like the Mpongwe for example<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span>, to a
+wave crest destined on their extinction to fall again. Now and again as
+a storm on the sea, the impulse of a revealed religion sweeps down on to
+this ocean of nature philosophy, elevates it or confuses it according to
+the initial profundity of it. If you have ever seen the difference
+between a deep sea storm and an esturial storm, you will know what I
+mean. Yet this has nothing to do with the truth or falsity of the Fetish
+thought-form, but merely has a bearing on the quality of the minds that
+deal with it, as it must on all minds not under the influence of a
+revealed religion; and I now turn, in conclusion of this brief
+consideration of the schools of Fetish in West Africa, to the next
+school to the Mpongwe, namely, the school of Nkissism. I need not go
+into details concerning it here; you have them at your command in the
+two great works of Bastian, <i>An Expedition under Loango Küste und Besuch
+in San Salvador</i>, and in Mr. R. E. Dennett&rsquo;s <i>Folk Lore of the Fjorts</i>,
+published by the liberality of the Folk Lore Society, and also his
+former book, <i>Seven Years among the Fjorts</i>.<a name="FNanchor_21_22" id="FNanchor_21_22"></a><a href="#Footnote_21_22" class="fnanchor">[21]</a></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 436px;" id="IMG173A1"><span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span>
+<img src="images/ill-173a1.jpg" width="436" height="650" alt="Fjort Natives of Kacongo and Loango" title="Fjort Natives of Kacongo and Loango" />
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 650px;" id="IMG173A2"><span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span>
+<img src="images/ill-173a2.jpg" width="650" height="464" alt="Fjort Natives of Kacongo and Loango." title="Fjort Natives of Kacongo and Loango." />
+<p><span class="facingleft">[<i>To face page 155.</i></span></p>
+<span class="caption"><span class="smcap">Fjort Natives of Kacongo and Loango.</span></span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The predominant feature in this school is undoubtedly the extra
+recognition given to the mystery of the power of the earth, Nkissi &rsquo;nsi.
+Here you find the earth goddess Nzambi the paramount feature in the
+Fetish; from her the Fetish priests have their knowledge of the proper
+way to manage and communicate with lower earth spirits, round her circle
+almost all the legends, in her lies the ultimate human hope of help and
+protection. Nzambi is too large a subject for us to enter into here. She
+is the great mother, but she is not absolute in power. She is not one of
+the forms of the great unheeding over-lord of gods, like <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span>Nyankupong,
+or Abassi-boom; the equivalent to him, is her husband Nzambi Mpungu,
+among the followers of Nkissism; but the predominance given in this
+school to the great Princess Nzambi has had two effects that must be
+borne in mind in studying the region from Loango to the south bank of
+Congo. Firstly, it apparently led to Nzambi being confused by the
+natives with the Holy Virgin, when they were under the tuition of the
+Roman Catholic missionaries during the sixteenth and seventeenth
+centuries; hence Nzambi&rsquo;s cult requires to be studied with the greatest
+care at the present day. Secondly, partly in consequence of the native
+predominance given to her, and partly in the predominance she has gained
+from the aforesaid confusion, women have a very singular position, a
+superior one to that which they have in other schools; this you will see
+by reading the stories collected by Mr. Dennett. I will speak no further
+now concerning these schools of Fetish, for Nkissism is the most
+southern of the West African schools, its domain extending over the
+whole of the regions once forming the kingdom of Kongo down to Angola.
+Below Angola, on the West Coast, you come to the fringing zone of the
+Kalahi desert, and to those interesting people the Bushmen, of whose
+religion I am unable, with any personal experience, to speak. Below them
+you strike South Africa. South Africa is South Africa; West Africa is
+West Africa. Of the former I know nothing, of the latter alas! only a
+tenth part of what I should wish to know, so I return to pure Fetish and
+to its bearing on witchcraft.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_19_20" id="Footnote_19_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor_19_20"><span class="label">[19]</span></a> <i>History of Loango</i>, by the Abbé Proyart, 1776. Pinkerton,
+vol. xvi., p. 587.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_20_21" id="Footnote_20_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor_20_21"><span class="label">[20]</span></a> <i>Travels in West Africa.</i> Fetish Chapters.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_21_22" id="Footnote_21_22"></a><a href="#FNanchor_21_22"><span class="label">[21]</span></a> Sampson Low and Co.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+
+<h2>FETISH AND WITCHCRAFT</h2>
+
+<p class="pblock">Wherein the student having by now got rather involved in things in
+general, is constrained to discourse on witchcraft and its position
+in West African religious thought, concluding with the conviction
+that Fetish is quite clear though the student has not succeeded in
+making it so.</p>
+
+<p>Now, here we come to a very interesting question: What is witchcraft in
+itself? Conversing freely with the Devil, says Christendom, firmly; and
+taking the Devil to mean the Spirit of Evil, I am bound to think
+Christendom is in a way scientifically quite right, though the accepted
+scientific definition of witchcraft at present is otherwise, and holds
+witchcraft to be conversing with Natural Science, which of course I
+cannot accept as the Devil. Thus I cannot reconcile the two definitions
+should they mean the same thing; and so I am here really in the position
+of being at one in opinion with the Roman Catholic missionaries of the
+fifteenth century, who, as soon as they laid eyes on my friend the
+witch-doctor, recognised him and his goings on as a mass of witchcraft,
+and went for the whole affair in an exceeding game way.</p>
+
+<p>But let us take the accepted view, that first propounded by Sir Alfred
+Lyall; and I humbly beg it to be clearly understood I am only speaking
+of the bearing of that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span> view on Fetish in West Africa. I was of course
+fully aware of the accepted view of the innate antagonism between
+religion and witchcraft when I published in a deliberately scattered
+form some of my observations on Fetish, being no more desirous of giving
+a mental lead to white men than to black, but only wistful to find out
+what they thought of things as they are. The consequence of this action
+of mine has been, I fear, on the whole a rather more muddled feeling in
+the white mind regarding Fetish than ever heretofore existed; a feeling
+that, if what I said was true, (and in this matter of Fetish information
+no one has gainsaid the truth of it), West African religion was more
+perplexing than it seemed to be when regarded as a mere degraded brutal
+superstition or childish foolishness.</p>
+
+<p>However, one distinguished critic has tackled my Fetish, and gallantly:
+the writer in the <i>Edinburgh Review</i>. With his remarks on our heresy
+regarding the deification of ancestors I have above attempted to deal,
+owning he is quite right&mdash;we do not believe in deified ancestors. I now
+pass on to his other important criticism, and again own he is quite
+right, and that &ldquo;witchcraft and religious rites in West Africa are
+originally indistinguishable.&rdquo;<a name="FNanchor_22_23" id="FNanchor_22_23"></a><a href="#Footnote_22_23" class="fnanchor">[22]</a> This is evidently a serious affair
+for West Africa and me, so I must deal with it carefully, and first
+quote my critic&rsquo;s words following immediately those just cited. &ldquo;If this
+is correct there can be no doubt that such a confusion of the two ideas
+that in their later forms not only stand widely apart, but are always
+irreconcilably hostile, denotes the very lowest stage of aboriginal
+superstition wherever it prevails, for it has been held that, although
+the line between abject<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span>
+fetishism and witchcraft may be difficult to trace in the elementary
+stages, yet from the beginning a true distinction can invariably be
+recognised. According to this theory, the witch is more nearly allied
+with rudimentary science than with priestcraft, for he relies not upon
+prayer, worship, or propitiation of divinities, but upon his own secret
+knowledge and experience of the effect producible by certain tricks and
+mysterious devices upon the unseen powers, over whom he has obtained a
+sort of command. Instead of serving like a priest these powers, he is
+enabled by his art to make them serve him, and it is for this reason
+that his practices very soon become denounced and detested by the
+priesthood.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Now there are many interesting points to be considered in West Africa
+bearing on the above statement of Sir Alfred Lyall&rsquo;s theory of the
+nature of witchcraft,&mdash;points which I fancy, if carefully considered,
+would force upon us the strange conclusion that, accepting this theory
+as a general statement of the nature of witchcraft, there was no
+witchcraft whatever in West Africa, nothing having &ldquo;a true distinction&rdquo;
+in the native mind from religion. You may say there is no religion and
+it&rsquo;s all witchcraft, but this is a superficial view to take; you see the
+orthodox Christian view of witchcraft contains in it an element not
+present in the West African affair; the Christian regards the witch with
+hatred as one knowing good, yet choosing evil. The West African has not
+this choice in his mind; he has to deal with spirits who are not, any of
+them, up to much in the way of virtue viewed from a human standpoint. I
+don&rsquo;t say they are all what are called up here devils; a good many of
+them are what you might call reasonable, respectable, easy-going sort of
+people; some are downright bad;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span> in fact, I don&rsquo;t think it would be
+going too far to say that they are all downright bad if they get their
+tempers up or take a dislike to a man; there is not one of them
+beneficent to the human race at large. Nzambi is the nearest approach to
+a beneficent deity I have come across, and I feel she owes much of this
+to the confusion she profits by, and the Holy Virgin suffers from, in
+the regions under Nkissism; but Nzambi herself is far from morally
+perfect and very difficult tempered at times. You need not rely on me in
+this matter; take the important statement of Dr. Nassau: &ldquo;Observe, these
+were distinctly prayers, appeals for mercy, agonising protests; but
+there was no praise, no love, no thanks, no confession of sin.&rdquo;<a name="FNanchor_23_24" id="FNanchor_23_24"></a><a href="#Footnote_23_24" class="fnanchor">[23]</a> He
+was speaking regarding utterances made down there in the face of great
+afflictions and sorrow; and there was no praise, because there was no
+love, I fancy; no thanks because what good was done to the human being
+was a mere boughten thing he had paid for. No confession of sin, because
+the Fetish believer does not hold he lives in a state of sin, but that
+it is a thing he can commit now and again if he is fool enough. Sin to
+him not being what it is to us, a vile treason against a loving Father,
+but a very ill-advised act against powerful, nasty-tempered spirits.
+Herein you see lies one difference between the Christian and the Fetish
+view,&mdash;a fundamental one, that must be borne in mind.</p>
+
+<p>Then in the above-quoted passage you will observe that the dislike to
+witchcraft is traced in a measure to the action of priesthoods. This
+hatred is undoubted. But witchcraft is as much hated in districts in
+West Africa where there are no organised priesthoods as in districts<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span>
+where there are&mdash;in the regions under the Calabar and Mpongwe schools,
+for example, where the father of the house is the true priest to the
+family, where what looks like a priesthood, but which is a law god-cult
+only&mdash;the secret society&mdash;is the dominant social thing. Now this law
+god-cult affair, Purroh, Oru, Egbo, Ukukiwe, etc., etc., call it what
+you please, it&rsquo;s all the same thing, is not the organisation that makes
+war on witchcraft in West Africa. It deals with it now and then, if it
+is brought under its official notice; but it is not necessary that this
+should be done; summary methods are used with witches. It just appeals
+at once to ordeal, any one can claim it. You can claim it, and
+administer it yourself to yourself, if you are the accused party and in
+a hurry. A. says to you, &ldquo;You&rsquo;re a witch.&rdquo; &ldquo;I&rsquo;m not,&rdquo; you ejaculate. I
+take the bean; down it goes; you&rsquo;re sick or dead long before the
+elaborate mechanism of the law society has heard of the affair. Of
+course, if you want to make a big palaver and run yourself and your
+accuser into a lot of expense you can call in the society; but you
+needn&rsquo;t. From this and divers things like it I do not think the hatred
+of witchcraft in West Africa at large has anything originally to do with
+the priesthood. You will say, but there is the hatred of witchcraft in
+West Africa. You have only to shout &ldquo;<i>Ifot</i>&rdquo; at a man or woman in
+Calabar, or &ldquo;<i>Ndo tchi(</i>)&rdquo; in Fjort-land, and the whole population, so
+good-tempered the moment before, is turned bloodthirsty. Witches are
+torn to bits, destroyed in every savage way, when the ordeal has
+conclusively proved their guilt&mdash;mind you, never before. Granted; but I
+believe this to be just a surging up of that form of terror called hate.</p>
+
+<p>I am old enough to remember the dynamite scares up here, and the Jack
+the Ripper incidents; then it was only<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span> necessary for some one to call
+out, &ldquo;Dynamiter&rdquo; or &ldquo;Jack the Ripper&rdquo; at a fellow-citizen, and up surged
+our own people, all same for one with those Africans, only our people,
+not being so law-governed, would have shredded the accused without
+ordeal, had we not possessed that great factor in the formation of
+public virtue, the police, who intervened, carried away the accused to
+the ordeal&mdash;the police court&mdash;where the affair was gone into with
+judicial calm. Honestly, I don&rsquo;t believe there is the slightest mystic
+revulsion against witchcraft in West Africa; public feeling is always at
+bursting-point on witches, their goings-on are a constant danger to
+every peaceful citizen&rsquo;s life, family, property, and so on, and when the
+general public thinks it&rsquo;s got hold of one of the vermin it goes off
+with a bang; but it does not think for one moment that the witch is <i>per
+se</i> in himself a thing apart; he is just a bad man too much, who has
+gone and taken up with spirits for illegitimate purposes. The mere
+keeping of a familiar power, which under Christendom is held so vile a
+thing, is not so held in West Africa. Everyone does it; there is not a
+man, woman, or child who has not several attached spirits for help and
+preservation from danger and disease. It is keeping a spirit for bad
+purposes only that is hateful. It is one thing to have dynamite in the
+hand of the government or a mining company for reasonable reasons, quite
+another to have it in the hands of enemies to society; and such an enemy
+is a witch who trains the spirits over which he has got control to
+destroy his fellow human beings&rsquo; lives and properties.</p>
+
+<p>The calling in of ordeal to try the witch before destroying him has many
+interesting points. The African, be it granted, is tremendously under
+the dominion of law, and it is the law that such trials should take
+place before execution; but<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span> there is also involved in it another
+curious fact, and that is that the spirit of the ordeal is held to be
+able to manage and suppress the bad spirits trained by the witch to
+destruction. Human beings alone can collar the witch and destroy him in
+an exemplary manner, but spiritual aid is required to collar the witch&rsquo;s
+devil, or it would get adrift and carry on after its owner&rsquo;s death.
+Regarding ordeal affairs I will speak when dealing with legal procedure.</p>
+
+<p>Such being the West African view of witchcraft, I venture to think there
+are in this world divers reasons for hating witchcraft. There is the
+fetish one, that he is an enemy to society; there is the priesthood one,
+that he is a sort of quack or rival practitioner&mdash;under this head of
+priesthood aversion for witchcraft I think we may class the witchcraft
+that is merely a hovering about of the old religion which the priesthood
+of an imported religion are anxious to stamp out; and there is that
+aversion to witchcraft one might call the Protestant aversion, which
+arises from the feeling that it is a direct sin against God Himself.
+This latter feeling has been the cause of as violent a persecution of
+witches, witness the action of King James I. and that of the Quakers in
+America, as any West African has ever presented to the world. Throughout
+all these things the fact remains, that whether black, white, or yellow,
+the witch is a bad man, a murderer in the eyes of Allah as well as those
+of humanity.</p>
+
+<p>That all witches act by means of poison alone would be too hasty a thing
+to say, because I think we need hardly doubt that the African is almost
+as liable to die from a poisonous idea put into his mind as a poisonous
+herb put into his food; indeed, I do not know that in West Africa we
+need confine ourselves to saying natives alone do this, for white men
+sink and die under an idea that breaks their<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span> spirit. All the vital
+powers are required there to resist the depressing climate. If they are
+weakened seriously in any way, death is liable to ensue. The profound
+belief in the power of a witch causes a man who knows, say, that either
+a nail has been driven into an Nkiss down on the South-West coast, or
+the Fangaree drum beaten on him up in the Sierra Leone region, to
+collapse under the terror of it, and I own I can see no moral difference
+between the guilt of the man or woman who does these things with the
+intent to slay a fellow-citizen and that of one who puts bush into his
+chop&mdash;both mean to kill and do kill, but both methods are good West
+African witchcraft. The latter may seem to be an incipient form of
+natural science, but it seems to me&mdash;I say it humbly&mdash;that the West
+African incipient scientist is not the local witch, but that highly
+respectable gentleman or lady, the village apothecary, the <i>Nganga
+bilongo</i> or the <i>Abiabok</i>. The means of killing in vogue in West African
+witchcraft without the direct employment of poison are highly
+interesting, but I think it would serve no good purpose for me to give
+even the few I know in detail. There is one interesting point in this
+connection. I have said that in order to make a charm efficacious
+against a particular person you must have preferably some of his blood
+in your possession, or, failing that, some hair or nail clipping;
+failing these, some articles belonging intimately to him&mdash;a piece of his
+loin-cloth, or, under the school of Nkissi, a bit of his iron. This I
+believe to hold good for all true fetish charms; but we have in the
+Bight of Benin charms which are under the influence of a certain amount
+of Mohammedan ideas&mdash;for example, the deadly charms of the Kufong
+society. This class of charm does not require absolutely a bit of
+something nearly connected with the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span> victim, but nevertheless it cannot
+act at a great distance, or without the element of personal connection.
+Take the Fangaree charm, for example, to be found among the Mendi
+people, and all the neighbouring peoples who are liable to go in for
+Kufong.</p>
+
+<p>Fangaree is the name of a small drum that is beaten by a hammer made of
+bamboo. The uses of this drum are wide and various, but it also gives
+its name to the charm, because the charm, like the drum, is beaten with
+a similar stick. The charm stuff itself is made of a dead man&rsquo;s bone, of
+different herbs smoked over a fire and powdered the same day, ants&rsquo;-hill
+earth, and charcoal. This precious mixture is made into a parcel; that
+parcel is placed on a frame made of bamboo sticks. On the top of the
+charm a small live animal&mdash;an insect, I am informed, will do&mdash;is secured
+by a string passing over it, and the charm is fixed with wooden forks
+into the ground on either side. This affair is placed by the murderer
+close to a path the victim will pass along, and the murderer sits over
+it, waiting for him to come. When he comes, he is allowed to pass just
+by, and then his enemy breaks a dry bamboo stick; the noise causes the
+victim to turn and look in the direction of the noise&mdash;<i>i.e.</i> on to the
+charm&mdash;and then the murderer hits the live animal on it, calling his
+victim&rsquo;s name, and the charm is on him. If the animal is struck on the
+head, the victim&rsquo;s head is affected, and he has violent fits until &ldquo;he
+dies from breaking his neck&rdquo; in one of them; if the animal is struck to
+tailwards, the victim gets extremely ill, but in this latter case he can
+buy off the charm and be cured by a Fangaree man. A similar arrangement
+is in working order under some South-West coast murder societies I am
+acquainted with. The interesting point, however, is the necessity of
+establish<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span>ing the personal connection between the victim and the charm
+by means of making him look on the charm and calling his name. Without
+his looking it&rsquo;s no good. Hence it comes that it is held unwise to look
+behind when you hear a noise o&rsquo;night in the bush; indeed, no cautious
+person, with sense in his head and strength in his legs, would dream of
+doing this unless caught off guard. In connection also with this turning
+the face being necessary to the working of the Fangaree charm, there is
+another charm that is worked under Kufong, according to several natives
+from its region&mdash;the hinterland of Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Ivory
+Coast&mdash;with whom I have associated when we have both been far from our
+respective homes away in South-West Africa. It is a charm I have never
+met with as indigenous in the South-West or Oil Rivers Fetish, and I
+think it has a heavier trace of Mohammedan influence in it than the
+Fangaree charm. The way it works is this. A man wants to kill you
+without showing blood. Only leopard society men do that, and your enemy,
+we will presume, is not a leopard. So he throws his face on you by a
+process I need not enter into. You hardly know anything is wrong at
+first; by-and-by you notice that every scene that you look on, night or
+day, has got that face in it, not a filmy vision of a thing, but quite
+material in appearance, only it&rsquo;s in abnormal places for a face to be,
+and it is a face only. It may be on the wall, or amongst the roof poles,
+or away in a corner of the hut floor; outdoors it is the same&mdash;the face
+is first always, there just where you can see it. Some of my informants
+hold that it keeps coming closer to you as time goes on; but others say
+no; it keeps at one distance all the time. This, however, is a minor
+point; it is its being there that gets to matter. It is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span> in amongst the
+bushes at the side of the path, or in the water of the river, or at the
+end of your canoe, or in the oil in the pots, or in the Manchester
+cottons in the factory shop. Wherever you look, there it is. In a way
+it&rsquo;s unobtrusive, it does not spread itself out, or make a noise, or
+change, yet, sooner or later, in every place, you cannot miss seeing it.
+At first you think, by changing your environment&mdash;going outdoors, coming
+in, going on a journey, mixing with your fellow-men, or avoiding
+them&mdash;you can get rid of the thing; but you find, when you look
+round,&mdash;a thing you are certain to do when the charm has got its
+grip,&mdash;for sure that face is there as usual. Now this sort of thing
+tells on the toughest in time, and you get sick of life when it has
+always got that face mixed up in it, so sick that you try the other
+thing&mdash;death. This is an ill-advised course, but you do not know in time
+that, when you kill yourself, you will find that on the other side, in
+the other thing, you will see nothing but that face, that unchanging
+silent face you are so sick of. The Kufong man who has thrown his face
+at you knows, and when he hears of your suicide he laughs. Naturally you
+cannot know, because you are not a Kufong man, or the charm could not be
+put on you. What you &ldquo;can do in this here most awful go,&rdquo; as Mr. Squeers
+would say, I am unfortunately not able to tell you. I made many
+inquiries from men who know &ldquo;the face,&rdquo; who had had it happen on people
+in their families, and so on, but in answer to my inquiries as to why
+the afflicted did not buy it off, what charms there were against it, and
+so forth, I was always told it was a big charm, that the man who put it
+on lost something of himself by so doing, so it was never put on except
+in cases of great hatred that would stick at nothing and would kill;
+also that it was of no real use for the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span> victim to kill his charmer,
+though that individual, knowing the pleasure so doing would afford his
+victim, takes good care to go on a journey, and to keep out of the way
+until the charm has worked out in suicide. There is a certain amount of
+common sense in this proceeding which is undoubtedly true African, but
+there is a sort of imaginative touch which makes me suspect Mohammedan
+infusion; anyhow, I leave you to judge for yourself whether,
+presupposing you accept the possibility of a man doing such a thing to
+you or to any one you love, you think he can be safely ignored, or
+whether he is not an enemy to society who had better be found out and
+killed&mdash;killed in a showy way. Personally I favour the latter course.</p>
+
+<p>There is but one other point in witchcraft in West Africa that I need
+now detain you with, and that is why a person killed by witchcraft
+suffers more than one who dies of old age, for herein lies another
+reason for this hatred of witchcraft. Every human soul in West Africa
+throughout all the Fetish schools is held to have a certain proper time
+of incarnation in a human body, whether it be one incarnation or endless
+series of incarnations; anything that cuts that incarnation period short
+inconveniences the soul, to say the least of it. Under Ellis&rsquo;s school,
+and I believe throughout all the others, the soul that lives its life in
+a body fully through is held happy; it is supposed to have learnt its
+full lesson from life, and to know the way down to the shadow-land home
+and all sorts of things. Hence also comes the respect for the aged,
+common throughout all West Africa. They are the knowing ones. Such an
+one was the late Chief Long John of Bonny. Now if this process of
+development is checked by witchcraft and the soul is prematurely driven
+from the body, it does not know all that it should, and its<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span> condition
+is therefore miserable. It is, as it were, sent blind, or deaf, or lame
+into the spirit-land. This is a thing not only dreaded by individuals
+for themselves, but hated for those they love; hence the doer of it is a
+hated thing. You must remember that when you get keen hatred you must
+allow for keen affection, it is not human to have one without the other.
+That the Africans are affectionate I am fully convinced. This affection
+does not lie precisely on the same lines as those of Europeans, I allow.
+It is not with them so deeply linked with sex; but the love between
+mother and child, man and man, brother and sister, woman and woman, is
+deep, true, and pure, and it must be taken into account in observing
+their institutions and ideas, particularly as to this witchcraft where
+it shows violently and externally in hatred only to the superficial
+observer. I well remember gossiping with a black friend in a plantation
+in the Calabar district on witchcraft, and he took up a stick and struck
+a plant of green maize, breaking the stem of it, saying, &ldquo;There, like
+that is the soul of a man who is witched, it will not ripen now.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>We will now turn to the consideration of that class whose business in
+life is mainly to guard the community from witchcraft and from
+miscellaneous evil spirits acting on their own initiative, the Fetish
+Men of West Africa, namely, those men and women who devote their lives
+to the cult of West African religion. Such people you find in every West
+African district; but their position differs under different schools,
+and it is in connection with them that we must recognise the differences
+in the various schools, remembering that the form of Fetish makes the
+form of Fetish Man, not the Fetish Man the form of Fetish. He may, as it
+were, embroider it, complicate it, mystify it,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span> as is the nature of all
+specialists in all professions, but primarily he is under it, at any
+rate in West Africa, where you find the Fetish man in every district,
+but in every district in a different form. For example, look at him
+under the Ellis school. Where there are well-defined gods, there your
+Fetish Man is quite the priest, devoting himself to the cult of one god
+publicly, probably doing a little general practice into the bargain with
+other minor spirits. To the laity he of course advertises the god he
+serves as the most reliably important one in the neighbourhood; but it
+has come under my notice, and you will find under Ellis&rsquo;s, that if the
+priest of a god gets personally unwell and finds his own deity
+ineffective, he will apply for aid to a professional brother who serves
+another god. Below Ellis&rsquo;s school, in the Calabar school, your Fetish
+Man is somewhat different; the gods are not so definite or esteemed, and
+the Fetish Man is becoming a member of a set of men who deal with gods
+in a lump, and have the general management of minor spirits. Below this
+school, in the Mpongwe, the Fetish Man is even less specialised as
+regards one god; he is here a manager of spirits at large, with the
+assistance of a strong spirit with whom he has opened up communication.
+Below this school, in that of Nkissi, the Fetish Man becomes more truly
+priest-like&mdash;he is the Nganga of an Nkiss; but nevertheless his position
+is a different one to that of the priest in Ellis&rsquo;s school; here he is
+in a better position than in the Mpongwe school, but in an inferior one
+to that in Ellis&rsquo;s, where he is not the lone servitor or manager for a
+god, but a member of a powerful confraternity. You must bear in mind, of
+course, that the Fetish Man is always, from a lay standpoint, a highly
+important person; but professionally, I cannot but think, a priest say
+of Tando in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span> Ashantee or of Shango in Dahomey, is of a higher grade than
+a Nganga to an Nkiss, certainly far higher than a Fetish Man under the
+Mpongwe school, where every house father and every village chief does a
+lot of his own Fetish without professional assistance. Of course chiefs
+and house fathers do a certain amount in all districts&mdash;in fact, in West
+Africa every man and woman does a certain amount of Fetish for himself;
+but where, as in Ellis&rsquo;s school, you get a regular set of priests and
+plenty of them, the religion falls into their hands to a greater extent.
+I feel that the study of the position of Fetish-Men is deserving of
+great attention. I implore the student who may take it up to keep the
+Fetish Man for practical purposes distinct from the gentleman who
+represents the law god-cult&mdash;the secret tribal society. If you persist
+in mixing them, you will have in practical politics as fine a mess as if
+you mixed up your own Bench of Bishops with the Woolsack. I beg to
+contribute to the store of knowledge on this point sundry remarks sent
+me on most excellent native authority from the Gold Coast:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The inhabitants of Cape Coast must congratulate themselves that they
+enjoy the protection of seventy-seven fetishes. Every town (and this
+town) has one fetish house or temple, often built in a square or oblong
+form of mud or swish, and thatched over, or constructed of sticks or
+poles placed in a circular form and thatched. In these temples several
+images are generally placed. Every Fetish-Man or priest, moreover, has
+his private fetishes in his own house, one of a bird, stones encased by
+string, large lumps of cinder from an iron furnace, calabashes, and
+bundles of sticks tied together with string. All these are stained with
+red ochre and rubbed over with eggs. They are placed on a square
+platform and shrouded from the vulgar gaze.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The fetishes are regarded as spiritual intelligent beings who make the
+remarkable objects of nature their residence or enter occasionally into
+the images and other artificial representations which have been duly
+consecrated by certain ceremonies. It is the belief of this people that
+the fetishes not unfrequently render themselves visible to mortals. Thus
+the great fetish of the rock on which Cape Coast Castle stands is said
+to come forth at night in human form, but of superhuman size, and to
+proceed through the town dressed in white to chase away evil spirits.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;In all the countries along the Coast (Gold) the regular fetish day is
+Tuesday. The fishermen would expect that, were they to go out on that
+day, it would spoil their fishing.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The priest&rsquo;s office may in some cases be hereditary, but it is not
+uniformly so, for the children of Fetish-Men sometimes refuse to devote
+themselves to the pursuits of their parents and engage in other
+occupations. Any one may enter the office after suitable training, and
+parents who desire that their children may be instructed in its
+mysteries place them with a Fetish-Man, who receives a premium for each.
+The order of Fetish-Men is further augmented by persons who declare that
+the fetish has suddenly seized on them. A series of convulsive and
+unnatural bodily distortions establish their claim. Application is made
+to the fetish for counsel and aid in every domestic and public
+emergency. When persons find occasion to consult a private Fetish-Man,
+they take a present of gold-dust and rum and proceed to his house. He
+receives the presents, and either puts a little of the rum on the head
+of every image or pours a small quantity on the ground before the
+platform as an offering<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span> to the whole pantheon; then, taking a brass pan
+with water in it, he sits down with the pan between him and the
+fetishes, and his inquirers also seat themselves to await the result.
+Having made these preparatory arrangements, looking earnestly into the
+water, he begins to snap his fingers, and addressing the fetish, extols
+his power, telling him that the people have arrived to consult him, and
+requesting him to come and give the desired answer. After a time the
+fetish-man is wrought up into a state of fury. He shakes violently and
+foams at the mouth; this is to intimate that the fetish was come home
+and that he himself is no longer the speaker, but the fetish, who uses
+his mouth and speaks by him. He now growls like a tiger and asks the
+people if they have brought rum, requiring them at the same time to
+present it to him. He drinks, and then inquires for what purpose they
+have sent for him. If a relative is ill, they reply that such a member
+of their family is sick and they have tried all the means they could
+devise to restore him, but without success, and they, knowing he is a
+great fetish, have come to ask his aid, and beg him to teach them what
+they should do. He then speaks kindly to them, expresses a hope that he
+shall be able to help them, and says, &ldquo;I go to see.&rdquo; It is imagined that
+the fetish then quits the priest, and, after a silence of a few minutes,
+he is supposed to return, and gives his response to the inquirers.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;In cases of great difficulty the oracle at Abrah is the last resort of
+the Fantees. This notable oracle is always consulted at night. They find
+a large fire made upon the ground, and the presents they have brought
+they place in the hands of the priests who are in attendance. They are
+then directed to elevate their presents above their heads<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span> and to fix
+their eyes steadfastly upon the ground, for should they look up, the
+fetish, it is said, would inflict blindness on them for their
+sacrilegious gaze. After a time the oracle gives a response in a shrill,
+small voice intended to convey the idea that it proceeds from an
+unearthly source, and the inquirers, having obtained the end of their
+visit, then depart.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;In cases of bodily affliction the fetish orders medical preparations
+for the patient. If the malady of the patient does not appear to yield
+to such applications, the fetish is again consulted, and in some cases,
+as a further expedient, the priest takes a fowl and ties it to a stick,
+by which operation it is barbarously squeezed to death. The stick is
+then placed in the path leading to the house for the purpose of
+deterring evil spirits from approaching it. When the patient is a rich
+man, several sheep are sacrificed, and he is fetished until the last
+moment arrives amidst the howls of a number of old Fetish Women, who
+continue to besmear with eggs and other medicine the walls and doorposts
+of his house and everything that is around him until he has ceased to
+breathe.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Not only does the African depart from life under the care of
+Fetish-Men&mdash;and, as my valued correspondent ungallantly remarks, &ldquo;old
+fetish-women&rdquo;&mdash;but he is met, as it were, by them on his arrival. My
+correspondent says &ldquo;as soon as the child is born the Fetish-Man binds
+certain fetish preparations round his limbs, using at the same time a
+form of incantation or prayer. This is done to fortify the infant
+against all kinds of evil. On the eighth day after the birth, the father
+of the child, accompanied by a number of friends, proceeds to the house
+of the mother. If he be a rich man, he takes with him a gallon of ardent
+spirits to be used on<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span> the festive occasion. On arriving at the house,
+the friends form a circle round the father, who delivers a kind of
+address in which he acknowledges the kindness of the gods for giving him
+the child, and calls upon those present also to thank the fetishes on
+his account; then, taking the child in his arms, he squirts upon it a
+little spirit from his mouth, pronouncing the name by which it is to be
+called. A second name which the child usually takes is that of the day
+of the week on which it is born. The following are the names of the days
+in the Fanti language, varied in their orthography according to the sex
+of the child:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="center">
+<table border="0" cellpadding="6" cellspacing="0" summary="Day Names">
+<tr><td >&nbsp;</td><td align="left">Male.</td><td>Female.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">Sunday</td><td align="left">Quisi</td><td align="left">Akosua.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">Monday</td><td align="left">Kujot</td><td align="left">Ajua.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">Tuesday</td><td align="left">Quabina</td><td align="left">Abmaba.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">Wednesday</td><td align="left">Quaku</td><td align="left">Ekua.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">Thursday</td><td align="left">Quahu</td><td align="left">Aba.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">Friday</td><td align="left">Kufi</td><td align="left">Efua.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align="left">Saturday</td><td align="left">Qamina</td><td align="left">Ama.</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<p>Those ceremonials called on the Coast &ldquo;customs&rdquo; are the things that show
+off the Fetish-Man at the best in more senses of the word than one. We
+will take the yam custom. The intentions of these yam customs are
+twofold&mdash;firstly they are a thanksgiving to the fetishes for allowing
+their people to live to see the new yams, and for the new yams, but they
+are also institutions to prevent the general public eating the new yam
+before it&rsquo;s ready. The idea is, and no doubt rightly, that unripe yams
+are unwholesome, and the law is that no new yams must be eaten until the
+yam custom is made. The Fetish-Men settle when the yams are in a fit
+state to pass into circulation, and then make the custom. It generally
+occurs at the end of August, but is sometimes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span> kept back until the
+beginning of September. In Fantee all the inhabitants of the towns
+assemble under the shade of the grove adjoining the fetish hut, and a
+sheep and a number of fowls are killed, part of their flesh is mixed
+with boiled yams and palm-oil, and a portion of this mixture is placed
+on the heads of the images, and the remainder is thrown about before the
+fetish hut as a peace-offering to the deities.</p>
+
+<p>At Winnebah, on the Gold Coast, there is an interesting modification in
+the yam custom. The principal fetish of that place, it is believed, will
+not be satisfied with a sheep, but he must have a deer brought alive to
+his temple, and there sacrificed. Accordingly on the appointed day every
+year when the custom is to be celebrated, almost all the inhabitants
+except the aged and infirm go into the adjoining country&mdash;an open
+park-like country, studded with clumps of trees. The women and children
+look on, give good advice, and shriek when necessary, while the men beat
+the bush with sticks, beat tom-toms, and halloo with all their might.
+While thus engaged, my correspondent remarks in his staid way,
+&ldquo;sometimes a leopard starts forth, but it is usually so frightened with
+the noise and confusion that it scampers off in one direction as fast as
+the people run from it in another. When a deer is driven out, the chase
+begins, the people try to run it down, flinging sticks at its legs. At
+last it is secured and carried exultingly to the town with shoutings and
+drummings. On entering the town they are met by the aged people carrying
+staves, and, having gone in procession round the town, they proceed to
+the fetish house, where the animal is sacrificed, and partly offered to
+the fetish, partly eaten by the priests.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>These yam customs are at their fullest in the Benin<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span> Bights, but you get
+a custom made for the new yam in all the districts lower down. These
+customs have long been credited with being stained by human sacrifices.
+Not altogether unjustly. You can always read human sacrifice for goats
+and fowls when you are considering a district inhabited by true Negroes,
+and the occasion is an important one, because in West Africa a human
+sacrifice is the most persuasive one to the fetishes. It is just with
+them as with a chief&mdash;if you want to get some favour from him you must
+give him a present. A fowl or a goat or a basket of vegetables, or
+anything like that is quite enough for most favours, but if you want a
+big thing, and want it badly, you had better give him a slave, because
+the slave is alike more intrinsically valuable and also more useful. So
+far as I know, all human beings sacrificed pass into the service of the
+fetish they are sacrificed to. They are not merely killed that he may
+enjoy their blood, but that he may have their assistance. Fetishes have
+much to do, and an extra pair of hands is to them always acceptable. As
+for the importance of these harvest customs to the general system of
+Fetish, I think in West Africa it is small. The goings on, the
+licentiousness and general jollification that accompany them, upsetting
+law and order for days, give them a fallacious look of importance; but I
+think far more really near the heart of the Fetish thought-form is the
+lonely man who steals at night into the forest to gain from Sasabonsom a
+charm, and the woman who, on her way back from market, throws down
+before the fetish houses she passes a scrap of her purchases; compared
+to the cult of the law-god, well, yam customs are dirty water price,
+palaver, and insignificant politically.</p>
+
+<p>I have dealt here with Fetish as far as the position of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span> human being
+is concerned, because this phase may make it more comprehensible to my
+fellow white men who regard the human being as the main thing in the
+created universe, but I must beg you to remember that this idea of the
+importance of the human race is not held by the African. The individual
+is supremely important to himself, and he values his friends and
+relations and so on, but abstract affection for humanity at large or
+belief in the sanctity of the lives of people with whom he is unrelated
+and unacquainted, the African barely possesses. He is only capable of
+feeling this abstract affection when under the influence of one of the
+great revealed religions which place the human being higher in the scale
+of Creation. This comes from no cruelty of mind <i>per se</i>, but is the
+result of the hardness of the fight he has to fight against the world;
+and possessing this view of the equal, if not greater importance of many
+of the things he sees round him, the African conceives these things also
+have their fetish&mdash;a fetish on the same ground idea, but varying from
+human fetish. The politics of Mungo mah Lobeh, the mountain, with the
+rest of nature, he believes to exist. The Alemba rapid has its affairs
+clearly, but the private matters of these very great people are things
+the human being had better keep out of; and it is advisable for him to
+turn his attention to making terms with them and go into their presence
+with his petition when their own affairs are prosperous, when their
+tempers are not as it were up over some private ultra-human affair of
+their own. I well remember the opinions expressed by my companions
+regarding the folly&mdash;mine, of course&mdash;of obtruding ourselves on Mungo
+when that noble mountain was vexed too much, and the opinion expressed
+by an Efik friend in a tornado that came down on us. Well, there you
+have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span> this difference. I instinctively say &ldquo;us.&rdquo; She did not think we
+were objects of interest to the tornado or the forest it was scourging.
+She took it they had a sort of family row on, and we might get hit with
+the bits, therefore it was highly unfortunate that we were present at
+the meeting. Again, it is the same with the surf. The boat-boys see it&rsquo;s
+in a nasty temper, they keep out of it, it may be better to-morrow, then
+it will tolerate them, for it has no real palaver with them
+individually. Of course you can go and upset the temper of big nature
+spirits, but when you are not there they have their own affairs.</p>
+
+<p>Hence it comes that we have in Fetish a religion in which its believers
+do not hold that devotion to religion constitutes Virtue. The ordinary
+citizen is held to be most virtuous who is least mixed up in religious
+affairs. He can attain Virtue, the love and honour of his fellow-men, by
+being a good husband and father, an honest man in trade, a just man in
+the palaver-house, and he must, for the protection of his interests,
+that is to say, not only his individual well-being, but the well-being
+of those dependent on him, go in to a certain extent for religious
+practices. He must associate with spirits because spirits are in all
+things and everywhere and over everything; and the good citizen deals
+with the other spirits as he deals with that class of spirits we call
+human beings; he does not cheat the big ones of their dues; he spills a
+portion of his rum to them; he gives them their white calicoes; he
+treats his slave spirits honourably, and he uses his slave spirits for
+no bad purpose, and if any great grief falls on him he calls on the
+great over-lord of gods, mentioning these things. But men are not all
+private citizens; there are men whose destiny puts them in high
+places&mdash;men who are not only house<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span> fathers but who are tribe fathers.
+They, to protect and further the interests of those under them, must
+venture greatly and further, and deal with more powerful spirits, as it
+were, their social equals in spiritdom. These good chiefs in their
+higher grade dealings preserve the same clean-handed conduct. And
+besides these there are those men, the Fetish men, who devote their
+lives to combating evil actions through witches and miscellaneous
+spirits who prey on mankind. These men have to make themselves important
+to important spirits. It is risky work for them, for spirits are a risky
+set to deal with. Up here in London, when I have to deal with a spirit
+as manifest in the form of an opinion, or any big mind-form incarnate in
+one man, or in thousands, I often think of an African friend of mine who
+had troubles, and I think sympathetically, for his brother explained the
+affair to me. He was an educated man. &ldquo;You see,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;my brother&rsquo;s
+got a strong Ju Ju, but it&rsquo;s a damned rocky Ju Ju to get on with.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_22_23" id="Footnote_22_23"></a><a href="#FNanchor_22_23"><span class="label">[22]</span></a> July, 1897, p. 221.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_23_24" id="Footnote_23_24"></a><a href="#FNanchor_23_24"><span class="label">[23]</span></a> <i>Travels in West Africa.</i> (Macmillan, 1897, p. 453.)</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIII" id="CHAPTER_VIII"></a>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+
+<h2>AFRICAN MEDICINE</h2>
+
+<p class="pblock">Mainly from the point of view of the native apothecary, to which is
+added some account of the sleep disease and the malignant
+melancholy.</p>
+
+<p>There is, as is in all things West African, a great deal of fetish
+ceremonial mixed up with West African medical methods. Underlying them
+throughout there is the fetish form of thought; but it is erroneous to
+believe that all West African native doctors are witch doctors, because
+they are not. One of my Efik friends, for example, would no more think
+of calling in a witch doctor for a simple case of rheumatism than you
+would think of calling in a curate or a barrister; he would just call in
+the equivalent to our general practitioner, the abiabok. If he grew
+worse instead of better, he would then call in his equivalent to our
+consulting physician, the witch doctor, the abiadiong. But if he started
+being ill with something exhibiting cerebral symptoms he would have in
+the witch doctor at once.</p>
+
+<p>This arises from the ground principle of all West African physic.
+Everything works by spirit on spirit, therefore the spirit of the
+medicine works on the spirit of the disease. Certain diseases are
+combatable by certain spirits in certain<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span> herbs. Other diseases are
+caused by spirits not amenable to herb-dwelling spirits; they must be
+tackled by spirits of a more powerful grade. The witch doctor who
+belongs to the school of Nkissism will become more profound on this
+matter still, and will tell you all herbs, indeed everything that comes
+out of the Earth, have in them some of the power of the Earth, Nkissi
+nisi; but the general view is the less concrete one&mdash;that it is a matter
+of only certain herbs having power. This I have been told over and over
+again in various West Coast tongues by various West African physicians,
+and in it lies the key to their treatment of disease&mdash;a key without
+which many of their methods are incomprehensible, but which shows up
+most clearly in the methods of the witch doctor himself. In the practice
+of the general practitioner, or, more properly speaking, the apothecary,
+it is merely a theory, just as a village chemist here may prescribe blue
+pill without worrying himself about its therapeutic action from a
+scientific point of view.</p>
+
+<p>Before I pass on to the great witch doctor, the physician, I must detain
+you with a brief account of the
+neglected-by-traveller-because-less-showy African village apothecary, a
+really worthy person, who exists in every West African district I know
+of; often, as in the Calabar and Bonny region, a doctor whose practice
+extends over a fair-sized district, wherein he travels from village to
+village. If he comes across a case, he sits down and does his best with
+it, may be for a fortnight or a month at a time, and when he has
+finished with it and got his fee, off he goes again. Big towns, of
+course, have a resident apothecary, but I never came across a town that
+had two apothecaries. It may be professional etiquette, but, though I
+never like to think evil of the Profession whatever colour its
+complexion may be, it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span> may somehow be connected with a knowledge of the
+properties of herbs, for I observed when at Corisco that an apothecary
+from the mainland who was over there for a visit shrank from dining with
+the local medico.</p>
+
+<p>These apothecaries are, as aforesaid, learned in the properties of
+herbs, and they are the surgeons, in so far as surgery is ventured on. A
+witch doctor would not dream of performing an operation. Amongst these
+apothecaries there are lady doctors, who, though a bit dangerous in
+pharmacy, yet, as they do not venture on surgery, are, on the whole,
+safer than their <i>confrčres</i>, for African surgery is heroic.</p>
+
+<p>Many of the apothecaries&rsquo; medical methods are fairly sound, however. The
+Dualla practitioner is truly great on poultices for extracting foreign
+substances from wounds, such as bits of old iron cooking pot, a very
+frequent foreign substance for a man to get into him in West Africa,
+owing to pots being broken up and used as bullets. Almost incredible
+stories are told by black men and white in Cameroons concerning the
+efficiency of these poultices; one I heard from a very reliable white
+authority there of a man who had been shot with bits of iron pot in the
+thigh. The white doctor extracted several pieces, and declared he had
+got them all out; but the man went on suffering and could not walk, so
+finally a country doctor was called in, and he applied his poultice. In
+a few minutes he removed it, and on its face lay two pieces of iron pot.
+The white doctor said they had been in the poultice all the time, but he
+did not carry public opinion with him, for the patient recovered
+rapidly.</p>
+
+<p>The Negroes do not seem to me to go in for baths in medical treatment
+quite so much as the Bantu; they hold<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span> more with making many little
+incisions in the skin round a swollen joint, then encasing it with clay
+and keeping a carefully tended fire going under it. But the Bantu is
+given greatly to baths, accompanied by massage, particularly in the
+treatment of that great West African affliction, rheumatism. The Mpongwe
+make a bath for the treatment of this disease by digging a suitably
+sized hole in the ground and putting into it seven herbs&mdash;whereof I know
+the native names only, not the scientific&mdash;and in addition in go
+cardamoms and peppers. Boiling water is then plentifully poured over
+these, and the patient is laid on and covered with the parboiled green
+stuff. Next a framework of twigs is placed over him, and he is hastily
+clayed up to keep the steam in, only his head remaining above ground. In
+this bath he is sometimes kept a few hours, sometimes a day and a half.
+He is liable to give the traveller who may happen suddenly on him while
+under treatment the idea that he is an atrocity; but he is not; and when
+he is taken out of the bath-poultice he is rubbed and kneaded all over,
+plenty more hot water being used in the process, this indeed being the
+palladium of West Coast physic.</p>
+
+<p>The Fjort tribe do not bury their rheumatic patients until they are dead
+and all their debts paid, but they employ the vapour bath. My friend,
+Mr. R. E. Dennet, who has for the past eighteen years lived amongst the
+Fjort, and knows them as no other white man does, and knows also my
+insatiable thirst for any form of West African information, has kindly
+sent me some details of Fjort medical methods, which I give in his own
+words&mdash;&ldquo;The Fjort have names for many diseases; aches are generally
+described as <i>tanta ki tanta</i>; they say the head suffers <i>Ntu tanta ki
+tanta</i>, the chest suffers <i>Mtima tanta ki tanta</i>, and so on. Rheumatism<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span>
+that keeps to the joints of the bones and cripples the sufferer is
+called <i>Ngoyo</i>, while ordinary rheumatism is called <i>Macongo</i>. They
+generally try to cure this disease by giving the sufferers vapour baths.
+They put the leaves of the <i>Nvuka</i> into a pot of boiling water, and
+place the pot between the legs of the patient, who is made to sit up.
+They then cover up the patient and the pot with coverings.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;They try to relieve the local pain by spluttering the affected part
+with chalk, pepper, and logwood, and the leaves of certain plants that
+have the power of blistering.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Small-pox they try to cure by smearing the body of the patient over
+with the pulped leaves of the mzeuzil. Palm oil is also used. These
+patients are taken to the woods, where a hut is built for them, or not,
+according to the wealth and desire of their relations. If poor they are
+often allowed to die of starvation. A kind of long thin worm that creeps
+about under the eyelid is called <i>Loyia</i>, and is skilfully extracted by
+many of the natives by means of a needle or piece of wood cut to a sharp
+point.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Blind boils they call <i>Fvuma</i>, and they cure them by splintering over
+them the pulped root <i>Nchechi</i>, mixed with red and white earth. Leprosy
+they call <i>Boisi</i>, ague <i>Chiosi</i>, matter from the ear <i>Mafina</i>, rupture
+<i>Sangafulla</i>. But diseases of the lungs, heart, liver, and spleen seem
+to puzzle the native leeches and many natives die from these terrible
+ills. Cupping and bleeding, which they do with the hollow horns of the
+goat and the sharpened horn of a kid, are the remedies usually resorted
+to.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;All persons are supposed to have the power to give their enemies these
+different sicknesses. Amulets, frontlets, bracelets, and waistbands
+charged with medicines are also used as either charms or cures.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;A woman who was stung by a scorpion went nearly mad, and, rushing into
+the river, tried to drown herself. I tried my best to calm her and cure
+her by the application of a few simple remedies, but she kept us awake
+all night, and we had to hold her down nearly the whole time. I called
+in a native surgeon to see if he could do anything, and he spluttered
+some medicine over her, and, placing himself opposite to her, shouted at
+her and the evil spirit that was in her. She became calmer, and the
+surgeon left us. As I was afraid of a relapse, I sent the woman to be
+cured in a town close by. The Princess of the town picked out the sting
+of the scorpion with a needle, and gave the woman some herbs, which
+acted as a strong purge, and cured her. As the Nganga bilongo
+(apothecary) is busy curing the patient, he generally has a white fowl
+tied to a string fastened to a peg in the ground close to him. I have
+described this in <i>Seven Years among the Fjort</i>.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>I think this communication of Mr. Dennett&rsquo;s is of much interest, and I
+hastily beg to remark that, if you have not got a devoted friend to hold
+you down all night, call in an apothecary in the morning time, and then
+hand you over to a Princess&mdash;things that are not always handy even in
+West Africa when you have been stung by a scorpion&mdash;things that, on the
+other hand, are always handy in West Africa&mdash;carbonate of soda applied
+promptly to the affected part will save you from wanting to drown
+yourself and much other inconvenience. The sting should be extracted
+regardless of the shedding of blood, carbonate of soda in hot water
+washed over the place, and then a poultice faced with carbonate of soda
+put on.</p>
+
+<p>Although I do not say these West African doctors possess any specific
+for rheumatism, it is an undoubted fact that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span> the South-west Coast
+tribes, with their poultices and vapour baths, are very successful in
+treating it, more so than the true Negroes, with their clay plaster and
+baking method. Rheumatism is a disease the Africans seem especially
+liable to, whatever may be the local climate, whether it be that of the
+reeking Niger Delta, or the dry delightful climate of Cabinda; moreover,
+my friends who go whaling tell me the Bermuda negroes also suffer from
+rheumatism severely, and are &ldquo;a perfect cuss,&rdquo; wanting to come and sit
+in the blood and blubber of fresh-killed whales. Small-pox is a vile
+scourge to Africa. The common treatment is to smear the body of the
+patient with the pulped leaves of the mzeuzil palm and with palm oil;
+but I cannot say the method is successful, save in preventing pitting,
+which it certainly does. The mortality from this disease, particularly
+among the South-west Coast tribes, is simply appalling. But it is
+extremely difficult to make the bush African realise that it is
+infectious, for he regards it as a curse from a great Nature spirit,
+sent in consequence of some sin, such as a man marrying within the
+restricted degree, or something of that kind. Mr. Dennett mentions
+small-pox patients being sent into the bush with more or less
+accommodation provided. Mr. Du Chaillu gave Mr. Fraser the idea that the
+Bakele tribe habitually drove their small-pox sick into the bush and
+neglected them, which certainly, from my knowledge of the tribe, I must
+say is not their constant habit by any means. I venture to think that
+this rough attempt at isolation among the Fjort is a remnant of the
+influence of the great Portuguese domination of the kingdom of Congo in
+the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, when the Roman
+Catholic missionaries got hold of the Fjort as no other West African has
+since been got hold of. Never<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span>theless the keeping of the sick in huts
+you will find in almost all districts in places&mdash;<i>i.e.</i> round the house
+of a great doctor. My friend Miss Mary Slessor, of Ok˙on, has the bush
+round her compound fairly studded with little temporary huts, each with
+a patient in. You see, distinguished doctors everywhere are a little
+uppish, and so their patients have to come to them. Such doctors are
+usually specialists, noted for a cure of some particular disease, and
+often patients will come to such a man from towns and villages a week&rsquo;s
+journey or more away, and then build their little shantie near his
+residence, and remain there while undergoing the cure.</p>
+
+<p>There is a prevalent Coast notion that white men do not catch small-pox
+from black, but I do not think this is, at any rate, completely true. I
+was informed when in Loanda that during an epidemic of it amongst the
+natives, every white man had had a more or less severe touch, and I have
+known of cases of white men having small-pox in other West Coast places,
+small-pox they must either have caught from natives or have made
+themselves, which is improbable. I fancy it is a matter connected with
+the vaccination state of the white, although there seem to be some
+diseases prevalent among natives from which whites are immune&mdash;the Yaws,
+for example.</p>
+
+<p>Less terrible in its ravages than small-pox, because it is far more
+limited in the number of its victims, is leprosy; still you will always
+find a case or so in a district. You will find the victims outcasts from
+society, not from a sense of its being an infectious disease, but
+because it is confounded with another disease, held to be a curse from
+an aggrieved Nature spirit. There was at Ok˙on when I was there a leper
+who lived in a regular house of his own, not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span> a temporary hospital hut,
+but a house with a plantation. He led a lonely life, having no wife or
+family or slave; he was himself a slave, but not called on for
+service&mdash;it was just a lonely life. People would drop in on him and
+chat, and so on, but he did not live in town. There was also another one
+there, who had his own people round him, and to whom people would send
+their slaves, because he was regarded as a good doctor; but he also had
+his house in the bush, and not in town.</p>
+
+<p>Undoubtedly the diseases that play the greatest continuous havoc with
+black life in West Africa are small-pox, divers forms of pneumonia,
+heart-disease, and tetanus, the latter being largely responsible for the
+terrible mortality among children; but the two West African native
+diseases most interesting to the European on account of their
+strangeness, are the malignant melancholy and the sleep sickness, and
+strangely enough both these diseases seem to have their head centre in
+one region&mdash;the lower Congo. They occur elsewhere, but in this region
+they are constantly present, and now and again seem to take an epidemic
+form. Regarding the first-named, I am still collecting information, for
+I cannot tell whether the malignant melancholy of the lower Congo is one
+and the same with the hystero-hypochondria, the home-sickness of the
+true Negro. In the lower Congo I was informed that this malignant
+melancholy had the native name signifying throwing backwards, from its
+being the habit of the afflicted to throw themselves backwards into
+water when they attempted a drowning form of suicide.<a name="FNanchor_24_25" id="FNanchor_24_25"></a><a href="#Footnote_24_25" class="fnanchor">[24]</a> They do not,
+however, confine themselves to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span> attempts to drown themselves only, but
+are equally given to hanging, the constant thing about all their
+attempts being a lack of enthusiasm about getting the thing definitely
+done: the patient seems to potter at it, not much caring whether he does
+successfully hang or drown himself or no, but just keeps on, as if he
+could not help doing it. This has probably given rise to the native
+method of treating this disease&mdash;namely, holding a meeting of the
+patient&rsquo;s responsible relations, who point out elaborately to him the
+advantages of life over death, and enquire of him his reasons for
+hankering after the latter. If in spite of these representations he
+persists in a course of habitual suicide, he is knocked on the head and
+thrown into the river; for it is a nuisance to have a person about who
+is continually hanging himself to the house ridge pole and pulling the
+roof half off, or requiring a course of sensational rescues from
+drowning.</p>
+
+<p>The sleep disease<a name="FNanchor_25_26" id="FNanchor_25_26"></a><a href="#Footnote_25_26" class="fnanchor">[25]</a> is also a strange thing. When I first arrived in
+Africa in 1893 there had just been a dreadful epidemic of it in the
+Kakongo and lower Congo region, and I saw a good many cases, and became
+much interested in it, and have ever since been trying to gather further
+information regarding it.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Patrick Manson in his important paper<a name="FNanchor_26_27" id="FNanchor_26_27"></a><a href="#Footnote_26_27" class="fnanchor">[26]</a> states that it has never
+been known to affect any one who has not at one time or another been
+resident within this area, and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span>observes on its distribution that &ldquo;it
+seems probable that as our knowledge of Africa extends, this disease
+will be found endemic here and there throughout the basins of the
+Senegal, the Niger, the Congo, and their affluents. We have no
+information of its existence in the districts drained by the Nile and
+the Zambesi, nor anywhere on the eastern side of the continent.&rdquo; As far
+as my own knowledge goes the centres of this disease are the Senegal and
+the Congo. I never saw a case in the Oil Rivers, nor could I hear of
+any, though I made every inquiry; the cases I heard of from Lagos and
+the Oil Rivers were among people who had been down as labourers, &amp;c., to
+the Congo. What is the reason of this I do not know, but certainly the
+people of the lower Congo are much given to all kinds of diseases, far
+more so than those inhabiting the dense forest regions of Congo
+Franįais, or the much-abused mangrove swamps of the Niger Delta.</p>
+
+<p>Dr. Manson says, &ldquo;The sleeping sickness has been attributed to such
+things as sunstroke, beriberi, malaria, poison, peculiar foods, such as
+raw bitter manioc, and diseased grain; it is evident, however, that none
+of these things explains all the facts.&rdquo; In regard to this I may say I
+have often heard it ascribed to the manioc when in Kakongo, the idea
+being that when manioc was soaked in water surcharged with the poisonous
+extract, it had a bad effect. Certainly in Kakongo this was frequently
+the case in many districts where water was comparatively scarce. The
+pools used for soaking the root in stank, and the prepared root stank,
+in the peculiar way it can, something like sour paste, with a dash of
+acetic acid, and thereby the villages stank and the market-places ditto,
+in a way that could be of no use to any one except a person anxious to
+find<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span> his homestead in the dark; but Dr. Manson&rsquo;s suggestion is far more
+likely to be the correct one. Against it I can only urge that in some
+districts where I am informed by my medical friends that <i>Filaria
+perstans</i> is very prevalent, such as Calabar, the Niger, and the Ogowe,
+sleeping sickness is not prevalent. Dr. Manson says &ldquo;the fact that the
+disease can be acquired only in a comparatively limited area, suggests
+that the cause is similarly limited; and the fact that the disease may
+develop years after the endemic area has been quitted, suggests that the
+cause is of such a nature that it may be carried away from the endemic
+area and remain latent, as regards its disease-producing qualities for a
+considerable period; even for years.&rdquo; He then goes on to say, &ldquo;<i>Filaria
+perstans</i>, so far as is known, is limited in its geographical
+distribution to Western Equatorial Africa&mdash;that is to say, it can be
+acquired there only&mdash;and it may continue in active life for many years
+after its human host has left the country in which alone it can be
+acquired. We also know that similar entozoa in their wanderings in the
+tissues by accident of location, or by disease, or injury of their
+organs, not infrequently give rise to grave lesions in their hosts. I
+therefore suggest that possibly <i>Filiaria perstans</i> may in some way be
+responsible for the sleeping sickness. I know that this parasite is
+extremely common in certain sleeping sickness districts, and moreover, I
+have found it in the blood of a considerable number of cases of this
+disease&mdash;in six out of ten&mdash;including that described by Mackenzie. There
+are many difficulties in the way of establishing this hypothesis, but
+there is a sufficient inherent probability about it to make it well
+worth following up.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The most important statement that I have been able to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span> get regarding it
+so far, has been one sent me by Mr. R. E. Dennett; who says &ldquo;The
+sleeping sickness though prevalent throughout Kakongo and Loango is most
+common in the north of Loango and the south of Kakongo, that is north of
+the river Quillou and among the Mussorongo.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;What the cause of the sickness is, it is hard to say, but it is one of
+those scourges which is ever with us. The natives say any one may get
+it, that it is not hereditary, and only infectious in certain stages.
+They avoid the <i>dejecta</i> of affected persons, but they do not force the
+native to live in the bush as they do a person affected by small-pox.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Pains in the head chiefly just above the nose are first experienced,
+and should these continue for a month or so it is to be expected that
+the disease is <i>Madotchila</i>, or the first stage of the sleeping
+sickness.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;In the word <i>Madotchila</i> we have the idea of a state of being poisoned
+or bewitched. At this stage the sickness is curable, but as the sick man
+will never admit that he has the sickness and will suffer excruciating
+pain rather than complain, and as it is criminal to suggest to the
+invalid or others that he is suffering from the dreadful disease, it
+often happens that it gets great hold of the afflicted and from time to
+time he falls down overcome by drowsiness.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Then he swells up and has the appearance of one suffering from dropsy,
+and this stage of the disease is called <i>Malazi</i>, literally meaning
+thousands (<i>Kulazi</i> = one thousand, the verb <i>Koula</i> to become great and
+<i>zi</i> the productive fly.)</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;This appears to be the acute stage of the disease and death often
+occurs within eight days from the beginning of the swelling.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Then comes the stage <i>Ntolotolo</i>, meaning sleep or mock death.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The next stage is called <i>Tchela nxela nbela</i>, that is the knife
+cutting stage, referring to the operation of bleeding as part of the
+cure; and the last stage of the disease is called <i>Nlemba Ngombo</i>.
+<i>Lemba</i> means to cease. The rites of <i>Lemba</i> are those which refer to
+the marriage of a woman who swears to die with her husband or rather to
+cease to live at the same time as he does. <i>Ngombo</i> is the name of the
+native grass cloth in which, before the <i>Nlele</i> or cotton cloth of the
+white man appeared, the dead were wrapped previous to burial. Thus in
+the name <i>Nlemba Ngombo</i> we have the meaning of marriage to the deathly
+winding sheet or shroud.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;I remember how poor Sanda (a favourite servant of Mr. Dennett&rsquo;s, a
+mussorong boy) was taken sick with pains in his head which I at first
+mistook for simple headache. As he was of great service to me I kept him
+in the factory instead of sending him to town (the custom with invalids
+in Kakongo is that they should go to their town to be doctored). I
+purged him and gave him strong and continued doses of quinine and he got
+better; but from time to time he suffered from recurring headache and
+drowsiness, and on one occasion when I was vexed at finding him asleep
+and suspecting him of dissipation, was going to punish him, I was
+informed by another servant that the poor fellow was suffering from the
+sleeping sickness. I at once sent him to town with sufficient goods to
+pay his doctor&rsquo;s bill, and his relations did all in their power to have
+him properly cured, taking him many miles to visit certain Ngangas famed
+for the cure of this fell disease.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;He came back to me well and happy. The next year<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span> however, the malady
+returned, and he went to town and gradually wasted away. They told me
+that sores upon one of his arms had caused him to lose a hand, which he
+lived to see buried before him. Sanda was of royal blood, so his body
+was taken across from the north bank to San Antonio or Sonio, on the
+south bank of the Congo, and there he was buried with his fathers.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Another sad case was that of a woman who lived in the factory.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;As a child, it appeared afterwards, she had suffered from the disease,
+and had been cured by the good French doctor then resident in Landana
+(Dr. Lucan). I knew nothing of this at the time, and put her sickness
+down to drink, but got a doctor to see her. He could not make out what
+was the matter, but thought it might possibly be some nervous disease;
+altogether we were completely puzzled.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;On one occasion during my absence she nearly tortured one of her
+children to death by stabbing her with a needle. On my return, and when
+I heard what she had done, I was very angry with her, and turned her out
+of the factory, and shortly afterwards the poor creature died in the
+swelling state of the disease.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Joaõ (a more or less civilised native) tells me that one of his wives
+was cured of this sleeping sickness. She was living with him in a white
+man&rsquo;s factory when she had it, and on one occasion fell upon a demijohn
+and cut her back open rather seriously&mdash;the white man cured her so far
+as the wound was concerned. A native doctor, a Nganga or Kakamucka,
+later on cured the sleeping sickness. He first gave her an emetic, then
+each day he gave her a kind of Turkish bath; that is, having boiled
+certain herbs in water, he placed her within the boiling decoction under
+a covering<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span> of cloth, making her perspire freely. Towards nightfall he
+poured some medicine up her nostrils and into her eyes, so that in the
+morning when she awoke, her eyes and nose were full of matter; at the
+same time he cupped and bled her in the locality of the pain in the
+head. What the medicines were I cannot say, neither will the Nganga tell
+any one save the man he means shall succeed him in his office.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The native doctors appear to know when the disease has become incurable
+and the life of the patient is merely a question of a few days, for once
+while I was at Chemongoanleo, on the lower Congo I heard the village
+carpenter hammering nails into planks, and asked my servant what they
+were doing. &lsquo;Building Buite&rsquo;s coffin,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;What, is he dead?&rsquo; said
+I. &lsquo;No, but he must die soon,&rsquo; he answered. This statement was confirmed
+by the relations of Buite who came to me for rum as my share towards his
+funeral expenses. Imagine my feelings when shortly after this Buite,
+swollen out of all likeness to his former self, crawled along to the
+shop and asked me for a gallon of rum to help him pay his doctor&rsquo;s bill.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;A doctor of the Congo Free State began to take an interest in the
+sickness and asked me to persuade some one suffering from the disease to
+come and place himself under his care, promising that he would have a
+place apart made for him at the station, so that he could study the
+sickness and try to cure the poor fellow. After a good deal of trouble I
+got him a patient willing to remain with him, but owing to some red tape
+difficulty as to the supply of food for the sick man this doctor&rsquo;s good
+intentions came to nought. A Portuguese doctor here also gave his
+serious attention to the sleeping sickness, and it was reported<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span> that he
+had found a cure for it in some part of a fresh billy-goat. This good
+man wanted a special hospital to be built for him and a subsidy so that
+he might devote himself to the task he had undertaken. His Government,
+however, although its hospitals are far in advance of those of its
+neighbours on the Coast, could not see its way to erect such a place.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>All I need add to this is that I was informed that the disease when it
+had once definitely set in ran its fatal course in a year, but that when
+it came as an epidemic it was more rapidly fatal, sometimes only a
+matter of a few weeks, and it was this more acute form that was
+accompanied by wild delirium. Another native informant told me when it
+was bad it usually lasted only from twenty to forty days.</p>
+
+<p>Monteiro says the sleep disease was unknown south of the Congo until it
+suddenly attacked the town of Musserra, where he was told by the natives
+as many as 200 died of it in a few months. This was in 1870, and curious
+to say it did not spread to the neighbouring towns. Monteiro induced the
+natives to remove from the old town and the mortality decreased till the
+disease died out. &ldquo;There was nothing in the old town to account for this
+sudden singular epidemic. It was beautifully clean and well-built on
+high dry ground, surrounded by mandioca plantations, the last place to
+all appearance to expect such a curious outbreak.&rdquo;<a name="FNanchor_27_28" id="FNanchor_27_28"></a><a href="#Footnote_27_28" class="fnanchor">[27]</a></p>
+
+<p>Monteiro also observes that &ldquo;there is no cure known for it,&rdquo; but he is
+speaking for Angola, and I think this strengthens his statement that it
+is a comparatively recent importation there. For certainly there are
+cures, if not known, at any rate believed in, for the sleeping sickness
+in its own home Kakongo and Loango. There is a great difference in the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span>diseases, flora and fauna, of the north and south banks of the
+Congo&mdash;whether owing to the difficulty of crossing the terrifically
+rapid and powerful stream of the great river I do not know. Still there
+was&mdash;more in former times than now&mdash;much intercourse between the natives
+of the two banks when the Portuguese discovered the Congo in 1487. The
+town called now San Antonio was the throne town of the kingdom of Kongo,
+and had nominally as provinces the two districts Kakongo and Loango,
+these provinces that are now the head centres of the sleep disease. Yet
+in the early accounts given of Kongo by the Catholic missionaries, who
+lived in Kongo among the natives, I have so far found no mention of the
+sleep disease. It is impossible to believe that Merolla, for example,
+could have avoided mentioning it if he had seen or heard of it.
+Merolla&rsquo;s style of giving information was, like my own, diffuse.
+Certainly we must remember that these Catholic missionaries were not
+much in Loango and Kakongo as those provinces had broken almost entirely
+away from the Kongo throne prior to the Portuguese arrival, so perhaps
+all we can safely say is that in the 15-17th centuries there was no
+sleep disease in the districts on the south bank of the Congo, and it
+was not anything like so notoriously bad in the districts on the north
+bank.</p>
+
+<p>Before quitting the apothecary part of this affair, I may just remark
+that if you, being white, of a nervous disposition, and merely in
+possession of an ordinary amount of medical knowledge, find yourself
+called in to doctor an African friend or acquaintance, you must be
+careful about hot poultices. I should say, <i>never</i> prescribe hot
+poultices. An esteemed medical friend, since dead, told me<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span> that when he
+first commenced practice in West Africa he said to a civilised native
+who was looking after his brother&mdash;the patient&mdash;&ldquo;Give him a linseed
+poultice made like this&rdquo;&mdash;demonstration&mdash;&ldquo;and mind he has it hot.&rdquo; The
+man came back shortly afterwards to say his brother had been very sick,
+but was no better, though every bit of the stuff had been swallowed so
+hot it had burnt his mouth. But swallowing the poultice is a minor
+danger to its exhibition. Even if you yourself see it put on outside,
+carefully, exactly where that poultice ought to be, the moment your back
+is turned the patient feeling hot gets into the most awful draught he
+can find, or into cold water, and the consequences are inflammation of
+the lungs and death, and you get the credit of it. The natives
+themselves you will find are very clever at doctoring in their own way,
+by no means entirely depending on magic and spells; and you will also
+find they have a strong predilection for blisters, cupping and bleeding,
+hot water and emetics; in all their ailments and on the whole it suits
+them very well. Therefore I pray you add your medical knowledge and your
+special drugs to theirs and for outside applications stick to blisters
+in place of hot poultices.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_24_25" id="Footnote_24_25"></a><a href="#FNanchor_24_25"><span class="label">[24]</span></a> An experienced medical man from West Africa informs me
+that he considers the Africans very liable to hysterical disease, and he
+attributes the throwing backwards to the patient&rsquo;s desire not to spoil
+his or her face, a thing ladies are especially careful of, and says that
+turning a lady face downwards on the sand is as efficacious in breaking
+up the hysterical fit as throwing water over their clothes is with us.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_25_26" id="Footnote_25_26"></a><a href="#FNanchor_25_26"><span class="label">[25]</span></a> Negro lethargy; Maladie du sommeil; Enfermedad del sueno;
+Nelavane (Oulof); Dadane (Sereres); Toruahebue (Mendi); Ntolo (Fjort).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_26_27" id="Footnote_26_27"></a><a href="#FNanchor_26_27"><span class="label">[26]</span></a> <i>System of Medicine.</i> Volume II. Edited by Dr. Clifford
+Allbutt. Macmillan &amp; Co., 1897.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_27_28" id="Footnote_27_28"></a><a href="#FNanchor_27_28"><span class="label">[27]</span></a> <i>Angola and the River Congo.</i> Macmillan. Vol. i., p. 144.</p></div>
+</div>
+<hr class="chap" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IX" id="CHAPTER_IX"></a>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+
+<h2>THE WITCH DOCTOR</h2>
+
+<p class="pblock">African Medicine mainly from the point of view of the Witch Doctor.</p>
+
+<p>We will now leave the village apothecary and his methods, and turn to
+the witch doctor, the consulting physician. He of course knows all about
+the therapeutic action of low-grade spirits, such as dwell in herbs and
+so on; but he knows more&mdash;namely the actions of higher spirits on the
+human soul, and the disorders of the human soul into the bargain.</p>
+
+<p>The dogma that rules his practice is that in all cases of disease in
+which no blood is showing, the patient is suffering from something wrong
+in the soul. In order to lay this dogma fairly before you, I should here
+discourse on the nature of spirits unallied to the human soul&mdash;non-human
+spirits&mdash;and the nature of the human spirit itself; but as on the one
+hand, I cannot be hasty on such an important group of subjects, and, on
+the other, I cannot expect you to be anything else in such a matter, I
+forbear, and merely beg to remark that the African does not believe in
+anything being soulless, he regards even matter itself as a form of
+soul, low, because not lively, a thing other spirit forms use as they
+please&mdash;practically as the cloth of the spirit that uses it. This
+conception is, as far as I know, constant in both Negro and Bantu. I
+will therefore here<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span> deal only with what the African regards as merely
+one class of spirits&mdash;an important class truly, but above it there are
+at least two more important classes, while beneath it in grade there
+are, I think, about eleven, and equal to it, but differing in nature,
+several classes&mdash;I don&rsquo;t exactly know how many. This class of spirits is
+the human soul&mdash;the <i>Kla</i> of the true Negro, the <i>Manu</i> of the Bantu.
+These human souls are also of different grades, for one sort is believed
+to be existent before birth, as well as during life and after death,
+while other classes are not. There is more interesting stuff here, but I
+am determined to stick to my main point now&mdash;the medical. Well, the
+number of souls possessed by each individual we call a human being is
+usually held to be four&mdash;(1) the soul that survives, (2) the soul that
+lives in an animal away wild in the bush, (3) the shadow cast by the
+body, (4) the soul that acts in dreams. I believe that the more profound
+black thinkers hold that these last-named souls are only functions of
+the true soul, but from the witch doctor&rsquo;s point of view there are four,
+and he acts on this opinion when doctoring the diseases that afflict
+these souls of a man.</p>
+
+<p>The dream-soul is the cause of woes unnumbered to our African friend,
+and the thing that most frequently converts him into that desirable
+state, from a witch doctor&rsquo;s point of view of a patient. It is this way.
+The dream-soul is, to put it very mildly, a silly flighty thing. Off it
+goes when its owner is taking a nap, and gets so taken up with
+sky-larking, fighting, or gossiping with other dream-souls that
+sometimes it does not come home to its owner when he is waking up. So,
+if any one has to wake a man up great care must always be taken that it
+is done softly&mdash;softly, namely gradually and quietly, so as to give the
+dream-soul<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span> time to come home. For if either of the four souls of a man
+have their intercommunication broken, the human being possessing them
+gets very ill. We will take an example. A man has been suddenly roused
+by some cause or other before that dream-soul has had time to get into
+quarters. That human being feels very ill, and sends for the Witch
+Doctor. The medical man diagnoses the case as one of absence of
+dream-soul, instantly claps a cloth over the mouth and nose, and gets
+his assistant to hold it there until the patient gets hard on
+suffocated; but no matter, it&rsquo;s the proper course of treatment to
+pursue. The witch doctor himself gets ready as rapidly as possible
+another dream-soul, which if he is a careful medical man, he has brought
+with him in a basket. Then the patient is laid on his back and the
+cloths removed from the mouth and nose, and the witch doctor holds over
+them his hands containing the fresh soul, blowing hard at it so as to
+get it well into the patient. If this is successfully accomplished, the
+patient recovers. Occasionally, however, this fresh soul slips through
+the medical man&rsquo;s fingers, and before you can say &ldquo;Knife&rdquo; is on top of
+some 100-feet-high or more silk cotton tree, where it chirrups gaily and
+distinctly. This is a great nuisance. The patient has to be promptly
+covered up again. If the doctor has an assistant with him, that
+unfortunate individual has to go up the tree and catch the dream-soul.
+If he has no assistant, he has to send his power up the tree after the
+truant; doctors who are in full practice have generally passed the time
+of life when climbing up trees personally is agreeable. When, however,
+the thing has been re-captured and a second attempt to insert it is
+about to be made, it is held advisable to get the patient&rsquo;s friends and
+relatives to stand round him in a ring and howl lustily, while your
+assistant also howling<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span> lustily, but in a professional manner, beats a
+drum. This prevents the soul from bolting again, and tends to frighten
+it into the patient.</p>
+
+<p>In some obstinate cases of loss of dream-soul, however, the most
+experienced medical man will fail to get the fresh soul inserted. It
+clings to his fingers, it whisks back into the basket or into his hair
+or clothes, and it chirrups dismally, and the patient becomes convulsed.
+This is a grave symptom, but the diagnosis is quite clear. The patient
+has got a <i>sisa</i> in him, so there is no room for the fresh soul.</p>
+
+<p>Now, a <i>sisa</i> is a dreadful bad thing for a man to have in him, and an
+expensive thing to get out. It is the surviving soul of a person who has
+not been properly buried&mdash;not had his devil made, in fact. And as every
+human surviving soul has a certain allotted time of existence in a human
+body before it can learn the dark and difficult way down to Srahmandazi,
+if by mischance the body gets killed off before the time is up, that
+soul, unless properly buried and sent on the way to Srahmandazi, or any
+other Hades, under expert instruction given as to the path for the dead,
+becomes a <i>sisa</i>, and has to hang about for the remaining years of its
+term of bodily life.</p>
+
+<p>These <i>ensisa</i> are held to be so wretchedly uncomfortable in this state
+that their tempers become perfect wrecks, and they grow utterly
+malignant, continually trying to get into a human body, so as to finish
+their term more comfortably. Now, a <i>sisa&rsquo;s</i> chief chance of getting
+into a body is in whipping in when there is a hole in a man&rsquo;s soul
+chamber, from the absence of his own dream-soul. If a <i>sisa</i> were a
+quiet, respectable soul that would settle down, it would not matter
+much, for the dream-soul it supplants is not of much account. But a
+<i>sisa</i> is not.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span> At the best, it would only live out its remaining term,
+and then go off the moment that term was up, and most likely kill the
+souls it had been sheltering with by bolting at an inconvenient moment.
+This was the verdict given on the death of a man I knew who, from what
+you would call faintness, fell down in a swamp and was suffocated.
+Inconvenient as this is, the far greater danger you are exposed to by
+having a <i>sisa</i> in you lies in the chances being 10 to 1 that it is
+stained with blood, for, without being hard on these unfortunate
+unburied souls, I may remark that respectable souls usually get
+respectably buried, and so don&rsquo;t become <i>ensisa</i>. This blood which is
+upon it the devils that are around smell and go for, as is the nature of
+devils; and these devils whip in after the <i>sisa</i> soul into his host in
+squads, and the man with such a set inside him is naturally very
+ill&mdash;convulsions, delirium, high temperature, &amp;c., and the indications
+to your true witch doctor are that that <i>sisa</i> must be extracted before
+a new dream-soul can be inserted and the man recover.</p>
+
+<p>But getting out a <i>sisa</i> is a most trying operation. Not only does it
+necessitate a witch doctor sending in his power to fetch it <i>vi et
+armis</i>, it also places the medical man in a position of grave
+responsibility regarding its disposal when secured. The methods he
+employs to meet this may be regarded as akin to those of antiseptic
+surgery. All the people in the village, particularly babies and old
+people&mdash;people whose souls are delicate&mdash;must be kept awake during the
+operation, and have a piece of cloth over the nose and mouth, and every
+one must howl so as to scare the <i>sisa</i> off them, if by mischance it
+should escape from the witch doctor. An efficient practitioner, I may
+remark, thinks it a great disgrace to allow a <i>sisa</i> to escape from him;
+and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span> such an accident would be a grave blow to his practice, for people
+would not care to call in a man who was liable to have this occur.
+However, our present medical man having got the <i>sisa</i> out, he has still
+to deal with the question of its disposal before he can do anything
+more. The assistant blows a new dream soul into the patient, and his
+women see to him; but the witch doctor just holds on to the <i>sisa</i> like
+a bulldog.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes the disposal of the <i>sisa</i> has been decided on prior to its
+extraction. If the patient&rsquo;s family are sufficiently well off, they
+agree to pay the doctor enough to enable him to teach the <i>sisa</i> the way
+to Hades. Indeed, this is the course respectable medical men always
+insist on although it is expensive to the patient&rsquo;s family. But there
+are, I regret to say, a good many unprincipled witch doctors about who
+will undertake a case cheap.</p>
+
+<p>They will carry off with them the extracted <i>sisa</i> for a small fee, then
+shortly afterwards a baby in the village goes off in tetanic
+convulsions. No one takes much notice of that, because it&rsquo;s a way babies
+have. Soon another baby is born in the same family&mdash;polygamy being
+prevalent, the event may occur after a short interval&mdash;well, after
+giving the usual anxiety and expense, that baby goes off in convulsions.
+Suspicion is aroused. Presently yet another baby appears in the family,
+keeps all right for a week may be, and then also goes off in
+convulsions. Suspicions are confirmed. The worm&mdash;the father, I
+mean&mdash;turns, and he takes the body of that third baby and smashes one of
+its leg bones before it is thrown away into the bush; for he knows he
+has got a wanderer soul&mdash;namely, a <i>sisa</i>, which some unprincipled
+practitioner has sent into his family. He just breaks the leg so as to
+warn the soul he is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span> not a man to be trifled with, and will not have his
+family kept in a state of perpetual uproar and expense. It sometimes
+happens, however, in spite of this that, when his fourth baby arrives,
+that too goes off in convulsions. Thoroughly roused now, paterfamilias
+sternly takes a chopper and chops that infant&rsquo;s remains up extremely
+small, and it is scattered broadcast. Then he holds he has eliminated
+that <i>sisa</i> from his family finally.</p>
+
+<p>I am informed, however, that the fourth baby to arrive in a family
+afflicted by a <i>sisa</i> does not usually go off in convulsions, but that
+fairly frequently it is born lame, which shows that it is that wanderer
+soul back with its damaged leg. It is not treated unkindly but not taken
+much care of, and so rarely lives many years&mdash;from the fetish point of
+view, of course, only those years remaining of its term of bodily life
+out of which some witchcraft of man or some vengeance of a god cheated
+it.</p>
+
+<p>If I mention the facts that when a man wakes up in the morning feeling
+very stiff and with &ldquo;that tired feeling&rdquo; you see mentioned in
+advertisements in the newspapers, he holds that it arises from his own
+dream-soul having been out fighting and got itself bruised; and that if
+he wakes up in a fright, he will jump up and fire off his gun, holding
+that a pack of rag tag devils have been chasing his soul home and
+wishing to scare them off, I think I may leave the complaints of the
+dream-soul connected with physic and pass on to those connected with
+surgery.</p>
+
+<p>Now, devoted as I am to my West African friends, I am bound in the
+interests of Truth to say that many of them are sadly unprincipled.
+There are many witches, not witch doctors, remember, who make it a
+constant practice to set traps for dream-souls. Witches you will find
+from<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span> Sierra Leone to Cameroons, but they are extra prevalent on the
+Gold Coast and in Calabar.</p>
+
+<p>These traps are usually pots containing something attractive to the
+soul, and in this bait are concealed knives or fish-hooks&mdash;fish-hooks
+when the witch wants to catch the soul to keep, knives when the desire
+is just to injure it.</p>
+
+<p>In the case of the lacerated dream-soul, when it returns to its owner,
+it makes him feel very unwell; but the symptoms are quite different from
+those arising from loss of dream-soul or from a <i>sisa</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The reason for catching dream-souls with hooks is usually a low
+mercenary one. You see, many patients insist on having their own
+dream-soul put back into them&mdash;they don&rsquo;t want a substitute from the
+doctor&rsquo;s store&mdash;so of course the soul has to be bought from the witch
+who has got it. Sometimes, however, the witch is the hireling of some
+one intent on injuring a particular person and keen on capturing the
+soul for this purpose, though too frightened to kill his enemy outright.
+So the soul is not only caught and kept, but tortured, hung up over the
+canoe fire and so on, and thus, even if the patient has another
+dream-soul put in, so long as his original soul is in the hands of a
+torturer, he is uncomfortable.</p>
+
+<p>On one occasion, for example, I heard one of the Kru boys who were with
+me making more row in his sleep, more resounding slaps and snores and
+grunts than even a normal Kru boy does, and, resolving in my mind that
+what that young man really required was one of my pet pills, I went to
+see him. I found him asleep under a thick blanket and with a
+handkerchief tied over his face. It was a hot night, and the man and his
+blanket were as wet with sweat as if they had been dragged through a
+river. I suggested<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span> to head-man that the handkerchief muzzle should come
+off, and was informed by him that for several nights previously the man
+had dreamt of that savoury dish, crawfish seasoned with red pepper. He
+had become anxious, and consulted the head-man, who decided that
+undoubtedly some witch was setting a trap for his dream-soul with this
+bait, with intent, &amp;c. Care was now being taken to, as it were, keep the
+dream-soul at home. I of course did not interfere and the patient
+completely recovered.</p>
+
+<p>We will now pass on to diseases arising from disorders in the other
+three souls of a man. The immortal or surviving soul is liable to a
+disease that its body suffered from during its previous time on earth,
+born again with it. Such diseases are quite incurable, and I only
+personally know of them in the Calabar and Niger Delta, where
+reincarnation is strongly believed in.</p>
+
+<p>Then come the diseases that arise from injury to the shadow-soul. It
+strikes one as strange at first to see men who have been walking, say,
+through forest or grass land on a blazing hot morning quite happily, on
+arrival at a piece of clear ground or a village square, most carefully
+go round it, not across, and you will soon notice that they only do this
+at noontime, and learn that they fear losing their shadow. I asked some
+Bakwiri I once came across who were particularly careful in this matter
+why they were not anxious about losing their shadows when night came
+down and they disappeared in the surrounding darkness, and was told that
+that was all right, because at night all shadows lay down in the shadow
+of the Great God, and so got stronger. Had I not seen how strong and
+long a shadow, be it of man or tree or of the great mountain itself, was
+in the early morning time? Ah me! I said, the proverb<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span> is true that says
+the turtle can teach the spider. I never thought of that.</p>
+
+<p>Murders are sometimes committed by secretly driving a nail or knife into
+a man&rsquo;s shadow, and so on; but if the murderer be caught red-handed at
+it, he or she would be forthwith killed, for all diseases arising from
+the shadow-soul are incurable. No man&rsquo;s shadow is like that of his own
+brother, says the proverb.</p>
+
+<p>Now we come to that very grave class of diseases which arise from
+disorders of the bush-soul. These diseases are not all incurable,
+nevertheless they are very intractable and expensive to cure. This
+bush-soul is, as I have said, resident in some wild animal in the
+forest. It may be in only an earth pig, or it may be in a leopard, and,
+quite providentially for the medical profession no layman can see his
+own soul&mdash;it is not as if it were connected with all earth pigs, or all
+leopards, as the case may be, but it is in one particular earth pig or
+leopard or other animal&mdash;so recourse must be had to medical aid when
+anything goes wrong with it. It is usually in the temper that the
+bush-soul suffers. It is liable to get a sort of aggrieved neglected
+feeling, and want things given it. When you wander about the wild gloomy
+forests of the Calabar region, you will now and again come across, far
+away from all human habitation or plantation, tiny huts, under whose
+shelter lies some offering or its remains. Those are offerings
+administered by direction of a witch doctor to appease a bush-soul. For
+not only can a witch doctor see what particular animal a man&rsquo;s bush-soul
+is in, but he can also see whereabouts in the forest that animal is.
+Still, these bush-souls are not easily appeased. The worst of it is that
+a man may be himself a quiet steady man, careful of his diet<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span> and
+devoted to a whole skin, and yet his bush-soul be a reckless blade,
+scorning danger, and thereby getting itself shot by some hunter or
+killed in a trap or pit; and if his bush-soul dies, the man it is
+connected with dies. Therefore if the hunter who has killed it can be
+found out&mdash;a thing a witch doctor cannot do unless he happens by chance
+to have had his professional eye on that bush-soul at the time of the
+catastrophe; because, as it were, at death the bush-soul ceases to
+exist&mdash;that hunter has to pay compensation to the family of the
+deceased. On the other hand, if the man belonging to the bush-soul dies,
+the bush-soul animal has to die too. It rushes to and fro in the
+forest&mdash;&ldquo;can no longer find a good place.&rdquo; If it sees a fire, it rushes
+into that; if it sees a lot of hunters, it rushes among them&mdash;anyhow, it
+gets itself killed off.</p>
+
+<p>We will now turn our attention to that other great division of
+diseases&mdash;namely such as are caused only and directly by human agency.
+Those I have already detained you too long over are caused by spirits
+acting on their own account, for even in the case of the trapped
+dream-souls they are held themselves to have shown contributory
+negligence in getting hooked or cut in traps.</p>
+
+<p>The others arise from what is called witchcraft. You will often hear it
+said that the general idea among savage races is that death always
+arises from witchcraft; but I think, from what I have said regarding
+diseases arising from bush-souls&rsquo; bad tempers, from contracting a
+<i>sisa</i>, from losing the shadow at high noon, and from, it may be, other
+causes I have not spoken of, that this generalisation is for West Africa
+too sweeping. But undoubtedly sixty per cent of the deaths are believed
+to arise from witchcraft. I would put the percentage higher, were it not
+for the terrible<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span> mortality from tetanus among children, which sometimes
+is and sometimes is not put down to witchcraft, and the mortality from
+smallpox and the sleep disease down south in Loango and Kakongo, those
+diseases not being in any case that I have had personal acquaintance
+with imputed to witchcraft at all. Indeed I venture to think that any
+disease that takes an epidemic form is regarded as a scourge sent by
+some great outraged Nature spirit, not a mere human dabbler in devils. I
+have dealt with witchcraft itself elsewhere, therefore now I only speak
+regarding it medically; and I think, roughly speaking, not absolutely,
+mind you, that the witching something <i>out</i> of a man is the most common
+iniquity of witchcraft from Cape Juby to Cameroons, the region of the
+true Negro stock; while from Cameroons to Benguella&mdash;the limit of my
+knowledge to the south on the western side of the continent&mdash;the most
+common iniquity of witchcraft is witching something into him. As in the
+diseases arising from the loss of the dream-soul I have briefly dealt
+with the witching something out, I now turn to the witching something
+in.</p>
+
+<p>I well remember, in 1893, being then new to and easily alarmed by the
+West Coast, going into a village in Kakongo one afternoon and seeing
+several unpleasant-looking objects stuck on poles. Investigation showed
+they were the lungs, livers, or spleens of human beings; and local
+information stated that they were the powers of witches&mdash;witches that
+had been killed and, on examination, found to have inside them these
+things, dangerous to the state and society at large. Wherefrom it was
+the custom to stick up on poles these things as warnings to the general
+public not to harbour in their individual interiors things to use
+against their fellow-creatures. They mutely but firmly said, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span>&ldquo;See! if
+you turn witch, your inside will be stuck on a pole.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>I may remark that in many districts of the South-West coast and middle
+Congo it is customary when a person dies in an unexplainable way, namely
+without shedding blood, to hold a post-mortem. In some cases the
+post-mortem discloses the path of the witch through the victim&mdash;usually,
+I am informed, the injected witch feeds on the victim&rsquo;s lungs&mdash;in other
+cases the post-mortem discloses the witch power itself, demonstrating
+that the deceased was a keeper of witch power, or, as we should say, a
+witch.</p>
+
+<p>Once when I was at Batanga a woman dropped down on the beach and died.
+The usual post-mortem was held, and local feeling ran high. &ldquo;She no
+complain, she no say nothing, and then she go die one time.&rdquo; The
+post-mortem disclosed what I think you would term a ruptured aneurism of
+the aorta, but the local verdict was &ldquo;she done witch herself&rdquo;&mdash;namely
+that she was a witch, who had been eaten by her own power, therefore
+there were great rejoicings over her death.</p>
+
+<p>This dire catastrophe is, however, liable to overtake legitimate medical
+men. All reasonable people in every clime allow a certain latitude to
+doctors. They are supposed to know things other people need not, and to
+do things, like dissections and such, that other people should not, and
+no one thinks any the worse of them. This is the case with the African
+physician, whom we roughly call the witch doctor, but whose full title
+is the combatant of the evils worked by witches and devils on human
+souls and human property. This medical man has, from the exigencies of
+his profession, to keep in his own inside a power, and a good strong one
+at that, which he can employ in his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span> practice by sending it into
+patients to fetch out other witch powers, <i>sisas</i>, or any miscellaneous
+kind of devil that may have got into them. His position is totally
+different from that of the layman. He is known to possess a witch power,
+and the knowledge of how to employ it; but instead of this making him an
+object of aversion to his fellow-men, it secures for him esteem and
+honour, and the more terrifically powerful his power is known to be, the
+more respect he gains; for suppose you were taken ill by a real bad
+devil, you would prefer a medical man whose power was at least up to
+that devil&rsquo;s fighting weight.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless his having to keep the dangerous devil in his own inside
+exposes the witch doctor to grave personal danger, for if, from a
+particularly healthy season, or some notorious quack coming into his
+district, his practice falls off, and his power is thereby not kept fed,
+that unfortunate man is liable to be attacked by it. This was given me
+as the cause of the death of a great doctor in the Chiloango district,
+and I heard the same thing from the Ncomi district, so it is clear that
+many eminent men are cut off in the midst of their professional career
+in this way.</p>
+
+<p>As for what this power is like in its corporal form, I can only say that
+it is evidently various. One witch doctor I know just to the north of
+Loango always made it a practice to give his patients a brisk emetic as
+soon as he was called in, and he always found young crocodiles in the
+consequences. I remember seeing him in one case secure six lively young
+crocodiles that had apparently been very recently hatched. These were
+witch powers. Again, I was informed of a witch who was killed near the
+Bungo River having had found inside him a thing like a lizard, but with
+wings like a bat. The most peculiar form of witch power I have heard of
+as being<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span> found inside a patient was on the Ogowe from two native
+friends, both of them very intelligent, reliable men, one of them a
+Bible reader. They said that about two years previously a relation of
+theirs had been badly witched. A doctor had been called in, who
+administered an emetic, and there appeared upon the scene a strange
+little animal that grew with visible rapidity. An hour after its coming
+to light it crawled and got out of the basin, and finally it flew away.
+It had bat&rsquo;s wings and a body and tail like a lizard. This catawampus,
+my informant held, had been witched into the man when it was &ldquo;small,
+small&rdquo;&mdash;namely, very small. It might, they thought, have been given to
+their relation in some food or drink by an enemy, but for sure, if it
+had not been disturbed by that emetic, it would have grown up inside the
+man and have eaten its way out through his vitals.</p>
+
+<p>From the whole of the above statements I think I have shown you that if
+as a witch doctor you are called in to a patient who is ill, but who is
+not showing blood anywhere, your diagnosis will be that he has got some
+sort or another of devil the matter with him, and that the first
+indication is to find out who put that devil in, because, in the
+majority of cases, until you know this you can&rsquo;t get it out; the second
+is to get it out; the third is to prevent its getting adrift, and into
+some one else.</p>
+
+<p>I have only briefly sketched the ideas and methods of witch doctors in
+West Africa, in so far as treatment is concerned. The infinite variety
+of methods employed in detecting who has been the witch in a given case;
+the infinite variety of incantations and so on, I have no space to dwell
+on here, and will conclude by giving you a general sketch of the career
+of a witch doctor.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>We will start with the medical student stage. Now, every West African
+tribe has a secret society&mdash;two, in fact, one for men and one for women.
+Every free man has to pass through the secret society of his tribe. If
+during this education the Elders of this society discover that a boy is
+what is called in Calabar an <i>ebumtup</i>&mdash;a person who can see
+spirits&mdash;the elders of the society advise that he should be brought up
+to the medical profession. Their advice is generally taken, and the boy
+is apprenticed as it were to a witch doctor, who requires a good fee
+with him. This done, he proceeds with his studies, learns the difference
+between the dream-soul basket and the one <i>sisas</i> are kept in&mdash;a mistake
+between the two would be on a par with mistaking oxalic acid for Epsom
+salts. He is then taught how to howl in a professional way, and, by
+watching his professor, picks up his bedside manner. If he can acquire a
+showy way of having imitation epileptic fits, so much the better. In
+fact, as a medical student, you have to learn pretty well as much there
+as here. You must know the dispositions, the financial position, little
+scandals, &amp;c., of the inhabitants of the whole district, for these
+things are of undoubted use in divination and the finding of witches,
+and in addition you must be able skilfully to dispense charms, and know
+what babies say before their own mothers can. Then some day your
+professor and instructor dies, his own professional power eats him, or
+he tackles a disease-causing spirit that is one too many for him, and on
+you descend his paraphernalia and his practice.</p>
+
+<p>It is usual for a witch doctor to acquire for his power a member of one
+of the higher grade spirit classes&mdash;he does not acquire a human
+soul&mdash;and his successor usually, I think, takes the same spirit, or, at
+any rate, a member of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span> same class. This does not altogether limit
+you as a successor to a certain line of practice, but, as no one spirit
+can do all things, it tends to make you a specialist. I know a district
+where, if any one wanted a canoe charm, they went to one medical man; if
+a charm to keep thieves off their plantation, to another.</p>
+
+<p>This brings us to the practice itself, and it may be divided into two
+divisions. First, prophylactic methods, namely, making charms to protect
+your patient&rsquo;s wives, children, goats, plantations, canoes, &amp;c. from
+damage, houses from fire, &amp;c., &amp;c., and to protect the patient himself
+from wild animals and all danger by land or water. This is a very paying
+part, but full of anxiety. For example, put yourself in the place of a
+Mpangwe medical friend of mine. You have with much trouble got a really
+valuable spirit to come into a paste made of blood and divers things,
+and having made it into a sausage form, and done it round with fibre
+wonderfully neatly, you have painted it red outside to please the
+spirits&mdash;because spirits like red, they think it&rsquo;s blood. Well, in a
+week or so the man you administered it to comes back and says &ldquo;that
+thing&rsquo;s no good.&rdquo; His paddle has broken more often than before he had
+the thing. The amount of rocks, and floating trees, to say nothing of
+snags, is, he should say, about double the normal, whereby he has lost a
+whole canoe load of European goods, and, in short, he doesn&rsquo;t think much
+of you as a charm maker. Then he expectorates and sulks offensively. You
+take the charm, and tell him it was a perfectly good one when you gave
+it him, and you never had any complaints before, but you will see what
+has gone wrong with it. Investigation shows you that the spirit is
+either dead or absent. In the first case it has been killed by a
+stronger spirit of its own class; in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span> the second, lured away by bribery.
+Now this clearly points to your patient&rsquo;s having a dangerous and
+powerful enemy, and you point it out to him and advise him to have a
+fresh and more powerful charm&mdash;necessarily more expensive&mdash;with as
+little delay as possible. He grumbles, but, realising the danger, pays
+up, and you make him another. The old one can be thrown away, like an
+empty pill-box.</p>
+
+<p>The other part of your practice&mdash;the clinical&mdash;consists in combating
+those witches who are always up to something&mdash;sucking blood of young
+children, putting fearful wild fowl into people to eat up their most
+valued viscera, or stealing souls o&rsquo; nights, blighting crops, &amp;c.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore you see the witch doctor&rsquo;s life is not an idle one; he has not
+merely to humbug the public and pocket the fees&mdash;or I should say &ldquo;bag,&rdquo;
+pockets being rare in this region&mdash;but he works very hard, and has his
+anxieties just like a white medical man. The souls that get away from
+him are a great worry. The death of every patient is a danger to a
+certain extent, because the patient&rsquo;s soul will be vicious to him until
+it is buried. But I must say I profoundly admire our West African witch
+doctors for their theory of <i>sisas</i> as an explanation of their not
+always being able to insert a new soul into a patient, for by this
+theory they save themselves somewhat, and do not entail on themselves
+the treatment their brother medicos have to go through on the Nass River
+in British Columbia. According to Mr. Fraser, in that benighted Nass
+River district those native American doctors hold it possible that a
+doctor may swallow a patient&rsquo;s soul by mistake. This is their theory to
+account for the strange phenomenon of a patient getting worse instead of
+better when a doctor has been called in, and so the unfortunate doctor
+who has had this accident<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span> occur is made to stand over his patient while
+another medical man thrusts his fingers in his throat, another kneads
+him in the abdomen, and a third medical brother slaps him on the back.
+All the doctors present have to go through the same ordeal, and if the
+missing soul does not turn up, the party of doctors go to the head
+doctor&rsquo;s house to see if by chance he has got it in his box. All the
+things are taken out of the box, and if the soul is not there, the head
+doctor, the President of the College of Physicians, the Sir Somebody
+Something of the district, is held by his heels with his learned head in
+a hole in the floor, while the other doctors wash his hair. The water
+used is then taken and poured over the patient&rsquo;s head.</p>
+
+<p>I told this story to all the African witch doctors I knew. I fear, that
+being hazy in geography, they think it is the practice of the English
+medical profession; but, anyhow every one of them regarded the doctors
+of the Nass River as a set of superstitious savages, and imbeciles at
+that. Of course a medical man had to see to souls, but to go about in
+squads, administer rough emetics to themselves, instead of to the
+patients, and as for that head washing&mdash;well, people can be fool too
+much! None of them showed the slightest signs of adopting the British
+Columbia method, none of them showed even any signs of adopting my
+suggestion that they should go and teach those benighted brothers of
+theirs the theory of <i>insisa</i>.</p>
+
+<p>If you ask me frankly whether I think these African witch doctors
+believe in themselves, I think I must say, Yes; or perhaps it would be
+safer to say they believe in the theory they work by, for of that there
+can be very little doubt. I do not fancy they ever claim invincible
+power over disease;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span> they do their best according to their lights. It
+would be difficult to see why they should doubt their own methods,
+because, remember, all their patients do not die; the majority recover.
+I am not putting this recovery down to their soul-treatment method, but
+to the village apothecary, who has usually been doctoring the patient
+with drugs before the so-called witch doctor is called in. Of course the
+apothecary does not get the credit of the cure in this case, but I fancy
+he deserves it. Another point to be remembered is that the Africans on
+the West Coast, at any rate, are far more liable than white men to many
+strange nervous disorders, especially to delirium, which often occurs in
+a comparatively slight illness. Why I do not pretend to understand; but
+I think in these nervous cases the bedside manners of a witch
+doctor&mdash;though strongly resembling that of the physician who attended
+the immortal Why Why&rsquo;s mother&mdash;may yet be really useful.</p>
+
+<p>As to the evil these witch doctors do in the matter of getting people
+killed for bewitching it is difficult to speak justly. I fancy that, on
+the whole, they do more good than harm, for remember witchcraft in these
+districts is no parlour game; in the eyes of Allah as well as man it is
+murder, for most of it is poison. Most witchcraft charms I know of among
+people who have not been in contact with Mohammedanism have always had
+that element of mixing something with the food or drink&mdash;even in that
+common, true Negro form of killing by witchcraft, putting medicine in
+the path, there is a poisoned spike as well as charm stuff. There can be
+no doubt that the witch doctor&rsquo;s methods of finding out who has poisoned
+a person are effective, and that the knowledge in the public mind of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span>
+this detective power keeps down poisoning to a great extent. Of the
+safeguards against unjust accusation I will speak when treating of law.</p>
+
+<p>As to their using hypnotism, I suppose they do use something of the sort
+at times. West Indians, with whom I was always anxious to talk on the
+differences and agreements between Vodou and Obeah and their parent West
+African religion, certainly, in their description of what they called
+Wanga&mdash;and translated as Glamour&mdash;seemed to point to this; but for
+myself, save in the case of blood coming before, one case of which I
+witnessed, I have seen nothing beyond an enormously elaborated common
+sense. I dare not call it sound, because it is based on and developed
+out of animism, and of that and our white elaborated view I am not the
+judge, remembering you go the one way, I the other&mdash;which is the best,
+God knows.</p><hr class="chap" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_X" id="CHAPTER_X"></a>CHAPTER X</h2>
+
+<h2>EARLY TRADE IN WEST AFRICA</h2>
+
+<p class="pblock">Concerning the accounts given by classic writers of West Africa,
+and of the method of barter called the Silent Trade.</p>
+
+<p>It is a generally received opinion that there are too many books in the
+world already. I cannot, however, subscribe to any Institution that
+proposes to alter this state of affairs, because I find no consensus of
+opinion as to which are the superfluous books; I have my own opinion on
+the point, but I feel I had better keep it to myself, for I find the
+very books I dislike&mdash;almost invariably in one-volume form, as this one
+is, though of a more connected nature than this is likely to be&mdash;are the
+well-beloved of thousands of my fellow human beings; and so I will
+restrict my enthusiasms in the matter of books to the cause of
+attempting to incite writers to give us more. If any one wants
+personally to oblige me he will forthwith write a masterly history of
+the inter-relationships&mdash;religious, commercial, and cultural&mdash;of the
+other races of the earth with the African, and he can put in as an
+appendix a sketch of the war conquest of Africa by the white races. I do
+not ask for a separate volume on this, because there will be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span> so many on
+the others; moreover, it is such a kaleidoscopic affair, and its
+influence alike on both European, Asiatic, and African seems to me
+neither great nor good.</p>
+
+<p>For the past fifteen years I have been reading up Africa; and the effect
+of the study of this literature may best be summarised in Mr. Kipling&rsquo;s
+observation, &ldquo;For to admire an&rsquo; for to see, For to be&rsquo;old this world so
+wide, It&rsquo;s never been no good to me, But I can&rsquo;t drop it if I tried.&rdquo;
+Wherein it has failed to be of good, I hastily remark, is that after all
+this fifteen years&rsquo; reading, I found I had to go down into the most
+unfashionable part of Africa myself, to try to find out whatever the
+thing was really like, and also to discover which of my authors had been
+doing the heaviest amount of lying. It seemed clear to the meanest
+intelligence that this form of the darkening of counsel was fearfully
+prevalent among them, because of the way they disagreed about things
+among themselves. Of course I have so far only partially succeeded in
+both these matters; for, regarding the first, personal experience taught
+me that things differed with district; regarding the second, that all
+the people who have been to Africa and have written books on it have,
+off and on, told the truth, and that what seemed to the public who have
+not been there to be the most erroneous statements have been true in
+substance and in fact, and that those statements they have accepted
+immediately as true on account of their either flattering their vanity
+or comfortably explaining the reasons of the failure of their
+endeavours, have the most falsehood in them.</p>
+
+<p>There is another point I must mention regarding this material for that
+much wanted colossal work on the history<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span> of African relationships with
+the rest of the world&mdash;which I do not intend to write, but want written
+for me&mdash;and that is the superiority both in quality and quantity of the
+portion which relates to the Early History of the West Coast. Yet very
+little attention has been given in our own times to this. I might say no
+attention, were it not for Sir A. B. Ellis, that very noble man and
+gallant soldier, who did so much good work for England both with sword
+and pen. Just for the sake of the work being worth doing, not in the
+hope of reward; for twenty years&rsquo; service and the publication of a
+series of books of great interest and importance taught him that West
+Africa was under a ban that it was beyond his power to remove;
+nevertheless he went on with his work unfaltering, if not uncomplaining,
+and died, in 1895, a young man, practically killed by the Warim
+incident&mdash;the true history of which has yet to be written. For the
+credit of my country, I must say that just before death he was knighted.</p>
+
+<p>I do not quote Colonel Ellis&rsquo;s works extensively, because, for one
+thing, it is the duty of people to read them first-hand, and as they are
+perfectly accessible there is no excuse for their not doing so; and, for
+another thing, I am in touch with the majority of the works from which
+he gathered his information regarding the early history, and with the
+natives from whom he gathered his ethnological information. There are
+certain points, I grant, on which I am unable to agree with him, such as
+the opinion he formed from his personal prejudices against the traders
+in West Africa; but in the main, regarding the regions with which he was
+personally acquainted and on which he wrote&mdash;the Bight of Benin
+regions&mdash;I am only too glad that there is Colonel Ellis for me to agree
+with.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The fascination of West Africa&rsquo;s historical record is very great,
+bristling as it does with the deeds of brave men, bad and good, black
+and white. What my German friends would call the Blüth-period of this
+history is decidedly that period which was inaugurated by the great
+Prince Henry the Navigator; and no man who has ever read, as every man
+should read, Mr. Major&rsquo;s book on Prince Henry, can fail to want to know
+more still, and what happened down in those re-discovered Bights of
+Benin and Biafra after this Blüth-period closed. This can be done,
+mainly thanks to a Dutchman named Bosman, who was agent for the great
+Dutch house of the Gold Coast for many years circa 1698, and who wrote
+home to his uncle a series of letters of a most exemplary nature reeking
+with information on native matters and local politics, and suffused with
+a tender fear of shocking his aunt, which did not, however, seem in his
+opinion to justify him in suppressing important ethnological facts.</p>
+
+<p>Regarding the ethnological information we have of the Gold Coast
+natives, the most important works are those by the late Sir A. B. Ellis.
+His books are almost models of what books should be that are written by
+people studying native customs in their native land. We have also the
+results of scientific observers in the works of Buckhardt and Bastian,
+besides a mass of scattered information in the works of travellers,
+Bosman, Barbot, Labat, Mathews, Bowditch, Cruickshank, Winwood Reade, H.
+M. Stanley, Burton, Captain Canot, Captain Binger, and others, and quite
+recently a valuable contribution to our knowledge in Mr. Sarbar&rsquo;s <i>Fanti
+Customary Laws</i>.<a name="FNanchor_28_29" id="FNanchor_28_29"></a><a href="#Footnote_28_29" class="fnanchor">[28]</a> I think that every student of the African form of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span>
+thought should master these works thoroughly, and I fully grant their
+great importance; but, nevertheless, I am quite unable to agree with Mr.
+Jevons (<i>Introduction to the History of Religion</i>, p. 164) when he says,
+regarding Fetishism, that &ldquo;it is certainly amongst the inhabitants of
+the Gold and Slave Coasts that the subject can best be studied.&rdquo; These
+two Coasts are, I grant, the best place for a student who is resident in
+Europe, and therefore dependent on the accounts given by others of the
+things he is dealing with, to draw his information from, because of the
+accuracy and extent of the information he can get from Ellis&rsquo;s work;
+but, apart from Ellis the value of these regions to an ethnologist is
+but small, and for an ethnologist who will go out to West Africa and
+study his material for himself, the whole of the Coast regions of the
+Benin Bight are but of tenth-rate importance, because of the great and
+long-continued infusion of both Mohammedan and European forms of thought
+into the original native thought-form that has taken place in these
+regions. This subject I will refer to later, and I will return now to
+the history, confining myself to the earlier portions of it, and to that
+which bears on the early development of trade.</p>
+
+<p>I sincerely wish I could go into full details regarding the whole
+history of the locality here, because I know my only chance of being
+allowed to do so is on paper, and it would be a great relief to my mind;
+but I forbear, experience having taught me that the subject, to put it
+mildly, is not of general interest. For example, person after person
+have I tried to illuminate and educate in the matter of our
+relationships with the Ashantees; always, alas, in vain. Before I have
+got<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span> half through they &ldquo;hear a voice I cannot hear that&rsquo;s calling them
+away;&rdquo; or remember something &ldquo;that must be done at once;&rdquo; or, worst of
+all, go off straightway to sleep, after once or twice feebly enquiring,
+&ldquo;Where is that place?&rdquo; Of course I am glad that my little knowledge has
+been the comfort it has to several people. Once, when I was
+homeward-bound along the Gold Coast, three gentlemen came on board very
+ill from fever, and homeward-bound, too. Their worst symptom was
+agonising insomnia. &ldquo;Not a wink,&rdquo; they assured my friend the Irish
+purser, had they had &ldquo;for a couple of months.&rdquo; &ldquo;We&rsquo;ll soon put that
+right for you on board this boat,&rdquo; he said, in his characteristically
+kind and helpful manner. To my great surprise, that same afternoon he
+deliberately tackled me on the subject of the real reason that induced
+Osai Kwofi Kari Kari to cross the Prah in January, 1873. I was charmed
+at this unwonted display of interest in the subject, and hoped also to
+gain further information on it from those recently shipped Gold Coasters
+in the smoking-room. I was getting on fairly well with it; and my friend
+the purser, instead of having &ldquo;some manifests to write out,&rdquo; as was
+usual with him, nobly battled with the intricacies of the subject for a
+good half hour and more; and then, just when I was in the middle of some
+topographical elucidation, accompanied by questions, up that purser
+rose, yawned and stretched himself, and hailed the doctor, who happened
+to be passing by. &ldquo;What do you think of that, doctor?&rdquo; he said, pointing
+to the settee. &ldquo;Do them a power of good,&rdquo; says his compatriot the
+medico. Turning round, I saw the three victims of insomnia grouped
+together; the middle man had his head pillowed on the oilclothed top of
+the table, and reclining, more or less gracefully, against him on either
+side<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span> were his two companions, their half-smoked pipes fallen from their
+limp fingers&mdash;all profoundly, unquestionably asleep. &ldquo;Oh, yes! of
+course, I was delighted,&rdquo; but not flattered; and, warned by this
+incident, I will here only say that should any one be really interested
+in the eventful history of the long struggle between the English,
+Portuguese, French, Dutch, and Brandenburgers, with each other and with
+the natives, for the possession of the country where the black man&rsquo;s
+gold came from, they will find a good deal about it in the works already
+cited; and should any medical man&mdash;the remedy is perhaps a little too
+powerful to be trusted in the hands of the laity&mdash;require it for the
+treatment of insomnia as above indicated, I recommend that part of it
+which bears on the Ashantee question in small but regular doses.</p>
+
+<p>Our earliest authorities mentioning Africa with the knowledge in them
+that it is surrounded by the ocean, save at Suez, are Theopompus and
+Herodotus. Unfortunately all Theopompus&rsquo;s works are lost to us,
+voluminous though they were, his history alone being a matter of
+fifty-eight volumes, while before he took up history he had won for
+himself a great reputation as an orator, during the reigns of Philip and
+Alexander the Great. He is perpetually referred to, however, though not
+always praised, by other great classical writers, Cicero, Pliny, the two
+Dionysiuses and others, and was evidently regarded as a great authority;
+one particular fragment of his works that refers to Africa is preserved
+by Ælian, and consists of a conversation between Silenus and Midas, King
+of Phrygia. Silenus says that Europe, Asia, and Africa are surrounded by
+the sea, but that beyond the known world there is an island of immense
+extent containing large animals and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span> men of twice our stature. This
+island Mr. Major thinks, and doubtless rightly, is connected with the
+tradition of our old friend&mdash;you know what I mean, as Captain Marryat&rsquo;s
+boatswain says&mdash;the Atlantis of Plato. This affair I will no further
+mention or hint at, but hastily pass on to that other early authority,
+Herodotus, who was born 484 years before Christ, and whose works, thanks
+be, have survived. He says: &ldquo;The Ph&#339;nician navigators under command
+of Pharaoh-Necho, King of Egypt, setting sail from the Red Sea, made
+their way to the Southern Sea; when autumn approached they drew their
+vessels to land, sowed a crop, waited until it was ripe for harvest,
+reaped it, and put again to sea.&rdquo; Having spent two years in this manner,
+in the third year they reached the Pillars of Hercules, (Jebu Zatout,
+and Gibraltar), and returned to Egypt, &ldquo;reporting,&rdquo; says Herodotus,
+&ldquo;what does not find belief in me, but may perhaps in some other persons,
+for they said in sailing round Africa they had the sun to the right (to
+the North) of them. In this way was Libya first known.&rdquo;<a name="FNanchor_29_30" id="FNanchor_29_30"></a><a href="#Footnote_29_30" class="fnanchor">[29]</a></p>
+
+<p>Much has been written regarding the accuracy of these Ph&#339;nician
+accounts; for, as frequently happens, their mention of a thing that
+seemed at first to brand their account as a lie remains to brand it as
+the truth&mdash;and although I have no doubt those Ph&#339;nician gentlemen
+heartily wished they had said nothing about having seen the sun to the
+North, yet it was best for them in the end, as it demonstrates to us
+that they had, at any rate, been South of the Equator; and we owe to
+Herodotus here, as in many other places in his works, a debt of
+gratitude for honestly putting down what he did not believe himself; he<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span>
+also has suffered from this habit of accuracy, becoming himself regarded
+by the superficial people of this world as a credulous old romancer,
+which he never was. Good man, he only liked fair play. &ldquo;Here,&rdquo; he says
+as it were, &ldquo;is a thing I am told. It&rsquo;s a bit too large for my belief
+hatch, but if you can get it down yours, you&rsquo;re free and welcome to ship
+it.&rdquo; Herodotus, however, accepts the fact that Africa was surrounded by
+water, save at its connection with the great land mass of the earth
+(Europe and Asia) by the Isthmus of Suez.</p>
+
+<p>Several other attempts to circumnavigate Africa were made prior to
+Herodotus&rsquo;s writings. One that we have mention of<a name="FNanchor_30_31" id="FNanchor_30_31"></a><a href="#Footnote_30_31" class="fnanchor">[30]</a> was made by a
+Persian nobleman named Sataspes, whom Xerxes had, for a then capital
+offence, condemned to impalement. This man&rsquo;s mother persuaded Xerxes
+that if she were allowed to deal with her son she would impose on him a
+more terrible punishment even than this, namely, that he should be
+condemned to sail round Libya. There is no doubt this good lady thought
+thereby to save her son; but, as events turned out, Xerxes, by accepting
+her suggestion, did not cheat justice by granting this as an alternative
+to immediate execution. However, off Sataspes sailed with a ship and
+crew from Egypt, out through the Pillars of Hercules, and doubling the
+Cape of Libya, then named Solois, he steered south, and, says Herodotus,
+&ldquo;traversed a vast extent of sea for many months, and finding he had
+still more to pass he turned round and returned to Egypt and then back
+to Xerxes, who had him then impaled, because, for one thing he had not
+sailed round Libya, and for another, Xerxes held he lied about those
+regions of it that he had visited; for Sataspes <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span>said he had seen a
+nation of little men who wore garments made of palm leaves, who,
+whenever his crew drew their ships ashore, left their cities and flew
+into the mountains, though he did them no injury, only taking some
+cattle from them; and the reason he gave for his not sailing round Libya
+was that his ships could go no further.&rdquo; Sataspes&rsquo;s end was sad, but one
+cannot feel that he was a loss to the class of romancers of travel.</p>
+
+<p>Another and a more determined navigator was Eudoxus of Cyzicus (<span class="fakesc">B.C.</span>
+117). The scanty record we have of his exploration is of great interest.
+While he was making a stay in Alexandria, he met an Indian who was the
+sole survivor of a crew wrecked on the Red Sea coast. He is the Indian
+who persuaded Ptolemy Euergetes to fit out an expedition to sail to
+India, and off they went and succeeded in it greatly, but on their
+return the king seized the cargo; so therefore, as a private enterprise,
+the thing was a failure. However, Eudoxus was a man of great
+determination, and on the death of Ptolemy VII. in the reign of his
+successor, he set out on another expedition to India. On his return
+voyage he was driven down the African Coast, and found there on the
+shore amongst other wreckage the prow of a vessel with the figure of a
+horse carved on it. This relic he took with him as a curiosity, and on
+his successful return to Alexandria exhibited it there in the market
+place, and during its exhibition it was recognised by some pirates from
+Cadiz (Gades) who happened to be in that city, and they testified that
+the small vessels which were employed in the fisheries along the West
+African Coast as far as the River Lixius (Wadi al Knos) always had the
+figure of a horse on their prows, and on this account were called
+&ldquo;horses.&rdquo; The fact<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span> of this wreck of a vessel belonging to Western
+Europe being found on the East Coast of Africa joined with the knowledge
+that these vessels did not pass through the Mediterranean Sea, gave
+Eudoxus the idea that the vessel he had the figure head of must have
+come round Africa from the West Coast, and he then proceeded to Cadiz
+and equipped three vessels, one large and two of smaller size, and
+started out to do the same thing, bar wrecking. He sailed down the known
+West Coast without trouble, but when he came to passing on into the
+unknown seas, he had trouble with the crews, and was compelled to beach
+his vessels. After doing this he succeeded in persuading his crews to
+proceed, but it was then found impossible to float the largest vessel,
+so she was abandoned, and the expedition proceeded in the smaller and in
+a ship constructed from the wreck of the larger on which the cargo was
+shipped with the expedition. Eudoxus reached apparently Senegambia, and
+then another mutiny broke out, and he had to return to Barbary. But
+undaunted he then fitted out another expedition, consisting of two
+smaller vessels, and once again sailed to the South to circumnavigate
+Africa. Nothing since has been heard of Eudoxus of Cyzicus surnamed the
+Brave.<a name="FNanchor_31_32" id="FNanchor_31_32"></a><a href="#Footnote_31_32" class="fnanchor">[31]</a></p>
+
+<p>On his second voyage he fell in with natives who, he says, spoke the
+same language that he had previously heard on the Eastern Coast of
+Africa. If he was right in this, some authors hold he must have gone
+down the West Coast, at least as far as Cameroons, because there you
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span>nowadays first strike the language, which does stretch across the
+continent, namely, the Bantu, and we have no reason to suppose that the
+Bantu border line was ever further North on this Coast than it is at
+present; indeed, the indications are, I think, the other way; but as far
+as the language goes, it seems to me that Eudoxus could have heard the
+same language as on the East African Coast far higher up than Cameroons,
+namely, on the Moroccoan Coast, for in those days, prior to the great
+Arab invasion, most likely the language of the Berber races had
+possession of Northern Africa from East Coast to West. However, there is
+another statement of his which I think points to Eudoxus having gone far
+South, namely, that the reason of his turning back was an inability to
+get provisions, for this catastrophe is not likely to have overtaken so
+brave a man as he was until he reached the great mangrove swamps of the
+Niger. The litoral of the Sahara was in those days, we may presume, from
+the accounts we have far later from Leo Africanus and Arab writers, more
+luxuriant and heavily populated than it is at present.</p>
+
+<p>Of these voyages, however, we have such scant record that we need not
+dwell on them further, and so we will return to about 300 <span class="fakesc">B.C.</span>, and
+consider the wonderful voyage made by Hanno of Carthage, of which we
+have more detailed knowledge; although there still remains a certain
+amount of doubt as to who exactly Hanno was, mainly on account of Hanno
+apparently having been to Carthage what Jones is to North Wales&mdash;the
+name of a number of individuals with a habit of doing everything and
+frequently distinguishing themselves greatly. The Carthaginians were to
+the classic world much what the English are to the modern, a great
+colonising,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span> commercial people&mdash;warlike when wanted. They planted
+colonies in North Africa and elsewhere, and had commercial relationship
+with all the then known nations of the world, including a trans-Sahara
+trade with the people living to the South of the Great Desert. We shall
+never know to the full where those Carthaginians went, from the paucity
+of record; but we have record of the voyage of this Hanno in a
+<i>Periplus</i> originally written in the Punic language and then translated
+into Greek.<a name="FNanchor_32_33" id="FNanchor_32_33"></a><a href="#Footnote_32_33" class="fnanchor">[32]</a> Hanno, it seems, was a chief magistrate at Carthage, and
+Pliny says his voyage was undertaken when Carthage was in a most
+flourishing condition.<a name="FNanchor_33_34" id="FNanchor_33_34"></a><a href="#Footnote_33_34" class="fnanchor">[33]</a> From the <i>Periplus</i> we learn that the
+expedition to the West Coast consisted of sixty ships of fifty oars
+each, and 30,000 persons of both sexes, ample provisions and everything
+necessary for so great an undertaking. The object of this expedition was
+to explore, to found colonies, and to increase commerce. The expedition,
+after passing the Pillars of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span>Hercules, sailed two days along the coast
+and founded their first colony, which they called Thymatirum. Just south
+of this place, on a promontory called Soloeis, they built a temple to
+Neptune. A short distance further on they found a beautiful lake, the
+edges of which were bordered with large reeds, the country abounding in
+elephants and other game; a day&rsquo;s sail from this place, they founded
+five small cities near the sea called respectively Cariconticos, Gytte,
+Acra, Millitea, and Arambys. The next most important part of their
+voyage was their discovery of the great River Lixius, on the banks of
+which they found a pastoral people they called the Lixitae. These seem
+to have been a mild people; but there were in the neighbourhood tribes
+of a ferocious character, and they were also told there were Trogloditae
+dwelling in the mountains, where the Lixius took its rise, who were
+fleeter than horses. Unfortunately we are not told how long the
+Carthaginians took in reaching this River Lixius; but if the
+Carthaginians had been keeping close in shore they would not have met
+with a river that looked great until they reached the mouth of the Ouro
+(23°36' N. lat), which is four miles wide, but only an estuary; but as
+the Carthaginians do not seem to have gone up it, they may not have
+noticed its imperfections, and so, pursuing that dangerous method of
+judging a West African river from its mouth, regarded it as a great
+river. However this may have been, they took with them as guides and
+interpreters some of the Lixitae, and continued their voyage for three
+days, when they came to a large bay, an island in it containing a circle
+of five stadia, and proceeded to found another colony on that island,
+calling it Cerne, where they judged<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span> they were as far from the Pillars
+of Hercules as these were from Carthage. So it is held now that Cerne is
+the same as the French trading station Arguin (about 240 miles north of
+Senegal River), on to whose shoals the wreck of the French frigate <i>La
+Méduse</i> drifted in 1816, the tragedy of which is familiar to us all from
+Géricault&rsquo;s great painting.</p>
+
+<p>Hanno next called at a place where there was a great lake, which they
+entered by sailing up a river called by them Cheretes. In this they
+found three islands, all larger than the island of Cerne. One day&rsquo;s sail
+then brought them to the extremity of the lake overhung by mountains,
+which were inhabited by savages clad in wild beasts&rsquo; skins, who
+prevented their landing by pelting them with stones. The next point in
+their voyage was a large and broad river, infested with crocodiles and
+river horses; and from this place they made their way back to Cerne,
+where they rested and repaired and then set forth again, sailing south
+along the African shores for twelve successive days. The language of the
+natives of these regions the Lixitae did not understand, and the
+Carthaginians could not hold any communication with them for another
+reason, that they always fled from them; towards the last day they
+approached some large mountains covered with trees. They went on two
+days further, when they came to a large opening in the sea, on land on
+either side of which was a plain whereon they saw fires in every
+direction. At this place<a name="FNanchor_34_35" id="FNanchor_34_35"></a><a href="#Footnote_34_35" class="fnanchor">[34]</a> they refilled their<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span> water barrels, and
+continued their voyage five days further, when they reached a large bay
+which their interpreters said was called the Western Horn. In this bay
+they found a large island, in the centre of which was a salt lake with a
+small island in it. When they went ashore in the day time they saw no
+inhabitants, but at night time they heard in every direction a confused
+noise of pipes, cymbals, drums and song, which alarmed the crew, while
+the diviners they had with them, equivalent to our naval chaplains,
+strongly advised Hanno to leave that place as speedily as possible.
+Hanno, however, being less alarmed than his companions, pushed on South,
+and they soon found themselves abreast of a country blazing with fires,
+streams of which seemed to be pouring from the mountain tops down into
+the sea. &ldquo;We sailed quickly thence,&rdquo; says Hanno, &ldquo;being much terrified.&rdquo;
+Proceeding four days further they found that things did not improve in
+appearance from their point of view, for the whole country seemed ablaze
+at night, a country full of fire, and at one point the fire seemed to
+fly up to the very stars. Hanno says their interpreters told them that
+this great fire was the Chariot of the Gods. Three days more sailing
+South brought them to another bay, called the Southern Horn. In this bay
+they found a large island, in which again there was a lake with another
+island in it, having inhabitants who were savage, and whose bodies were
+covered with hair. These people the interpreters called the
+Gorillae&mdash;some were captured and taken aboard, but so savage and
+unmanageable did they prove that they were killed and the skins
+preserved. As most of the inhabitants of the Islands of the Gorillae
+seemed to be females, and as these ladies had made such a gallant fight
+of it with their Carthaginian<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span> captors, Hanno kept their skins to hang
+up in the Temple of Juno on his return home, evidently intending to be
+complimentary both to the Goddess and the Gorillae; but it is to be
+feared neither of them took it as it was meant, for Hanno had no luck
+from the Gods after this, having to turn back from shortness of
+provisions, and finally ending his career by, some say, being killed,
+and others say exiled from Carthage on account of his having a lion so
+tame that it would carry baggage for him; Punic public opinion held that
+this demonstrated him to be a man dangerous to the State. The Gorillae
+seem to have worked out their vengeance on white men by making it more
+than any man&rsquo;s character for truth is worth to see one of them&mdash;except
+stuffed in a museum, with a label on.</p>
+
+<p>How far Hanno really went down South is not known with any certainty. M.
+Gosselin held he only reached the River Nun, on the Moroccoan coast.
+Major Rennell fixed his furthest point somewhere north of Sierra Leone,
+and held the Island of the Gorillae to be identical with the Island of
+Sherboro&rsquo;. Bougainville believed that he at any rate went well into the
+Bight of Benin, while others think he went at any rate as far as Gaboon.
+I cannot myself see why he should not have done so, considering the
+winds and tides of the locality and the time taken; indeed, I should be
+quite willing to believe he went down to Congo, and that in the most
+terrific of the fires he witnessed an eruption of the volcanic peak of
+Cameroon, a volcano not yet extinct. Indeed the name given to this high
+fire &ldquo;that almost reached the stars&rdquo; by his interpreters&mdash;the Chariot of
+the Gods&mdash;is not so very unlike the name the Cameroon Peak bears to this
+day, Mungo Mah Lobeh, the Throne or Place of Thunder, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span> this native
+name is also capable of being translated into &ldquo;the Place of the Gods&rdquo; or
+spirits. The thing I do not believe in the affair is that the Lixitae
+interpreters ever called it or any other place &ldquo;a chariot&rdquo;; for as Hanno
+was the first white man they had seen, and they had no chariots of their
+own, it is unlikely they could have known anything of chariots; and I
+think this Chariot of the Gods must have been an error of Hanno&rsquo;s in
+translating his interpreter&rsquo;s remarks. It is perfectly excusable in him
+if it is so, because to understand what an interpreter means who does
+not know your language, and whose own language you are not an adept in,
+and who is translating from a language regarding which you are both
+alike ignorant, is a process fraught with difficulty. I have tried it,
+so speak feelingly. It is true it is not an impossibility, as those
+unversed in African may hastily conjecture, because at least one-third
+of an African language consists in gesture, and this gesture part is
+fairly common to all tribes I have met, so that by means of it you can
+get on with daily life; but it breaks down badly when you come to the
+names of places. I myself once went on a long march to a place that
+subsequent knowledge informed me was &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know&rdquo; in my director&rsquo;s
+native tongue. Still, if he did not know, I did not know, and so it was
+all the same. I got there all right, therefore it did not matter to me;
+but I was haunted during my stay in it by a confused feeling that
+perhaps I was flying in the face of Science by being somewhere
+else&mdash;being in two places at the same time.</p>
+
+<p>I really, however, cannot help thinking Hanno must have got past the
+Niger Delta; for there is nothing to frighten any one, as far as the
+look of things go, until you go south from Calabar, and find yourself
+facing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span> that magnificent Great Cameroon and Fernando Po; and Hanno&rsquo;s
+people were scared as they were never scared before. Yet, again, there
+are those fires, which were in the main doubtless what that very wise
+and not half-appreciated missionary, the late Rev. J. Leighton Wilson,
+says they were, namely, fires made by the native burning down the high
+grass at the end of a dry season to make his farms. Now Hanno could have
+seen any quantity of these along parts of the shores of the Bight of
+Benin, but is not likely to have seen them to any alarming extent on the
+Biafran Bight, because the shores thereof are deeply fringed with
+mangrove swamps, and the native does not start making farms in them.
+Hanno might have seen what looked like the smoke of innumerable fires on
+the sides of Cameroon Mountain and Fernando Po. I myself have seen the
+whole mighty forest there smoking as if beneath it smouldered the
+infernal regions themselves; but it is only columns and wafts of mist,
+and so gives no blaze at night; if you want to see a real land of flame
+with, over it, a pall of cloud reflecting back its crimson light in a
+really terrifying way, you must go south of Cameroon, south of Congo
+Franįais, south, until you reach the region of the Great Congo itself;
+and there&mdash;on the grass-covered hills and plains of the Lower Congo
+lands&mdash;you will see a land of fire at the end of the dry season,
+terrific enough to awe any man. Of course, if Hanno passed the Congo and
+went down as far as the fringing sands of the Kalahari desert, he would
+certainly not have been able to get stores; but also down there he would
+not have met with an island on which there were gorillas; for even if we
+grant that there was sufficient dense forest south of the Congo in his
+days for gorillas to have inhabited, and allow that in old days gorillas
+were<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span> south of the Congo, which they are not now, still, there is no
+island near the coast. So I am afraid we cannot quite settle Hanno&rsquo;s
+furthest point, and must content ourselves by saying he was a brave man,
+a good sailor, and a credit therefore to his country and the human race.</p>
+
+<p>After Hanno&rsquo;s time I cannot find any record of a regular set of trading
+expeditions down the West Coast by the Carthaginians. From scattered
+observations it is certain the commerce of the Carthaginians with the
+Barbary Coast and the Bight of Benin was long carried on; but it does
+not seem to have been carried on along the coast of the Bight of Biafra;
+and the voyage in 170 <span class="fakesc">B.C.</span> may be cited in support of this, showing that
+the voyage as far south as Eudoxus went was then considered as
+marvellous and new. Still, on the other hand, it must be remembered
+that, prior to our own day, the navigator had no great inducement to
+tell the rest of the world exactly where he had been; indeed, the
+navigator whose main interest is commerce is, to this day, not keen on
+so doing. He would rather keep little geographical facts&mdash;such as short
+cuts by creeks, and places where either gold, or quicksilver, and buried
+ivory, is plentiful&mdash;to himself, than go explaining about these things
+for the sake of getting an unrepaying honour. One sees this so much in
+studying the next period of this history&mdash;the early Portuguese and early
+French discoveries; you will find that one of these nations knew about a
+place years before the other came along, and discovered it, and claimed
+it as its own&mdash;with disputes as a natural consequence.</p>
+
+<p>There has, however, been one very interesting point in the dealing of
+the nations of higher culture with the Africans, and that is the way
+their commerce<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span> with them has had periods of abeyance. The Egyptians
+have left us record of having been extensively in touch with the
+interior of Africa, <i>via</i> the Nile Valley,&mdash;then came a pause. Then came
+the Carthaginian commerce,&mdash;then a pause. Then the Portuguese, French,
+English, Dutch, and Dane trading enterprise, say, roughly from 1340 to
+1700,&mdash;then a falling off of this enterprise; revived during the
+Slave-trade days, falling off again on its suppression, and reviving in
+our own days. I suppose I ought to say greatly, but&mdash;well, we will
+discuss that later. These pauses have always been caused by the nations
+of higher culture getting too busy with wars at home to trouble
+themselves about the African, all the more so because the produce of
+Africa has filtered slowly, whether it was fetched by white man or no,
+into their markets through the hands of the energetic North African
+tribes and the Arabs. Whenever the white man has settled down with his
+home affairs, and has had time to spare, he has always gone and looked
+up the African again, &ldquo;discovered him,&rdquo; and he has always found him in
+the same state of culture that the pioneers of the previous Blüth-period
+found him in. Hanno does not find down the West Coast another
+Carthage&mdash;he finds bush fires, and hears the tom-tom and the horn and
+the shouts. He finds people slightly clad and savage. Then read Aluise
+da Ca da Mostro and the rest of Prince Henry&rsquo;s adventures; well, you
+might&mdash;save that the old traveller is more interesting&mdash;almost be
+reading a book published yesterday. The only radical change made for
+large quantities of Africans by means of white intercourse was made by
+exporting them to America. How this is going to turn out we do not yet
+know; and whether or no, after the present period of white exploitation
+of Africa,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span> there may not come another pause from our becoming too
+interested in some big fight of our own to keep up our interest in the
+African, we cannot tell; so I will pass on to a very interesting point
+in a method of trade mentioned by the early authorities&mdash;the silent
+trade.</p>
+
+<p>Herodotus gives us the first description of it,<a name="FNanchor_35_36" id="FNanchor_35_36"></a><a href="#Footnote_35_36" class="fnanchor">[35]</a> saying that the
+Carthaginians state that beyond the Pillars of Hercules there is a
+region of Libya, and men who inhabit it. When they arrive among these
+people and have unloaded their merchandise they set it in order on the
+shore, go on board their ships and make a great smoke, and the
+inhabitants seeing the smoke come down to the sea shore, deposit gold in
+exchange for the merchandise, and withdraw to some distance. The
+Carthaginians then going ashore examine the goods, and if the quantity
+seems sufficient for the merchandise they take it and sail away; but if
+it is not sufficient they go on board again and wait; the natives then
+approach and deposit more gold until they have satisfied them: neither
+party ever wrongs the other, for they do not touch the gold before it is
+made adequate to the value of the merchandise, nor do the natives touch
+the merchandise before the Carthaginians have taken the gold.</p>
+
+<p>The next description of this silent trade I have been able to find is
+that given by Aluise da Ca da Mostro, a Venetian gentleman who, allured
+by the accounts of the riches of West Africa given by Prince Henry the
+Navigator, abandoned trading with the Low Countries, entered the
+Prince&rsquo;s service, and went down the Coast in 1455. When in the district
+of Cape Blanco, at a place called by him Hoden, he was told that six
+days&rsquo; journey from this place <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span>there was a place called Tagazza,
+signifying a chest of gold; there large quantities of rock salt were dug
+from the earth every year and carried on camels by the Arabs and the
+Azanaghi, who were tawny Moors,<a name="FNanchor_36_37" id="FNanchor_36_37"></a><a href="#Footnote_36_37" class="fnanchor">[36]</a> in separate companies to Timbuk, and
+from thence to the Empire of Melli, which belonged to the negroes;
+having arrived there they disposed of their salt in the course of eight
+days, at the rate of two and three hundred mitigals the load (a mitigal
+= a ducat), according to the quantity thereof, after which they returned
+home with the gold they had been paid in. These merchants reckoned it
+forty days&rsquo; journey on horseback from Tagazza to &ldquo;Timbuk&rdquo; as Mostro,
+while from Timbuk to Melli it is thirty days&rsquo; journey. Ca da Mostro then
+inquired to what use the salt taken to Melli was put; and they said that
+the merchants used a certain quantity of it themselves, for on account
+of their country lying near the Line, where the days and nights are of
+equal length, at certain seasons of the year the heats were excessive,
+and putrefied the blood unless salt was taken; their method of taking it
+was to dissolve a piece in a porringer of water daily and drink it. When
+the remainder of the salt reached Melli, carried thither on camels, each
+camel load was broken up into pieces of a suitable size for one man to
+carry. A large number of what Ca da Mostro calls footmen&mdash;whom we
+nowadays call porters&mdash;were assembled at Melli to be ready to carry the
+salt from thence further away still into the heart of Africa.</p>
+
+<p>I have dwelt on this salt&rsquo;s wanderings because we<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span> have here a very
+definite description of a trade route, and the importance of
+understanding these trade routes is very great. We do not learn,
+however, exactly where the salt goes to beyond Melli; but Melli seems to
+have been, as Timbuctoo was, and to a certain extent still is, a trade
+focus; and from Melli evidently the salt went in many directions, and it
+is interesting to note Ca da Mostro&rsquo;s observations on the salt porters,
+who he says carry in each hand a long forked stick, which when they are
+tired they fix into the ground and rest their loads on; so to-day may
+you see the West African porters doing, save that it is only the porters
+who have to pass over woodless plateaux on their journeys that carry two
+sticks.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 426px;" id="IMG263A"><span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span>
+<img src="images/ill-263a.jpg" width="426" height="650" alt="Oil River Natives" title="Oil River Natives" />
+<p><span class="facingleft">[<i>To face page 245.</i></span></p>
+<span class="caption"><span class="smcap">Oil River Natives.</span></span>
+</div>
+
+<p>Speaking however further on the course of this salt trade Ca da Mostro
+says that some of the merchants of Melli go with it until they come to a
+certain water, whether fresh or salt his informant could not say; but he
+holds it most likely was fresh, or there would be no need of carrying
+salt there; and it is the opinion of the few people who have of late
+years interested themselves in the matter that this great water is the
+Niger Joliba. But be this as it may, when those merchants from Melli
+arrive on the banks of this great water they place their shares of salt
+in heaps in a row, every one setting a mark on his own. This done, the
+merchants retire half a day&rsquo;s journey; then &ldquo;the negroes, who will not
+be seen or spoken with, and who seem to be the inhabitants of some
+islands, come in large boats,&rdquo; and having viewed the salt lay a sum of
+gold on every heap and then retire. When they are all gone the negro
+merchants who own the salt return, and if the quantity of gold pleases
+them they take it and leave the salt; if not, they leave both and
+withdraw themselves again. The silent people then<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span> return, and the heaps
+from which they find the gold has been removed they carry away, and
+either advance more gold to the other heaps or take their gold from them
+and leave the salt. In this manner, says Ca da Mostro, from very ancient
+times these negroes have traded without either speaking to or seeing
+each other, until a few years before, when he was at Cape Blanco among
+the Azanaghi, who supply the negroes of Melli with their salt as
+aforesaid, and who evidently get from them gossip as well as gold. They
+told him that their fellow merchants among the black Moors had told them
+that they had had serious trouble in consequence of the then Emperor of
+Melli, a man who took more general interest in affairs than was common
+in Emperors of Melli, having been fired with a desire to know why these
+customers of his traders did not like being seen; he had commanded the
+salt merchants when they next went to traffic with the silent people to
+capture some of them for him by digging pits near the salt heaps,
+concealing themselves therein and then rushing out and seizing some of
+the strange people when they came to look at the salt heaps. The
+merchants did not at all relish the royal commission, for they knew, as
+any born trader would, that it must be extremely bad for trade to rush
+out and seize customers by the scruff of their necks while they were in
+the midst of their shopping. However, much as the command added to their
+commercial anxieties, the thing had to be done, or there was no doubt
+the Emperor would relieve them both of all commercial anxieties and
+their heads at one and the same time. So they carried out the royal
+command, and captured four of their silent customers. Three they
+immediately liberated, thinking that to keep so many would only increase
+the bad blood, and one specimen<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span> would be sufficient to satisfy the
+Imperial curiosity. Unfortunately however the unfortunate captive they
+retained would neither speak nor eat, and in a few days died; and so the
+salt merchants of Melli returned home in very low spirits, feeling
+assured that their Emperor would be actively displeased with them for
+failing to satisfy his curiosity, and that the silent customers would be
+too alarmed and angered with them for their unprovoked attack to deal
+with them again. Subsequent events proved them to be correct in both
+surmises: his Majesty was highly disgusted at not having been able to
+see one of these people; and naturally, for the description given to him
+of those they had captured was at least highly interesting. The
+merchants said they were a span taller than themselves and well shaped,
+but that they made a terrible figure because their under lip was thicker
+than a man&rsquo;s fist and hung down on their breasts; also that it was very
+red, and something like blood dropped from it and from their gums. The
+upper lip was no larger than that of other people, and owing to this
+there were exposed to view both gums and teeth, which were of great
+size, particularly the teeth in the corners of the mouth. Their eyes
+were of great size and blackness. As for the customers, for three years
+went the merchants of Melli to the banks of the great water and arranged
+their salt heaps and looked on them for gold dust in vain: but the
+fourth year it was there; and the merchants of Melli believed that their
+customers&rsquo; lips had begun to putrefy through the excessive heat and the
+want of salt, so that being unable to bear so grievous a distemper they
+were compelled to return to their trade. Things were then established on
+a fairly reasonable basis; the merchants did not again attempt to see
+their customers, and they knew<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span> from their experience with their captive
+that they were by nature dumb; for had there been speech in him, would
+he not have spoken under the treatment to which he was subjected? And as
+for the Emperor of Melli he said right out he did not care whether those
+blacks could speak or no, so long as he had but the profit of their
+gold.</p>
+
+<p>This gold, I may remark, that was collected at Melli was divided into
+three parts: the first was sent by the Melli caravans to Kokhia on the
+caravan route to Syria and Cairo; the other two parts went from Melli to
+<a name="CORR3" id="CORR3"><ins class="correction" title="original: Timbucto">Timbuctoo</ins></a>, where it was again divided up, some of it going to Toet,<a name="FNanchor_37_38" id="FNanchor_37_38"></a><a href="#Footnote_37_38" class="fnanchor">[37]</a>
+and from thence along the coast to Tunis, in Barbary. Some of it went to
+Hoden, not far from Cape Blanco, and from there to Oran and Hona; thence
+it went to Fez, Morocco, Azila-Azasi, and Moosa, towns outside the
+Straits of Gibraltar, whence it went into Europe, through the hands of
+Italians, and other Christians, who exchanged their merchandise for the
+wares of the Barbary moors; and the remainder of the gold went down to
+the West African Coast to the Portuguese at Arguin. This description of
+the gold route is by Ca da Mostro, and is the first description of West
+African trade route I have found.</p>
+
+<p>But I must tear myself from the fascination of gold and its trade routes
+and return to that silent trade. The next person after Ca da Mostro to
+mention it is Captain Richard Jobson, who in 1620-1621 made a voyage
+especially to discover &ldquo;the golden trade,&rdquo; of what he calls Tombâk,
+which is our last author&rsquo;s Timbuk, by way of the Gambia, then held by
+many to be a mouth of the Niger.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Jobson&rsquo;s inquiries regarding this &ldquo;golden trade&rdquo; informed him that the
+great demand for salt in the Gambia trade arose from the desire for it
+among the Arabiks of Barbary; that the natives themselves only consumed
+a small percentage of this import, trading away the main to those
+Arabiks in the hinterland, who in their turn traded it for gold to
+Tombak, where the demand for it was great, because that city, although
+possessing all manner of other riches and commodities, lacked salt, so
+that the Arabiks did a good trade therein. Jobson was also informed that
+the Arabiks had, as well as the market for salt at Timbuctoo, a market
+for it with a strange people who would not be seen, and who lived not
+far from Yaze; that the salt was carried to them, and in exchange they
+gave gold. Asking a native merchant, who was engaged in this trade, why
+they would not be seen, he made a sign to his lips, but would say no
+more. Jobson, however, learnt from other sources that the reason these
+negroes buy salt from the tawny Moors is because of the thickness of
+their lips, which hang down upon their breasts, and, being raw, would
+putrefy if they did not take salt, a thing their country does not
+afford, so that they must traffic for it with the Moors. The manner they
+employ, according to Jobson, is this: the Moors on a fixed day bring
+their goods to a place assigned, where there are certain houses
+appointed for them; herein they deposit their commodities, and, laying
+their salt and other goods in parcels or heaps separately, depart for a
+whole day, during which time their customers come, and to each parcel of
+goods lay down a proportion of gold as they value it, and leave both
+together. The merchants then return, and as they like the bargain take
+the gold and leave their wares, or if they think the price<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span> offered too
+little, they divide the merchandise into two parts, leaving near the
+gold as much as they are inclined to give for it, and then again depart.
+At their next return the bargain is finished, for they either find more
+gold added or the whole taken away, and the goods left on their hands.</p>
+
+<p>A further confirmation of the existence of this method of trading we
+find in that most interesting voyage of Claude Jannequin, Sieur de
+Rochfort, 1639. He says, &ldquo;In this cursed country&rdquo;&mdash;he always speaks of
+West Africa like that&mdash;&ldquo;there is no provision but fish dried in the sun,
+and maize and tobacco.&rdquo; The natives will only trade by the French laying
+down on the ground what they would give for the provisions, and then
+going away, on which the natives came and took the commodities and left
+the fish in exchange. The regions he visited were those of Cape Blanco.</p>
+
+<p>To this day you will find a form of this silent trade still going on in
+Guinea. I have often seen on market roads in many districts, but always
+well away from Europeanised settlements, a little space cleared by the
+wayside, and neatly laid with plantain leaves, whereon were very tidily
+arranged various little articles for sale&mdash;a few kola nuts, leaves of
+tobacco, cakes of salt, a few heads of maize, or a pile of yams or sweet
+potatoes. Against each class of articles so many cowrie shells or beans
+are placed, and, always hanging from a branch above, or sedately sitting
+in the middle of the shop, a little fetish. The number of cowrie shells
+or beans indicate the price of the individual articles in the various
+heaps, and the little fetish is there to see that any one who does not
+place in the stead of the articles removed their proper price, or who
+meddles with the till,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span> shall swell up and burst. There is no doubt it
+is a very easy method of carrying on commerce.</p>
+
+<p>In what the silent trade may have originated it is hard to say; but one
+thing is certain, that the dread and fear of the negroes did not result
+from the evil effects of the slave trade, as so many of their terrors
+are said to have done, for we have seen notice of it long before this
+slave trade arose. Nevertheless, there can be but little doubt that it
+arose from a sense of personal insecurity, and has fetish in it, the
+natives holding it safer to leave so dangerous a thing as trafficking
+with unknown beings&mdash;white things that were most likely spirits, with
+the smell of death on them&mdash;in the hands of their gods. In the cases of
+it that I have seen no doubt it was done mostly for convenience, one
+person being thereby enabled to have several shops open at but little
+working expense; but I have seen it employed as a method of trading
+between tribes at war with each other.<a name="FNanchor_38_39" id="FNanchor_38_39"></a><a href="#Footnote_38_39" class="fnanchor">[38]</a> We must dismiss, I fear,
+bashfulness regarding lips as being a real cause; but I will not dismiss
+the bleeding lips as a mere traveller&rsquo;s tale, because I have seen quite
+enough to make me understand what those people who told of bleeding
+thick lips meant; several, not all of my African friends, are a bit
+thick about the lower lip, and when they have been passing over
+waterless sun-dried plateaux or bits of desert they are anything but
+decorative. The lips get swollen and black, and Ca da Mostro does not go
+too far in his description of what he was told regarding them.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_28_29" id="Footnote_28_29"></a><a href="#FNanchor_28_29"><span class="label">[28]</span></a> Clowes and Sons, 1897.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_29_30" id="Footnote_29_30"></a><a href="#FNanchor_29_30"><span class="label">[29]</span></a> <i>Melpomene</i>, IV. 41.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_30_31" id="Footnote_30_31"></a><a href="#FNanchor_30_31"><span class="label">[30]</span></a> <i>Melpomene</i>, IV. 43.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_31_32" id="Footnote_31_32"></a><a href="#FNanchor_31_32"><span class="label">[31]</span></a> See Ellis&rsquo;s <i>History of the Gold Coast</i>, also Tozer&rsquo;s
+<i>History of Ancient Geography</i>, Beazley&rsquo;s <i>Dawn of Modern Geography</i>,
+and <i>Strabo</i>, <span class="fakesc">B.C.</span> 25, book xvii, edited by Theodore Jansonius ab
+Almelooven, Amsterdam, 1707.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_32_33" id="Footnote_32_33"></a><a href="#FNanchor_32_33"><span class="label">[32]</span></a> There is doubt as to whether this <i>Periplus</i> is the entire
+one with which the classic writers were conversant.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_33_34" id="Footnote_33_34"></a><a href="#FNanchor_33_34"><span class="label">[33]</span></a> &ldquo;Et Hanno Carthaginis potentia florente circumvectus a
+Gabibus ad finem Arabiae navigationem eam prodidit scripto&rdquo;; (and Hanno,
+when Carthage flourished, sailed round from Cadiz to the remotest parts
+of Arabia, and left an account of his voyage in writing) Plinius, lib.
+ii. cap. lxvii. p.m. 220. See also lib. v. cap. i. p.m. 523, and
+Pomponius Mela, lib. iii. cap. ix. p. 63, edit. Isaici Vossii.
+</p><p>
+There is an English version of the <i>Periplus</i>, edited by Falconer,
+London, 1797; and an Oxford edition of it, and some other works, by Dr.
+Hudson, 1698. Also there is a work on Hanno&rsquo;s <i>Periplus</i> based on MS. in
+the Meyer Museum at Liverpool by Simonides, not the Iambic poet, who
+wrote a ridiculous satire against women, quoted by Ælian; nor yet
+Simonides who was one of the greatest of the ancient poets, and
+flourished in the seventy-fifth Olympia; but a modern gentleman
+connected with America, whose work I am sufficient scholar neither to
+use nor to criticise.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_34_35" id="Footnote_34_35"></a><a href="#FNanchor_34_35"><span class="label">[34]</span></a> Major identifies this place with Cape Verde, pointing out
+that the inability of the Lixitae interpreters to understand the
+language accords with the fact that at the Senegal commences the country
+of the blacks; &ldquo;the immense opening&rdquo; he regards as the Gambia.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_35_36" id="Footnote_35_36"></a><a href="#FNanchor_35_36"><span class="label">[35]</span></a> <i>Melpomene</i>, IV. 96.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_36_37" id="Footnote_36_37"></a><a href="#FNanchor_36_37"><span class="label">[36]</span></a> The writers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
+commonly divide up the natives of Africa into&mdash;1, Moors; 2, Tawny Moors;
+3, Black Moors, a term that lingers to this day in our word Blackeymoor;
+4, Negroes.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_37_38" id="Footnote_37_38"></a><a href="#FNanchor_37_38"><span class="label">[37]</span></a> Ato, according to the version given in Grynæus.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_38_39" id="Footnote_38_39"></a><a href="#FNanchor_38_39"><span class="label">[38]</span></a> Mr. Ling Roth kindly informs me of further instances of
+this silent trading to be found in <i>Lander&rsquo;s Journal</i>, Lond., 1832, iii.
+161-163, and Forbes&rsquo;s <i>Wanderings of a Naturalist</i>, Lond. 1886, where it
+is cited for the Kubus of Sumatra. He says it also occurs among the
+Veddahs, and that there is in no case any fetish control.</p></div>
+</div>
+<hr class="chap" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XI" id="CHAPTER_XI"></a>CHAPTER XI</h2>
+
+<h2>FRENCH DISCOVERY OF WEST AFRICA</h2>
+
+<p class="pblock">Concerning the controversy that is between the French and the
+Portuguese as to which of them first visited West Africa, with
+special reference to the fort at Elmina.</p>
+
+<p>We will now turn our attention to the other pioneers of our present West
+African trade, and commence with the French, for we cannot disassociate
+our own endeavours in this region from those of France, Portugal,
+Holland, and the Brandenburgers; nor are we the earliest discoverers
+here. When we English heard the West African Coast was a region worth
+trading with, those great brick-makers for the architects of England&rsquo;s
+majesty, the traders, went for it and traded, and have made that trading
+pay as no other nation has been able to do. However, from the first we
+got called hard names&mdash;pirates, ruffians, interlopers, and such like&mdash;in
+fact, every bad name the other nations could spare from the war of abuse
+they chronically waged against each other.</p>
+
+<p>The French claim to have traded with West Africa prior to the
+discoveries made there by the emissaries of Prince Henry the
+Navigator.<a name="FNanchor_39_40" id="FNanchor_39_40"></a><a href="#Footnote_39_40" class="fnanchor">[39]</a> When on my last voyage out I was <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span>in French territory, I
+own the discovery of this claim of my French friends came down on me as
+a shock, because on my previous voyage out I had been in Portuguese
+possessions, and had spent many a pleasant hour listening to the recital
+of the deeds of Diego Caõ and Lopez do Gonsalves, and others of that
+noble brand of man, the fifteenth-century Portugee. I heard then nothing
+of French discoverers, and also had it well knocked out of my mind that
+the English had discovered anything of importance in West Africa save
+the Niger outfalls, and I had a furious war to keep this honour for my
+fellow countrymen. Then when I got into French territory not one word
+did I hear of Diego Caõ or Lopez; and so as a distraction from the
+consideration of the private characters of people still living, I
+started discoursing on what I considered a safer and more interesting
+subject, and began to recount how I had had the honour of being
+personally mixed up in the monument to Diego Caõ at the mouth of the
+Congo, and what fine fellows&mdash;I got no farther than that, when, to my
+horror, I heard my heroes called microbes, followed by torrents of
+navigators&rsquo; names, all French, and all unknown to me. Being out for
+information I never grumble when I get it, let it be what it may. So I
+asked my French friends to write down clearly on paper the names of
+those navigators, and promised as soon as I left the forests of the
+Equator, and reached the book forests of Europe, I would try and find
+out more about them. I have; and I own that I owe profound apologies to
+those truly great Frenchmen for not having made their acquaintance
+sooner; nevertheless I still fail to see why my honoured Portuguese,
+Diego and Lopez, should have been called microbes, and I have no regrets
+about my fights for the honour of the Niger for my own countrymen, nor
+for my constant attempts <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span>to take the conceit out of my French and
+Portuguese friends, as a set-off for &ldquo;the conceit about England&rdquo; they
+were always trying to take out of me, by holding forth on what those
+Carthaginians had done on the West Coast before France or Portugal were
+so much as dreamt of.</p>
+
+<p>The Portuguese discoveries you can easily read of in Major&rsquo;s great book
+on Prince Henry; and as this book is fully accepted as correct by the
+highest Portuguese authorities, it is safer to do so than to attempt to
+hunt your Portuguese hero for yourself, because of the quantity of names
+each of them possesses, and the airy indifference as to what part of
+that name their national chroniclers use in speaking of them. I have
+tried it, and have several times been in danger of going to my grave
+with the idea that I was investigating the exploits of two separate
+gentlemen, whereas I was only dealing with two parts of one gentleman&rsquo;s
+name; nevertheless, it is a thing worth learning Portuguese for. And, in
+addition to Major&rsquo;s book, we have now, thanks to the Hakluyt Society,
+that superb thing, the Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of
+Guinea, by Gomez Eanes de Zurara&mdash;a work completed in 1453. This work is
+one on which we are largely dependent for the details of the early
+Portuguese discoveries, because Gomez Eanes spent the later part of his
+life in tidying up the Torre do Tombo&mdash;namely, the national archives, of
+which he was keeper&mdash;and his idea of tidying up included the lady-like
+method of destroying old papers. It makes one cold now to think of the
+things De Zurara may have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span> destroyed; but he evidently regarded himself,
+as does the nineteenth century spring-cleaner, as a human benefactor;
+and, strange to say, his contemporaries quite took his view; indeed,
+this job was done at the request of the Cortes, and with the Royal
+sanction. There is also an outstanding accusation of forgery against
+Zurara, but that is a minor offence, and is one we need only take into
+consideration when contemplating the question as to whether a man
+capable of destroying early manuscripts and forgery might not be also
+capable of leaving out of his Chronicle, in honour of the Navigator, any
+mention of there being Frenchmen on the Coast, when he sent out his
+emissaries to discover what might lay hidden from the eye of man down in
+the Southern Seas. I do not, however, think De Zurara left out this
+thing intentionally, but that he had no knowledge of it if it did exist,
+for no man could have written as he wrote, unless he had a heart too
+great for such a meanness. Certain it is Prince Henry never knew, for
+these are the five reasons given by Zurara, in the grave, noble
+splendour of his manner, why the Prince undertook the discoveries with
+which his name will be for ever associated. I give the passage almost in
+full because of its beauty. &ldquo;And you should note well that the noble
+spirit of this Prince (Henry the Navigator) by a sort of natural
+constraint was ever urging him both to begin and carry out very great
+deeds; for which reason after the taking of Ceuta, he always kept ships
+well armed against the Infidel, both for war and because he also had a
+wish to know the land that lay beyond the Isles of Canary and that Cape
+called Bojador, for that up to his time neither by writings nor by the
+memory of man was known with any certainty the nature of the land beyond
+that Cape. Some said indeed Saint Brandan had passed that way,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span> and
+there was another tale of two galleys rounding the Cape which never
+returned ... and because the said Lord Infant wished to know the truth
+of this&mdash;since it seemed to him if he, or some other Lord, did not
+endeavour to gain that knowledge, no mariners or merchants would ever
+dare to attempt it, (for the reason that none of them ever trouble
+themselves to sail to a place where there is not a sure and certain hope
+of profit,) and seeing also that no other prince took any pains in this
+matter, he sent out his own ships against those parts, to have manifest
+certainty of them all, and to this he was stirred up by his zeal for the
+service of God, and of King Dom Duarto, his Lord and brother, who then
+reigned; and this was the first reason of his action.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The second reason was that if there chanced to be in those lands a
+population of Christians or some havens into which it would be possible
+to sail without peril, many kinds of merchandise might be brought to
+this nation which would find a ready market, and reasonably so because
+no other people of these parts traded with them, nor yet people of any
+other that were known; and also the products of this nation might be
+taken there, which traffic would bring great profit to our countrymen.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The third reason was that as it was said that the power of the Moors in
+that land of Africa was very much greater than was commonly supposed,
+and that there were no Christians among them nor any other race of men,
+and because every wise man is obliged by natural prudence to wish for a
+knowledge of the power of his enemy; therefore the said Lord Infant
+exerted himself to cause them to be fully discovered to make it known
+determinedly how far the power of those Infidels extended.&rdquo;</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The fourth reason was because during the one and thirty years he had
+warred against the Moors he had never found a Christian King nor a Lord
+outside this land, who for the love of Jesus Christ would aid him in the
+said war; therefore he sought to know if there were in those parts any
+Christian Princes in whom the charity and the love of Christ was so
+ingrained that they would aid him against those enemies of the Faith.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The fifth reason was the great desire to make increase of the Faith of
+our Lord Jesus Christ, and to bring to Him all the souls that should be
+saved.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>According to the Portuguese, Gil Eannes was the first emissary of Prince
+Henry who succeeded in passing Cape <a name="CORR4" id="CORR4"><ins class="correction" title="original: Bodajor">Bojador</ins></a>. This feat he accomplished
+in 1434; but on this his first voyage out he contented himself with
+passing the Cape: a thing which previous expeditions of Prince Henry had
+failed to do, and which, so far apparently as Prince Henry knew, had not
+been done before, for it was regarded as a tremendous achievement.</p>
+
+<p>The next year Prince Henry&rsquo;s cupbearer, Affonso Gonsalves Baladaya, set
+out accompanied by Gil Eannes in a caravel; and the coast to the South
+of Bojador was visited; their furthest expedition was to a shallow bay
+called by them Angra des Ruives.<a name="FNanchor_40_41" id="FNanchor_40_41"></a><a href="#Footnote_40_41" class="fnanchor">[40]</a> They then returned to Portugal, and
+the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span>next year again went down the coast as far as a galley-shaped rock.
+This place they called Pedro de Galli, from its appearance; its present
+name is Pedra de Galla. Their chief achievement was the discovery of the
+Rio do Oura. It is not an important river in itself, but only one of
+those deceptive estuaries common on the West coast. But it was the first
+West African place the Portuguese got gold dust at, hence its name. The
+amount of gold was apparently not considerable, and the chief cargo that
+expedition took home was sea wolves&rsquo; skins; they reported quantities of
+seals or sea wolves as they called them here, and this report was the
+cause of the next Portuguese expedition; for the Portuguese in those
+days seem to have always been anxious for sea wolves&rsquo; oil and skins; and
+whether this be a survival or no, it seems to me curious that the ladies
+of Lisbon are to this day very keen on sealskin jackets, which their
+climate can hardly call for imperatively. But, however this may be, it
+is certain that we have no account of the Portuguese having passed south
+of the next important cape South of Bojador, namely, Blanco, before
+1443. The terrible tragedy of Tangiers and political troubles hindered
+their explorations from 1436 to 1441,<a name="FNanchor_41_42" id="FNanchor_41_42"></a><a href="#Footnote_41_42" class="fnanchor">[41]</a> and the French claim to have
+been down the West Coast trading not only before this date, but before
+Prince Henry sent a single expedition out at all, namely, as early as
+1346.</p>
+
+<p>The French story is that there was a deed of association of the
+merchants of Dieppe and Rouen of the date 1364. This deed was to arrange
+for the carrying on to greater proportions of their already existing
+trade with West Africa. The original of this deed was burnt, according
+to <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span>Labat, at Dieppe, in the conflagration of 1694.<a name="FNanchor_42_43" id="FNanchor_42_43"></a><a href="#Footnote_42_43" class="fnanchor">[42]</a> How long before
+this Association was formed that trade had been carried on, it is a
+little difficult to make out, I find, from the usual hindrance to the
+historical study of West Africa, namely, lack of documentary evidence
+and a profusion of recriminatory lying. This association was under the
+patronage of the Dukes of Normandy, then Kings of England; and its
+ultimate decay is partly attributed to the political difficulties these
+patrons became involved in. The French authorities say the Association
+was an exceedingly flourishing affair; and it is stated that under its
+auspices factories were established at Sierra Leone, and that a fort was
+built at La Mina del Ore, or Del Mina, the place now known as Elmina, as
+early as 1382. Now it is round the subject of this fort that most
+controversy wages, for this French statement does not at all agree with
+the Portuguese account of the fort. The latter claim to have discovered
+the coast&mdash;called by them La Mina, by us the Gold&mdash;in 1470, with an
+expedition commanded by João de Santarim and Pedro de Escobara. The
+Portuguese, finding this part of the coast rich in gold, and knowing the
+grabbing habits of other nations where this was concerned, determined to
+secure this trade for themselves in a sound practical way, although they
+were already guarded by a Papal Bull. The expedition that discovered La
+Mina was the last one made during the reign of Affonso V.; but his son,
+who succeeded him as João II., rapidly set about acting on the
+information it brought home. This king indeed took an intelligent
+interest in the Guinea trade, and was well versed in it; for a part of
+his revenues before he came to the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span>throne had been derived from it and
+its fisheries. João II. energetically pushed on the enterprise founded
+by his father Affonso V., who had in 1469 rented the trade of the Guinea
+Coast to Fernam Gomez for five years at 500 equizodas a year,<a name="FNanchor_43_44" id="FNanchor_43_44"></a><a href="#Footnote_43_44" class="fnanchor">[43]</a> on the
+condition that 100 leagues of new coast should be discovered annually,
+starting from Sierra Leone, the then furthest known part, and reserving
+the ivory trade to the Crown. The expedition sent out by King João,
+commanded by the celebrated Diego de Azambuja, took with it, in ten
+caravels and two smaller craft, ready fashioned stones and bricks, and
+materials for building, with the intention of building a fort as near as
+might be to a place called Sama, where the previous expedition had
+reported gold dust to be had from the natives. This fort was to be a
+means of keeping up a constant trade with the natives, instead of
+depending only on the visits of ships to the coast. Azambuja selected
+the place we know now as Elmina as a suitable site for this fort. Having
+obtained a concession of the land from the King Casamanca, on
+representing to him what an advantage it would be to him to have such a
+strong place wherein he and his people could seek security against their
+enemies, and which would act as a constant market place for his trade,
+and a storehouse for the Portuguese goods, Azambuja lost no time in
+building the fort with his ready-fashioned materials, and not only the
+fort, but a church as well. Both were dedicated to San Gorge da Mina,
+and a daily mass was instituted to be said therein for the repose of the
+soul of the great Prince Henry the Navigator, whose body had been laid
+to rest in November, 1460. Indeed, one cannot but be struck with the
+wealth of Portuguese information that we possess, regarding the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span>building of the castle at Elmina and by the good taste shown by the
+Portuguese throughout; for, besides establishing this mass&mdash;a mass that
+should be said in all Catholic churches on the West African Coast to
+this day in memory of the great man whose enterprise first opened up
+that great, though terrible region, to the civilised world&mdash;King João
+granted many franchises and privileges to people who would go and live
+at San Gorge da Mina, and aid in expanding the trade and civilisation of
+the surrounding region, which is as it should be; for people who go and
+live in West Africa for the benefit of their country deserve all these
+things, and money down as well. Having done these, the king evidently
+thought he deserved some honour himself, which he certainly did, so he
+called himself Lord of Guinea, and commanded that all subsequent
+discoverers should take possession of the places they discovered in a
+more substantial way than heretofore; for it had been their custom
+merely to erect wooden crosses or to carve on trees the motto of Prince
+Henry, <i>Talent de bien faire</i>. The monuments King João commanded should
+be erected in place of these transient emblems he designed himself; they
+were to be square pillars of stone six feet high, with his arms upon
+them, and two inscriptions on opposite sides, in Latin and Portuguese
+respectively, containing the exact date when the discovery of the place
+was made; by his order the cross that was to be on each was to be of
+iron and cramped into the pedestal. Major says the cross was to surmount
+the structure; but my Portuguese friends tell me it was to be in the
+pedestal, and also that the remains of these old monuments are still to
+be seen in their possessions; so we must presume that the outfit for an
+exploring expedition in King João&rsquo;s days included a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span> considerable cargo
+of ready-dressed stones and materials for monuments, and that from the
+quantity of discoveries these expeditions made, the sixteenth century
+Portuguese homeward bound must have been flying as light as the Cardiff
+bound collier of to-day.</p>
+
+<p>Still it is remarkable that with all the wealth of detail that we have
+of these Portuguese discoveries in the fifteenth century there is no
+mention of the French being on the coast before Pedro do Cintra reaches
+Sierra Leone and calls it by this name because of the thunder on the
+mountains roaring like a lion, and so on; but he says nothing of French
+factories ashore. Azambuja gives quantities of detail regarding the
+building of San Gorge da Mina, but never says a word about there being
+already at this place a French fort; yet Sieur Villault, Escuyer, Sieur
+de Bellfond,<a name="FNanchor_44_45" id="FNanchor_44_45"></a><a href="#Footnote_44_45" class="fnanchor">[44]</a> speaks of it with detail and certainty. Also M. Robbe
+says that one of the ships sent out by the association of merchants in
+1382 was called the <i>Virgin</i>, that she got as far as Kommenda, and
+thence to the place where Mina stands, and that next year they built at
+this place a strong house, in which they kept ten or twelve of their men
+to secure it; and they were so fortunate in this settlement that in 1387
+the colony was considerably enlarged, and did a good trade until 1413,
+when, owing to the wars in France, the store of these adventurers being
+exhausted, they were obliged to quit not only Mina, but their other
+settlements, as Sestro Paris, Cape Mount, Sierra Leone, and Cape Verde.</p>
+
+<p>Villault, who went to West Africa to stir up the French to renew the
+Guinea trade, openly laments the folly of the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span>French in ever having
+abandoned it owing to certain prejudices they had taken against the
+climate. His account of it is that about the year 1346 some adventurers
+of Dieppe, a port in Normandy, who as descendants of the Normans, were
+well used to long voyages, sailed along the coast of the negroes,
+Guinea, and settled several colonies in those parts, particularly about
+Cape Verde, in the Bay of Rio Fesco, and along the Melequeta coast. To
+the Bay, which extends from Cape Ledo to Cape Mount they gave the name
+of the Bay of France; that of Petit Dieppe to the village of Rio Corso
+(between Rio France and Rio Sestro); that of Sestro Paris to Grand
+Sestro, not far from Cape Palmas; while they carried to France great
+quantities of Guinea pepper and elephants&rsquo; tusks, whence the inhabitants
+of Dieppe set up the trade of turning ivory and making several useful
+works, as combs, for which they grew famous, and still continue so.
+Villault also speaks of &ldquo;a fair church still in being&rdquo; at Elmina,
+adorned with the arms of France, and also says that the chief battery to
+the sea is called by the natives La Battarie de France; and he speaks of
+the affection the natives have for France, and says they beat their
+drums in the French manner. Barbot also speaks of the affection of the
+natives for the French, and says that on his last voyage in 1682 the
+king sent him his second son as hostage, if he would come up to Great
+Kommondo, and treat about settling in his country, although he had
+refused the English and the Dutch. Barbot, however, does not agree with
+Villault about the prior rights of France to the discovery of Guinea; he
+thinks that if these facts be true it is strange that there is no
+mention of so important an enterprise in French historians, and
+concludes that it would be unjust to the Portuguese to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span> attribute the
+first discovery of this part of the world to the French. He also thinks
+it evidence against it that the Portuguese historians are silent on the
+point, and that Azambuja, when he began to build his castle at Elmina in
+1484, never mentions there being a castle there that had been built by
+Frenchmen in 1385. This, however, I think is not real evidence against
+the prior right of France. Take, for instance, the examples you get
+constantly when reading the books of Portuguese and Dutch writers on
+Guinea. You cannot fail to be struck how they ignore each other&rsquo;s
+existence as much as possible when credit is to be given; indeed were it
+not for the necessity they feel themselves under of abusing each other,
+I am sure they would do so altogether, but this they cannot resist. Here
+is a sample of what the Portuguese say of the Dutch: &ldquo;That the rebels
+(meaning the Dutch) gained more from the blacks by drunkenness, giving
+them wine and strong liquors, than by force of arms, and instructing
+them as ministers of the Devil in their wickedness. But that their
+dissolute lives and manners, joined to the advantage which the
+Portuguese at Mina, though inferior in numbers, had gained over them in
+some rencontres, had rendered them as contemptible among the blacks for
+their cowardice as want of virtue. That however the blacks, being a
+barbarous people, susceptible of first impressions, readily enough
+swallowed Calvin&rsquo;s poison (Protestantism), as well as took off the
+merchandise which the Dutch, taking advantage of the Portuguese
+indolence sold along the coast, where they were become absolute
+pirates.&rdquo; Then, again, the same author says, &ldquo;The quantity of
+merchandises brought by the Dutch and their cheapness, has made the
+barbarians greedy of them, although persons of quality and honour
+assured them that they would<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span> willingly pay double for Portuguese goods,
+as suspecting the Dutch to be of less value, buying them only for want
+of better.&rdquo;<a name="FNanchor_45_46" id="FNanchor_45_46"></a><a href="#Footnote_45_46" class="fnanchor">[45]</a> I could give you also some beautiful examples of what
+the Dutch say of the Portuguese and the English, and of what the French
+say of both, but I have not space; moreover, it is all very like what
+you can read to-day in things about rival nations and traders out in
+West Africa. I myself was commonly called by the Portuguese there a
+pirate because I was English, and that was the proper thing to call the
+English,&mdash;there was no personal incivility meant; and I quote the above
+passage just to impress on you that when you are reading about West
+African affairs, either ancient or modern, you must make allowance for
+this habit of speaking of rival nations&mdash;it is the climate. And although
+the Portuguese and the Dutch may choose to ignore the French early
+discoveries, yet they both showed a keen dread of the French from their
+being so popular with the natives, and did their utmost to oust them
+from the West Coast, which they succeeded in doing for a long period.
+And then again to this day, when a trader in West Africa finds a place
+where trade is good, he does not cable home to the newspapers about it.
+If it is necessary that any lying should be done about that place he
+does it himself; but what he strives most to do is to keep its existence
+totally unknown to other people; sooner or later some other trader comes
+along and discovers it, and then that place becomes unhealthy for one or
+the other of its discoverers,&mdash;and that is the climate again. Thus by
+the light of my own dispassionate observations in West Africa, I am
+quite ready to believe in that early French discovery; and I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span> quite
+agree with Villault about the quantity of words derived from the French
+that you will find to this day among the native tongues, and even in the
+trade English of the Coast, and in districts that have not been under
+French sway in the historical memory of man. One of these words is the
+word &ldquo;ju ju,&rdquo; always regarded by the natives as a foreign word. Their
+own word for religion, or more properly speaking for sacred beings, is
+&ldquo;bosum,&rdquo; or &ldquo;woka.&rdquo; They only say &ldquo;ju ju&rdquo; so that you white man may
+understand. The percentage, however, of Portuguese words in trade
+English is higher than that of French.</p>
+
+<p>After the fifteenth century it is not needful now to discuss in detail
+the subject of the French presence in West Africa; for both Dutch and
+Portuguese freely own to the presence there of the Frenchmen, and openly
+state that they were a source of worry and expense to them, owing to the
+way the natives preferred the French to either of themselves.</p>
+
+<p>The whole subject of the French conquests in Africa is an exceedingly
+interesting one, and one I would gladly linger over, for there is in it
+that fascination that always lies in a subject which contains an element
+of mystery. The element of mystery in this affair is, why France should
+have persisted so in the matter&mdash;why she should have spent blood and
+money on it to the extent she has, does, and I am sure will continue to
+do, without its ever having paid her in the past, or paying her now, or
+being likely to pay her in the future, as far as one can see. There are
+moments when it seems to me clear enough why she has done it all; but
+these moments only come when I am in an atmosphere reeking of La Gloire
+or La France&mdash;a thing I own I much enjoy; but when I am back in the cold
+intellectual greyness of commercial England, France&rsquo;s conduct<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span> in Africa
+certainly seems a little strange and curious, and far more inexplicable
+than it was when one was oneself personally risking one&rsquo;s life and
+ruining one&rsquo;s clothes, after a beetle in the African bush. I really
+think it is this sporting instinct in me that enables me to understand
+France in Africa at all; and which gives me a thrill of pleasure when I
+read in the newspapers of her iniquitous conduct in turning up, flag and
+baggage, in places where she had no legal right to be, or, worse still,
+being found in possession of bits of other nations&rsquo; hinterland when a
+representative of the other arrives there with the intention of
+discovering it, and to his disgust and alarm finds the most prominent
+object in the landscape is the blue to the mast, blood to the last, flag
+of France, with a fire-and-flames Frenchman under it, possessed of a
+pretty gift of writing communications to the real owner of that
+hinterland&mdash;a respectable representative of England or
+Germany&mdash;communications threatening him with immediate extinction, and
+calling him a filibuster and an assassin, and things like that. For the
+life of me I cannot help a &ldquo;Go it, Sall, and I&rsquo;ll hold your bonnit&rdquo;
+feeling towards the Frenchman. It is not my fault entirely. Gladly would
+I hold my own countryman&rsquo;s bonnet, only he won&rsquo;t go it if I do; so I
+have to content myself with the knowledge that England has made the West
+Coast pay, and that she certainly did beat the Dutch and Portuguese off
+the Coast in a commercial war. Still she will never beat France off in
+that way, because the French interest in Africa is not a commercial one.
+France can and will injure our commerce in West Africa, in all
+probability she will ultimately extinguish it, if things go on as they
+are going, while we cannot hit back and injure her commercial prosperity
+there because she has none to injure.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span> There is also another point of
+great interest, and that is the different effect produced by the
+governmental interference of the two nations in expansion of territory.
+That the expansion of trade, and spheres of influence are concurrent in
+this region is now recognised by our own Government;<a name="FNanchor_46_47" id="FNanchor_46_47"></a><a href="#Footnote_46_47" class="fnanchor">[46]</a> although the
+Government somewhat flippantly remarks &ldquo;possibly too late.&rdquo; It is, in my
+opinion, certainly too late as regards both Sierra Leone and the Gold
+Coast; but yet we see small evidence of our Government taking themselves
+seriously in the matter, or of their feeling a regret for having failed
+to avail themselves of the work done for England on the West Coast by
+some of the noblest men of our blood. I have often heard it said it was
+a sad thing for an Englishman to contemplate our West African
+possessions, save one, the Royal Niger; but I am sure it is a far sadder
+thing for an Englishwoman who is full of the pride of her race, and who
+well knows that that pride can only be justified by its men, to see on
+the one hand the splendid achievements of Mungo Park, the two Landers,
+the men who held the Gold Coast for England when the Government
+abandoned it after the battle of Katamansu, of Winwood Reade who, in the
+employ of Messrs. Swanzy, won the right to the Niger behind Sierra
+Leone, and many others; and on the other hand to see the map of West
+Africa to-day, which shows only too clearly that the English
+Government&rsquo;s last chance of saving the honour of England lies in their
+supporting the Royal Niger Company.</p>
+
+<p>It seems that as soon as a West Coast region falls under direct
+governmental control with us a process of petrification sets in, and a
+policy of international amiability and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span>Reubenism, for which we have
+Scriptural authority to expect nothing but failure. It was of course
+necessary for our Government to take charge in West Africa when the
+partitioning of that continent took place; but I fail to admire those
+men who at the Council Board of Europe lost for England what had been
+won for her by better, braver men. Still it is no use, in these weird
+un-Shakespearian times, for any one to use strong language, so I&rsquo;ll turn
+to the consideration of the advance made in West Africa by France; for
+any one can understand how a woman must admire the deeds of brave men
+and the backing up of those deeds by a brave Government.</p>
+
+<p>The earlier history of the French occupation of Africa is that of a
+series of commercial companies, who all came to a bad end. Of the
+Association of the Merchants of Dieppe and Rouen in the fourteenth
+century I have already spoken; and whatever may be the difficulty of
+proving its existence in 1364, there is, I believe, no one who doubts
+that it had an existence that terminated in 1664. The French authorities
+ascribe its fall to the wars in France that succeeded the death of
+Charles VI, 1392, and to the death of some of the principal merchants
+belonging to it; but &ldquo;the greatest cause of all was that many who had
+gotten vast riches began to be ashamed of the name of traders, although
+to that they owed their fortunes, and allying with the nobility set up
+as quality,&rdquo; and neglected business in the usual way, when this happens.
+The most flourishing settlements went into decay, and were abandoned all
+save one, on the Isle of Sanaga, or what Labat calls the Niger, the
+river we now call the Senegal.<a name="FNanchor_47_48" id="FNanchor_47_48"></a><a href="#Footnote_47_48" class="fnanchor">[47]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>This French settlement is to this day one of the main French ports in
+Africa, and it has remained in their possession, with the brief interval
+of falling into the hands of the English for a few months.</p>
+
+<p>The company that took over the enterprise of this Rouen and Dieppe
+Association in 1664 was called the Compagnie des Indes Occidentals; it
+paid for the stock and rights of the previous association the sum of
+150,000 livres, and it had tremendous ambitions, for not only did it buy
+up the West African enterprise, but also the rights of the lords
+proprietors in the isles of Martinique, Guadaloupe, St. Christopher,
+Santa Cruz, and Maria Galanta in the West Indies. This company came to a
+sad end when it had still thirty years of its charter to run; in 1673 it
+sold its remaining term of West African rights to a new company called
+d&rsquo;Afrique for 7500 livres. Its West Indian possessions the king seized
+in 1674, and united them with the Crown.</p>
+
+<p>Its successor, the Compagnie d&rsquo;Afrique, started with its thirty years&rsquo;
+charter, and all the great ambitions of its predecessor. The king gave
+it every assistance in the way of ships and troops to carry out its
+designs; and it availed itself of these, for finding its trade
+incommoded by the Dutch, who were then settled at Anguin and Goree in
+1677, it got the king to remove the Dutch nuisance from Goree by an
+expedition under Count d&rsquo;Estras, and in 1678, by an expedition of its
+own, under M. de Casse, it cleared the Dutch out of Anguin.</p>
+
+<p>This company also made many treaties with the native chiefs. In 1679, by
+means of treaty with the chiefs of Rio Fresco, nowadays barbarously
+spelt Rufisque, and Portadali, now Portindal, and Joal, whose name is
+still uninjured, it acquired rights over all the territory between <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span>Cape
+Verde and the Gambia;<a name="FNanchor_48_49" id="FNanchor_48_49"></a><a href="#Footnote_48_49" class="fnanchor">[48]</a> an exclusion from there of all other traders,
+and an exemption from all customs; and in addition to these enterprises
+it entered into a contract with the King of France to provide him with
+2,000 negroes per annum for his West Indian Islands, and as many more as
+he might require for use in the galleys. Shortly after this the
+Compagnie d&rsquo;Afrique expired in bankruptcy, compounding with its
+creditors at the rate of 5<i>s.</i> in the Ŗ, which I presume was paid mainly
+out of the 1,010,000 livres for which it sold its claim to its
+successors. The successors were a little difficult to find at first, for
+there seems to have been what one might call distaste for West African
+commercial enterprise among the French public just then. However, a
+company was got together to buy up its rights, accept its
+responsibilities and carry on business in 1681.</p>
+
+<p>In the matter of the company that succeeded the d&rsquo;Afrique, confusion is
+added to catastrophe, owing to the then Minister of State, M. Seignelay,
+for some private end, having divided up the funds and created two
+separate companies,&mdash;one to have the trade from Cape Blanco and the
+Gambia&mdash;the Compagnie du Senegal; the other to hold the rest of the
+Guinea trade to the Cape of Good Hope, the Compagnie du Guinea. This
+arrangement, of course, left the Senegal Company with all the
+responsibility of the compagnie d&rsquo;Afrique, and without sufficient funds
+to deal with them; and the Compagnie du Senegal complained, when, in
+1694, it found its affairs in much confusion, throwing the blame on the
+Government; but, says Astley, &ldquo;the great are seldom without excuses for
+what they do,&rdquo; and the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span>division of the concession was persisted in, on
+the grounds that when the company that succeeded d&rsquo;Afrique was intact it
+failed to fulfil the Government contract of sending 2,000 negroes
+annually to the West Indies; and also that it had not imported as much
+gold from Africa as it might have done. Against this the Directors
+remonstrated loudly, saying that, during the two years and a half during
+which they had been responsible for exporting negroes to the West
+Indies, they had supplied 4,560 negroes, that the register of the Mint
+proved they had sent home in three years 400 marks of gold, and that it
+had cost them 400,000 livres to re-establish the trade of the Compagnie
+d&rsquo;Afrique, for which they had already paid more than it was worth. All
+they got by these complaints was an extension of their trade rights from
+Gambia to Sierra Leone and a confirmation of their monopoly in exporting
+negroes to the French West Indies, and of their rights to Anguin and
+Goree, that is to say, a promise of Government assistance if those Dutch
+should come and attempt to reinstate themselves to the incommodation of
+French commerce.</p>
+
+<p>All this however did not avail to make the Compagnie du Senegal
+flourish, so in 1694 it sold its remaining seventeen years of rights for
+300,000 livres, to Sieur d&rsquo;Apougny, one of the old Directors; and this
+enterprising man secured the assistance of eighteen new shareholders,
+and obtained from the Crown a new charter, and started afresh under the
+name of the &ldquo;Compagnie du Senegal, Cap Nord et Coté d&rsquo;Afrique.&rdquo; It did
+not prosper; nevertheless it may be regarded as having produced the
+founder of modern Senegal, for it sent out to attend to its affairs,
+when things were in a grievous mess, one of the greatest<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span> men who have
+ever gone from Europe to Africa&mdash;namely, Sieur Brüe.</p>
+
+<p>The name of this company of Sieur d&rsquo;Apougny was d&rsquo;Afrique; and the usual
+thing happened to it in 1709, when, for 250,000 livres, it made over its
+rights to a set of Rouen merchants, reserving, however, to itself the
+right of carrying on certain branches of the trade for which it held
+Government contracts; failing to carry these out they were taken from it
+and handed over to the company of Rouen merchants, who succumbed to
+their liabilities in 1717. Their rights were then bought up, for
+1,600,000 livres, by the already established Mississippi Company of
+Paris&mdash;a company which survived until 1758.</p>
+
+<p>In 1758 the English again captured St. Louis, the French main post in
+Senegal. In 1779 the French recaptured it, and it was ceded to them by
+England officially in the treaty of 1783. This was merely the usual kind
+of international amenity prevalent on the West Coast in those days.
+Dutch, French, English, Danes, Portuguese, and Courlanders would
+gallantly seize each other&rsquo;s property out there, while their respective
+Governments at home, if the matter were brought before their notice, and
+it was apparently worth their while, disowned all knowledge of their
+representatives&rsquo; villainies and returned the booty to the prior owner on
+paper. The aggrieved Power then engaged in the difficult undertaking of
+regaining possession; the said original villain knowing little and
+caring less about the arrangements made on the point by his home
+Government. But just at this period England dealt French trade a
+frightful blow. The whole of her iniquity took the form of one John Law,
+a native of Edinburgh,<a name="FNanchor_49_50" id="FNanchor_49_50"></a><a href="#Footnote_49_50" class="fnanchor">[49]</a> who raised himself to the dignity of
+comptroller-general<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span> of the finance of France by a specious scheme for a
+bank, an East India Company and a Mississippi Company, by the profits of
+which the French national debt was to be paid off, a thing then in
+urgent need of doing, and every one connected with the affair was to
+make their fortunes, an undertaking always in need of doing in any
+country. The French Government gave him every encouragement, and in 1716
+he opened the bank; in 1719 the shares of that bank were worth more than
+eighty times the current specie in France; in 1720 that bank burst,
+spreading commercial ruin. To this may be ascribed the period of
+paralysis in the Senegal trade from 1719. The Compagnie de Senegal had
+handed over their interest to the Mississippi Company involved in John
+Law&rsquo;s bank scheme. After this, up to 1817, France like F. M. the Duke of
+Wellington anent playing upon the harp, &ldquo;had other things to do&rdquo; than
+attend to West Africa. During the Napoleonic Wars England took all the
+French possessions in West Africa, but by the treaty of Paris of 1814
+she handed back those in Senegal, save the Gambia. The French <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span>vessel
+sent out to take over the territory was the ill-starred and
+ill-navigated <i>Méduse</i>. Owing to her wreck it was not until 1817 that
+France replaced officially her standard on this Coast. On the 25th of
+January of that year, and represented by Colonel Smaltz, she again
+entered into possession of Goree and St. Louis in the mouth of the
+Senegal, which was practically all she had, and that was in a very
+unsatisfactory state. Colonel Smaltz, in 1819, had to come to an
+agreement with the Oulof chief of the St Louis district to pay him a
+subsidy, but a mere catalogue of the wars between the French and the
+Oulofs is not necessary here; they were mutually unsatisfactory until
+there enters on the scene that second great founder of the French power
+in Africa, General Faidherbe, in 1854. Faidherbe is indeed the founder;
+but had it not been for Sieur Brüe and his travels far into the
+interior, and the evidence he collected regarding the riches therein,
+and of the general value of the country, it is not likely that, as
+things were in 1854, France would have troubled herself so much about
+extending her power in Senegal.</p>
+
+<p>Faidherbe was also one of those men who get possessed by a belief in the
+future of West Africa, regardless of any state of dilapidation they may
+find it in, and who have the power of infusing their enthusiasm into the
+minds of others; and he roused France to the importance of Senegal,
+saying prophetically, &ldquo;Our possession on the West Coast of Africa is
+possibly the one of all our colonies that has before it the greatest
+future, and it deserves the whole sympathy and attention of the Empire.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>These were words more likely to inspire France or any other reasonable
+Power with a desire to give Senegal attention, than those used by the
+previous French visitor<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span> there, M. Sanguin, in 1785, who, speaking of
+the island of St. Louis, says it consists entirely of burning sands on
+whose barren surface you sometimes meet with scattered flints thrown out
+among their ballast by ships, and the ruins of buildings formerly
+erected by Europeans; but he remarks it is not surprising the sands are
+barren, for the air is so strongly impregnated with salt, which pervades
+everything and consumes even iron in a very short space of time. The
+heat he reports unpleasant, and rendered thus more so by the reflection
+from the sand. If the island were not all it might be, one might still
+hope for better things ashore on the mainland, but not according to M.
+Sanguin. The mainland is covered with sand and overrun with mangles, not
+the sort, you understand, that vulgar little English boys used to state
+their mothers had sold and invested the money in a barrel organ, but
+what we now call mangroves; then, mentioning that the St. Louis water
+supply was the cause of most of those maladies which carry off the
+Europeans so rapidly, that at the end of every three years the colony
+has a fresh set of inhabitants, M. Sanguin discourses on the charms of
+West African night entertainments in a most feeling and convincing way,
+stating that there was an infinity of gnats called mosquitoes, which
+exist in incredible quantities. He does not mind them himself, oh dear
+no! being a sort of savage, he says, totally indifferent to the
+impression he may create in the fair sex, so that, if you please, he
+smears himself over with butter, which preserves him from the
+mosquitoes&rsquo; impertinent stings. How he came by a sufficiency of butter
+for this purpose I won&rsquo;t pretend to know; but he knew mosquitoes, for
+impertinent is a perfect word for them. M. Sanguin, however, was not the
+sort of man,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span> with all his ability and enterprise, to advertise Senegal
+successfully to France. Whatever Frenchman would care to go to a land
+where he needs must be sufficiently indifferent to the fair sex to smear
+himself with butter! Dire and awful dangers and miscellaneous horrors,
+even to being carried off by maladies among mangles in an atmosphere
+stiff with mosquitoes, but not that!</p>
+
+<p>Now Faidherbe was different. Remember to the honour of the man he
+started with the above-described environment, but he took the grand tone
+and did not dwell on local imperfections; the burning sands of Senegal
+he mentioned, as all who know them are, by a natural constraint, forced,
+as Azurara would say, to do, but he said our intentions are pure and
+noble, our cause is just, the future cannot fail us;<a name="FNanchor_50_51" id="FNanchor_50_51"></a><a href="#Footnote_50_51" class="fnanchor">[50]</a> and with such
+words, to his credit and to the credit of La France, he spoke to her
+heart; and he spoke truly, for with all its failures, with all the
+fearful loss of the lives of Frenchmen, Senegal is a grand thing, and it
+is a great thing for France, for from it has risen her masterdom over
+the Western Soudan&mdash;a work also inaugurated by Faidherbe, through his
+support of Lieutenant Maze, who reached the Niger. Practical in his
+work, Faidherbe was also&mdash;by rebuilding the fort at Medina&mdash;the
+annexation of the Oulof country (1856); the institution of a battalion
+of native Tirailleurs (1857); the telegraph line between St. Louis and
+Goree (1862); the construction of the harbour at Darkar and the erection
+of a first-class lighthouse at Cape Verd (1864); and the annexation of
+the kingdom of Cayore (1865). A grand record! and one that would be
+grander for France were it not for the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span>mismanagement that followed
+Faidherbe&rsquo;s rule in commercial and financial matters.</p>
+
+<p>The want of financial success in her enterprise in West Africa is a
+matter that has constantly irritated France. She is continually saying:
+&ldquo;English possessions on that Coast pay, why should not mine?&rdquo; It is not
+my business to obtrude on her an answer, I merely dwell on the subject
+because I clearly see there are creeping nowadays into our own methods
+of managing Africa, those very same causes of financial failure that
+have afflicted her, namely, too high tariffs, too exaggerated views of
+the immediate profits to be got from those regions, and certain unfair
+methods of dealing with natives.</p>
+
+<p>In attempting, however, to account for the trade from the French
+possessions in West Africa being proportionately so small to the immense
+area of country, the make of the country and its native inhabitants must
+be taken into consideration. Enormous districts of the French
+possessions are, to put it mildly, not fertile, and capable of producing
+in the way of a marketable commodity only gum, which is gathered from
+the stems of the acacia horrida. It is an excellent gum, and there is
+plenty of this acacia, and other gum-yielding acacias, but pickers are
+not so plentiful, particularly now French authorities object to native
+enterprise taking the form of raiding districts for slaves to employ in
+the industry. Other enormous districts, however, are as fertile as need
+be, and densely forested with forests rich in magnificent timber and
+rubber wealth. The inhabitants, a most important factor in the
+prosperity or otherwise, of West African regions, are varied, but
+roughly speaking, we may say France possesses the whole<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span> of the tawny
+Moors, and tawny Moors have their good points and their bad. Their good
+point, from our present point of view, is their commercial enterprise.
+From the earliest historical account we have of them to the present day,
+it has been their habit to suck the trade out of the rich and fertile
+districts, carry it across the desert, and trade it with the white
+Moors, who, in their turn, carried it to the Mediterranean and Red Sea
+ports. The opening of the West Coast seaboard trade, inaugurated by the
+Portuguese, has acted as a commercial loss to the tawny Moors during the
+past 400 years, and must be held, in a measure, accountable for the
+decay of the great towns of Timbuctoo, Jenne, Mele, and so on, though
+only in a measure, for herein comes the bad point of the inhabitants of
+the Western Soudan, from our point of view, namely, their devotion to
+religious differences and politics, which prevents their attending to
+business. As this state of internecine war came on about the same period
+as the opening to the black Moors and negroes of a market direct with
+European traders in the Bight of Benin, it hurried the tawny Moors to
+commercial decay. Timbuctoo never recovered the blow dealt her by the
+Moorish conquest in 1591. At the breaking up of the Empire of Askia the
+Great, revolt and war raged through the region, Jenne revolted in the
+west, an example followed by the Touaregs Fulah and Malinkase tribes.
+Both north and south were thrown into confusion, and Timbuctoo, their
+intermediary, finding her commerce injured, rebelled in her turn. She
+was conquered and brutally repressed by the Moorish conquerors in 1594.
+A terrible dearth provoked by a lack of rain visited the town, and her
+inhabitants were reduced to eating the corpses<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span> of animals, and even of
+men. This was followed by the pestilence of 1618,<a name="FNanchor_51_52" id="FNanchor_51_52"></a><a href="#Footnote_51_52" class="fnanchor">[51]</a> but through this
+arose any quantity of wars and upheavals of political authority among
+the tawny Moors in the early days of European intercourse with the West
+African Coast. They assumed a more acute, religious form in our own
+century, or to be more accurate just at the end of the eighteenth, when
+Shazkh Utham Danfodio arose among the Fulahs as a religious reformer,
+and a warrior missionary. He was a great man at both, but as a disturber
+of traffic still greater, a thing that cannot be urged to so great an
+extent against the other great Muslam missionary Umaru l&rsquo;Haji. Still his
+gathering together an army of 20,000 men in 1854-55, and going about
+with them on a series of proselytizing expeditions against any tribe in
+the Upper Niger and Senegal region he found to be in an unconverted
+state, was little better than a nuisance to the French authorities at
+that time. Danfodio&rsquo;s affairs have fallen into the hands of England to
+arrange, and very efficiently her great representative in West Africa,
+the Royal Niger Company, has arranged them. But for our Danfodio and his
+consequences, France has had twenty, and she has dealt with them both
+gallantly and patiently. But there will always be, as far as one can
+see, trouble for France with her tawny Moors, now that the sources of
+their support are cut off from them by many of the districts they once
+drew their trade from&mdash;the sea-board districts of the Benin Bight, like
+Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast and Lagos, in the English Niger&mdash;being in
+the hands of a nation whose commercial instincts enable it to see the
+benefits of lower tariffs than France affects. Even were our tariffs to
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span>be raised to-morrow, the trade would again begin to drain back into the
+hands of its old owners, the tawny Moors, for the Western Soudan is
+being pacified by France. If some way is not devised of providing the
+tawny Moors with trade sufficient to keep them, things must go badly
+there, owing to the unfertility of the greater part of their country and
+the increase of the population arising from the pacification of the
+Western Soudan, which France is effecting. I will dwell no longer on
+this sketch of the history of the advance of France in Western Africa.
+We in England cannot judge it fairly. Nationally, her honour there is
+our disgrace; commercially, her presence is our ruin.</p>
+
+<p>Two things only stand out from these generalisations. The Royal Niger
+Company shows how great England can be when she is incarnate in a great
+man, for the Royal Niger Company is so far Sir George Taubman-Goldie.
+The other thing that stands out unstained by comatose indifference to
+the worth of West Africa to England is her Commerce as represented by
+her West Coast traders, who have held on to the Coast since the
+sixteenth century with a bulldog grip, facing death and danger, fair
+weather and foul. Fine things both these two things are, but they do not
+understand each other; they would certainly not understand me regarding
+their affairs were I to talk from June to January, so I won&rsquo;t attempt
+to, but speak to the general public, who so far have understood neither
+Sir George Goldie, nor the West Coast trader, nor for the matter of that
+their mutual foe France, and I beg to say that France has not been so
+destructive an enemy to England there as England&rsquo;s own folly has been as
+incarnate in the parliamentary resolution of 1865; that the achievements
+of France in exploration in the West<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span>ern Soudan make one of the grandest
+pages of all European efforts in Africa; that the influence of France
+over the natives has been, is, and, I believe, will remain good. &ldquo;Our
+intentions are pure and noble, our cause is just, the future cannot fail
+us,&rdquo; said Faidherbe. So far as the natives are concerned, this has been
+the policy of France in Western Africa. So far as diplomatic relations
+with ourselves, humanly speaking, it has not; but diplomacy is
+diplomacy, and the amount of probity&mdash;justice&mdash;in diplomacy is a thing
+that would not at any period cover a threepenny-bit. It is a form of war
+that shows no blood, but which has not in it those things which sanctify
+red war, honour and chivalry. Nevertheless, diplomacy is an essential
+thing in this world; it does good work, it saves life, it increases
+prosperity, it advances the cause of religion and knowledge, and
+therefore the World must not be hard on it for its being&mdash;what it is.
+Personally, I prefer contemplating other things, and so I turn to
+Commerce.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 650px;" id="IMG299A"><span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span>
+<img src="images/ill-299a.jpg" width="650" height="446" alt="St. Paul do Loanda" title="St. Paul do Loanda" />
+<p><span class="facingleft">[<i>To face page 281.</i></span></p>
+<span class="caption"><span class="smcap">St. Paul do Loanda.</span></span>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_39_40" id="Footnote_39_40"></a><a href="#FNanchor_39_40"><span class="label">[39]</span></a> See the first edition of <i>Henry the Navigator</i>, by R. H.
+Major, who, with the enormous wealth of his knowledge, vigorously
+defends the claim to Portuguese priority; although I do not quite agree
+with him on the value of the absence of evidence in disproving the
+French claim I am deeply indebted to him for the mention of references
+on the point.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_40_41" id="Footnote_40_41"></a><a href="#FNanchor_40_41"><span class="label">[40]</span></a> This is an interesting case of the alteration that has
+taken place in Portuguese place names in West Africa. Angra des Ruives
+in English is Gurnard Bay, and this name was given to it by the
+Portuguese because of the quantity of this fish found there. In the
+<i>West African Pilot</i> you find the place called Garnet Bay, and the
+<i>Pilot</i> says &ldquo;fish are abundant&rdquo;; but as it does not say that garnets
+abound there, nor that it was discovered by Lord Wolseley, I think there
+is reason to believe that its name is Gurnard Bay, in translation of
+Angra des Ruives.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_41_42" id="Footnote_41_42"></a><a href="#FNanchor_41_42"><span class="label">[41]</span></a> <i>Prince Henry the Navigator</i>; Major.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_42_43" id="Footnote_42_43"></a><a href="#FNanchor_42_43"><span class="label">[42]</span></a> Labat, <i>Afrique occidentale</i>, vol. iv. p. 8. 1724.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_43_44" id="Footnote_43_44"></a><a href="#FNanchor_43_44"><span class="label">[43]</span></a> Equal to nearly Ŗ30 English per annum.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_44_45" id="Footnote_44_45"></a><a href="#FNanchor_44_45"><span class="label">[44]</span></a> <i>A Relation of the Coasts of Africa called Guinea
+collected by Sieur Villault, Escuyer, Sieur de Bellfond, in the years
+1666-1667.</i> London: John Starkey, 1670.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_45_46" id="Footnote_45_46"></a><a href="#FNanchor_45_46"><span class="label">[45]</span></a> Vas Conselo&rsquo;s <i>Life of King João</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_46_47" id="Footnote_46_47"></a><a href="#FNanchor_46_47"><span class="label">[46]</span></a> Duke of Devonshire&rsquo;s speech at Liverpool, June, 1897.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_47_48" id="Footnote_47_48"></a><a href="#FNanchor_47_48"><span class="label">[47]</span></a> Labat. At present the Isle of St. Louis, and what is
+called the Niger, is the river Sanaga&mdash;or Senega and Senegal, as the
+French corrupt it.&mdash;Astley, 1745.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_48_49" id="Footnote_48_49"></a><a href="#FNanchor_48_49"><span class="label">[48]</span></a> An extent of thirty leagues and six leagues within the
+land.&mdash;Labat, p. 19.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_49_50" id="Footnote_49_50"></a><a href="#FNanchor_49_50"><span class="label">[49]</span></a> John Law was the eldest son of an Edinburgh goldsmith,
+born about 1681. &ldquo;Bred to no business, but possessed of great abilities,
+and a fertile invention,&rdquo; he, when very young, recommended himself to
+the King&rsquo;s ministers in Scotland to arrange fiscal matters, then in some
+confusion from the union of the Kingdoms. His scheme, however, was not
+adopted. Great at giving other people good advice on money matters, he
+failed to manage his own. After a gay career in Edinburgh, and gaining
+himself the title of &ldquo;Beau Law,&rdquo; he got mixed up in a duel, and fled to
+the Continent. He was banished from Venice and Genoa for draining the
+youth of those cities of their money, and wandered about Italy, living
+on gaming and singular bets and wagers. He proposed his scheme to the
+Duke of Savoy, who saw by this scheme he could soon, by deceiving his
+subjects in this manner, get the whole of the money of the kingdom into
+his possession; but as Law could not explain what would happen then, he
+was repulsed, and proceeded to Paris, where, under the patronage of the
+Duc d&rsquo;Orleans, they found favour with Louis XIV. When his crash came he
+was exiled, and died in Venice in 1729.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_50_51" id="Footnote_50_51"></a><a href="#FNanchor_50_51"><span class="label">[50]</span></a> <i>Notice de Senegal</i>, Paris, 1859, p. 99.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_51_52" id="Footnote_51_52"></a><a href="#FNanchor_51_52"><span class="label">[51]</span></a> For an interesting account of Timbuctoo and its history,
+see <i>Timbuctoo the Mysterious</i>, by M. Felix Dubois. 1897.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XII" id="CHAPTER_XII"></a>CHAPTER XII</h2>
+
+<h2>COMMERCE IN WEST AFRICA</h2>
+
+<p class="pblock">Concerning the reasons that deter this writer from entering here on
+a general history of the English, Dutch and Portuguese in Western
+Africa; to which is added some attempt to survey the present state
+of affairs there.</p>
+
+<p>Lack of space, not lack of interest, prevents me from sketching the
+careers of other nations in West Africa even so poorly as I have that of
+France; but the truth is, the material for the history of the other
+nations is so enormous that in order to present it with anything
+approaching clearness or fairness, folio volumes are required. I have a
+theory of the proper way to write the history of all European West
+African enterprises&mdash;a theory I shall endeavour to put into practice if
+I am ever cast ashore on an uninhabited island, with a suitable library,
+a hogshead of ink, a few tons of writing paper, accompanied by pens, and
+at least a quarter of a century of uninterrupted calm at my disposal.
+The theory itself is short, so I can state it here. Pay no attention to
+the nasty things they say about each other&mdash;it&rsquo;s the climate.</p>
+
+<p>The history of the Portuguese occupation of West Africa is the great
+one. The material for its early geographico-historical side is in our
+hands, owing to the ability of Mr. Major and his devotion to the memory
+of Prince Henry<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span> the Navigator. But the history of Portugal in West
+Africa from the days of the Navigator onwards wants writing. Sir A. B.
+Ellis fortunately gives us, in his history of the Gold Coast, an account
+of the part that Portugal played there, but, except for this region, you
+must hunt it up second-hand in the references made to it by prejudiced
+rivals, or in scattered Portuguese books and manuscripts. While as for
+the commercial history of Portugal in West Africa, although it has been
+an unbroken one from the fifteenth century to our own time, it has so
+far not been written at all. This seems to me all the more deplorable,
+because it is full of important lessons for those nations who are now
+attempting to exploit the regions she first brought them into contact
+with.</p>
+
+<p>It must be noted, for one thing, that Portugal was the first European
+nation to tackle Africa in what is now by many people considered the
+legitimate way, namely, by direct governmental control. Other nations
+left West African affairs in the hands of companies of merchant
+adventurers and private individuals for centuries. Nevertheless,
+Portugal is nowadays unpopular among the other nations engaged in
+exploiting Africa. I shrink from embroiling myself in controversy, but I
+am bound to say I think she has become unpopular on account of
+prejudice, coupled with that strange moral phenomenon that makes men
+desirous of persuading themselves that a person they have treated badly
+deserves such treatment.</p>
+
+<p>The more powerful European nations have dealt scandalously, from a moral
+standpoint, with Portugal in Africa. This one could regard calmly, it
+being in the nature of powerful nations to do this sort of thing, were
+it not for the airs they give themselves; and to hear them<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span> talking
+nowadays about Portugal&rsquo;s part in African history is enough to make the
+uninitiated imagine that the sweet innocent things have no past of their
+own, and never knew the price of black ivory.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, but that is all forgiven and forgotten, and Portugal is just what
+she always was at heart,&rdquo; you say. Well, Portugal at heart was never
+bad, as nations go. Her slaving record is, in the point of humanity to
+the cargo, the best that any European nation can show who has a slaving
+West African past at all.</p>
+
+<p>The thing she is taxed with nowadays mainly is that she does not
+develope her possessions. Developing African possessions is the fashion,
+so naturally Portugal, who persists on going about in crinoline and poke
+bonnet style, gets jeered at. This is right in a way, so long as we
+don&rsquo;t call it the high moral view and add to it libel. I own that my own
+knowledge of Portuguese possessions forces me to regard those
+possessions as in an unsatisfactory state from an imperialistic
+standpoint; a grant made by the home government for improvements, say
+roads, has a tendency to&mdash;well, not appear as a road. Some one&mdash;several
+people possibly&mdash;is all the better and happier for that grant; and after
+all if you do not pay your officials regularly, and they are not
+Englishmen, you must take the consequences. Even when an honest
+endeavour is made to tidy things up, a certain malign influence seems to
+dodge its footsteps in a Portuguese possession. For example, when I was
+out in &rsquo;93, Portugal had been severely reminded by other nations that
+this was the Nineteenth Century. Bom Dios&mdash;Bother it, I suppose it
+is&mdash;says Portugal&mdash;must do something to smarten up dear Angola. She is
+over 400 now, and hasn&rsquo;t had any new frocks since<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span> the slave trade days;
+perhaps they are right, and it&rsquo;s time this dear child came out. So
+Loanda, Angola, was ordered street lamps&mdash;stylish things street
+lamps!&mdash;a telephone, and a water supply. Now, say what you please,
+Loanda is not only the finest, but the only, city in West Africa.
+&ldquo;Lagos! you ejaculate&mdash;you don&rsquo;t know Lagos.&rdquo; I know I have not been
+ashore there; nevertheless I have contemplated that spot from the point
+of view of Lagos bar for more than thirty solid hours, to say nothing of
+seeing photographs of its details galore, and I repeat the above
+statement. Yet for all that, Loanda had no laid-on water supply nor
+public street lamps until she was well on in her 400th year, which was
+just before I first met her. During the past she had had her water
+brought daily in boats from the Bengo River, and for street lighting she
+relied on the private enterprise of her citizens.<a name="FNanchor_52_53" id="FNanchor_52_53"></a><a href="#Footnote_52_53" class="fnanchor">[52]</a> The reports given
+me on these endeavours to develope were as follows. As for the water in
+its laid-on state, it was held by the more aristocratic citizens to be
+unduly expensive (500 reis per cubic metre), and they grumbled. The
+general public, though holding the same opinion, did not confine their
+attention to grumbling. Stand-pipes had been put up in suitable places
+and an official told off to each stand-pipe to make a charge for water
+drawn. Water in West Africa is woman&rsquo;s palaver, and you may say what you
+please about the down-troddenness of African ladies elsewhere, but I
+maintain that the West African lady in the matter of getting what she
+wants is no discredit to the rest of the sex, black, white, or yellow.
+In this case the ladies wanted that water, but did not go so far as
+wanting <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span>to pay for it. In the history given to me it was evident to
+an unprejudiced observer that they first tried kindness to the guardian
+officials of the stand-pipes, but these men were of the St. Anthony
+breed, and it was no good. Checked, but not foiled, in their admirable
+purpose of domestic economy, those dear ladies laid about in their minds
+for other methods, and finally arranged that one of a party visiting a
+stand-pipe every morning should devote her time to scratching the
+official while the rest filled their water pots and hers. This ingenious
+plan was in working order when I was in Loanda, but since leaving it I
+do not know what modification it may have undergone, only I am sure that
+ultimately those ladies will win, for the African lady&mdash;at any rate the
+West coast variety&mdash;is irresistible; as Livingstone truly remarked,
+&ldquo;they are worse than the men.&rdquo; In the street lamp matter I grieve to say
+that the story as given to me does not leave my own country blameless.
+Portugal ordered for Loanda a set of street lamps from England. She sent
+out a set of old gas lamp standards. There being no gas in Loanda there
+was a pause until oil lamps to put on them came out. They ultimately
+arrived, but the P.W.D. failed to provide a ladder for the lamplighter.
+Hence that worthy had to swarm each individual lamp-post, a time-taking
+performance which normally landed him in the arms of Aurora before
+Loanda was lit for the night; but however this may be, I must own that
+Loanda&rsquo;s lights at night are a truly lovely sight, and its P.W.D.&rsquo;s
+chimney a credit to the whole West Coast of Africa, to say nothing of
+its Observatory and the weather reports it so faithfully issues, so
+faithfully and so scientifically that it makes one deeply regret that
+Loanda has not got a climate that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span> deserves them, but only one she might
+write down as dry and have done with it.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 650px;" id="IMG303A1"><span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span>
+<img src="images/ill-303a1.jpg" width="650" height="440" alt="Cliffs at Loanda" title="Cliffs at Loanda" />
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 650px;" id="IMG303A2"><span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span>
+<img src="images/ill-303a2.jpg" width="650" height="347" alt="Cliffs at Loanda" title="Cliffs at Loanda" />
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 650px;" id="IMG303A3"><span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span>
+<img src="images/ill-303a3.jpg" width="650" height="442" alt="Cliffs at Loanda" title="Cliffs at Loanda" />
+<p><span class="facingleft">[<i>To face page 285.</i></span></p>
+<span class="caption"><span class="smcap">Cliffs at Loanda</span></span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The present position of the Angola trade is interesting, instructive,
+and typical. I only venture to speak on it in so far as I can appeal to
+the statements of Mr. Nightingale, who is an excellent authority, having
+been long resident in Angola, and heir to the traditions of English
+enterprise there, so ably represented by the firm of Newton, Carnegie
+and Co. The trade of Ka Kongo, the dependent province on Angola, I need
+not mention, because its trade is conditioned by that of its neighbours
+Congo Franįais and the Congo Belge.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 650px;" id="IMG305A"><span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span>
+<img src="images/ill-305a.jpg" width="650" height="492" alt="Dondo Angola" title="Dondo Angola" />
+<p><span class="facingleft">[<i>To face page 287.</i></span></p>
+<span class="caption"><span class="smcap">Dondo Angola.</span></span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The interesting point&mdash;painfully interesting&mdash;is the supplanting of
+English manufactures, and the way in which the English shipping
+interest<a name="FNanchor_53_54" id="FNanchor_53_54"></a><a href="#Footnote_53_54" class="fnanchor">[53]</a> at present suffers from the differential duties favouring
+the Portuguese line, the Empreza Nacional de Navigacão a Vapor. This
+line, on which I have had the honour of travelling, and consuming in
+lieu of other foods enough oil and olives for the rest of my natural
+life, is an admirable line. It shows a calm acquiescence in the
+ordinances of Fate, a general courteous gentleness, combined with strong
+smells and the strain of stringed instruments, not to be found on other
+West Coast boats. It runs two steamers a month (6th and 23rd) from
+Lisbon, and they call at Madeira, St. Vincent, Santiago, Principe and
+San Thome Islands, Kabinda, San Antonio (Kongo), Ambriz, Loanda,
+Ambrizzette, Novo Redondo, Benguella, Mossamedes and Port Alexander,
+every<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span> alternate steamer calling at Liverpool. The other steamboat
+lines that visit Loanda are the African and British-African of
+Liverpool, which run monthly, in connection with the other South-west
+African ports; and the Woermann line from Hamburg. The French
+Chargeurs-Reunis started a line of steamers from Havre <i>via</i> Lisbon to
+Loanda, Madagascar, Delagoa Bay, touching at Capetown, when so disposed,
+but this line has discontinued calling in on Loanda. The other
+navigation for Angola is done by the Rio Quanza Company, which runs two
+steamers up that river as far as Dondo; but this industry, Dondo
+included, Mr. Nightingale states to be in a parlous state since the
+extension of the Royal Trans-African Railway Company<a name="FNanchor_54_55" id="FNanchor_54_55"></a><a href="#Footnote_54_55" class="fnanchor">[54]</a> to Cazengo, &ldquo;as
+all the coffee which previously came <i>via</i> Dondo by means of carriers,
+now comes by rail, the town of Dondo is almost deserted; the house
+property which a few years ago was valued at Ŗ200,000 sterling, to-day
+would not realise Ŗ10,000.&rdquo; I may remark in this connection, however,
+not to raise the British railway-material makers&rsquo; feelings unduly, that
+all this railway&rsquo;s rolling stock and material is Belgian in origin. This
+seems to be the fate of African railways. I am told it is on account,
+for one thing, of the way in which the boilers of the English
+locomotives are set in, namely, too stiffly, whereby they suffer more
+over rough roads than the more loosely hung together foreign-made
+locomotives; and, for another, that English-made rolling stock is too
+heavy for rough roads, and that roads under the conditions in Africa
+cannot be otherwise than rough, &amp;c. It is not, however, Belgian stuff
+alone <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span>that is competing and ousting our own from the markets of Angola.
+American machinery, owing to the personal enterprise of several American
+engineering firms, is supplying steam-engines and centrifugal pumps for
+working salt at Cucuaco, and machinery for dealing with sugar-cane. Mr.
+Nightingale says the cultivation of the sugar-cane is rapidly extending,
+for the sole purpose of making rum. The ambition of every small trader,
+after he has put a few hundreds of milreis together, is to become a
+fazendeiro (planter) and make rum, for which there is ever a ready sale.
+But regarding the machinery, Mr. Nightingale says: &ldquo;Up to the present
+time no British firm has sent out a representative to this province.
+There is a fair demand for cane-crushing mills, steam engines and
+turbines. A representative of an American firm is out here for the third
+time within four years, and has done good business; and there is no
+reason why the British manufacturers should not do as well. The American
+machinery is inferior to British makes, and cheaper; but it sells well,
+which is the principal thing.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 650px;" id="IMG307A1"><span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span>
+<img src="images/ill-307a1.jpg" width="650" height="468" alt="Trading Stores" title="Trading Stores" />
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 650px;" id="IMG307A2"><span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span>
+<img src="images/ill-307a2.jpg" width="650" height="508" alt="Trading Stores" title="Trading Stores" />
+<p><span class="facingleft">[<i>To face page 289.</i></span></p>
+<span class="caption"><span class="smcap">Trading Stores.</span></span>
+</div>
+
+<p>It is the same story throughout the Angola trade. No English matches
+come into its market. The Companhia de Mossemedes, which is only
+nominally Portuguese, and is worked by German capital, has obtained from
+the Government an enormous tract of country stretching to the Zambesi,
+with rights to cure fish and explore mines. Cartridges made in Holland,
+and an iron pier made in Belgium, an extinct trade in soap and a failing
+one in Manchester goods,<a name="FNanchor_55_56" id="FNanchor_55_56"></a><a href="#Footnote_55_56" class="fnanchor">[55]</a> and gunpowder, are all sad items in Mr.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span>
+Nightingale&rsquo;s lament. Small matters in themselves, you may think, but
+straws show which way the wind blows, and it blows against England&rsquo;s
+trade in every part of Africa not under England&rsquo;s flag. It would not,
+however, be fair to put down to differential tariffs alone our failing
+trade in Angola, because our successful competitors in hardware and
+gunpowder are other nations who have to face the same
+disadvantages&mdash;Germany, Holland, and Belgium. Portugal herself is now
+competing with the Manchester goods. She does so with well-made stuffs,
+but she is undoubtedly aided by her tariff. The consular report (1949)
+says: &ldquo;The falling off in Manchester cotton since 1891 shows a
+diminution of 1,665,710 kilos. Cotton, if coming from Manchester via
+Lisbon, 1,665,710, duties 80 per cent, or 250 reis per kilo, equal
+333,144 milreis (about Ŗ51,250); cotton coming from Portugal, 1,665,710
+kilos, duties 25 reis per kilo, equal to 41,642 dollars, 750 reis <a name="CORR5" id="CORR5"><ins class="correction" title="original: (about Ŗ6,400">
+(about Ŗ6,400)</ins></a>, showing a difference in the receipts for one year of Ŗ44,850.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>There is in this statement, I own, a certain obscurity, which has
+probably got into it from the editing of the home officials. I do not
+know if the 1,665,710 kilos, representing the difference between what
+England shipped to Angola in 1891 and what she shipped in 1896, was
+supplied in the latter years from Portugal of Portuguese manufacture;
+but assuming such to have been the case, the position from a tariff
+point of view would work out as follows: 1,665,710 kilos of cottons from
+Manchester would pay duty, at 250 reis per kilo, 416,427&frac12; milreis.
+Taking the exchange at 3<i>s.</i> sterling per milreis, this amounts to
+Ŗ62,464. If this quantity of Manchester-made cottons had gone to Lisbon,
+and there become nationalised, and sent forward to Angola in Portuguese
+steamers, the duty would<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span> have been 80 per cent. of 250 reis per kilo,
+or say 333,142 milreis, equal to Ŗ49,971; but if this quantity were
+manufactured in Portugal, and shipped by Portuguese steamers, the duty
+would be 25 reis per kilo, equal to Ŗ6,246. The premium in favour of
+Portuguese production on this quantity is therefore Ŗ56,218, a terrific
+tax on the Portuguese subjects of Angola, for one year, in one class of
+manufactures only.</p>
+
+<p>The deductions, however, that Mr. Nightingale draws from his figures in
+regard to Portugal and her province are quite clear. He says, &ldquo;There is
+no doubt that the province of Angola is a very rich one. No advantages
+are held out for merchants to establish here, and thus bring capital
+into the place, which means more business, the opening up of roads, and
+the development of industries and agriculture. Generally the colony
+exists for the benefit of a few manufacturers in Portugal, who reap all
+the profit.&rdquo; Again, he says, &ldquo;The merchants are much too highly taxed, a
+good fourth part of their capital is paid out in duties, with no
+certainty when it will be realised again. Angola, with plenty of
+capital, moderate taxes and low duties, might in a few years become a
+most flourishing colony.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Now here we come to the general problem of the fiscal arrangements
+suitable for an African colony; and as this is a subject of great
+importance to England in the administration of her colonies, and errors
+committed in it are serious errors, as demonstrated by the late war in
+Sierra Leone,&mdash;the most serious even we have had for many years to deal
+with in West Africa,&mdash;I must beg to be allowed to become diffuse, humbly
+stating that I do not wish to dogmatise on the matter, but merely to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span>
+attract the attention of busy practical men to the question of the
+proper system to employ in the administration of tropical possessions.
+This seems to me a most important affair to England, now that she has
+taken up great territories and the responsibilities appertaining to them
+in that great tropical continent, Africa. There are other parts of the
+world where the suitability of the system of government to the
+conditions of the governed country is not so important.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 650px;" id="IMG309A"><span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span>
+<img src="images/ill-309a.jpg" width="650" height="431" alt="St. Paul do Loanda" title="St. Paul do Loanda" />
+<p><span class="facingleft">[<i>To face page 291.</i></span></p>
+<span class="caption"><span class="smcap">St. Paul do Loanda.</span></span>
+</div>
+
+<p>It seems to me that the deeper down from the surface we can go the
+greater is our chance of understanding any matter; and I humbly ask you
+to make a dive and consider what reason European nations have for
+interfering with Africa at all. There are two distinct classes of
+reasons that justify one race of human beings interfering with another
+race. These classes are pretty nearly inextricably mixed; but if, like
+Mark Twain&rsquo;s horse and myself, you will lean against a wall and think, I
+fancy you will see that primarily two classes of reasons exist&mdash;(<i>a</i>),
+the religious reason, the rescue of souls&mdash;a reason that is a duty to
+the religious man as keen as the rescue of a drowning man is to a brave
+one; (<i>b</i>), pressure reasons. These pressure reasons are divisible into
+two sub-classes&mdash;(1) external; (2) internal. Now of external pressure
+reasons primarily we have none in Africa. The African hive has so far
+only swarmed on its own continent; it has not sent off swarms to settle
+down in the middle of Civilisation, and terrify, inconvenience, and
+sting it in a way that would justify Civilisation not only in destroying
+the invading swarm, but in hunting up the original hive and smoking it
+out to prevent a recurrence of the nuisance, as the Roman Empire was
+bound to try and do with its Barbarians.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span> Such being the case,<a name="FNanchor_56_57" id="FNanchor_56_57"></a><a href="#Footnote_56_57" class="fnanchor">[56]</a> we
+can leave this first pressure reason&mdash;the war justification&mdash;for
+interfering with the African&mdash;on one side, and turn to the other
+reason,&mdash;the internal pressure reasons acting from within on the
+European nations. These are roughly divisible into three
+sub-classes:&mdash;(1) the necessity of supplying restless and ambitious
+spirits with a field for enterprise during such times as they are not
+wanted for the defence of their nation in Europe&mdash;France&rsquo;s reason for
+acquiring Africa; (2) population pressure; (3) commercial pressure. The
+two latter have been the chief reason for the Teutonic nations, England
+and Germany, overrunning the lands of other men. This Teutonic race is a
+strong one, with the habit, when in the least encouraged by Peace and
+Prosperity, of producing more men to the acre than the acre can keep.
+Being among themselves a kindly, common-sense race, it seems to them
+more reasonable to go and get more acres elsewhere than to kill
+themselves off down to a level which their own acres could support. The
+essential point about the &ldquo;elsewhere&rdquo; is that it should have a climate
+suited to the family. These migrations to other countries made under the
+pressure of population usually take place along the line of least
+resistance, namely, into countries where the resident population is
+least able to resist the invasion, as in America and Australia; but
+occasionally, as in the case of Canada and the Cape, they follow the
+conquest of an European rival who was the pioneer in rescuing the
+country from savagery.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I am aware that this hardly bears out my statement that the Teutonic
+races are kindly, but as I have said &ldquo;among themselves,&rdquo; we will leave
+it; and to other people, the original inhabitants of the countries they
+overflow, they are on the whole as kindly as you can expect family men
+to be. A distinguished Frenchman has stated that the father of a family
+is capable of anything; and it certainly looks as if he thought no more
+of stamping out the native than of stamping out any other kind of vermin
+that the country possessed to the detriment of his wife and children. I
+do not feel called upon to judge him and condemn, for no doubt the
+father of a family has his feelings; and as it must have been irritating
+to an ancestor of modern America to come home from an afternoon&rsquo;s
+fishing and find merely the remains of his homestead and bits of his
+family, it was more natural for him to go for the murderers than strive
+to start an Aborigines&rsquo; Protection Society. Though why, caring for wife
+and child so much as he does, the Teuton should have gone and planted
+them, for example, in places reeking with Red Indians is a mystery to
+me. I am inclined to accept my French friend&rsquo;s explanation on this
+point, namely, that it arose from the Teuton being a little thick in the
+head and incapable of considering other factors beyond climate. But this
+may be merely thickness in my own head&mdash;a hopelessly Teutonic one.</p>
+
+<p>However, the occupation of territory from population pressure in Europe
+we need not consider here; for it is not this reason that has led Europe
+to take an active interest in tropical Africa. It is a reason that comes
+into African affairs only&mdash;if really at all&mdash;in the extreme north and
+extreme south of the continent&mdash;Algeria and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span> Cape. The vast regions
+of Africa from 30° N. to 20° S., have long been known not to possess a
+climate suitable for colonising in. &ldquo;Men&rsquo;s blood rapidly putrifies under
+the tropic zone.&rdquo; &ldquo;Tropical conditions favour the growth of pathogenic
+bacteria&rdquo;&mdash;a rose called by another name. Anyhow, not the sort of
+country attractive to the father of a family to found a home in. Yet, as
+in spite of this, European nations are possessing themselves of this
+country with as much ardour as if it were a health resort and a gold
+mine in one, it is plain they must have another reason, and this reason
+is in the case of Germany and England primarily commercial pressure.</p>
+
+<p>These two Teutonic nations have the same habit in their commercial
+production that they have in their human production,&mdash;the habit of
+overdoing it for their own country; and just as Lancashire, for example,
+turns out more human beings than can comfortably exist there, so does
+she turn out more manufactured articles than can be consumed there; and
+just as the surplus population created by a strong race must find other
+lands to live in, so must the surplus manufactures of a strong race find
+other markets; both forms of surplus are to a strong race wealth.</p>
+
+<p>The main difference between these things is that the surplus
+manufactured article is in no need of considering climate in the matter
+of its expansion. It stands in a relation to the man who goes out into
+the world with it akin to that of the wife and family to the colonist;
+the trader will no more meekly stand having his trade damaged than the
+colonist will stand having his family damaged; but at the same time, the
+mere fact that the climate destroys trade-stuff is, well, all the better
+for trade, and trade, moreover, leads the trader to view the native
+population from<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span> a different standpoint to that of the colonist. To that
+family man the native is a nuisance, sometimes a dangerous one, at the
+best an indifferent servant, who does not do his work half so well as in
+a decent climate he can do it himself. To the trader the native is quite
+a different thing, a customer. A dense native population is what the
+trader wants; and on their wealth, prosperity, peace and industry, the
+success of his endeavours depends.</p>
+
+<p>Now it seems to me that there are in this world two classes of regions
+attractive to the great European manufacturing nations, England and
+Germany, wherein they can foster and expand their surplus production of
+manufactured articles. (1) Such regions as India and China. (2) Such
+regions as Africa. The necessity of making this division comes from the
+difference between the native populations. In the first case you are
+dealing with a people who are manufacturers themselves, and you are
+selling your goods mainly against gold. In the second the people are not
+manufacturers themselves except in a very small degree, and you are
+selling your goods against raw material. In a bustling age like this
+there seems to be a tendency here and in Germany to value the first form
+of market above the second. I fail to see that this is a sound
+valuation. The education our commerce gives will in a comparatively
+short time transform the people of the first class of markets into rival
+producers of manufactured articles wherewith to supply the world&rsquo;s
+markets. We by our pacification of India have already made India a
+greater exporter than she was before our rule there. If China is opened
+up, things will be even worse for England and Germany; for the Chinese,
+with their great power of production, will produce<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span> manufactured
+articles which will fairly swamp the world&rsquo;s markets; for, sad to say,
+there is little doubt but they can take out of our hands all textile
+trade, and probably several other lines of trade that England, Germany,
+and America now hold. India and China being populated, the one by a set
+of people at sixes and sevens with each other, and the other by a set of
+people who, to put it mildly, are not born warriors, cannot, except
+under the dominion and protection of a powerful European nation,
+commercially prosper. But England and Germany are not everybody. There
+is France. I could quite imagine France, for example, in possession of
+China, managing it on similar lines to those on which she is now
+managing West Africa, but with enormously different results to herself
+and the rest of the world. Her system of differential tariffs, be it
+granted, keeps her African possessions poor, and involves her in heavy
+imperial expenditure; but the Chinaman&rsquo;s industry would support the
+French system, and thrive under her jealous championship. This being the
+case, it is of value to England and Germany to hold as close a grip as
+possible over such regions as India and China, even though by so doing
+they are nourishing vipers in their commercial bosoms.</p>
+
+<p>The case of the second class of markets&mdash;the tropical African&mdash;is
+different. Such markets are of enormous value to us; they are,
+especially the West African ones, regions of great natural riches in
+rubber, oil, timber, ivory, and minerals from gold to coal. They are in
+most places densely populated with customers for England&rsquo;s manufactured
+goods. The advantages of such a region to a manufacturing nation like
+ourselves are enormous; for not only do we get rid there of our
+manufactured goods, but we<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span> get, what is of equal value to our
+manufacturing classes, raw material at a cheap enough rate to enable the
+English manufacturers to turn out into the markets of the civilised
+world articles sufficiently cheap themselves to compete with those of
+other manufacturing nations.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 650px;" id="IMG316A1"><span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span>
+<img src="images/ill-316a1.jpg" width="650" height="541" alt="In an Angola Market." title="In an Angola Market." />
+<span class="caption"><span class="smcap">In an Angola Market.</span></span>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 366px;" id="IMG316A2"><span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span>
+<img src="images/ill-316a2.jpg" width="366" height="500" alt="A Man of South Angola" title="A Man of South Angola" />
+<p><span class="facingleft">[<i>To face page 297.</i></span></p>
+<span class="caption"><span class="smcap">A Man of South Angola.</span></span>
+</div>
+
+<p>The importance to us of such markets as Africa affords us seems to me to
+give us one sufficient reason for taking over these tropical African
+regions. I do not use the word justification in the matter, it is a word
+one has no right to use until we have demonstrated that our interference
+with the native population and our endeavours for our own population
+have ended in unmixed good; but it is a sound reason, as good a reason
+as we had in overrunning Australia and America. Indeed, I venture to
+think it is a better one, for the possession of a great market enables
+thousands of men, women and children to live in comfort and safety in
+England, instead of going away from home and all that home means; and
+this commercial reason,&mdash;for all its not having a high falutin sound in
+it,&mdash;is the one and only expansion reason we have that in itself desires
+the national peace and prosperity of the native races with whom it
+deals.</p>
+
+<p>It seems to me no disgrace to England that her traders are the expanding
+force for her in Africa. There are three classes of men who are powers
+to a State&mdash;the soldier, the trader, and the scientist. Their efforts,
+when co-ordinated and directed by the true statesman&mdash;the religious man
+in the guise of philosopher and poet&mdash;make a great State. Being English,
+of course modesty prevents my saying that England is a great State. I
+content myself by saying that she is a truly great people, and will
+become a great State when she is led by a line of great
+statesmen<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span>&mdash;statesmen who are not only capable, as indeed most of our
+statesmen have been, of seeing the importance of India and the colonies,
+but also capable of seeing the equal importance to us of markets.</p>
+
+<p>England&rsquo;s democracy must learn the true value of the markets that our
+fellow-countrymen have so long been striving to give her, and must
+appreciate the heroism those men have displayed, only too often
+unrequited, never half appreciated by the sea-wife, who &ldquo;breeds a breed
+of rovin&rsquo; men and casts them over sea.&rdquo; Those who go to make new homes
+for the old country in Australia and America do not feel her want of
+interest keenly; but those heroes of commerce who go to fight and die in
+fever-stricken lands for the sake of the old homes at home, do feel her
+want of interest.</p>
+
+<p>I am not speaking hastily, nor have I only West Africa in my mind in
+this matter; there are other regions where we could have succeeded
+better, with advantage to all concerned&mdash;Malaya, British Guiana, New
+Guinea, the West Indies, as well as West Africa. If you examine the
+matter I think you will see that all these regions we have failed in are
+possessed of unhealthy climates, while the regions we have succeeded
+with are those possessed of healthy climates. The reason for this
+difference in our success seems to me to lie mainly in our deficiency of
+statesmanship at home. We really want the humid tropic zone more than
+other nations do; a climate that eats up steel and hardware as a rabbit
+eats lettuces is an excellent customer to a hardware manufacturing town,
+&amp;c. A region densely populated by native populations willing to give raw
+trade stuffs in exchange for cotton goods, which they bury or bang out
+on stones in the course of washing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span> or otherwise actively help their
+local climate to consume, is invaluable to a textile manufacturing town.
+Yet it would be idle to pretend that our Government has realised these
+things. Our superior ability as manufacturers, and the great enterprise
+of our men who have gone out to conquer the markets of the tropics, have
+given us all the advantages we now enjoy from those markets, but they
+could do no more; and now, when we are confronted by the expansion of
+other European nations, those men and their work are being lost to
+England. Our fellow-countrymen will go anywhere and win anywhere to-day
+just as well as yesterday, where the climate of the region allows
+England to throw enough of them in at a time to hold it independent of
+the home government; but in places where we cannot do this, in the
+unhealthy tropical regions where those men want backing up against the
+aggression on their interests of foreign governments, well, up to the
+present they have not had that backing up, and hence we have lost to
+England in England the advantages we so easily might have secured.</p>
+
+<p>An American magazine the other day announced in a shocked way that I
+could evidently &ldquo;swear like a trooper!&rdquo; I cannot think where it got the
+idea from; but really!&mdash;well, of course I don&rsquo;t naturally wish to, but I
+cannot help feeling that if I could it would be a comfort to me; for
+when I am up in the great manufacturing towns, England properly so
+called, their looms and forges seem to me to sing the same song to the
+great maker of Fate&mdash;we must prosper or England dies. And there is but
+one thing they can prosper on&mdash;for there is but one feeding ground for
+them and all the thousands of English men, women and children dependent
+on them<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span>&mdash;the open market of the World. To me the life blood of England
+is her trade. Her soul, her brain is made of other things, but they
+should not neglect or spurn the thing that feeds them&mdash;Commerce&mdash;any
+more than they should undervalue the thing that guards them&mdash;the
+warrior.</p>
+
+<p>But, you will say, we will not be tied down to this commercial reason as
+England&rsquo;s reason for taking over the administration of tropical Africa.
+My friend, I really think on the whole you had better&mdash;it&rsquo;s reasonable.
+I grant that it has not been the reason why English missionaries and
+travellers have risked their lives for the good of Africa, or of human
+knowledge, but as a ground from which to develop a policy of
+administering the country this commercial one is good, because it
+requires as aforesaid the prosperity of the African population; and your
+laudable vanities in the matter I cannot respect, when I observe right
+in the middle of the map of Africa an enormous region called the Congo
+Free State. I have reason to believe that that region was opened up by
+Englishmen&mdash;Livingstone, Stanley, Speke, Grant and Burton. If you had
+been so truly keen on suppressing Arab slavery and native cannibalism,
+there was a paradise for you! Yet, you hand it over to some one else.
+Was it because you thought some one else could do it better? or&mdash;but we
+will leave that affair and turn to the consideration of the possibility
+of administering tropical Africa, governmentally, to the benefit of all
+concerned.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_52_53" id="Footnote_52_53"></a><a href="#FNanchor_52_53"><span class="label">[52]</span></a> Loanda has now a gas company, and the installation is well
+under way, under Belgian supervision.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_53_54" id="Footnote_53_54"></a><a href="#FNanchor_53_54"><span class="label">[53]</span></a> Referring to cotton goods, the Foreign Office report on
+the trade of Angola for 1896 (1949) says the same cottons coming from
+Manchester would pay 250 reis per kilo in foreign bottoms, and 80 per
+cent of 250 reis if coming in Portuguese bottoms and nationalised in
+Lisbon.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_54_55" id="Footnote_54_55"></a><a href="#FNanchor_54_55"><span class="label">[54]</span></a> Angola also has a small railway from Catumbella to
+Benguella, a distance of 15 kiloms. and is contemplating constructing an
+important line from either Benguella or Mossamedes up to Caconda.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_55_56" id="Footnote_55_56"></a><a href="#FNanchor_55_56"><span class="label">[55]</span></a> The imports in 1896 from England being 978,745 kilos,
+against 2,644,455 in 1891&mdash;a difference of 1,665,710 kilos against
+Manchester.&mdash;<i>Foreign Office Annual Series, Consular Report, No. 1949</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_56_57" id="Footnote_56_57"></a><a href="#FNanchor_56_57"><span class="label">[56]</span></a> In saying this I am aware of the conduct of Carthage and
+of the Barbary Moors. But neither of these were primarily African. The
+one was instigated by Greece, the other by the Vandals and the Arabs.</p></div>
+</div>
+<hr class="chap" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIII" id="CHAPTER_XIII"></a>CHAPTER XIII</h2>
+
+<h2>THE CROWN COLONY SYSTEM</h2>
+
+<p class="pblock">Wherein it is set down briefly why it is necessary to enter upon
+this discussion at all.</p>
+
+<p>Now, you will say, Wherefore should the general public in England
+interest itself in this matter? Surely things are now governmentally
+administered in England&rsquo;s West African Colonies for the benefit of all
+parties concerned.</p>
+
+<p>Well, that is just exactly and precisely what they are not. The system
+of Crown Colonies, when it is worked by Portuguese, does, at any rate,
+benefit some of the officials; but English officials are incapable of
+availing themselves of the opportunities this system offers them; and
+therefore, as this form of opportunity is the only benefit the thing can
+give any one, the sooner the Crown Colony system is removed from the
+sphere of practical politics and put under a glass case in the South
+Kensington Museum, labelled &ldquo;Extinct,&rdquo; the better for every one.</p>
+
+<p>I beg you, before we go further in this matter, to look round the world
+calmly, and then, when you have allowed the natural burst of enthusiasm
+concerning the extent and the magnificence of the British Empire to
+pass, you will observe that in the more unhealthy regions England has
+failed. I say she has failed because of the Crown Colony<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span> system&mdash;failed
+with them even during days wherein she has had to face nothing like what
+she has to face to-day from the commercial competition of other nations.</p>
+
+<p>In order to justify myself for holding the view that it is possible for
+any system of English administration to fail anywhere, I would draw your
+attention to the fact that the system used by us for governing unhealthy
+regions is the Crown Colony system. The two things go together, and we
+must assign one of them as the reason of our failure. You may, if it
+please you, put it down to the other thing, the unhealthiness. I cannot,
+for I know that no race of men can battle more gallantly with climate
+than the English&mdash;no other race of men has shown so great a capacity as
+we have to make the tropics pay. Still to-day we stand face to face with
+financial disaster in tropical regions.</p>
+
+<p>If you will look through a list of England&rsquo;s tropical unhealthy
+possessions, leaving out West Africa, you will see nothing but
+depression. There are the West Indies, British Guiana, and British
+Honduras. All of these are naturally rich regions and accessible to the
+markets of the world. There is not one of them hemmed in by great
+mountain chains or surrounded by arid deserts, across which their
+products must be transported at enormous cost. They are all on our
+highway&mdash;the sea; nor are they sparsely populated. Their population,
+according to the latest Government returns, is 1,653,832, and this
+estimate is acknowledged to be necessarily imperfect and insufficient.
+But with all these advantages we find no prosperity there under our
+rule. Nothing but poverty and discontent and now pauperisation in the
+shape of grants from the Imperial Exchequer. You say, &ldquo;Oh! but that is
+on account of the sugar bounties and the majority of the population not
+being<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span> English;&rdquo; but that argument won&rsquo;t do. Look at the Canary Islands.
+They were just as hard hit by aniline dyes supplanting cochineal. Their
+population is not mainly English; but down on those islands came an
+Englishman, the Spanish Government had the sense to let him have his
+way, and that Englishman, Mr. A. L. Jones, of Liverpool, has, in a space
+of only fifteen years, made those islands a source of wealth to Spain,
+instead of paupers on an Imperial bounty. &ldquo;But,&rdquo; you say, &ldquo;we have other
+regions under the Crown Colony system that are not West Indian.&rdquo;
+Granted, but look at them. There are the West African group; a group of
+three in the Mediterranean, Gibraltar, Malta, and Cyprus, two
+fortifications and a failure; away out East another group, which are
+prosperous from the fact that they are surrounded by countries whose
+fiscal arrangements are providentially worse than their own, and this
+seems to be the only condition which can keep a Crown Colony on its
+financial legs at all. For all our Crown Colonies adjacent to countries
+who can compete with them in trade matters are paupers, or their
+efficiency and value to the Empire is in the sphere of military and
+naval affairs, as posts and coaling stations. These possessions of the
+Gibraltar, Malta, and Hong-Kong brand should be regarded as being part
+of our navy and army, and not confused with colonies, though essential
+to them.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Still,&rdquo; you say, &ldquo;you are forgetting Ceylon, the Fiji Islands, the
+Falklands, and the Mauritius.&rdquo; I am not. Ceylon is part of India and
+practically an Indian province, so is out of my arguments. I present you
+with the others wherefrom to build up a defence of the Crown Colony
+system. Say, &ldquo;See the Falklands off Cape Horn, with a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span> population of
+1,789, and heaps of sheep and a satisfactory budget.&rdquo; I can say nothing
+against them, and may possibly be forced to admit that for such a
+region, off Cape Horn, and with a population mainly of sheep, the Crown
+Colony system may be a Heaven-sent form of administration. But I think
+England would be wiser if she looked carefully at the West Indian group
+and recognised how like their conditions are to those of the West
+African group, for in their disastrous state of financial affairs you
+have an object lesson teaching what will be the fate of Crown Colonies
+in West Africa&mdash;Gambia, Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast and Lagos&mdash;if she
+will be not warned in time to alter the system at present employed for
+governing these possessions. It is an object lesson in miniature of what
+will otherwise be an infinitely greater drain on the resources of
+England, for West Africa is immensely larger, immensely more densely
+populated, and immensely more deadly in climate than the West Indies.
+For one Englishman killed by the West Indies West Africa will want ten;
+for every Ŗ1,000, Ŗ20,000&mdash;and all for what? Only for the sake of a
+system&mdash;a system intrinsically alien to all English ideals of
+government&mdash;a system that doddered along until Mr. Chamberlain expected
+it to work and then burst out all over in rows, and was found to be
+costing some 25 per cent. of the entire bulk of white trade with West
+Africa; a system that, let the land itself be ever so rich, can lead to
+nothing but heart-breaking failure.</p>
+
+<p>Now I own the Crown Colony system looks well on paper. It consists of a
+Governor, appointed by the Colonial Office, supported by an Executive
+and Legislative Council (both nominated), and on the Gold Coast with two
+unofficial members in the legislative body. These Councils, as far as
+the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span> influence they have, are dead letters, and legislation is in the
+hands of the Governor. This is no evil in itself. You will get nothing
+done in tropical Africa except under the influence of individual men;
+but your West African Governor, though not controlled by the Councils
+within the colony, is controlled by a power outside the colony, namely
+the Colonial Office in London. Up to our own day the Colonial Office has
+been, except in the details of domestic colonial affairs, a drag-chain
+on English development in Western Africa. It has not even been
+indifferent, but distinctly, deliberately adverse. In the year 1865 a
+Select Committee of the House of Commons inquired into and reported upon
+the state of British establishments on the western coast of Africa. &ldquo;It
+was a strong Committee, and the report was brief and decided.
+Recognising that it is not possible to withdraw the British Government
+wholly or immediately from any settlements or engagements on the West
+African Coast, the Committee laid down that all further extension of
+territory or assumption of government, or new treaties offering any
+protection to native tribes, would be inexpedient, and that the object
+of our policy should be to encourage in the natives the exercise of
+those qualities which may render it possible for us more and more to
+transfer to them the administration of all the governments with a view
+to the ultimate withdrawal from all, except, perhaps, Sierra Leone.&rdquo;<a name="FNanchor_57_58" id="FNanchor_57_58"></a><a href="#Footnote_57_58" class="fnanchor">[57]</a></p>
+
+<p>Remember also this. This one in 1865 was not the first of those sort of
+fits the Colonial Office had in West African affairs. It was just as bad
+after the Battle of Katamansu in 1827, and had it not been for the
+English traders our honour <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span>to the natives we had made treaties with
+would have been destroyed, and the Gold Coast lost whole and entire.</p>
+
+<p>This policy of 1865 has remained the policy of the English Government
+towards West Africa up to 1894. In spite of it, the English have held
+on. Governor after Governor, who, as soon as he became acquainted with
+the nature of the region, has striven to rouse official apathy, has been
+held in, and his spirit of enterprise broken by official snubs, and has
+been taught that keeping quiet was what he was required to do. It broke
+many a man&rsquo;s heart to do it; but doing it worked no active evil on the
+colony under his control, the affairs of which financially prospered in
+the hands of the trading community so well, that not only had no West
+African colony any public debt, except Sierra Leone, which was a
+philanthropic station, but the Gold Coast, for example, had sufficient
+surplus to lend money to colonies in other parts of the world. But at
+last the time came when the aggression on Africa by the Continental
+powers fulfilled all the gloomy prophecies which the merchants of
+Liverpool had long been uttering; and one possession of ours in West
+Africa after another felt the effects of the activity of other nations
+and the apathy of our own. They would have felt it in vain, and have
+utterly succumbed to it, had it not been for two Englishmen. Sir George
+Taubman Goldie, who, when in West Africa on a voyage of exploration,
+recognised the possibilities of the Niger regions, and secured them for
+England in the face of great difficulties; and Mr. Chamberlain.
+Concerning Sir George Goldie&rsquo;s efforts in securing a most important
+section of West Africa for England, I shall have occasion to speak
+later. Concerning Mr. Chamberlain, I may as well speak now; but be it
+understood, both these men,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span> whatever their own ideas on their work may
+be, were men who came up at a critical point to reinforce Liverpool and
+Bristol and London merchants, who had fought for centuries&mdash;not to put
+too fine a point on it&mdash;from the days of Edward IV. for the richest
+feeding grounds in all the world for England&rsquo;s manufacturing millions.
+The dissensions, distrust and misunderstandings which have raged among
+these three representatives of England&rsquo;s majesty and power, are no
+affair of mine, as a mere general student of the whole affair, beyond
+the due allowance one must make for the grave mischief worked by the
+human factors. Well, as aforesaid, Mr. Chamberlain alone of all our
+statesmen saw the great possibilities and importance of Western Africa,
+and thinking to realise them, forthwith inaugurated a policy which if it
+had had sound ground to go on, would have succeeded. It had not, it had
+the Crown Colony system&mdash;and our hope for West Africa is that so
+powerful a man as he has shown himself to be in other political fields,
+may show himself to be yet more powerful, and formulate a totally new
+system suited for the conditions of West Africa, and not content himself
+with the old fallacy of ascribing failure to the individuals, white or
+black, government official or merchant or missionary, who act under the
+system which alone is to blame for England&rsquo;s present position in West
+Africa; but I own that if Mr. Chamberlain does this he will be greater
+than one man can ever be reasonably be expected to be, and again it is,
+I fear, not possible to undo what has been done by the resolution of
+1865.</p>
+
+<p>Possibly the greatest evil worked by this resolution has been the
+separation of sympathy between the Merchants and the Government. Since
+1865 these two English factors have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span> been working really against each
+other. Possibly the greatest touch of irony in modern politics is to be
+found in a despatch dated March 30th, 1892, addressed to the British
+Ambassador at Paris, wherein it is said, &ldquo;The colonial policy of Great
+Britain and France in West Africa has been widely different. France from
+her basis on the Senegal coast has pursued steadily the aim of
+establishing herself on the Upper Niger and its affluents; this object
+she has attained by a large and constant expenditure, and by a
+succession of military expeditions. Great Britain, on the other hand,
+has adopted the policy of advance by commercial enterprise; she has not
+attempted to compete with the military operations of her neighbour.&rdquo;<a name="FNanchor_58_59" id="FNanchor_58_59"></a><a href="#Footnote_58_59" class="fnanchor">[58]</a>
+I should rather think she hadn&rsquo;t! Let alone the fact that France did not
+expand mainly by military operations, but through magnificent explorers
+backed up by sound sense. While, as for Great Britain &ldquo;adopting the
+policy of advance by commercial enterprise&rdquo;&mdash;well, I don&rsquo;t know what the
+writer of that despatch&rsquo;s ideas on &ldquo;adoption&rdquo; are, but suppression would
+be the truer word. Had Great Britain given even her countenance to
+&ldquo;commercial enterprise,&rdquo; she would have given it by now representation
+in her councils for West Africa, a thing it has not yet got. True, there
+is the machinery for this representation ready in the Chambers of
+Commerce, but these Chambers have no real power whatsoever as far as
+West African affairs are concerned; they are graciously permitted to
+send deputations to the Colonial Office and write letters when they feel
+so disposed, but practically that is all.</p>
+
+<p>Truly it is a ridiculous situation, because West Africa matters to no
+party in England so much as it matters to the mercantile. I am aware I
+shall be told that it is <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span>impossible that one section of Englishmen can
+have a greater interest in any part of the Empire than another section,
+and, for example, that West Africa matters quite as much to the
+religious party as it does to the mercantile. But, to my mind, neither
+Religion nor Science is truly concerned in the political aspect of West
+Africa. It should not matter, for example, to the missionary whether he
+works under one European Government or another, or a purely native
+Government, so long as he is allowed by that Government to carry on his
+work of evangelisation unhindered; nor, similarly, does it matter to the
+scientific man, so long as he is allowed to carry on his work; but to
+the merchant it matters profoundly whether West Africa is under English
+or foreign rule, and whether our rule there is well ordered. For one
+thing, on the merchants of West Africa falls entirely the duty of
+supplying the revenue which supports the government of our colonies
+there; and for another, it seems to me that whether the Government he is
+under is English or no does matter very much to the English merchant.
+His duty as an Englishman is the support of the population of his own
+country, directly the support of its manufacturing classes. Everything
+that tends to alienate his influence from the service of his
+fellow-countrymen is a degradation to him. He may be individually as
+successful in trading with foreign-made goods, but as a member of the
+English State he is at a lower level when he does so; he becomes a mere
+mercenary in the service of a foreign power engaged in adding to the
+prosperity of an alien nation. Again, in this matter the difference
+between the religious man and the commercial shows up clearly. Let<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span> the
+religion of the missionary be what it may, his aim is according to it to
+secure the salvation of the human race. What does it matter to him
+whether the section of the human race he strives to save be black,
+white, or yellow? Nothing; as the noble records of missions will show
+you. Therefore I repeat that West Africa matters to no party in the
+English State so much as it matters to the mercantile. With no other
+party are true English interests so closely bound up.</p>
+
+<p>West Africa probably will never be a pleasant place wherein to spend the
+winter months, a holiday ground that will serve to recuperate the jaded
+energies of our poets and painters, like the Alps or Italy; probably,
+likewise, it will never be a place where we can ship our overflow
+population; and for the same reason&mdash;its unhealthiness&mdash;it will be of no
+use to us as a military academy, for troops are none the better for
+soaking in malaria and operating against ill-armed antagonists. But West
+Africa is of immense use to us as a feeding-ground for our manufacturing
+classes. It could be of equal value to England as a healthy colony, but
+in a reverse way, for it could supply the wealth which would enable them
+to remain in England in place of leaving it, if it were properly managed
+with this definite end in view. It is idle to imagine that it can be
+properly managed unless commercial experts are represented in the
+Government which controls its administration, as is not the case at
+present. It is no case of abusing the men who at present strive to do
+their best with it. They do not set themselves up as knowing much about
+trade, and they constantly demonstrate that they do not. Armed with
+absolutely no definite policy, subsisting on official and non-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span>expert
+trade opinion, they drift along, with some nebulous sort of notion in
+their heads about &ldquo;elevating the African in the plane of civilisation.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Now, of course, there exists a passable reason for things being as they
+are in our administration of West Africa. England is never malign in
+intention, and never rushes headlong into a line of policy. Therefore,
+in order to comprehend how it has come about that she should have a
+system so unsuited to the regions to which it is applied, as the Crown
+Colony system is unsuited to West Africa, we must calmly investigate the
+reason that underlies this affair. This reason, which is the cause of
+all the trouble, is a misconception of the nature of West Africa, and it
+must be considered under two heads.</p>
+
+<p>The thing behind the resolution of 1865 is the undoubted fact that West
+Africa is no good for a Colony from its unhealthiness. There is no one
+who knows the Coast but will grant this; but surely there is no one who
+knows, not only the West Coast of Africa but also the necessities of our
+working classes in England, who can fail to recognise that this is only
+half an argument against England holding West Africa; because we want
+something besides regions whereto we can send away from England men and
+women, namely, we want regions that will enable us to keep the very
+backbone of England, our manufacturing classes, in a state of healthy
+comfort and prosperity at home in England, in other words, we want
+markets.</p>
+
+<p>Alas! in England the necessity for things grows up in a dumb way, though
+providentially it is irresistibly powerful; once aroused it forces our
+statesmen to find the required thing, which they with but bad grace and
+grievous groans proceed leisurely to do.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>This is pretty much the same as saying that the English are deficient in
+statesmanship, and this is what I mean, and I am convinced that no other
+nation but our own could have prospered with so much of this
+imperfection; but remember it is an imperfection, and is not a thing to
+be proud of any more than a stammer. External conditions have enabled
+England so far barely to feel her drawback, but now external conditions
+are in a different phase, and she must choose between acquiring
+statesmanship competent to cope with this phase, or drift on in her
+present way until the force of her necessities projects her into an
+European war. A perfectly unnecessary conclusion to the pressure of
+commercial competition she is beginning to feel, but none the less
+inevitable with her present lack of statecraft.</p>
+
+<p>The second part of the reason of England&rsquo;s trouble in West Africa is
+that other fallacious half reason which our statesmen have for years
+been using to soothe the minds of those who urged on her in good time
+the necessity for acquiring the hinterlands of West Africa, namely,
+&ldquo;After all, England holds the key of them in holding the outlets of the
+rivers.&rdquo; And while our statesmen have been saying this, France has been
+industriously changing the lock on the door by diverting trade routes
+from the hinterland she has so gallantly acquired, down into those
+seaboard districts which she possesses.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Well, well, well,&rdquo; you will say, &ldquo;we have woke up at last, we can be
+trusted now.&rdquo; I own I do not see why you should expect to be suddenly
+trusted by the men with whose interests you have played so long. I
+remember hearing about a missionary gentleman who was told a long story
+by the father of a bad son, who for years went gallivanting about West
+Africa, bringing the family into<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span> disrepute, and running up debts in all
+directions, and finally returned to the paternal roof. &ldquo;Dear me! how
+interesting,&rdquo; said the missionary; &ldquo;quite the Parable of the Prodigal
+Son! I trust, My Friend, you remembered it, and killed the fatted calf
+on his return?&rdquo; &ldquo;No, Sar,&rdquo; said the parent; &ldquo;but I dam near kill that ar
+prodigal son.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_57_58" id="Footnote_57_58"></a><a href="#FNanchor_57_58"><span class="label">[57]</span></a> See Lucas&rsquo;s <i>Historical Geography of the British
+Colonies</i>, Oxford, 1894.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_58_59" id="Footnote_58_59"></a><a href="#FNanchor_58_59"><span class="label">[58]</span></a> Parliamentary Paper, C 6701, 92.</p></div>
+</div>
+<hr class="chap" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIV" id="CHAPTER_XIV"></a>CHAPTER XIV</h2>
+
+<h2>THE CROWN COLONY SYSTEM IN WEST AFRICA</h2>
+
+<p class="pblock">Wherein is set down briefly in what manner of ways the Crown Colony
+system works evil in Western Africa.</p>
+
+<p>I have attempted to state that the Crown Colony system is unsuited for
+governing Western Africa, and have attributed its malign influence to
+its being a system which primarily expresses the opinions of
+well-intentioned but ill-informed officials at home, instead of being,
+according to the usual English type of institution, representative of
+the interests of the people who are governed, and of those who have the
+largest stake in the countries controlled by it&mdash;the merchants and
+manufacturing classes of England. It remains to point out how it acts
+adversely to the prosperity of all concerned; for be it clearly
+understood there is no corruption in it whatsoever: there is waste of
+men&rsquo;s lives, moneys, and careers, but nothing more at present. By-and-by
+it will add to its other charms and functions that of being, in the
+early future, a sort of patent and successful incubator for hatching a
+fine lively brood of little Englanders, who will cry out, &ldquo;What is the
+good of West Africa?&rdquo; and so forth; and they will seem sweetly
+reasonable, because by then West Africa will be down on the English
+rates, a pauper.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It may seem inconceivable, however, that the present governing body of
+West Africa, the home officials, and the English public as represented
+in Parliament, can be ill-informed. West Africa has not been just shot
+up out of the ocean by a submarine volcanic explosion; nor are we
+landing on it out of Noah&rsquo;s ark, for the thing has been in touch with
+Europe since the fifteenth century; yet, inconceivable as it may seem
+that there is not by now formulated and in working order a method of
+governing it suitable for its nature, the fact that this is so remains,
+and providentially for us it is quite easy of explanation without
+abusing any one; though no humane person, like myself for example, can
+avoid sincerely hoping that Mr. Kipling is wrong when he sings</p>
+
+<div class="poem">
+<span class="i4">&ldquo;Deep in all dishonour have we stained our garments&rsquo; hem.</span><br />
+<span class="i4">Yet be ye not dismayed, we have stumbled and have strayed.</span><br />
+<span class="i4">Our leaders went from righteousness, the Lord will deal with them.&rdquo;</span><br />
+</div>
+
+<p>For although it is true that we have made a mess of this great feeding
+ground for England&rsquo;s manufacturing millions; yet there are no leaders on
+whom blame alone can fall, whom we can make scapegoats out of, who can
+be driven away into the wilderness carrying the sins of the people. The
+blame lies among all those classes of people who have had personally to
+deal with West Africa and the present system; and the Crown Colony
+system and the resolution of &rsquo;65 are merely the necessary fungi of
+rotten stuff, for they have arisen from the information that has been,
+and has not been, placed at the disposal of our Government in England by
+the Government officials of West Africa, the Missionaries, and the
+Traders.</p>
+
+<p>We will take the traders&rsquo; blame first&mdash;their contribution to the evil
+dates from about 1827 and consists in omission<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span>&mdash;frankly, I think that
+they, in their generation, were justified in not telling all they could
+tell about the Coast. They found they could get on with it, keep it
+quiet and manage the natives fairly well under the system of Courts of
+Equity in the Rivers, and the Committee of merchants with a Governor
+approved of by the Home Government, which was working on the Gold Coast
+up to 1843. In 1841 there arose the affair of Governor Maclean, and the
+inauguration of the line of policy which resulted in the resolution of
+1865. The governmental officials having cut themselves off from the
+traders and taken over West Africa, failed to manage West Africa, and so
+resolved that West Africa was not worth managing,&mdash;a thing they are
+bound to do again.</p>
+
+<p>The abuse showered on the merchants, and the terrific snubs with which
+the Government peppered them, did not make the traders blossom and
+expand, and shower information on those who criticised them&mdash;there are
+some natures that are not sweetened by Adversity. Moreover, the
+Government, when affairs had been taken over by the Offices in London,
+took the abhorrent form of Customs, and displayed a lively love of the
+missionary-made African, as he was then,&mdash;you can read about him in
+Burton<a name="FNanchor_59_60" id="FNanchor_59_60"></a><a href="#Footnote_59_60" class="fnanchor">[59]</a>&mdash;and for the rest got up rows with the traders&rsquo; best
+customers, the untutored African; rows, as the traders held, unnecessary
+in their beginning and feeble-handed in their termination. The whole of
+this sort of thing made the trader section keep all the valuable
+information to itself, and spend its energies in eluding the Customs,
+and talking what Burton terms &ldquo;Commercial English.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Then we come to the contribution made by the Government officials to the
+formation of an erroneous <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span>opinion concerning the state of affairs in
+West Africa. This arose from the conditions that surrounded them there,
+and the way in which they were unable, even if they desired, to expand
+their influence, distrusted naturally enough by the trading community
+since 1865, held in continuously by their home instructions, and
+unprovided with a sufficient supply of men or money on shore to go in
+for empire making, and also villainously badly quartered,&mdash;as you can
+see by reading Ellis&rsquo;s <i>West African Sketches</i>. It is small wonder and
+small blame to them that their account of West Africa has been a gloomy
+one, and such it must remain until these men are under a different
+system: for all the reasons that during the past have caused them to
+paint the Coast as a place of no value to England, remain still in full
+force,&mdash;as you can see by studying the disadvantages that service in a
+West African Crown Colony presents to-day to a civilian official.</p>
+
+<p>Firstly, the climate is unhealthy, so that the usual make of Englishman
+does not like to take his wife out to the Coast with him. This means
+keeping two homes, which is expensive, and it gives a man no chance of
+saving money on an income say of Ŗ600 a year, for the official&rsquo;s life in
+West Africa is necessarily, let him be as economical as he may, an
+expensive one; and, moreover, things are not made more cheerful for him
+by his knowing that if he dies there will be no pension for his wife.</p>
+
+<p>Secondly, there being no regular West African Service, there is no
+security for promotion; owing to the unhealthiness of the climate it is
+very properly ordained that each officer shall serve a year on the
+Coast, and then go home on a six months&rsquo; furlough. It is a fairly common
+thing for a man to die before his twelve months&rsquo; term is up, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span> a
+still more common one for him to have to go on sick leave. Of course,
+the moment he is off, some junior official has to take his place and do
+his work. But in the event of the man whose work he does dying, gaining
+a position in another region, or promotion, the man who has been doing
+the work has no reason to hope he will step into the full emoluments and
+honours of the appointment, although experience will thus have given him
+an insight into the work. On the contrary, it too often happens that
+some new man, either fresh from London or who has already held a
+Government appointment in some totally different region to the West
+African, is placed in the appointment. If this new man is fresh to such
+work as he has to do, the displaced man has to teach him; if he is from
+a different region, he usually won&rsquo;t be taught, and he does not help to
+develop a spirit of general brotherly love and affection in the local
+governmental circles by the frank statement that he considers West
+African officials &ldquo;jugginses&rdquo; or &ldquo;muffs,&rdquo; although he fairly offers to
+&ldquo;alter this and show them how things ought to be done.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Then again the civilian official frequently complains that he has no
+such recognition given him for his services as is given to the military
+men in West Africa. I have so often heard the complaint, &ldquo;Oh, if a man
+comes here and burns half a dozen villages he gets honours; while I, who
+keep the villages from wanting burning, get nothing;&rdquo; and mind you, this
+is true. Like the rest of my sex I suffer from a chronic form of scarlet
+fever, and, from a knowledge of the country there, I hold it rubbish to
+talk of the brutality of mowing down savages with a Maxim gun when it
+comes to talking of West African bush fighting; for your West African is
+not an unarmed savage, he does<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span> not assemble in the manner of Dr.
+Watts&rsquo;s ants, but wisely ensconces himself in the pleached arbours of
+his native land, and lets fly at you with a horrid scatter gun. This is
+bound to hit, and when it hits makes wounds worse than those made by a
+Maxim; in fact he quite turns bush fighting into a legitimate sport, let
+alone the service done him by his great ally, the climate. Still, it is
+hard on the civilian, and bad for English interests in West Africa, that
+the man who by his judgment, sympathy, and care, keeps a district at
+peace, should have less recognition than one who, acting under orders,
+doing his duty gallantly, and all that, goes and breaks up all native
+prosperity and white trade.</p>
+
+<p>All these things acting together produce on the local Government
+official a fervid desire to get home to England, and obtain an
+appointment in some other region than the West Coast. I feel sure I am
+well within the mark when I say that two-thirds of the present
+Government officials in the West African English Crown Colonies have
+their names down on the transfer list, or are trying to get them there;
+and this sort of thing simply cannot give them an enthusiasm for their
+work sufficient to ensure its success, and of course leads to their
+painting a dismal picture of West Africa itself.</p>
+
+<p>I am perfectly well aware that the conditions of life of officials in
+West Africa are better than those described by Ellis. Nevertheless, they
+are not yet what they should be: a corrugated iron house may cost a heap
+of money and yet not be a Paradise. I am also aware that the houses and
+general supplies given to our officials are immensely more luxurious
+than those given to German or French officials; but this does not
+compensate for the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span> horrors of boredom suffused with irritation to which
+the English official is subjected. More than half the quarrelling and
+discontent for which English officials are celebrated, and which are
+attributed to drink and the climate, simply arise from the domestic
+arrangements enforced on them in Coast towns, whereby they see far too
+much of each other. If you take any set of men and make them live
+together, day out and day in, without sufficient exercise, without
+interest in outside affairs, without dividing them up into regular
+grades of rank, as men are on board ship or in barracks, you are simply
+bound to have them dividing up into cliques that quarrel; the things
+they quarrel over may seem to an outsider miserably petty, but these
+quarrels are the characteristic eruption of the fever discontent. And
+may I ask you if the opinion of men in such a state is an opinion on
+which a sound policy wherewith to deal with so complex a region can be
+formed? I think not, yet these men and the next class alone are the
+makers of our present policy&mdash;the instructors of home official opinion.</p>
+
+<p>The next class is the philanthropic party. It is commonly confused with
+the missionary, but there is this fundamental difference between them.
+The missionary, pure and simple, is a man who loves God more than he
+loves himself, or any man. His service (I am speaking on fundamental
+lines, as far as I can see) is to place in God&rsquo;s charge, for the glory
+of God, souls, that according to his belief, would otherwise go
+elsewhere. The philanthropist is a person who loves man; but he or she
+is frequently no better than people who kill lapdogs by over-feeding, or
+who shut up skylarks in cages, while it is quite conceivable to me, for
+example, that a missionary could kill a man to save his soul, a
+philanthropist kill his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span> soul to save his life, and there is in this a
+difference. I have never been able to get up any respectful enthusiasm
+for the so-called philanthropist, so that I have to speak of him with
+calm care; not as I have spoken of the missionary, feeling he was a
+person I could not really harm by criticising his methods.</p>
+
+<p>It is, however, nowadays hopeless to attempt to separate these two
+species, distinct as I believe them to be; and they together undoubtedly
+constitute what is called the Mission party not only in England but in
+Germany. I believe this alliance has done immense harm to the true
+missionary, for to it I trace that tendency to harp upon horrors and
+general sensationalism which so sharply differentiates the modern from
+the classic missionary reports. Take up that noble story of Dennis de
+Carli and Michael Angelo of Gattina, and read it through, and then turn
+on to wise, clear-headed Merolla da Sorrento, and read him; you find
+there no sensationalism. Now and again, when deeply tried, they will
+say, &ldquo;These people live after a beastly manner, and converse freely with
+the Devil,&rdquo; but you soon find them saying, &ldquo;Among these people there are
+some excellent customs,&rdquo; and they give you full details of them, with
+evident satisfaction. You see it did not fundamentally matter to these
+early missionaries whether their prospective converts &ldquo;had excellent
+customs&rdquo; or &ldquo;lived after a beastly manner,&rdquo; from a religious standpoint.
+Not one atom&mdash;they were the sort of men who would have gone for Plato,
+Socrates, and all the Classics gaily, holding that they were not
+Christians as they ought to be; but this never caused them to paint a
+distorted portrait of the African. This thing, I believe, the modern
+philanthropist has induced the modern missionary only too frequently to
+do, and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</a></span> other regrettable element which has induced him to do it
+has been the apathy of the English public, a public which unless it were
+stirred up by horrors would not subscribe. Again the blame is with
+England at home, but the harm done is paid for in West Africa. The
+portrait painted of the African by the majority, not all, but the
+majority of West African mission reports, has been that of a child,
+naturally innocent, led away and cheated by white traders and grievously
+oppressed by his own rulers. I grant you, the African taken as a whole
+is the gentlest kind of real human being that is made. I do not however
+class him with races who carry gentleness to a morbid extent, and for
+governmental purposes you must not with any race rely on their main
+characteristic alone; for example, Englishmen are honest, yet still we
+require the police force.</p>
+
+<p>The evil worked by what we must call the missionary party is almost
+incalculable; from it has arisen the estrangement of English interests,
+as represented by our reason for adding West Africa to our Empire at
+all&mdash;the trader&mdash;and the English Government as represented by the Crown
+Colony system; and it has also led to our present policy of destroying
+powerful native States and the power of the African ruling classes at
+large. Secondarily it is the cause of our wars in West Africa. That this
+has not been and is not the desire of the mission party it is needless
+to say; that the blame is directly due to the Crown Colony system it is
+as needless to remark; for any reasonable system of its age would long
+ere now have known the African at first hand, not as it knows him, and
+knows him only, at its head-quarters, London, from second-hand vitiated
+reports. It has, nowadays, at its service the common sense and humane
+opinions of the English trade lords as represented by the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</a></span> Chambers of
+Commerce of Liverpool and Manchester; but though just at present it
+listens to what they say&mdash;thanks to Mr. Chamberlain&mdash;yet it cannot act
+on their statements, but only querulously says, &ldquo;Your information does
+not agree with our information.&rdquo; Allah forbid that the information of
+the party with whom I have had the honour to be classed should agree
+with that sort of information from other sources; and I would naturally
+desire the rulers of West Africa to recognise the benefit they now enjoy
+of having information of a brand that has not led to such a thing as the
+Sierre Leone outbreak for example, and to remember in this instance that
+six months before the hut tax there was put on, the Chambers had
+strongly advised the Government against it, and had received in reply
+the answer that &ldquo;The Secretary of State sees no reason to suppose that
+the hut tax will be oppressive, or that it will be less easy to collect
+in Sierra Leone than in Gambia.&rdquo; Why, you could not get a prophetic
+almanac into a second issue if it were not based on truer knowledge than
+that which made it possible for such a thing to be said. Nevertheless,
+no doubt this remarkable sentence was written believing the same to be
+true, and confiding in the information in the hands of the Colonial
+Office from the official and philanthropic sources in which the Office
+believes.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_59_60" id="Footnote_59_60"></a><a href="#FNanchor_59_60"><span class="label">[59]</span></a> <i>Wanderings in West Africa</i>, vol. i., 1863.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XV" id="CHAPTER_XV"></a>CHAPTER XV</h2>
+
+<h2>MORE OF THE CROWN COLONY SYSTEM</h2>
+
+<p class="pblock">Wherein is set down the other, or main, reason against this system.</p>
+
+<p>Having attempted to explain the internal evils or what one might call
+the domestic rows of the Crown colony system, I will pass on to the
+external evils&mdash;which although in a measure consequent on the internal
+are not entirely so, and this point cannot be too clearly borne in mind.
+Tinker it up as you may, the system will remain one pre-eminently
+unsuited for the administration of West Africa.</p>
+
+<p>You might arrange that officials working under it should be treated
+better than the official now is, and the West African service be brought
+into line in honour with the Indian, and afford a man a good sound
+career. You might arrange for the Chambers of Commerce, representing the
+commercial factor, to have a place in Colonial Office councils. But if
+you did these things the Crown colony system would still remain unsuited
+to West Africa, because it is a system intrinsically too expensive in
+men and money, so that the more you develop it the more expensive it
+becomes. Concerning this system as applied to the West Indies a West
+Indian authority the other day said it was putting an elephant to draw a
+goat chaise;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</a></span> concerning the West African application of it, I should
+say it was trying to open a tin case with a tortoise-shell paper knife.
+Of course you will say I am no authority, and you must choose between
+those who will tell you that only a little patience is required and the
+result of the present governmental system in West Africa will blossom
+into philanthropic and financial successes, and me who say it cannot do
+so but must result in making West Africa a debt-ridden curse to England.
+All I can say for myself is that I am animated by no dislike to any set
+of men and without one farthing&rsquo;s financial interest in West Africa. It
+would not affect my income if you were to put 100 per cent. ad valorem
+duty on every trade article in use on the Coast and flood the Coast with
+officials, paid as men should be paid who have to go there, namely, at
+least three times more than they are at present. My dislike to the
+present state of affairs is solely a dislike to seeing my country, to my
+mind, make a fool of herself, wasting men&rsquo;s lives in the process and
+deluding herself with the idea that the performance will repay her.</p>
+
+<p>Personally, I cannot avoid thinking that before you cast yourself in a
+whole-souled way into developing anything you should have a knowledge of
+the nature of the thing as it is on scientific lines. Education and
+development unless backed by this knowledge are liable to be thrown
+away, or to produce results you have no use for. I remember a
+distressing case that occurred in West Africa and supports my opinion. A
+valued friend of mine, a seaman of great knowledge and experience, yet
+lacking in that critical spirit which inquires into the nature of things
+before proceeding with them, confident alone in the rectitude of his own
+intentions, bought a canary bird at a Canary Island. He knew that the
+men<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[Pg 326]</a></span> who sell canaries down there are up to the sample description of
+deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. So he brought to bear
+upon the transaction a deal of subtlety, but neglected fundamental
+facts, whereby his triumph at having, on the whole, done the canary
+seller brown by getting him to take in part value for the bird a box of
+German colonial-grown cigars, was vanity. For weeks that gallant seaman
+rubbed a wet cork up and down an empty whisky bottle within the hearing
+of the bird, which is the proper thing to do providing things are all
+right in themselves, and yet nothing beyond genial twitterings rewarded
+his exertions. So he rubbed on for another week with even greater
+feeling and persuasive power, and then, to drop a veil upon this tragedy
+of lost endeavour, that canary laid an egg. Now, if that man had only
+attended to the nature of things and seen whether it were a cock or hen
+bird, he would not have been subjected to this grievous disappointment.
+Similarly, it seems to me, we are, from the governmental point of view,
+like that sea captain&mdash;swimming about in the West African affair with a
+lot of subtle details, in an atmosphere of good intentions, but not in
+touch with important facts; we are acting logically from faulty
+premises.</p>
+
+<p>Now, let us grant that the Crown Colony system is not fully developed in
+West Africa, for if it were, you may say, it would work all right;
+though this I consider a most dangerous idea. Let us see what it would
+be if it were fully developed.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. St. Loe Strachey<a name="FNanchor_60_61" id="FNanchor_60_61"></a><a href="#Footnote_60_61" class="fnanchor">[60]</a> thus defines Crown Colonies:&mdash;&ldquo;These are
+possessions which are for the most part peopled by non-European races of
+dark colour, and governed not by persons elected by themselves, but by a
+governor and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[Pg 327]</a></span>other officials sent out from England. The reason for this
+difference is a very simple one. Those colonies which are peopled by men
+of English and European races can provide themselves with a better
+government than we can provide them with from here. Hence they are given
+responsible governments.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Those colonies in which the English or European element is very small
+can best be governed, it is found, by the Crown Colony system. The
+native, dark-skinned population are not fit to govern themselves&mdash;they
+are too ignorant and too uncivilised, and if the government is left
+entirely in the hands of the small number of whites who may happen to
+live in the colony, they are apt not to take enough care of the
+interests of the coloured inhabitants. The simplest form of the Crown
+Colony is that found in some of the smaller groups of islands in the
+West Indies. Here a governor is sent out from England, and he&mdash;helped by
+a secretary, a judge, and other officials&mdash;governs the island, reporting
+his actions to the Colonial Office, and consulting the able officials
+there before he takes important steps. In most cases, however, the
+governor has a council, either nominated from among the principal
+persons in the colony, or else elected by the inhabitants. In some
+cases&mdash;Jamaica or Barbadoes, for example&mdash;the council has very great
+power, and the type of government may be said to approach that of the
+self-governing colonies.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Now, in West Africa the system is the same as that &ldquo;found in some of the
+smaller groups of the West Indian islands,&rdquo; although these West African
+colonies have each a nominated council of some kind. I should hesitate
+to say, however, &ldquo;to assist the governor.&rdquo; Being nominated by him they
+can usually manage to agree with him; it is only<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[Pg 328]</a></span> another hindrance or
+superfluous affair. Before taking any important steps the West African
+governor is supposed to consult the officials at the Colonial Office;
+but as the Colonial Office is not so well informed as the governor
+himself is, this can be no help to him if he be a really able man, and
+no check on him if he be not an able man. For, be he what he may, he is
+the representative of the Colonial Office; he cannot, it is true,
+persuade the Colonial Office to go and involve itself in rows with
+European continental powers, because the Office knows about them; but if
+he is a strong-minded man with a fad he can persuade the Colonial Office
+to let him try that fad on the natives or the traders, because the
+Colonial Office does not know the natives nor the West African trade.</p>
+
+<p>You see, therefore, you have in the Governor of a West African
+possession a man in a bad position. He is aided by no council worth
+having, no regular set of experts; he is held in by another council
+equally non-expert, except in the direction of continental politics. He
+may keep out of mischief; he could, if he were given either time or
+inducement to study the native languages, laws, and general ethnology of
+his colony, do much good; but how can he do these things, separated from
+the native population as he necessarily is, by his under officials, and
+with his time taken up, just as every official&rsquo;s time is taken up under
+the Crown Colony system, with a mass of red-tape clerkwork that is
+unnecessary and intrinsically valueless? I do not pretend to any
+personal acquaintance with English West African Governors. I only look
+on their affairs from outside, but I have seen some great men among
+them. One of them who is dead would, I believe, had the climate spared
+him, have become a man whom every one interested in West<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[Pg 329]</a></span> Africa would
+have respected and admired. He came from a totally different region, the
+Straits Settlements. He found his West African domain in a lethargic
+mess, and he hit out right and left, falling, like the rain, on the just
+and the unjust. I do not wish you to take his utterances or his actions
+as representing him; but from the spirit of them it is clear he would
+have become a great blessing to the Coast had he but lived long enough.
+I am aware he was unpopular from his attempts to enforce the ill-drafted
+Land Ordinance, but primarily responsible for this ill-judged thing he
+was not.</p>
+
+<p>In addition to Sir William Maxwell there have been, and are still, other
+Governors representative of what is best in England; but, circumstanced
+as they are under this system, continually interrupted as their work is
+by death or furloughs home, neither England nor West Africa gets
+one-tenth part of the true value of these men.</p>
+
+<p>In addition to the Governor, there are the other officials, medical,
+legal, secretarial, constabulary, and customs. The majority of these are
+engaged in looking after each other and clerking. Clerking is the breath
+of the Crown Colony system, and customs what it feeds on. Owing to the
+climate it is practically necessary to have a double staff in all these
+departments,&mdash;that is what the system would have if it were perfect; as
+it is, some official&rsquo;s work is always being done by a subordinate; it
+may be equally well done, but it is not equally well paid for, and there
+is no continuity of policy in any department, except those which are
+entirely clerk, and the expense of this is necessarily great. The main
+evil of this want of continuity is of course in the Governors&mdash;a
+Governor goes out, starts a new line of policy, goes home on furlough
+leaving in charge the Colonial<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[Pg 330]</a></span> Secretary, who does not by all means
+always feel enthusiastic towards that policy; so it languishes. Governor
+comes back, goes at it again like a giant refreshed, but by no means
+better acquainted with local affairs for having been away; then he goes
+home again, or dies, or gets a new appointment; a brand new Governor
+comes out, he starts a new line of policy, perhaps has a new Colonial
+Secretary into the bargain; anyhow the thing goes on wavering, not
+advancing. The only description I have heard of our policy in West
+African Colonies that seems to me to do it justice is that given by a
+medical friend of mine, who said it was a coma accompanied by fits.</p>
+
+<p>Of course this would not be the case if the Colonial Office had a
+definite detailed policy of its own, and merely sent out men to carry it
+out; but this the Colonial Office has not got and cannot have, because
+it has not got the scientific and commercial facts of West Africa in its
+possession. It has therefore to depend on the Governors it sends out;
+and these, as aforesaid, are men of divers minds. One Governor is truly
+great on drains; he spends lots of money on them. Another Governor
+thinks education and a cathedral more important; during his reign drains
+languish. Yet another Governor comes along and says if there are schools
+wanted they should be under non-sectarian control, but what is wanted is
+a railway; and so it goes on, and of course leads to an immense waste of
+money. And this waste of money is a far more serious thing than it
+looks; for it is from it that the policy has arisen, of increasing
+customs dues to a point that seriously hampers trade development, and
+the far more serious evil of attempting directly as well as indirectly
+to tax the native population.</p>
+
+<p>I am bound to say I believe any ordinary Englishman<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[Pg 331]</a></span> would be fairly
+staggered if he went out to West Africa and saw what there was to show
+for the expenditure of the last few years in our Crown Colonies
+there,<a name="FNanchor_61_62" id="FNanchor_61_62"></a><a href="#Footnote_61_62" class="fnanchor">[61]</a> and knew that all that money had been honestly expended in
+the main, that none of it had been appropriated by the officials, that
+they had only had their pay, and that none too great.</p>
+
+<p>But, you will say, after all, if West Africa is as rich as it is said to
+be, surely it can stand a little wasteful expenditure, and support an
+even more expensive administration than it now has. All I can say is,
+that it can stand wasteful expenditure, but only up to a certain point,
+which is now passed; it would perhaps be more true to say it could stand
+wasteful expenditure before the factor of the competition of French and
+German colonies alongside came in; and that a wasteful expenditure that
+necessitates unjust methods of raising revenue, such as direct taxation
+on the natives, is a thing West Africa will not stand at all. Of course
+you can do it; you can impose direct taxation on the native population,
+but you cannot make it financially pay to do so; for one thing, the
+collection of that tax will require a considerable multiplication of
+officials black and white, the black section will by their oppressive
+methods engender war, and the joint body will consume more than the
+amount that can be collected. From a fiscal standpoint direct taxation
+of a non-Mohammedanised or non-Christianised community is rank
+foolishness, for reasons known to every ethnologist. As for the natural
+riches of West Africa, I am a profound believer in them, and regard West
+Africa, taken as a whole, as one of the richest regions in <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[Pg 332]</a></span>the world;
+but, as Sir William Maxwell said, &ldquo;I am convinced that, from causes
+wholly unpreventable, West Africa is and must remain a place with
+certain peculiar dangers of its own&rdquo;<a name="FNanchor_62_63" id="FNanchor_62_63"></a><a href="#Footnote_62_63" class="fnanchor">[62]</a>; therefore it requires most
+careful, expert handling. It is no use your trying to get its riches out
+by a set of hasty amateur experiments; it is no use just dumping down
+capital on it and calling these goings on &ldquo;Developing the resources,&rdquo; or
+&ldquo;Raising the African in the plane of civilisation;&rdquo; because these goings
+on are not these things, they are but sacrifices on the altars of folly
+and idleness.</p>
+
+<p>Properly managed, those parts of West Africa which our past apathy has
+left to us are capable of being made into a group of possessions before
+which the direct value to England, in England, of all the other regions
+that we hold in the world would sink into insignificance.</p>
+
+<p>Sir William Maxwell, when he referred to &ldquo;causes wholly unpreventable,&rdquo;
+was referring mainly to the unhealthiness of West Africa. There seems no
+escape from this great drawback. Every other difficulty connected with
+it one can imagine removable by human activity and ingenuity&mdash;even the
+labour difficulty&mdash;but, I fear, not so the fever. Although this is not a
+thing to discourage England from holding West Africa, it is a thing
+which calls for greater forethought in the administration of it than she
+need give to a healthy region. In a healthy region it does not matter so
+much whether there is an excess over requirements in the number of men
+employed to administer it, but in one with a death rate of at least 35
+per cent. of white men it does matter.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[Pg 333]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I confess it is this excessive expenditure of men which I dislike most
+in the Crown Colony system, though I know it cannot help it; it is in
+the make of the thing. If these men were even employed in some great
+undertaking it would be less grievous; but they are many of them
+entirely taken up with clerk work, and all of them have to waste a large
+percentage of their time on it. Some of the men undoubtedly get to like
+this, but it is a morbid taste. I know one of our possessions where the
+officials even carry on their personal quarrels with each other on
+government paper in a high official style, when it would be better if
+they put aside an hour a week and went and punched each other&rsquo;s heads,
+and gave the rest of their time to studying native law and languages and
+pottering about the country getting up information on it at large, so
+that the natives would become familiarised with the nature of Englishmen
+first-hand, instead of being dependent for their knowledge of them on
+interpreters and the set of subordinate native officials and native
+police.</p>
+
+<p>I wish that it lay in my power to place before you merely a set of
+figures that would show you the present state of our West African
+affairs, but such figures do not exist. Practically speaking, there are
+no reliable figures for West African affairs. They are not cooked, but
+you know what figures are&mdash;unless they be complete and in their proper
+stations, they are valueless.</p>
+
+<p>The figures we have are those which appear in &ldquo;The Colonial Annual
+Series&rdquo; of reports. These are not annual; for example, the Gold Coast
+one was not published for three years; but no matter, when they are
+published they are misleading enough, unless you know things not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[Pg 334]</a></span>
+mentioned in them but connected with them. However, we will just run
+through the figures published for one West African Crown Colony. For
+many reasons I am sorry to have to take those regarding Sierra Leone,
+but I must, as at present they are the most correct available.</p>
+
+<p>Now the element of error which must be allowed for in these arises from
+the proximity of the French colony of French Guinea, which is next door
+to Sierra Leone. That colony has been really developing its exports.
+Goods have, up to last year, come out through our colony of Sierra
+Leone, and have been included with the exports of Sierra Leone itself,
+though Sierra Leone has not dwelt on this interesting fact. And,
+equally, since 1890 goods going into French Guinea have gone in through
+Sierra Leone, and though traceable with care, have been put in with the
+total of the imports. So you see it is a little difficult to find out
+whether it has been French Guinea or Sierra Leone that has really been
+doing the trade mentioned in the figures.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, it has been customary to take these joint, mixed up
+figures and get happy over &ldquo;the increase of trade in Sierra Leone during
+the past ten year$1&rdquo;;dquo;; but a little calm consideration will prevent you
+from falling into this idle error.</p>
+
+<p>Personally I think that if you are cautious you will try and estimate
+the trade by the exports; for among the imports there are Government
+stores, railway material, &amp;c., things that will have some day to be paid
+for, because it is the rule not to assist a colony under the system
+until it has been reduced to a West Indian condition; whereas the
+exports give you the buying power of the colony, and show the limits of
+the trade which may be expected to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[Pg 335]</a></span> be done under existing conditions.
+Now, the annual total exports during the five years ending&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="center">
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="exports">
+<tr><td class="tdl">1875,</td><td class="tdl" colspan="3">amounted in value to,</td><td>Ŗ396,709</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">1880,</td><td class="tdl">"</td><td class="tdl">"</td><td class="tdl">"</td><td class="tdl">Ŗ368,855</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">1885,</td><td class="tdl">"</td><td class="tdl">"</td><td class="tdl">"</td><td class="tdl">Ŗ386,848</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">1890,</td><td class="tdl">"</td><td class="tdl">"</td><td class="tdl">"</td><td class="tdl">Ŗ333,390</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">1895,</td><td class="tdl">"</td><td class="tdl">"</td><td class="tdl">"</td><td class="tdl">Ŗ435,175</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+<p>These figures show for the twenty-five years an increase of less than 10
+per cent., or about &frac12; per cent, per annum; and this is not so very
+thrilling when one comes to think that that 10 per cent., and probably
+more, is showing the increase in the trade not of Sierra Leone, but of
+French Guinea, and remembers that in 1874 the exports were Ŗ481,894, an
+amount they have not since touched.</p>
+
+<p>Then again even in error you are never quite sure if your Colonial
+Annual is keeping line; sometimes you will get one by a careful
+conscientious secretary who takes no end of trouble, and tells you lots
+of things which you would like to hear about next year, only next year
+you don&rsquo;t. For example, in Sierra Leone affairs the report for 1887 gave
+you the imports for consumption in the colony, while that of 1896
+represented the total imports, including those afterwards shipped to
+French Guinea and elsewhere; and again, in estimating the value of the
+imports Gambia adds the cost of freight and insurance to the invoice
+value of imports, and the cost of package to the declared value of
+exports. So far, only Gambia does this, but at any moment an equally
+laudable spirit might develop in one of the other colonies, and cause
+further distraction to the student of their figures.</p>
+
+<p>Besides these clerking errors of omission, there is a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[Pg 336]</a></span> constant
+unavoidable error arising from the so-called smuggling done by the
+native traders in the hinterland. Remember that colonies which you see
+neatly enough marked on a map of West Africa with French, English,
+German, are not really each surrounded by a set of Great Walls of China.
+For example, under the present arrangement with France, if France keeps
+to that beautiful Article IX. in the Niger Convention and does not tax
+English goods more than she at present taxes French goods on the Ivory
+coast&mdash;cottons of English manufacture will be able to be sold 10 per
+cent. cheaper in the French territory than in the adjacent English Gold
+Coast.</p>
+
+<p>Up to the present time it has paid the native hinterland trader to come
+down into the Gold Coast and buy his cotton goods, for English cottons
+suit his West African markets better than other makes, that is to say
+they have a higher buying power; and then he went down into the French
+Ivory Coast and bought his spirits and guns, which were cheaper there
+because of lower duty. Having got his selection together he went off and
+did business with the raw material sellers, and sold the raw material he
+had purchased back to the two Coasts from which he had bought his
+selection, sending the greater part of it to the best market for the
+time being. Now you have changed that, or, rather, you have given France
+the power to change it by selling English cottons cheaper than they can
+be sold in your own possessions, and thereby rendered it unnecessary for
+the hinterland traders to buy on the Gold Coast at all. It will remain
+necessary for him to buy on the Ivory Coast, for spirits and guns he
+must have; and if he can get his cottons at the same place as he gets
+these, so much the better for him. It is doubtful, however, whether
+henceforth<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[Pg 337]</a></span> it will be worth his while to come down and sell his raw
+material in your possessions at all. He may browse around your interior
+towns and suck the produce out of them, but it will be to the enrichment
+of the French colony next door; and, of course, as things are even now,
+this sort of thing, which goes on throughout all the various colonies of
+France, England, Germany and Portugal, does not tend to give true value
+to the official figures concerning trade published by any one of them.</p>
+
+<p>I have no intention, however, of dwelling on the various methods
+employed by native smugglers with a view to aiding their suppression. It
+may be a hereditary taint contracted by my ancestors while they
+sojourned in Devon, it may be private personal villainy of my own; but
+anyhow, I never feel, as from an official standpoint I ought, towards
+smugglers. I do not ask you to regard the African native trader as a
+sweet innocent who does not realise the villainy of his doings,&mdash;he
+knows all about it; but only once did I feel harshly towards him over
+smuggling. A native trader had arranged to give me a lift, as it were,
+in his canoe, and I noticed, with a flattered vanity and a feeling of
+gratitude, how very careful he had been to make me quite comfortable in
+the stern, with a perfect little nest of mats and cloths. When we
+reached our destination and that nest was taken to pieces, I saw that
+what you might call the backbone of the affair was three kegs of
+gunpowder, a case of kerosine, and some packages of lucifer matches.
+That rascal fellow black, as Barbot would call him, had expected we
+should meet the customs patrol boat, and, basely encroaching on the
+chivalry of the white man towards the white woman judged that I and my
+nest would not be overhauled. If there had been a guardian cherub for
+the Brussels Convention or for Customs doubtless I should have been
+blown sky<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[Pg 338]</a></span> high and have afforded material for a moral tale called &ldquo;The
+Smuggler&rsquo;s Awful End,&rdquo; but there are no cherubs who watch over Customs
+or the Brussels Convention in West Africa and I have no intention of
+volunteering for such an appointment.</p>
+
+<p>But to return to the Sierra Leone finances and the relationship which
+the expenditure of that colony bears to the revenue. The increase in the
+imports is apparently the thing depended on to justify the idea that as
+the trade has increased the governmental expenditure has a right to do
+so likewise. The imports increase in 1896 is given as Ŗ90,683. From this
+you must deduct for railway material, Ŗ26,000, and for the increased
+specie import, Ŗ19,591, which leaves you an increase of imports of
+Ŗ45,092 from 1887-1896, and remember a good percentage of this remainder
+of Ŗ45,092 belongs to French Guinea.</p>
+
+<p>Now the expenditure on the government of Sierra Leone has increased from
+Ŗ58,534 in 1887 to Ŗ116,183, being an increase at the rate of 99.1 per
+cent., whereas the exports during the same period have increased at the
+rate of 34.8 per cent, or from Ŗ333,157 to Ŗ449,033.</p>
+
+<p>In other words, whereas in 1887 the government expenditure amounted to
+17.5 per cent, the exports in 1896 amounted to 25.4 per cent. The sum of
+Ŗ40,579 of this increase is credited to police, gaols, transport, and
+public works;<a name="FNanchor_63_64" id="FNanchor_63_64"></a><a href="#Footnote_63_64" class="fnanchor">[63]</a> and if this is to be the normal rate of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[Pg 339]</a></span>increase, the
+prospects of the colony are serious; for it contains no rich mineral
+deposit as far as is at present known, nor are there in it any great
+native states. As far as we know, Sierra Leone must for an immense
+period depend on bush products collected by the natives, whose trade
+wants are only a few luxuries. For it must be remembered that in all
+these West African colonies there is not one single thing Europeans can
+sell to the natives that is of the nature of a true necessity, a thing
+the natives must have or starve. There is but one thing that even
+approaches in the West African markets to what wheat is in our own&mdash;that
+thing is tobacco. Next in importance to it, but considerably lower, is
+the group of trade articles&mdash;gunpowder, guns, and spirits, next again
+salt, and below these four staples come Manchester goods and
+miscellanies; the whole of the rest that lies in the power of
+civilisation to offer to the West African markets are things that are
+luxuries, things that will only be purchased by the native when he is in
+a state of prosperity. This subject I have, however, endeavoured to
+explain elsewhere.<a name="FNanchor_64_65" id="FNanchor_64_65"></a><a href="#Footnote_64_65" class="fnanchor">[64]</a></p>
+
+<p>We have for Sierra Leone, fortunately, a scientific authority to refer
+to on this matter of the natural resources of the country, and the
+amount of the natural riches we may presume we can take into account
+when arranging fiscal matters. This authority is the report of Mr.
+Scott-Elliott on the district traversed by the Anglo-French Boundary
+Commission.<a name="FNanchor_65_66" id="FNanchor_65_66"></a><a href="#Footnote_65_66" class="fnanchor">[65]</a></p>
+
+<p>Regarding mineral, the report states &ldquo;that the only <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[Pg 340]</a></span>mineral of
+importance is iron, of which the country appears to contain a very large
+amount. There is a particularly rich belt of titaniferous iron ore in
+the hills behind Sierra Leone.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Titaniferous iron is an excellent thing in its way, and good for steel
+making; but it exists nearer home and in cheaper worked regions than
+Sierra Leone.</p>
+
+<p>The soil is grouped by the report into three classes:</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;1. That of the plateaux and hills above 2,000, or sometimes descending
+to 1,000 feet, which is due to the disintegration of gneiss and granite
+rocks.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;2. The red laterite which covers almost invariably all the lower hills
+from the sea level to 1,000 or 2,000 feet.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;3. The alluvium, due either to the action of the mangroves along the
+coast, or to rivers and streams inland.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>These soils are capable of and do produce fine timber, rubber, oil and
+rice, and the general tropical food stuffs, but these, except the three
+first, are not very valuable export articles. Whether it is possible to
+enhance the agricultural value of the alluvium regions by growing
+tobacco, jute, coffee, cocoa, cotton and sugar, for export, is by some
+authorities regarded as doubtful on account of the labour problem; but
+at any rate, if these industries were taken in hand on a large scale, a
+scale sufficient materially to alter the resources of a West African
+colony, they would require many years of fostering, and it would be long
+before they could contribute greatly to the resources of such a colony
+as Sierra Leone, in the face of the organised production and cheaper
+labour, wherewith the supply now in the markets of Europe could be
+competed with.</p>
+
+<p>I have had the advantage of associating with German and Portuguese and
+French planters of coffee and cocoa.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[Pg 341]</a></span> These are the planters who up to
+the present have been the most successful in West Africa. I do not say
+because they are better men, but because they have better soils and
+better labour than there is in our colonies. By these gentlemen I have
+been industriously educated in soils, &amp;c.; and from what I have learnt
+about this matter I am bound regretfully to say that most of the soil of
+the English possessions is not really rich, taken in the main. There are
+in places patches of rich soil; and the greater part of our soil will be
+all the better this day 10,000 years hence; but at present the soil is
+mainly sour clay, slime and skin soils, skin soils over rock, skin soils
+over sour clay, skin soils over water-logged soil. We have, alas, not
+got the rich volcanic earth of Cameroon, Fernando Po, and San Thome and
+Principe. The natives who work the soil understand it fairly well, and
+negro agriculture is in a well-developed state, and their farms are most
+carefully tended and well kept. The rule along the Bight of Benin and
+Biafra is to change the soil of the farm at least every third year; this
+they do by cutting down a new bit of bush, burning the bush on the
+ground at the end of the dry season, and planting the crops. The old
+farm is then allowed to grow bush or long grass, whichever the
+particular district goes in for, until the time comes to work back on
+that piece of land again, when the bush which has grown is in its turn
+cut down and the ground replanted. This burning of the trees or grass is
+clearly regarded by the native agriculturist as manuring; it is
+practically the only method of manuring available for them in a country
+where cattle in quantities are not kept. It is a wasteful way with
+timber and rubber growing on the ground of course; but not so wildly
+wasteful as it looks, for your Negro agriculturist does not go to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[Pg 342]</a></span> make
+his farm on bits of forest that require very hard clearing work. He
+clears as easily as he can by means of collecting the great fluffy seed
+bunches of a certain tree which are inflammable and adding to them all
+the other inflammable material he can get; he then places these bonfires
+in the bit of forest he wants to clear and sets fire to them on a
+favourable night, when the proper sort of breeze is blowing to fan the
+flames; when the conflagration is over, he fells a few of the trees and
+leaves the rest standing scorched but not killed. Moreover, of course an
+African gentleman cannot go and make his farm anywhere he likes: he has
+to stick to the land which belongs to his family, and work round and
+round on that. This gives a highly untidy aspect to the family estate,
+you might think; considering the extent of it, a very small percentage
+must be kept under cultivation and the rest neglected. But this is not
+really so; if you were to go and take away from him a bit of the
+neglected land, you would be taking his farm, say for the year after
+next and grievously inconvenience him, and he would know it.</p>
+
+<p>The native method of making farms does not, indeed, do so much harm in
+well-watered, densely-populated regions like those of Sierra Leone or
+the Niger Delta; but it does do an immense amount of harm in regions
+that are densely populated and require to make extensive farms, more
+particularly in the regions of Lagos and the Gold Coast, where the
+fertile belt is only a narrow ribbon, edged on the one side by the sand
+sea of the Sahara, and on the other by the salt sea of the South
+Atlantic. You can see the result of it in the district round Accra,
+which has always been heavily populated; for hundreds of years the
+forest has been kept down by agricultural enterprise. Consequences are,
+the rainfall is now diminished to a point that threatens to extinguish<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[Pg 343]</a></span>
+agriculture, at any rate, a sufficient agriculture to support the local
+population; and it is not too much to say you can read on the face of
+the Accra plain famines to come. There is little reason to doubt that
+both the African deserts, the Sahara and the Kalahari, are advancing
+towards the Equator. Round Loanda you come across a sand-logged region
+of some fifty square miles, where you get the gum shed by forests that
+have gone, humanly speaking, never to return; human agency is largely
+responsible, it is like sawing the branch of a tree partially through,
+and then the wind breaks it off. Forest destruction in lands adjacent to
+deserts is the same thing; the forest is destroyed to a certain extent,
+an extent that diminishes the rainfall and makes it unable to resist the
+desert winds, and then&mdash;finis.</p>
+
+<p>In the regions of the double rains in the great forest belt of Africa
+things are different, so you cannot generalise for West Africa at large
+in this matter. It is one thing for forest destruction to go on in the
+Gold Coast, quite another for it to go on in Calabar or Congo Franįais,
+where men fight back the forest as Dutchmen fight the sea.</p>
+
+<p>But I apologise. This, you will say, is not connected with Governmental
+expenditure, &amp;c.; but it is to me a more amusing subject, and indirectly
+has a bearing; for example, Government expenditure in the direction of
+instituting a Forestry Department would be right enough in some regions,
+but unnecessary in others.</p>
+
+<p>To return to this agriculture in Sierra Leone. Well, it is, like all
+West African agriculture, spade husbandry. It is concerned with the
+cultivation of vegetables for human consumption alone. In the interior
+of Sierra Leone and throughout the Western Soudan, for which Sierra
+Leone was once a principal port, there is a fair cattle country,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[Pg 344]</a></span> and an
+old established one, as is shown by the exports of hides mentioned in
+the writers of the seventeenth century. Yet it would be idle for the
+most enthusiastic believer in West Africa to pretend that the Western
+Soudan is coming on to compete with Argentina or Australia in the export
+of frozen meat; the climate is against it, and therefore this cattle
+country can only be represented in trade in a hide and horn export.
+Wool&mdash;as the sheep won&rsquo;t wear it, preferring hair instead and that of
+poor quality&mdash;need not I think be looked forward to from West Africa at
+all.</p>
+
+<p>I have taken the published accounts of Sierra Leone, because, as I have
+said, they are the most complete. They are also, in the main, the most
+typical. It is true that Sierra Leone has not the gold wealth, nor the
+developing timber industry of the Gold Coast; but if you ignore French
+Guinea, and include the things belonging to it with the Sierra Leone
+totals, you will get a fairly equivalent result. Lagos has not yet shown
+a mineral export, but it and the Gold Coast have shown of late years an
+immensely increased export of rubber. Rubber, oil, and timber are the
+three great riches of our West African possessions, the things that may
+be relied on, as being now of great value and capable of immense
+expansion. But these things can only be made serviceable to the markets
+of the world and a source of riches to England by the co-operation of
+the natives of the country. In other words, you must solve the labour
+problem on the one hand, and increase the prosperity of the native
+population on the other, in order to make West Africa pay you back the
+value of the life and money already paid for her. This solution of the
+labour problem and this co-operation of the natives with you, the Crown
+Colony system will never gain for you, because it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[Pg 345]</a></span> is too expensive for
+you and unjust to them, not intentionally, not vindictively nor
+wickedly, but just from ignorance. It destroys the native form of
+society, and thereby disorganises labour. It has no power of
+re-organising it. You hear that people are leaving Coomassie and Benin,
+instead of flocking in to those places, as they were expected to after
+the destruction of the local tyrannies. English influence in West
+Africa, represented as it now is by three separate classes of
+Englishmen, with no common object of interest, or aim in policy, is not
+a thing capable of re-organising so difficult a region. I have taken the
+Sierra Leone figures because, as I have said, they are the most complete
+and typical, and the state of the trade and the expenditure on the
+Government are those prior to the hut tax war. So they cannot be
+ascribed to it, nor can the plea be lodged that the expenditure was an
+enforced one. These figures merely show you the thing that led up to the
+hut tax war and the heavy enforced expenditure it has and will entail,
+and my reason for detaining you with them is the conviction that a
+similar policy pursued in our other colonies will lead to the same
+results&mdash;the destruction of trade and the imposition on the colonies of
+a debt that their natural resources cannot meet unless we are prepared
+to go in for forced labour and revert to the slave trade policy.</p>
+
+<p>It seems clear enough that our present policy in the Crown Colonies, of
+a rapidly increasing expenditure in the face of a steadily falling
+trade, must necessarily lead our Government to seek for new sources of
+revenue beyond customs dues. New sources under our present system can
+only be found in direct taxation of the native population; the result of
+this is now known.</p>
+
+<p>I will not attempt to deal fully with the figures we<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">[Pg 346]</a></span> possess for our
+remaining Crown Colonies in Western Africa,&mdash;Gambia, the Gold Coast, and
+Lagos,&mdash;but merely refer to a few points regarding them that have so far
+been published. When the result of the policy pursued in these colonies
+leads to the inevitable row, and the figures are dealt with by competent
+men, there is, to my mind, no doubt that a state equal to that of Sierra
+Leone as a fool&rsquo;s paradise will be discovered; and the deplorable part
+of the thing is, that the trade palavers of the Chambers and the
+Colonial Office will give to hasty politicians the idea that West Africa
+is not worthy of Imperial attention, and large quantities of the blame
+for this failure of our colonies will be put down quite unjustly to
+French interference. That French interference has troubled our colonies
+there, no one will attempt to deny; or that if it had been acting on
+them when they were in a healthy state it would merely have had a tonic
+effect, as it has had on the Royal Niger Company&rsquo;s territories; but,
+acting on the Crown Colonies in their present state, French influence
+has naturally been poisonous. Even I, not given to sweet mouth as I am,
+shrink from saying what has been the true effect on the Crown Colonies
+of England of the policy pursued by us towards French advance. This only
+will I say, that the French policy is no discredit to France. Regarding
+the financial condition of Gambia it is not necessary for us to worry
+ourselves. Gambia is a nuisance to France. She loves to have high dues,
+and she cannot have them round Gambia way. She has had to encyst it, or
+it would be to her Senegal and French Guinea possessions a regular main
+to lay on smuggling. Knowing this she has encysted it; it pays better to
+smuggle from French Guinea into Gambia or Sierra Leone than from Gambia
+or Sierra Leone into<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[Pg 347]</a></span> the French possessions. This is a grave commercial
+position for us, but to it is largely owing the advance of the
+prosperity of these French possessions during the past three years.</p>
+
+<p>The Gold Coast has on the west a French possession, the Ivory Coast, on
+the east the German Togoland. Togo is a narrow strip, and to its east
+and surrounding it to the north is the French colony of Dahomey, whose
+recent expansion has told heavily on its next-door neighbours, both Togo
+and the English colony to the east, Lagos. I give below the latest
+available figures for the foreign West African possessions.<a name="FNanchor_66_67" id="FNanchor_66_67"></a><a href="#Footnote_66_67" class="fnanchor">[66]</a></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[Pg 348]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Unfortunately there are no figures available for the French Sudan which
+would represent the real value of the trade; the total value of trade
+is, however, considerable. You must remember that in dealing with French
+colonies you are dealing with those of a nation not gifted with
+commercial intelligence; and that, in spite of the perpetual hampering
+of trade in French colonies, the granting of concessions to French firms
+who have not the capital to work them, but are only able to prevent any
+one else doing so, the high differential tariffs, in some cases 100 per
+cent., which up to the present time have been levied on English goods,
+&amp;c.; the English traders nevertheless work in the markets of the French
+colonies, and work mainly on French goods. Of the Ŗ117,518 representing
+the Ivory Coast trade for the first quarter of this year, over Ŗ76,000
+was English trade, and of the Dahomey Ŗ156,835 for the same period,
+Ŗ131,705. In reading the imports figures for these French colonies in
+Upper Guinea, you must remember that those imports include material for
+the well directed, unamiable intention of France to cut us off from what
+she regards as her own Western Soudan; it is a form of investment far
+more profitable than our expenditure on railways, gaols, prisons, and
+frontier police. It is one that, presuming this highly unlikely
+thing&mdash;France becoming commercially intelligent&mdash;would any year now
+enable her entirely to pocket the West African trade down to Lagos from
+Senegal. She may do it at any moment, though it is a very remote
+possibility. So we will return to the Gold Coast finances, though our
+authorities on them are at present meagre.</p>
+
+<p>In 1892 the Gold Coast government was financially in a flourishing
+condition. On the 1st of January, 1891, there<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">[Pg 349]</a></span> was a sum of Ŗ75,181
+4<i>s.</i> 4<i>d.</i> standing to the credit of the colony, which was increased to
+Ŗ127,796 2<i>s.</i> 3<i>d.</i> on the 1st of January, 1892, and to Ŗ152,766 16<i>s.</i>
+7<i>d.</i> on the 1st of January, 1893, and the colony had no public debt.
+There was no native direct taxation. The Customs dues were lower than
+they are now. The extremely careful official who drew up the report
+shows evidence of realising that Customs represent an indirect taxation
+on the native population, for he says: &ldquo;In Sierra Leone and Lagos the
+taxation per head is very much higher (than 2<i>s.</i> 5<i>d.</i> per head), in
+the former nine times, and in the latter seven times.&rdquo;<a name="FNanchor_67_68" id="FNanchor_67_68"></a><a href="#Footnote_67_68" class="fnanchor">[67]</a> However, in
+all three colonies, apart from the attempts at direct taxation, the
+indirect taxation on the native has considerably increased by now.</p>
+
+<p>The report for 1894 shows the colony still progressing rapidly, the
+trade of it amounting in value to Ŗ1,663,173 19<i>s.</i> 9<i>d.</i>, of which
+Ŗ812,830 8<i>s.</i> 10<i>d.</i> represented the imports, and Ŗ850,343 10<i>s.</i>
+11<i>d.</i> the exports. The expenditure showed a large increase as compared
+with previous years. It amounted to Ŗ226,931 19<i>s.</i> 4<i>d.</i>, being Ŗ8,670
+13<i>s.</i> 7<i>d.</i> in excess of the revenue for the year, and Ŗ47,997 7<i>s.</i>
+11<i>d.</i> more than in 1893. The principal items of increase were public
+works, upon which the sum of Ŗ54,163 0<i>s.</i> 3<i>d.</i> was spent, and the
+expedition in defence of the protected district of Attabubu against an
+Ashanti invasion, which cost Ŗ10,778 11<i>s.</i> The Gold Coast assets on
+31st of December, 1894, stood at Ŗ166,944 8<i>s.</i> 7<i>d.</i><a name="FNanchor_68_69" id="FNanchor_68_69"></a><a href="#Footnote_68_69" class="fnanchor">[68]</a> Then came the
+last Ashanti war, regarding which I beg to refer you to Dr. Freeman&rsquo;s
+book.<a name="FNanchor_69_70" id="FNanchor_69_70"></a><a href="#Footnote_69_70" class="fnanchor">[69]</a> No one can deny that he has both experience and intelligence
+enough to justify him<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">[Pg 350]</a></span> in offering his opinion on the matter. I entirely accept his
+statements from my knowledge of native affairs elsewhere in West Africa.
+Anyhow, the last Ashanti war absorbed a good deal of the assets of the
+Gold Coast. There is no published authority to cite, but I do not think
+there is an asset now standing to the credit of the Gold Coast Colony,
+unless it be a loan.</p>
+
+<p>The income for the Gold Coast Colony in 1896 was Ŗ237,460 6<i>s.</i> 7<i>d.</i>,
+the expenditure Ŗ282,277 15<i>s.</i> 9<i>d.</i> The exports Ŗ792,111, against
+Ŗ877,804 in 1895; but the imports were Ŗ910,000, against Ŗ981,537. Since
+1896 the Customs dues have risen; but, <i>per contra</i>, the expenditure has
+also risen, in consequence of the expenses arising from the occupation
+of Ashanti, and the Gold Coast railway. The occupation of Ashanti and
+the railway must be looked on in the light of investments&mdash;investments
+that will be profitable or unprofitable, according to their
+administration, which one must trust will be careful, for they are both
+things you cannot just dump your money down on and be done with, for the
+up-keep expenses of both are necessarily large.</p>
+
+<p>The subject of West African railways is one that all who are interested
+in the future of our possessions there should study most carefully, for
+two main reasons. Firstly, that there is possibly no other way in which
+money can be spent so unprofitably and extensively as on railways in
+such a region. Secondly, because railways are in several districts
+there&mdash;districts with no water carriage possibilities&mdash;simply essential
+to the expansion of trade. In other words, if you make your railway
+through the right district, in the right way, it is a thing worth
+having, a sound investment. If you do not, it is a thing you are better
+without;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">[Pg 351]</a></span> not an investment, but an extravagance. The cost of its
+construction must fall on the colony, alike in money and the
+distraction, from ordinary trade, of the local labour supply. In both
+countries the cost of a railway out there is necessarily great. I
+hastily beg to observe I am not aiming at a rivalry with Martin Tupper
+in saying this, but am only driven to it by so many people in their
+haste saying &ldquo;Oh, for goodness gracious sake! let the Government make a
+railway anywhere; it&rsquo;s done little enough for us, and any railway is
+better than none.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>There has been considerable difficulty over the Gold Coast Railway
+already, though it is only just now entering on the phase of actual
+existence. Surveys have been made for it in all directions. Surveys are
+expensive things out there. But the general idea the Government gave the
+Chambers of Commerce was that, at any rate, this railway was to run up
+into Ashanti, and be a great general trade artery for the Colony. The
+other day Manchester found out, quite unexpected like, that the
+Government whose affections Commerce had regarded as safely and properly
+set on the hinterland trade was off, if you please, flirting round the
+corner with a group of gold mines at Tarquah, and intended, nay, was
+even then proceeding with the undertaking of running the one and only
+Gold Coast railway just up to Tarquah, and no further, until this
+section paid. Manchester, very properly shocked at this fickleness in
+the Government and its heartless abandonment of the hinterland trade,
+said things, interesting and excited things, in its <i>Guardian</i>; but,
+beyond illustrating the truth of the old adage that it&rsquo;s &ldquo;well to be off
+with the old love before you are on with the new,&rdquo; things of no avail.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">[Pg 352]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>This Tarquah railway is estimated to cost Ŗ5,000 per mile. It is to be
+financed by a loan, raised by the Crown Colony Agents, of Ŗ250,000. We
+have ample reason to believe that this Ŗ5,000 per mile will not
+represent one-third of its final cost from demonstrations by the Uganda,
+Congo Belge, and Senegal railways; more particularly are we so assured
+from the knowledge that the railway&rsquo;s construction will be in the hands
+of nominees of the Crown Agents, whose method of arranging for the
+construction of these railways is curious. They do not invite tenders
+for material or freight in the open market, and they do not give the
+taxed people in the country itself any opportunity for contracting for
+the supply of as much local material as possible&mdash;things it would be
+alike fair and business-like to do. Exceedingly curious, moreover, is
+the fact that the nominees of the Crown Agents&rsquo; employers are not
+subject to the control of the local governmental authorities on the
+Coast, their sole connection with the affair apparently being confined
+to the passing of ordinances, as per instruction from the Colonial
+Office, authorising loans for the payment of the debt incurred by making
+the railway.</p>
+
+<p>There is no doubt that any Gold Coast railway which is ever to pay even
+for its coal must run through a rich bit of the local gold reefs.
+Similarly, there is no doubt that the gold mines of the Gold Coast have
+been terribly kept back by lack of transport facilities for the
+machinery necessary to work them; but there is, nevertheless, evidently
+much that is unsound in the present railway scheme. If the charge for
+it, as some suggest, were to be thrown on the gold mines, it would be as
+heavy a charge as the old bad transport was, and they would be no less
+hampered. If, as is most likely, the charge for the railway<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353">[Pg 353]</a></span> be thrown
+on the general finance of the colony, it will be a drain on other forms
+of trade, without in any way improving them; in fact, during its
+construction, it will absorb labour from the general trade&mdash;oil, rubber,
+and timber&mdash;and, if it extensively increases the gold-mining industry,
+it will keep the labour tied to it chronically, to the disadvantage of
+other trades.</p>
+
+<p>Lagos, our next Crown Colony, is a very rich possession, and under Sir
+Alfred Moloney, who discovered the use of the Kicksia Africana as a
+rubber tree, and Sir Gilbert Carter, who fostered the industry and
+opened the trade roads, sprang in a few years into a phenomenal
+prosperity. Then came the French aggression on its hinterland, the
+seizing of Nikki, which was one of those <i>foci</i> of trade routes, though
+possibly, as many have said, a non-fertile bit of country in itself. To
+give you some idea of the bound up in prosperity made by Lagos, the
+exports in 1892 were Ŗ577,083; in 1895, Ŗ985,595. The main advance has
+been in rubber, which in 1896 was exported from Lagos to the value of
+Ŗ347,721. Early in this year, however, the state of the Lagos trade was
+considered so unsatisfactory that a local commission to inquire into the
+causes of this state of affairs was appointed.</p>
+
+<p>The publication of the Government Trade Returns for 1897 supported the
+long grumble that had been going on about the bad state of trade in
+Lagos, the imports for 1897 showing a decrease on those of 1895 by
+Ŗ67,474. The <i>Board of Trade Journal</i>, quoting from the <i>Lagos Weekly
+Record</i> of February 28th, 1898, says, &ldquo;An examination of the export
+returns affords a clue to the direction of such decrease. It is to be
+noted that notwithstanding that the export of rubber in 1897 shows an
+excess of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354">[Pg 354]</a></span> Ŗ13,367 above that exported in 1895, yet in the aggregate of
+the total exports of the two years that of 1897 shows a decrease of
+Ŗ193,745; this is due to the great falling off which is perceptible in
+the palm oil and kernel trade, which together show a decrease in 1897 of
+Ŗ162,580 as compared with the quantities exported in 1895; while as
+compared with the exports in 1896 the decrease amounts to Ŗ114,773. The
+returns show a steady and increasing decline in the exports of these
+products, for while the decrease in 1896 as compared with 1895 was only
+Ŗ47,807, the decrease had risen in 1897 as compared with the previous
+year to Ŗ114,773, as already intimated, which implies that there has
+been a further falling off of the trade to the extent of nearly Ŗ67,000.
+This manifest excessive diminution in what must be regarded as the
+staple commodities of the trade is undoubtedly a serious indication, for
+though these commodities come under the classification of jungle
+products they are not liable to exhaustion as are the rubber or timber
+industries, and hence they form the only reliable commodities upon which
+the trade must expand. The dislocation of the labour system in the
+hinterland is no doubt responsible in a large measure for the falling
+off in the yield of these products, while in many instances they have
+been abandoned for the more remunerative rubber business. But, be the
+circumstances what they may, it is evident that there has been an actual
+decrease of trade to the extent of over Ŗ114,000.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>This was the state of affairs the local committee was appointed to deal
+with. Its discussions were long and careful. I will not attempt to drag
+you through its final report, which a grossly ungrateful public in Lagos
+sniffed at because<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">[Pg 355]</a></span> it merely seemed carefully to reproduce every one&rsquo;s
+opinion on the causes of the falling off of trade and to agree with it
+solemnly; but, like the rest of the local world, it made no sweeping
+suggestion of means whereby things could be altered. Since the
+committee, however, was formed, there has been a greater interest taken
+in expenditure, healthy in its way, but too often ignoring the fact,
+that it is not so much the amount of money that is spent governmentally
+that constitutes waste, but the things on which it is expended. Large
+sums have been spent in Lagos, I am informed, on building a Government
+House that every valuable Governor ought to be paid to keep out of, so
+unhealthy is its situation, and again on bridging a lagoon that has no
+particular sound bottom to it worth mentioning.</p>
+
+<p>That such forms of expenditure are not the necessary grooves into which
+a place like Lagos is driven in order to get rid of its money is
+undoubted. The local press at any rate indicates other grooves; for
+example here is a cheerful little paragraph:</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<i>A propos</i> of what was said in your last issue about the grave-diggers,
+there is no doubt that something should be done to relieve the men from
+the strain of work to which they are continuously subjected. The demands
+of a constantly increasing death rate, which has caused the cemeteries
+to be enlarged, make it necessary that the number of grave-diggers
+should be increased. Besides, these men are poorly paid for the work
+they do. Of the twenty grave-diggers, six are paid at the rate of 1<i>s.</i>
+per diem, and the rest at the rate of 10<i>d.</i> They have no holidays,
+either, like other people. While the Government labourers, of whom there
+is a host, may skulk half their time, the hard-working<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356">[Pg 356]</a></span> grave-digger is
+at it from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day, Sundays included, for the Grim
+Reaper is ever busy. The Keeper of the graveyards, also, has much to do
+for the paltry salary he receives. I would earnestly appeal to the
+authorities to do something to raise the burden of this overworked
+staff.&rdquo;<a name="FNanchor_70_71" id="FNanchor_70_71"></a><a href="#Footnote_70_71" class="fnanchor">[70]</a> So would I, but rather in the direction of giving the &ldquo;Grim
+Reaper&rdquo; and the grave-diggers fewer people to bury. I must also give you
+another beautiful little bit of local colour, although it suggests
+further expenditure. &ldquo;It is satisfactory to note that the Chamber of
+Commerce intends to take up the question of the swamp near the petroleum
+magazine. Since the Government made the causeway leading to the
+dead-house and cut off the tidal inflow, the upper portion of the swamp
+has been formed into a most noxious disease-breeding sink, into which
+refuse of all kinds is thrown, the stagnant waters and refuse combining,
+under the effects of the sun, to emit a most formidable pestilential
+effluvia. In the interests of humanity something should be done to abate
+this nuisance.&rdquo;<a name="FNanchor_71_72" id="FNanchor_71_72"></a><a href="#Footnote_71_72" class="fnanchor">[71]</a></p>
+
+<p>However, I leave these local questions of Lagos town. They just present
+a pretty picture of the difficulties that surround dealing with a place
+that has by nature swamps, that must have dead-houses, grave-diggers,
+and extensive cemetery accommodation, and that is peopled by natives who
+will instinctively throw refuse into any hole; with evidently a large
+death rate in the native population and a published death rate in whites
+of 153 per thousand. Let us now return to the higher finance.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The total expenditure of Lagos in 1888 amounted to <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357">[Pg 357]</a></span>Ŗ62,735 15<i>s.</i>
+11<i>d.</i> The expenditure has risen in 1898 to Ŗ192,760, which gives an
+excess of Ŗ130,025. The total cost of the staff in 1888 was Ŗ15,932,
+while the present cost amounts to Ŗ41,604, which is an increase of
+Ŗ25,672. This increase, apart from the augmentation in the Governor&rsquo;s
+salary, is mainly in respect to the following departments:&mdash;Secretariat,
+Harbour Department, Constabulary and Police, and the Public Works
+Department. The cost of working the secretariat has been increased by
+Ŗ1,074, due to the following additional officers:&mdash;Two assistant
+colonial secretaries, a chief clerk, and a first clerk. It is well known
+that in 1888, when the department cost the colony about one-half its
+present expenses as regards the European staff, the work was performed
+with efficiency and despatch; while at present it is not only difficult
+to get business got through, but, what is more, if the business is not
+followed up with watchful care, it will become lost in the
+superabundance of assistants and clerks who crowd the department, and
+the practical expression of whose work is more discernible on the public
+revenue than anything else.&rdquo;<a name="FNanchor_72_73" id="FNanchor_72_73"></a><a href="#Footnote_72_73" class="fnanchor">[72]</a> The <i>Lagos Record</i> goes on to say,
+&ldquo;There is room for retrenchment in the matter of expenditure on account
+of the European official staff.&rdquo; I do not follow it here. It is room for
+retrenchment in mere routine workers, black and white, that is wanted,
+and the liberation of the Europeans to do work worth their risking their
+lives in West Africa for. The percentage of black officials, mainly
+clerks&mdash;excellent and faithful to their duties&mdash;is increasing in all our
+colonies there too rapidly; and the existence of poorly paid but
+numerous posts under Government with a certain amount of prestige, is a
+dangerous allurement to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358">[Pg 358]</a></span> native young men, tempting them from nobler careers, and forming them
+into a sort of wall-class between the English official and the main body
+of the native population. Take, for example, the number of Government
+servants at the Gold Coast, according to Sir William Maxwell, 1897;&mdash;</p>
+
+<table style="width:50%" cellpadding="2" summary="Government servants">
+<tr><td style="width:20%" align="right">&nbsp;</td>
+    <td style="width:10%" align="right">European<br />officers</td>
+    <td style="width:10%" align="right">Native<br />clerks.</td>
+    <td style="width:10%" align="right">Hausas.</td>
+    <td style="width:10%" align="right">Civil police.</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdlp">Accra</td>
+    <td class="tdrp">35</td>
+    <td class="tdrp">206</td>
+    <td class="tdrp">432</td>
+    <td class="tdrp">105</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td class="tdlp">Cape Coast</td>
+    <td class="tdrp">8</td>
+    <td class="tdrp">69</td>
+    <td class="tdrp">0</td>
+    <td class="tdrp">47</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td class="tdlp">Elmina</td>
+    <td class="tdrp">5</td>
+    <td class="tdrp">36</td>
+    <td class="tdrp">50</td>
+    <td class="tdrp">19</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>An awful percentage of clerks is 311 for such a country, more clerks
+than police, only 121 less Government native clerks than soldiers in the
+army; and you may depend upon it the white officials are clerking away,
+more or less, too. I always think how very apposite the answer of an
+official was to the criticism of excessive expenditure: &ldquo;Sir, there is
+no reckless expenditure; every J pen has to be accounted for!&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>No, I am quite unable to agree that anything but the Crown Colony system
+is to blame, and that because it is engaged in administering a district
+with no possibilities in it for England save commercial matters, in
+which the Crown Colony system is not well informed. I have only quoted
+these figures to show you that Lagos and the Gold Coast are merely
+keeping line with Sierra Leone&mdash;increasing their expenditure in the face
+of a falling trade, with a dark trade future before them, on account of
+French activity in cutting them off from their inland markets, and of
+their own mismanagement of the native races.</p>
+
+<p>The trade and the prosperity of West Africa depend on jungle products.
+There is no more solid reason to fear the extinction of West Africa&rsquo;s
+jungle products of oil, timber,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359">[Pg 359]</a></span> fibre, rubber, than there is to worry
+about the extinction of our own coal-fields&mdash;probably not so much&mdash;for
+they rapidly renew themselves. Yes, even rubber, though that is slower
+at it than palm oil and kernel; and at present not one-tenth part of the
+jungle products are in touch with commerce; and save gold, and that to a
+very small extent, the mineral wealth of West Africa is untouched. It is
+not in all regions only titaniferous iron; there are silver, lead,
+copper, antimony, quicksilver, and tin ores there unexploited, and which
+it would not be advisable to attempt to exploit until the so-called
+labour problem is solved. This problem is really that of the
+co-operation for mutual benefit of the African and the Englishman. In
+the solution of this problem alone lies the success of England in West
+Africa, not of England herself, for England could survive the loss of
+West Africa whole, though doing so would cost her dear alike in honour
+and in profit. The Crown Colony system which now represents England in
+West Africa will never give this solution. It necessarily destroys
+native society, that is to say, it disorganises it, and has not in it
+the power to reorganise. As I have already endeavoured to show, English
+influence in West Africa, as represented by the Crown Colony system,
+consists of three separate classes of Englishmen with no common object
+of interest, and is not a thing capable of organising so difficult a
+region. All these three classes, be it granted, each represent things
+for the organisation of a State. No State can exist without having the
+governmental, the religious, and the mercantile factors, working
+together in it; but in West Africa these representatives of the English
+State are things apart and opposed to each other, and do not constitute
+a State. You might as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360">[Pg 360]</a></span> well expect to get the functions of a State, good
+government, out of these three disconnected classes of Englishmen in
+Africa, as expect to know the hour of day from the parts of a watch
+before they were put together.</p>
+
+<p>You will see I have humbly attempted to place this affair before you
+from no sensational point of view, but from the commercial one&mdash;the
+value of West Africa to England&rsquo;s commerce&mdash;and have attempted to show
+you how this is suffering from the adherence of England to a form of
+government that is essentially un-English. I have made no attack on the
+form of government for such regions formulated in England&rsquo;s more
+intellectual though earlier period of Elizabeth, the Chartered Company
+system as represented by the Royal Niger Company. I have neither shares
+in, nor reason to attack the Royal Niger Company, which has in a few
+years, and during the period of the hottest French enterprise, acquired
+a territory in West Africa immensely greater than the territory acquired
+during centuries under the Crown Colony system; it has also fought its
+necessary wars with energy and despatch, and no call upon Imperial
+resources; it has not only paid its way, but paid its shareholders their
+6 per cent., and its bitterest enemies say darkly, far more. I know from
+my knowledge of West Africa that this can only have been effected by its
+wise native policy. I know that this policy owes its wisdom and its
+success to one man, Sir George Taubman Goldie, a man who, had he been
+under the Crown Colony system, could have done no more than other men
+have done who have been Governors under it; but, not being under it, the
+territories he won for England have not been subjected to the jerky
+amateur policy of those which are under the Crown Colony system. For
+nearly twenty years the natives<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361">[Pg 361]</a></span> under the Royal Niger Company have had
+the firm, wise, sympathetic friendship of a great Englishman, who
+understood them, and knew them personally. It is the continuous
+influence of one great Englishman, unhampered by non-expert control,
+that has caused England&rsquo;s exceedingly strange success in the Niger;
+coupled with the identity of trade and governmental interest, and the
+encouragement of religion given by the constitution and administration
+of the Niger Company. This is a thing not given by all Chartered
+Companies; indeed, I think I am right in saying that the Niger and the
+North Borneo Companies stand alone in controlling territories that have
+been essentially trading during recent years. This association of trade
+and government is, to my mind, an <i>absolutely necessary restraint</i> on
+the Charter Company form of government;<a name="FNanchor_73_74" id="FNanchor_73_74"></a><a href="#Footnote_73_74" class="fnanchor">[73]</a> but there is another element
+you must have to justify Charters, and that is that they are in the
+hands of an Englishman of the old type.</p>
+
+<p>I am perfectly aware that the natives of Lagos and other Crown Colonies
+in West Africa are, and have long been, anxious for the Chartered
+Company of the Niger to be taken over by the Government, as they
+pathetically and frankly say, &ldquo;so that now the trade in their own
+district is so bad, it may get a stimulus by a freer trade in the
+Niger,&rdquo; and the native traders not connected with the Company may rush
+in; while officials in the Crown Colonies have been equally anxious, as
+they say with frankness no less pathetic, so that they may have chances
+of higher appointments. I am equally aware that the merchants of England
+not connected with the Niger Company, which is <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362">[Pg 362]</a></span>really an association of
+African merchants, desire its downfall; yet they all perfectly well
+know, though they do not choose to advertise the fact, that three months
+Crown Colony form of government in the Niger territories will bring war,
+far greater and more destructive than any war we have yet had in West
+Africa, and will end in the formation of a debt far greater than any
+debt we now have in West Africa, because of the greater extent of
+territory and the greater power of the native States, now living
+peacefully enough under England, but not under England as misrepresented
+by the Crown Colony system. I am not saying that Chartered Companies are
+good; I am only saying they are better than the Crown Colony plan; and
+that if the Crown Colony system is substituted for the Chartered
+Company, which is directly a trading company, England will have to pay a
+very heavy bill. There would be, of course, a temporary spurt in trade,
+but it would be a flash in the pan, and in the end, an end that would
+come in a few years&rsquo; time, the British taxpayer would be cursing West
+Africa at large, and the Niger territories in particular. Personally, I
+entirely fail to see why England should be tied to either of these
+plans, the Crown Colony or the Chartered Company, for governing tropical
+regions. Have we quite run out of constructive ability in Statecraft? Is
+it not possible to formulate some new plan to mark the age of Victoria?</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_60_61" id="Footnote_60_61"></a><a href="#FNanchor_60_61"><span class="label">[60]</span></a> <i>Industrial and Social Life of the Empire.</i> Macmillan and
+Co.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_61_62" id="Footnote_61_62"></a><a href="#FNanchor_61_62"><span class="label">[61]</span></a> For Lagos, Gold Coast, Sierra Leone and Gambia from 1892
+to 1896, Ŗ2,364,266.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_62_63" id="Footnote_62_63"></a><a href="#FNanchor_62_63"><span class="label">[62]</span></a> Forty-eighth annual report Liverpool Chamber of Commerce,
+1898.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+<p><a name="Footnote_63_64" id="Footnote_63_64"></a><a href="#FNanchor_63_64"><span class="label">[63]</span></a></p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="3" summary="Expenditure on police and gaols">
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td class="tdc">Ŗ</td><td class="tdl">Increase.</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Expenditure on police and gaols,</td>
+    <td>1896</td><td class="tdr">31,504</td><td class="tdc">Ŗ</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">"&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+    <td>1887</td><td class="tdr">3,037</td><td class="tdr">28,467</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Expenditure on transport</td>
+    <td>1896</td><td class="tdr">10,091</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">"&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+    <td>1887</td><td class="tdr">3,298</td><td class="tdr">6,793</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Expenditure on public works</td>
+    <td>1896</td><td class="tdr">6,736</td><td>&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">"&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
+    <td>1887</td><td class="tdr">1,417</td><td class="tdrbb">5,319</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Aggregate Increase</td>
+    <td>&nbsp;</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td class="tdr">40,579</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_64_65" id="Footnote_64_65"></a><a href="#FNanchor_64_65"><span class="label">[64]</span></a> &ldquo;The Liquor Traffic in West Africa,&rdquo; <i>Fortnightly Review</i>,
+April, 1898.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_65_66" id="Footnote_65_66"></a><a href="#FNanchor_65_66"><span class="label">[65]</span></a> <i>Colonial Reports, Miscellaneous, No. 3, 1893.</i> G. F.
+Scott Elliott M.A., F.L.S., and C. A. Raisin, B.Sc.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_66_67" id="Footnote_66_67"></a><a href="#FNanchor_66_67"><span class="label">[66]</span></a>
+French colonies&mdash;
+</p>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="French colonies">
+<tr>
+  <td></td>
+  <td colspan="2" align="center">Imports.</td>
+  <td colspan="2" align="center">Exports.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td></td>
+  <td colspan="2"><img src="images/bracket1.jpg" width="150" height="15" alt="bracket" title="" /></td>
+  <td colspan="2"><img src="images/bracket1.jpg" width="150" height="15" alt="bracket" title="" /></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td></td>
+  <td align="center">1896.</td><td align="center">1897.</td>
+  <td align="center">1896.</td><td align="center">1897.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td></td>
+  <td align="center">Ŗ</td><td align="center">Ŗ</td>
+  <td align="center">Ŗ</td><td align="center">Ŗ</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+   <td>Senegal</td>
+       <td class="tdr">1,047,000</td><td class="tdr">1,167,000&nbsp;</td>
+       <td class="tdr">783,000</td><td class="tdr">845,000&nbsp;</td>
+   </tr>
+   <tr>
+   <td>French Guinea</td>
+       <td class="tdr">185,000</td><td class="tdr">240,000*</td>
+       <td class="tdr">231,000</td><td class="tdr">201,000*</td>
+   </tr>
+   <tr>
+   <td>Ivory Coast</td>
+       <td class="tdr">186,000</td><td class="tdr">188,000&nbsp;</td>
+       <td class="tdr">176,000</td><td class="tdr">189,000&nbsp;</td>
+   </tr>
+   <tr>
+   <td>Dahomey</td>
+       <td class="tdr">389,000</td><td class="tdr">330,000&nbsp;</td>
+       <td class="tdr">364,000</td><td class="tdr">231,000&nbsp;</td>
+   </tr>
+   <tr>
+   <td>French Congo</td>
+       <td class="tdr">192,000</td><td class="tdc">**</td>
+       <td class="tdr">190,000</td><td class="tdc">**</td>
+   </tr>
+   <tr>
+       <td class="tdl" colspan="2">*  For nine months only.</td>
+   </tr>
+   <tr>
+       <td class="tdl" colspan="2">** No statistics.</td>
+   </tr>
+</table>
+<p><br />
+Trade of Dahomey and the Ivory Coast for the first three months<br />
+of 1898&mdash;<br /></p>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="3" summary="1898 Trade">
+<tr>
+    <td></td>
+    <td class="tdc">Imports.</td>
+    <td class="tdc">Exports.</td>
+    <td class="tdc">Total trade.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdc">Ŗ</td>
+  <td class="tdc">Ŗ</td>
+  <td class="tdc">Ŗ</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+   <td>Ivory Coast</td>
+       <td class="tdr">58,658</td><td class="tdr">58,560</td><td class="tdr">117,518</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+   <td>Dahomey</td>
+       <td class="tdr">84,064</td><td class="tdr">72,771</td><td class="tdr">156,835</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>German possessions&mdash;</p>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="German Possessions">
+<tr>
+  <td></td>
+  <td colspan="3" align="center">Imports.</td>
+  <td colspan="3" align="center">Exports.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td></td>
+  <td colspan="3"><img src="images/bracket1.jpg" width="200" height="15" alt="bracket" title="" /></td>
+  <td colspan="3"><img src="images/bracket1.jpg" width="200" height="15" alt="bracket" title="" /></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td></td>
+  <td align="center">1895.</td><td align="center">1896.</td><td align="center">1897.</td>
+  <td align="center">1895.</td><td align="center">1896.</td><td align="center">1897.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td></td>
+  <td align="center">Ŗ</td><td align="center">Ŗ</td><td align="center">Ŗ</td>
+  <td align="center">Ŗ</td><td align="center">Ŗ</td><td align="center">Ŗ</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+   <td>Togoland</td>
+       <td class="tdr">117,000</td><td class="tdr">94,000</td><td class="tdr">99,000</td>
+       <td class="tdr">152,000</td><td class="tdr">83,000</td><td class="tdr">39,000</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+   <td>Cameroon</td>
+       <td class="tdrbb">283,000</td><td class="tdrbb">268,000</td><td class="tdcbb">*</td>
+       <td class="tdrbb">204,000</td><td class="tdrbb">198,000</td><td class="tdcbb">*</td>
+   </tr>
+<tr>
+   <td>Total</td>
+       <td class="tdr">400,000</td><td class="tdr">362,000&nbsp;</td><td class="tdc">*</td>
+       <td class="tdr">356,000</td><td class="tdr">281,000&nbsp;</td><td class="tdc">*</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+   <td class="tdl" colspan="6">* No figures for calendar year. <i>Board of Trade Journal</i>, September, 1898.</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_67_68" id="Footnote_67_68"></a><a href="#FNanchor_67_68"><span class="label">[67]</span></a> <i>Colonial Annual</i>, No. 88, Gold Coast for 1892, published
+1893.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_68_69" id="Footnote_68_69"></a><a href="#FNanchor_68_69"><span class="label">[68]</span></a> Ditto, No. 188.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_69_70" id="Footnote_69_70"></a><a href="#FNanchor_69_70"><span class="label">[69]</span></a> <i>Ashanti and Jaman.</i> Constable, 1898.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_70_71" id="Footnote_70_71"></a><a href="#FNanchor_70_71"><span class="label">[70]</span></a> <i>Lagos Standard</i>, September 7, 1898.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_71_72" id="Footnote_71_72"></a><a href="#FNanchor_71_72"><span class="label">[71]</span></a> <i>Lagos Weekly Record</i>, September 10, 1898.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_72_73" id="Footnote_72_73"></a><a href="#FNanchor_72_73"><span class="label">[72]</span></a> <i>Lagos Weekly Record</i>, August 27, 1898.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_73_74" id="Footnote_73_74"></a><a href="#FNanchor_73_74"><span class="label">[73]</span></a> See Introduction to <i>Folk Lore of the Fjort</i>. R. E.
+Dennett. David Nutt, 1898.</p></div>
+</div>
+<hr class="chap" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363">[Pg 363]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVI" id="CHAPTER_XVI"></a>CHAPTER XVI</h2>
+
+<h2>THE CLASH OF CULTURES</h2>
+
+<p class="pblock">Wherein this student, realising as usual, when too late, that the
+environment of such opinions as are expressed above is boiling hot
+water, calls to memory the excellent saying, &ldquo;As well be hung for a
+sheep as a lamb,&rdquo; and goes on.</p>
+
+<p>I have no intention, however, of starting a sort of open-air steam
+laundry for West African washing. I have only gone into the
+unsatisfactory-to-all-parties-concerned state of affairs there not with
+the hope, but with the desire, that things may be improved and further
+disgrace avoided. It would be no good my merely stating that, if England
+wishes to make her possessions there morally and commercially pay her
+for the loss of life that holding them entails, she must abolish her
+present policy of amateur experiments backed by good intentions, for you
+would naturally not pay the least attention to a bald statement made by
+merely me. So I have had to place before you the opinions of others who
+are more worthy of your attention. I must, however, for myself disclaim
+any right to be regarded as the mouthpiece of any party concerned,
+though Major Lugard has done me the honour to place me amongst the
+Liverpool merchants. I can claim no right to speak as one of them. I
+should be only too glad if I had this honour, but I have not. There was
+early this year<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364">[Pg 364]</a></span> a distressing split between Liverpool and myself&mdash;whom
+I am aware they call behind my back &ldquo;Our Aunt&rdquo;&mdash;and I know they regard
+me as a vexing, if even a valued, form of relative.</p>
+
+<p>This split, I may say (remembering Mr. Mark Twain&rsquo;s axiom, that people
+always like to know what a row is about), arose from my frank admiration
+of both the Royal Niger Company and France, neither of which Liverpool
+at that time regarded as worthy of even the admiration of the most
+insignificant; so its <i>Journal of Commerce</i> went for me. The natural
+sweetness of my disposition is most clearly visible to the naked eye
+when I am quietly having my own way, so naturally I went for its
+<i>Journal of Commerce</i>. Providentially no one outside saw this deplorable
+family row, and Mr. John Holt put a stop to it by saying to me, &ldquo;Say
+what you like, you cannot please all of us;&rdquo; had it not been for this I
+should not have written another line on the maladministration of West
+Africa beyond saying, &ldquo;Call that Crown Colony system you are working
+there a Government! England, at your age, you ought to be ashamed of
+yourself!&rdquo; But you see, as things are, I am not speaking for any one,
+only off on a little lone fight of my own against a state of affairs
+which I regard as a disgrace to my country.</p>
+
+<p>Well but, you may say, after all what you have said points to nothing
+disgraceful. You have expressly said that there is no corruption in the
+government there, and the rest of the things&mdash;the change of policy
+arising from the necessity for white men to come home at the least every
+twelve months, the waste of money necessary to local exigencies, and the
+fact that officers and gentlemen cannot be expected to understand and
+look after what one might<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_365" id="Page_365">[Pg 365]</a></span> call domestic expenses&mdash;may be things
+unavoidable and peculiar to the climate. To this I can only say, Given
+the climate, why do you persist in ignoring the solid mass of expert
+knowledge of the region that is in the hands of the mercantile party,
+and go on working your Governors from a non-expert base? You have in
+England an unused but great mass of knowledge among men of all classes
+who have personally dealt with West Africa&mdash;yet you do not work from
+that, organise it, and place it at the service of the brand new
+Governors who go out; far from it. I know hardly any more pathetic sight
+than the new official suddenly appointed to West Africa buzzing round
+trying to find out &ldquo;what the place is really like, you know.&rdquo; I know
+personally one of the greatest of our Governors who have been down
+there, a man with iron determination and courage, who was not content
+with the information derivable from a list of requisites for a tropical
+climate, the shorter Hausa grammar and a nice cheery-covered little work
+on diseases&mdash;the usual fillets with which England binds the brows of her
+Sacrifices to the Coast&mdash;but went and read about West Africa, all by
+himself, alone in the British Museum. He was a success, but still he
+always declares that the only book he found about this particular part
+was a work by a Belgian, with a frontispiece depicting the author, on an
+awful river, in the act, as per inscription, of shouting, &ldquo;Row on, brave
+men of Kru!&rdquo; which, as subsequent knowledge showed him that bravery was
+not one of the main qualities of the Kru men, shook him up about all his
+British Museum education. So in the end he, like the rest, had to learn
+for himself, out there. Of course, if the Governors were carefully
+pegged down to a West African place and lived long enough, and were not
+by nature faddists,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366">[Pg 366]</a></span> doubtless they would learn, and in the course of a
+few years things would go well; but they are not pegged down. No sooner
+does one of them begin to know about the country he is in charge of than
+off he is whisked and deposited again, in a brand new region for which
+West Africa has not been a fitting introduction.</p>
+
+<p>Then, as for the domestic finance, why expect officers and lawyers,
+doctors and gentlemen from clubland to manage fiscal matters? Of course
+they naturally don&rsquo;t know about trade affairs, or whether the Public
+Works Department is spending money, or merely wasting it. You require
+professional men in West Africa, but not to do half the work they are
+now engaged on in connection with red tape and things they do not
+understand. Of course, errors of this kind may be merely Folly, you may
+have plenty more men as good as these to replace them with, so it may
+matter more to their relations than to England if they are wasted alike
+in life and death, and you are so rich that the gradual extinction of
+your tropical trade will not matter to your generation. But as a
+necessary consequent to this amateurism, or young gentlemen&rsquo;s academy
+system, the Crown Colony system, there is disgrace in the injustice to
+and disintegration of the native races it deals with.</p>
+
+<p>Now when I say England is behaving badly to the African, I beg you not
+to think that the philanthropic party has increased. I come of a
+generation of Danes who when the sun went down on the Wulpensand were
+the men to make light enough to fight by with their Morning Stars; and
+who, later on, were soldiers in the Low Countries and slave owners in
+the West Indies, and I am proud of my ancestors; for, whatever else they
+were, they were not humbugs; and the generation that is round me now<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367">[Pg 367]</a></span>
+seems to me in its utterances at any rate tainted with humbug. I own
+that I hate the humbug in England&rsquo;s policy towards weaker races for the
+sake of all the misery on white and black it brings; and I think as I
+see you wasting lives and money, sowing debt and difficulties all over
+West Africa by a hut tax war in Sierra Leone, fighting for the sake of
+getting a few shillings you have no right to whatsoever out of the
+African,&mdash;who are you that you should point your finger in scorn at my
+tribe? I as one of that tribe blush for you, from the basis that you are
+a humbug and not scientific, which, I presume you will agree is not the
+same thing as my being a philanthropist.</p>
+
+<p>I had the honour of meeting in West Africa an English officer who had
+previously been doing some fighting in South Africa. He said he &ldquo;didn&rsquo;t
+like being a butterman&rsquo;s nigger butcher.&rdquo; &ldquo;Oh! you&rsquo;re all right here
+then,&rdquo; I said; &ldquo;you&rsquo;re out now for Exeter Hall, the plane of
+civilisation, the plough, and the piano.&rdquo; I will not report his remarks
+further; likely enough it was the mosquitoes that made him say things,
+and of course I knew with him, as I know with you, butchery of any sort
+is not to your liking, though war when it&rsquo;s wanted is; the distinction I
+draw between them is a hard and fast one. There is just the same
+difference to my mind between an unnecessary war on an unarmed race and
+a necessary war on the same race, as there is between killing game that
+you want to support yourself with or game that is destructive to your
+interests, and on the other hand the killing of game just to say that
+you have done it. This will seem a deplorably low view to take, but it
+is one supported by our history. We have killed down native races in
+Australasia and America, and it is no use slurring over the fact that we
+have profited<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368">[Pg 368]</a></span> by so doing. This argument, however, cannot be used in
+favour of killing down the African in tropical Africa, more particularly
+in Western Tropical Africa. If you were to-morrow to kill every native
+there, what use would the country be to you? No one else but the native
+can work its resources; you cannot live in it and colonise it. It would
+therefore be only an extremely interesting place for the zoologist,
+geologist, mineralogist, &amp;c., but a place of no good to any one else in
+England.</p>
+
+<p>This view, however, of the profit derivable from and justifying war you
+will refuse to discuss; stating that such profit in your wars you do not
+seek; that they have been made for the benefit of the African himself,
+to free him from his native oppressors in the way of tyrannical chiefs
+and bloody superstitions, and to elevate him in the plane of
+civilisation. That this has been the intention of our West African wars
+up to the Sierra Leone war, which was forced on you for fiscal reasons,
+I have no doubt: but that any of them advanced you in your mission to
+elevate the African, I should hesitate to say. I beg to refer you to Dr.
+Freeman&rsquo;s opinions on the Ashantee wars on this point,<a name="FNanchor_74_75" id="FNanchor_74_75"></a><a href="#Footnote_74_75" class="fnanchor">[74]</a> but for
+myself I should say that the blame of the failure of these wars to
+effect their desired end has been due to the want of power to
+re-organise native society after a war; for example, had the 1873
+Ashantee war been followed by the taking over of Ashantee and the strong
+handling of it, there would not have been an 1895 Ashantee war; or, to
+take it the other way, if you had followed up the battle of Katamansu in
+1827, you need not have had an 1874 war even. Dr. Freeman holds, that if
+you had let the Ashantis have a sea-port and generally behaved fairly
+reasonably, you <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_369" id="Page_369">[Pg 369]</a></span>need hardly have had Ashantee wars at all. But, however
+this may be, I think that a good many of the West African wars of the
+past ten years have been the result of the humbug of the previous sixty,
+during which we have proclaimed that we are only in Africa for peaceful
+reasons of commerce, and religion, and education, not with any desire
+for the African&rsquo;s land or property: that, of course, it is not possible
+for us to extend our friendship or our toleration to people who go in
+for cannibalism, slave-raiding, or human sacrifices, but apart from
+these matters we have no desire to meddle with African domestic affairs,
+or take away their land. This, I own, I believe to have honestly been
+our intention, and to be our intention still, but with our stiff Crown
+Colony system of representing ourselves to the African, this intention
+has been and will be impossible to carry out, because between the true
+spirit of England and the spirit of Africa it interposes a distorting
+medium. It is, remember, not composed of Englishmen alone, it includes
+educated natives, and yet it knows the true native only through
+interpreters.</p>
+
+<p>But why call this humbug? you say. Well, the present policy in Africa
+makes it look so. Frankly, I do not see how you could work your original
+policy out unless it were in the hands of extremely expert men, patient
+and powerful at that. Too many times in old days have you allowed white
+men to be bullied, to give the African the idea that you, as a nation,
+meant to have your way. Too many times have you allowed them to violate
+parts of their treaties under your nose, until they got out of the way
+of thinking you would hold them to their treaties at all, and then
+suddenly down you came on them, not only holding them to their side of
+the treaties, but not holding<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_370" id="Page_370">[Pg 370]</a></span> to your own, imposing on them
+restrictions and domestic interference which those treaties made no
+mention of at all. I have before me now copies of treaties with chiefs
+in the hinterland of our Crown Colonies, wherein there is not even the
+anti-slavery clause&mdash;treaties merely of friendship and trade, with the
+undertaking on the native chief&rsquo;s part to hand over no part or right in
+his territories to a foreign power without English Government consent.
+Yet, in the districts we hold from the natives under such treaties, we
+are contemplating direct taxation, which to the African means the
+confiscation of the property taxed. We have, in fact, by our previous
+policy placed ourselves to the African with whom we have made treaties,
+in the position of a friend. &ldquo;Big friend,&rdquo; it is true, but not conqueror
+or owner. Our departure now from the &ldquo;big friend&rdquo; attitude into the
+position of owner, hurts his feelings very much; and coupled with the
+feeling that he cannot get at England, who used to talk so nicely to
+him, and whom he did his best to please, as far as local circumstances
+and his limited power would allow, by giving up customs she had an
+incomprehensible aversion to, it causes the African chief to say &ldquo;God is
+up,&rdquo; by which I expect he means the Devil, and give way to war, or
+sickness, or distraction, or a wild, hopeless, helpless, combination of
+all three; and then, poor fellow, when he is only naturally suffering
+from the dazzles your West African policy would give to an iron post,
+you go about sagely referring to &ldquo;a general antipathy to civilisation
+among the natives of West Africa,&rdquo; &ldquo;anti-white-man&rsquo;s leagues,&rdquo; &ldquo;horrible
+secret societies,&rdquo; and such like figments of your imagination; and
+likely enough throw in as a dash for top the statement that the chief is
+&ldquo;a drunken slave-raider,&rdquo; which as the captain of the late s.s.
+<i>Sparrow</i> would<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_371" id="Page_371">[Pg 371]</a></span> say, &ldquo;It may be so, and again, it mayn&rsquo;t.&rdquo; Anyhow it
+seems to occur to you as an argument only after the war is begun, though
+you have known the man some years; and it has not been the ostensible
+reason for any West African war save those in the Niger Company&rsquo;s
+territories, which run far enough inland to touch the slave-raiding
+zone, and which are entirely excluded from my arguments because they
+have been in the hands of experts on West Africa in war-making and in
+war-healing.</p>
+
+<p>Our past wars in West Africa, I mean all our wars prior to the hut-tax
+war, have been wars in order to suppress human sacrifice, to protect one
+tribe from the aggression of another, and to prevent the stopping of
+trade by middlemen tribes. These things are things worth fighting for.
+The necessity we have been under to fight them has largely arisen from
+our ancestors shirking a little firm-handedness in their generation.</p>
+
+<p>There is very little doubt that, owing to a want of reconstruction after
+destruction, these wars have not been worth to the Empire the loss of
+life and money they have cost; but this is nothing against us as
+fighters nor any real disgrace to our honour, but merely a slur on our
+intellectual powers in the direction of statecraft. They are wars of a
+totally different character to those of the hut-tax kind, that arise
+from aggressions on native property: the only thing in common between
+them is the strain of poor statecraft. This imperfection, however,
+exists to a far greater extent in hut-tax war, for to it we owe that
+general feeling of dislike to the advance of civilisation you now hear
+referred to. That, to a certain extent, this dislike already exists as
+the necessary outcome of our policy of late years, and that it will
+increase yearly, I fear there is very little doubt.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_372" id="Page_372">[Pg 372]</a></span> It is the toxin
+produced by the microbe. It is the consequence of our attempt to
+introduce direct taxation, which seems to me to be an affair identical
+with your greased cartridges for India. Doubtless, such people ought not
+to object to greased cartridges; but, doubtless, such people as we are
+ought not to give them, and commit, over again, a worthless blunder,
+with no bad intention be it granted, but with no common sense.</p>
+
+<p>It has been said that the Sierra Leone hut-tax war is &ldquo;a little Indian
+mutiny&rdquo;; those who have said it do not seem to have known how true the
+statement is, for these attacks on property in the form of direct
+taxation are, to the African, treachery on the part of England, who,
+from the first, has kept on assuring the African that she does not mean
+to take his country from him, and then, as soon as she is strong enough,
+in his eyes, deliberately starts doing it. When you once get between two
+races the feeling of treachery, the face of their relationship is
+altered for ever, altered in a way that no wholesome war, no brutality
+of individuals, can alter. Black and white men for ever after a national
+breach of faith tax each other with treachery, and never really trust
+each other again.</p>
+
+<p>The African, however, must not be confounded with the Indian.
+Externally, in his habits he is in a lower culture state; he has no
+fanatical religion that really resents the incursions of other religions
+on his mind; Fetish can live in and among all sorts and kinds of
+religions without quarrelling with them in the least, grievously as they
+quarrel with Fetish; he has no written literature to keep before his
+eyes a glorious and mythical past, which, getting mixed up with his
+religious ideas, is liable in the Indian to make him take at times<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_373" id="Page_373">[Pg 373]</a></span>
+lobster-like backward springs in the direction of that past, though it
+was never there, and he would not have relished it if it had been.
+Nevertheless, the true Negro is, I believe, by far the better man than
+the Asiatic; he is physically superior, and he is more like an
+Englishman than the Asiatic; he is a logical, practical man, with
+feelings that are a credit to him, and are particularly strong in the
+direction of property; he has a way of thinking he has rights, whether
+he likes to use them or no, and will fight for them when he is driven to
+it. Fight you for a religious idea the African will not. He is not the
+stuff you make martyrs out of, nor does he desire to shake off the
+shackles of the flesh and swoon into Nirvana; and although he will sit
+under a tree to any extent, provided he gets enough to eat and a little
+tobacco, he won&rsquo;t sit under trees on iron spikes, or hold a leg up all
+the time, or fakirise in any fashion for the benefit of his soul or
+yours. His make of mind is exceedingly like the make of mind of
+thousands of Englishmen of the stand-no-nonsense,
+Englishman&rsquo;s-house-is-his-castle type. Yet, withal, a law-abiding man,
+loving a live lord, holding loudly that women should be kept in their
+place, yet often grievously henpecked by his wives, and little better
+than a slave to his mother, whom he loves with a love he gives to none
+other. This love of his mother is so dominant a factor in his life that
+it must be taken into consideration in attempting to understand the true
+Negro. Concerning it I can do no better than give you the Reverend
+Leighton Wilson&rsquo;s words; for this great missionary knew, as probably
+none since have known, the true Negro, having laboured for many years
+amongst the most unaltered Negro tribes&mdash;the Grain coast tribes&mdash;and his
+words are as true to-day of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_374" id="Page_374">[Pg 374]</a></span> the unaltered Negro as on the day he wrote
+them thirty-eight years ago, and Leighton Wilson, mind you, was no blind
+admirer of the African.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Whatever other estimate we may form of the African, we may not doubt
+his love for his mother. Her name, whether dead or alive, is always on
+his lips and in his heart. She is the first being he thinks of when
+awakening from his slumbers and the last he remembers when closing his
+eyes in sleep; to her he confides secrets which he would reveal to no
+other human being on the face of the earth. He cares for no one else in
+time of sickness, she alone must prepare his food, administer his
+medicine, perform his ablutions, and spread his mat for him. He flies to
+her in the hour of his distress, for he well knows if all the rest of
+the world turn against him she will be steadfast in her love, whether he
+be right or wrong.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;If there be any cause which justifies a man in using violence towards
+one of his fellow men it would be to resent an insult offered to his
+mother. More fights are occasioned among boys by hearing something said
+in disparagement of their mothers than all other causes put together. It
+is a common saying among them, if a man&rsquo;s mother and his wife are both
+on the point of being drowned, and he can save only one of them, he must
+save his mother, for the avowed reason if the wife is lost he may marry
+another, but he will never find a second mother.&rdquo;<a name="FNanchor_75_76" id="FNanchor_75_76"></a><a href="#Footnote_75_76" class="fnanchor">[75]</a></p>
+
+<p>Among the tribes of whom Wilson is speaking above, it is the man&rsquo;s true
+mother. Among the Niger Delta tribes it is often the adopted mother, the
+woman who has taken him when, as a child, he has been left motherless,
+or, if he is a boughten child, the woman who has taken care of him.
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_375" id="Page_375">[Pg 375]</a></span>Among both, and throughout all the bushmen tribes in West Africa,
+however, this deep affection is the same; next to the mother comes the
+sister to the African, and this matter has a bearing politically.</p>
+
+<p>There is little doubt that there exists a distrustful feeling towards
+white culture. Up to our attempt to enforce direct taxation it was only
+a distrustful feeling that a few years careful, honest handling would
+have disposed of. Since our attempt there is no doubt there is something
+approaching a panicky terror of white civilisation in all the native
+aristocracies and property owners. It is not, I repeat, to be attributed
+to Fetish priests. Certainly, on the whole, it is not attributable to a
+dislike of European customs or costumes; it is the reasonable dislike to
+being dispossessed alike of power and property in what they regard as
+their own country. A considerable factor in this matter is undoubtedly
+the influence of the women&mdash;the mothers of Africa. Just as your African
+man is the normal man, so is your African woman the normal woman. I
+openly own that if I have a soft spot in my feelings it is towards
+African women; and the close contact I have lived in with them has given
+rise to this, and, I venture to think, made me understand them. I know
+they have their faults. For one thing they are not so religiously minded
+as the men. I have met many African men who were philosophers, thinking
+in the terms of Fetish, but never a woman so doing. Be it granted that
+on the whole they know more about the details of Fetish procedure than
+the men do. Yet though frightened of them all, a blind faith in any
+mortal Ju Ju they do not possess. Your African lady is artful with them,
+not philosophic, possibly because she has other things to do&mdash;what with
+attending to the children,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_376" id="Page_376">[Pg 376]</a></span> the farm, and the market&mdash;than go mooning
+about as those men can. For another thing they go in for husband
+poisoning in a way I am unable to approve of.</p>
+
+<p>Well, it may be interesting to inquire into the reasons that make the
+West African woman a factor against white civilisation. These reasons
+are&mdash;firstly, that she does not know practically anything about it; and,
+secondly, she has the normal feminine dislike to innovations. Missionary
+and other forms of white education have not been given to the African
+women to anything like the same extent that they have been given to the
+men. I do not say that there are not any African women who are not
+thoroughly educated in white education, for there are, and they can
+compare very favourably from the standpoint of their education with our
+normal women; but these have, I think I may safely say, been the
+daughters of educated African men, or have been the women who have been
+immediately attached to some mission station. I have no hesitation in
+saying that, considering the very little attention that has been given
+to the white education of the African women, they give evidence of an
+ability in due keeping with that of the African men. But all I mean to
+say is, that our white culture has not had a grasp over the womankind of
+Africa that can compare with that it has had over the men; for one woman
+who has been brought home to England and educated in our schools, and
+who has been surrounded by English culture, &amp;c., there are 500 men. But
+into the possibilities of the African woman in the white education
+department I do not mean to go; I am getting into a snaggy channel by
+speaking on woman at all. It is to the mass of African women, untouched
+by white culture, but with an enormous influence over their sons and
+brothers, that I am now referring as a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_377" id="Page_377">[Pg 377]</a></span> factor in the dislike to the
+advance of white civilisation; and I have said they do not like it
+because, for one thing, they do not know it; that is to say, they do not
+know it from the inside and at its best, but only from the outside.
+Viewed from the outside in West Africa white civilisation, to a shrewd
+mind like hers, is an evil thing for her boys and girls. She sees it
+taking away from them the restraints of their native culture, and in all
+too many cases leading them into a life of dissipation, disgrace, and
+decay; or, if it does not do this, yet separating the men from their
+people.</p>
+
+<p>The whole of this affair requires a whole mass of elaborate explanations
+to place it fairly before you, but I will merely sketch the leading
+points now. (1) The law of mütterrecht makes the tie between the mother
+and the children far closer than that between the father and them: white
+culture reverses this, she does not like that. (2) Between husband and
+wife there is no community in goods under native law; each keeps his and
+her separate estate. White culture says the husband shall endow his wife
+with all his worldly goods; this she knows usually means, that if he has
+any he does not endow her with them, but whether he has or has not he
+endows himself with hers as far as any law permits. Similarly he does
+not like it either. These two white culture things, saddling him with
+the support of the children and endowing his wife with all his property,
+presents a repulsive situation to the logical African. Moreover, white
+culture expects him to think more of his wife and children than he does
+of his mother and sisters, which to the uncultured African is absurd.</p>
+
+<p>Then again both he and his mother see the fearful effects of white
+culture on the young women, who cannot be prevented in districts under
+white control from going down to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_378" id="Page_378">[Pg 378]</a></span> the coast towns and to the Devil:
+neither he nor the respectable old ladies of his tribe approve of this.
+Then again they know that the young men of their people who have
+thoroughly allied themselves to white culture look down on their
+relations in the African culture state. They call the ancestors of their
+tribe &ldquo;polygamists,&rdquo; as if it were a swear-word, though they are a
+thousand times worse than polygamists themselves: and they are ashamed
+of their mothers. It is a whole seething mass of stuff all through and I
+would not mention it were it not that it is a factor in the formation of
+anti-white-culture opinion among the mass of the West Africans, and that
+it causes your West African bush chief to listen to the old woman whom
+you may see crouching behind him, or you may not see at all, but who is
+with him all the same, when she says, &ldquo;Do not listen to the white man,
+it is bad for you.&rdquo; He knows that the interpreter talking to him for the
+white man may be a boughten man, paid to advertise the advantages of
+white ways; and he knows that the old woman, his mother, cannot be
+bought where his interest is concerned: so he listens to her, and she
+distrusts white ways.</p>
+
+<p>I am aware that there is now in West Africa a handful of Africans who
+have mastered white culture, who know it too well to misunderstand the
+inner spirit of it, who are men too true to have let it cut them off in
+either love or sympathy from Africa,&mdash;men that, had England another
+system that would allow her to see them as they are, would be of greater
+use to her and Africa than they now are; but I will not name them: I
+fight a lone fight, and wish to mix no man, white or black, up in it, or
+my heretical opinions. That handful of African men are now fighting a
+hard enough fight to prevent the distracted,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_379" id="Page_379">[Pg 379]</a></span> uninformed Africans from
+rising against what looks so like white treachery, though it is only
+white want of knowledge; and also against those &ldquo;water flies&rdquo; who are
+neither Africans nor Europeans, but who are the curse of the Coast&mdash;the
+men who mislead the white man and betray the black.</p>
+
+<p>Next to this there is another factor almost equally powerful, with which
+I presume you cannot sympathise, and which I should make a mess of if I
+trusted myself to explain. Therefore I call in the aid of a better
+writer, speaking on another race, but talking of the identical same
+thing. &ldquo;In these days the boot of the ubiquitous white man leaves its
+mark on all the fair places of the earth, and scores thereon an even
+more gigantic track than that which affrighted Robinson Crusoe in his
+solitude. It crushes down the forest, beats out roads, strides across
+the rivers, kicks down native institutions, and generally tramples on
+the growths of natives and the works of primitive man, reducing all
+things to that dead level of conventionality which we call civilisation.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Incidentally it stamps out much of what is best in the customs and
+characteristics of the native races against which it brushes; and though
+it relieves him of many things which hurt or oppressed him ere it came,
+it injures him morally almost as much as it benefits him materially. We
+who are white men admire our work not a little&mdash;which is natural, and
+many are found willing to wear out their souls in efforts to convert the
+thirteenth century into the nineteenth in a score of years. The natives,
+who for the most part are frank Vandals, also admire efforts of which
+they are aware that they are themselves incapable, and even the
+<i>laudator temporis acti</i> has his mouth stopped by the cheap and often
+tawdry luxury which the coming of the white man<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_380" id="Page_380">[Pg 380]</a></span> has placed within his
+reach. So effectually has the heel of the white man been ground into the
+face of Pérak and Selangor, that these native states are now only
+nominally what their name implies. The white population outnumbers the
+people of the land in most of the principal districts, and it is
+possible for a European to spend weeks in either of these states without
+coming into contact with any Asiatics save those who wait at table,
+clean his shirts, or drive his cab. It is possible, I am told, for a
+European to spend years in Pérak or Selangor without acquiring any
+profound knowledge of the natives of the country or of the language
+which is their special medium. This being so, most of the white men who
+live in the protected native states are somewhat apt to disregard the
+effect their actions have upon the natives and labour under the common
+European inability to view natives from a native standpoint. Moreover,
+we have become accustomed to existing conditions; and thus it is that
+few perhaps realise the precise nature of the work which the British in
+the Peninsula have set themselves to accomplish. What we are really
+attempting, however, is nothing less than to crush into twenty years the
+revolution in facts and in ideas, which, even in energetic Europe, six
+long centuries have been needed to accomplish. No one will, of course,
+be found to dispute that the strides made in our knowledge of the art of
+government since the thirteenth century are prodigious and vast, nor
+that the general condition of the people of Europe has been immensely
+improved since that day; but nevertheless one cannot but sympathise with
+the Malays who are suddenly and violently translated from the point to
+which they have attained in the natural development of their race, and
+are required to live up to the standard of a people who are six
+centuries in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_381" id="Page_381">[Pg 381]</a></span> advance of them in national progress. If a plant is made
+to blossom or bear fruit three months before its time it is regarded as
+a triumph of the gardener&rsquo;s art; but what then are we to say of this
+huge moral forcing system we call &lsquo;protection&rsquo;? Forced plants we know
+suffer in the process; and the Malay, whose proper place is amidst the
+conditions of the thirteenth century, is apt to become morally weak and
+seedy and lose something of his robust self respect when he is forced to
+bear Nineteenth century fruit.&rdquo;<a name="FNanchor_76_77" id="FNanchor_76_77"></a><a href="#Footnote_76_77" class="fnanchor">[76]</a></p>
+
+<p>Now, the above represents the state of affairs caused by the clash of
+different culture levels in the true Negro States, as well as it does in
+the Malay. These two sets of men, widely different in breed, have from
+the many points of agreement in their State-form, evidently both arrived
+in our thirteenth century. The African peoples in the central East, and
+East, and South, except where they are true Negroes, have not arrived in
+the Thirteenth century, or, to put it in other words, the true Negro
+stem in Africa has arrived at a political state akin to that of our own
+Thirteenth century, whereas the Bantu stem has not; this point, however,
+I need not enter into here.</p>
+
+<p>There are, of course, local differences between the Malay Peninsula and
+West Africa, but the main characteristics as regards the State-form
+among the natives are singularly alike. They are both what Mr. Clifford
+aptly likens to our own European State-form in the Thirteenth century;
+and the effect of the white culture on the morals of the natives is also
+alike. The main difference between them results from the Malay Peninsula
+being but a narrow strip of land and thinly peopled, compared to the
+densely populated section of a continent we call West Africa. Therefore,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_382" id="Page_382">[Pg 382]</a></span>although the Malay in his native state is a superior individual warrior
+to the West African, yet there are not so many of him; and as he is less
+guarded from whites by a pestilential climate, his resistance to the
+white culture of the Nineteenth century is inferior to the resistance
+which the West African can give.</p>
+
+<p>The destruction of what is good in the Thirteenth century culture level,
+and the fact that when the Nineteenth century has had its way the main
+result is seedy demoralised natives, is the thing that must make all
+thinking men wonder if, after all, such work is from a high moral point
+of view worth the Nineteenth century doing. I so often think when I hear
+the progress of civilisation, our duty towards the lower races, &amp;c.,
+talked of, as if those words were in themselves Ju Ju, of that improving
+fable of the kind-hearted she-elephant, who, while out walking one day,
+inadvertently trod upon a partridge and killed it, and observing close
+at hand the bird&rsquo;s nest full of callow fledglings, dropped a tear, and
+saying &ldquo;I have the feelings of a mother myself,&rdquo; sat down upon the
+brood. This is precisely what England representing the Nineteenth
+century is doing in Thirteenth century West Africa. She destroys the
+guardian institution, drops a tear and sits upon the brood with motherly
+intentions; and pesky warm sitting she finds it, what with the nature of
+the brood and the surrounding climate, let alone the expense of it. And
+what profit she is going to get out of such proceedings there, I own I
+don&rsquo;t know. &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; you say, &ldquo;yes, it is sad, but it is inevitable.&rdquo; I do
+not think it is inevitable, unless you have no intellectual constructive
+Statecraft, and are merely in that line an automaton. If you will try
+Science, all the evils of the clash between the two culture periods
+could be avoided, and you could assist<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_383" id="Page_383">[Pg 383]</a></span> these West Africans in their
+Thirteenth century state to rise into their Nineteenth century state
+without their having the hard fight for it that you yourself had. This
+would be a grand humanitarian bit of work; by doing it you would raise a
+monument before God to the honour of England such as no nation has ever
+yet raised to Him on Earth.</p>
+
+<p>There is absolutely no perceivable sound reason why you should not do it
+if you will try Science and master the knowledge of the nature of the
+native and his country. The knowledge of native laws, religion,
+institutions, and State-form would give you the knowledge of what is
+good in these things, so that you might develop and encourage them; and
+the West African, having reached a Thirteenth century state, has
+institutions and laws which with a strengthening from the European hand
+would by their operation now stamp out the evil that exists under the
+native state. What you are doing now, however, is the direct contrary to
+this: you are destroying the good portion and thereby allowing what is
+evil, or imperfect, in it as in all things human, to flourish under your
+protection far more rankly than under the purely native Thirteenth
+century State-form, with Fetish as a state religion, it could possibly
+do.</p>
+
+<p>I know, however, there is one great objection to your taking up a
+different line towards native races to that which you are at present
+following. It is one of those strange things that are in men&rsquo;s minds
+almost without their knowing they are there, yet which, nevertheless,
+rule them. This is the idea that those Africans are, as one party would
+say, steeped in sin, or, as another party would say, a lower or degraded
+race. While you think these things, you must act as you are acting. They
+really are the same idea in different clothes. They both presuppose all
+mankind to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_384" id="Page_384">[Pg 384]</a></span> have sprung from a single pair of human beings, and the
+condition of a race to-day therefore to be to its own credit or blame. I
+remember one day in Cameroons coming across a young African lady, of the
+age of twelve, who I knew was enjoying the advantages of white tuition
+at a school. So, in order to open up conversation, I asked her what she
+had been learning. &ldquo;Ebberyting,&rdquo; she observed with a genial smile. I
+asked her then what she knew, so as to approach the subject from a
+different standpoint for purposes of comparison. &ldquo;Ebberyting,&rdquo; she said.
+This hurt my vanity, for though I am a good deal more than twelve years
+of age, I am far below this state of knowledge; so I said, &ldquo;Well, my
+dear, and if you do, you&rsquo;re the person I have long wished to meet, for
+you can tell me why you are black.&rdquo; &ldquo;Oh yes,&rdquo; she said, with a perfect
+beam of satisfaction, &ldquo;one of my pa&rsquo;s pa&rsquo;s saw dem Patriark Noah wivout
+his clothes.&rdquo; I handed over to her a crimson silk necktie that I was
+wearing, and slunk away, humbled by superior knowledge. This, of course,
+was the result of white training direct on the African mind; the story
+which you will often be told to account for the blackness and whiteness
+of men by Africans who have not been in direct touch with European, but
+who have been in touch with Muhammedan, tradition&mdash;which in the main has
+the same Semitic source&mdash;is that when Cain killed Abel, he was horrified
+at himself, and terrified of God; and so he carried the body away from
+beside the altar where it lay, and carried it about for years trying to
+hide it, but not knowing how, growing white the while with the horror
+and the fear; until one day he saw a crow scratching a hole in the
+desert sand, and it struck him that if he made a hole in the sand and
+put the body in, he could hide it from God, so he did; but<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_385" id="Page_385">[Pg 385]</a></span> all his
+children were white, and from Cain came the white races, while Abel&rsquo;s
+children are black, as all men were before the first murder. The present
+way of contemplating different races, though expressed in finer
+language, is practically identical with these; not only the religious
+view, but the view of the suburban agnostic. The religious European
+cannot avoid regarding the races in a different and inferior culture
+state to his own as more deeply steeped in sin than himself, and the
+suburban agnostic regards them as &ldquo;degraded&rdquo; or &ldquo;retarded&rdquo; either by
+environment, or microbes, or both.</p>
+
+<p>I openly and honestly own I sincerely detest touching on this race
+question. For one thing, Science has not finished with it; for another,
+it belongs to a group of subjects of enormous magnitude, upon which I
+have no opinion, but merely feelings, and those of a nature which I am
+informed by superior people would barely be a credit to a cave man of
+the palæolithic period. My feelings classify the world&rsquo;s inhabitants
+into Englishmen, by which I mean Teutons at large, Foreigners, and
+Blacks. Blacks I subdivide into two classes, English Blacks and Foreign
+Blacks. English Blacks are Africans. Foreign Blacks are Indians,
+Chinese, and the rest. Of course, everything that is not Teutonic is, to
+put it mildly, not up to what is; and equally, of course, I feel more at
+home with and hold in greater esteem the English Black: a great, strong
+Kruman, for example, with his front teeth filed, nothing much on but
+oil, half a dozen wives, and half a hundred jujus, is a sort of person
+whom I hold higher than any other form of native, let the other form
+dress in silk, satin, or cashmere, and make what pretty things he
+pleases. This is, of course, a general view; but I am often<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_386" id="Page_386">[Pg 386]</a></span> cornered
+for the detail view, whether I can reconcile my admiration for Africans
+with my statement that they are a different kind of human being to white
+men. Naturally I can, to my own satisfaction, just as I can admire an
+oak tree or a palm; but it is an uncommonly difficult thing to explain.
+All I can say is, that when I come back from a spell in Africa, the
+thing that makes me proud of being one of the English is not the manners
+or customs up here, certainly not the houses or the climate; but it is
+the thing embodied in a great railway engine. I once came home on a ship
+with an Englishman who had been in South West Africa for seven unbroken
+years; he was sane, and in his right mind. But no sooner did we get
+ashore at Liverpool, than he rushed at and threw his arms round a
+postman, to that official&rsquo;s embarrassment and surprise. Well, that is
+just how I feel about the first magnificent bit of machinery I come
+across: it is the manifestation of the superiority of my race.</p>
+
+<p>In philosophic moments I call superiority difference, from a feeling
+that it is not mine to judge the grade in these things. Careful
+scientific study has enforced on me, as it has on other students, the
+recognition that the African mind naturally approaches all things from a
+spiritual point of view. Low down in culture or high up, his mind works
+along the line that things happen because of the action of spirit upon
+spirit; it is an effort for him to think in terms of matter. We think
+along the line that things happen from the action of matter upon matter.
+If it were not for the Asiatic religion we have accepted, it is, I
+think, doubtful whether we should not be far more materialistic in
+thought-form than we are. This steady sticking to the material<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_387" id="Page_387">[Pg 387]</a></span> side of
+things, I think, has given our race its dominion over matter; the want
+of it has caused the African to be notably behind us in this, and far
+behind those Asiatic races who regard matter and spirit as separate in
+essence, a thing that is not in the mind either of the Englishman or the
+African. The Englishman is constrained by circumstances to perceive the
+existence of an extra material world. The African regards spirit and
+matter as undivided in kind, matter being only the extreme low form of
+spirit. There must be in the facts of the case behind things, something
+to account for the high perception of justice you will find in the
+African, combined with an inability to think out a pulley or a lever
+except under white tuition. Similarly, taking the true Negro States,
+which are in its equivalent to our Thirteenth century, it accounts for
+the higher level of morals in them than you would find in our Thirteenth
+century; and I fancy this want of interest and inferiority in
+materialism in the true Negro constitutes a reason why they will not
+come into our Nineteenth century, but, under proper guidance could
+attain to a Nineteenth century state of their own, which would show a
+proportionate advance. The simile of the influence of the culture of
+Rome, or rather let us say the culture of Greece spread by the force of
+Rome, upon Barbarian culture is one often used to justify the hope that
+English culture will have a similar effect on the African. This I do not
+think is so. It is true the culture of Rome lifted the barbarians from
+what one might call culture 9 to culture 17, but the Romans and the
+barbarians were both white races. But you see now a similar lift in
+culture in Africa by the influence of Mohammedan culture, for example in
+the Hausa States and again in the Western Soudan, where there is no
+fundamental race difference.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_388" id="Page_388">[Pg 388]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In both English and Mohammedan Berber influence on the African there is
+another factor, apart from race difference; namely, that the two higher
+cultures are in a healthier state than that of Rome was at the time it
+mastered the barbarian mind; in both cases the higher culture has the
+superior war force.</p>
+
+<p>This seems to me simply to lay upon us English for the sake of our
+honour that we keep clean hands and a cool head, and be careful of
+Justice; to do this we must know what there is we wish to wipe out of
+the African, and what there is we wish to put in, and so we must not
+content ourselves by relying materially on our superior wealth and
+power, and morally on catch phrases. All we need look to is justice.
+Love for our fellow-man, pity, charity, mercy, we need not bother our
+heads about, so long as we are just. These things are of value only when
+they are used as means whereby we can attain justice. It is no use
+saying that it matters to a Teuton whether the other race he deals with
+is black, white, yellow&mdash;I can quite conceive that we should look down
+on a pea-green form of humanity if we had the chance. Naturally, I think
+this shows a very proper spirit. I should be the last to alter any of
+our Teutonic institutions to please any race; but when it comes to
+altering the institutions of another race, not for the reason even of
+pleasing ourselves but merely on the plea that we don&rsquo;t understand them,
+we are on different ground. If those ideas and institutions stand in the
+way of our universal right to go anywhere we choose and live as honest
+gentlemen, we have the power-right to alter them; but if they do not we
+must judge them from as near a standard of pure Justice as we can attain
+to.</p>
+
+<p>There are many who hold murder the most awful crime<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_389" id="Page_389">[Pg 389]</a></span> a man can commit,
+saying that thereby he destroys the image of his Maker; I hold that one
+of the most awful crimes one nation can commit on another is destroying
+the image of Justice, which in an institution is represented more truly
+to the people by whom the institution has been developed, than in any
+alien institution of Justice; it is a thing adapted to its environment.
+This form of murder by a nation I see being done in the destruction of
+what is good in the laws and institutions of native races. In some parts
+of the world, this murder, judged from certain reasonable standpoints,
+gives you an advantage; in West Africa, judged from any standpoint you
+choose to take, it gives you no advantage. By destroying native
+institutions there, you merely lower the moral of the African race, stop
+trade, and the culture advantages it brings both to England and West
+Africa. I again refer you to the object lesson before you now, the hut
+tax war in Sierra Leone. Awful accusations have been made against the
+officers and men who had the collecting of this tax. In the matter of
+the native soldiery, there is no doubt these accusations are only too
+well founded, but the root thing was the murder of institutions. The
+worst of the whole of this miserable affair is that a precisely similar
+miserable affair may occur at any time in any of our West African Crown
+Colonies&mdash;to-morrow, any day,&mdash;until you choose to remove the Crown
+Colony system of government.</p>
+
+<p>It has naturally been exceedingly hard for men who know the colony and
+the natives, with the experience of years in an unsentimental commercial
+way, to keep civil tongues in their heads while their interests were
+being wrecked by the action of the government; but whether or no the
+white officers were or were not brutal in their<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_390" id="Page_390">[Pg 390]</a></span> methods we must presume
+will be shown by Sir David Chalmers&rsquo;s report. I am unable to believe
+they were. But there is no manner of doubt that outrages have been
+committed, disgraceful to England, by the set of riff-raff rascal
+Blacks, who had been turned out by, or who had run away from, the
+hinterland tribes down into Sierra Leone Colony, and there been turned,
+by an ill-informed government, into police, and sent back with power
+into the very districts from which they had, shortly before, fled for
+their crimes. I entirely sympathise, therefore, with the rage of
+Liverpool and Manchester, and of every clear-minded common-sense
+Englishman who knows what a thing the hut tax war has been. And I want
+common-sense Englishmen to recognise that a system capable of such
+folly, and under which such a thing could happen in an English
+possession, is a system that must go. For a system that gets short of
+money, from its own want of business-like ability, and then against all
+expert advice goes and does the most unscientific thing conceivable
+under the circumstances, to get more, is a thing that is a disgrace to
+England. Yet the Sierra Leone Colony was capable of this folly, and the
+people in London were capable of saying to Liverpool and Manchester,
+that no difficulty was expected from the collection of the tax. If this
+is so in our oldest colony, what reason have we to believe that in the
+others we are safer? Any of them, in combination with London, may
+to-morrow go and do the most unscientific thing conceivable, and
+disgrace England, in order to procure more local revenue, and fail at
+that.</p>
+
+<p>The desire to develop our West African possessions is a worthy one in
+its way, but better leave it totally alone than attempt it with your
+present machinery; which the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_391" id="Page_391">[Pg 391]</a></span> moment it is called upon to deal with the
+administration of the mass of the native inhabitants gives such a
+trouble. And remember it is not the only trouble your Crown colony
+system can give; it has a few glorious opportunities left of further
+supporting everything I have said about it, and more. But I will say no
+more. You have got a grand rich region there, populated by an uncommon
+fine sort of human being. You have been trying your present set of ideas
+on it for over 400 years; they have failed in a heart-breaking drizzling
+sort of way to perform any single solitary one of the things you say you
+want done there. West Africa to-day is just a quarry of paving-stones
+for Hell, and those stones were cemented in place with men&rsquo;s blood mixed
+with wasted gold.</p>
+
+<p>Prove it! you say. Prove it to yourself by going there&mdash;I don&rsquo;t mean to
+Blazes&mdash;but to West Africa.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_74_75" id="Footnote_74_75"></a><a href="#FNanchor_74_75"><span class="label">[74]</span></a> <i>Ashantee and Jaman</i>, Freeman (Constable and Co., 1898).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_75_76" id="Footnote_75_76"></a><a href="#FNanchor_75_76"><span class="label">[75]</span></a> <i>Western Africa</i>, Wilson, 1856, p. 116.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_76_77" id="Footnote_76_77"></a><a href="#FNanchor_76_77"><span class="label">[76]</span></a> <i>East Coast Etchings.</i> H. Clifford, Singapore, 1896.</p></div>
+</div>
+<hr class="chap" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_392" id="Page_392">[Pg 392]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVII" id="CHAPTER_XVII"></a>CHAPTER XVII</h2>
+
+<p>AN ALTERNATIVE PLAN</p>
+
+<p class="pblock">Wherein the student, having said divers harsh things of those who
+destroy but do not reconstruct, recognises that, having attempted
+destruction, it is but seemly to set forth some other way whereby
+the West African colonies could be managed.</p>
+
+<p>West Africa, I own, is a make of country difficult for a power with a
+different kind of culture, climate and set of institutions, and so on,
+to manage from Europe satisfactorily. But, as things go, I venture to
+think it presents no especial difficulty; that all the difficulties that
+exist in this matter are difficulties arising from
+misunderstandings,&mdash;things removable, not things of essence, barring
+only fever.</p>
+
+<p>Also I feel convinced that no one of our English governmental methods at
+present existing is suitable for its administration. It is no use
+saying, Look at our Indian system, why not just introduce that into West
+Africa? I have the greatest admiration for our Indian system; it is the
+right thing in the right place, thanks to its having healthily grown up,
+fostered by experts, military and civil. Nevertheless it would not do
+for West Africa to-day. What we want there is the sowing of a similar
+system, not the transplanting of the Indian in its perfect form, for
+that is to-day for West Africa infinitely too expensive. If a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_393" id="Page_393">[Pg 393]</a></span> man
+before his fortune is made spends a fortune, he ends badly; if he
+measures his expenditure with his income and develops his opportunities,
+he ends as a millionaire; and we must never forget that great dictum
+that the State is the perfection of the individual man, and should mould
+our politics accordingly.</p>
+
+<p>I hold it to be a sound and healthy idea of ours that our possessions
+over-sea should pay their own way, and I therefore distrust the
+cucumber-frame form of financial politics that at present holds the
+field in West African affairs. It has been the pride and boast of the
+West African colonies that they have paid their way; let it remain so.
+It seems to me unsound that our colonies there should receive loans
+wherewith to carry on; for, for one thing, it makes them carry on more
+than is good for them, and merely means a piling up of debt; and, for
+another, it gives West Africa the notion that it is England&rsquo;s business
+to support her, which to my mind it distinctly is not; for if we wanted
+a lapdog set of colonies we could get healthier ones elsewhere.
+Moreover, it pauperises instead of fostering the proper pride, without
+which nothing can flourish.</p>
+
+<p>Apart from our Indian system, we have, for governing those regions where
+our race cannot locally produce a sufficient population of its own to
+take the reins of government out of the hands of officialdom in England,
+only two other systems, namely, the Chartered Company and the Crown
+Colony. I beg to urge that it is high time we had a third system.
+Concerning the Crown Colony system for Africa, I have spoken as
+tolerantly as I believe it is possible for any one acquainted with its
+working in West Africa to speak. If I were to say any more I might say
+something<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_394" id="Page_394">[Pg 394]</a></span> uncivil, which, of course, I do not wish to do. Concerning
+the Chartered Company system, I need only remark that there are two
+distinct breeds of Chartered Companies&mdash;the one whose attention is
+turned to the trade, the other whose attention is turned to the lands
+over which its charter gives it dominion. The first kind is represented
+in Africa by the Royal Niger Company, the second by the South African.</p>
+
+<p>The second form of Chartered Company, that interested in land, we have
+not in West Africa under the name of a Company; but the present Crown
+Colony system represents it, and I feel certain that whatever good the
+South African Company may have done for the empire in South Africa, it
+has done an immense amount of harm in Western Africa. For some, to me
+unknown, reason the South African Company has found favour in the sight
+of officialdom in London; and, fascinated by its success in South
+Africa, yet recognising its drawbacks, officialdom has attempted to
+introduce what they regard as best in the South African system into West
+Africa. I do not think any student can avoid coming to the conclusion
+that the policy which is now driving the Crown Colonies in West Africa
+is one and the same with that of Mr. Rhodes. I do not mean that Mr.
+Rhodes, had he had the handling of West Africa, would himself have used
+this form of policy. He formulated it for South Africa; but, with his
+careful study of such things as local needs, he would have formulated
+another form for West Africa, which is a totally different region.</p>
+
+<p>To take only two of the differences, and state them brutally. First, in
+West Africa the most valuable asset you have is the native: the more
+heavily the district there is populated with Africans, and the more
+prosperous those<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_395" id="Page_395">[Pg 395]</a></span> natives are, the better for you; for it means more
+trade. All the gold, ivory, oil, rubber, and timber in West Africa are
+useless to you without the African to work them; you can get no other
+race that can replace him, and work them; the thing has now been tried,
+and it has failed. Whereas in South Africa the converse is true: you can
+do without the African there, you can replace him with pretty nearly any
+other kind of man you like, or do the work yourself. The second
+difference is, that the land in South Africa is worth your having, you
+can go and domesticate on it; whereas in West Africa you cannot. A
+failure to recognise these differences is at the root of our present
+ill-judged West African policy, outside the Royal Niger Company&rsquo;s
+domain; by introducing South African methods we are trying to get what
+is of no use to us, the <i>Landes Hoheit</i>, and thereby devastating what is
+of use to us, the trade.</p>
+
+<p>However, I will not detain you over this interesting question of
+Chartered Company government. I merely wish to draw your attention to
+the two breeds, the Land Company, and the Trade Company; and to urge
+that they are things to be applied in their respective proper
+environments. I can honestly assure you, I know every blessed, single,
+mortal thing that can be said against the trade form which I admire, for
+I have lived under a hail of this sort of information since I was
+discovered by my big juju, Liverpool, to be such an admirer of what I
+called a co-ordinate system of government and trade, and Liverpool
+called divers things.</p>
+
+<p>I shall go to my grave believing that Liverpool had reasons for
+attacking the Company, but neglected fundamental facts in its
+controversy with the Trade Company, which, to it, was &ldquo;a little more
+than kith, and less than kind.&rdquo;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_396" id="Page_396">[Pg 396]</a></span> The Royal Niger Company has
+demonstrated its adaptation to its environment. Without any forced
+labour, without any direct taxation, it has paid. I venture to think,
+though I have no doubt it would severely hurt the feelings of the
+R.N.C., that we may regard the Royal Niger Company as representing the
+perfected system of native government in West Africa plus English
+courage and activity. I believe that on this foundation has been built
+its success. For say what you like, if the Royal Niger had not got on
+well with the natives in its territories&mdash;dealt cleanly, honestly,
+rationally with them&mdash;it would never have extended its influence in the
+grand way it has, represented only by a mere handful of white men, in
+what is, as far as we know, the most densely populated region with the
+highest and most organised form of native power in all tropical Africa.
+Had it not been to the natives it ruled a just, honourable, and
+desirable form of government, it would long ago have been stamped out by
+them, or would have been compelled to call in England&rsquo;s armed support to
+maintain it, as the Crown Colony system has been compelled to do in
+Sierra Leone and on the Gold Coast. It has not had to call in Imperial
+assistance, and it has paid its shareholders&mdash;a sound, healthy conduct;
+but, nevertheless, remember that all the great debt of gratitude you and
+every one of the English owe the Royal Niger Company for defending the
+honour of England against Continental enterprise, for maintaining the
+honour of England in the eyes of the native races with whom it had made
+treaties, you do not owe to the Chartered Company <i>system</i>, but to Sir
+George Goldie, the man who had to use it because it was the <i>best</i>
+existing system available for such a region. You have too much sense to
+give all the honour to Lord Kitchener of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_397" id="Page_397">[Pg 397]</a></span> Khartoum&rsquo;s sword, though a
+sword is an excellent thing. I trust, therefore, you have too much sense
+to give all honour to the Chartered Company, even when it is a trading
+company. Trade is an excellent thing, but, in the case of the Royal
+Niger, this very factor, trade, restricts the man who uses the Chartered
+Company to a set of white men and a set of black. Therefore, never can I
+feel that either Liverpool or the Brass men have profited by the R.N.C.
+as they would have done if there had been a better system available for
+dealing with what Mr. St. Loe Strachey delicately calls &ldquo;a dark-skinned
+population&rdquo; with an insufficient local white population at hand.
+Briefly, I should say that the Chartered Company system keeps its &ldquo;ain
+fish-guts for its ain sea-maws&rdquo; too much. Therefore now, when, like many
+before me who have laboured strenuously to reform, I have given up the
+idea that reformation is possible for the individual on whom they have
+expended their powers, and have decided that there are some people whom
+you can only reform with a gun, I will start reforming myself, and say
+the Chartered Company system is not good enough, taken all round as
+things are, for West Africa for these reasons.</p>
+
+<p>First, a Chartered Company consists of a band of merchants, ruling
+through, and by, a great man. If that great man who expands the
+influence and power of the Company lives long enough to establish a form
+of policy, well and good. I have sufficient trust in the common sense of
+a band of English merchants, provided their interest is common, to
+believe they will adhere to the policy; but suppose he does not, or
+suppose you do not start with a good man, you will merely have a mess,
+as has been demonstrated by the perpetual failures of our French<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_398" id="Page_398">[Pg 398]</a></span>
+friends&rsquo; Chartered Companies. By the way, I may remark that although
+France is no great admirer of the chartered system with us, she is
+devoted to it for herself, sprinkling all her West African possessions
+with them freely, only unfortunately, as their names are usually far
+longer than their banking accounts, they do not grow conspicuous; even
+apart from these private and subsidised Chartered Companies in French
+possessions, France follows the chartered system imperially in West
+Africa by keeping out non-French trade with differential tariffs, and so
+on. But, after all, in this matter she is no worse than English critics
+of the Royal Niger; and it is a common trait of all West African
+palavers that those who criticise are amply well provided themselves
+with the very faults they find so repulsive in others&mdash;it&rsquo;s the climate.</p>
+
+<p>Secondly, the Chartered Company represents English trade interests in
+sections, instead of completely; English honour, common sense, military
+ability, and so on, the Royal Niger under Sir George Goldie has
+represented more perfectly than these things have ever been represented
+in West&mdash;or, I may safely say, Africa at large; but the trade interests
+of England it has only represented partially, or in other words, it has
+only represented the trade interests of its shareholders and the natives
+it has made treaties with, and what we want is something that will
+represent our trade interests there completely. Therefore, I do not
+advocate it as the general system for West Africa, for under another
+sort of man it might mean merely a more rapid crash than we are in for
+with the Crown Colony system. To my dying day I shall honour that great
+Trade Company, the Royal Niger, for representing England, that is,
+England properly so-called, to the world at large, during<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_399" id="Page_399">[Pg 399]</a></span> one of the
+darkest ages we have ever had since Charles II.; and, I believe that it,
+with the Committee of Merchants who held the Gold Coast for England
+after the battle of Katamansu, when her officials would have abandoned
+alike the Gold Coast and her honour in West Africa, will stand out in
+our history as grand things, but yet I say we want another system.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Du binst der Geist der stets verneint!&rdquo; you ejaculate. You do not like
+Crown Colonies. You won&rsquo;t grovel to Chartered Companies, however good.
+You prove, on your own showing, that there is not in West Africa a
+sufficiently large, or a sufficiently long resident, local English
+population&mdash;what with their constantly leaving for home or for the
+cemetery&mdash;to form an independent colony. What else remains?</p>
+
+<p>Well, I humbly beg to say that there is another system&mdash;a system that
+pays in all round peace and prosperity&mdash;a system whereby a region with a
+native population&mdash;a lively one in a Thirteenth century culture
+state&mdash;of about 30,000,000, is ruled. The total value of exports from
+the regions I refer to averages Ŗ14,000,000, out of a country of very
+much the same make as West Africa; the floating capital in its trade is
+some Ŗ25,000,000; its actual land area is 562,540 square miles; yet its
+trade with its European country amounts, nevertheless, to at least one
+half of that carried on between India and England. If you apply the
+system that has built this thing up, practically since 1830, to West
+Africa, you will not get the above figures out in forty years; but you
+will get at least two-thirds of them; and that would be a grand rise on
+your present West African figures, and in time you could surpass these
+figures, for West Africa is far larger, and far nearer European markets,
+and you have the advantage of superior shipping.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_400" id="Page_400">[Pg 400]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The region I am citing is not so unhealthy for whites as West Africa.
+Still, it has a stiff death-rate of its own; even nowadays, when it has
+pulled that death-rate down by Science&mdash;a thing, I may remark, you never
+trouble your head about in West Africa, or think worthy of your serious
+attention.</p>
+
+<p>I will not insult your knowledge by telling you where this system is
+working to-day, or who works it, and all that. The same consideration
+also bars me from applying for a patent for this system; for although I
+lay it before you altered to what I think suitable for West Africa, the
+main lines of the system remain. The only thing I confess that makes me
+shaky about its being applied to West Africa is, that this system
+requires and must have experts black and white to work it, both at home
+in England and out in West Africa. Still, you have a sufficient supply
+of such experts, if only you would not leave things so largely in the
+hands of clerks and amateurs; who, with the assistance of faddists and
+renegade Africans, break up the native true Negro culture state, leaving
+you little sound stuff to work on in the regions now under the Crown
+Colony system.</p>
+
+<p>Before I proceed to sketch the skeleton of the other system, I must lay
+before you briefly the present political state of West Africa in the
+words of the greatest living expert on the subject, as they are given in
+a remarkable article in the <i>Edinburgh Review</i> for October, 1898.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The weighty utterance of Sir George Goldie should never be forgotten,
+&lsquo;Central African races and tribes have, broadly speaking, no sentiment
+of patriotism as understood in Europe.&rsquo; There is, therefore, little
+difficulty in inducing them to accept what German jurisconsults term
+&lsquo;Ober<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_401" id="Page_401">[Pg 401]</a></span> Hoheit,&rsquo; which corresponds with our interpretation of our vague
+term &lsquo;Protectorate.&rsquo; But when complete sovereignty or &lsquo;Landes Hoheit,&rsquo;
+is conceded, they invariably stipulate that their local customs and
+systems of government shall be respected. On this point they are,
+perhaps, more tenacious than most subject races with whom the British
+Empire has had to deal; while their views and ideas of life are
+extremely difficult for an Englishman to understand. It is therefore
+certain that even an imperfect and tyrannical native African
+administration, if its extreme excesses were controlled by European
+supervision, would be in the early stages productive of far less
+discomfort to its subjects than well-intentioned but ill-directed
+efforts of European magistrates, often young and headstrong, and not
+invariably gifted with sympathy and introspective powers. If the welfare
+of the native races is to be considered, if dangerous revolts are to be
+obviated, the general policy of ruling on African principles through
+native rulers must be followed for the present. Yet it is desirable that
+considerable districts in suitable localities should be administered on
+European principles by European officials, partly to serve as types to
+which the native governments may gradually approximate, but principally
+as cities of refuge in which individuals of more advanced views may find
+a living if native government presses unduly upon them, just as in
+Europe of the Middle Ages men whose love of freedom found the iron-bound
+system of feudalism intolerable, sought eagerly the comparative liberty
+of cities.&rdquo;<a name="FNanchor_77_78" id="FNanchor_77_78"></a><a href="#Footnote_77_78" class="fnanchor">[77]</a></p>
+
+<p>There are a good many points in the above classic passage on which I
+would fain become diffuse, but I <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_402" id="Page_402">[Pg 402]</a></span>forbear; merely begging you to note
+carefully the wording of that part concerning government by natives
+ruling on African principles, because here is a pitfall for the hasty.
+You will be told that this is the present policy in Crown Colonies&mdash;but
+it is not. What they are doing is ruling on European principles through
+natives, which is a horse of another colour entirely and makes it hot
+work for the unfortunate native catspaw chief, and so all round
+unsatisfactory that no really self-respecting native chief will take it
+on.</p>
+
+<p>Well, to return to that other system: what it has got to do is to unite
+English interests&mdash;administrative, commercial and educational&mdash;into one
+solid whole, and combine these with native interests; briefly, to be a
+system where the Englishman and the African co-operate together for
+their mutual benefit and advancement, and therefore it must be a
+representative system, and one of those groups of representative systems
+which form the British Empire.</p>
+
+<p>For reasons I need not discuss here it must be a duplicate system, with
+an English and an African side, these two united and responsible to the
+English Crown, but both having as great a share of individual freedom in
+Africa as possible. By and by the necessity for the duplicate system may
+disappear, but at present it is necessary.</p>
+
+<p>I will take the English side first. There should be in England an
+African Council, in whose hands is the power of voting supplies and of
+appointing the Governor-General, subject to the approval of the Crown,
+and to whom firms trading in Africa should be answerable for the actions
+of their representatives. This council should be of nominated members,
+from the Chambers of Commerce of Liverpool, Manchester, London, Bristol,
+and Glasgow. Of course,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_403" id="Page_403">[Pg 403]</a></span> they should not be paid members. This council
+would occupy a similar position in West African administration to that
+which the House of Commons occupies in English.</p>
+
+<p>Under this Grand Council there should be two sub-councils reporting to
+it, one a joint committee of English lawyers and medical men, the other
+a committee of the native chiefs. Neither of these councils should be
+paid, but sufficient should be granted them to pay their working
+expenses. The members of these sub-councils of the Grand Council should
+be appointed&mdash;the medical and legal committee by say, the Lord
+Chancellor and the College of Physicians respectively, and the committee
+of African chiefs by the chiefs in West Africa.</p>
+
+<p>I make no pretence at believing that either of these sub-councils for
+the first few years of their existence will be dove-cots&mdash;lawyers and
+doctors will always fight each other: but the lawyers will hold the
+doctors in and <i>vice versa</i>, and the common sense of the Grand Council
+will hold them both well down to practical politics. With the council of
+chiefs there will probably be less trouble, and this council will be an
+ambassador to the white government at headquarters capable of
+representing to it native opinion and native requirements.</p>
+
+<p>Representing the Grand Council and nominated by it, subject to the
+approval of the Crown, as represented by the Chief Secretary for the
+Colonies and the Privy Council, there must be one Governor-General for
+West Africa: he must be supreme commander of the land and sea forces,
+with the right of declaring peace and war, and concluding treaties with
+the native chiefs; he must be a proved expert in West African affairs;
+he must be paid, say, Ŗ5,000 a year; he must spend six months on the
+Coast on a tour<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_404" id="Page_404">[Pg 404]</a></span> of inspection, during which he must be accessible alike
+to the European and native. He may, if he sees fit, spend more than six
+months out there; but it is not advisable he should reside there
+permanently, for if he does so, he will assuredly get out of touch with
+the Grand Council, of which he should <i>ex officio</i> be chairman or
+president. This grand council with its sub-councils is all that is
+required in England for the government of West Africa. It is not, as you
+see, an expensive system <i>per se</i>: with its power to raise supplies, it
+could vote itself sufficient to carry on its out-of-pocket expenses in
+the matter of clerks and goods inspectors. The connecting link between
+it and Africa is the Governor-General; between it and England, the Chief
+Secretary for the Colonies&mdash;not the Colonial, or Foreign, or any other
+existing Office: things it should be equal with, not subject to.</p>
+
+<p>Out in Africa, the Governor-General should be the representative of the
+English <i>raj</i>&mdash;the Ober Hoheit of England&mdash;and the head of the system of
+Landes Hoheit, represented by the African chiefs; in him the two must
+join. Under his control, on the European side, must be the few European
+officials required to administer the country locally. These must be
+carefully picked, experienced men, provided with sufficient power to
+enforce their rule with promptitude when it comes to details; but the
+policy of the Ober Hoheit should be the policy of the Governor and Grand
+Council, not of the individual official.</p>
+
+<p>Immediately in grade under the Governor-General should come a set of
+district commissioners or governors, one for each of the present
+colonies. These men should be the resident representatives of the
+Governor-General, and responsible to him for the affairs, trade and
+political, of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_405" id="Page_405">[Pg 405]</a></span> their districts. These district commissioners should be
+paid Ŗ2,000 a year each, and have a term of residence on the Coast of
+twelve months, with six months&rsquo; furlough at home on half pay, the other
+half of the pay going to the men who represent them during their absence
+at home&mdash;the senior sub-commissioners of their districts.<a name="FNanchor_78_79" id="FNanchor_78_79"></a><a href="#Footnote_78_79" class="fnanchor">[78]</a></p>
+
+<p>The next grade are the sub-commissioners. These are only required in the
+districts now termed Protectorates; the Europeanised coast towns to be
+under a different system I will sketch later. Well, these Protectorate
+districts should be divided up among sub-commissioners, who should each
+reside in his allotted district. They should be responsible directly to
+the district commissioner, and they should represent to him constantly
+the chiefs&rsquo; council of the sub-district and the trade, and on the other
+hand represent trade and the Ober Hoheit things to the native chiefs.
+These men, therefore, will be the backbone of the system, and primarily
+on them will depend its success; so they must be expert men&mdash;well
+acquainted with the native culture state, and with the trade. Each of
+these sub-commissioners should have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_406" id="Page_406">[Pg 406]</a></span> in his district, his own town, from
+which he should frequently make tours of inspection round his district
+at large; but this town should be what Sir George Goldie calls &ldquo;a town
+of refuge.&rdquo; English law should rule in it absolutely, administered by an
+official, one of the class of men approved by the legal sub-council of
+the Grand Council. The sub-commissioner should also have in his town a
+medical staff of three men, nominated by the medical side of the
+sub-council of the Grand Council. These three (chief medical, assistant
+medical, and dispenser) should have a hospital provided, where they can
+carry on their work properly. Also in this town should be the military
+force sufficient to enforce rule in the district&mdash;either to go and
+prevent one chief bagging another chiefs belongings, or to assist a
+chief in a domestic crisis. It is impossible to say how large a military
+staff a sub-commissioner would require; some districts would require no
+more than fifty soldiers, while another might require 200. Details of
+this kind the Governor-General must decide; but whatever size this force
+may be, it should be composed of troops under efficient military
+control. I believe the West Indian troops to be the best for this
+service; but here again you will meet, if you take the trouble to
+inquire of people who ought to know, the greatest haziness of mind
+combined with an enormous difference of opinion. Some will tell you that
+the West Indians are no good, that they are cowardly and unfit for bush
+work, and require as many carriers as a white regiment. Others say the
+opposite, and hold forth on the evil of using raw savages as troops in
+such a country, and placing men who have been cast out on account of
+crime into positions of power and authority in the very districts
+wherein all the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_407" id="Page_407">[Pg 407]</a></span> power they should have by rights would be to swing at
+the end of a rope.</p>
+
+<p>There is much to be said on both sides; the only thing I will say is
+that military affairs in West Africa are in much the same scrappy mess
+as civil, and require reorganisation. There is, no doubt, excellent
+fighting material in many West African tribes, and turbulent native
+spirits are all the better for military organisation and discipline; it
+is certain, however, that such men should be deported from districts
+wherein they have private scores to settle, and used elsewhere after
+they have been disciplined. If it were possible for the native regiments
+now being drilled in the hinterlands of our colonies out there to be
+used actively to guard our people from foreign aggression, there would
+be a good reason for having them, but recent events have demonstrated,
+in the Gold Coast hinterland for example, that they cannot, according to
+Government notions, be so employed. Therefore they are worse than
+useless, for they merely add to the unjustifiable aggressions on the
+native residents by aggressions of their own; such things as native
+police under the white Government side for the districts of the
+protectorate should not exist. They are a sort of wild fowl who will get
+you and themselves into more rows than they will ever get any one out
+of, and they will squeeze you and the native population into the
+bargain. The chiefs of the district should be responsible for the
+internal administration of justice among their own people. If a chief
+fails in this he should be removed, with the assistance of the military
+force at the command of the sub-commissioner. When, in fact, a chief is
+found to be going astray, the fact should be promptly brought before the
+council of chiefs; a definite short time, say a month,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_408" id="Page_408">[Pg 408]</a></span> should be
+allowed them to bring him to his bearings, and if at the expiration of
+this time they fail to do so, without any further delay the
+sub-commissioner should step in. In a very short time the chiefs&rsquo;
+council would see the advisability of keeping this from happening, and
+also see that it can only be prevented by enforcing good government
+among themselves.</p>
+
+<p>Well, this West Indian guard should of course be under its proper
+military officers, and at the disposal of the sub-commissioner, and well
+installed in barracks, and made generally as happy as circumstances will
+permit.</p>
+
+<p>Then again in each town which forms the centre of a sub-commissioner&rsquo;s
+district there should be representatives of any firms who may wish to
+trade there. They can each have their separate factories, or form a
+local association for working the trade of the district as it pleases
+them. I think it would be advisable that in each of these towns away in
+the interior there should be a warehouse, whereto all goods coming up
+for the separate trading firms should be delivered, and wherein all
+exports ready for transport to the coast should be lodged, and the
+figures concerning these things ascertained. This should be the business
+of the sub-commissioner&rsquo;s secretary, and he can be aided in it by a
+black clerk. But it would not be a custom-house, because customs, like
+native regiments, do not exist out there under this system.</p>
+
+<p>If any of the firms like to establish sub-factories in the district
+outside the town, they should have every facility impartially afforded
+them to do so. Any attack made on them by the natives should be promptly
+revenged, but outside the town in all trade matters the native law
+should rule under the administration of the local chief,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_409" id="Page_409">[Pg 409]</a></span> with a power
+(in important cases&mdash;say, over Ŗ20 involved) of appeal to the chiefs&rsquo;
+council, and from that, if need be to the sub-commissioner.</p>
+
+<p>Now in this town, acting with and directing the council of chiefs, you
+will have all that the hinterland districts in West Africa at present
+require for their administration and development, except, you will say,
+religion and education. As for the first, as represented by the
+missions, I think they will do best away from the rest, as I will
+presently attempt to explain. As for education, that will be in their
+hands too, and with them. The missionary stations about the district,
+however, will be under the direct control and protection of the
+sub-commissioner and his town. No gaol will be required there or
+elsewhere in West Africa; the sort of thing a gaol represents is better
+represented by a halter and convict labour gang. So much, as old Peter
+Heylin would say, for the sub-commission.</p>
+
+<p>The district commissioner for a colony and its hinterland should have a
+residence at one of the chief towns on the coast, making tours round to
+his sub-commissioners as occasion requires; and he should always be
+accessible both to his sub-commissioners and to the district chiefs. At
+his head town should be the headquarters of the military force required
+by his colony, and the headquarters of the labour service.</p>
+
+<p>We will now turn to the administration of the coast towns, places that
+have been long in our possession and have a sufficient white and
+Europeanised African population to justify us in regarding them as
+English possessions in the Landes Hoheit sense. These towns should be
+governed by municipality, and should be under English law, having
+accredited magistrates approved of by the Grand Council<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_410" id="Page_410">[Pg 410]</a></span> and paid, not
+by the municipalities, but by the Grand Council.</p>
+
+<p>Each municipality should occupy in the system an identical position to
+that occupied by the sub-commissioner in his town, and communicate with
+the district commissioner direct, receive all goods, and make returns of
+them to him. They should each have and be responsible for hospitals and
+schools within the town, and for its police, lighting, and sanitary
+affairs. Each municipality should be paid by the Government the same pay
+as a sub-commissioner, Ŗ1,000 a year. They should get their extra
+resources from a charge on the trade of the town at a fixed rate made by
+the Grand Council for all municipalities under the system.</p>
+
+<p>This system would do away with the division of our possessions, at
+present so misleading and vexatious and unnecessary, into Colonies and
+Protectorates, and substitute for that division the just division into
+regions under our Landes Ober Hoheit (municipalities), and those under
+our Ober Hoheit&mdash;(sub-commissioners&rsquo; districts). Both alike would be
+under the Governor-General as representing the Grand Council.</p>
+
+<p>There still remains one important new development in our West African
+methods&mdash;the organisation of native labour. The institution of a regular
+and reliable labour supply seems to me one of the most vital things for
+the progress of West Africa. There is undoubtedly in West Africa an
+enormous supply of labour, and that the true negro can work and work
+well the Krumen have amply demonstrated. All that is required is method
+and organisation. This you could easily supply. If, for example, you
+were to direct those energies of yours which are now employed in raising
+native regiments in the hinterland to raising<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_411" id="Page_411">[Pg 411]</a></span> and regulating a native
+labour army, it would be better. A native regiment of soldiers is a
+thing you do not want in any hinterland district, whereas the native
+regiment of labourers is a thing you do want very badly.</p>
+
+<p>There is also in this connection another fact: while, under the present
+state of affairs, one colony will be choked with men anxious for work,
+and another colony will be starving for labour, if all the English
+colonies were united under one system, and a regular labour department
+were instituted, this would be obviated.</p>
+
+<p>There exist in West Africa two sources of labour supply, but I think the
+Labour Department had better deal with only one of them&mdash;the free paid
+labour&mdash;the other, the convict, would be better placed under the kind
+care of the municipalities.</p>
+
+<p>All persons convicted of offences other than capital, should be, at the
+discretion of the magistrates, sentenced to a fine, or so many weeks&rsquo;
+labour. The whole of this labour should be devoted to the Public Works
+Department of the Municipality, not of the State, and above all, should
+not be sent away up into the hinterland, where there will be no one to
+look after it as convict labour requires. Quite apart from this, there
+should be the State Labour Department, whose jurisdiction would extend
+over both colony and hinterland, and whose white officials should be a
+distinct line in the service; one or more of these officials should be
+in every hinterland sub-commissioner&rsquo;s town. They would be recruiters
+and drillers of labourers, just as you now have recruiters and drillers
+of soldiers there; and a requisition should be made to all the chiefs,
+to draft into this labour army any person, under their rule, who might
+be anxious to serve as a labourer; and they<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_412" id="Page_412">[Pg 412]</a></span> should also have power to
+enrol any labour volunteer recruits that might come into the town,
+provided the chiefs could not show a satisfactory reason against their
+so doing. This labour army should be divided up into suitably sized
+gangs, with a head man elected by his gang, and be employed in the
+transport work required by the Government, or let out by the Government
+to private individuals requiring labour within the district, or drafted
+to other English colonies on the Coast, if occasion required, to do
+certain jobs&mdash;I do not say for certain spaces of time, because piecework
+is the best system for West Africa. An attempt should be made gradually
+to induce the hinterland chiefs to adopt the Kru social system, wherein
+every man serves so many years as a labourer, then, about the age of
+thirty, joins the army and becomes a compound soldier-policeman, ending
+up in honour and glory as a local magistrate. But it must be remembered
+that domestic slavery is not a great institution among the Kru tribes,
+as it is amongst the hinterland tribes in our colonies; the Kru system
+could not, therefore, be immediately introduced.</p>
+
+<p>We now come to the question of where the revenue is to come from to
+support this system. There is no difficulty about that in itself; the
+difficulty comes in in the method to be employed in its collection. When
+one has a chartered trading company it is, of course, a simple matter;
+when you have a Crown Colony it is done by means of the custom-house
+system. The alternative system, however, is not a chartered company;
+under it individual firms, so long as they can show sufficient capital
+and good faith, would work the details of their trade out there as
+freely and privately as in England. I think every effort should be made
+to do away in West Africa with the custom-house system as it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_413" id="Page_413">[Pg 413]</a></span> exists in
+English Crown Colonies. In Cameroon it is better, but in our Crown
+Colonies and also in the Niger Coast Protectorate it is ruinous to the
+tempers of ship masters and shippers, and the cause of a great waste of
+time&mdash;decidedly one of the main causes of the undue length of voyages to
+and from the Coast.</p>
+
+<p>It seems to me that the revenue of our West African possessions must be
+a charge on the trade; and that this charge should, as much as possible,
+be collected in Europe from the shippers instead of from their
+representatives on the Coast. If I were king in Babylon, I would make
+all the trade to West Africa pass through Liverpool, and pay its customs
+there to a custom-house of the Grand Council, or through the English
+ports of the other chambers represented on the Grand Council&mdash;each
+chamber being responsible for the trade of its port. I am aware that
+this would cause difficulty with the increasing continental trade; but
+this would be obviated by affiliating Hamburg and Havre to the Council
+and giving into their hands the collections of the dues at those ports.
+The Grand Council should fix annually the amount of the trade tax, and
+it should have at its disposal for this matter the figures sent home by
+the separate district commissioners in West Africa. The sub-commissioner
+of a district should know the amount of trade his district was doing,
+and be paid a commission on it to stimulate his interest. If the goods
+used in his district were delivered at one warehouse in his town, he
+would have little difficulty in getting the figures, which he should
+pass on to the district commissioner, who should forward them to the
+Grand Council with report in duplicate to the Governor-General, so that
+that officer might keep his finger on the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_414" id="Page_414">[Pg 414]</a></span> pulse of the prosperity of
+each district; similarly, the municipalities should report to him the
+trade done in the towns under their control.</p>
+
+<p>In addition, the Government, that is to say, the Grand Council, should
+take over the monopoly of the tobacco import and the timber export. By
+using tobacco in the same way as European governments use coinage, an
+immense revenue could be very cheaply obtained. The Grand Council should
+sell the tobacco to the individual traders who work the West African
+markets, allowing no other tobacco to be used in the trade; this revenue
+also could be collected in Europe.</p>
+
+<p>The timber industry should, I think, be under governmental control, both
+for the sake of providing the Government with revenue and for the sake
+of protecting the forests from destruction in those districts where
+forest destruction is a danger to the common weal, by weakening the
+forest barriers against the Sahara.</p>
+
+<p>The return that the Government should make for these monopolies to the
+independent trader should be, among other things, transport. In the
+course of a few years the Government would have in hand a sufficient
+surplus to build a pier across the Gold Coast surf. It is possible to
+build piers across the West Coast surf, for the French have done it. I
+would not advocate one great and mighty pier, that ocean-going steamers
+could go alongside, for all the Gold Coast ports, but a set of <b>T</b>-headed
+piers where surf boats or lighters could discharge, and the employment
+of stout steam tugs to tow surf boats and lighters to and fro between
+the lighters and the pier.</p>
+
+<p>Then again, every mile of available waterway inland should be utilised,
+and patrolled by Government cargo<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_415" id="Page_415">[Pg 415]</a></span> boats of the lawn-mower or flat-iron
+brand, as the Chargeurs-Reunis are subsidised to patrol the Ogowé. On
+the Gold Coast you have the Volta and the Ancobra available for this; in
+Sierra Leone and Lagos you have many waterways penetrating inland.</p>
+
+<p>Land transport should also be in the hands of the Government, and goods
+delivered free of extra charge at the towns of the sub-commissioners;
+this could be done by the Labour Department. When sufficient surplus
+revenue was in hand, light railways on the French system should be
+built, similarly delivering, free of freight, the goods belonging to the
+inland registered traders, but charging freight for passengers and local
+goods traffic. A telegraph and postal service should also be another
+source of revenue, if thrown open at a low charge to the general public.
+If there is a telegraph office in West Africa, where telegrams can be
+sent at a reasonable rate, the general public will throw away a lot of
+money on it in a fiscally fascinating way.</p>
+
+<p>These various sources of revenue will place in the hands of the Grand
+Council a sufficient revenue, and if that revenue is expended by them in
+developing methods of transport, I am confident that the trade of the
+district, in the hands of the private firms, will healthily expand,
+alike rapidly and continuously, and thereby supply more revenue, which,
+expended with equal wisdom, will again increase the trade and prosperity
+of the region, and make West Africa into a truly great possession.</p>
+
+<p>The things I depend on for the development of West Africa, are mainly
+two. First, the sub-commissioner&rsquo;s town, acting in fellowship with the
+chiefs&rsquo; council of the district. The example of that town will stimulate
+the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_416" id="Page_416">[Pg 416]</a></span> best of the chiefs to emulation; it will by every self-respecting
+chief, be regarded as stylish to have clean wide streets and shops, a
+telegraph and post-office, and things like that. Seeing that his elder
+brother, the sub-commissioner, has a line of telegraph connecting him
+with the district commission town, he will want a line of telegraph too.
+By all means let him have it; let him have the electric light and a
+telephone, if he feels he wants it, and will pay for it; but don&rsquo;t force
+these things, let them come, natural like. The great thing, however, in
+the sub-commissioner&rsquo;s town is that it should be so ruled and governed
+that it does not become a thing like our Coast towns now, <a name="CORR6" id="CORR6"><ins class="correction" title="sink&mdash;holes">sink-holes</ins></a> of
+moral iniquity, that stink in the nose of a respectable African&mdash;things
+he hates to see his sons and daughters and people go down into.</p>
+
+<p>Secondly, I depend on municipal Government on the lines I have laid down
+for the Coast towns. The Government of these municipalities would be in
+the hands of the representatives of the trading firms, and the more
+important native traders&mdash;people, as I hold, perfectly capable of
+dealing with affairs, and having a community of interests.</p>
+
+<p>The great difficulty in arranging any system for the government of West
+Africa lies not in the true difficulties this region presents, but in
+the fictitious difficulties that are the growth of years of mutual
+misunderstanding and misrepresentation. That great mass of mutual
+distrust, so that to-day down there white man distrusts white man and
+black, black man distrusts black man and white, may seem on a
+superficial review to be justified. But if you go deeper you will find
+that this distrust is the mere product of folly and ignorance, and is
+therefore removable.</p>
+
+<p>The great practical difficulty lies in arranging a system<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_417" id="Page_417">[Pg 417]</a></span> whereby the
+white trader can work on every legitimate line absolutely free from
+governmental hindrance. I have too great a respect for the West Coast
+traders to publish any criticism on them. I hold that the competition
+among them is too severe for them to face the present state of West
+Africa and prosper as men should who run so great a risk of early death
+as the West Coast trader runs. I should like to know who profits by
+their internecine war; I think no one but the native buyers of their
+goods. Again now, under the present Crown Colony system, the traders,
+knowing they are the people who have paid for the Government for years,
+who have given it the money it lives on, naturally ask for something
+back in the way of local improvements. The Government has now no money
+to carry out these improvements, unless it borrows it. The Government as
+at present existing must necessarily waste that borrowed money just as
+it has wasted the money the traders have paid it; therefore the
+consequences of improvements under the present system must be debt,
+which the traders must pay in the end. I would therefore urge the
+traders to abandon a policy of demanding improvements and protection in
+their trade relationships with the natives, such as ordinances against
+adulteration of produce, &amp;c., and to realise that by gaining these
+things they are but enslaving themselves in the future. Let them rather
+adopt the policy of altering the form of government before they proceed
+to urge further governmental expenditure.</p>
+
+<p>If the traders require a dry-nurse system, let them formulate one in
+place of the one sketched above. I do not, however, think they want
+anything of the kind, unless they are indeed degenerate; but, if they
+do, I beg them to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_418" id="Page_418">[Pg 418]</a></span> bear in mind that you cannot have an Alexandra
+feeding bottle and a latch key; they must choose one or the other. At
+present, the Crown Colony system gives neither. Under it the trader is
+treated like a child, a neglected child, one of those interesting but
+unfortunate children who have to support an elderly relative, who would
+be all the better for a cheap funeral.</p>
+
+<p>Upon the missionary and educational side of the system I have advocated
+I need not enlarge. Just as trade should go on under it free, so should
+mission effort; there should be no governmental forcing of either, but
+it should be steadily borne in mind that the regeneration of the
+considerable amount of broken up stuff which exists in the Coast town
+regions&mdash;the Africans who have lost their old culture and their old
+Fetish regulation or conduct without being completely Europeanised&mdash;is a
+work that can only be effected by the missionary, and therefore in the
+hands of the missions should be placed the whole education department,
+with the one demand on it from the Government that in their schools
+every scholar should have the opportunity of acquiring a sound education
+in the rudiments of English reading, writing and arithmetic. Give him
+this knowledge, and your brilliant young African has demonstrated that
+he can rise to any examination such as an European university offers
+him. Under the system I advocate there need be no limitation as to
+colour in the officials employed in the municipalities. In the
+sub-commissioners&rsquo; towns the head officials must be Englishmen, but
+among the regions under the Landes Hoheit in the hinterland, Africans
+educated as doctors or as traders could have grand careers provided they
+did honest work.</p>
+
+<p>The consideration of the African side of this system of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_419" id="Page_419">[Pg 419]</a></span> administration
+is a thing into which&mdash;after all the long recitation I have inflicted on
+you concerning African religion and law&mdash;I am not justified in plunging
+here. I will merely, therefore, lay before you a statement of African
+Common Law, so that you may see the African principle through which the
+Landes Hoheit&mdash;the government of Africa by Africans&mdash;would work. I am
+confident that the thing&mdash;the African principle&mdash;is so sound that it
+could work; there is no need for us to put our Commerce under it, any
+more than there is need that we should attempt to put the African&rsquo;s
+private property under our own law; but a healthy Commerce and a healthy
+Law should co-operate, and can co-operate.</p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_77_78" id="Footnote_77_78"></a><a href="#FNanchor_77_78"><span class="label">[77]</span></a> Preface by Sir George Goldie to Vandeleur&rsquo;s <i>Campaigning
+on the Upper Nile and Niger</i>, 1898.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_78_79" id="Footnote_78_79"></a><a href="#FNanchor_78_79"><span class="label">[78]</span></a> The time which a man ought to be expected to remain in
+West Africa is difficult to determine&mdash;representatives of trading firms
+are expected to remain out two years, and the mortality among them is
+certainly no higher than among the officials with their twelve months&rsquo;
+service. It is contended by the commercial party that it takes a man
+several months after returning from furlough to get into working order
+again, that under the twelve months&rsquo; system no sooner has he done this
+than he is off on furlough again, in short that the system is foolish
+and wasteful in the extreme. On the other hand the advocates of the
+short service plan contend that a man is not fit for work at all after
+twelve months in West Africa, and that if he is not definitely ill, he
+has at any rate lost all energy. Personally, I fancy it depends on the
+individual, and that with a definite policy the short service plan will
+be quite safe.</p></div>
+</div>
+<hr class="chap" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_420" id="Page_420">[Pg 420]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVIII" id="CHAPTER_XVIII"></a>CHAPTER XVIII</h2>
+
+<h2>AFRICAN PROPERTY</h2>
+
+<p class="pblock">Wherein some attempt is made to set down the divers kinds of
+property that exist among the people of the true Negro race in
+Western Africa, and the law whereby it is governed.</p>
+
+<p>In speaking on the subject of African property and the laws which guard
+it in its native state, I must, in the space at my disposal here,
+confine myself to speaking of these things as they are in one division
+of the many different races of human beings that inhabit that vast
+continent of Africa; and, in order to present the affair more clearly, I
+must take them as they exist in their most highly developed state,
+namely, among the people of the true Negro stock, for it is among these
+people that pure African culture has reached so far its fullest state of
+development.</p>
+
+<p>The distribution zone of this true Negro stock cannot yet be fixed with
+any approach to accuracy, but we know that the seaboard of the regions
+inhabited by the true Negro is that vast stretch of the African West
+Coast from a point south of the Gambia River to a point just north of
+Cameroon River, in the region of the Rio del Rey. We can safely say,
+within this region you will find the true Negro, but we cannot safely
+say how far inland, or how far down south of the Rio del Rey we shall
+find him. That this stock extends through up to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_421" id="Page_421">[Pg 421]</a></span> the Nile regions;
+that it stretches far away south of the Nile in the interior of the
+Upper Congo regions, appearing in the Azenghi; that it stretches south
+on the coast line below the Rio del Rey, appearing as the so-called
+noble tribes of the Bight of Panavia, the Ajumba, Mpongwe, Igalwa, and
+also as Osheba, Befangh, will be demonstrated I believe when we have a
+sufficient supply of ethnological observers in Africa. But it must be
+remembered that you can only get the true Negro unadulterated in the
+coast regions of Western Africa between the Rivers Gambia and Cameroon.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 412px;" id="IMG438A"><span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span>
+<img src="images/ill-438a.jpg" width="412" height="650" alt="A Housa" title="A Housa" />
+<p><span class="facingleft">[<i>To face page 420.</i></span></p>
+<span class="caption"><span class="smcap">A Housa.</span></span>
+</div>
+
+<p>In the fringe regions of the West Soudan you have an adulterated form of
+him&mdash;adulterated in idea with Mohammedanism, and the Berber races; to
+the east and to the south with that other great African race division,
+the Bantu. I venture to think that Bantu adulteration mainly takes the
+form of language. We have in our own continent many instances of races
+of greater strength and conquering power adopting the language of the
+weaker peoples whom they have conquered, when the language has been one
+more adapted to the needs of life and more widely diffused than their
+own, and therefore more suited to commercial intercourse.</p>
+
+<p>The Negro languages are poor, and, moreover, they differ among
+themselves so gravely that one tribe cannot understand another tribe
+that lives even next door to it. I know 147 such languages in the region
+of the Niger Delta alone. Now this sort of thing means interpreters, and
+is hindersome to commercial intercourse, and therefore you always find
+the true Negro, when he is in a district where he has opportunities of
+trading with other peoples, adopting their language, and making for use
+in public life a corrupt English, Portuguese, or Arabic lingo.
+Similarly, it seems<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_422" id="Page_422">[Pg 422]</a></span> to me, he has in the regions he has conquered in
+Southern and Central Africa, adopted Bantu, and much the same thing has
+happened, and is still happening, there, as happened in Southern and
+Central Europe. Just as the powerful barbarian stocks adopted Latin in a
+way that must keep Priscian&rsquo;s head still in bandages and to this day
+seriously mar his happiness in the Elysian fields, so have the true
+Negroes adopted the flexible Bantu languages. But it would be as
+unscientific to regard a Spaniard or a Frenchman as a full-blooded
+ancient Roman, as to regard many of the Negro tribes now speaking Bantu
+language as Bantu men.</p>
+
+<p>The Negro has, moreover, not only adopted Bantu languages in some
+regions, such as the Mpongwe, for example, but he has also adopted to a
+certain extent Bantu culture. I am sure those of you who have lived
+among the true Negroes and true Bantu, will agree with me that these
+cultures differ materially. Africa, so far as I know it, namely, from
+Sierra Leone to Benguela, smells generally rather strong, but
+particularly so in those districts inhabited by the true Negro. This
+pre-eminence the true Negroes attain to by leaving the sanitary matters
+of villages and towns in the hands of Providence. The Bantu culture
+looks after the cleaning and tidying of the village streets to a
+remarkable degree, though by no means more clean in the houses, which,
+in both cultures, are quite as clean and tidy as you will find in
+England. Again, in the Bantu culture you will find the slaves living in
+villages apart: inside the true Negro they live with their owners; and
+there are other points which mark the domestic cultures of these people
+as being different from each other, which I need not detain you with
+now. All these points in Bantu domestic culture the true <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_423" id="Page_423">[Pg 423]</a></span>Negro will
+adopt, as well as language; but there seem to be two points he does not
+readily adopt, or rather two points in his own culture to which he
+clings. One is the religious: in Bantu you find a great female god, who,
+for practical purposes, is more important than the great male god, in so
+far as she rules mundane affairs. In the true Negro the great gods are
+male. There are great female gods, but none of them occupy a position
+equal to that occupied by Nzambi, as you find the Bantu great female god
+called among the people who are undoubtedly true Bantu, the Fjort. The
+other, is the form of the State, and one important part of that form is
+the institution in the Negro tribes of a regular military organisation,
+with a regular War Lord, not one and the same with the Peace Lord.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 650px;" id="IMG441A1"><span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span>
+<img src="images/ill-441a1.jpg" width="650" height="460" alt="House Property in Kacongo" title="House Property in Kacongo" />
+<span class="caption"><span class="smcap">House Property in Kacongo.</span></span>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 650px;" id="IMG441A2"><span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span>>
+<img src="images/ill-441a2.jpg" width="650" height="483" alt="Bubies of Fernando Po" title="Bubies of Fernando Po" />
+<p><span class="facingleft">[<i>To face page 423.</i></span></p>
+<span class="caption"><span class="smcap">Bubies of Fernando Po.</span></span>
+</div>
+
+<p>This, I am aware, is not the customary or fashionable view of race
+distribution in Africa, but allow me to recall to your remembrance one
+of the most fascinating books ever written, <i>The Adventures of Andrew
+Battel, of Leigh in Essex</i>, who for eighteen years lived among the
+districts of the Lower Congo.</p>
+
+<p>I do this in order to show that I am not theorising in this matter.
+Andrew Battel left London on a ship sweetly named <i>The May Morning</i>, and
+having a consort named the <i>Dolphin</i>&mdash;they were pinnaces of fifty tons
+each&mdash;on the 20th of April, 1589. With very little delay they fell into
+divers disasters, and Andrew became a prisoner in the hands of the
+Portuguese at Loanda. He had a very bad time of it, the Portuguese then
+regarding all Englishmen as pirates and nothing more, except heretics
+and vermin. Andrew, with the enterprise and common sense of our race,
+escaped several times from captivity, and, with the stupidity of our
+race fell into it again, but his great escape<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_424" id="Page_424">[Pg 424]</a></span> was when he fell in with
+the Ghagas. Well, these Ghagas, Andrew Battel and the Portuguese
+historians say, were a fearful people, who came from behind Sierra
+Leone, and when the Kingdom of Congo was discovered by Diego Caõ in
+1484, the Ghagas were attacking it so severely that, but for the timely
+arrival of the Portuguese and the help they gave Congo, there would in a
+very short time have been no Kingdom of Congo left to discover; and to
+this day Dr. Blyden, who went there on a Government mission, says that
+up by Fallaba, in the Sierra Leone hinterland, you will now and then see
+a Ghaga&mdash;a man feared, a man of whom the country people do not know
+where his home is, nor what he eats or how he lives, but from whom they
+shrink as from a superior terrible form of human being&mdash;a remnant, or
+remainder over, of those people whose very name struck terror throughout
+Central Equatorial Africa in the 15th century, when, for some reason we
+do not know, they made a warlike migration down among the peaceful
+feeble Bantu.</p>
+
+<p>If you will carefully study the account given of the organisation of the
+Ghagas and also of the organisation of the Kingdom of Congo, I think you
+will see that in the Ghagas you have a true Negro State form, while in
+the Congo Kingdom you have something different; something that is
+nowadays called Bantu. What became of the Ghagas when foiled by the
+Portuguese in destroying the Kingdom of Congo is not exactly known, but
+there is a definite ground for thinking that, modified by intermarriage
+and a different environment, they split up, and are now represented by
+the warlike South African tribes and East African tribes, such as the
+Matabele, and the Massai, and so on. The modification of this portion of
+the true Negro stem in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_425" id="Page_425">[Pg 425]</a></span> south and the east is akin to the
+modification the stem has undergone nearer to its true home on the West
+Coast of Africa, where to the north of Sierra Leone and behind the coast
+regions of the Ivory, Gold, and Slave Coasts it has, by admixture with
+the Berber tribes of the Western Soudan, produced the Black Moors,
+namely the Mandingo, the Hausa, and Oullaf. These Black Moors of the
+Western Soudan have attained to a high pitch of barbaric culture; it
+appears to be a further development of the true Negro culture, but it is
+so suffused with the Mohammedan idea and law that it is not in this
+state that we can best study the native culture of the pure Negro.
+Neither can we study it well in those south and east regions where it
+has adopted Bantu language and culture to a certain extent.</p>
+
+<p>I will not, however, attempt to enter here upon the question of the
+continental distribution of the Negro and Bantu stocks; I will merely
+beg observers of African tribes to note carefully whether their tribe is
+given to street-cleaning, to keeping slaves in separate villages, or to
+venerating a great female god. If it is, it has got a Bantu culture; if,
+in addition, it has a regular military organisation, or a keen
+commercial spirit, or a certain ability to rule over the tribes round
+it, I beg they will suspect Negro blood and do their best to give us
+that tribe&rsquo;s migration history; and then we may in future times be able
+to settle the question of race distribution on better lines than our
+present state of knowledge allows of. Having said that the law and
+institutions of the true Negro stock cannot best be studied in those
+regions where they are adulterated by alien cultures, it remains to say
+where they can best be studied. I think that undoubtedly this region is
+that of the Oil Rivers.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_426" id="Page_426">[Pg 426]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The thing you must always bear in mind when observing institutions and
+so on from Sierra Leone down to Lagos, is that the fertile belt between
+the salt sea of the Bight of Benin and the sand sea of Sahara is but a
+narrow band of forest and fertile country, while, when you get below
+Lagos&mdash;Lagos itself is a tongue of the Western Soudan coming down to the
+sea&mdash;you are in the true heart of Africa, the Equatorial Forest Belt;
+and that it is in this belt that you will get your materials at their
+purest. Therefore take the regions inhabited by the true Negro. In the
+regions from Sierra Leone to the Gold Coast, you have, it is true, not
+much white influence or adulteration, mainly because of the rock-reefed
+shore being dangerous to navigators. There is in this region undoubtedly
+a great and yearly increasing so-called Arab, but really Mohammedanised
+Berber, influence working on the true Negro. The natives themselves have
+their State-form in a state of wreckage from the destruction of the old
+Empire of Meli, which fell, from reasons we do not know, some time in
+the 16th century. We have, however, miserably little information on this
+particular region of Sierra Leone, the Pepper and Ivory Coasts, owing to
+its never having been worked at by a competent ethnologist; but the
+accounts we have of it show that the secret societies have here got the
+upper hand to an abnormal extent for the Negro state. Then we come to
+the Gold Coast region which has been so excellently worked at by the
+late Sir A. B. Ellis. Here you have a heavy amount of adulteration in
+idea, and, moreover, the long-continued white influence&mdash;1435-1898&mdash;has
+decidedly tended to a disorganisation of the Negro State-form, and to an
+undue development of the individual chief; nevertheless the law-form now
+existent on the Gold Coast is, when tested against a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_427" id="Page_427">[Pg 427]</a></span> knowledge of the
+pure Negro law-form as found in the Oil Rivers, almost unaltered, and I
+think if you will carefully study that valuable book, Sarbar&rsquo;s <i>Fanti
+Customary Law</i>, you will also see that the State-form is identical in
+essence with that of the Oil Rivers&mdash;the House system.</p>
+
+<p>The House is a collection of individuals; I should hesitate to call it a
+developed family. I cannot say it is a collection of human beings,
+because the very dogs and canoes and so on that belong to it are part of
+it in the eye of the law, and capable therefore alike of embroiling it
+and advancing its interests. These Houses are bound together into groups
+by the Long ju-ju proper to the so-called secret society, common to the
+groups of houses. The House itself is presided over by what is called,
+in white parlance, a king, and beneath him there are four classes of
+human beings in regular rank, that is to say, influence in council:
+firstly, the free relations of the king, if he be a free man himself,
+which is frequently not the case; if he be a slave, the free people of
+the family he is trustee for; secondly, the free small people who have
+placed themselves under the protection of the House, rendering it in
+return for the assistance and protection it affords them service on
+demand; the third and fourth classes are true slave classes, the higher
+one in rank being that called the Winnaboes or Trade boys, the lower the
+pull-away boys and the plantation hands.<a name="FNanchor_79_80" id="FNanchor_79_80"></a><a href="#Footnote_79_80" class="fnanchor">[79]</a> The best point in it, as a
+system, is that it gives to the poorest boy who paddles an oil canoe a
+chance of becoming a king.</p>
+
+<p>Property itself in West Africa, and as I have reason to believe from
+reports in other parts of tropical Africa that I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_428" id="Page_428">[Pg 428]</a></span> am acquainted with, is
+firmly governed and is divisible into three kinds. Firstly, ancestral
+property connected with the office of headmanship, the Stool, as this
+office is called in the true Negro state, the Cap, as it is called down
+in Bas Congo; secondly, family property, in which every member of the
+family has a certain share, and on which he, she, or it has a claim;
+thirdly, private property, that which is acquired or made by a man or
+woman by their personal exertions, over and above that which is earned
+by them in co-operation with other members of their family which becomes
+family property, and that which is gained by gifts or made in trade by
+the exercise of a superior trading ability.</p>
+
+<p>Every one of these forms of property is equally sacred in the eye of the
+African law. The property of the Stool must be worked for the Stool;
+working it well, increasing it, adds to the importance of the Stool, and
+makes the king who does so popular; but he is trustee, not owner, of the
+Stool property, and his family don&rsquo;t come in for that property on his
+death, for every profit made by the working of Stool property is like
+this itself the property of the Stool, and during the king&rsquo;s life he
+cannot legally alienate it for his own personal advantage, but can only
+administer it for the benefit of the Stool.</p>
+
+<p>The king&rsquo;s power over the property of the family and the private
+property of the people under his rule, consists in the right of Ban, but
+not arričre Ban. Family property is much the same as regards the laws
+concerning it as Stool property. The head of the family is the trustee
+of it. If he is a spendthrift, or unlucky in its management, he is
+removed from his position. Any profit he may make with the assistance of
+a member of his own family becomes family property; but of course any
+profit he may make with the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_429" id="Page_429">[Pg 429]</a></span> assistance of his free wives or wife, a
+person who does not belong to his family, or with the assistance of an
+outsider, may become his own. Private property acquired in the ways I
+have mentioned is equally sacred in the eyes of the law. I do not
+suppose you could find a single human being, slave or free, who had not
+some private property of his or her very own. Amongst that very
+interesting and valuable tribe, the Kru, where the family organisation
+is at its strictest, you can see the anxiety of the individual Kruman to
+secure for himself a little portion of his hard-earned wages and save it
+from the hands of his family elders. The Kruman&rsquo;s wages are paid to him,
+or changed by him, into cloths and sundry merchandise, and he is not
+paid off until the end of his term of work. So he has to hurry up in
+order to appropriate to himself as much as he can on the boat that takes
+him back to his beloved &ldquo;We&rdquo; country, and industriously make for himself
+garments out of as much of his cotton goods as he can; for even a man&rsquo;s
+family, even in Kru country, will not take away his shirt and trousers,
+but I am afraid there is precious little else that the Kruman can save
+from their rapacity. What he can save in addition to these, he informs
+me, he gives to his mother, or failing his mother, to a favourite
+sister, who looks after it and keeps it for him, she being, woman-like,
+more fit to quarrel if need be with the family elders than he is
+himself. But all private property once secured is sacred, very sacred,
+in the African State-form. I do not know from my own investigations, nor
+have I been able to find evidence in the investigations of other
+observers, of any king, priesthood, or man, who would openly dare
+interfere with the private property of the veriest slave in his
+district, diocese, or household. I know this seems a risky thing to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_430" id="Page_430">[Pg 430]</a></span>
+say, and I do not like to say it because I feel that if I were a betting
+man I could make a good thing over betting on it, for experience has
+taught me that every time an African&rsquo;s property is taken by a fellow
+African under native law, and in times of peace, it is taken after it is
+confiscated by its original owner, either in bankruptcy or crime. You
+will hear dozens of accounts of how everything an African possessed was
+seized on, etc., but if you look into them you will find in every case
+that the individual so cleaned out owed it all, and frequently far more,
+before he or she fell into the hands of the Official Receiver, the local
+chief.</p>
+
+<p>One of the most common causes of an individual&rsquo;s entire estate being
+seized upon is a conviction for witchcraft. Every form of property in
+Africa is liable to be called on to meet its owner&rsquo;s debts, and the
+witch&rsquo;s is too heavy a debt for any individual&rsquo;s private estate to meet
+and leave a surplus. For not only does the witch owe to the family of
+the person, of whose murder he or she is convicted, the price of that
+life, but it is felt by the Community that the witch has not been found
+out in the first offence, and so every miscellaneous affliction that has
+recently happened is put down to the convicted witch&rsquo;s account. Mind
+you, I do not say <i>all</i> these claims are <i>satisfied</i> out of the estate
+of the witch deceased, (witches are always deceased by the authorities
+with the utmost despatch after conviction) because the said property has
+during the course of the trial got into the hands of Officialdom and has
+a natural tendency to stop there. But one thing is certain, there is no
+residuary estate for the witch&rsquo;s own relations. Not that for the matter
+of that they would dare claim it in any case, lest they should be
+involved with the witch and accused as accomplices.</p>
+
+<p>Still, legally, the witch&rsquo;s relations have the consolation of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_431" id="Page_431">[Pg 431]</a></span> knowing
+that, if things go smoothly and they evade being accused of a share in
+the crime, they cannot be called on to meet the debts incurred by the
+witch. From a family point of view better a dead witch than a live
+speculative trader.</p>
+
+<p>The reason of this delicate little point of law I confess gave me more
+trouble to discover than it ought to have done, for the explanation was
+quite simple, namely, the witch&rsquo;s body had been taken over by the
+creditors.</p>
+
+<p>Now, according to African law, if you take a man&rsquo;s life, or, for the
+matter of that, his body, dead or alive, in settlement of a debt, your
+claim is satisfied. You have got legal tender for it. I remember coming
+across an amusing demonstration of this law in the colony of Cameroon.
+There was, and still is, a windy-headed native trader there who for
+years has hung by the hair of loans over the abyss of bankruptcy. All
+the local native traders knew that man, but there arrived a new trader
+across from Calabar district who did not. Like the needle to the pole,
+our friend turned to him for a loan in goods and got it, with the usual
+result namely, excuses, delays, promises&mdash;in fact anything but payment;
+enraged at this, and determined to show the Cameroon traders at large
+how to carry on business on modern lines, the young Calabar trader
+called in the Government and the debtor was gently but firmly confined
+to the Government grounds. Of course he was not put in the chain-gang,
+not being a serious criminal, but provided with a palm-mat broom he
+proceeded to do as little as possible with it, and lead a contented,
+cheerful existence.</p>
+
+<p>It rather worried the Calabar man to see this, and also that his drastic
+measure caused no wild rush to him of remonstrating relations of the
+imprisoned debtor; indeed they did<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_432" id="Page_432">[Pg 432]</a></span> not even turn up to supply the said
+debtor with food, let alone attempt to buy him off by discharging his
+debt. In place of them, however, one by one the Cameroon traders came to
+call on the Calabar merchant, all in an exceedingly amiable state of
+mind and very civil. They said it gave them pleasure to observe his
+brisk method of dealing with that man, and it was a great relief to
+their minds to see a reliable man of wealth like himself taking charge
+of that debtor&rsquo;s affairs, for now they saw the chance of seeing the
+money they had years ago advanced, and of which they had not, so far,
+seen a fraction back, neither capital nor interest. The Calabar man grew
+pale and anxious as the accounts of the debts he had made himself
+responsible for came in, and he knew that if the debtor died on his
+hands, that is to say in the imprisonment he had consigned him to, he
+would be obliged to pay back all those debts of the Cameroon man, for
+the German Government have an intelligent knowledge of native law and
+carry it out in Cameroon. Still the Calabar man did not like climbing
+down and letting the man go, so he supplied him with food and worried
+about his state of health severely. This that villainous Cameroon fellow
+found out, and was therefore forthwith smitten with an obscure abdominal
+complaint, a fairly safe thing to have as my esteemed friend Dr. Plehn
+was absent from that station, and therefore not able to descend on the
+malingerer with nauseous drugs. It is needless to say that at this
+juncture the Calabar man gave in, and let the prisoner out, freeing
+himself thereby from responsibility beyond his own loss, but returning a
+poorer and a wiser man to his own markets, and more assured than ever of
+the villainy of the whole Dualla tribe.</p>
+
+<p>In any case legally the relatives of a debtor seized or<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_433" id="Page_433">[Pg 433]</a></span> pawned can
+redeem, if they choose, the person or the body by paying off the debt
+with the interest, 33&frac12; per cent. per annum, to the common rate. Great
+sacrifices and exertions are made by his family to redeem almost every
+debtor, and the family property is strained to its utmost on his or her
+behalf; but in the case of a witch it is different, no set of relatives
+wish to redeem a convicted witch, who, reduced by the authorities to a
+body, and that mostly in bits and badly damaged, is not a thing
+desirable. No! they say Society has got him and we are morally certain
+he must have been illegitimate, for such a thing as a witch never
+happened in our family before, and if we show the least interest in the
+remains we shall get accused ourselves. Of course if a man or woman&rsquo;s
+life is taken on any other kind of accusation save witchcraft, the
+affair is on a different footing. The family then forms a higher
+estimate of the deceased&rsquo;s value than they showed signs of to him or her
+when living, and they try to screw that value to the uttermost farthing
+out of the person who has killed their kinsman. Society at large only
+regards you for doing this as a fool man to think so highly of the
+departed, whose true value it knows to be far below that set on him. In
+the case of a living man taken for debt, he is a slave to his creditor,
+a pawn slave, but not on the same footing as a boughten slave; he has
+not the advantages of a true slave in the matter of succeeding to the
+wealth or position of the house, but against that he can be a free man
+the moment his debts are paid. This may be a theoretical possibility
+only, just as it would be theoretical for me to expect my family to bail
+me out if the bail were a question of a million sterling, but in legal
+principle the redemption is practicable.</p>
+
+<p>In the case of taking a dead body another factor is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_434" id="Page_434">[Pg 434]</a></span> introduced. By
+taking charge of and interring a body, you become the executor to the
+deceased man&rsquo;s estate. I have known three sets of relatives arrive with
+three coffins for one body, and a consequential row, for a good deal can
+be made by an executor; but if you make yourself liable for the body&rsquo;s
+liabilities care is needed, and there is no reckless buying of bodies
+with whose private affairs you are not conversant, in West Africa. It is
+far too wild a speculation for such quiet commercial men as my African
+friends are. Hence it comes that a Negro merchant on a trading tour away
+from his home, overtaken by death in a town where he is not known, is
+not buried, but dried and carefully put outside the town, or on the road
+to the market, the road he came by, so that any one of his friends or
+relations, who may perchance come some time that way, can recognise the
+remains. If they do they can take the remains home and bury them if they
+like, or bury them there, free and welcome, but the local County Council
+will do nothing of the kind. A nice thing a set of respectable elders,
+or as their Fanti, name goes Paynim, would let themselves in for by
+burying the body of a gentleman who happened to have four murders, ten
+adultery cases, a crushing mass of debt, and no earthly assets save a
+few dilapidated women, bad ones at that, and a whole pack of children
+with the Kraw Kraw, or the Guinea worm, or both together and including
+the Yaws.</p>
+
+<p>This brings us to another way besides witchcraft whereby a gentleman in
+West Africa can throw away a fine fortune by paying his debts, namely,
+the so-called adultery. Adultery out there, I hastily beg to remark, may
+be only brushing against a woman in a crowded market place or bush path,
+or raising a hand in defence against a virago. It&rsquo;s the wrong<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_435" id="Page_435">[Pg 435]</a></span> word, but
+the customary one to use for touching women, and it is exceedingly
+expensive and a constant source of danger to the most respectable of
+men, the demands made on its account being exorbitant: sometimes so
+exorbitant that I have known of several men who, in order to save their
+family from ruin&mdash;for if their own private property were insufficient to
+meet it the family property would be liable for the balance&mdash;have given
+themselves up as pawn-slaves to their accusers.</p>
+
+<p>There is but one check on this evil of frivolous and false accusation,
+and that is that when there have been many cases of it in a district,
+the cult of the Law God of that region gets a high moral fit on and
+comes down on that district and eats the adultery. I need not say that
+this is to the private benefit of no layman in the district, for
+notoriously it is an expensive thing to have the Law God down, and a
+thing every district tries to avoid. There is undoubtedly great evil in
+this law, which presses harder on private and family property than
+anything else, harder even than accusations of witchcraft; but it
+safeguards the women, enabling them to go to and fro about the forest
+paths, and in the villages and market places at home, and far from home,
+without fear of molestation or insult, bar that which they get up
+amongst themselves.</p>
+
+<p>The methods employed in enforcing the payment of a debt are appeal to
+the village headman or village elders; or, after giving warning, the
+seizure of property belonging to the debtor if possible, or if not, that
+of any other person belonging to his village will do. This procedure
+usually leads to palaver, and the elders decide whether the amount
+seized is equal to the debt or whether it is excessive; if excessive the
+excess has to be returned, and there is also the appeal to the Law
+Society. In the regions of the Benin<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_436" id="Page_436">[Pg 436]</a></span> Bight we have also, as in India,
+the custom of collecting debts by Dharna. In West Africa the creditor
+who sits at the debtor&rsquo;s door is bound to bring with him food for one
+day, this is equivalent to giving notice; after the first day the debtor
+has to supply him with food, for were he to die he would be answerable
+for his life and the worth thereof in addition to the original debt. If
+I mention that there is no community of goods between a man and his wife
+(women owning and holding property under identical conditions to men in
+the eye of the law), I think I shall have detained you more than long
+enough on the subject of the laws of property in West Africa. You will
+see that the thing that underlies them is the conception that every
+person is the member of some family, and all the other members of the
+family are responsible for him and to him and he to them; and every
+family is a member of some house, and all the other members of the house
+are responsible for and to the families of which it is composed.</p>
+
+<p>The natural tendency of this is for property to become joint property,
+family property, or to be absorbed into family property. A man by his
+superior ability acquires, it may be, a considerable amount of private
+property, but at his death it passes into the hands of the family. There
+are Wills, but they are not the rule, and they more often refer to an
+appointment of a successor in position than to a disposal of effects.
+The common practice of gifts there supplies the place of Wills with us;
+a rich man gives his friend or his favourite wife, child, or slave,
+things during his life, while he can see that they get it, and does not
+leave the matter till after his death. The good point about the African
+system is that it leaves no person uncared for; there are no unemployed
+starving poor, every individual is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_437" id="Page_437">[Pg 437]</a></span> responsible for and to his fellow
+men and women who belong to the same community, and the naturally strong
+instinct of hospitality, joined with the knowledge that the stranger
+within the gates belongs to a whole set of people who will make palaver
+if anything happens to him, looks well after the safety of wanderers in
+Negro land. The bad point is, of course that the system is cumbersome,
+and, moreover, it tends, with the operation of the general African law
+of <i>mutterrecht</i>, the tracing of descent through females, to prevent the
+building up of great families. For example, you have a great man, wise,
+learned, just, and so on; he is esteemed in his generation, but at his
+death his property does not go to the sons born to him by one of his
+wives, who is a great woman of a princely line, but to the eldest son of
+his sister by the same mother as his own. This sister&rsquo;s mother and his
+own mother was a slave wife of his father&rsquo;s; this, you see, keeps good
+blood in a continual state of dilution with slave blood. The son he has
+by his aristocratic wife may come in for the property of her brother,
+but her brother belongs to a different family, so he does not take up
+his father&rsquo;s greatness and carry it on with the help his father&rsquo;s wealth
+could give him in the father&rsquo;s family. I do not say the system is unjust
+or anything like that, mind; I merely say that it does not tend to the
+production of a series of great men in one family.</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, when once you have mastered the simple fundamental rules
+that underlie the native African idea of property they must strike you
+as just, elaborately just; and there is another element of simplicity in
+the thing, and that is that all forms of property are subject to the
+same law, land, women, china basons, canoes, slaves, it matters not
+what, there is the law.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_438" id="Page_438">[Pg 438]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>You will ofter hear of the vast stretches of country in Africa unowned,
+and open to all who choose to cultivate them or possess them. Well,
+those stretches of unowned land are not in West Africa. I do not pretend
+to know other parts of the continent. In West Africa there is not one
+acre of land that does not belong to some one, who is trustee of it, for
+a set of people who are themselves only life tenants, the real owner
+being the tribe in its past, present, and future state, away into
+eternity at both ends. But as West African land is a thing I should not
+feel, even if I had the money, anxious to acquire as freehold, and as
+you can get under native law a safe possession of mining and cultivation
+rights from the representatives living of the tribe they belong to, I do
+not think that any interference is urgently needed with a system
+fundamentally just.</p>
+
+<p>After having said so much on African native property, it may be as well
+to say what African property consists of. It is not necessary for me to
+go into the affair very fully, but you will remember, I am sure, the old
+statement of &ldquo;women and slaves constitute the wealth of an African.&rdquo; The
+African himself would tell you nine times in ten that women and slaves
+caused him the lack of it. Still they are undoubtedly a factor in the
+true Negro&rsquo;s wealth, but to consider them property it is necessary to
+consider them as property in different classes. Here and now I need only
+divide them into two classes&mdash;wives properly so-called, and male and
+female slaves. The duty of the slave is to increase directly the wealth
+of his or her owner&mdash;that of the wife to increase it also, but in a
+different manner, namely, by bringing her influence to bear for his
+advantage among her own family and among the people of the district she
+lives in. A big chief will have three or more<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_439" id="Page_439">[Pg 439]</a></span> of these wives, each of
+them living in her own house, or in the culture state of Calabar, in her
+own yard in his house, having her own farm away in the country, where
+she goes at planting and harvest times. She possesses her own slaves and
+miscellaneous property, which includes her children, and the main part
+of this property is really the property of her family, just as most
+people&rsquo;s property is in West Africa. The husband will reside with each
+of these wives in turn, yet he has a home of his own, with his slave
+wives, and his children properly so called, similarly having his own
+farm and miscellaneous property, which similarly belongs mainly to his
+family, and this house is usually presided over by his mother, or
+failing her a favourite sister.</p>
+
+<p>The immediate rule of a husband over his wife may be likened to that of
+a constitutional monarch, that of a man or woman over a slave to that of
+an absolute monarch, though true absolutism is in the Negro State-form
+not to be found in any individual man. The nearest approach to it is,
+very properly, in the hands of the cult of the Law God, the tribal
+secret society, but even from that society the individual can appeal, if
+he dare, to Long Ju Ju.</p>
+
+<p>The other forms of wealth possessed by an African, his true wealth, are
+market rights, utensils, canoes, arms, furniture, land, and trade goods.
+It is in his capacity to command these things in large quantities that
+his wealth lies, it is his wives and slaves who enable and assist him to
+do this thing. So take the whole together and you will see how you can
+have a very rich African, rich in the only way it is worth while being
+rich in, power, yet a man who possibly could not pay you down Ŗ20, but a
+real millionaire for all that.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_440" id="Page_440">[Pg 440]</a><br /><a name="Page_441" id="Page_441">[Pg 441]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_79_80" id="Footnote_79_80"></a><a href="#FNanchor_79_80"><span class="label">[79]</span></a> See &ldquo;Lecture on African Religion and Law,&rdquo; published by
+leave of the Hibbert Trustees in the <i>National Review</i>. September,
+1897.</p></div>
+</div>
+<hr class="chap" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_442" id="Page_442">[Pg 442]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="APPENDICES" id="APPENDICES"></a>APPENDICES</h2>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 440px;" id="IMG459A"><span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span>
+<img src="images/ill-459a.jpg" width="440" height="650" alt="Ja Ja, King of Opobo" title="Ja Ja, King of Opobo" />
+<p><span class="facingleft">[<i>To face page 443.</i></span></p>
+<p><span class="caption"><span class="smcap">Ja Ja, King of Opobo.</span></span></p>
+</div>
+<hr class="chap" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_443" id="Page_443">[Pg 443]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="APPENDIX_I" id="APPENDIX_I"></a>APPENDIX I</h2>
+
+<h3>A SHORT DESCRIPTION OF THE NATIVES OF THE NIGER COAST PROTECTORATE,
+WITH SOME ACCOUNT OF THEIR CUSTOMS, RELIGION, TRADE, &amp;c. BY <span class="smcap">M. le
+COMTE C. N. de CARDI.</span></h3>
+
+<p>It is with some diffidence I attempt this task, because many more able
+men have written about this country, with whom occasionally I shall most
+likely be found not quite in accord; but if a long residence in and
+connection with a country entitles one to be heard, then I am fully
+qualified, for I first went to Western Africa in 1862, and my last
+voyage was in 1896.</p>
+
+<p>Previous to 1891, the date at which this Coast (Benin to Old Calabar)
+was formed into a British Protectorate under the name of the Oil Rivers
+Protectorate, now the Niger Coast Protectorate, each of the rivers
+frequented by Europeans for the purpose of trade was ruled over more or
+less intelligently by one, and in some cases by two, sable potentates,
+who were responsible to Her Britannic Majesty&rsquo;s Consul for the safety
+and well-being of the white traders; also for the fostering of trade in
+the hinterlands of their district, for which good offices they were paid
+by the white traders a duty called &ldquo;comey,&rdquo; which amounted to about 2s.
+6d. per ton on the palm oil exported. When the palm<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_444" id="Page_444">[Pg 444]</a></span> kernel trade
+commenced it was generally arranged that two tons of palm kernels should
+be counted to equal one ton of palm oil so far as regards fiscal
+arrangements. The day this duty was paid was looked upon by the king, or
+kings if there were two of them, as a festival; in earlier years a
+certain amount of ceremony was also observed.</p>
+
+<p>The king would arrive on board the trader&rsquo;s hulk or sailing ship (some
+firms doing their trade without the assistance of a hulk) to an
+accompaniment of war horns, drums, and other savage music. With the king
+would generally come one or two of his chiefs and his Ju-Ju man, but
+before mounting the gangway ladder a bottle of spirit or palm wine would
+be produced from some hidden receptacle, one of the small boys, who
+always follow the kings or chiefs to carry their handkerchiefs and
+snuff-boxes, would then draw the cork and hand a wine-glass and the
+bottle to the Ju-Ju man, who would pour himself out a glass, saying a
+few words to the Ju-Ju of the river, at the same time spilling a little
+of the liquor into the water; he would then drink up what remained in
+the glass, hand glass and bottle to the king, who would then proceed as
+the Ju-Ju man had done, being followed on the same lines by the chiefs
+who were with him.</p>
+
+<p>Their devotions having thus been duly attended to, the king, Ju-Ju man
+and his attendant chiefs would mount the ladder to the deck of the
+vessel. The European trader would, as a rule, be there to receive him
+and escort him on to the poop, where the king would be asked to sit down
+to a sumptuous repast of pickled pork, salt beef, tinned salmon, pickles
+and cabin biscuits. There would be also roast fowls and goat for the
+trader and his assistants, and for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_445" id="Page_445">[Pg 445]</a></span> vegetables yams and potatoes, the
+latter a great treat for the white men, but not thought much of by the
+natives.</p>
+
+<p>The king with his friends making terrific onslaughts on the pork, beef
+and tinned salmon, after having eaten all they could would ask for more,
+and pile up a plate of beef, pork and salmon, if there was any left, to
+pass out to their attendants on the main deck, at the same time begging
+some biscuits for their pull-away boys in the canoe, a request always
+acceded to.</p>
+
+<p>Drinkables, you will observe, so far have had no part in the feed; it is
+because these untutored natives follow Nature&rsquo;s laws much closer than
+Europeans, and never drink until they have finished eating. The king,
+having done justice to the victuals, now politely intimates to the
+European trader that &ldquo;he be time for wash mouth.&rdquo; Being asked what his
+sable majesty would like to do it in, he generally elects &ldquo;port win,&rdquo; as
+the natives call port wine. His chiefs, not being such connoisseurs as
+his majesty, are, as a rule, satisfied with a bottle or two of beer or
+gin, carefully sticking to the empty bottles.</p>
+
+<p>In the meantime, had you looked over the side of the ship, you would
+have wondered what his majesty&rsquo;s forty or fifty canoe boys were doing,
+so carefully divesting themselves of every rag of cloth and hiding it by
+folding it up as small as possible and sitting on it. This was so as to
+point out to the trader, when he came to the gangway to see the king
+away, that &ldquo;he no be proper for king&rsquo;s boys no have cloth.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The king, having duly washed his mouth, is now ready to proceed with the
+business of his visit. The payment of the comey is very soon arranged,
+it being a settled sum and the different goods having their recognised
+value in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_446" id="Page_446">[Pg 446]</a></span> pawns, bars, coppers or crues according to the currency of the
+particular river.</p>
+
+<p>But the &ldquo;shake hand&rdquo;<a name="FNanchor_80_81" id="FNanchor_80_81"></a><a href="#Footnote_80_81" class="fnanchor">[80]</a> is now to be got through, and the &ldquo;dashing&rdquo;<a name="FNanchor_81_82" id="FNanchor_81_82"></a><a href="#Footnote_81_82" class="fnanchor">[81]</a>
+to the king; his friends who are with him want their part, and it would
+surprise a stranger the number of wants that seem to keep cropping up in
+a West African king&rsquo;s mind as he wobbles about your ship, until, finding
+he has begged every mortal thing that he can, he suddenly makes up his
+mind that further importunity will be useless; he decides to order his
+people into his canoe, which in most cases they obey with surprising
+alacrity, brought about, I have no doubt, by the thought that now comes
+their turn.</p>
+
+<p>Arrived at the gangway, his majesty, in the most natural way imaginable,
+notices for the first time (?) that his boys are all naked, and turning
+with an appealing look to the trader, he points out the bareness of the
+royal pull-away boys, and intimates that no white trader who respects
+himself could think of allowing such a state of things to continue a
+moment longer. This meant at least a further dash of four dozen
+fishermen&rsquo;s striped caps and about twelve pieces of Manchester cloth.</p>
+
+<p>One would suppose that this was the last straw, but before his majesty
+gets into his canoe several more little wants crop up, amongst others a
+tot of rum each for his canoe boys, and perchance a few fathoms of rope
+to make a new painter for his canoe, until sometimes the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_447" id="Page_447">[Pg 447]</a></span> white trader
+almost loses his temper. I have heard of one (?) who did on one
+occasion, and being an Irishman, he thus apostrophised one of these
+sable kings, &ldquo;Be jabers, king, I am thinking if I dashed you my ship you
+would be after wanting me to dash you the boats belonging to her, and
+after that to supply you with paint to paint them with for the next ten
+years.&rdquo; There was a glare in that Irishman&rsquo;s eye, and that king noticed
+it, and decided the time had come for him to scoot, and history says he
+scooted. In the early days of the palm oil trade, the custom inaugurated
+by the slave traders of receiving the king on his visit to the ship was
+by a salute of six or seven guns, and another of equal number on his
+departure, the latter being an intimation to all whom it might concern
+that his majesty had duly received his comey, and that trade was open
+with the said ship. This was continued for some years, but as the
+security of the seas became greater in those parts the trading ships
+gave up the custom of carrying guns, and the intimation that the king
+&ldquo;done broke trade&rdquo; with the last arrival was effected by his majesty
+sending off a canoe of oil to the ship, and the sending round of a
+verbal message by one of the king&rsquo;s men.</p>
+
+<p>Since the year 1891 the kings of the Oil Rivers have been relieved of
+the duty of collecting comey, as a regular government of these rivers
+has been inaugurated by H.B.M. Government, comey being replaced by
+import duties.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_448" id="Page_448">[Pg 448]</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>NATIVE SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT IN BENIN, AND RELIGION</h3>
+
+<p>Though there is a great similarity in the native form of government in
+these parts, it would be impossible to convey a true description of the
+manners and customs of the various places if I did not treat of each
+river and its people separately; I shall therefore commence by
+describing the people of Benin.</p>
+
+<p>The Benin kingdom, so far as this account of it will go, was said to
+extend from the boundaries of the Mahin country (a district between the
+British Colony of Lagos and the Benin River) and the river Ramos; thus
+on the coast line embracing the rivers Benin, Escravos, and Forcados,
+also the hinterland, taking in Warri up to the Yoruba States.</p>
+
+<p>For the purpose of the work I have set myself, I shall treat of that
+part of the kingdom that may be embraced by a line drawn from the mouth
+of the river Ramos up to the town of Warri, thence to Benin City, and
+brought down to the coast a little to the north of the Benin River. This
+tract of country is inhabited by four tribes, viz., the Jakri tribe, the
+dominant people on the coast line; the Sobo tribe, a very timid but most
+industrious people, great producers of palm oil, as well as being great
+agriculturists; an unfortunate people placed as they were between the
+extortions of the Jakris and the slave raiding of the Benin City king
+for his various sacrificial purposes; the third tribe are the Ijos,
+inhabiting the lower parts of the Escravos, Forcados, and Ramos rivers;
+this latter tribe are great canoe builders and agriculturists in a small
+way, produce<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_449" id="Page_449">[Pg 449]</a></span> a little palm oil, and by some people are accused of being
+cannibals; this latter accusation I don&rsquo;t think they deserve, in the
+full acceptation of the word, for thirty-three years ago I passed more
+than a week in one of their towns, when I was quite at their mercy,
+being accompanied by no armed men and carrying only a small revolver
+myself, which never came out of my pocket. Since when I have visited
+some of their towns on the Bassa Creek outside the boundary I have drawn
+for the purpose of this narrative, and never was I treated with the
+least disrespect.</p>
+
+<p>The fourth tribe is the Benin people proper, whose territory is supposed
+to extend as far back as the boundaries of the Yoruba nation, starting
+from the right bank of the Benin River. In this territory is the once
+far-famed city of Benin, where lived the king, to whom the Jakri, the
+Sobo, and the Ijo tribes paid tribute.</p>
+
+<p>These people have at all times since their first intercourse with
+Europeans, now some four hundred years, been renowned for their barbaric
+customs.</p>
+
+<p>The earlier travellers who visited Benin City do not mention human
+sacrifices among these customs, but I have no doubt they took place; as
+these travellers were generally traders and wanted to return to Benin
+for trade purposes, they most likely thought the less said on the
+subject the best. I find, however, that in the last century more than
+one traveller mentions the sacrifice of human beings by the king of
+Benin, but do not lead one to imagine that it was carried to the
+frightful extent it has been carried on in later years.</p>
+
+<p>I think myself that the custom of sacrificing human beings has been
+steadily increasing of late years, as the city of Benin became more and
+more a kind of holy city amongst the pagan tribes.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_450" id="Page_450">[Pg 450]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Their religion, like that of all the neighbouring pagans, admits of a
+Supreme Being, maker of all things, but as he is supposed to be always
+doing good, there is no necessity to sacrifice to him.</p>
+
+<p>They, however, implicitly believe in a malignant spirit, to whom they
+sacrifice men and animals to satiate its thirst for blood and prevent it
+from doing them any harm.</p>
+
+<p>Some of the pagan customs are of a sanitary character. Take, for
+instance, the yam custom. This custom is more or less observed all along
+the West Coast of Africa, and where it is unattended by any sacrificing
+of human or animal life, except the latter be to make a feast, it should
+be encouraged as a kind of harvest festival. When I say this was a
+sanitary law, I must explain that the new yams are a most dangerous
+article of food if eaten before the yam custom has been made, which
+takes place a certain time after the yams are found to be fit for taking
+out of the ground.</p>
+
+<p>The new yams are often offered for sale to the Europeans at the earliest
+moment that they can be dug up, some weeks in many cases before the
+custom is made; the consequence is that many Europeans contract severe
+attacks of dysentery and fever about this time.</p>
+
+<p>The well-to-do native never touches them before the proper time, but the
+poorer classes find it difficult to keep from eating them, as they are
+not only very sweet, but generally very cheap when they first come on
+the market.</p>
+
+<p>The king of Benin was assisted in the government of his country and his
+tributaries by four principal officers; three of these were civil
+officers; these officers and the Ju-Ju men were the real governors of
+the country, the king being little more than a puppet in their hands.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_451" id="Page_451">[Pg 451]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It was these three officers who decided who should be appointed governor
+of the lower river, generally called New Benin.</p>
+
+<p>Their choice as a rule fell upon the most influential chief of the
+district, their last choice being Nana, the son of the late chief
+Alumah, the most powerful and richest chief that had ever been known
+amongst the Jakri men. I shall have more to say about Nana when I am
+dealing with the Jakri tribe.</p>
+
+<p>Amongst the principal annual customs held by the king of Old Benin, were
+the customs to his predecessors, generally called &ldquo;making father&rdquo; by the
+English-speaking native of the coast.</p>
+
+<p>The coral custom was another great festival; besides these there were
+many occasional minor customs held to propitiate the spirit of the sun,
+the moon, the sky, and the earth. At most of these, if not all, human
+sacrifices were made.</p>
+
+<p>Kings of Benin did not inherit by right of birth; the reigning king
+feeling that his time to leave this earth was approaching, would select
+his successor from amongst his sons, and calling his chief civil officer
+would confide to him the name of the one he had selected to follow him.</p>
+
+<p>Upon the king&rsquo;s death this officer would take into his own charge the
+property of the late king, and receive the homage of all the expectant
+heirs; after enjoying the position of regent for some few days he would
+confide his secret to the chief war minister, and the chosen prince
+would be sent for and made to kneel, while they declared to him the will
+of his father. The prince thereupon would thank these two officers for
+their faithful services, and then he was immediately proclaimed king of
+Benin.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_452" id="Page_452">[Pg 452]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Now commences trouble for the non-successful claimants; the king&rsquo;s
+throne must be secure, so they and their sons must be suppressed. As it
+was not allowed to shed royal blood, they were quietly suffocated by
+having their noses, mouths and ears stuffed with cloth. To somewhat take
+the sting out of this cruel proceeding they were given a most pompous
+funeral.</p>
+
+<p>Whilst on the subject of funerals I think I had better tell you
+something about the funeral customs of the Benineese.</p>
+
+<p>When a king dies, it is said, his domestics solicit the honour of being
+buried with him, but this is only accorded to a few of his greatest
+favourites (I quite believe this to have been true, for I have seen
+myself slaves of defunct chiefs appealing to be allowed to join their
+late master); these slaves are let down into the grave alive, after the
+corpse has been placed therein. Graves of kings and chiefs in Western
+Africa being nice roomy apartments, generally about 12 feet by 8 by 14,
+but in Benin, I am told, the graves have a floor about 16 feet by 12,
+with sides tapering to an aperture that can be closed by a single
+flag-stone. On the morning following the interment, this flag-stone was
+removed, and the people down below asked if they had found the King.
+This question was put to them every successive morning, until no answer
+being returned it was concluded that the slaves had found their master.
+Meat was then roasted on the grave-stone and distributed amongst the
+people with a plentiful supply of drink, after which frightful orgies
+took place and great licence allowed to the populace&mdash;murders taking
+place and the bodies of the murdered people being brought as offerings
+to the departed, though at any other time murder was severely punished.
+Chiefs and women of distinction are<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_453" id="Page_453">[Pg 453]</a></span> also entitled to pompous funerals,
+with the usual accompaniment of massacred slaves. If a native of Benin
+City died in a distant part of the kingdom, the corpse used to be dried
+over a gentle fire and conveyed to this city for interment. Cases have
+been known where a body having been buried with all due honours and
+ceremonies, it has been afterwards taken up and the same ceremonies as
+before gone through a second time.</p>
+
+<p>The usual funeral ceremonies for a person of distinction last about
+seven or eight days, and consist, besides the human sacrifices, of
+lamentations, dancing, singing and considerable drinking.</p>
+
+<p>The near relatives mourn during several months&mdash;some with half their
+heads shaved, others completely shaven.</p>
+
+<p>The law of inheritance for people of distinction differs from that of
+the kings in the fact that the eldest son inherits by right of
+primogeniture, and succeeds to all his father&rsquo;s property, wives and
+slaves. He generally allows his mother a separate establishment and
+maintenance and finds employment and maintenance for his father&rsquo;s other
+wives in the family residence. He is expected to act liberally with his
+younger brothers, but there is no law on this question. Before entering
+into full possession of his father&rsquo;s property he must petition the king
+to allow him to do so, accompanying the said petition with a present to
+the king of a slave, as also one to each of the three great officers of
+the king. This petition is invariably granted. A widow cannot marry
+again without the permission of her son, if she have a son; or if he be
+too young, the man who marries her must supply a female slave to wait
+upon him instead of his mother.</p>
+
+<p>Theft was punished by fine only, if the stolen property<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_454" id="Page_454">[Pg 454]</a></span> was restored,
+but by flogging if the thief was unable to make restitution.</p>
+
+<p>Murder was of rare occurrence. When detected it was punished with death
+by decapitation, and the body of the culprit was quartered and exposed
+to the beasts and birds of prey.</p>
+
+<p>If the murderer be a man of some considerable position he was not
+executed, but escorted out of the country and never allowed to return.</p>
+
+<p>In case of a murder committed in the heat of passion, the culprit could
+arrange matters by giving the dead person a suitable funeral, paying a
+heavy fine to the three chief officers of the king and supplying a slave
+to suffer in his place. In this case he was bound to kneel and keep his
+forehead touching the slave during his execution.</p>
+
+<p>In all cases where an accusation was not clearly proved, the accused
+would have to undergo an ordeal to prove his guilt or innocence. To
+fully describe the whole of these would fill several hundred pages, and
+as most of them could be managed by the Ju-Ju men in such a way, that
+they could prove a man guilty or innocent according to the amount of
+present they had received from the accused&rsquo;s friends, I will pass on to
+other subjects.</p>
+
+<p>Adultery was very severely punished in whatever class it took place; in
+the lower classes all the property of the guilty man passed at once to
+the injured husband, the woman being severely flogged and expelled from
+her husband&rsquo;s house.</p>
+
+<p>Amongst the middle class this crime could be atoned for by the friends
+of the guilty woman making a money present to the injured husband; and
+the lady would be restored to her outraged lord&rsquo;s favour.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_455" id="Page_455">[Pg 455]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The upper classes revenged themselves by having the two culprits
+instantly put to death, except when the male culprit belonged to the
+upper classes; then the punishment was generally reduced to banishment
+from the kingdom of Benin for life.</p>
+
+<p>Amongst these people one finds some peculiar customs concerning
+children. Amongst others, a child is supposed to be under great danger
+from evil spirits until it has passed its seventh day. On this day a
+small feast is provided by the parents; still it is thought well to
+propitiate the evil spirits by strewing a portion of the feast round the
+house where the child is.</p>
+
+<p>Twin children, according to some accounts, were not looked upon with the
+same horror in Benin as they are in other parts of the Niger Delta; as a
+fact, they were looked upon with favour, except in one town of the
+kingdom, the name of which I have never been able to get, nor have I
+been able to locate the spot; but wherever it is, I am informed both
+mother and children were sacrificed to a demon, who resided in a wood in
+the neighbourhood of this town.</p>
+
+<p>This law of killing twin children, like most Ju-Ju laws, could be got
+over if the father was himself not too deeply steeped in Ju-Juism, and
+was sufficiently wealthy to bribe the Ju-Ju priests. The law was always
+mercilessly carried out in the case of the poorer class of natives&mdash;the
+above refers solely to the part of Benin kingdom directly under the king
+of Old Benin, and does not hold good with regard to the Sobos, Jakris,
+or Ijos.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_456" id="Page_456">[Pg 456]</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>ORIGIN OF THE BENIN CITY PEOPLE</h3>
+
+<p>According to Clapperton the Benin people are descendants of the Yoruba
+tribes, the Yoruba tribes being descended from six brothers, all the
+sons of one mother. Their names were Ikelu, Egba, Ijebu, Ifé, Ibini
+(Benin), and Yoruba.</p>
+
+<p>According to the late Sultan Bello (the Foulah chief of Sokoto at the
+time of Captain Clapperton&rsquo;s visit to that city), the Yoruba tribes are
+descended from the children of Canaan, who were of the tribe of Nimrod.</p>
+
+<p>In my opinion there is room for much speculation on this statement of
+the Sultan Bello.</p>
+
+<p>It is a very curious fact that the people of Benin City have been, from
+the earliest accounts we have of them, great workers in brass. Might not
+the ancestors of this people have brought the art of working in brass
+with them from the far distant land of Canaan? Moses, when speaking of
+the land of Canaan, says, &ldquo;out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass&rdquo;
+(Deut. viii. 9). Here we must understand copper to be meant; because
+brass is not dug out of the earth, but copper is, and found in abundance
+in that part of the world.</p>
+
+<p>Yet another curious subject for reflection, from the first information
+that European travellers give us (<i>circa</i> 1485) in their descriptions of
+the city of Benin, mention has invariably made of towers, from the
+summits of which monster brass serpents were suspended. Upon the entry
+of the punitive expedition into Benin City in the month of February,
+1897, Benin City still possessed one of these serpents in brass, not
+hanging from a tower, but laid upon the roof of one of the king&rsquo;s
+houses.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_457" id="Page_457">[Pg 457]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Might not these brazen serpents be a remnant of some tradition handed
+down from the time of Moses? for do we not read in the Scriptures, that
+the people of Israel had sinned; and God to punish them sent fiery
+serpents, which bit the people, and many died. Then Moses cried to God,
+and God told him to make a serpent of brass, and set it on a pole.
+(Numbers xxi. 9.)</p>
+
+<p>While on the subject of serpents, I may mention that in the
+neighbourhood of Benin, there is a Ju-Ju ordeal pond or river, said to
+be infested with dangerous and poisonous snakes and alligators, through
+which a man accused of any crime passing unscathed proves his innocence.</p>
+
+<p>There are some other customs connected with the position of the king of
+Benin, as the head of the Ju-Juism of his country, which seem to have
+some trace of a Biblical origin, but which I will not discuss here, but
+leave to the ethnologists to unravel, if they can.</p>
+
+<p>That they were a superior people to the surrounding tribes is amply
+demonstrated by their being workers in brass and iron; displaying
+considerable art in some of their castings in brass, iron, copper and
+bronze, their carving in ivory, and their manufacture of cotton
+cloth&mdash;no other people in the Delta showing any such ability.</p>
+
+<p>The Jakri tribe, who inhabit that part of the country lying between the
+Sobo country and the Ijo country, were the dominant tribe in the lower
+or New Benin country. Being themselves tributary to the Benin king, they
+dare not make the Sobo or Ijo men pay a direct tribute to them for the
+right to live, but they indirectly took a much larger tribute from them
+than ever they paid the king of Benin.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_458" id="Page_458">[Pg 458]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The Jakris were the brokers, and would not allow either of the
+above-named tribes to trade direct with the white men.</p>
+
+<p>The principal towns of the Jakri men were:&mdash;Brohemie<a name="FNanchor_82_83" id="FNanchor_82_83"></a><a href="#Footnote_82_83" class="fnanchor">[82]</a> (destroyed by
+the English in 1894): this town was generally called Nana&rsquo;s town of late
+years. Nana was Governor of the whole of the country lying between a
+line drawn from the Gwato Creek to Wari and the sea-coast; his
+governorship extending a little beyond the Benin River, and running down
+the coast to the Ramos River. This appointment he held from the king of
+Benin, and was officially recognised by the British Consul as the
+head-man of the Jakri tribe, and for any official business in connection
+with the country over which he was Governor. Jeboo or Chief Peggy&rsquo;s
+town, situated on the waterway to Lagos; Jaquah town or Chief Ogrie&rsquo;s
+town. The above towns are all on the right bank of the river.</p>
+
+<p>On the left bank of the river are found the following towns:&mdash;Bateri, or
+Chief Numa&rsquo;s town, lying about half an hour&rsquo;s pull in a boat from Déli
+Creek. Chief Numa, was the son of the late Chief Chinomé, a rival in his
+day to Allumah, the father of Nana, the late Governor; Chinomé was the
+son of Queen Doto of Wari, who years ago was most anxious to see the
+white man at her town, and repeatedly advised the white men to use the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_459" id="Page_459">[Pg 459]</a></span>
+Forcados for their principal trading station; but the old Chief Allumah
+was against any such exodus, and as he was a very big trader in
+palm-oil, he of course carried the day, and the white men stuck to their
+swamp at the mouth of the river Benin.</p>
+
+<p>Close to Numa&rsquo;s town his brother Fragoni has established a small town.
+At some little distance from Bateri is Booboo, or the late Chief
+Bregbi&rsquo;s town. Galey, the eldest son of the late Chinomé, has a small
+town in the Déli Creek. This man, though the eldest son of the late
+Chief Chinomé, is not a chief, though his younger brother Numa is. Here
+is a knotty point in Jakri law of inheritance, which differs from the
+Benin City law on the subject.</p>
+
+<p>Wari, the capital of Jakri, though almost if not actually as old a town
+as Benin City, has never had the bad reputation that the latter city has
+always had. I attribute this to the fact that the ladies of Warri have
+always been a power in the land.</p>
+
+<p>Sapele is a place that has come very much into notice since the country
+has been under the jurisdiction of the Niger Coast Protectorate, and is
+without doubt one of the best stations on the Benin territory. I am glad
+to say that the Europeans have at last deserted to a great extent their
+factories at the mouth of the Benin River, and are now principally
+located at Sapele and Wari.</p>
+
+<p>The Jakri tribe claim to be of the same race as the people of Benin City
+and kingdom. This I am inclined to dispute; I think they were a coast
+tribe like the Ijos. Tradition says that Wari was founded by people from
+Benin kingdom and for many years was tributary to the king of Benin, but
+in 1778 Wari was reported to be quite independent. They may have become
+almost the same<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_460" id="Page_460">[Pg 460]</a></span> race by intermarriage with the Benin people that went
+to Wari; but that they were originally the same race I say no.</p>
+
+<p>The religion of the Jakri tribe and the native laws and system of
+ordeals were, as far as I have been able to ascertain, identical with
+those of the Benin kingdom; with the exception of the human sacrifices
+and their law of inheritance which does not admit the right of
+primogeniture&mdash;following in this respect, the laws of the Bonny men and
+their neighbours. Twin children are usually killed by the Jakris, and
+the mother driven into the bush to die.</p>
+
+<p>The Jakri tribe are, without doubt, one of the finest in the Niger Coast
+Protectorate; many of their present chiefs are very honest and
+intelligent men, also excellent traders. Their women are noted as being
+the finest and best looking for miles round.</p>
+
+<p>The Jakri women have already made great strides towards their complete
+emancipation from the low state in which the women of neighbouring
+tribes still find themselves, many of them being very rich and great
+traders.</p>
+
+<p>The Sobo tribe have been kept so much in the background by the Jakris
+that little is known about them. What little is known of them is to
+their credit.</p>
+
+<p>We now come to the Ijo tribe, or at least, that portion of them that
+live within the Niger Coast Protectorate; these men are reported by some
+travellers to be cannibals, and a very turbulent people; this character
+has been given them by interested parties. Their looks are very much
+against them as they disfigure their faces by heavy cuts as tribal
+marks, and some pick up the flesh between their<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_461" id="Page_461">[Pg 461]</a></span> eyes making a kind of
+ridge, that gives them a savage expression. Though I have put the limit
+of these people at the river Ramos, they really extend along the coast
+as far as the western bank of the Akassa river. They have never had a
+chance and, with the exception of large timber for making canoes, their
+country does not produce much. Though I have seen considerable numbers
+of rubber-producing trees in their country, I never was able to induce
+them to work it. No doubt they asked the advice of their Ju-Ju as to
+taking my advice, and he followed the usual rule laid down by the
+priesthood of Ju-Ju-ism, no innovations.</p>
+
+<p>Whilst I was in the Ijo country I carefully studied their Ju-Ju, as I
+had been told they were great believers in, and practisers of Ju-Ju-ism.
+I found little in their system differing from that practised in most of
+the rivers of the Delta.</p>
+
+<p>In all these practices human agency plays a very large part, and this
+seems to be known even to the lower orders of the people; as an
+instance, I must here relate an experience I once had amongst the Ijos.
+I had arranged with a chief living on the Bassa Creek to lend me his
+fastest canoe and twenty-five of his people, to take me to the Brass
+river; the bargain was that his canoe should be ready at Cock-Crow Peak
+the following morning. I was ready at the water-side by the time
+appointed, but only about six of the smallest boys had put in an
+appearance; the old chief was there in a most furious rage, sending off
+messengers in all directions to find the canoe boys. After about two
+hours&rsquo; work and the expenditure of much bad language on the part of the
+old chief, also some hard knocks administered to the canoe boys by the
+men who<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_462" id="Page_462">[Pg 462]</a></span> had been sent after them, as evidenced by the wales I saw on
+their backs, the canoe was at last manned, and I took my seat in it
+under a very good mat awning which nearly covered the canoe from end to
+end, and thanking my stars that now my troubles had come to an end I
+hoped at least for a time. I was, however, a very big bit too premature,
+for before the old chief would let the canoe start, he informed me he
+must make Ju-Ju for the safety of his canoe and the safe return of it
+and all his boys, to say nothing of my individual safety.</p>
+
+<p>One of the first requirements of that particular Ju-Ju cost me further
+delay, for a bottle of gin had to be procured, and as the daily market
+in that town had not yet opened, and no public house had yet been
+established by any enterprising Ijo, it took some time to procure.</p>
+
+<p>On the arrival of the article, however, my friend the old chief
+proceeded in a most impressive manner to repeat a short prayer, the
+principal portion I was able to understand and which was as follows: &ldquo;I
+beg you, I beg you, don&rsquo;t capsize my canoe. If you do, don&rsquo;t drown any
+of my boys and don&rsquo;t do any harm to my friend the white man.&rdquo; This was
+addressed to the spirit of the water; having finished this little
+prayer, he next sprinkled a little gin about the bows of the canoe and
+in the river, afterwards taking a drink himself. He then produced a leaf
+with about an ounce of broken-up cooked yam mixed with a little palm
+oil, which he carefully fixed in the extreme foremost point of the
+canoe.</p>
+
+<p>At last this ceremony was at an end and we started off, but alas! my
+troubles were only just beginning. We had been started about half an
+hour, and I had quietly dozed off into a pleasant sleep, when I was
+awakened by feeling<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_463" id="Page_463">[Pg 463]</a></span> the canoe rolling from side to side as if we were
+in rough water; just then the boys all stopped pulling, and on my
+remonstrance they informed me Ju-Ju &ldquo;no will,&rdquo; <i>id est</i>, that the Ju-ju
+had told them they must go back. I used gentle persuasion in the form of
+offers of extra pay at first, then I stormed and used strong language,
+or at least, what little Ijo strong language I knew, but all to no
+avail. I then began to inquire what Ju-Ju had spoken, and they pointed
+out a small bird that just then flew away into the bush; it looked to me
+something like a kingfisher. The head boy of the canoe then explained to
+me that this Ju-ju bird having spoken, <i>id est</i>, chirped on the
+right-hand side of the canoe, and the goat&rsquo;s skull hanging up to the
+foremost awning stanchion having fallen the same way (this ornament I
+had not previously noticed), signified that we must turn back. So turn
+back we did, though I thought at the time the boys did not want to go
+the journey, owing to the almost continual state of quarrelling that had
+been going on for years between the Ijos and the Brassmen. I was not far
+wrong, for when we eventually did arrive at Brass, I had to hide these
+Ijo people in the hold of my ship, as the very sight of a Brassman made
+them shiver.</p>
+
+<p>The following morning the same performance was gone through; we started,
+and at about the same point Ju-Ju spoke again; again we returned. My old
+friend the chief was very sorry he said, but he could not blame his boys
+for acting as they had done, Ju-Ju having told them to return. He would
+not listen when I told him I felt confident his boys had assisted the
+Ju-Ju by making the canoe roll about from side to side.</p>
+
+<p>However, I thought the matter over to myself during that second day, and
+decided I would make sure one part<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_464" id="Page_464">[Pg 464]</a></span> of that Ju-ju should not speak
+against me the next morning, and that was the goat&rsquo;s skull, so during
+that night after every Ijo was fast asleep, I visited that skull and
+carefully secured it to its post by a few turns of very fine fishing
+line in such a manner that no one could notice what I had done, if they
+did not specially examine it. I dare not fix it to the left, that being
+the favourable side, for fear of it being noticed, but I fixed it
+straight up and down, so that it could not demonstrate against my
+journey.</p>
+
+<p>I retired to my sleeping quarters and slept the sleep of the just, and
+next morning started in the best of spirits, though continually haunted
+by the fear that my little stratagem might be discovered. We had got
+about the same distance from the town that we had on the two previous
+mornings when the canoe began to oscillate as usual, caused by a
+combined movement of all the boys in the canoe, I was perfectly
+convinced, for the creek we were in was as smooth as a mill pond. Many
+anxious glances were cast at the skull, and the canoe was made to roll
+more and more until the water slopped over into her, but the skull did
+not budge, and, strange to relate, the bird of ill omen did not show
+itself or chirp this morning, so the boys gave up making the canoe
+oscillate and commenced to paddle for all they were worth, and the
+following evening we arrived at my ship in Brass. We could have arrived
+much earlier, but the Ijos did not wish to meet with any Brassmen, so we
+waited until the shades of night came on, and thus passed unobserved
+several Brass canoes, arriving safely at my ship in time for dinner.</p>
+
+<p>I carefully questioned the head boy of the Ijo boys all about this bird
+that had given me so much trouble. He explained to me that once having
+passed a certain point in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_465" id="Page_465">[Pg 465]</a></span> the creek, the bird not having spoken and the
+skull not having demonstrated either, it was quite safe to continue on
+our journey, conveying to me the idea that this bird was a regular
+inhabitant of a certain portion of the bush, which was also their sacred
+bush wherein the Ju-Ju priests practised their most private devotions.
+The same species of bird showed itself several times both on the right
+of us and on the left of us as we passed through other creeks on our way
+to Brass, but the canoe boys took no notice of it.</p>
+
+<p>In dealing with the Benin Kingdom I have allowed myself somewhat to
+encroach upon the Royal Niger Company&rsquo;s territory, which commences on
+the left bank of the river Forcados and takes in all the rivers down to
+the Nun (Akassa), and the sea-shore to leeward of this river as far as a
+point midway between the latter river and the mouth of the Brass river,
+thence a straight line is drawn to a place called Idu, on the Niger
+River, forming the eastern boundary between the Royal Niger Company&rsquo;s
+territory and the Niger Coast Protectorate. I have not defined the
+western boundary between the Royal Niger Company&rsquo;s territory and the
+other portion of the Niger Coast Protectorate otherwise than stating
+that it commences on the seashore at the eastern point of the Forcados.</p>
+
+<p>Benin Kingdom, as a kingdom, may now be numbered with the past. For
+years the cruelties known to be enacted in the city of Benin have been
+such that it was only a question of ways and means that deterred the
+Protectorate officials from smashing up the place several years ago.</p>
+
+<p>It is a very curious trait in the character of these savage kinglets of
+Western Africa how little they seem<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_466" id="Page_466">[Pg 466]</a></span> to have been impressed by the
+downfall of their brethren in neighbouring districts. Though they were
+well acquainted with all that was passing around them. Thus the fall of
+Ashantee in 1873 was well known to the King of Dahomey, yet he continued
+on his way and could not believe the French could ever upset him. Nana,
+the governor of the lower Benin or Jakri, could not see in the downfall
+of Ja Ja that the British Government were not to be trifled with by any
+petty king or governor of these rivers; though Nana was a most
+intelligent native, he had the temerity to show fight against the
+Protectorate officials, and of course he quickly found out his mistake,
+but alas! too late for his peace of mind and happiness; he is now a
+prisoner at large far away from his own country, stripped of all his
+riches and position. Here was an object lesson for Abu Bini, the King of
+Benin, right at his own door, every detail of which he must have heard
+of, or at least his Ju-Ju priests must have heard of the disaster that
+had happened to Nana, his satrap.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing daunted Abu Bini and his Ju-Ju priests continued their evil
+practices; then came the frightful Benin massacre of Protectorate
+officials and European traders, besides a number of Jakris and Kruboys
+in the employment of the Protectorate.</p>
+
+<p>The first shot that was fired that January morning, 1897, by the
+emissaries of King Abu Bini, sounded the downfall of the City of Benin
+and the end of all its atrocious and disgusting sacrificial rites, for
+scarcely three months after the punitive expedition camped in the King&rsquo;s
+Palace at old Benin.</p>
+
+<p>The two expeditions that have had to be sent to Benin River within the
+last few years have been two unique<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_467" id="Page_467">[Pg 467]</a></span> specimens of what British sailors
+and soldiers have to cope with whilst protecting British subjects and
+their interests, no matter where situated.</p>
+
+<p>I do not suppose that there are in England to-day one hundred people who
+know, and can therefore appreciate at its true value, the risk that each
+man in those two expeditions ran. In the attack on Nana&rsquo;s town the
+British sailors had to walk through a dirty, disgusting, slimy mangrove
+swamp, often sinking in the mud half way up their thighs, and this in
+the face of a sharp musketry fire coming from unseen enemies carefully
+hidden away, in some cases not five yards off, in dense bush, with
+occasional discharges of grape and canister. But nothing stopped them,
+and Nana&rsquo;s town was soon numbered with the things that had been.</p>
+
+<p>It was the same to a great extent in the attack on Benin, only varied by
+the swamps not being quite so bad as at Nana&rsquo;s town, but the distance
+from the water side was much farther; in the former case one might say
+it was only a matter of minutes once in touch with the enemy; in the
+attack on Benin city it was a matter of several days marching through
+dense bush, where an enemy could get within five yards of you without
+being seen, and in some places nearer. Almost constantly under fire,
+besides a sun beating down on you so hot that where the soil was sandy
+you felt the heat almost unbearable through the soles of your boots, to
+say nothing of the minor troubles of being very short of drinking water,
+and at night not being able to sleep owing to the myriads of sand-flies
+and mosquitoes; getting now and again a perfume wafted under your
+nostrils, in comparison with which a London sewer would be eau de
+Cologne.</p>
+
+<p>I was once under fire for twelve hours against European<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_468" id="Page_468">[Pg 468]</a></span> trained troops,
+so know something about a soldier&rsquo;s work, and for choice I would prefer
+a week&rsquo;s similar work in Europe to two hours&rsquo; West African bush and
+swamp fighting, with its aids, fever and dysentery.</p>
+
+<p>Before I quit Benin I want to mention one thing more about Ju-Ju. When
+the attack was made on Benin city, the first day&rsquo;s march had scarcely
+begun when two white men were killed and buried. After the column passed
+on, the natives came and dug the bodies up, cut their heads and hands
+off, and carried them up to Benin city to the Ju-Ju priests, who showed
+them to the king to prove to him that his Ju-Ju, managed by them, was
+greater than the white man&rsquo;s; in fact, the king, I am told, was being
+shown these heads and hands at the moment when the first rockets fell in
+Benin city. Those rockets proved to him the contrary, and he left the
+city quicker than he had ever done in his life before.</p>
+
+<p>To point out to my readers how all the natives of the Delta believed in
+the power of the Benin Ju-Ju, I must tell you none of them believed the
+English had really captured the King until he was taken round and shown
+to them, the belief being that, on the approach of danger, he would be
+able to change himself into a bird and thus fly away and escape.</p>
+
+<h3>BRASS RIVER</h3>
+
+<p>Brass River is then the first river we have to deal with on the Niger
+Coast Protectorate, to the eastward of the Royal Niger Company&rsquo;s
+boundary.</p>
+
+<p>The inhabitants of Brass call their country Nimbé and themselves Nimbé
+nungos, the latter word meaning people.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_469" id="Page_469">[Pg 469]</a></span> Their principal towns were
+Obulambri and Basambri, divided only by a narrow creek dry at low water.
+In each of these towns resided a king, each having jurisdiction over
+separate districts of the Nimbé territory; thus the King of Obulambri
+was supposed to look after the district on the left hand of the River
+Brass, his jurisdiction extending as far as the River St. Barbara. The
+King of Basambri&rsquo;s district extended from the right bank of the Brass
+River, westward as far as the Middleton outfalls; included in this
+district was the Nun mouth of the River Niger. These two kinglets had a
+very prosperous time during the closing days of the slave trade, as most
+of the contraband was carried on through the Brass and the Nun River
+both by Bonnymen and New Calabar men after they had signed treaties with
+Her Majesty&rsquo;s Government to discontinue the slave trade in their
+dominions. When eventually the trade in slaves was finally put down
+their prosperity was not at an end, for they went largely into the palm
+oil trade, and did a most prosperous trade along the banks of the Niger
+as far as Onitsa.</p>
+
+<p>Though these two kings always objected to the white men opening up the
+Niger, and did their utmost to retard the first expeditions, they were
+not slow in demanding comey from the early traders who established
+factories in the Nun mouth of the Niger; this part of the Niger is also
+called the Akassa.</p>
+
+<p>These people are a very mixed race, and to describe them as any
+particular tribe would be an error. I believe the original inhabitants
+of the mouths of these rivers were the Ijos, and that the towns of
+Obulambri and Bassambri were founded by some of the more adventurous
+spirits amongst the men from the neighbourhood of Sabogrega, a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_470" id="Page_470">[Pg 470]</a></span> town on
+the Niger; being afterwards joined by some similar adventurers from
+Bonny River. The three people are closely connected by family ties at
+this day.</p>
+
+<p>As a rule these people have always had the character of being a well
+behaved set of men; it is a notable fact in their favour that they were
+the only people that, once having signed the treaty with Her Majesty&rsquo;s
+Government to put down slavery, honestly stuck to the terms of the
+treaty; unlike their neighbours, they did so, though they were the only
+people who did not receive any indemnity.</p>
+
+<p>They, however, have occasionally lost their heads and gone to excesses
+unworthy of a people with such a good reputation as they have generally
+enjoyed.</p>
+
+<p>Their last escapade was the attack on the factory of the Royal Niger
+Company at Akassa some few years ago, and for which they were duly
+punished; their dual mud and thatch capital was blown down, and one
+small town called Fishtown destroyed.</p>
+
+<p>Impartial observers must have pitied these poor people driven to despair
+by being cut off from their trading markets by the fiscal arrangements
+of the Royal Niger Company. The latter I don&rsquo;t blame very much, they are
+traders; but the line drawn from Idu to a point midway between the Brass
+River and the Nun entrance to the Niger River, as being the boundary
+line for fiscal purposes between the Royal Niger Company and the Niger
+Coast Protectorate, was drawn by some one at Downing Street who
+evidently looked upon this part of the world as a cheesemonger would a
+cheese.</p>
+
+<p>In 1830 it was at Abo on the Niger where Lander the traveller met with
+the Brassmen, who took him down to Obulambri, but no ship being in Brass
+River, they took<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_471" id="Page_471">[Pg 471]</a></span> him and his people over to Akassa, at the Nun mouth of
+the Niger, to an English ship lying there. History says he was anything
+but well received by the captain of this vessel, and that the Brassmen
+did not treat him as well as they might; however, they did not eat him,
+as they no doubt would have done could they have looked into the future.
+Whatever their treatment of Lander was, it could not have been very bad,
+as they received some reward for what assistance they had given him some
+time after.</p>
+
+<p>It was amongst these people that I was enabled to study more closely the
+inner working of the domestic slavery of this part of Western Africa,
+and where it was carried on with less hardship to the slaves themselves
+than any place else in the Delta, until the Niger Company&rsquo;s boundary
+line threw most of the labouring population on the rates, at least they
+would have gone on the rates if there had been any to go on, but
+unfortunately the municipal arrangements of these African kingdomlets
+had not arrived at such a pitch of civilisation; the consequence was
+many died from starvation, others hired themselves out as labourers, but
+the demand for their services was limited, as they compared badly with
+the fine, athletic Krumen, who monopolise all the labour in these parts.
+Then came the punitive expedition for the attack on Akassa that wiped
+off a few more of the population, so that to-day the Brassmen may be
+described as a vanishing people.</p>
+
+<p>The various grades of the people in Brass were the kings, next came the
+chiefs and their sons who had by their own industry, and assisted in
+their first endeavours by their parents, worked themselves into a
+position of wealth, then came the Winna-boes, a grade mostly supplied by
+the favourite slave of a chief, who had been his constant<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_472" id="Page_472">[Pg 472]</a></span> attendant for
+years, commencing his career by carrying his master&rsquo;s
+pocket-handkerchief and snuff-box, pockets not having yet been
+introduced into the native costume; after some years of this duty he
+would be promoted to going down to the European traders to superintend
+the delivery of a canoe of oil, seeing to its being tried, gauged, &amp;c.
+This first duty, if properly performed, would lead to his being often
+sent on the same errand. This duty required a certain amount of <i>savez</i>,
+as the natives call intelligence, for he had to so look after his
+master&rsquo;s interests that the pull-away boys that were with him in the
+canoe did not secrete any few gallons of oil that there might be left
+over after filling up all the casks he had been sent to deliver; nor
+must he allow the white trader to under-gauge his master&rsquo;s casks by
+carelessness or otherwise. If he was able to do the latter part of his
+errand in such a diplomatic manner that he did not raise the bile of the
+trader, that day marked the commencement of his upward career, if he was
+possessed of the bump of saving. All having gone off to the satisfaction
+of both parties, the trader would make this boy some small present
+according to the number of puncheons of oil he had brought down, seldom
+less than a piece of cloth worth about 2s. 6d., and, in the case of
+canoes containing ten to fifteen puncheons, the trader would often dash
+him two pieces of cloth and a bunch or two of beads. This present he
+would, on his return to his master&rsquo;s house, hand over to his mother (<i>id
+est</i>, the woman who had taken care of him from the time when he was
+first bought by his Brass master). She would carefully hoard this and
+all subsequent bits of miscellaneous property until he had in his
+foster-mother&rsquo;s hands sufficient goods to buy an angbar of oil&mdash;a
+measure containing thirty gallons. Then he would<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_473" id="Page_473">[Pg 473]</a></span> approach his master
+(always called &ldquo;father&rdquo; by his slaves) and beg permission to send his
+few goods to the Niger markets the next time his master had a canoe
+starting&mdash;which permission was always accorded. He had next to arrange
+terms with the head man or trader of his master&rsquo;s canoe as to what
+commission he had to get for trading off the goods in the far market. In
+this discussion, which may occupy many days before it is finally
+arranged, the foster-mother figures largely; and it depends a great deal
+upon her standing in the household of the chief as to the amount of
+commission the trade boy will demand for his services. If the
+foster-mother should happen to be a favourite wife of the chief, well,
+then things are settled very easily, the trade boy most likely saying he
+was quite willing to leff-em to be settled any way she liked; if, on the
+contrary, it was one of the poorer women of the chiefs house, Mr.
+Trade-boy would demand at least the quarter of the trade to commence
+with, and end up by accepting about an eighth. As the winnabo could
+easily double his property twice a year&mdash;and he was always adding to his
+store in his foster-mother&rsquo;s hands from presents received each time he
+went down to the white trader with his father&rsquo;s oil&mdash;it did not take
+many years for him to become a man of means, and own canoes and slaves
+himself. Many times have I known cases where the winnabo has repeatedly
+paid up the debts of his master to the white man.</p>
+
+<p>According to the law of the country, the master has the right to sell
+the very man who is paying his debts off for him; but I must say I never
+heard a case of such rank ingratitude, though cases have occurred where
+the master has got into such low water and such desperate difficulties
+that his creditors under country law have seized everything<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_474" id="Page_474">[Pg 474]</a></span> he was
+possessed of, including any wealthy winnaboes he might have.</p>
+
+<p>Some writers have said this class could purchase their freedom; with
+this I don&rsquo;t agree. The only chance a winnabo had of getting his freedom
+was, supposing his master died and left no sons behind him old enough or
+capable enough to take the place of their father, then the winnabo might
+be elected to take the place of his defunct master: he would then become
+<i>ipso facto</i> a chief, and be reckoned a free man. If he was a man of
+strong character, he would hold until his death all the property of the
+house; but if one of the sons of his late master should grow up an
+intelligent man, and amass sufficient riches to gather round him some of
+the other chief men in the town, then the question was liable to be
+re-opened, and the winnabo might have to part out some of the property
+and the people he had received upon his appointment to the headship of
+the house, together with a certain sum in goods or oil, which the elders
+of the town would decide should represent the increment on the portion
+handed over. I have never known of a case where the whole of the
+property and people have been taken away from a winnabo in Brass; but I
+have known it occur in other rivers, but only for absolute misuse,
+misrule, and misconduct of the party.</p>
+
+<p>Egbo-boes are the niggers or absolute lower rank of slaves, who are
+employed as pull-away boys in the oil canoes and gigs of the chiefs, and
+do all the menial work or hard labour of the towns that is not done by
+the lower ranks of the women slaves.</p>
+
+<p>The lot of these egbo-boes is a very hard one at times, especially when
+their masters have no use for them in their oil canoes. At the best of
+times their masters don&rsquo;t provide<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_475" id="Page_475">[Pg 475]</a></span> them with more food then is about
+sufficient for one good square meal a day; but, when trade is dull and
+they have no use for them in any way, their lot is deplorable indeed.
+This class has suffered terribly during the last ten years owing to the
+complete stoppage of the Brassmen&rsquo;s trade in the Niger markets.</p>
+
+<p>This class had few chances of rising in the social scale, but it was
+from this class that sprang some of the best trade boys who took their
+masters&rsquo; goods away up to Abo and occasionally as far as Onitsa, on the
+Niger.</p>
+
+<p>Cases have occurred of boys from this class rising to as good a position
+as the more favoured winnaboes; but for this they have had to thank some
+white trader, who has taken a fancy to here and there one of them, and
+getting his master to lend him to him as a cabin boy&mdash;a position
+generally sought after by the sons of chiefs, so as to learn &ldquo;white
+man&rsquo;s mouth,&rdquo; otherwise English.</p>
+
+<p>The succession laws are similar to those of the other Coast tribes one
+meets with in the Delta, but to understand them it requires some little
+explanation. A tribe is composed of a king and a number of chiefs. Each
+chief has a number of petty chiefs under him. Perhaps a better
+definition for the latter would be, a number of men who own a few slaves
+and a few canoes of their own, and do an independent trade with the
+white men, but who pay to their chiefs a tribute of from 20 to 25 per
+cent, on their trade with the white man. In many cases the white man
+stops this tribute from the petty chiefs and holds it on behalf of the
+chief. This collection of petty chiefs with their chief forms what in
+Coast parlance is denominated a House.</p>
+
+<p>The House may own a portion of the principal town, say Obulambri, and
+also a portion in any of the small towns<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_476" id="Page_476">[Pg 476]</a></span> in the neighbouring creeks,
+and it may own here and there isolated pieces of ground where some petty
+chief has squatted and made a clearance either as a farm or to place a
+few of his family there as fishermen; in the same way the chief of the
+house may have squatted on various plots of ground in any part of the
+district admitted by the neighbouring tribes to belong to his tribe. All
+these parcels and portions of land belong in common to the House&mdash;that
+is, supposing a petty chief having a farm in any part of the district
+was to die leaving no male heirs and no one fit to take his place, the
+chief as head of the house would take possession, but would most likely
+leave the slaves of the dead man undisturbed in charge of the farm they
+had been working on, only expecting them to deliver him a portion of the
+produce equivalent to what they had been in the habit of delivering to
+their late master, who was a petty chief of the house.</p>
+
+<p>The head of the house would have the right of disposal of all the dead
+man&rsquo;s wives, generally speaking the younger ones would be taken by the
+chief, the others he would dispose of amongst his petty chiefs; if, as
+generally happens, there were a few aged ones amongst them for whom
+there was no demand he would take them into his own establishment and
+see they were provided for.</p>
+
+<p>As a matter of fact, all the people belonging to a defunct petty chief
+become the property of the head of the house under any circumstances;
+but if the defunct had left any man capable of succeeding him, the head
+chief would allow this man to succeed without interfering with him in
+any way, provided he never had had the misfortune to raise the chief&rsquo;s
+bile; in the latter case, if the chief was a very powerful chief, whose
+actions no one dare question, the chances<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_477" id="Page_477">[Pg 477]</a></span> are that he would either be
+suppressed or have to go to Long Ju-Ju to prosecute his claim, the
+expenses of which journey would most likely eat up the whole of the
+inheritance, or at least cripple him for life as far as his commercial
+transactions were concerned. It is of course to the interest of the head
+of a house to surround himself with as many petty chiefs as he possibly
+can, as their success in trade, and in amassing riches whether in slaves
+or goods, always benefits him; even in those rivers where no heavy
+&ldquo;topside&rdquo; is paid to the head of the house by the white traders, the
+small men or petty chiefs are called upon from time to time to help to
+uphold the dignity of the head chief, either by voluntary offerings or
+forced payments. Public opinion has a good deal to say on the subject of
+succession; and though a chief may be so powerful during his lifetime
+that he may ride roughshod over custom or public opinion, after his
+death his successor may find so many cases of malversation brought
+against the late chief by people who would not have dared to open their
+mouths during the late chief&rsquo;s lifetime, that by the time they are all
+settled he finds that a chief&rsquo;s life is not a happy one at all times.
+Claims of various kinds may be brought up during the lifetime of a
+chief, and three or four of his successors may have the same claim
+brought against them, each party may think he has settled the matter for
+ever; but unless he has taken worst, the descendants of the original
+claimants will keep attacking each successor until they strike one who
+is not strong enough to hold his own against them, and they succeed in
+getting their claim settled. This settlement does not interfere with the
+losing side turning round and becoming the claimants in their turn. Some
+of these family disputes are very curious; take for instance a case<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_478" id="Page_478">[Pg 478]</a></span> of
+a claim for five female slaves that may have been wrongfully taken
+possession of by some former chief of a house, this case perhaps is kept
+warm, waiting the right moment to put it forward, for thirty years, the
+claim then becomes not only for the original five women, but for their
+children&rsquo;s children and so on.</p>
+
+<h3>RELIGION</h3>
+
+<p>The Brass natives to-day are divided into two camps as far as religion
+is concerned: the missionary would no doubt say the greater number of
+them are Christians, the ordinary observer would make exactly the
+opposite observation, and judging from what we know has taken place in
+their towns within the last few years, I am afraid the latter would be
+right.</p>
+
+<p>The Church Missionary Society started a mission here in 1868; it is
+still working under another name, and is under the superintendence of
+the Rev. Archdeacon Crowther, a son of the late Bishop Crowther.</p>
+
+<p>Their success, as far as numbers of attendants at church, has been very
+considerable; and I have known cases amongst the women who were
+thoroughly imbued with the Christian religion, and acted up to its
+teaching as conscientiously as their white sisters; these however are
+few.</p>
+
+<p>With regard to the men converts I have not met with one of whom I could
+speak in the same terms as I have done of the women.</p>
+
+<p>Whilst fully recognising the efforts that the missionaries have put
+forth in this part of the world, I regret I can&rsquo;t bear witness to any
+great good they have done.</p>
+
+<p>This mission has been worked on the usual lines that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_479" id="Page_479">[Pg 479]</a></span> English missions
+have been worked in the past, so I must attribute any want of success
+here as much to the system as anything.</p>
+
+<p>One of the great obstacles to the spread of Christianity in these parts
+is in my opinion the custom of polygamy, together with which are mixed
+up certain domestic customs that are much more difficult to eradicate
+than the teachings of Ju-Ju, and require a special mission for them
+alone.</p>
+
+<p>Almost equal to the above as an obstacle in the way of Christianity is
+what is called domestic slavery; Europeans who have visited Western
+Africa speak of this as a kind of slavery wherein there is no hardship
+for the slave; they point to cases where slaves have risen to be kings
+and chiefs, and many others who have been able to arrive at the position
+of petty chief in some big man&rsquo;s house. I grant all this, but all these
+people forget to mention that until these slaves are chiefs they are not
+safe; that any grade less than that of a chief that a slave may arrive
+to does not secure him from being sold if his master so wished.</p>
+
+<p>Further, domestic slavery gives a chief power of life and death over his
+slave; and how often have I known cases where promising young slaves
+have done something to vex their chief their heads have paid the
+penalty, though these young men had already amassed some wealth, having
+also several wives and children.</p>
+
+<p>People who condone domestic slavery, and I have heard many
+kindly-hearted people do so, forget that however mild the slavery of the
+domestic slave is on the coast, even under the mildest native it is
+still slavery; further, these slaves are not made out of wood, they are
+flesh and blood, they in their own country have had fathers and mothers.
+During<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_480" id="Page_480">[Pg 480]</a></span> my lengthened stay on the coast of Africa I never questioned a
+slave about his or her own country that I did not find they much
+preferred their own country far away in the interior to their new home.
+Some have told me that they had been travelling upwards of two months
+and had been handed from one slave dealer to another, in some cases
+changing their owner three or four times before reaching the coast. On
+questioning them how they became slaves, I have only been told by one
+that her father sold her because he was in debt; several times I have
+been told that their elder brothers have sold them, but these cases
+would not represent one per cent. of the slaves I have questioned; the
+almost general reply I have received has been that they had been stolen
+when they had gone to fetch water from the river or the spring, as the
+case might be, or while they have been straying a little in the bush
+paths between their village and another. Sometimes they would describe
+how the slave-catchers had enticed them into the bush by showing them
+some gaudy piece of cloth or offered them a few beads or negro bells,
+others had been captured in some raid by one town or village on another.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore domestic slavery in its effect on the interior tribes is doing
+very near the same amount of harm now that it did in days gone by. It
+keeps up a constant fear of strangers, and causes terrible feuds between
+the villages in the interior.</p>
+
+<p>What is the use of all the missionaries&rsquo; teaching to the young girl
+slaves so long as they are only chattels, and are forced to do the
+bidding of their masters or mistresses, however degrading or filthy that
+bidding may be?</p>
+
+<p>The Ju-Juism of Brass is a sturdy plant, that takes a great deal of
+uprooting. A few years ago a casual observer<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_481" id="Page_481">[Pg 481]</a></span> would have been inclined
+to say the missionaries are making giant strides amongst these people. I
+remember, as evidence of how keenly these people seemed to take to
+Christianity up to a certain point, a little anecdote that the late
+Bishop Crowther once told me about the Brass men. I think it must have
+been a very few years before his death. I saw the worthy bishop
+staggering along my wharf with an old rice bag full of some heavy
+articles. On arriving on my verandah he threw the bag down, and after
+passing the usual compliments, he said, &ldquo;You can&rsquo;t guess what I have got
+in that bag.&rdquo; I replied I was only good at guessing the contents of a
+bag when the bag was opened; but judging from the weight and the
+peculiar lumpy look of the outside of the bag, I should be inclined to
+guess yams. &ldquo;Had he brought me a present of yams?&rdquo; I continued. &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he
+replied; &ldquo;the contents of that bag are my new church seats in the town
+of Nimbé; the church was only finished during the week, and I decided to
+hold a service in it on Sunday last; and, do you believe me, those logs
+of wood are a sample of all we had for seats for most part of the
+congregation! I have therefore brought them down to show you white
+gentlemen our poverty, and to beg some planks to make forms for the
+church.&rdquo; I promised to assist him, and he left, carefully walking off
+with his bag of fire-wood, for that was all it was, cut in lengths of
+about fifteen inches, and about four inches in diameter. Here ends my
+anecdote, so far as the bishop was concerned, for he never came back to
+claim the fulfilment of my promise; but later on one of my clerks
+reported to me that there had been a great run on inch planks during the
+week, and that the purchasers were mostly women, and the poorest natives
+in the place. This fact, coupled with the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_482" id="Page_482">[Pg 482]</a></span> fact that the bishop never
+came back for the planks he had begged of me, caused me to make some
+inquiries, and I found that the church had been plentifully supplied
+with benches by the poorer portion of the congregation.</p>
+
+<p>Yet how many of these earnest people could one guarantee to have
+completely cast out all their belief in Ju-Juism? If I were put upon my
+oath to answer truthfully according to my own individual belief, I am
+afraid my answer would be <i>not one</i>.</p>
+
+<p>What an awful injustice the missionary preaches in the estimation of the
+average native woman, when he advises the native of West Africa to put
+away all his wives but one. Supposing, for instance, it is the case of a
+big chief with a moderate number of wives, say only twenty or thirty, he
+may have had children by all of them, or he may have had children by a
+half dozen of them,&mdash;what is to become of those wives he discards? are
+they to be condemned to single blessedness for the remainder of their
+days? Native custom or etiquette would not allow these women to marry
+the other men in the chief&rsquo;s house; they can&rsquo;t marry into other houses,
+because they would find the same condition of things there as in their
+own husband&rsquo;s house, always supposing Christianity was becoming general.
+These difficulties in the way of the missionary are the Ju-Ju priests&rsquo;
+levers, which they know well how to use against Christianity, and which
+accounts for the frequent slide back to Ju-Juism, and in some cases
+cannibalism of otherwise apparently semi-civilized Africans.</p>
+
+<p>The Pagan portion of the inhabitants of the Brass district have still
+their old belief in the Ju-Ju priests and animal worship.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_483" id="Page_483">[Pg 483]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The python is the Brass natives&rsquo; titular guardian angel. So great was
+the veneration of this Ju-Ju snake in former times, that the native
+kings would sign no treaties with her Britannic Majesty&rsquo;s Government
+that did not include a clause subjecting any European to a heavy fine
+for killing or molesting in any way this hideous reptile. When one
+appeared in any European&rsquo;s compound, the latter was bound to send for
+the nearest Ju-Ju priest to come and remove it, for which service the
+priest expected a dash, <i>id est</i>, a present; if he did not get it, the
+chances were the priest would take good care to see that that European
+found more pythons visited him than his neighbours; and as a rule these
+snakes were not found until they had made a good meal of one of the
+white man&rsquo;s goats or turkeys, it came cheaper in the long run to make
+the usual present.</p>
+
+<p>It is now some twenty years ago that the then agent of Messrs. Hatton
+and Cookson in Brass River found a large python in his house, and killed
+it. This coming to the ears of the natives and the Ju-Ju priests, caused
+no little excitement; the latter saw their opportunity, worked up the
+people to a state of frenzy, and eventually led them in an attack on the
+factory of Messrs. Hatton and Cookson, seized the agent and dragged him
+out of his house on to the beach, tied him up by his thumbs, each Ju-Ju
+priest present spat in his mouth, afterwards they stripped him naked and
+otherwise ill treated him, besides breaking into his store and robbing
+him of twenty pounds worth of goods. The British Consul was appealed to
+for redress, and upon his next visit to the river inquired into the
+case, but, <i>mirabile dictu</i>, decided that he was unable to afford the
+agent any redress, as he had brought the punishment on himself. I don&rsquo;t
+mention the name of this Consul, as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_484" id="Page_484">[Pg 484]</a></span> it would be a pity to hand down to
+posterity the fact that England was ever represented by such an idiot.</p>
+
+<p>Besides the python the Brass men had several other secondary Ju-Jus;
+amongst others may be mentioned the grey and white kingfisher, also
+another small bird like a water-wagtail, besides which, in common with
+their neighbours, they believed in a spirit of the water who was
+supposed to dwell down by the Bar, and to which they occasionally made
+offerings in the shape of a young slave-girl of the lightest complexion
+they could buy.</p>
+
+<p>The burial customs of this people differed little from others in the
+Niger Delta, but as I was present at the burial of two of their
+kings&mdash;viz. King Keya and King Arishima, at which I saw identically the
+same ceremonial take place, I will describe what I saw as far as my
+memory will serve me, for the last of these took place about thirty
+years ago.</p>
+
+<p>The grave in this instance was not dug in a house, but on a piece of
+open ground close to the king&rsquo;s house, but was afterwards roofed over
+and joined on to the king&rsquo;s houses. The size of the grave was about
+fourteen by twelve feet, and about eight feet deep. At the end where the
+defunct&rsquo;s head would be, was a small table with a cloth laid over it,
+upon this were several bottles of different liquors, a large piece of
+cooked salt beef and sundry other cooked meats, ship&rsquo;s biscuits, &amp;c. The
+ceiling of this chamber was supported by stout beams being laid across
+the opening, upon which would be placed planks after the body had been
+lowered into position, then the whole would be covered over with a part
+of the clay that had been taken out of the hole, the rest of the clay
+being afterwards used to form the walls of the house, that was
+eventually constructed over<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_485" id="Page_485">[Pg 485]</a></span> the grave; a small round hole about three
+inches in diameter being made in the ceiling of the grave, apparently
+about over the place where the head of the corpse would lay. Down this
+would be poured palm wine and spirits on the <a name="CORR7" id="CORR7"><ins class="correction" title="original: aniversaries">anniversaries</ins></a> of the king&rsquo;s
+death, by his successor and by the Ju-Ju priests. This part of the
+ceremony would be called &ldquo;making his father,&rdquo; if it was a son who
+succeeded; if it was not a son, he would describe it as &ldquo;making his big
+father&rdquo;; though he was perhaps no blood relation at all.</p>
+
+<p>Previous to the burial the body of the king lay in state for two days in
+a small hut scarcely five feet high, with very open trellis work sides.
+I believe they would have kept the body unburied longer if they could
+have done so, but at the end of the second day his Highness commenced to
+be very objectionable. The king&rsquo;s body was dressed for this ceremony in
+his most expensive robes, having round the neck several necklaces of
+valuable coral, to which his chiefs would add a string more or less
+valuable according to their means, as they arrived for the final
+ceremony. The Europeans were expected to contribute something towards
+the funeral expenses, which contribution generally consisted of a cask
+of beef, a barrel of rum, a hundredweight of ship&rsquo;s biscuits, and from
+twenty to thirty pieces of cloth. Even in this there was a certain
+amount of rivalry shown by the Europeans, to their loss and the natives&rsquo;
+gain. One knowing trader amongst them on this occasion had just received
+a consignment of imitation coral, an article at that time quite unknown
+in the river, either to European trader or to natives; so he decided to
+place one of these strings of imitation coral round the king&rsquo;s neck
+himself, and thus create a great sensation, for had it been real coral
+its value would have been one hundred pounds. He had,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_486" id="Page_486">[Pg 486]</a></span> however, not
+counted on the king&rsquo;s very objectionable state, and when he proceeded to
+place his offering round the king&rsquo;s neck, he nearly came to grief, and
+did not seem quite himself until he had had a good stiff glass of brandy
+and water. The news spread like wildfire of this man&rsquo;s munificence, and
+soon the principal chiefs waited upon him to thank him for his present
+to their dead king; the other Europeans were green with jealousy, though
+each had in his turn tried to outdo his neighbour; unfortunately, there
+was a Scotchman there &ldquo;takin&rsquo; notes,&rdquo; and faith he guessed a ruse, but
+he was a good fellow and friend of the donor, and kept the secret for
+some years, and did not tell the tale until it could do his friend no
+harm.</p>
+
+<p>The cannons had been going off at intervals for the last two days.
+Towards ten o&rsquo;clock of the second night after death the king was placed
+in a very open-work wicker casket, and carried shoulder high round the
+town, and then finally deposited in his grave. During this time the
+cannons were being continually fired off, and individuals were assisting
+in the din by firing off the ordinary trade gun. I and another European
+concealed ourselves near the grave, and carefully watched all night to
+see if they sacrificed any slaves on the king&rsquo;s grave, or put any poor
+creatures down into the grave to die a lingering death; but we saw
+nothing of this done, though we had been informed that no king or chief
+of Brass was ever buried without some of his slaves being sent with him
+into the next world; as our informant explained, how would they know he
+had been a big man in this life if he did not go accompanied by some of
+his niggers into the next?</p>
+
+<p>The firing of cannon is kept up at intervals for an indefinite number of
+days after the final interment; but there<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_487" id="Page_487">[Pg 487]</a></span> is no hard and fast rule as
+to its duration as far as I have been able to ascertain, and I think
+myself it is ruled by the greater or less liberality of the successors,
+who are the ones who have to pay for the gunpowder.</p>
+
+<p>Amongst other customs that are common to all these rivers and this river
+is the killing of twin children; but since the mission has been
+established here the missionaries have done their utmost to wean the
+people from this remnant of savagery.</p>
+
+<p>A curious custom that I have heard of in most of these rivers is the
+throwing into the bush, to be devoured by the wild beasts, any children
+that may be born with their front teeth cut. I found this custom in
+Brass, but with an exception, <i>id est</i>, I knew a pilot in Twon Town who
+had had the misfortune to be born with his upper front teeth through;
+whether it was because it was only the upper teeth that were through, or
+whether it was that the law is not so strictly carried out in the case
+of a male, I was never able to make sure of; however, he had been
+allowed to live, but it appears in his case some part of the law had to
+be carried out at his death, viz. he was not allowed to be buried, but
+was thrown into the bush, to fall a prey to the wild beasts, and any
+property he might die possessed of could not be inherited by any one,
+but must be dissipated or thrown into the bush to rot. I believe the
+Venerable Archdeacon Crowther has been instrumental in saving several of
+these kind of children in Bonny.</p>
+
+<p>The women of Brass are, like their sisters in Benin river, moving on
+towards women&rsquo;s rights; for though they have been for many generations
+the hewers of wood and drawers of water, and made to do most of the hard
+work of the country, they had commenced some years ago to enjoy<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_488" id="Page_488">[Pg 488]</a></span> more
+freedom than their sisters in the leeward rivers. They still do most of
+the fishing, and the fishing girls of Twon Town used to present a pretty
+sight as some fifteen or twenty of their tiny canoes used to sweep past
+the European factories, each canoe propelled by two or three graceful,
+laughing, chattering girls; with them would generally be seen a canoe or
+two paddled by some dames of a maturer age. Though <i>passée</i> as far as
+their looks were concerned, they could still ply their paddle as well as
+the best amongst the younger ones, as they forced their frail canoes
+through water to some favourite quiet blind creek where the currentless
+water allowed them to use their preparation<a name="FNanchor_83_84" id="FNanchor_83_84"></a><a href="#Footnote_83_84" class="fnanchor">[83]</a> for stupefying the fish,
+and in little over three hours you might see them come paddling back,
+each tiny canoe with from fifty to a hundred small grey mullet,
+sometimes with more and occasionally with a few small river soles.</p>
+
+<p>The Brass man, like his neighbours, had his public Ju-Ju house as well
+as his private little Ju-Ju chamber, the latter was to be found in any
+Brass man&rsquo;s establishment which boasted of more than one room; those who
+could not afford a separate chamber used to devote a corner of their own
+room, where might be seen sundry odds and ends bespattered with some
+yellow clay, and occasionally a white fowl hung by the leg to remain
+there and die of starvation and drop gradually to pieces as it
+decomposed.</p>
+
+<p>The public Ju-Ju house at Obulambri was not a very pretentious affair;
+it consisted of a native hut of wattle and daub, the walls not being
+carried more than half way up to the eaves, roofed with palm mats; in
+the centre was an iron <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_489" id="Page_489">[Pg 489]</a></span>staff about five feet high, surrounded by eight
+bent spear heads; this was called a tokoi, at the foot of it was a hole
+about three inches in diameter, down which the Ju-Ju priests would pour
+libations of tombo or palm wine, as a sacrifice to the Ju-Ju. I was
+informed that this Ju-Ju house was built over the grave of the original
+founder of Obulambri town. Behind the tokoi, on a kind of altar raised
+about eighteen inches from the ground, were displayed about a dozen
+human skulls; at the time I visited it the Ju-Ju man explained to me
+that the greater part of these had belonged to New Calabar prisoners
+taken in their last war with those people; besides the skulls were
+sundry odds and ends of native pottery, as also a few bowls and jugs of
+European manufacture. What part this pottery played in their devotions I
+could never get a Ju-Ju man to explain, some of them appeared to have
+held human blood. Stacked up in one corner were a few human bones,
+principally thigh and shin bones.</p>
+
+<p>The Brassmen do not often sacrifice human beings to their Ju-Jus, except
+in time of war, when all prisoners without exception were sacrificed.</p>
+
+<p>Their Ju-Ju snake occasionally secured a small child by crawling
+unobserved into a house when the elders were absent or asleep. I once
+was passing through a small fishing village in the St. Nicholas river,
+when most of the inhabitants were away fishing, and hearing terrible
+screams went to see what was the cause of the trouble, and found several
+women wringing their hands and running to and fro in front of a small
+hut. For several minutes I could not get them to tell me what was the
+cause of their trouble; at last one of them trembling, with the most
+abject fear and quite unable to speak, pointed to the door of the hut.
+I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_490" id="Page_490">[Pg 490]</a></span> went and looked in, but it was so dark I could see nothing at first,
+so stepped inside; when, getting accustomed to the semi-darkness, I saw
+a large python, some ten or twelve feet long, hanging from the ridge
+pole of the hut immediately over a child about two years old that was
+calmly sleeping. To snatch up the child and walk out was the work of a
+moment. I then found that the woman who had pointed to the door of the
+hut was the mother of the child&mdash;her gratitude to me for delivering her
+child from certain death can be more easily imagined than described.
+Upon asking why she had not acted as I had done, she replied she dare
+not have interfered with the snake in the way I had done. I afterwards
+asked several of the more intelligent natives of Brass if the Ju-Ju law
+did not allow a mother to save her child in such a case. Some said she
+was a fool woman, and that she could have taken her child away the
+moment she saw it in danger; but others said had she done so, she would
+have been liable to be killed herself or pay a heavy fine to the Ju-Ju
+priests; and I am inclined to believe the latter version to be
+correct.<a name="FNanchor_84_85" id="FNanchor_84_85"></a><a href="#Footnote_84_85" class="fnanchor">[84]</a></p>
+
+<p>Amongst other curious customs these people make use of the feather
+ordeal, to find out robbery, witchcraft, and adultery, &amp;c. In this
+ordeal it rests a great deal with the Ju-Ju man who performs it whether
+it proves the party guilty or not. This ordeal is performed as
+follows:&mdash;The Ju-Ju man takes a feather from the underpart of a fowl&rsquo;s
+wing, making choice of a stronger or weaker one, according <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_491" id="Page_491">[Pg 491]</a></span>to how he
+intends the ordeal shall demonstrate, then, drawing the tongue of the
+accused as far out of his mouth as he can, forces the quill of the
+feather through from the upper side and draws it out by grasping the
+point of the feather from the under side of the tongue; if the feather
+is unbroken the accused person is proved guilty, if on the contrary the
+feather breaks in the attempt to pass it through the tongue it proves
+the innocence of the person. It may be seen from this description how
+very easy it was to prove a person innocent, the mere fact of the
+feather breaking in the attempt to push it through the tongue being
+sufficient; thus, when suitably approached, the Ju-Ju man could not only
+prove a person&rsquo;s innocence, but also save him any inconvenience in
+eating his mess of foo foo and palaver sauce that evening.</p>
+
+<h3>NEW CALABAR</h3>
+
+<p>The intervening rivers between the Brass and New Calabar Rivers are the
+St. Nicholas, the St. Barbara, the St. Bartholomew, and the Sombrero;
+the influence of the king of New Calabar may be said to commence at the
+St. Bartholomew River, extending inland to about five or ten miles
+beyond the town of Bugama. The lower parts of the St. Bartholomew and
+the numerous creeks, running between that river and New Calabar are
+mostly inhabited by fishermen and their families, their towns and
+villages being without exception the most squalid and dirty of any to be
+found in the Delta. Beyond fishing, the males seem to do little else
+than sleep; occasionally the men assist their wives and children in
+making palm-leaf mats, used generally all over the Delta in place of
+thatch&mdash;not a very profitable employment, as the demand varies
+considerably<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_492" id="Page_492">[Pg 492]</a></span> according to the seasons. After a very rough and
+boisterous rainy season, the price may be two shillings and sixpence, or
+its equivalent, for four hundred of these mats, each mat being a little
+over two feet in length, but falling in bad times to two shillings and
+sixpence for five to six hundred. A roof made with these mats threefold
+thick will last for three years.</p>
+
+<p>These people call themselves Calabar men simply because they live within
+the influence of the Calabarese. In the upper part of these small
+rivers, about a day&rsquo;s journey by canoe from the mouth of St.
+Bartholomew, is the chief town of a small tribe of people called the
+Billa tribe, connected by marriage with the Bonny men, several of the
+kings of Bonny having married Billa women. These people are producers in
+a small way of palm-oil, and though they are located so close to the New
+Calabar people, prefer to sell their produce to the Bonny men, who send
+their canoes over to the Billa country to fetch the oil, the latter
+people not having canoes large enough for carrying the large puncheons
+which the Bonny men send over to collect their produce in.</p>
+
+<p>The New Calabar men are now split up into three towns called Bugama,
+where the king lives; Abonema, of which Bob Manuel is the principal
+chief; and Backana, where the Barboy House reside. Besides they have
+numerous small towns scattered about in the network of creeks connecting
+the Calabar River with the Sombrero River. Previous to 1880 these people
+all dwelt together in one large town on the right bank of the Calabar
+River, nearly opposite to where the creek, now called the Cawthorne
+Channel,<a name="FNanchor_85_86" id="FNanchor_85_86"></a><a href="#Footnote_85_86" class="fnanchor">[85]</a> branches off from the main river.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_493" id="Page_493">[Pg 493]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>For some few years previous the chief of the Barboy House, Will Braid,
+had incurred the displeasure of the Amachree house, which was the king&rsquo;s
+house. For certain private reasons the king, with whom sided most of the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_494" id="Page_494">[Pg 494]</a></span>other chiefs, had decided to break down the Barboy house, which had
+been a very powerful house in days anterior to the present king&rsquo;s
+father, and tradition says that the Barboys had some right to be the
+reigning house. Will Braid, the head of the house at this time, had by
+his industry and honourable conduct raised the position of the house to
+very near its former influence. This was one of the private reasons that
+caused the king to look on him with disfavour.</p>
+
+<p>When one of these West African kinglets decides that one of their chiefs
+is getting too rich, and by that means too powerful, he calls his more
+immediate supporters together, and they discuss the means that are to be
+used to compass the doomed one&rsquo;s fall. If he be a man of mettle, with
+many sub-chiefs and aspiring trade boys, the system resorted to is to
+trump up charges against him of breaches of agreement as to prices paid
+by him or his people in the Ibo markets for produce, and fine him
+heavily. If he pays without murmur, they leave him alone for a time; but
+very soon another case is brought against him either on the same lines
+or for some breach of native etiquette, such as sending his people into
+some market to trade where, perchance, he has been sending his people
+for years; but the king and his friendly chiefs dish up some old custom,
+long allowed to drop in abeyance, by which his house was debarred from
+trading in that particular market. The plea of long usance would avail
+him little; another fine would be imposed. This injustice would
+generally have the effect desired, the doomed one would refuse to pay,
+then down the king would come on him for disregarding the orders of
+himself and chiefs; fine would follow fine, until the man lost his head
+and did some rash act, which assisted his enemies to more certainly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_495" id="Page_495">[Pg 495]</a></span>
+compass his ruin. Or he does what I have seen a persecuted chief do in
+these rivers on more than one occasion: that is, he gathers all his
+wives and children about him, together with his most trusted followers
+and slaves, also any of his family who are willing to follow him into
+the next world, lays a double tier of kegs of <a name="CORR8" id="CORR8"><ins class="correction" title="original: gunpowder on the floor fo">gunpowder on the floor of</ins></a>
+the principal room in his dwelling-house and knocks in the heads of the
+top tier of kegs. Placing all his people on this funeral pile, he seats
+himself in the middle with a fire-stick grasped in his hand, then sends
+a message to the king and chiefs to come and fetch the fines they have
+imposed on him. The king and chiefs generally shrewdly guessed what this
+message meant, and took good care not to get too near, stopping at a
+convenient distance to parley with him by means of messengers. The
+victim finding there was no chance of blowing up his enemies along with
+himself and people, would plunge the fire-stick into the nearest keg,
+and the next moment the air would be filled with the shattered remains
+of himself and his not unwilling companions.</p>
+
+<p>Having digressed somewhat to explain how chiefs are undone, I must
+continue my account of the New Calabar people and the cause of their
+deserting their original town. This was brought about by Will Braid, on
+whom the squeezing operation had been some time at work. He turned at
+bay and defied the king and chiefs; this led to a civil war, in which he
+was getting the worst of the game, so one dark night he quietly slipped
+away with most of his retainers and took refuge in Bonny. This led to
+complications, for Bonny espoused the cause of W. Braid and declared war
+against New Calabar; thus in place of suppressing Will Braid they came
+near to being suppressed themselves, the Bonny men very pluckily
+establishing themselves opposite New Calabar<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_496" id="Page_496">[Pg 496]</a></span> town, where they threw up
+a sand battery, in which they placed several rifled cannon, and did
+considerable damage to the New Calabar town, from whence a feeble return
+fire was kept up for several days, during which time the Calabar men
+occupied themselves in placing their valuables and people in security,
+and eventually, unknown to the Bonny men, clearing out all their war
+canoes and fighting men through creeks at the back of their town to the
+almost inaccessible positions of Bugama and Abonema. The Bonny men
+continued the bombardment, but finding there was no reply from the town,
+despatched, during the night, some scouts to find out what was the
+position of things in the New Calabar town; on their return they
+reported the town deserted. The Bonny men lost no time in following the
+New Calabar men to their new position, but found Bugama inaccessible, so
+turned their attention to Abonema, which they very pluckily assaulted,
+but were repulsed with considerable loss, losing one of their best war
+canoes, in which was a fine rifled cannon; at the same time the Bonny
+chief, Waribo, who had most energetically led the assault, barely
+escaped with his life, as he was in the war canoe that had been sunk by
+the New Calabar men. This victory was very pluckily gained by Chief Bob
+Manuel and his people, who were greatly assisted in the defence of their
+position by having been supplied at an opportune moment with a
+mitrailleuse by one of the European traders in the New Calabar river.
+This defeat somewhat cooled the courage of the Bonny men; the war
+however continued to be carried on in a desultory manner for several
+months, until both sides were tired of the game, and at last all the
+questions in dispute between the king and chiefs of New Calabar and Will
+Braid, and the matters in dispute between the New<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_497" id="Page_497">[Pg 497]</a></span> Calabar men and the
+Bonny men were by mutual agreement left to the arbitration of the king
+and chiefs of Okrika, and King Ja Ja and the chiefs of Opobo. The
+arbitrators met on board one of Her Majesty&rsquo;s vessels in Bonny River in
+1881, King Ja Ja being represented by Chief Cookey Gam and several other
+chiefs, the king and chiefs of Okrika being in full force. The result of
+the arbitration did not give complete satisfaction to any party, owing
+to the advice of Ja Ja on the affair not having been listened to in its
+entirety. However, W. Braid returned to New Calabar territory and
+founded a town of his own, assisted by his very faithful Chief Yellow of
+Young Town. Thus ended the last war between the old rivals Bonny and New
+Calabar. It is on record that these two countries had been scarcely ever
+at peace for any length of time since New Calabar was first founded some
+two hundred and fifty years ago, when, tradition says, one of the
+Ephraim Duke family left Old Calabar and settled at the spot from whence
+they retired in 1880.</p>
+
+<p>Old traders I met with in the early sixties informed me that during one
+of these wars, between the years 1820 and 1830, the king Pepple, then
+reigning in Bonny succeeded in capturing the king of Calabar of that
+time (the grandfather of the last king Amachree), and to celebrate his
+victory and royal capture, made a great feast to which he invited all
+the European slave traders then in his country. The feast was a right
+royal one, the king had a special dish prepared for himself which was
+nothing less than the heart of his royal captive, torn from his scarcely
+lifeless body.</p>
+
+<p>The New Calabar people, though said to be descended from the Old Calabar
+race, have not retained any of the characteristics of the latter,
+neither in their language nor<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_498" id="Page_498">[Pg 498]</a></span> dress, nor have they retained the
+elaborate form of secret society or native freemasonry peculiar to the
+Efik<a name="FNanchor_86_87" id="FNanchor_86_87"></a><a href="#Footnote_86_87" class="fnanchor">[86]</a> race called Egbo.</p>
+
+<p>Their religion is the same animistic form of Ju-Juism and belief in the
+oracle they call Long Ju-Ju situated in the vicinity of Bende in the
+hinterland of Opobo, common to all the inhabitants of the Delta; besides
+the latter, they are believers in the power of a Ju-Ju in some mystic
+grove in the Oru country. The peculiar test at this latter place is said
+to have been established by some ancient dame having uttered some
+fearful curse or wish at the spot where the ordeal is administered. The
+descriptions of this are rather vague, as no one who has undergone it
+has ever been known to return, that is, if he has really seen the oracle
+work, for if it works it is a sign of his guilt and drowns him; if he is
+innocent it does not work, so on his return he is not in a position to
+describe it. But the proprietors of this interesting Ju-Ju have for very
+many years found that a nigger fetches a better price alive than when
+turned into butcher&rsquo;s meat; they have therefore been in the habit of
+selling the guilty victim into slavery in as far distant a country as
+possible; but occasionally one of these men have drifted down to the
+coast again, but dare not return to his own country as no one would
+believe he was anything else but a spirit. One of these &ldquo;spirits&rdquo; I had
+the pleasure to interview on one occasion, and he told me that the only
+ones who were actually drowned were the old or unsaleable men; when two
+men went to this Ju-Ju or ordeal well, to decide some vital question
+between them, the party taking<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_499" id="Page_499">[Pg 499]</a></span> best would want to see his dead or
+drowned opponent; for this purpose the Ju-Ju priests always kept a few
+of the old and decrepit votaries on hand to be drowned as required, but
+the opponent was never allowed to stand by and see the oracle work, but
+was taken up to the well and allowed to see a dead body lying at the
+bottom, and after he had glanced in and satisfied himself there was a
+drowned person there, he would be hurried away by the Ju-Ju priests and
+their assistants. That these priests had the supernatural power to make
+the water rise up in the well, this &ldquo;spirit&rdquo; thoroughly believed, and
+when I offered the suggestion of an underground water supply brought
+from some higher elevation, he scouted the idea and gave me his private
+opinion thus: &ldquo;White man he no be fit savey all dem debly ting Ju-Ju
+priest fit to do; he fit to change man him face so him own mudder no fit
+savey him; he fit make dem tree he live for water side, bob him head
+down and drink water all same man; he fit make himself alsame bird and
+fly away; you fit to look him lib for one place and you keep you eye for
+him, he gone, you no fit see him when he go.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>Which little speech turned into ordinary English meant to say that white
+people could not understand the devilish tricks the Ju-Ju priests were
+able to do, they could so disguise a person that his own mother would
+not recognise him, this without the assistance of any make-up but simply
+from their devilish science; that they could cause a tree on the banks
+of a river to bend its stem and imbibe water through its topmost
+branches; that they could change themselves into birds and fly away; and
+lastly, that they could make themselves invisible before your eyes and
+so suddenly that you could not tell when they had done so.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_500" id="Page_500">[Pg 500]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>I asked him why the Ju-Ju man had not altered him, so that when he sold
+him it would be impossible for any one who had known him in his own
+country ever to recognise him if they saw him in another. His reply was:
+&ldquo;Ju-Ju man savey them man what believe in Ju-Ju no will believe me dem
+time I go tell dem I be dem Os&#363;k&#363; of Young Town come back from
+Long Ju-Ju. He savey all man go run away from me in my own country.&rdquo;
+&ldquo;Well,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;how about the people amongst whom you now are? they
+believe in very nearly the same Ju-Jus that your own people do, what do
+they say about you?&rdquo; &ldquo;Oh! they say I be silly fellow and no savey I done
+die one time, and been born again in some other country.&rdquo; I then asked
+him how they accounted for his knowing about the people who were still
+alive in his own country and to be able to talk about matters which had
+taken place there within the previous five or six years. Then I got the
+word the inquirer in this part of the world generally gets when he
+wishes to dive into the inner circles of native occultism, viz.,
+&ldquo;Anemia,&rdquo; which means &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The chiefs in New Calabar in the days of the last king&rsquo;s father were an
+extremely fine body of men, both physically and commercially; the latter
+quality they owed to the strong hand the king kept over them, and the
+excellent law he inaugurated when he became the king with regard to
+trade, viz., that no New Calabar chief or other native was allowed to
+take any goods on credit from the Europeans. His power was absolute, and
+considering that he inherited his father&rsquo;s place at a time when the
+country was in the throes of war with Bonny&mdash;his father being the king
+captured by the king of Bonny<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_501" id="Page_501">[Pg 501]</a></span> mentioned previously&mdash;the success of his
+rule was wonderful, for he pulled his country together and carried on
+the war with such ability that Bonny ultimately was glad to come to
+terms; a peace was agreed upon which lasted many years, until the old
+king of Bonny died, and his son wishing to emulate his father re-opened
+hostilities, but with such ill-success and loss to his country that it
+eventually led to his being deposed and exiled from his country for some
+years.</p>
+
+<p>The New Calabar people are and have been always great believers in
+Ju-Juism, the head Ju-Ju priest being styled the Ju-Ju king and ranking
+higher than the king in any matters relating to purely native affairs.</p>
+
+<p>The shark is their principal animal deity, to which they were in the
+habit of sacrificing a light-coloured child every seven years. This used
+to be openly and ostentatiously performed by a procession of a
+half-dozen large canoes being formed up at the town of New Calabar, each
+canoe being manned by forty to fifty paddlers; in the midships of each
+canoe a deck some ten feet long would be placed on which the Ju-Ju
+priests and a number of the younger chiefs and the grown-up sons of the
+chief men would huddle together and keep up a continuous howling and
+dancing, accompanied with the waving of their hands and handkerchiefs,
+until they arrived down near the mouth of the river. When the water
+began to be so rough that the singers and dancers could not keep their
+feet, it was a sign the offering must be cast into the sea; the Ju-Ju
+men and their assistants all supplicating their friend the shark to
+intercede with the Spirit of the Water to keep open the entrance to
+their river and cause plenty of ships to come to their river to trade.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_502" id="Page_502">[Pg 502]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Their Ju-Ju house in their original town was a much larger and more
+pretentious edifice than that of Bonny, garnished with human and goats&rsquo;
+skulls in a somewhat similar manner, unlike the Bonny Ju-Ju house in the
+fact that it was roofed over, the eaves of which were brought down
+almost to the ground, thus excluding the light and prying eyes at the
+same time; at either side of the main entrance, extending some few feet
+from the eaves, was a miscellaneous collection of iron three-legged
+pots, various plates, bowls and dishes of Staffordshire make, all of
+which had some flower pattern on them, hence were Ju-Ju and not
+available for use or trade&mdash;the old-fashioned lustre jug, being also
+Ju-Ju, was only to be seen in the Ju-Ju house, though a great favourite
+in Bonny and Brass as a trade article&mdash;at this time all printed goods or
+cloth with a flower or leaf pattern on them were Ju-Ju. Any goods of
+these kinds falling into the hands of a true believer had to be
+presented to the Ju-Ju house. As traders took good care not to import
+any such goods, people often wondered where all these things came from.
+Had they arrived shortly after a vessel bound to some other port had had
+the misfortune to be wrecked off New Calabar, they would have solved the
+problem at once, for anything picked up from a wreck which is Ju-Ju has
+to be carried off at once to the Ju-Ju house. I remember on one occasion
+visiting this Ju-Ju house just after a large ship called the <i>Clan
+Gregor</i> bound into Bonny had been wrecked off New Calabar, and found the
+Ju-Ju house decked both inside and out with yards of coloured cottons
+from roof to floor; but the Ju-Ju priests did not get all their rights,
+for some tricky natives on salving a bale of goods would carefully slit
+the bale just sufficiently<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_503" id="Page_503">[Pg 503]</a></span> to see what were the goods inside, and
+should they be Ju-Ju would not open them, but take them to their
+particular friend amongst the European traders, and get him to send them
+away to some other river for sale on joint account.</p>
+
+<p>Every eighth day is called Calabar Sunday, the day following being
+formerly the market day or principal receiving day for the white traders
+of the native produce, which consisted principally, and still does, of
+palm oil. The native Sunday was passed in olden days by the chief in
+receiving visits from the white men and jamming<a name="FNanchor_87_88" id="FNanchor_87_88"></a><a href="#Footnote_87_88" class="fnanchor">[87]</a> with them for any
+produce he had the intention of selling the following day, or clearing
+up any little Ju-Ju matters that he had been putting off for the want of
+a slack day, not because it was his Sunday, but because that was a day
+on which by custom he could not visit the ships. I remember it was on
+paying a visit to old King Amachree, the father of the late king of the
+same name, I saw for the first time a native sacrifice. I was then
+little more than a boy as a matter of fact, I was under seventeen years
+of age, but filling a man&rsquo;s place in New Calabar who had been invalided
+home. The old king had taken me under his special protection and gave me
+much good advice and counsel, which was of great use to me in my novel
+position. My employers ought to have been very thankful to him, for
+though I was the youngest trader in the river by some twelve years, I
+held my own with them and got a larger share of the produce of the river
+than my predecessor had done, all owing to the old brick of a king, who
+would come and see how I was doing on the big trade days, and if he
+thought I was not doing as well as my neighbours he would <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_504" id="Page_504">[Pg 504]</a></span>send off a
+message to a small creek close to the shipping, where the natives used
+to wait with their oil until it was jammed for, <i>id est</i>, agreed for,
+and order three or four canoes of oil to be sent off to me, though I had
+not seen its owner to agree with him as to what he was to get for it. I
+held this appointment for a little over six months, when, my senior
+having returned, I had to go back to my duties in Bonny under the chief
+agent of the firm, a Captain Peter Thompson, one of the kindest-hearted
+skippers that ever entered Bonny river. In those days we all had some
+nickname that we were known by amongst the natives, and another amongst
+the white men. Amongst the former he was called Calla Thompson, because
+he was short, in contradistinction to another Thompson who was tall,
+called Opo Thompson; but his name amongst the white men was Panter
+Thompson, owing to his inability to pronounce the &ldquo;th&rdquo; in panther during
+a discussion as to whether we had tigers or only panthers on the West
+Coast of Africa. Poor Panter, after a most successful voyage of a little
+over two years, was preparing to return home, and had only a few more
+weeks to remain in Bonny, when in stepping into his boat his foot
+slipped and he fell into the river at a point known to be infested with
+sharks. A brother skipper jumped into the boat, and actually clutched
+him by his cap at the same moment poor Panter said &ldquo;I am gone, Ned!&rdquo; no
+doubt feeling himself being drawn down by some hungry shark.</p>
+
+<p>His son now commands one of the finest steamers of the African Steamship
+Company, and seems to have inherited in a marked degree all the good
+qualities of his father; so, travellers to West Africa, if you want a
+comfortable ship and a thorough good fellow to travel with,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_505" id="Page_505">[Pg 505]</a></span> take your
+passage in the ship commanded by Captain Willie Thompson, R.N.R.</p>
+
+<p>But this is digressing. I must get back to New Calabar and tell you what
+I saw at my introduction to Ju-Juism under the auspices of dear old King
+Amachree. The occasion was the swearing Ju-Ju with some people in the
+interior, with whom they had only lately opened up commercial relations,
+and they wanted them to swear they would trade with no other people but
+them. The deputation, who represented the market people, looked as wild
+a lot as one could wish to see, and, as far as I could make out, the
+ceremony I was watching was a kind of preliminary canter to a more
+impressive, and most likely more diabolical one to be carried out at
+some future date in the stranger folks&rsquo; country. On this occasion the
+officiating Ju-Ju priest did not seem to address any of his words to the
+strangers, who looked on with a certain amount of fear depicted in their
+countenance.</p>
+
+<p>The Ju-Ju priest was clothed (?) in a superb dark-coloured and
+greasy-looking rag about his loins, barely sufficient to satisfy the
+easiest going of European Lord Chamberlains; but from the expressive
+grunts of satisfaction which greeted his appearance in the Ju-Ju house,
+I was led to suppose his dress was quite correct and proper for the
+occasion. His head was shaved on the right side, and all down his right
+side and leg he had been dusted over with some greyish-white native
+chalk. He said a few words in an undertone to one of his assistants, who
+went out of sight for a moment or so and quickly returned with a very
+fine almost milk-white goat, the poor beast seeming to anticipate its
+fate from its fearfully loud bleating. The Ju-Ju priest seized the poor<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_506" id="Page_506">[Pg 506]</a></span>
+beast by its muzzle with his left hand, and dexterously tossing its body
+under his left arm, forced its head back towards his left shoulder until
+the neck of the beast formed an arc, his assistant handing him at this
+moment a very sharp white-handled spear-pointed knife, which he drew
+across the animal&rsquo;s throat, almost severing its head from its body.
+Quick as lightning he dropped on one knee and held the bleeding animal
+over a receptacle, having the appearance of a large soup plate,
+fashioned in the clay of the ground immediately in front of the altar
+arrangement. In the centre of this plate was a hole down which the
+quickly coagulating blood slowly trickled; after the interval of what
+appeared to me minutes, but was in fact most likely less than a minute,
+the Ju-Ju man laid the lifeless body of the goat down with its neck over
+the opening in the plate, leaving it there to drain. At the moment of
+the sacrifice various gongs and old ship bells were struck by young men
+stationed near them for that purpose&mdash;a wrecked ship&rsquo;s bell being
+generally presented to the Ju-Ju house, though not as in the case of
+Ju-Ju goods by law prescribed. New Calabar people had been fairly well
+observant of this custom, and the wrecks numerous, judging from the
+number of ships&rsquo; bells in the Ju-Ju house. At every movement of the
+Ju-Ju priest the king and chief would grunt out a noise very much
+resembling that auld Scotch word &ldquo;ahum.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The Ju-Ju house had amongst its possessions several ill-shapen wooden
+idols, and scattered about the affair that represented an altar were
+various small idols looking very much like children&rsquo;s dolls; also
+several large elephant&rsquo;s tusks, and two or three very well carved ones,
+with the usual procession of coated and naked figures winding round
+them.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_507" id="Page_507">[Pg 507]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The present king of New Calabar<a name="FNanchor_88_89" id="FNanchor_88_89"></a><a href="#Footnote_88_89" class="fnanchor">[88]</a> is a son of my old friend King
+Amachree, and is called King Amachree also, but has shown little of the
+ability of his late father, being completely led by the nose by his
+brother George Amachree, who practically rules both king and people.</p>
+
+<p>The former is a small, quiet, and rather amiable man, but of a
+vacillating and unreliable character; his brother and prime minister is,
+on the contrary, a tall and very fine specimen of the negro race,
+endowed by nature with a very suave and not unmusical voice, a very able
+speaker, clear and logical reasoner, but of a very grasping nature&mdash;an
+excellent and successful trader and exceedingly nice man to deal with,
+as long as he has got things moving the way that suits him and his
+policy; but when thwarted in his designs, trading or political, he
+becomes a difficult customer to deal with, and a very unpleasant and
+objectionable type of negro &ldquo;big man.&rdquo; Nevertheless, had he had the
+fortune to have been born in a civilised Africa, I feel confident his
+natural abilities, assisted by education, would have made him a man of
+eminence in whatever country his lot might have been cast.</p>
+
+<p>Most of the New Calabar chiefs bear a very favourable repute amongst the
+white traders, and compare very favourably intellectually with the
+neighbouring chiefs of the Niger Delta.</p>
+
+<p>Another chief of no mean capacity is Bob Manuel, of Abonema, exceedingly
+neat, almost a dandy in appearance, a very shrewd trader, clear and
+concise in his speech, honourable in all his dealings, of a very
+reserved tempera<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_508" id="Page_508">[Pg 508]</a></span>ment; but a charming man to talk with, once started on
+any topic that interests him or his visitor.</p>
+
+<p>Owing to some peculiarities in their dress, the New Calabar chiefs are
+very different to the chiefs in other parts of the Delta. They never
+appear outside of their houses unless robed in long shirts (made of real
+india madras of bold check patterns, in which no other colour but red,
+blue and white is ever allowed to be used) reaching down to their heels;
+under this they wear a singlet and a flowing loin cloth of the same
+material as their shirts. Of late years, during the rainy season, some
+of them have added elastic-side boots and white socks, but the most
+curious part of their get-up is their head-gear, for since about 1866
+they have taken to wearing wigs. These are only worn on high days and
+holidays and at special functions, but the effect sometimes is so
+utterly ridiculous as to be more than strangers can look at without
+laughing. Imagine an immensely stout and somewhat podgy negro with
+elastic-side boots, white stockings, long shirt, several strings of
+coral hung round his neck and hanging in festoons down as far as where
+his waistcoat would end, did he wear one, a Charles II. light flaxen
+wig, the latter topped up by an ordinary stove-pipe black silk hat!</p>
+
+<p>This fashion of wearing wigs, I am afraid, was unconsciously inaugurated
+by me, having taken with me in 1865 to New Calabar some wigs that I had
+used in some private theatricals in England. A chief named Tom Fouché
+saw them, and was enchanted with a nigger&rsquo;s trick wig, the top of which
+could be raised by pulling a hidden silk cord, and eventually he became
+the proud possessor of my stock, and produced a great sensation the
+first public festival he appeared at. Previous to this I never saw a wig
+in New<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_509" id="Page_509">[Pg 509]</a></span> Calabar; as a matter of fact, they have no excuse for them, a
+bald-headed native being an almost unheard-of curiosity, and grey or
+white heads are very scarce. Alas! like all pioneers, I did not reap the
+reward I should have done, as I left the New Calabar river before the
+fashion had caught on, and Messrs. Thomas Harrison and Co., of
+Liverpool, became the principal purveyors of wigs to the Court of New
+Calabar.</p>
+
+<p>These people are remarkable for the bold stand they have made against
+the persecution of their neighbours almost from the day their founder
+planted his foot on the New Calabar soil, or mud rather, I should say;
+besides their wars with the Bonny men, they were often attacked by the
+Brass men, allies of Bonny. With the Okrika men they were almost
+constantly at war. This latter was a kind of guerilla warfare carried on
+in the creeks, and consisted in seizing any unprotected small canoe with
+its crew of two or three men or women and cargo, the latter generally
+being yams or Indian corn, the custom being on both sides to eat these
+prisoners.</p>
+
+<p>The Church Missionary Society established a mission here in 1875, but
+during the war of 1879 and 1880 the missionary had to leave. Their
+success had not been brilliant up to this date, owing, no doubt, in some
+measure, to the immense power wielded by the Ju-Ju priests in New
+Calabar.</p>
+
+<p>It was not until 1887-8 that the missionaries were able to again
+commence their labours amongst these people, and then not in the
+principal town. Archdeacon Crowther, however, succeeded about this time
+in getting a plot of ground in Bob Manuel&rsquo;s town, Abonema, for the
+purpose of building a mission station. As to the success of this<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_510" id="Page_510">[Pg 510]</a></span> last
+effort I can&rsquo;t speak from personal observation, as I left this river
+shortly afterwards myself; in fact, it was on my last visit to Abonema
+that I conveyed in my steamer, the <i>Quorra</i>, the missionary and his wife
+to their new home from Brass. They were a young couple of very well
+educated and most intelligent Sierra Leone natives.</p>
+
+<h3>BONNY AND THE PEPPLE FAMILY</h3>
+
+<p>This river was the most important slave market in the Delta, as a matter
+of fact surpassing in numbers of slaves exported any other single
+slave-dealing station on the West or South-West Coast of Africa.</p>
+
+<p>According to Mr. Clarkson, the historian of the abolition of the
+slave-trade, this river and Old Calabar exported more slaves than all
+the other slave-dealing centres on the West and South-West Coasts of
+Africa combined.</p>
+
+<p>It is a well-known fact that for about two hundred years the average
+annual output of slaves through the Bonny River was about 16,000 (this
+included the shipments from New Calabar), totalling up to the immense
+number of <a name="CORR9" id="CORR9"><ins class="correction" title="original: 3,200,00 souls">3,200,000 souls</ins></a> taken out of this part of Africa during two
+centuries.</p>
+
+<p>The above figures do not represent the total depletion this part of
+Africa suffered during this time. To the above immense number of slaves
+exported must be added the number of lives lost in the raids made on the
+Ibo villages for the purpose of capturing the people to sell as slaves;
+we must also add the number that died on their way down from the
+interior to the coast, and to these again must be added the slaves
+refused by the European trader by reason<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_511" id="Page_511">[Pg 511]</a></span> of any defect, malformation,
+or incipient signs of disease. The fate of these poor souls was sad; but
+perhaps many of their brethren envied them their quick release from the
+cares of this world. The native slave-dealer was too practical a man to
+burden himself with mouths to fill that he could not immediately turn
+into cloth, rum, gunpowder or coral, so oftener than otherwise he would
+simply tell his own niggers to drop their canoe astern of the slave
+ship, cut the rejected slaves heads off, and cast their bodies into the
+river to feed the sharks, this often taking place within sight of the
+European slaver.</p>
+
+<p>A very moderate allowance for loss of life between the interior and the
+slave-ship from the above-mentioned causes would be at the least 40 per
+cent.; thus totalling the immense number of 4,480,000 souls sent out of
+this one district in about two centuries. The greater number of these
+were Ibos, a slave much sought after in the olden days by planters in
+the West Indies and the Southern States of America.</p>
+
+<p>I have mentioned these latter facts here to point out to my readers that
+the so-called benevolent domestic slavery as practised on the coast of
+Western Africa and tolerated in Her Britannic Majesty&rsquo;s West African
+Colonies, must, as a natural consequence, lead to a deplorable loss of
+life, though not in so wholesale a manner as the export of slaves led to
+in former days.</p>
+
+<p>The Bonny people claim to be descended from the Ibo tribe, but I should
+be inclined to think that their proper description to-day would be a
+mixture of Ibos, Kwos, Billa, and sundry infusions of blood from
+inter-marriage with the female slaves brought down by the slave-dealers
+from places lying beyond and at the back of the Ibo people.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_512" id="Page_512">[Pg 512]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Whatever their origin may have been, a commercial spirit is, and has
+been since their first intercourse with Europeans, a very highly
+developed trait in their character. As I have already shown, they were
+the greatest slave traders in Western Africa, and when that, for them,
+lucrative trade was finally put a stop to by the treaty signed on the
+21st of November, 1848, between Her Britannic Majesty&rsquo;s Consul and King
+Pepple, whereby King Pepple was to receive an annual present of $2,000
+for six years&mdash;[previous to this, one, if not two treaties had been
+signed by King Pepple, with Her Britannic Majesty&rsquo;s representatives,
+with the same object; but the greed of gain had been too much for his
+dusky Majesty, combined with the continued presence on the coast of the
+Spanish slave-dealers; one of the latter being established at Brass as
+late as 1844]&mdash;they then turned their whole attention to the legitimate
+trade of palm oil, and soon became the largest exporters of that article
+on the West Coast of Africa. Their trade in this article had not been
+inconsiderable since 1825, at which date the Liverpool merchants had
+seriously turned their attention to legitimate trade.</p>
+
+<p>In 1837-38, the export of palm oil was already about 14,200 tons, all
+carried in sailing vessels principally owned in Liverpool, and mostly by
+firms that had been in the slave trade.</p>
+
+<p>Like the natives of Brass, many of these people have embraced the
+Christian faith, the Church Missionary Society having placed one of
+their stations here in 1866, some two years earlier than the Brass
+Mission was commenced.</p>
+
+<p>Their endeavours have certainly met with considerable success in
+prevailing upon a large number of the natives to give up many of their
+Ju-Ju practices; amongst others,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_513" id="Page_513">[Pg 513]</a></span> the worship of the iguana, an immense
+lizard, which from time immemorial had been the Bonny man&rsquo;s titular
+guardian angel. They not only got them to give up worshipping this
+saurian, but also, to mark a new departure in their religious ideas, the
+missionaries prevailed upon the people to organise a general iguana
+hunt; so, following the old saying of &ldquo;the better the day, the better
+the deed,&rdquo; one Easter Sunday, about the year 1883 or 1884, or about
+twenty-two years after the establishment of the mission, the bells of
+the mission church rang out the signal for the wholesale slaughter of
+these reptiles. To such an extent and with such good will did the people
+work that day, that by evening time not one was left alive in the town.
+That day it was everybody&rsquo;s job to kill these reptiles, but it was
+nobody&rsquo;s job to clear away the dead bodies, there being no County
+Council in Bonny to see to the scavenger work after this animal St.
+Bartholomew; the consequence was the stench was so great from the
+decaying bodies that every European predicted a general sickness would
+be the natural outcome of it all; but no such unlucky event happened,
+and the natives did not seem to notice the extra strong perfume very
+much&mdash;one of them observing, to a growl about it by a white man, that
+&ldquo;it be all same them trade beef you sell we people for chop.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The Bonny men until late years were steeped in all the most vile
+practices of Ju-Juism&mdash;sacrificing human beings to their various Ju-Jus,
+and eating all their prisoners captured in war, certain of their Ju-Ju
+practices demanding an annual human sacrifice. If at this time they
+happened to be at peace with their neighbours, and consequently without
+any prisoner to be sacrificed, the Ju-Ju men would disguise themselves
+in some fantastic dress<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_514" id="Page_514">[Pg 514]</a></span> (some Europeans have said they disguise
+themselves as leopards; I have never seen this disguise used, and doubt
+it very much), and prowl about the town and its byeways, seizing for
+their purpose in preference some stray stranger that might be staying in
+the town; failing a stranger, some noted bad character belonging to the
+town in whose fate no one would be greatly interested would be seized
+upon. To say these practices are completely stamped out would be,
+perhaps, not quite the truth; but that they are being stamped out I feel
+convinced, and considering what believers in Ju-Ju these people have
+been, I think I may say fairly quick.</p>
+
+<p>The common sense of the people is assisting very much, and the women are
+showing themselves capable of something better than what their former
+state condemned them to. The final decision to slaughter the iguana some
+years ago was brought about by them in a great measure on solid common
+sense grounds, for had not the iguana been their mortal enemy for years
+by eating their fowls and chickens before their eyes, thus destroying
+about the only means a woman of the lower class, or one who had ceased
+to please her lord and master, had of making a little pin money.</p>
+
+<p>The Ju-Ju house of Bonny, once the great show place of the town, has now
+completely disappeared and its hideous contents are scattered; strange
+to say, I saw, only a few weeks ago, in the house of a lady in London,
+one of the sacrificial pots of native earthenware that had done duty for
+many generations in the Bonny Ju-Ju House.</p>
+
+<p>A description of this Ju-Ju house may be interesting to some of my
+readers. It was an oblong building of about forty feet long by thirty
+broad, surrounded by mud walls about eight or ten feet high; one portion
+over where the altar<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_515" id="Page_515">[Pg 515]</a></span> stood had had sticks arranged, as if the intention
+had been at some time to roof it over; at the end behind the altar the
+wall had been built in a semicircle; the altar looked very much like an
+ordinary kitchen plate rack with the edges of the plate shelves picked
+out with goat skulls. There were three rows of these, and on the three
+plate shelves a row of grinning human skulls; under the bottom shelf,
+and between it and the top of what would be in a kitchen the dresser,
+were eight uprights garnished with rows of goats&rsquo; skulls, the two middle
+uprights being supplied with a double row; below the top of the dresser,
+which was garnished with a board painted blue and white, was arranged a
+kind of drapery of filaments of palm fronds, drawn asunder from the
+centre, exposing a round hole with a raised rim of clay surrounding it,
+ostensibly to receive the blood of the victims and libations of palm
+wine.</p>
+
+<p>To one side, and near the altar, was a kind of roughly made table fixed
+on four straight legs; upon this was displayed a number of human bones
+and several skulls; leaning against this table was a frame looking very
+like a chicken walk on to the table; this also was garnished with
+horizontal rows of human skulls&mdash;here and there were to be seen human
+skulls lying about; outside the Ju-Ju house, upon a kind of trellis
+work, were a number of shrivelled portions of human flesh.</p>
+
+<p>Whilst writing about the wholesale slaughter of iguanas I forgot to
+mention that this was not the first time an animal that was Ju-Ju and
+held in high veneration had had a general battue arranged for it. The
+monkey used to hold a place in Bonny equal with the iguana, but for some
+reason or another it fell from its high estate, and was as ruthlessly
+slaughtered by its quondam worshippers.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_516" id="Page_516">[Pg 516]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Other Ju-Jus were the shark and the Spirit of the Water, or supposed
+guardian angel of the Bar. The bull was at one time worshipped, but not
+of late years; but still fresh beef was Ju-Ju, and twenty years ago no
+Bonny gentleman would touch it.</p>
+
+<p>Like fresh beef, milk of cows or goats was never used by natives,
+neither were eggs eaten by Bonny men or any of the neighbouring coast
+tribes.</p>
+
+<p>Native houses in Bonny are very little different to the general run of
+native houses along this coast, as far as the external appearance goes;
+but inside they are perfect Hampton Court mazes to the uninitiated. A
+noticeable peculiarity is that the entrance door and all the other
+doorways in a native house have a fixed barrier about eighteen inches
+high between each room from whence start the doorways proper. This forms
+a very favourite seat of the master of the house or his wife, but one
+must never step over them while any one is sitting on them; a man
+stepping over one while a man is sitting there means &ldquo;poison for eye,&rdquo;
+as the natives express it, which means to say your action will cause
+them sickness. A man doing the same when a female is sitting in this
+position has a much more significant meaning, and for a slave would
+entail a good flogging.</p>
+
+<p>No community of natives demonstrates the peculiar workings of domestic
+slavery so well as these people, for in no other place on the coast can
+any one find so many instances of the rapid rise of a bought slave from
+the lowest rung of the slave ladder to the topmost.</p>
+
+<p>The bought slave was quite a different class to the son of a slave born
+in Bonny of slave parents; for outside the direct descendants of the
+Pepple family, the freemen of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_517" id="Page_517">[Pg 517]</a></span> Bonny could be counted on one hand;
+therefore, a slave born in Bonny was looked upon as being almost equal
+with a freeman. These were called Bonny free; and the Bonny free, though
+they boast of their birth, can&rsquo;t boast of the most brains, for the most
+intelligent men of these people&mdash;especially during the last fifty
+years&mdash;have been bought slaves, with few exceptions.</p>
+
+<p>In 1837, the then reigning King Pepple had to get Captain Craigie of
+H.M. Navy to assist him in asserting his rights, a slave of his having
+usurped his place. A few years after, in 1854, this same King Pepple was
+deposed by his chiefs for making continuous war on New Calabar, and thus
+draining the wealth of the country, as well as for his cruelties to his
+own people; they, at the same time, found out another charge against him
+that he was an usurper, as there was a young man named Dapho Pepple, a
+son of his elder brother, who was entitled to the throne, and, with the
+assistance of the late Consul Beecroft, the change was made and the
+fighting King Pepple was taken away to Fernando Po, and eventually found
+his way to England in 1857; there he resided four years, was carefully
+looked after by the temperance party, and eventually became a convert to
+Christianity. Several sets of verses were strung together for and about
+him by the goody goody papers of the time. He made strong appeals to the
+British public for Ŗ20,000 to establish a mission in his country; but in
+this matter I am afraid he was not successful, as the mission was never
+started by him, and on his arrival home in Bonny River, in August, 1861,
+there was a dearth of current coin in the royal pockets.</p>
+
+<p>The following is King Pepple&rsquo;s address in verse, which,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_518" id="Page_518">[Pg 518]</a></span> he asserted, he
+spoke when seeking funds to establish a mission in his country. He only
+asked for a modest Ŗ20,000. I never heard what he got, but one thing I
+do know, whatever he did get, he never expended a shilling of it for the
+purpose it was given him:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Beloved bretheren,</span><br />
+<span class="i6">Young and old,</span><br />
+<span class="i2">I come to day to ask for gold</span><br />
+<span class="i2">To help the missionary Coons</span><br />
+<span class="i2">Who brave Bonny&rsquo;s hot simoons.</span><br />
+<span class="i4">Tooralooral! Rich and poor,</span><br />
+<span class="i4">A pewter plate is at the door!</span><br />
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">Now why must each of you decide</span><br />
+<span class="i2">Your heart and purse to open wide?</span><br />
+<span class="i2">It is because the imbued sin</span><br />
+<span class="i2">That e&rsquo;en now lurks each heart within</span><br />
+<span class="i4">Tooralooral! with all its might</span><br />
+<span class="i4">Is prompting you to close them tight.</span><br />
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">And then it must not be forgot</span><br />
+<span class="i2">That Hell is wide and awful hot,</span><br />
+<span class="i2">And gibbering fiends around us grin</span><br />
+<span class="i2">With joy to see us tumble in.</span><br />
+<span class="i4">Tooralooral! don&rsquo;t forget</span><br />
+<span class="i4">The Devil he may have you yet.</span><br />
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">But would you from destruction turn,</span><br />
+<span class="i2">Nor &rsquo;mid sulphurous vapours burn,</span><br />
+<span class="i2">But each become a blessed spirit,</span><br />
+<span class="i2">And kingdom come with joy inherit.</span><br />
+<span class="i4">Tooralooral! tip us a bob,</span><br />
+<span class="i4">To help us on our holy job.</span><br />
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">Remember, friends, we are but dust,</span><br />
+<span class="i2">And die in course of time we must.</span><br />
+<span class="i2">To show the seeds have taken root</span><br />
+<span class="i2">By yielding up the proper fruit,</span><br />
+<span class="i4">Tooralooral! are you willing</span><br />
+<span class="i4">To subscribe another shilling?</span><br /><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_519" id="Page_519">[Pg 519]</a></span>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">If you will help to save the nigger</span><br />
+<span class="i2">Your crown of glory shall be bigger,</span><br />
+<span class="i2">More white your robes, your sandals smarter,</span><br />
+<span class="i2">When we shall meet above herear&rsquo;ter</span><br />
+<span class="i4">Tooralooral! Psalms and Hymns,</span><br />
+<span class="i4">Cherubs sweet and Seraphims.</span><br />
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">Fields of glory, floods of light,</span><br />
+<span class="i2">Sweet effulgence, Angels bright,</span><br />
+<span class="i2">Sounds symphoneous, jewels rare,</span><br />
+<span class="i2">Sheets of gold and perfumed air.</span><br />
+<span class="i4">Tooralooral! fellow men,</span><br />
+<span class="i4">Hallelujah! and Amen.</span><br />
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>By what specious reasoning he succeeded in prevailing upon the
+authorities at the Foreign Office to countenance his return to Bonny, or
+what he described as his dominions, I know not. The fact, however, is on
+record that he did get this permission, and that he found some good
+friends in London to assist him with sufficient cash to pay Ŗ900 down on
+account of the charter of the <i>Bewley</i>, a small vessel of only about 180
+tons register, which was to carry him and his consort, the Queen
+Eleanor, better known in Bonny as Allaputa, and their royal suite, which
+consisted of nine English men and two English women; amongst the former
+he had nominated the following officials, viz., premier, secretary, an
+assistant secretary, three clerks, and one doctor, a farmer, and a valet
+for himself. Mrs. Wood, the gardener&rsquo;s wife, was to be schoolmistress,
+and the other English woman was to act as a maid of honour to the Queen
+Eleanor. All these people had agreements for salaries varying from Ŗ60
+to Ŗ600 per annum, some of them with an allowance of Ŗ15 for uniform;
+several of the agreements contained a clause that stipulated that the
+king was to supply them with suitable apartments in the royal<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_520" id="Page_520">[Pg 520]</a></span> palace.
+On arriving in the Bonny river, these poor people had a rude awakening,
+for they found that the king was not wanted by his people, had no royal
+palace, and no revenues. However, they did not immediately quit the
+service of the dusky monarch, but held on in the hope of getting
+sufficient arrears of pay out of him to pay their passages home; they
+had some reason for their action, for the old king still had a strong
+party friendly to him in the town. The king funked landing amongst his
+late subjects, and he remained on board the <i>Bewley</i>, until the 15th of
+October, landing at last with many misgivings. Strange to relate, the
+same day the walls of the Bonny Ju-Ju house crumbled to bits, caused, no
+doubt, by the heavy rains, but the king looked upon it as an omen boding
+no good to him.</p>
+
+<p>When the king landed, the captain of the <i>Bewley</i> gave the European
+suite notice that he could not supply them with food any longer, as the
+king was not able to pay him what he owed the ship.</p>
+
+<p>These poor people now found themselves in a sad plight, but the
+Liverpool supercargoes in the river gave them quarters in their
+different sailing vessels and hulks. Those who wished to try their luck
+in some other place on the coast had their passages paid by the
+supercargoes of the river; Miss Mary, the queen&rsquo;s maid of honour, was
+about the first to be sent home, the gardener and his wife left in
+November, and by the end of December the last of the king&rsquo;s white suite
+left the river. None were ever paid their arrears of wages, the king
+being with difficulty made to find Ŗ10 towards the passage money of the
+doctor. Strange to relate, though these eleven white people could not be
+said to have passed their time in Bonny river under the best conditions
+for health, being cooped up on board a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_521" id="Page_521">[Pg 521]</a></span> vessel of only 180 tons
+register, yet only one of them died, that one being the king&rsquo;s valet.
+All had remained more than two months in the river, some four months, at
+a time, when, according to some authorities, the coast climate is most
+to be dreaded.</p>
+
+<p>King Pepple never regained his ancient sway over the Bonny people, and
+after lingering in very indifferent health a few years, during which
+time he was every now and again springing some new intrigue on his
+people, he passed away at Ju-Ju Town, where he had been living almost
+ever since his return to his native land, for his health&rsquo;s sake, he
+asserted, but rumour had it that he felt himself safer away from the
+vicinity of his more powerful chiefs.</p>
+
+<p>After his death, the affairs of Bonny went back into the hands of the
+four regents, as they had been since the death of King Dapho up to the
+time of King Pepple&rsquo;s return in 1861, and in a great measure remained
+during the few years Pepple lived.</p>
+
+<p>These regents had originally been appointed by the late Acting Consul
+Lynslager on the 1st of September, 1855, and were the heads of the
+following houses:&mdash;</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="6" cellspacing="4" summary="Heads of Houses">
+<tr>
+ <td class="tdl"><i>Name of House.</i></td>
+ <td>&nbsp;</td>
+ <td class="tdl"><i>Native Name of Chief in <br />
+                    Possession in 1855.</i></td>
+ <td class="tdl"><i>Name of chief in <br />
+                    Possession in 1869.</i></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+ <td class="tdl">Annie Pepple</td>
+ <td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+ <td class="tdl">Elolly Pepple</td>
+ <td class="tdl">Ja Ja.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+ <td class="tdl">Captain Hart</td>
+ <td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+ <td class="tdl">Apho Dappa</td>
+ <td class="tdl">Still alive.</td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+ <td class="tdl">Adda Allison</td>
+ <td>&nbsp;</td>
+ <td class="tdl">Generally called Addah. </td>
+ <td class="tdl">&nbsp;&nbsp;"&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+ <td class="tdl">Manilla Pepple</td>
+ <td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td>
+ <td class="tdl">Erinashaboo</td>
+ <td class="tdl">Warrabo.</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td align="left" valign="middle" style="white-space: nowrap">
+    Oko Jumbo<br />
+    Jim Banago</td>
+  <td valign="middle" class="tdl" style="white-space: nowrap; font-size: 30pt">}</td>
+  <td align="left" valign="middle" style="white-space: nowrap">
+    Advisers to the regents,<br />
+    both wealthy men.</td>
+   <td align="left" valign="middle" style="white-space: nowrap">
+    Still alive.<br />
+    Squeeze Banago.</td>
+   </tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>The above lists show in a very marked manner the favourable side of
+domestic slavery; every one of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_522" id="Page_522">[Pg 522]</a></span> above chiefs were bought slaves or
+the sons of bought slaves, and in that case would be Bonny free. Ja Ja
+was bought by Adda Allison, and by him presented to Elolly Pepple, the
+name Ja Ja signifying a present in some native language in the
+hinterland of Bonny. Oko Jumbo was a slave bought by Manilla Pepple.
+Captain Hart was a slave bought from the Okrika people, and had been
+head slave of the late King Dapho. The others I am not sure about, but
+Squeeze Banago and Warrabo may have been Bonny free, though I have my
+doubts, but in no case from 1855 up to this date, 1869, had a son
+inherited from his father. I don&rsquo;t wish to be understood never did;
+because cases have occurred, and did occur during this time, where the
+son followed the father, but in these six principal Houses the chief was
+not the son of the former head of the House. A House, in native
+parlance, meant a number of petty chiefs congregated together for mutual
+protection, owning allegiance generally to the richest and most
+intelligent one amongst them, whom they called their father, and the
+Europeans called a chief. A House could be formed as Oko Jumbo formed
+his. He, as I have said above, was a bought slave, yet, by his superior
+intelligence and industry, he amassed, in early life, great wealth, was
+able to buy numerous slaves, some of whom showed similar aptitude to
+himself, to whom he showed the same encouragement that his master had
+shown him, and allowed them to trade on their own account. These men in
+their turn bought slaves, and allowed them similar privileges. This kind
+of evolution went on with uninterrupted success until Oko Jumbo, after
+twenty years&rsquo; trading, found himself at the head of five or six hundred
+slaves; for, according to country law, all the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_523" id="Page_523">[Pg 523]</a></span> slaves bought by his
+favoured slaves (now become petty chiefs or head boys) belonged to him
+as he belonged to Manilla Pepple; but owing to his accumulated riches
+and numerous followers he was beginning to take rank as a chief and head
+of a House. One must not think that the assistance given by an owner of
+slaves to here and there one, as described above, is all pure
+philanthropy; it is nothing of the kind, for for every hundred pounds
+worth of trade the slave does on his own account nowadays means Ŗ25 into
+the coffers of his master. In the early sixties this profit was not so
+great, but it represented in those days a ten to fifteen per cent.
+commission to the head of the House.</p>
+
+<p>There were five kinds of commission paid by the European traders to the
+heads of Houses. There were Ex Bar, Custom Bar, Work Bar, Gentlemen&rsquo;s
+Dash and Boys&rsquo; Dash, and as a slave who had been allowed to trade by his
+master rose in the social scale he marked the different stages he passed
+through by being allowed gradually to claim these various commissions on
+his own oil from the Europeans; thus at first he would get only the
+boys&rsquo; dash, = 1 pes of small Manchester cloth, value about 2s., and a
+fisherman&rsquo;s red cap, worth about 3d. The latter was supposed to go to
+his pull-away boys to buy palm wine. The second stage in his progress
+would be marked by his being allowed to take the gentlemen&rsquo;s dash,
+consisting of two pes of cloth, value 2s. 6d. each. The third he would
+be allowed to receive a portion of the work bar on his oil, sometimes
+only a third, gradually increasing until he would be allowed to claim
+the whole work bar. On arriving at this latter stage he would be
+expected to provide a war canoe and men and arms for the same, ready at
+any moment to turn out and fight for the general good<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_524" id="Page_524">[Pg 524]</a></span> of the country or
+to take part in any quarrel between his master and any other chief in
+Bonny, or to attend his master with it when he wished to visit any small
+country and make a little naval demonstration if these people had been a
+little slack in paying their debts. In course of time, this man, having
+supplied a war canoe, would aspire to being recognised as a chief, and
+thus be entitled to wear an eagle&rsquo;s feather in his hat. To arrive at
+this stage he would have to make some payments to the principal Ju-Ju
+men of the town, and if he never had been at war, and thus missed the
+opportunity of cutting an enemy&rsquo;s head off, he must purchase a slave for
+this purpose and cut the poor creature&rsquo;s head off in cold blood in the
+Ju-Ju house. This function was rigorously insisted upon by the Ju-Ju
+men, and under no circumstances would they allow a man to become a chief
+who had not cut a man&rsquo;s head off, either in war or in cold blood. After
+this ceremony, the new-made chief would be duly introduced, at a public
+meeting, to all the other chiefs, and the next day several brother
+chiefs would accompany him round to the various trading ships in the
+port, to intimate to the Europeans that he was a full chief, and
+entitled to receive all the work bar, ex bar, gentlemen&rsquo;s dash and boys&rsquo;
+dash that a chief was entitled to. I have previously mentioned custom
+bar; this originally was paid only to the king, and consisted of one
+iron bar upon every puncheon of oil bought by the European trader; in
+early days the king used to put a boy on board each ship to collect this
+toll, but in course of time found that he was more sure to be honestly
+dealt with if he left the white man to pay him occasionally what was due
+to him, than to receive it daily through his bar-boy. On the deposition
+of King Pepple, the custom bar was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_525" id="Page_525">[Pg 525]</a></span> collected by the four regents, whose
+descendants demanded it as a right, even after the return of the king,
+and continued to get it, until a few years ago, when all these bars were
+abolished in Bonny by mutual consent, and in their place was paid
+&ldquo;topping,&rdquo; varying from time to time, according to the saneness of the
+white traders, from twenty to thirty per cent. on the price of the oil,
+gentlemen&rsquo;s and boys&rsquo; dash still being continued.</p>
+
+<p>Referring back to the head-cutting ceremony, I must here mention a
+curious fact, when one remembers the savage state of these people, that
+I have known many Bonny men who were in a position to be made chiefs,
+and had conformed to all the preliminary forms, but who shirked the head
+cutting in cold blood, preferring thus to continue head boys only, until
+forced by the chiefs (generally instigated by the Ju-Ju men) to complete
+the ceremony. One in particular, named Jungo, I remember, who at the
+time of the civil war in Bonny in 1869 had been for some time eligible
+to become a chief, yet shirked the head cutting; he was amongst those
+who followed Ja Ja in his retreat to the Ekomtoro, afterwards called the
+Opobo; it was not until some years after arriving in the Opobo that some
+Ju-Ju priest remembered that Jungo had not distinguished himself during
+the war, and that he had yet to perform his head cutting. Poor Jungo was
+one of the mildest natured black men I have ever known, and tried all
+kinds of schemes to get out of the ordeal, even offering to give up some
+of his acquired rights, but public opinion and the Ju-Ju priests were
+too much for him, and the slave to be sacrificed was bought, and the
+ceremony carried out by Jungo; but he was such a poor performer that he
+unintentionally caused considerably more pain to his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_526" id="Page_526">[Pg 526]</a></span> victim than
+necessary, for Jungo tried to do the terrible deed by striking with his
+face turned the other way, the victim absolutely cursing him for his
+bungling. This latter episode may, perhaps, be put down as a traveller&rsquo;s
+yarn, but it is not at all to be wondered at, when it is known that
+these poor wretches are made drunk previous to being decapitated.</p>
+
+<p>Having described how a slave might become a chief, I will now describe
+how one became the head of a House or chief, and afterwards made himself
+a king, and one of the most powerful in this part of Africa.</p>
+
+<p>When Elolly Pepple died (some say he was poisoned), shortly after the
+return of King Pepple in 1861, the Annie Pepple House was for some time
+left without a head. The various chiefs held repeated meetings, and the
+generally coveted honour did not seem to tempt any of them; by right of
+seniority a chief named Uranta (about the freest man in the House, some
+asserted he was absolutely free), was offered the place, but he, for
+private reasons of his own, refused. After Uranta there were Annie
+Stuart, Black Foobra and Warrasoo, all men of some considerable riches
+and consideration, but they also shirked the responsibility, for Elolly
+had been a very big trader, and owed the white men, it was said, at the
+time of his death, a thousand or fifteen hundred puncheons of oil,
+equivalent to between ten and fifteen thousand pounds sterling, and none
+of the foremost men of the house dare tackle the settlement of such a
+large debit account, fearing that the late chief had not left sufficient
+behind him to settle up with, without supplementing it with their own
+savings, which might end in bankruptcy for them, and their final
+downfall from the headship. At this time there was in the House a young<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_527" id="Page_527">[Pg 527]</a></span>
+man who had not very long been made a chief, though he had, for a
+considerable number of years, been a very good trader, and was much
+respected by the white traders for his honesty and the dependence they
+could place in him to strictly adhere to any promise he made in trade
+matters. This young chief was Ja Ja, and though he was one of the
+youngest chiefs in the house, he was unanimously elected to fill the
+office. He, however, did not immediately accept, though his being
+unanimously elected amounted almost to his being forced to accept.</p>
+
+<p>He first visited <i>seriatim</i> each white trader, counted book (as they
+call going through the accounts of a House), and found that though there
+was a very large debit against the late chief, there was also a large
+credit, as a set off, in the way of sub-chief&rsquo;s work bars and the late
+Elolly&rsquo;s own work bars. At the same time, he arranged with each
+supercargo the order in which he would pay them off, commencing with
+those who were nearing the end of their voyage, and getting a promise
+from each that if he settled according to promise they would get their
+successor to give him an equal amount of credit that they themselves had
+given the late Elolly. A few days after, at a public meeting of the
+chiefs of the Annie Pepple House, he intimated his readiness to accept
+the headship of the House, distinctly informing them that, as they had
+elected him themselves, they must assist him in upholding his authority
+over them as a body, which would be no easy task for him when there were
+so many older and richer chiefs in the House who were more entitled than
+he was to the post. The older chiefs, only too delighted to have found
+in Ja Ja some one to take the responsibility of the late chief&rsquo;s debts
+and the troubles of chieftainship off their shoulders, were prepared,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_528" id="Page_528">[Pg 528]</a></span>
+and did solemnly swear, to assist him with their moral support, taking
+care not to pledge themselves to assist him in any of the financial
+affairs of the House.</p>
+
+<p>Ja Ja had not been many months head of the Annie Pepple House before he
+began to show the old chiefs what kind of metal he was made of; for
+during the first twelve months he had selected from amongst the late
+Elolly&rsquo;s slaves no less than eighteen or twenty young men, who had
+already amassed a little wealth, and whom he thought capable of being
+trusted to trade on their own account, bought canoes for them, took them
+to the European traders, got them to advance each of these young men
+from five to ten puncheons worth of goods, he himself standing guarantee
+for them. This operation had the effect of making Ja Ja immediately
+popular amongst all classes of the slaves of the late chief. At the same
+time, the slaves of the old chief of the House began to see that there
+was a man at the head of the House who would set a good example to their
+immediate masters. Some of these young men are now wealthy chiefs in
+Opobo, and as evidence that they had been well chosen, Ja Ja was never
+called upon to fulfil his guarantee.</p>
+
+<p>Two years after Ja Ja was placed at the head of the House the late
+Elolly&rsquo;s debts were all cleared off, no white trader having been
+detained beyond the date Ja Ja had promised the late chief&rsquo;s debts
+should be paid by. In consideration for the prompt manner in which Ja Ja
+had paid up, he received from each supercargo whom the late chief had
+dealt with a present varying from five to ten per cent. on the amount
+paid.</p>
+
+<p>From this date Ja Ja never looked back, becoming the most popular chief
+in Bonny amongst the white men, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_529" id="Page_529">[Pg 529]</a></span> the idol of his own people, but
+looked upon with jealousy by the Manilla Pepple House, to which belonged
+the successful slave, Oko Jumbo, who was now, both in riches and power,
+the equal of Ja Ja, though never his equal in popularity amongst the
+Europeans. Though there was a king in Bonny, and Warribo was the head of
+the Manilla House, <i>id est</i>, the king&rsquo;s House, Oko Jumbo and Ja Ja were
+looked upon by every one as being the rulers of Bonny. The demon of
+jealousy was at work, and in the private councils of the Manilla House
+it was decided that Ja Ja must be pulled down, but the only means of
+doing it was a civil war. The risks of this Oko Jumbo, Warribo and the
+king did not care to face, as though the Oko Jumbo party was most
+numerous, each side was equally supplied with big guns and rifles up to
+a short time before the end of 1868, when two European traders, on their
+way home, picked up a number of old 32 lb. carronades at Sierra Leone,
+and shipped the same down to Oko Jumbo. This sudden accession of war
+material, of course, put him in a position to provoke Ja Ja, and he cast
+about for a <i>causus belli</i>, but Ja Ja was an astute diplomatist, and
+managed to steer clear of all his opponent&rsquo;s pitfalls. A very small
+matter is often seized upon by natives as a means to provoke a war, and
+in this case the cause of quarrel was found in &ldquo;that a woman of the
+Annie Pepple House had drawn water from some pond belonging to the
+Manilla Pepple House.&rdquo; This was thought quite sufficient. A most
+insulting message was sent to Ja Ja, intimating that the time had come
+when nothing but a fight could settle their differences. His reply was
+characteristic of the man; he reminded them that he had no wish to
+fight, was not prepared, and, furthermore, that neither he, nor they,
+had<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_530" id="Page_530">[Pg 530]</a></span> paid their debts to the Europeans. The latter part of the message
+was too much for an irascible, one-eyed old fighting chief named Jack
+Wilson Pepple, so off he marched to his own house, and fired the first
+round shot into the Annie Pepple part of the town, and civil war was
+commenced. It was a bit overdue, the last having taken place in 1855. As
+a rule, they come round about every ten years, like the epidemics of
+malignant bilious fever of the coast.</p>
+
+<p>The Annie Pepple House was not slow to reply, but Ja Ja knew he was
+over-matched, both in guns and numbers of fighting men, so he only kept
+up a semblance of a fight sufficiently long to allow him to make a
+retreat to a small town called Tombo, in the next creek to the Bonny
+creek, only about three miles from Bonny by water, less by land.</p>
+
+<p>From here he was in a better position to parley with his opponents, and
+make terms if possible, but he soon saw that no arrangement less than
+the complete humiliation of himself and people was going to satisfy his
+enemies, for besides the jealousy of Oko Jumbo, the young King George
+Pepple, son of the gentleman who had been to England and brought out the
+European suite, had not forgotten that the Annie Pepple house,
+represented by the late Elolly, had been the chief opponents of his late
+father when he returned to Bonny in 1861 after his exile.</p>
+
+<p>This young man had been educated in England, and I must say did credit
+to whoever had had charge of his education. He both spoke and wrote
+English correctly, and had his father been able to hand over to him the
+kingship as he had received it in 1837, he might have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_531" id="Page_531">[Pg 531]</a></span> blossomed into a
+model king in West Africa; but, alas! the only thing he inherited from
+his father beyond the kingship was debt&mdash;king only in name, receiving
+only so much of his dues as the principal chiefs liked to allow him, not
+having the means of being a large trader, looked upon with scant favour
+by the Europeans, and owing to his English education lacking the rude
+ability of such men as Oko Jumbo and Ja Ja to make a position for
+himself, he became but a puppet in the hands of his principal chiefs; a
+fate, I am afraid, which has generally befallen the native of these
+parts who has attempted to retain any of the teachings of Christianity
+on his return amongst his pagan brethren.</p>
+
+<p>Few people can understand the reason of this. It is simply another proof
+of the wonderful power of Ju-Ju amongst these people, for it is to that
+occult influence that I trace the general ill-success of the educated
+native of the Delta in his own country,&mdash;unless he returns to all the
+pagan gods of his forefathers, and until he does so many channels of
+prosperity are completely closed to him.</p>
+
+<p>I am afraid I have wandered a little from my subject, but in doing so I
+hope I have made some things clear that otherwise might have appeared a
+little mixed from an European point of view, so will now return to Ja
+Ja.</p>
+
+<p>From Tombo Town Ja Ja communicated with the Bonny Court of Equity, and a
+truce was arranged, native meetings followed, and after several weeks of
+palavering, no better terms were offered Ja Ja than had before been
+offered to him. The white men interested themselves in the matter, and
+held meetings innumerable, until at last they were as divided as the
+natives. With the exception of one or two at the outside, they
+understood so little of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_532" id="Page_532">[Pg 532]</a></span> the occult workings of native squabbles that
+they could do little to smooth matters over. In the meantime, Ja Ja had
+been studying a masterly plan of retreat from Tombo Town to a river
+called the Ekomtoro, also called the Rio Condé in ancient maps.</p>
+
+<p>Once in this river, by fortifying two or three points he would be able
+to completely turn the tables on his enemies by barring their way to the
+Eboe markets, but to get there he would have to pass one, if not two,
+fortified points held by the Manilla Pepple people. Besides this, what
+would his position be when there, if he could not get any white men
+there to trade with? Luckily for him, there dropped from the clouds the
+very man he wanted. This was a trader named Charley, who had been in the
+Bonny River some years before, and was now established at Brass on his
+own account. At an interview with Ja Ja, that did not last half an hour,
+the whole plan of campaign was arranged. Charley returned to Brass and
+confided the scheme to his friend, Archie McEachan, who decided to join
+him. Thus Ja Ja had the certainty of support in his new home if he could
+only get there, and get there he did.</p>
+
+<p>Being shortly after joined by these two white traders trade was opened
+in the Ekomtoro, and on Christmas Day, 1870, Ekomtoro was named the
+&#334;p&#335;b&#333; River, after &#334;p&#335;b&#333;, the founder of the town of
+&ldquo;Grand Bonny,&rdquo; as Bonny men delight to call their mud and thatch
+capital.</p>
+
+<p>The name of &#334;p&#335;b&#333; was chosen by Ja Ja himself. To students of
+the peculiar relationship existing between a bought slave and his
+master, the latter looked up to and called father by his slave, this
+choice of the name of a man<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_533" id="Page_533">[Pg 533]</a></span> who had been a great man in his father&rsquo;s
+house, <i>id est</i>, his master&rsquo;s, demonstrates in a striking manner the
+veneration a bought slave, under the system of domestic slavery in these
+parts, in many cases displays, equalling in every respect that of the
+free-born direct descendant.</p>
+
+<p>The tables were now turned with a vengeance, and Ja Ja remained the
+master of the position, and for several years kept the Bonny men out of
+the Eboe and Qua markets; eventually agreeing to have the differences
+between himself and the Manilla Pepple people settled by the arbitration
+of the New Calabar and the Okrika chiefs with Commodore Commerell and
+Mr. Charles Livingstone, Her Britannic Majesty&rsquo;s Consul for the Bights
+of Benin and Biafra, as referees.</p>
+
+<p>Evidently the arbitrators considered that Ja Ja was in no way to blame
+for the civil war that had taken place in Bonny, for in the division of
+the markets that had been common property when Ja Ja and his people had
+formed an integral part of the Bonny nation, the greater part was given
+to Ja Ja and his right to remain where he had established himself fully
+recognised.</p>
+
+<p>Immediately on this settlement being come to, Her Britannic Majesty&rsquo;s
+Consul entered into a commercial treaty with Ja Ja recognising him as
+King of Opobo. This treaty was signed January 4th, 1873, the deed of
+arbitration having been signed the day previous.</p>
+
+<p>In giving my readers the history of this man up to this point, I have
+always had in my mind the question of domestic slavery, being anxious to
+give its most favourable side as fair an exposition as its unfavourable.</p>
+
+<p>I have in previous pages mentioned some of the latter, but those remarks
+only dealt with the early stages of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_534" id="Page_534">[Pg 534]</a></span> slave&rsquo;s condition after capture
+in the interior and his risks of arriving alive at his destination. I
+have now to deal with him as a chattel of one of the petty chiefs,
+chiefs or kings of Western Africa, admitting that his chances of
+improving his condition are manifold, his life until he gets his foot on
+the first rung of the ladder of advancement is terrible; he never knows
+from one moment to another when he may be re-sold, he is badly fed, in
+fact, some masters never feed their slaves at all when they are not
+actually employed pulling a canoe or doing other labour such as making
+farm, cutting sticks for house-building, &amp;c. Failing these employments,
+the slave has all his time to himself. His chances of putting this time
+to any profit are very few in the Oil Rivers; and should he by chance
+get some employment from a white man, his owner takes good care to
+receive his pay, the only thing the slave getting out of it being three
+full meals a day for a few days, making the starvation fare he is
+accustomed to the harder to bear afterwards. Were it not for their
+adopted mother, <i>id est</i>, the woman they are given to on being bought,
+their state would be absolutely unbearable in times of forced idleness;
+but these women almost invariably have considerable affection for their
+numerous adopted children, and though their means may be very limited,
+they generally manage to supply them with at least one meal a day in
+return for the many little services they perform for them, such as
+fetching water, carrying firewood in from the bush, selling their few
+fowls and eggs to the white men, and doing any other little matter of
+trade for them.</p>
+
+<p>Even those slaves who have been lucky enough to fall into the hands of a
+master who sees that they at least do<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_535" id="Page_535">[Pg 535]</a></span> not starve, have along with their
+less lucky brethren to put up with the ungovernable fits of temper which
+some of these black slave owners display at times, in many cases
+inflicting the most terrible punishment for trivial offences, as often
+as not only on suspicion that the slave was guilty. Amongst the numerous
+punishments I have known inflicted are the following.</p>
+
+<p>Ear cutting in its various stages, from clipping to total dismemberment;
+crucifixion round a large cask; extraction of teeth; suspension by the
+thumbs; Chilli peppers pounded and stuffed up the nostrils, and forced
+into the eyes and ears; fastening the victim to a post driven into the
+beach at low water and leaving him there to be drowned with the rising
+tide, or to be eaten by the sharks or crocodiles piecemeal; heavily
+ironed and chained to a post in their master&rsquo;s compound, without any
+covering over their heads, kept in this state for weeks, with so little
+food allowed them that cases have been known where the irons have
+dropped off them, but they, poor wretches, were too weak to escape, as
+they had been reduced to living skeletons; impaling on stakes; forcing a
+long steel ram rod through the body until it appeared through the top of
+the skull. The above are a few of the punishments that even to this day
+are practised, not only in the Niger Delta, but in the outlying
+districts of the West African colonies. It is very rare that the
+Government officials get to know anything about them; and when they do,
+it is difficult to procure a conviction owing to the fear natives have
+to come forward and act as witnesses.</p>
+
+<p>Besides the punishments enumerated above, there are many others, some of
+which are too horrible to be described here.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_536" id="Page_536">[Pg 536]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>One often hears people who know a little about West Africa talk about
+native law, but they forget to mention, if they happen to know it, that
+in a powerful chief&rsquo;s house there is only one exponent of the law, and
+that is the chief; for him native law only begins to have effect when it
+is a matter between himself and some other chief, or a combination of
+chiefs, whose power is equal or superior to his own.</p>
+
+<p>As an instance of the form which native justice (?) sometimes takes, I
+will relate what took place some years ago in one of the oil rivers. An
+old and very powerful chief had a young wife of whom he was immoderately
+jealous. Amongst his favourite attendants was a young male slave, a mere
+boy, to whom he had given many tokens of his favour; but the demon of
+jealousy whispered to him that his young slave boy was looked upon with
+too much favour by his young wife&mdash;herself little more than a child.
+That a slave of his should dare to cast his eyes on his wife was more
+than this terrible old chief could stand, so he decided to put an end at
+once to the love dreams of his slave, and at the same time point out to
+any other enterprising slave of his how dangerous it was to aspire to
+the forbidden favours of a chief&rsquo;s wife. So he ordered his young wife to
+cook him a specially good palm oil chop, a native dish of great repute,
+for his breakfast the following morning. The next morning when he sat
+down to his breakfast his favourite slave was behind his chair in
+attendance; his young wife was present to see her lord and master was
+properly served&mdash;the wives do not sit at table with their husbands&mdash;when
+suddenly the chief turned in his chair and ordered his young slave to
+sit at table with him. Naturally the slave hesitated to accept such an
+unheard-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_537" id="Page_537">[Pg 537]</a></span>of honour as to sit at table with his master; quickly scenting
+something terrible was going to befall him, he attempted to leave the
+apartment, but other slaves quickly barred his way, and he was brought
+back trembling with fright, the beads of perspiration rolling down his
+face and body in little rivulets, and placed in a chair opposite his
+master, who, all this time had not displayed any signs of anger;
+gradually the boy began to regain somewhat his scattered senses. Finding
+his master displayed no signs of anger, he began to do as he was
+ordered, the chief at the same time plied him with repeated doses of
+spirits, till at last the boy began to chatter, and attacked the food
+with a will. At length, having eaten and drunk till he could scarcely
+stand, his master asked him had he enjoyed his young mistress&rsquo;s cooking.
+On his replying yes, the chief called for a revolver, and telling him it
+was the last thing he ever would enjoy of his young mistress, he emptied
+the six chambers of the revolver into the poor lad&rsquo;s head; then having
+ordered his body to be thrown into the river, went on with the usual
+occupations of the day, never having once mentioned the reason of his
+act to his people nor explaining his meaning to his young wife.</p>
+
+<p>To the native mind the chief&rsquo;s actions spoke as plainly as possible; but
+not having spoken, his wife&rsquo;s family could not, had they wished, have
+made a palaver about his wife&rsquo;s good fame; for though the chief was
+originally a bought slave or nigger himself, his young wife was country
+free, her family being sufficiently powerful to have made things
+uncomfortable for him if he had accused her without proof of guilt. Had
+she been a slave, the chances are she would have been slaughtered.</p>
+
+<p>I do not wish to convey to my readers the idea that all<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_538" id="Page_538">[Pg 538]</a></span> chiefs in the
+Niger Delta are cruel monsters, but they all have power of life and
+death over their slaves; the mildest of them occasionally may find
+themselves so placed that they are compelled in conformity with some
+Ju-Ju right to sacrifice a slave or two. The ordinary punishments for
+theft and insubordination practised amongst these people are often
+terribly cruel and unnecessarily severe.</p>
+
+<p>Of course the Government of the Niger Coast Protectorate is steadily
+breaking down these savage customs, wherever and whenever they hear of
+them being practised within their jurisdiction; but the formation of the
+country, the dense forests, and the superstition of the people, all
+assist in keeping most cases from coming to their knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>Before taking leave of the Bonny people, I must not omit to mention that
+the custom of destroying twin children and children who had the
+misfortune to be born with teeth was, and is, a custom still observed
+amongst them. Another custom prevalent amongst these people, and common
+more or less to all other natives in the Delta, was the destroying of
+any woman if she became the mother of more than four children.</p>
+
+<h3>ANDONI RIVER AND ITS INHABITANTS.</h3>
+
+<p>This river lies a few miles to the east of Bonny River. The inhabitants
+of the lower part of the river are called Andoni men, and during the
+slave-dealing days these people were as well known to Europeans as the
+Bonny men, but, owing in a great measure to the much deeper water at the
+entrance to Bonny River than was to be found on the Andoni bar, the
+former river offering thus more facilities<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_539" id="Page_539">[Pg 539]</a></span> for deep-draughted ships,
+the traders gradually deserted the Andoni altogether, though these
+people were, I believe, the original owners of the land now claimed by
+the Bonny people as forming the Bonny kingdom. The Andoni men, being
+deserted by the European traders, gradually became a race of fishermen
+and small farmers. The Bonny men, having become the dominant race, and
+not allowing the Andonis any intercourse with the white traders in their
+river, the Andoni men protested against this treatment, and waged war
+against the Bonny men on many occasions in the early part of this
+century. The last war between these two peoples continued for some
+years; the Bonny men not always getting the best of these encounters,
+were very glad to come to terms with them in 1846, a treaty being then
+signed between the two tribes, wherein the Andoni men were secured equal
+rights with the Bonny men, but the commercial enterprise of these people
+seems to have died out. Yet the King of Doni Town, as their principal
+town is called in old maps, was reported by traders, who visited him in
+1699, as being a man of some intelligence, speaking the Portuguese
+language fluently, and having some knowledge of the Roman Catholic
+faith, yet still adhering to all the customs of Ju-Juism, furthermore
+describing the people as being such implicit believers in their Ju-Ju
+that they would kill any one who touched any of the idols in their Ju-Ju
+house.</p>
+
+<p>This may have been true at the time, but about five and twenty years ago
+I visited the town of Doni, as also their Ju-Ju house, and handled some
+of their idols, and they showed no irritation at my so doing. I had, of
+course, asked permission to do so of the Ju-Ju man who was showing me
+round. I have no doubt they would resent<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_540" id="Page_540">[Pg 540]</a></span> any one interfering with them
+without their permission. When I visited these people they gave me the
+idea that they had never seen a white man, or had any communication with
+him, for I vainly searched for any evidence that the white man had ever
+been established in their river. From all I was able to gather of their
+manners and customs I found that they differed little from any of their
+neighbours, though they are always described by interested parties as
+being inveterate cannibals and dangerous people for strangers to visit.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 343px;" id="IMG556A"><span class="totoi"><a href="#toi">ToList</a></span>
+<img src="images/ill-556a.jpg" width="343" height="650" alt="Ja Ja Making Ju Ju" title="Ja Ja Making Ju Ju" />
+<span class="caption"><span class="smcap">Ja Ja Making Ju Ju</span></span>
+<span class="facingright"><i>[To face page 540</i></span>
+</div>
+
+<h3>OPOBO RIVER.</h3>
+
+<p>After leaving Andoni, and continuing down the coast some ten or fifteen
+miles, the Opobo discharges itself into the sea. This river, marked in
+ancient maps as the Rio Condé and Ekomtoro, is the most direct way to
+the Ibo palm-oil-producing country.</p>
+
+<p>This river was well known to the Portuguese and Spanish slave traders,
+but as Bonny became the great centre for the slave trade, this river was
+completely deserted and forgotten to such an extent that, though an
+opening in the coast line was shown on the English charts where this
+river was supposed to be, it was never thought worth the trouble of
+naming, and remained quite unknown to the English traders until it came
+suddenly into repute, owing to Ja Ja establishing himself here in 1870.</p>
+
+<p>The people here are the Bonny men and their descendants who followed Ja
+Ja&rsquo;s fortunes, therefore their manners and customs are identical with
+those of Bonny.</p>
+
+<p>The physical appearance of these people is somewhat better than that of
+the Bonny men, owing, I think, to the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_541" id="Page_541">[Pg 541]</a></span> position of their town, which is
+built on a better soil, and raised a few feet higher than that of Bonny
+from the level of the river, also their uninterrupted successful trade
+since their arrival in this country has doubtless not a little
+contributed to their improved condition, while, on the other hand, the
+Bonny men suffered severely during the years from 1869 to 1873, owing to
+Ja Ja barring their way to the markets, and they seem never to have
+recovered themselves.</p>
+
+<p>Trading stations of the white men are at the mouth of the river and at
+Eguanga, the latter a station a few miles above Opobo town.</p>
+
+<p>Opobo became, under King Ja Ja&rsquo;s firm rule, one of the largest exporting
+centres of palm oil in the Delta, and for years King Ja Ja enjoyed a not
+undeserved popularity amongst the white traders who visited his river,
+but a time came when the price of palm oil fell to such a low figure in
+England that the European firms established in Opobo could not make both
+ends meet, so they intimated to King Ja Ja that they were going to
+reduce the price paid in the river, to which he replied by shipping
+large quantities of his oil to England, allowing his people only to sell
+a portion of their produce to the white men. The latter now formulated a
+scheme amongst themselves to divide equally whatever produce came into
+the river, and thus do away with competition amongst themselves. Ja Ja
+found that sending his oil to England was not quite so lucrative as he
+could wish, owing to the length of time it took to get his returns back,
+namely, about three months at the earliest, whilst by selling in the
+river he could turn over his money three or four times during that
+period. He therefore tried several means to break the white men&rsquo;s
+combination, at last hitting upon the bright idea of offering the whole
+of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_542" id="Page_542">[Pg 542]</a></span> the river&rsquo;s trade to one English house. The mere fact of his being
+able to make this offer shows the absolute power to which he had arrived
+amongst his own people. His bait took with one of the European traders;
+the latter could not resist the golden vision of the yellow grease thus
+displayed before him by the astute Ja Ja, who metaphorically dangled
+before his eyes hundreds of canoes laden with the coveted palm oil. A
+bargain was struck, and one fine morning the other white traders in the
+river woke up to the fact that their combination was at an end, for on
+taking their morning spy round the river through their binoculars (no
+palm oil trader that respects himself being without a pair of these and
+a tripod telescope, for more minute observation of his opponents&rsquo;
+doings) they saw a fleet of over a hundred canoes round the renegade&rsquo;s
+wharf, and for nearly two years this trader scooped all the trade. The
+fat was fairly in the fire now, and the other white traders sent a
+notice to Ja Ja that they intended to go to his markets. Ja Ja replied
+that he held a treaty, signed in 1873, by Mr. Consul Charles
+Livingstone, Her Britannic Majesty&rsquo;s Consul, that empowered him to stop
+any white traders from establishing factories anywhere above
+Hippopotamus Creek, and under which he was empowered to stop and hold
+any vessel for a fine of one hundred puncheons of oil. In June, 1885,
+the traders applied to Mr. Consul White, who informed King Ja Ja that
+the Protectorate treaty meant freedom of navigation and trade.</p>
+
+<p>So the traders finding their occupation gone, decided amongst themselves
+to take a trip to Ja Ja&rsquo;s markets, the only sensible thing they had done
+since the trouble commenced. This was a step in the right direction,
+namely,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_543" id="Page_543">[Pg 543]</a></span> by attempting to break down the curse of Western Africa <i>id
+est</i>, the power of the middle-man.</p>
+
+<p>The names of the four traders who first attempted to trade in the Ibo
+markets of King Ja Ja deserve to be recorded, for their action was not
+without great risk to themselves. They were:</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="Traders">
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdl">Mr. S. B. Hall<br />
+                  Mr. Thomas Wright<br />
+                  Mr. Richard Foster</td>
+  <td valign="middle" class="tdl" style="white-space: nowrap; font-size: 42pt">}</td>
+  <td> English</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td colspan="3">Mr. A. E. Brunschweiler&mdash;Swiss.<br /></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>To these must be added the name of Mr. F. D. Mitchell, who, though not
+in the first trip to the markets, joined in the subsequent attempt to
+establish business amongst the interior tribes. Their reception at the
+markets was not altogether a success, owing to the reception committee,
+or whatever represented it in those parts, being packed with either Ja
+Ja&rsquo;s own people or Ibos favourable to him.</p>
+
+<p>This good beginning was continued under great difficulties by these
+first traders with little profit or success for about two years, owing
+to the great power of Ja Ja amongst the interior tribes and the pressure
+he was able to bring to bear on the Ibo and Kwo natives.</p>
+
+<p>In the meantime, clouds had been gathering round the head of King Ja Ja.
+His wonderful success since 1870 had gradually obscured his former keen
+perception of how far his rights as a petty African king would be
+recognised by the English Government under the new order of things just
+being inaugurated in the Oil Rivers; honestly believing that in signing
+the Protectorate treaty of December 19th, 1884, with the <i>sixth</i> clause
+crossed out, he had retained the right given him by the commercial
+treaty of 1873 to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_544" id="Page_544">[Pg 544]</a></span> keep white men from proceeding to his markets, he got
+himself entangled in a number of disputes which culminated in his being
+taken out of the Opobo River in September, 1887, by Her Britannic
+Majesty&rsquo;s Consul, Mr. H. H. Johnston, C.B., now Sir Harry Johnston, and
+conveyed to Accra, where he was tried before Admiral Sir Hunt Grubbe,
+who condemned him to five years&rsquo; deportation to the West Indies, making
+him an allowance of about Ŗ800 per annum and returning a fine of thirty
+puncheons of palm oil, value about Ŗ450 in those days, which the late
+Consul Hewett had imposed upon him, a fine that the Admiral did not
+think the Consul was warranted in having imposed.</p>
+
+<p>Poor Ja Ja did not live to return to his country and his people whom he
+loved so well, and whose condition he had done so much to improve,
+though at times his rule often became despotic. One trait of his
+character may interest the public just now, as the Liquor Question in
+West Africa is so much <i>en evidence</i>, and that is, that he was a strict
+teetotaler himself and inculcated the same principles in all his chiefs.
+In his eighteen years&rsquo; rule as a king in Opobo he reduced two of his
+chiefs for drunkenness&mdash;one he sent to live in exile in a small fishing
+village for the rest of his life, the other, who had aggravated his
+offence by assaulting a white trader, he had deprived of all outward
+signs of a chief and put in a canoe to paddle as a pull-away boy within
+an hour of his committing the offence.</p>
+
+<p>During the Ashantee campaign of 1873 Sir Garnet Wolseley sent Captain
+Nicol to the Oil Rivers to raise a contingent of friendly natives; on
+his arrival in Bonny he was not immediately successful, so continued on
+to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_545" id="Page_545">[Pg 545]</a></span> Opobo, where he was the guest of the writer. Upon Captain Nicol
+explaining his errand, Ja Ja furnished him with over sixty of his
+war-boys, most of whom had seen considerable fighting in the late war
+between Bonny and Opobo. The news reaching Bonny of what Ja Ja had done,
+put the Bonny men upon their mettle, and when Captain Nicol reached
+Bonny on his way back to Ashantee, he found a further contingent waiting
+for him from the Bonny chiefs.</p>
+
+<p>This combined contingent did good work against the Ashantees, being
+favourably mentioned in despatches. Poor Captain Nicol, who raised them,
+and commanded them in most of their engagements with the enemy, was, I
+regret to say, killed whilst gallantly leading them on in one of the
+final rushes just before Coomassie was taken.</p>
+
+<p>In recognition of the above services of his men, Her Most Gracious
+Majesty Queen Victoria presented King Ja Ja with a sword of honour, the
+King of Bonny receiving one at the same time.</p>
+
+<p>Shipwrecked people were always sure of kindly treatment if they fell
+into the hands of Ja Ja&rsquo;s subjects, for he had given strict orders to
+his people dwelling on the sea-shore to assist vessels in distress and
+convey any one cast on shore to the European factories, warning them at
+the same time on no account to touch any of their property. He was also
+the first king in the Delta to restrain his people from plundering a
+wrecked ship, though the custom had been from time immemorial that a
+vessel wrecked upon their shores belonged to them by rights as being a
+gift from their Ju-Ju&mdash;an idea held by savage people in many other parts
+of the world.</p>
+
+<p>It seems a pity that a man who had so many good<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_546" id="Page_546">[Pg 546]</a></span> qualities should have
+ended as he did. He was a man who, properly handled, could have been
+made of much use in the opening up of his country. Unfortunately, the
+late Consul Hewett was prejudiced against Ja Ja from his first interview
+with him, finding in this nigger king a man of superior natural
+abilities to his own.</p>
+
+<p>Had the late Mr. Consul Hewett had the fiftieth part of the ability in
+dealing with the natives his sub and successor, Mr. H. H. Johnston,
+showed, there would never have been any necessity to deport Ja Ja.
+Unfortunately, between Ja Ja&rsquo;s stubbornness and the late Consul Hewett&rsquo;s
+bungling, matters had come to such a pass that some decisive measures
+were actually necessary to uphold the dignity of the Consular Office.</p>
+
+<p>When Mr. H. H. Johnston succeeded the late Mr. Consul Hewett, the Opobo
+palaver was in about as muddled a state as it was possible for it to
+have got into. Matters had been in an unsatisfactory state for some
+years between King Ja Ja and the late Consul. Ja Ja had over-stepped the
+bounds of propriety in more ways than one. He tried the same tactics
+with Mr. Johnston, who to look at, is the mildest-looking little man you
+can imagine, and therefore did not fill the native&rsquo;s eye as a ruler of
+men; but Mr. Johnston very soon let Ja Ja and the natives generally see
+he was made of different stuff to his predecessor, and the first
+attempts on Ja Ja&rsquo;s part not to act up to the lines he laid down for him
+settled his fate. Mr. Johnston offered him the choice of delivering
+himself up quietly as a prisoner or being treated as an enemy of the
+Queen, his town destroyed and himself eventually captured and exiled for
+ever. He elected to give himself up, was taken to Accra and there tried
+and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_547" id="Page_547">[Pg 547]</a></span> condemned after a fair hearing. I was present myself at the trial,
+and old friend as I was to him, I don&rsquo;t think the verdict would have
+been otherwise had I been in the judge&rsquo;s place, though there were many
+extenuating circumstances in his case, all of which were fully
+considered by Admiral Hunt Grubbe in his final sentence.</p>
+
+<p>I feel confident that had Mr. Consul Johnston had the management of
+affairs in the Opobo a few years earlier, Ja Ja would never have been
+deported, and instead of having to censure him, he would have handled
+him in such a manner as to make use of his influence in furthering
+British interests. I do not think I can describe the late King Ja Ja
+better than Mr. Consul Johnston did in a letter he addressed to Lord
+Salisbury under date of September 24th, 1887, wherein he writes as
+follows:&mdash;&ldquo;Ja Ja&rsquo;s chief friends and supporters for years past have been
+the naval officers on the coast. His generous hospitality, his frank,
+engaging manner, his naīf discourse, and amusing crudities of diction
+have gained the ready sympathy of these gentlemen; no doubt Ja Ja is no
+common man, though he is in origin a runaway slave,<a name="FNanchor_89_90" id="FNanchor_89_90"></a><a href="#Footnote_89_90" class="fnanchor">[89]</a> he was cut out
+by nature for a king, and he has the instinct of rule, though it not
+unfrequently degenerates into cruel tyranny.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;His demeanour is marked by quiet dignity, and his appearance and
+conversation are impressive.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Nevertheless, I know Ja Ja to be a deliberate liar,<a name="FNanchor_90_91" id="FNanchor_90_91"></a><a href="#Footnote_90_91" class="fnanchor">[90]</a> who exhibits
+little shame or confusion when his falsehoods <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_548" id="Page_548">[Pg 548]</a></span>are exposed. He is a
+bitter and unscrupulous enemy<a name="FNanchor_91_92" id="FNanchor_91_92"></a><a href="#Footnote_91_92" class="fnanchor">[91]</a> of all who attempt to dispute his
+trade monopolies, and the five British firms whose trade he has almost
+ruined during the past two years.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>A complaint often made against the Government by merchants established
+on the West Coast of Africa is want of official protection and
+assistance; in many cases in the past this has been the case; but they
+certainly could not make this complaint during the few months that Mr.
+Consul Johnston was at the head of the Consular service in the Oil
+Rivers. I will here give a summary of what exertions were made by the
+Government to assist the merchants in their praiseworthy attempts to get
+behind the middlemen in this one river, where Ja Ja was always given the
+credit of being the head and front of the obstruction, nothing ever
+being said about the king and chiefs of Bonny, who were equally
+interested with Ja Ja in keeping the white men out of the markets, their
+principal markets being on the River Opobo.</p>
+
+<p>Owing to the energetic representations of Mr. Consul H. H. Johnston, the
+British Government placed at his disposal for the settlement of the
+market question and the Ja Ja palaver the following Government vessels,
+viz., the <i>Watchful</i>, the <i>Goshawk</i>, the <i>Alecto</i>, the <i>Acorn</i>, the
+<i>Royalist</i>, and the <i>Raleigh</i>, the latter bringing Admiral Sir Hunt
+Grubbe up from the Cape of Good Hope for the trial of King Ja Ja.</p>
+
+<p>Result: Within a very short time after the deportation of Ja Ja, all the
+firms who had been so anxious to establish<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_549" id="Page_549">[Pg 549]</a></span> in the interior markets and
+thus get behind the middlemen (without doubt the curse of the Oil Rivers
+and every part of Africa where they are tolerated) gave up trading at
+the interior markets that had caused the Government so much trouble to
+open for them, and made an agreement with the middlemen, represented in
+this case by the Bonny men and Opobo men, that they would not attempt to
+trade any more in the interior markets if the middlemen would promise to
+trade with no European firm that attempted to trade in the interior
+markets. On the writer&rsquo;s last visit to the Opobo in 1896 there was only
+one firm trading in the interior markets, and that firm was not one of
+those that were in the river at the time of the clamour for the removal
+of Ja Ja and the opening of the interior in 1887.</p>
+
+<h3>KWO IBO.</h3>
+
+<p>This river was first visited in modern days in 1871 by the late Mr.
+Archie McEachan, who found the people very troublesome to deal with, and
+did not long remain there. No doubt the people were not so easy to deal
+with as those natives that have been for some hundreds of years dealing
+with Europeans; but as he was at the same time posing as a friend and
+supporter of Ja Ja, and the oil he got in Kwo Ibo was being diverted
+from Ja Ja&rsquo;s markets, the latter no doubt exerted a certain amount of
+pressure on his friend, and aided, if he did not actually cause him to
+decide to withdraw from Kwo Ibo.</p>
+
+<p>Kwo Ibo lay fallow for some time, then one or two Sierra Leone men
+attempted to trade there, but with little success, owing to the
+influence King Ja Ja had in the country. It was not until 1880-1 that
+any sustained<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_550" id="Page_550">[Pg 550]</a></span> effort was made to trade in this river; but about this
+time a Mr. Watts established a small trading station there, and
+succeeded in creating a trade, though he had a very difficult task to
+combat the opposition of King Ja Ja, who considered he was being
+defrauded of some of his supposed just rights. Had Mr. Watts pushed his
+way into the interior markets and dealt direct with the producers, he
+would deserve the united thanks of every merchant connected with the
+trade in the Niger Delta; but he did not, and contented himself with
+buying his produce on a little better terms than he could have done in
+Opobo or Old Calabar, and created another set of middlemen, who to-day
+consider they, like their neighbours, are justified in doing their
+utmost in keeping the European out of the interior. Mr. Watts eventually
+sold out his interest in the trade of this river to the combination of
+river firms now known under the name of the African Association of
+Liverpool.</p>
+
+<p>A mission has been established here for some years and I had the
+pleasure of meeting the missionary in charge, some two years ago, on his
+way home after a long sojourn in the Kwo Ibo; his description of the
+people and of the success of his mission work was most interesting. If
+he has returned to the seat of his labours and is still alive, I can
+only wish him every success in the work in which evidently his whole
+heart was centred.</p>
+
+<p>The name Kwo Ibo, which has been given to this river, gives one the idea
+that the inhabitants are a mixture of Kwos and Ibos. This to a certain
+extent may be a very good description as regards the inhabitants of the
+upper reaches of the river, which takes its rise, so it is supposed, in
+a lake in the Ibo country, afterwards passing through<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_551" id="Page_551">[Pg 551]</a></span> the Kwo, and
+discharges itself into the sea about half-way between the east point of
+the Opobo River and the Tom Shotts Point.</p>
+
+<p>The lower part of the river is inhabited principally by Andoni men by
+origin, but calling themselves Ibenos or Ibrons.</p>
+
+<p>These people deserve a great deal of credit for the plucky manner in
+which they withstood the numerous attacks the late King Ja Ja made upon
+them, and their stubborn refusal to discontinue trading with the white
+men established in their river, though they were but ill-provided with
+arms to defend themselves. During several years they must have suffered
+severely from the repeated raids the late King Ja Ja made upon them, not
+only from losses in battle, but also in having their towns destroyed and
+many of their people carried off as prisoners. Some of the earlier raids
+made by Ja Ja, I must in fairness to him say, were to a great extent
+brought on by the actions of the Ibrons themselves, who were not slow to
+attack and slay any Opobo men they caught wandering about, if the latter
+were not in sufficient numbers to defend themselves.</p>
+
+<p>In language, these people are closely allied to the old Calabar people,
+and many of their customs show them to have had more communication with
+those people than they have had with the Andoni people, at any rate for
+many years. I find no mention amongst the writings of the early
+travellers to Western Africa of their having visited this river, nor is
+it even named on any old chart that I have consulted, though on some I
+have seen a river indicated at the spot where the Kwo Ibo enters the
+sea.</p>
+
+<p>Needless to mention, they were, and the majority are<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_552" id="Page_552">[Pg 552]</a></span> to-day, steeped in
+Ju-Juism, witchcraft, and their attendant horrors.</p>
+
+<p>The Kwo people, whose country lies on both sides of the Kwo Ibo, and
+behind the Ibenos, are the tribe from whom were drawn the supplies of
+Kwo or Kwa slaves known under the name of the Mocoes in the West Indies.</p>
+
+<h3>OLD CALABAR.</h3>
+
+<p>I now come to the last river in the Niger Coast Protectorate, both banks
+of which belong to England, the next river being the Rio del Rey, of
+which England now only claims the right bank, Germany claiming the left
+and all the territory south to the river Campo, a territory almost as
+large as, if not equal to, the whole of the Niger Coast Protectorate,
+which ought to have been English, for was it not English by right of
+commercial conquest, if by no other, and for years had been looked upon
+by the commanders of foreign naval vessels as under English influence?</p>
+
+<p>Owing to some one blundering, this nice slice of African territory was
+allowed to slip into the hands of the Germans, hence my account of the
+Oil Rivers ought to be called an account of the Oil Rivers reduced by
+Germany.</p>
+
+<p>In speaking of the inhabitants of this river, I must also include the
+people who inhabit the lower part of the Cross River. This explanation
+would not have been necessary some few years ago, but I notice the more
+recent hydrographers make the Cross River the main river and the Old
+Calabar only a tributary of that river, which is, without doubt, the
+most correct.</p>
+
+<p>The principal towns are Duke Town (where are to be found nowadays the
+headquarters of the Niger Coast<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_553" id="Page_553">[Pg 553]</a></span> Protectorate, the Presbyterian Mission,
+and the principal trading factories of the Europeans), Henshaw Town,
+Creek and Town; besides these, the various kings and chiefs have
+numberless small towns and villages in the environs. In the lower part
+of the Cross river are many fishing villages, the inhabitants of which
+are looked upon as Old Calabar people, and owing to the latter being the
+dominant race they have to-day lost, or very nearly so, any trace of
+their forefathers, who I believe to have been Kwos with a strong strain
+of Andoni blood.</p>
+
+<p>These villages did, in days anterior to the advent of the European
+traders, an immense business with the interior in dried shrimps, the
+latter being used by the natives, not only as a flavouring to their
+stews and ragouts, but as a substitute for the all necessary salt.</p>
+
+<p>The original inhabitants of the district now occupied by the Old Calabar
+people were the Akpas, whom the Calabarese drove out, and to a great
+extent afterwards absorbed. This immigration of the Calabarese is said
+to have taken place very little over one hundred and fifty years ago.
+Originally coming from the upper Ibibio district of the Cross River,
+they belong to the Efik race, and speak that language, though nowadays,
+owing to numerous intermarriages with Cameroon natives and the great
+number of slaves bought from the Cameroons district, they are of very
+mixed blood. Most of the kings and chiefs of Old Calabar owe their rank
+and position to direct descent, some of them being of ancient lineage, a
+fact of which they are very proud. In this respect they differ in a
+great measure from their neighbours in Bonny and Opobo, where, oftener
+than otherwise, the succession falls to the most influential man in the
+House, slave or free-born.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_554" id="Page_554">[Pg 554]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The principal town of these people boasted, some few years ago, of many
+very nice villa residences, belonging to the chiefs, built of wood, and
+roofed with corrugated iron, mostly erected by a Scotch carpenter, who
+had established himself in Old Calabar, and who was in great request
+amongst the chiefs as an architect and builder. Unfortunately, these
+houses being erected haphazard amongst the surrounding native-built
+houses did not lend that air of improvement to the town they might
+otherwise have done if the chiefs had studied more uniformity in the
+building of the town, and arranged for wide streets in place of alley
+ways, many of which are not wide enough to let two Calabar ladies of the
+higher rank pass one another without the risk of their finery being
+daubed with streaks of yellow mud from the adjacent walls.</p>
+
+<p>The native houses of the better classes are certainly an improvement
+upon any others in the Protectorate, showing as they do some artistic
+taste in their embellishments. They are generally built in the form of a
+square or several squares, more or less exact, according to the extent
+of ground the builder has to deal with and the number of apartments the
+owner has need for. In some cases, I have seen a native commence his
+building operations by marking out two or three squares or oblongs,
+about twenty feet by fifteen, round which he would build his various
+apartments or rooms. In the centre of the inner squares, which are
+always left open to the sky, you almost invariably find a tree growing,
+either left there purposely when clearing the ground, or planted by the
+owner; occasionally you will find a fine crop of charms and Ju-Jus
+hanging from the branches of these trees.</p>
+
+<p>The inner walls, especially of the courtyards, are in most<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_555" id="Page_555">[Pg 555]</a></span> cases
+tastefully decorated with paintings, somewhat resembling the arabesque
+designs one sees amongst the Moors. No doubt this art and that of
+designing fantastic figures on brass dishes, which they buy from the
+Europeans and afterwards embellish with the aid of a big-headed nail and
+a hammer, comes to them from the Mohammedans of the Niger, of whom they
+used to see a good deal in former days.</p>
+
+<p>With regard to the dress of these people, I have not anything so
+interesting to relate about them as I had of the New Calabar gentlemen.
+Except on high days and holidays, there is little to distinguish the
+upper classes here from the same classes in any of the other rivers of
+the Protectorate, except that it might be in the peculiar way they knot
+the loin cloth on, leaving it to trail a little on the ground on one
+side, and their great liking for scarlet and other bright coloured
+stove-pipe hats. On their high festivals the kings appear in crowns and
+silk garments; the chiefs, who do not stick to the native gala garments
+of many-hued silks, generally appear in European clothes, not always of
+irreproachable fit, their queen, as every chief calls his head wife,
+appearing in a gorgeous silk costume that may have been worn several
+seasons before at Ascot or Goodwood by a London belle. Sometimes you may
+be treated to the sight of a dusky queen gaily displaying her ample
+charms in a low-cut secondhand dinner or ball dress that may have
+created a sensation when first worn at some swagger function in London
+or Paris. As the native ladies do not wear stays, and one of the
+greatest attributes of female beauty in Calabar is plumpness, and plenty
+of it, you may imagine that the local <i>modiste</i> has her wits greatly
+exercised in devising means to fill up the gaping space between the
+hooks and eyes. I once heard a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_556" id="Page_556">[Pg 556]</a></span> captain of one of the mail steamers
+describe this job as &ldquo;letting in a graving piece down the back.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>One of the customs peculiar to the Old Calabar people, practised
+generally amongst all classes, but most strictly observed by the
+wealthier people, is for a girl about to become a bride to go into
+retirement for several weeks just previous to her marriage, during which
+time she undergoes a fattening treatment, similar to that practised in
+Tunis. The fatter the bride the more she is admired. It is said that
+during this seclusion the future bride is initiated into the mysteries
+of some female secret society. Many of the chiefs are very stout, and
+given to <i>embonpoint</i>, a fact of which they are very proud.</p>
+
+<p>The lower-class women are not troubled with too much clothing, but still
+ample enough for the country and decency&rsquo;s sake. As one strolls through
+the town to see the market or pay a visit to some chief, one often
+encounters young girls, and sometimes women, in long, loose, flowing
+robes, fitting tight round the neck, and on inquiring who these are, the
+reply generally comes, &ldquo;Dem young gal be mission gal, dem tother one he
+be Saleone woman.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The mission here is the United Presbyterian Mission of Scotland,<a name="FNanchor_92_93" id="FNanchor_92_93"></a><a href="#Footnote_92_93" class="fnanchor">[92]</a> and
+a great deal of good has been done by it for these people, and is being
+done now, and great hopes are expected from their industrial mission,
+started only a few years ago, therefore, it would be unfair to make
+further comment on the latter; it is a step in the right direction.</p>
+
+<p>Some of the missionaries to Old Calabar have put in about forty years of
+active service, most of it passed on the coast. Amongst others who have
+lived to a great age in <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_557" id="Page_557">[Pg 557]</a></span>this mission should be mentioned the Rev. Mr.
+Anderson, who lived to the advanced age of between eighty and ninety
+years, greatly respected by both the European and native population.
+Amongst the lady missionaries the name of Miss Slessor stands out very
+prominently, and, considering the task she has set herself, viz., the
+saving of twin children and protection of their mothers, her success has
+been marvellous, for the Calabarese is, like his neighbours, still a
+great believer in the custom that says twin children are not to be
+allowed to live. This lady has passed about twenty years in Old Calabar,
+a greater part of the last ten years all alone at Ok˙on, a district
+which the people of Duke Town and the surrounding towns preferred not to
+visit, if they could manage any business they had with the people of
+Ok˙on without going amongst them. Many of these old customs will now be
+much more quickly stamped out than in the past, owing to the fact that
+it is in the power of the Consul-General to punish the natives severely
+who practise them. The preaching and exhortation of the missionaries to
+the people in the past was met by the very powerful argument, in a
+native&rsquo;s mind, that &ldquo;it was a custom his father had kept from time
+immemorial, and he did not see why he should not continue it,&rdquo; the Ju-Ju
+priests being clever enough to point out to the natives that, though the
+missionaries preached against Ju-Juism, they could not punish its
+votaries. But that is all changed now, and even the Ju-Ju priests begin
+to feel that the power of the Consul-General is much greater than that
+of their grinning idols and trickery.</p>
+
+<p>Though these people have been in communication with Europeans for at
+least two centuries, and under British influence for upwards of sixty
+years, and a mission has<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_558" id="Page_558">[Pg 558]</a></span> been established in their principal town for
+the best part of fifty years, it was a common thing to see human flesh
+offered for sale in the market within a very few years of the
+establishment of the British Protectorate.</p>
+
+<p>In judging the result of missionary effort in this river, or, in fact,
+any other part of Western Africa, one is apt to exclaim, &ldquo;What poor
+results for so much expenditure in lives and money!&rdquo; The cause is not
+far to seek if one knows the native, and has sufficiently studied his
+ways and customs as to be able to understand or read what is working in
+his brain.</p>
+
+<p>The upper or dominant classes, consisting of the kings, the chiefs, the
+petty chiefs and the trade boys (the latter being the traders sent into
+the far distant markets to buy the produce for their masters, and it is
+from this class that many of the chiefs in most of these rivers spring)
+are all, to a man, working either openly or secretly against the
+missionaries. Even when they have become converts and communicants, in
+very many cases they are as much an opponent as ever of the missionary.
+I can fancy I see some enthusiastic missionary jumping up with
+indignation depicted in every feature to tell me I am not telling the
+truth about his particular converts. Well, as I expect to be called a
+liar, I have taken care to admit that a very few converts are not
+opposed to the missionary, in order that I may say to any missionary
+that particularly wishes to wipe the floor with me that perchance his
+special converts are included in the minority that is represented by the
+very few cases where the convert is wholly and solely for the mission.</p>
+
+<p>What are the causes that lead these people to work against the missions?
+First and foremost is Ju-Ju and its<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_559" id="Page_559">[Pg 559]</a></span> multifarious ramifications,
+consisting of Ju-Ju priests of the district, the Ju-Ju priests of the
+surrounding country, and the travelling Ju-Ju men, described by the
+natives as witch doctors, who keep up a communication of ideas and
+thought from end to end of the pagan countries of West and South-West
+Africa.</p>
+
+<p>Secondly, not only is the teaching of Christianity opposed to Ju-Juism,
+but it is also opposed to the whole fabric of native customs other than
+Ju-Juism. Polygamy, for example, is an actual necessity, according to
+native custom, thus a wife after the birth of an infant retires from the
+companionship of her husband and devotes herself for the following two
+years to the cares of nursing. Then, again, at certain times, according
+to native custom, a woman is not allowed to prepare food that has to be
+eaten by others than herself. This would place the man with only one
+wife in a peculiar position, as it is a general custom in all these
+rivers, from the kings downwards, to have their food cooked by one of
+their wives. This custom arises from the fact that poisoning is known to
+be very much practised amongst all the Pagan tribes, and experience has
+taught the men that their greatest safety lies in the faithfulness of
+their wives, for the wives are aware that they have all to lose and
+nothing to gain by the death of their husbands.</p>
+
+<p>Many people who have visited Western Africa will say that the reports of
+secret poisoning on the coast are travellers&rsquo; yarns; but to refute that
+I will here describe a custom met with still in many places on the
+coast, and invariably practised amongst all natives in the purely native
+towns in the immediate vicinity of the coast towns. Even the coast towns
+people practise it still in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_560" id="Page_560">[Pg 560]</a></span> every case amongst themselves and in some
+cases with the Europeans. Of course, I don&rsquo;t say that the educated negro
+or coloured missionary will do it with Europeans, but many of the
+educated natives will do it with the uneducated native, and this custom
+is that your native host will never offer you food or drink without
+first tasting it to show you it is not poisoned. While I am on this
+topic, let me give any would-be travellers amongst the Pagans a bit of
+advice. Once they strike in amongst the purely native, always follow
+this custom; it will do no harm and may save them from unpleasant
+experiences.</p>
+
+<p>Thirdly, the native instinct of self-preservation is as much the first
+law of nature to the negro as it is to the rest of mankind. At first
+sight it might be said, &ldquo;Where is the link between self-preservation and
+missionary effort, and how comes it to work against the missions?&rdquo; I
+will try to explain this point as clearly as possible.</p>
+
+<p>Naturally the first people the missionary came in contact with were the
+coast tribes. These people, in almost if not every case, are
+non-producers, being simply the brokers between the white man and the
+interior; in not a few cases behind the coast tribes are other tribes
+who are again non-producers and are the brokers of the coast brokers, or
+make the coast brokers pay a tribute to them for passing through their
+country. No place so well illustrated this system as the trade on the
+lower Niger as it used to be conducted by the Brass, New Calabar and
+Bonny men. Previous to the advent of the Royal Niger Company in that
+river, these people paid a small tribute to perhaps a dozen different
+towns on their way up to Abo on the Niger&mdash;some of the Brass men used
+even to get as far as Onicha or Onitsha. Now that the Royal Niger
+Company<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_561" id="Page_561">[Pg 561]</a></span> is trading on the Niger, none of these people can go to the
+Niger to trade. Well, there you have one of the great objections to
+mission effort. Each of these small tribes who were non-producers have
+lost the tribute they used to exact from the Brass, Bonny and New
+Calabar native brokers, therefore all the non-producers are averse to
+the white man passing beyond them, be he missionary or trader. Of
+course, the greatest objectors to the white man penetrating into the
+interior are the coast middlemen, for it strikes at once at the source
+of all their riches, all the grandeur of their chieftainship, and for
+the rising generation all hope of their ever arriving to be a chief like
+their father or their masters, and have a large retinue of slaves, for
+the favourite slaves are in no way anxious to see slavery abolished,
+because with its abolition they only foresee ruin to their ambitious
+views.</p>
+
+<p>Thus you will understand me when I point out to you the weak spot in
+nine-tenths of the mission effort. They have been trying to look after
+the negro&rsquo;s soul and teaching him Christianity, which in the native mind
+is cutting at the root, not only of all their ancient customs, but
+actually aims at taking away their living without attempting to teach
+them any industrial pursuit which may help them in the struggle for
+life, which is daily getting harder for our African brethren as it is
+here in England.</p>
+
+<p>When I am speaking of mission effort I ought to include Government
+effort in the older colonies. No attempt has been made, as far as I am
+aware of, to open technical schools or to assist the natives to learn
+how to earn their living other than by being clerks or petty traders.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_562" id="Page_562">[Pg 562]</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>SECRET SOCIETIES AND FESTIVALS IN OLD CALABAR&mdash;AND THE COUNTRIES UP THE
+CROSS RIVER</h3>
+
+<p>To describe all the customs of the Old Calabar people would take up more
+space than I am allowed to monopolise in this work.</p>
+
+<p>They have numerous plays or festivals, in which they delight to disguise
+themselves in masks of the most grotesque ugliness. These masks are, in
+most cases, of native manufacture, and seem always to aim at being as
+ugly as possible. I never have seen any attempt on the part of a native
+manufacturer of masks to produce anything passably good looking.</p>
+
+<p>Egbo, the great secret society of these people, is a sort of
+freemasonry, having, I believe, seven or nine grades. To attempt to
+describe the inner working of this society would be impossible for me,
+as I do not belong to it. Though several Europeans have been admitted to
+some of the grades, none have ever, to my knowledge, succeeded in being
+initiated to the higher grades. The uses of this society are manifold,
+but the abuses more than outweigh any use it may have been to the
+people. As an example, I may mention the use which a European would make
+of his having Egbo, viz., if any native owed him money or its
+equivalent, and was in no hurry to pay, the European would blow<a name="FNanchor_93_94" id="FNanchor_93_94"></a><a href="#Footnote_93_94" class="fnanchor">[93]</a> Egbo
+on the debtor, and that man could not leave his house until he had paid
+up. Egbo could be, and was, used for matters of a much more serious
+nature than <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_563" id="Page_563">[Pg 563]</a></span>the above, such as the ruin of a man if a working majority
+could be got together against him. This society could work much more
+swiftly than the course adopted in other rivers to compass a man&rsquo;s
+downfall; <i>vide</i> Will Braid&rsquo;s trouble with his brother chiefs in New
+Calabar.</p>
+
+<p>The country up the Cross River, which is the main stream into the
+interior, improves a very few miles after leaving Old Calabar; in fact,
+the mangrove disappears altogether within twenty miles of Duke Town,
+being replaced by splendid forest trees and many clearings, the latter
+being, in some instances, the farms of Old Calabar chiefs. On arriving
+at Ikorofiong, which is on the right bank of the river, you find
+yourself on the edge of the Ikpa plain, which extends away towards Opobo
+as far as the eye can see. I visited this place thirty-five years ago,
+and stayed for a couple of days in the mission house, the gentleman then
+in charge being a Dr. Bailey. At that time this was the farthest station
+of the Old Calabar mission; since then they have established themselves
+in Umon, and have done great service amongst these people, who were
+previously to the advent of the mission terribly in the toils of their
+Ju-ju priests. The people of Umon speak a language quite different from
+the Calabarese. Umon is about one hundred miles by water from Old
+Calabar.</p>
+
+<p>Twenty or thirty miles further up the Cross River you come to the
+Akuna-Kuna country, inhabited by a very industrious race of people,
+great producers and agriculturists, and having abundance of cattle,
+sheep, goats and poultry. These people received one of Her Majesty&rsquo;s
+consuls with such joy and good feeling, and so loaded him with presents
+of farm produce, that his Kroo boatmen suffered severely from
+indigestion while they remained in the Akuna-Kuna<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_564" id="Page_564">[Pg 564]</a></span> country. A little
+farther up the river is the town of Ungwana, a mile or so beyond which
+is now to be found a mission station. This district is called Iku-Morut,
+and a few years ago the inhabitants were never happy unless they were at
+war with the Akuna-Kuna people. This state of things has been much
+modified by the presence in the country of protectorate officials.</p>
+
+<p>About sixty miles by river beyond Iku-Morut is the town Ofurekpe, in the
+Apiapam district. This place, its chief and people are everything to be
+desired, the town is clean, the houses are commodious, the inhabitants
+are friendly, and their country is delightful. They are a little given
+to cannibalism, but, I am very credibly informed, only practise this
+custom on their prisoners of war.</p>
+
+<p>Beyond this point the river passes through the Atam district, a country
+inhabited, so I was informed, by the most inveterate of cannibals. Not
+having visited these people, I am not able to speak from personal
+experience; but as I have generally found in Western Africa that a
+country bearing a very bad character does not always deserve all that is
+said against it, I shall give this country the benefit of the doubt, and
+say that once the natives get accustomed to having white people visit
+them, and have got over the fearful tales told them by the interested
+middlemen about the ability of the white men to witch them by only
+looking at them, then they will be as easy to deal with, if not easier,
+than the knowing non-producers.</p>
+
+<p>I know of one interior town, not in Old Calabar, where the principal
+chief had given a warm welcome to a white man and allotted him a piece
+of ground to build a factory on, which he was to return and build the
+following dry<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_565" id="Page_565">[Pg 565]</a></span> season. Before the time had elapsed the chief died,
+without doubt poisoned by some interested middleman. When the white man
+went up to the country according to his agreement, the new chief would
+not allow him to land, and accused him of having bewitched the late
+chief. The white trader was an old bird and not easily put off any
+object he had in view, so stuck to his right of starting trade in the
+country, and by liberal presents to the new chief at last succeeded in
+commencing operations, with the result that the new chief died in a very
+short time and the white man, who was put in charge of the factory, was
+shot dead whilst passing through a narrow creek on his way to see his
+senior agent, this being done in the interior country so as to throw the
+blame upon the people he was trading with. No one saw who fired the
+fatal shot, and the body was never recovered, as the boys who were with
+him were natives belonging to the coast people and in their fright
+capsized the small canoe he was travelling in, so they reported; but
+some months after the white man&rsquo;s ring mysteriously turned up, the tale
+being it was found in the stomach of a fish.</p>
+
+<p>I will here describe one other very practical custom that used to be
+observed all over the Old Calabar and Cross River district, but which
+has disappeared in the lower parts of the river, owing no doubt to the
+efforts of the missionaries having been successful in instilling into
+the native mind a greater respect for their aged relatives than formerly
+existed. If it ever occurs nowadays in the Calabar district it can only
+take place in some out of the way village far away in the bush, from
+whence news of a little matter of this kind might take months to reach
+the ears of the Government or the missionary; but this custom is still<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_566" id="Page_566">[Pg 566]</a></span>
+carried on in the Upper Cross River, and consists in helping the old and
+useless members of the village or community out of this world by a tap
+on the head, their bodies are then carefully smoke-dried, afterwards
+pulverised, then formed into small balls by the addition of water in
+which Indian corn has been boiled for hours&mdash;this mixture is allowed to
+dry in the sun or over fires, then put away for future use as an
+addition to the family stew.</p>
+
+<p>With all the cannibalistic tastes that these people have been credited
+with, I have only heard of them once ever going in for eating white men,
+and this occurred previous to the arrival in the Old Calabar river of
+the Efik race, if we are to trust to what tradition tells us. It appears
+that in 1668-9 four English sailors were captured by the then
+inhabitants of the Old Calabar River; three of them were immediately
+killed and eaten, the fourth being kept for a future occasion. Whether
+it was that being sailors, and thus being strongly impregnated with salt
+horse, tobacco and rum, their flesh did not suit the palate of these
+natives I know not, but it is on record that the fourth man was not
+eaten, but kindly treated, and some years after, when another English
+ship visited the river, he was allowed to return to England in her.
+Since that date, as far as I know, no white men have ever been molested
+by the Old Calabar people.</p>
+
+<p>There has been occasionally a little friction between traders and
+natives, but nothing very serious, though it is said some queer
+transactions were carried on by the white men during the slave-dealing
+days.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_567" id="Page_567">[Pg 567]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_80_81" id="Footnote_80_81"></a><a href="#FNanchor_80_81"><span class="label">[80]</span></a> &ldquo;Shake-hand&rdquo; was a present given by a trader each voyage
+on his arrival on the coast to the king and the chiefs who traded with
+him; the Europeans themselves gradually increased this to such an extent
+that some of the kings began to look upon it as a right, which led to
+endless palavers; if it is not completely abolished by now, it ought to
+be.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_81_82" id="Footnote_81_82"></a><a href="#FNanchor_81_82"><span class="label">[81]</span></a> &ldquo;Dashing&rdquo;&mdash;native word for making presents. This word is a
+corruption of a Portuguese word.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_82_83" id="Footnote_82_83"></a><a href="#FNanchor_82_83"><span class="label">[82]</span></a> Brohemie, founded by the late chief Alluma between fifty
+and sixty years ago. Chinomé, a powerful chief, fought with Allumah in
+1864-5 for supremacy; the former was conquered, and died some few years
+after. Chief Dudu, not mentioned in the text, founded in 1890 Dudu town,
+and is to-day a most loyal and respected chief. Chief Peggy died in
+1889. Chief Ogrie died in 1892, Chief Bregbi also died some years ago.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_83_84" id="Footnote_83_84"></a><a href="#FNanchor_83_84"><span class="label">[83]</span></a> This preparation is made from the pericarp of the Raphia
+Vinifera pounded up into a pulplike mass, which they mix in the water in
+their canoes and then bale out into the water in the creek.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_84_85" id="Footnote_84_85"></a><a href="#FNanchor_84_85"><span class="label">[84]</span></a> One good thing the missionaries have done since they have
+been in Brass, and that is, that, of persuading the natives, or at least
+the greater part of them, to give up the worship of this snake; and this
+part must have included the most influential portion of Brass society,
+for since about the year 1884 the Ju-Ju snake is killed wherever seen
+without any disastrous consequences to the killer.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_85_86" id="Footnote_85_86"></a><a href="#FNanchor_85_86"><span class="label">[85]</span></a> As an evidence of how secret the natives of these parts
+have always tried to keep, and have to a great extent kept, the
+knowledge of the various various creeks from the white men since the
+abolition of the slave trade, I may point to this creek, which is
+clearly marked and the soundings given in the old charts, <i>circa</i> 1698,
+but was quite unknown to the present generation of traders, until Capt.
+Cawthorne, of the African Steamship Company rediscovered it about
+1882-4. I well remember this creek being carefully described to me by
+Bonny men in 1862 as the haunt of lawless outcasts from Bonny and the
+surrounding countries, cannibals and pirates. About this time I was
+stationed in New Calabar, and in roaming about the creeks looking for
+something to shoot, I came across this beautiful wide creek and followed
+it until I sighted Breaker Island; but being only in a small shooting
+canoe I was forced to turn back the way I had come. The next morning I
+was favoured by the visit of King Amachree, the father of the present
+king, who said he had heard from his people that I had been down this
+creek, and he had come to warn me of the danger I ran in visiting that
+creek, giving me the same description that the Bonny men had done some
+months earlier. I laughed and told him I had heard the same yarn from
+the Bonny men. Later in the same year I mentioned my visit to an old
+freeman in Bonny, named Bess Pepple. He being a little inebriated at the
+time, let his tongue wag freely, and informed me that it was a creek
+often used by the slavers during the time the preventive squadron was on
+the coast, to take in their cargo. In one instance that he remembered he
+said there were five slavers up that creek when two of Her Majesty&rsquo;s
+gunboats were in Bonny, about the year 1837. About this time (1862) a
+mate of a ship who was in charge of a small schooner running between New
+Calabar and Bonny was forced by stress of weather to anchor inside the
+seaward mouth of this creek, and was attacked during the night by some
+natives, carried on shore, tied to a tree and flogged, the cargo of the
+schooner plundered, and the Kroomen also flogged. Complaint being made
+to the kings of New Calabar and Bonny, they both replied with the same
+tale: &ldquo;We no done tell you we no fit be responsible for dem men who live
+for dem creek; he be dam pirate.&rdquo; This was true they had, but the mate
+swore he recognised some Bonny men amongst his assailants.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_86_87" id="Footnote_86_87"></a><a href="#FNanchor_86_87"><span class="label">[86]</span></a> Efik race&mdash;the inhabitants of Old Calabar, said to have
+come from the Ibibio country, a district lying between Kwo country and
+the Cross River.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_87_88" id="Footnote_87_88"></a><a href="#FNanchor_87_88"><span class="label">[87]</span></a> Jamming, a trade term, meaning making an agreement to buy
+or sell anything at an agreed price.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_88_89" id="Footnote_88_89"></a><a href="#FNanchor_88_89"><span class="label">[88]</span></a> This king is now dead, he was the last of the kings of New
+Calabar, the country being now ruled over by a native council under the
+direction of the Niger Coast Protectorate officials.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_89_90" id="Footnote_89_90"></a><a href="#FNanchor_89_90"><span class="label">[89]</span></a> This is an error into which the late Consul Hewett no
+doubt led Mr. Johnston, as Ja Ja had been since 1861-2 a chief in Bonny
+and recognised as one of the regents of that place; originally a slave,
+I will admit, but not a runaway one.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_90_91" id="Footnote_90_91"></a><a href="#FNanchor_90_91"><span class="label">[90]</span></a> This failing is called diplomacy in civilised nations.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_91_92" id="Footnote_91_92"></a><a href="#FNanchor_91_92"><span class="label">[91]</span></a> <ins class="correction" title="Monopolies, have led Europeans">Monopolies have led Europeans</ins> on the West Coast of Africa
+to be equally as unscrupulous and bitter enemies of any one, white or
+black, who have attempted to dispute their trade monopolies.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_92_93" id="Footnote_92_93"></a><a href="#FNanchor_92_93"><span class="label">[92]</span></a> Established in Old Calabar in 1846.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_93_94" id="Footnote_93_94"></a><a href="#FNanchor_93_94"><span class="label">[93]</span></a> It is called blowing Egbo because notice is given of the
+Egbo law being set in motion against any one by one of the myrmidons of
+Egbo blowing the Egbo horn before the party&rsquo;s house.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<h2><a name="APPENDIX_II" id="APPENDIX_II"></a>APPENDIX II</h2>
+
+<h2>PART I</h2>
+
+<h3>A VOYAGE TO THE AFRICAN OIL RIVERS TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO. BY JOHN
+HARFORD</h3>
+
+<p>It was in the month of December, 1872, when I with seventeen others left
+our good old port of Bristol bound for one of the West African oil
+rivers on a trading voyage. It was a splendid morning for the time of
+year: bright, fine, and clear, when we were towed through our old lock
+gates, with the hearty cheers, good-byes, and God-speed-yous from our
+friends ringing in the air; and although there were some of us made sad
+by the parting kiss, which to many was the last on this earth, there was
+one whose heart felt so glad that he has often described the day as
+being one of the happiest in his life, and that one was your humble
+servant, the writer. Our first start was soon delayed, as we had to
+anchor in King Road and wait a fair wind. And now a word to any hearers
+who may be about to start on a new venture. Always wait for a fair
+wind&mdash;when that comes make the best use you can of it. Our fair wind
+came after some two weeks, and lasted long enough for us to get clear of
+the English land; but before we were clear of the Irish, we encountered
+head winds again. Being too far out to return, we had to beat our ship
+about under close reefed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_568" id="Page_568">[Pg 568]</a></span> topsails for another week. This was a rough
+time for all on board. At last the wind changed, and we this time
+succeeded in clearing the Bay of Biscay and then had a fairly fine run
+until we reached St. Antonia, one of the Cape de Verde Islands. This we
+sighted early one morning, and in the brilliant tropical sunshine it
+appeared to me almost a heavenly sight. We soon passed on, the little
+island disappeared, and once more our bark seemed to be alone on the
+mighty ocean. After a week or so we sighted the mainland of that great
+and wonderful continent Africa&mdash;wonderful, I say, because it has been
+left as if it were unknown for centuries, while countries not nearly its
+equal in any way have had millions spent upon them. Our first land fall
+was a port of Liberia. Liberia, I must tell you, is part of the western
+continent with a seaboard of some miles. It was taken over by the
+American Republic and made a free country for all those slaves that were
+liberated in the time of the great emancipation brought about by that
+good man William E. Channing. Here, on their own land, these people, who
+years before had been kidnapped from their homes, were once more free.</p>
+
+<p>After a week&rsquo;s buffeting about with cross currents and very little wind
+we at last reached the noted headland of Cape Palmas, a port of Liberia;
+we anchored here for one night and next morning were under way again.
+This time, having a fair wind and the currents with us, we soon made our
+next stopping place, which was a little village on the coast-line called
+Beraby. Here we had our first glimpse of African life. Directly we
+dropped anchor a sight almost indescribable met the eye of what appeared
+to be hundreds of large blackbirds in the water. We had not long to wait
+before we knew it was something more than black<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_569" id="Page_569">[Pg 569]</a></span>birds, for soon the ship
+was crowded from stem to stern with natives from the shore jabbering
+away in such a manner very alarming to a new-comer. I am not ashamed to
+confess that I was anything but sorry when the ship was cleared and we
+were off once more; this was soon done as we had only to take on board
+our Kroo men, or boys, as they are always called, although some of them
+are as finely built as ever a man could wish to be. We took about twenty
+of these boys, who engage for the voyage and become, like ourselves,
+part of the ship&rsquo;s crew. After each one had received one month&rsquo;s pay
+from our captain, and duly handed it over to their friends, and said
+their good-byes, general good-wishes were given, and we again up anchor,
+and set sail for the well-known port of Half Jack, which ought to be
+called the Bristol port of Half Jack, for here we met some half-dozen
+Bristol ships, who gave our captain a regular good old Bristol welcome.</p>
+
+<p>A few words about this important port may be of interest, although I am
+sorry to say we have managed to let it, valuable as it is, get into the
+hands of the French, like many more in that part. Half Jack is a very
+low-lying country with a large lagoon, as it is called running, between
+it and the mainland. Along the sides of this lagoon the country villages
+are situated, which produce that great product palm oil; this is sold to
+the Half Jack men, who in turn sell to our Bristol men and they ship it
+to all parts of Europe. We now leave Half Jack to its traders and
+natives, and after our captain has paid his complimentary visits, we set
+sail for the Gold Coast town of Accra; but before reaching that, we have
+to pass many fine ports and splendid headlands. Axim, in particular, I
+must mention, as it has recently come very much to the fore, owing to
+the great quantity of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_570" id="Page_570">[Pg 570]</a></span> mahogany that is now being exported from there, a
+wood that has revolutionised the furniture industries of this
+country&mdash;it has also enabled the thrifty men and women of England to
+make their homes more bright and cheerful by giving them the very cheap
+and beautiful furniture they could not have dreamed of years ago, when
+the only mahogany procurable was the black Spanish, which was far too
+expensive for ordinary persons to think about. Axim, in addition to this
+great export of wood, is the port of departure for the West African gold
+mines, and they will I have no doubt, in time prove of great value. The
+Ancobra River empties itself here. Axim being at its mouth, this river
+would be very useful in helping to develop the interior of this part,
+were it not that the mouth was so shallow and dangerous, two obstacles
+that the science of the future will, I expect, remove. We are now
+passing some of the finest specimens of coast scenery it is possible to
+see. I can better describe it by comparing it somewhat to our North
+Devon and Cornwall coasts, such splendid rocks and headlands and land
+that I venture to say will eventually prove very valuable.</p>
+
+<p>We next come to the important town of Elmina, one of the departure ports
+of the Ashantee country, and also where all noted prisoners are kept.
+King Prempeh, late of Ashantee, is now awaiting her Majesty&rsquo;s pleasure
+there; many others have found Elmina their home of detention after
+attempting to disobey our gracious Queen&rsquo;s commands.</p>
+
+<p>Cape Coast Castle is our next noted place. This is the chief departure
+port for the Ashantee country, and was at one time the Government seat
+for the Gold Coast Colony. It is a very fine rock-bound port, and from
+the sea its<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_571" id="Page_571">[Pg 571]</a></span> square-topped, white-washed houses, and its Castle on the
+higher promontory, form an imposing-looking picture. It is second to
+Accra for importance in this part; much gold comes from here. It is also
+a celebrated place for the African-made gold jewellery, some of which is
+very beautiful in design and workmanship. The grey parrots form a great
+article of barter here. Hundreds of these birds are brought to Liverpool
+every week, I may almost say all from this place. The people are chiefly
+of the Fantee tribe, and a fine and intelligent race they are. They have
+good schools, and many of the younger men ship off to other parts of the
+coast as clerks, &amp;c. Good cooks may be engaged from here, which is a
+fact I think well worth mentioning.</p>
+
+<p>And now we sail on to the present seat of Government for the Gold Coast
+Colony, Accra. This is a fine country, a flat, table-like land along the
+front, with the hills of the hinterland rising in the background. The
+landing here is somewhat dangerous in the rough season, and great care
+has to be taken by the men handling the surf-boats to avoid them
+capsizing. Many lives have been lost here in days gone by.</p>
+
+<p>I told you before why we called at the Kroo village Beraby, and the port
+of Half Jack. We now anchored at Accra to engage our black mechanics,
+for which the place is noted. Here you may procure any kind of mechanic
+you may mention&mdash;coopers, carpenters, gold- and silver-smiths,
+blacksmiths, &amp;c. In those early days the coopers and carpenters were
+engaged to assist our Bristol men, but to-day the whole of the work is
+done by the natives themselves. I do not think you would find a white
+cooper or carpenter in any of the lower ports, some of the natives<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_572" id="Page_572">[Pg 572]</a></span>
+being very clever with their tools. We also engaged our cooks, steward,
+and laundry men, which any establishment of any size in these parts must
+keep. For all these trades the natives have to thank chiefly the Basel
+Mission, which is, I believe, of Swiss origin. This mission started
+years ago to not only teach the boys the word of God, but to teach them
+at the same time to use their hands and brains in such a way that they
+were bound to become of some use to their fellow men, and command ready
+employment. This mission, I cannot help feeling, has been one of the
+greatest blessings they have ever had on that great continent. It has
+sent out hundreds of men to all parts, and to-day the whole of the West
+Coast is dependent upon Accra for its skilled labour. This way of
+instructing the natives is now, I am pleased to say, being followed by
+nearly all our missionary societies, and it is certainly one of the best
+means of civilising a great people like the Africans are.</p>
+
+<p>Not to take powder and shot and shoot them down because they don&rsquo;t
+understand our Christian law, but teach them how to make and construct,
+that they in time may become useful citizens, and that they may be
+better able to learn the value of the many valuable products growing in
+their midst, they will be ever thankful to us and bless our advent among
+them. These Accra people are a very fine race, clean, and distinctly
+above the ordinary type of negro, clearer cut features, well-built men
+and women. The women, especially, are superior to any of the West
+Africans I have met with up to the present. They, like their husbands,
+are fond of dress, and, like their husbands too, are hard-working and
+industrious; this was shown by the readiness of these people to
+undertake the porterage<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_573" id="Page_573">[Pg 573]</a></span> in the prompt manner they did for the late
+Ashantee Expedition, and which must have done a great deal towards
+bringing about the success of the same. You will be better able to
+understand this if you will suppose, we will say, six thousand men were
+landed at Land&rsquo;s End, their destination being Bristol, and with no train
+or horse to carry the food supply and ammunition, let alone the heavy
+guns. For this work some thousands of porters are required, each one of
+which must carry from 60 to 100 pounds in weight. This is carried on the
+head, and when I tell you these people think nothing of doing twenty
+miles a day, day after day, you will realise how physically strong they
+must be. The manner in which they rallied round the Government&mdash;men,
+women, and children&mdash;as soon as it was decided an expedition should be
+sent, must have been very encouraging to those in command.</p>
+
+<p>One thing, however, about these Accra people, while they have very much
+improved themselves in their dress they have not improved their villages
+as much as we would wish to see, but this will all come in time. Our old
+towns used to abound in narrow courts and lanes, while we to-day like to
+see open spaces, broad streets, &amp;c., with plenty of fresh air, knowing
+it is an absolute necessity to us, and it should be the first care of
+our councillors to do away as far as possible with all dens and alleys,
+so that if the cottage is small, the cottager can breathe pure, fresh
+air; for, as you all know, the working man&rsquo;s stock-in-trade is his
+health&mdash;when that goes, the cupboard is often bare.</p>
+
+<p>Now, I think it is about time we hove anchor and said good-bye to Accra.
+Our coopers and carpenters are engaged, and our crew being completed we
+set sail for our destination.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_574" id="Page_574">[Pg 574]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>After being some four or five days crossing the Bight of Biafra, we
+sighted the island of Fernando Po. Here our captain having to do a
+little business, we anchor for the night in the harbour of Santa Isabel.
+The little island of Fernando Po once belonged to us, but we exchanged
+it some years ago with the Spanish Government for another island in the
+West Indies, which our Government thought of more value. This, as far as
+the West Coast was concerned, was a pity, because at the time I am
+speaking of the island was a flourishing place, with about half-a-dozen
+or so English merchants, and a fairly good hotel; but not so now, for
+while there is still business going on, the place is not advancing, and
+a place that does not advance must go back. The chief merchants there
+to-day are English. This the Spanish would not have if they could help
+it, but being under certain obligations to them they suffer them to
+remain.</p>
+
+<p>The first view of Fernando Po when you arrive in the bay is a perfect
+picture; it makes one almost feel they would never like to leave there;
+its white houses all round the front on the higher level, its wharves
+and warehouses at the bottom, and its beautiful mountain rising
+magnificently in the background. Its whole appearance is very similar to
+the island of Teneriffe. It seems strange that here, almost in the
+middle of the tropics, if you have any desire to feel an English winter,
+you have only to go to the top of the Fernando Po mountain, which can
+easily be done in two days, or even less, for while at the foot the
+thermometer is registering 85° or 90° in the shade, on the top there is
+always winter cold and snow.</p>
+
+<p>Now, I think we had better continue our journey. We took a few
+passengers on board, and then set sail for the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_575" id="Page_575">[Pg 575]</a></span> Cameroon River. This
+being only fifty or sixty miles distant, we were not long before we came
+to anchor off what is called the Dogs&rsquo; Heads. Here we had to wait the
+flood, and almost three-quarter tide, to enable our ship to pass safely
+over a shallow part of the river called the flats. Now we come in sight
+of the then noted King Bell&rsquo;s Town, called after a king of that name.
+Here our ship is moored with two anchors, and here she has to remain
+until the whole of her cargo has been purchased. This was done, and is
+even to-day, by barter, that is exchanging the goods our ship has
+brought out for the products of the country, which at that time
+consisted only of palm oil, ivory, and cocoa-nuts; but before we
+commence to trade the ship has to be dismantled&mdash;top spars and yards
+taken down, and carefully put away with the rigging and running gear;
+spars are then run from mast to mast, and bow to stern, forming a ridge
+pole; then rafters are fastened to these coming down each side,
+supported by a plate running along the side, supported by upright posts
+or stanchions; the rafters are then covered with split-bamboos, over
+these are placed mats made from the bamboo and palm trees. It takes, of
+course, some thousands of mats to cover the ship all over, but this is
+done in about a month, and all by natives who are engaged for that
+particular work and belonging to that place. Our ship now being housed
+in, all hands who have not been sent to assist in taking another ship to
+England are given their different duties to assist the captain in
+carrying on the trade.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_576" id="Page_576">[Pg 576]</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>TRADING IN THE CAMEROONS</h3>
+
+<p>Each ship in those days had what was then called a cask house, that was
+a piece of land as nearly opposite as possible to where the ship lay
+moored. This land was always kept fenced round with young mangrove props
+or sticks, forming a compound; inside this compound would be two,
+perhaps three, fairly good sized stores or warehouses, and also an open
+shed for empty casks which had to be filled with palm oil and stowed in
+the ship for the homeward voyage. Now the first work to be done after
+the ship was made ready for trading, was to land as much of her cargo as
+was not immediately required for trading purposes, such as salt,
+caskage, earthenware, and all heavy goods. Salt in those days, as in the
+present, formed one of the staple articles of trade, therefore a ship
+would generally have from 200 to 300 tons of this on board, all of which
+would have to be landed into one of these store houses. At that time
+that meant a lot of labour, as every pound had to be carried by the
+natives from the boats to the store in baskets upon the head, over a
+long flat beach. To-day all this is altered, the salt is sent out in
+bags, and each store has a good iron wharf running out into the river
+with trolly lines laid upon it, which runs the goods right into the
+store, and so saves an immense amount of labour. After the salt came the
+casks, packed in what are called shooks; that is, the cask when emptied
+at home here, is knocked down and made into a small close package and in
+that condition only taking up an eighth part of the room it would take
+when filled with the palm oil, thus enabling the ship to carry, in
+addition to her cargo, enough casks to fill her up again completely<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_577" id="Page_577">[Pg 577]</a></span>
+when filled with oil. To carry on this work the crew of the ship was
+divided into two parts, one to work on board, the other on shore. The
+shore work was generally allotted to the Kroo boys we engaged up the
+coast, with one of the white men in charge, while the white crew with
+three or four natives would work the ship. In addition to all this work,
+trade would be going on every day, which meant 100 or so natives coming
+and going constantly from half-past five in the morning until three or
+four in the afternoon, when trade would cease for the day. This release,
+I need scarcely tell you, was most welcome to us all, for during the
+whole of this time the ship was nothing but a continual babel, which not
+unfrequently ended in a free fight all round, when, of course, a little
+force had to be used to restore quiet.</p>
+
+<p>The trading would be carried on in this way. The after end of the ship
+was partitioned off and made to resemble a shop as nearly as possible,
+in this were displayed goods of all kinds and descriptions too numerous
+to mention here. In front of this shop, at a small table, the captain
+sat, while an assistant would be in the shop ready to pass any goods
+that were required out to the purchasers, who first had to take their
+produce, whatever it might be, to the mate, who would be on the main
+deck to examine the oil and see that it was clean and free from dirt of
+any kind; he would also measure whatever was brought by the natives,
+then give them a receipt, or what was commonly called a book. This book
+was taken to the captain, who would ask what they required. All that
+could be paid for from the shop was handed over, while for the heavy
+goods another receipt or book was given which had to be handed to the
+man in charge of the store on the beach, who gave the native his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_578" id="Page_578">[Pg 578]</a></span>
+requirements there. So the work would go on from day to day, and month
+to month, until the whole of the ship&rsquo;s cargo had been bought, then the
+mat roof was taken off, masts and spars rigged up, sails bent and the
+ship made ready to sail for Old England. This, I must tell you, was a
+happy time for all on board, after lying, as we often did, some fourteen
+or fifteen months in the manner I have described. During these long
+months many changes took place; some of our crew fell ill with fever,
+and worst of all dysentery, one of the most terrible diseases that had
+to be contended with at that time. Three of our number, one after the
+other, we had to follow to the grave, while others were brought down to
+a shadow.</p>
+
+<p>Here I experienced my first attack of African fever, which laid me low
+for some two weeks. I remember quite well getting out of my bed for the
+first time; I had no idea I had been so ill; I could not stand, so had
+to return to my berth again. This was a rough time for us&mdash;we had no
+doctor, and very little waiting upon, I can tell you. If the
+constitution of the sufferer was not strong enough to withstand the
+attack he generally had to go under, as it was impossible for the
+captain to look after the sick and do his trade as well, and as he was
+the only one supposed to know anything about medicine, it was a poor
+look out. (I have known, after a ship had been out a few months, not a
+white man able to do duty out of the whole of the crew.) These were our
+hard times, as, in addition to working all day, the white crew had to
+keep the watch on board through the night, while the Kroo boys did the
+same on shore. So that when any of our men were ill, the watch had to be
+kept by the two or three that were able. Many a night after a hard day&rsquo;s
+work I have fallen fast asleep as soon as I had received my
+in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_579" id="Page_579">[Pg 579]</a></span>structions from the man I relieved. I fear my old captain got to know
+this, for he used to come on deck almost always in my watch, and
+sometimes ask me the time, which I very rarely could tell him. One night
+he caught me nicely. I was fast asleep, when suddenly I felt something
+very peculiar on my face. I put my hands up to rub my eyes as one does
+when just awakening, and, to my horror, my face was covered with palm
+oil, our captain standing at the cabin door laughing away. &ldquo;What is the
+matter?&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;has anything happened?&rdquo; &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; I replied; &ldquo;you have
+given me the contents of the oil-can.&rdquo; I need scarcely tell you I did
+not sleep much on watch after that. The wonder to me now is that we did
+not lose more lives during that trying time.</p>
+
+<p>Rumours of wars, as they were called, amongst the natives occasionally
+reached us, but we were left pretty much unmolested. One day the captain
+and I had a free fight with fifty or sixty natives, some of whom had
+stolen a cask from our store, which I happened to discover. We got our
+cask back and a few of them had more than they bargained for. Another
+time while I was on board a ship fitting out for home, the captain of
+her saw a native chief coming alongside who was heavily in his debt, so
+he made up his mind, without saying a word to any one, to make him a
+prisoner, so he invited him downstairs to have a glass of wine, leaving
+the forty or so people who had accompanied their chief in his canoe on
+deck. The captain then quietly locked him up, the chief shouted for
+assistance, his people rushed down and the tables were soon turned, for
+they took the captain prisoner and nearly killed him into the bargain,
+one man striking him with a sword nearly severed his hand from his arm,
+the two or three whites on board were powerless.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_580" id="Page_580">[Pg 580]</a></span> The natives having
+taken complete charge of the ship, we managed to hoist our flag for
+assistance, which was soon at hand, but too late to be of any use, for
+as soon as they had liberated their chief from his imprisonment, they
+all made off as quickly as they could to their own village. The captain
+was of course greatly to blame for not saying a word to any of us of his
+intention and for so underrating the strength of the chief&rsquo;s people. The
+chief was eventually brought to justice, however, by our own Consul.</p>
+
+<p>One other little break occurred to me to vary the monotony of those long
+months. Attached to our ship was a small cutter which used to run down
+to small villages outside the Cameroon River. To one called Victoria I
+journeyed once with the mate and our little craft on a small trading
+venture. Victoria is situated at the foot of the splendid Cameroon
+mountain, which, like its neighbour at Fernando Po, always has snow at
+the peak; it is over 13,000 feet high and at that time only one or two
+men had ventured to the summit&mdash;one was, I believe, the late Sir Richard
+Burton. Since then several others have succeeded, amongst them the
+present Sir Harry Johnston, who did a lot of travelling when he was
+Vice-Consul, in those parts. Victoria is a snug little place. It was
+founded some years ago by a very old missionary, a Mr. Seagar, a man who
+did a great work in his time and whose name will never be forgotten in
+the Cameroon River. It lies in what is called Ambas Bay, which is
+sheltered somewhat from the south-west winds by two small islands. On
+one of these a British Consulate was erected a few years ago. The whole
+of this part as well as the Cameroon River is now a portion of the
+German Colony. We soon completed our business here and returned once
+more to our duties in the river. Between Victoria and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_581" id="Page_581">[Pg 581]</a></span> Cameroon is the
+village of Bimbia, said to be one of the most noted slave depots in the
+district. Hundreds of slaves used to be shipped from here in the days
+when the trade was allowed, and it is said that some time after the
+trade was prohibited one of these slave ships was just about to embark
+her human freight, when a British man-o&rsquo;-war hove in sight. The captain,
+thinking his ship would be taken&mdash;and it was, I believe&mdash;and wanting to
+secure the golden dollars he had, took them to the shore and buried
+them. This is said to be thousands and thousands of pounds and is still
+unfound, so goes the tale. I tell it to you as it was told to me.</p>
+
+<p>Our daily routine in the river was so similar that we will now consider
+the whole of the ship&rsquo;s cargo had been bought, and she is getting ready
+to make a start for home, which we were all very glad of; but our joy
+did not last long, for the mail arriving just at that time with letters
+from England, the captain received communication from our owners that
+they were sending out another ship, which he was instructed was for our
+chief mate to take charge of. That meant that the mate would have to
+remain to lay the cargo of her, while our old ship went home; but the
+poor man had been very ill for some time previous to this news, and was
+totally unfit to take charge; so under the circumstances there was only
+one thing to be done, and that was for the captain to remain and send
+the mate home. As soon as this was decided upon, two of us were asked to
+stay behind and help to work the newly-arrived vessel. I was one, the
+cook was the other (our skipper liked to be looked after in the eating
+department). Well, we soon settled down in our new quarters, and in a
+week or so said good-bye to our old ship and shipmates, who were jolly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_582" id="Page_582">[Pg 582]</a></span>
+glad to get out of the river, and did not envy us poor fellows who had
+to go through all the old duties over again without a bit of change.
+However, we entered upon our work with cheerful hearts. We had a good
+captain, and had no intention of leaving him as long as he remained out.
+Perhaps a word or two about the natives&rsquo; trade tricks might interest
+you, then you will see a mate&rsquo;s life on an African trading ship was not
+altogether a &ldquo;bed of roses&rdquo;; and he had to be pretty sharp to catch
+them, otherwise our wily friends would be sure to have him. For
+instance, they had a happy knack of half-filling their casks with thick
+wood, secured in such a way to the inside of the heads that, instead of
+there being fifty gallons of oil in the cask which it would measure by
+the gauging rod, it would possibly not contain more than twenty-five;
+water, too, was very often introduced to make up a deficiency, and if
+you happened to tell our friend his oil contained water, you were told
+not water, it is rain. Another dodge was to mix a certain kind of herb
+with the oil, which caused it to ferment, so that half casks could very
+easily be made to look full ones. Dirt as well was freely used by the
+natives when they thought they could get it passed, so one had to keep
+one&rsquo;s eyes open.</p><hr class="chap" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_583" id="Page_583">[Pg 583]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>APPENDIX II</h2>
+
+<h2>PART II</h2>
+
+<h3>PIONEERING IN WEST AFRICA; OR, &ldquo;THE OPENING UP OF THE QUA IBOE RIVER&rdquo;</h3>
+
+<p>In the year 1880, I was asked by a Liverpool firm to undertake certain
+work in connection with one of the trading establishments on the Old
+Calabar River. The offer came at a very opportune time. Being anxious to
+improve my position, like most young fellows, I accepted, and was soon
+on the way to my new undertaking. My first business was to take an old
+ship, that had seen the best of her days, and had been lying there in
+the stream for many years as a trading hulk, now being considered unsafe
+to remain longer afloat. I had to place her on the beach in such a way
+that she could still be used as a trading establishment. This was not a
+small matter, as the beach upon which she had to be placed was not a
+good one for the purpose. However, I found that if I could get her to
+lie on a certain spot I had carefully marked out, there was every
+possibility of a success; but I fear I was the only one that thought so,
+as it was fully twelve months before my senior would let me undertake
+the venture; at last I got his consent, and in a very short time the
+vessel was landed safely, and, I am pleased to say, did duty for over
+ten years. It was while waiting for this<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_584" id="Page_584">[Pg 584]</a></span> consent that the beginning of
+the events I am going to narrate took place.</p>
+
+<p>Business was somewhat quiet in the Old Calabar, so our senior thought he
+would go for a bit of an excursion to a place called Qua Iboe, which was
+supposed to be a small tributary of the great river of Old Calabar, but
+which he found to his astonishment was some twenty-five miles westward
+of the mouth of the Old Calabar, and ninety miles from our main station
+at Calabar; however, he did not like to return without seeing the place,
+so he and his crew went, and after two or three days&rsquo; journey, they
+suddenly found themselves in the midst of breakers, and it was only by
+luck they got washed into the mouth of the river Qua Iboe, half-dead
+with fright, so much so that our senior would not venture back in the
+boat, but preferred walking overland.</p>
+
+<p>After being absent seven or eight days, he returned to headquarters with
+a very lively recollection of what he had gone through. Not being
+accustomed to the sea, the knocking about of the small boat very much
+upset him, then the long overland journey back took all the pleasure out
+of what he had intended to be a little holiday. Consequently, on his
+return he had but little to say about the river he had gone to see; and
+not being of a talkative disposition, had I not pressed him on the
+subject, I think, as far as our establishment was concerned, the Qua
+Iboe would have been a blank space on the map to-day, as many more fine
+places are in that great continent.</p>
+
+<p>So while we were at dinner, an evening or so after his return, feeling
+very anxious to hear something about his excursion, I remarked that we
+had not heard him say much about the new river. &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said he; &ldquo;for the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_585" id="Page_585">[Pg 585]</a></span>
+simple reason is that I know but very little about it, except that I
+nearly got capsized in the breakers.&rdquo; &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;is it a river of
+any size? Would it not be a good place to open up a new business?&rdquo; &ldquo;Oh,
+yes!&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;the river is a fair size, and it may or may not be a
+good place for business. We can&rsquo;t go there, we have not the means; we
+could not go without a vessel of some sort.&rdquo; &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said I, &ldquo;would you
+go if you could? Or, in other words, will you give me all the support I
+need if I undertake to go?&rdquo; &ldquo;Yes, certainly,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;I shall be only
+too pleased to give you anything we have here.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>That night I got to work and laid out all my plans. First I had to find
+a vessel. We had attached to our hulk a good large boat that would carry
+about ten tons. This boat I soon got rigged up with mast and sails. This
+done, I had a house constructed about sixty or seventy feet long by
+twenty wide, made ready to be put up on whatever spot I should pitch
+upon when I reached my new destination. This work, of course, took some
+little time. However, the eighth day after I had my senior&rsquo;s consent to
+go, I was sailing away from the Old Calabar, with my little craft and
+sixteen people besides myself.</p>
+
+<p>It took some four or five days to get to the long-looked-for Qua Iboe.
+At last we were rewarded with a glimpse of the bar and its breakers,
+which we had to pass before we could get into the river. We, however,
+reached it safely, and with thankful hearts I can tell you, as our
+journey had been anything but a pleasant one&mdash;so many of us in such a
+small craft. I felt bound to take this number, as in addition to wanting
+these people for the building of the establishment, I wished to make as
+big a show as I could to the, at that time, unknown natives, who<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_586" id="Page_586">[Pg 586]</a></span> had
+the reputation of being as bad a lot as were to be met with anywhere on
+the West Coast. Anyhow, I thought they would have to be pretty bad if I
+could not make something of them, so I sailed my boat flying up the
+river to the first village, which was supposed to be the senior one in
+the river, and was always called Big Town. It was just dusk when we
+arrived. We dropped anchor, and decided to rest for the night; but I
+found the villagers very excited, and not liking at all my advent among
+them, as they had just had news from the up-country informing them that
+if they allowed a white man to remain in their river, King Ja Ja, who
+was the very terror not only of this place, but of some fifty or sixty
+miles all round, had threatened to burn their towns down; he laying
+claim to all this country, allowed no one to trade there but himself.</p>
+
+<p>The advice I had from these people was that I had better go back and
+leave them and their river to themselves. But I said, No, I am not going
+back. I have come to open a trading station and to remain with you, and
+that King Ja Ja, or any one else but our British Consul, would never
+drive me from that river alive. I saw, though, it was useless taking any
+notice of these frightened people, so I up anchor the next morning, and
+sailed up the river; near the next village I saw a suitable spot for our
+establishment. I at once anchored our boat, landed our people with house
+and everything we had brought, put up a bit of a shanty to sleep under
+for the time, and set to work to build our house; this, I may tell you,
+did not take long, for by the end of the week we had a fine-looking
+place up, such a one had never been seen in that part before. The house
+complete, my next work was to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_587" id="Page_587">[Pg 587]</a></span> get goods for the natives to buy from us.
+This meant a journey for me.</p>
+
+<p>Ten days after our first arrival, our house and store were up and built,
+and I was away to the Old Calabar in our boat with some of my people to
+get goods to start our trade with; the remainder stayed to put the
+finishing touches to our building and to clear the land near.</p>
+
+<p>I was soon back at my post again and trade started. After this I had to
+make several journeys to keep our supply good, and all went well for
+about three months, with the exception of continuous rumours as to what
+King Ja Ja intended to do; these I took no notice of, as I did not
+anticipate he would molest me or my people. However, my peaceful
+occupation was not to last for long; for while I was away at Old Calabar
+replenishing our stock, a day or two previous to my return King Ja Ja,
+with about a thousand of his men, pounced down unexpectedly on these Qua
+Iboe people, burnt down seven villages, took one hundred prisoners, and
+drove the remainder of the population into the woods, cutting down every
+plantain tree, and destroying everything in the way of food stuff that
+was growing in the place. I arrived off the bar the day after this
+terrible business had taken place. When I left the river I left twelve
+of my people there. The head man had instructions that as soon as they
+saw me off the bar, when the tide was right for me to come in, to hoist
+a white flag.</p>
+
+<p>The day I arrived, after waiting until I knew high water must have
+passed, I took my glasses, but there was not a soul visible. Not caring
+to risk our little vessel without the signal, I took a small boat we had
+with us and started over the bar into the river. What my surprise was
+you<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_588" id="Page_588">[Pg 588]</a></span> will readily understand when, arriving at the store, I found only
+one man, half-dead with fright, and crying like a child; all I could get
+out of him was that Ja Ja had been there and killed every one in the
+place. The first thing I did was to at once return to the vessel, and
+bring her in with the remainder of my people. We landed all our stores,
+then I immediately hoisted our English ensign on the flag-staff. I
+prayed to the Almighty to defend us and the country from the tyranny of
+these dreadful men who had caused so much misery for these poor people.
+Their wretchedness I was soon brought face to face with.</p>
+
+<p>The morning after my arrival, if ever a man&rsquo;s heart was softened mine
+was, and the tears came to my eyes when I saw crawling into the house
+from the woods a poor, half-starved cripple child, covered with sores,
+and in a dreadful state. We took it in at once and cared for it. Then I
+sent my people into the woods to see if they chanced to come across any
+one, and to tell them to come in under our flag, and I would see that no
+harm again befell them. In this we were very successful, for one after
+the other they arrived, more dead than alive, until some 700 of them
+were in and around our house. The next thing to be thought about was
+food for them. My last cargo fortunately was all rice and biscuits. This
+relieved me somewhat, and I felt we could at least manage for a short
+time.</p>
+
+<p>To find food for such a great number gave me, as you may suppose,
+serious thought, for there was not a scrap left in the district; the
+land in this particular part being of a poor nature, the food grown at
+the best of times was very small, and this little had all been
+destroyed. But we had not to wait long before witnessing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_589" id="Page_589">[Pg 589]</a></span> one of the
+greatest blessings that could have happened. As soon as the men had
+somewhat recovered from their fright, they began to go out into the
+river to fish, when such quantities were caught that never in the
+remembrance of any person in that country had such an amount of fish
+been seen. Load after load was brought to the shore, in fact, some had
+to spoil before it could be cured.</p>
+
+<p>What did all this wonderful catch bring about? While a short time before
+these people had been in the greatest poverty and distress, now they are
+rejoicing and thankful for this abundance of food and wealth. I say
+wealth because fish in this part of Africa is more precious than gold
+with us. With fish anything can be bought in the market, from the
+smallest article to the largest slave. So you see here was our relief
+brought about by the ever bountiful Providence, whose all-seeing eye is
+ever near those who are in want and need and ask His aid, whether it be
+the poorest slave in Africa or the orphan child in England.</p>
+
+<p>From this time we began to gather strength day by day. New arrivals came
+in who had managed to get away to some place of safety until they felt
+they could return to their native place with security.</p>
+
+<p>As soon as Ja Ja and his men had destroyed the villages they returned to
+their town of Opobo, with the hundred prisoners, the whole of whom they
+massacred in cold blood, and exhibited to their townspeople, and, I am
+sorry to say, to some Europeans, for days. While this fearful murdering
+was going on twenty-five miles away from us I, with a few of the most
+courageous Ibunos, or Qua Iboe people, made a tour of the principal
+villages in the Ibuno country to let the inhabitants know of the deadly
+onslaught that had been committed on the people at the mouth of the
+river. They<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_590" id="Page_590">[Pg 590]</a></span> all swore to stand by us to a man, and to keep themselves
+free from Ja Ja&rsquo;s tyrannical rule. After making this round we returned
+to the mouth of the river and turned our attention to the defence of the
+new villages that were about to be built.</p>
+
+<p>A little accident occurred to us while leaving the last village, called
+Ikoropata, that may be worth mentioning as a warning to others who might
+be placed in a similar situation. We had just started after having a
+long palaver with the chiefs, our men, about twenty, marching in single
+file, I near the leading man. All at once I noticed he was carrying his
+gun in a very alarming and unsuitable way. Had it gone off by accident,
+which is not an unusual occurrence, the man behind him was bound to
+receive the contents, with perhaps fatal results. Having stopped them
+and explained the danger of carrying guns in this position, we started
+off again, every man with his weapon to his shoulder. Strange to say, a
+few minutes after the very man&rsquo;s gun I had noticed at first blew off
+into the air with a tremendous report. Had this happened before, I fear
+we might have had to take one of our comrades back more dead than alive.
+The escape was a marvellous one, and not easily forgotten by any of us.</p>
+
+<p>Now being back amongst our own people, we set about to get all the guns
+we could together, and all able bodied men I told off for gun practice
+and defence drill. This I carried on day after day, until we had quite a
+little band of well-trained men. All this time we were continually
+receiving rumours from the Opobo side as to what Ja Ja&rsquo;s next intentions
+were, and to keep up the excitement he sent about 200 men as near the
+mouth of the river as he dared. They settled themselves in a creek two
+or three<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_591" id="Page_591">[Pg 591]</a></span> miles away from us, and here they used to amuse themselves by
+letting off now and again a regular fusilade of guns. This generally
+occurred in the middle of the night when every one but the watchmen had
+gone to sleep, and had such an effect on the frightened Ibunos that
+often two-thirds of them would rush off to the woods under the
+impression that the Opobos were again making a raid upon them. This went
+on for weeks, so much so that I was almost losing heart, and sometimes
+thought I should never get confidence in the people. At last, to my
+great surprise one evening in walked to my house the whole of the
+chiefs, who had just held a meeting in the village and passed a law that
+no person should again leave the town. They said they had come to tell
+me they felt ashamed of themselves for running away so many times and
+leaving me alone and unprotected in their country, and had decided to
+leave me no more, but that every man should stand and die if needs be
+for the defence of their towns. Whether Ja Ja&rsquo;s people heard of this
+resolution I don&rsquo;t know, but they soon dropped their gun firing at
+night, and eventually left their camping ground. Their next move was to
+get into the Ibunos&rsquo; markets, and worry them there. This I was
+determined should not be done if I could help it. It was a long time
+before there was any real disturbance, although I could see that the
+Ibunos were daily getting more frightened that the Opobo people would
+monopolise their markets, and in that case they knew there would be very
+little chance for them.</p>
+
+<p>At last news came down the river that the Opobos had that afternoon sent
+a canoe to a market or town called Okot for the purpose of starting a
+trade with the natives. Now Okot was at that time one of the best
+markets the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_592" id="Page_592">[Pg 592]</a></span> Ibunos had, and for them to be suddenly deprived of this
+trading station would be a terrible calamity to us all. I did not know
+what was to be done. The Ibunos would not go to the market to face the
+Opobos, neither would they go further up the river for fear of being
+molested by them. The only thing to do was to go myself and start a
+station at the same place, and which would enable me to keep an eye on
+their movements, so I at once made ready to start the same evening, and
+by five o&rsquo;clock next morning I landed at Okot, and found the Opobo canoe
+there also, but like all Africans, time not being an object to them,
+they had not gone to the king or the owner of the land at the landing
+place. We did not wake the Opobos up on our arrival, but I immediately
+started for the village, and at daylight walked into the presence of the
+king of that part, who was so surprised to see a white man in his
+village that it took him some time to believe his eyes. Poor old chap! I
+fear he must have wished several times afterwards that he had never seen
+a white man, for he was taken prisoner by the Government in 1896 or 1897
+for insisting, I believe, in carrying out some human sacrifice at one of
+the feast times, and died in prison. But to return to my mission. I soon
+made him understand that I had come to start a trading station at his
+beach, but before doing this I had to secure the land at the landing
+place for the purpose. This he readily consented to, telling me at the
+same time that although the land at that particular spot did not belong
+to him he would instruct the owner of it to sell me all I wanted. So
+after paying the usual compliments to the old king, I started back for
+the landing place with the owner, who had already sold his right to me,
+and was now only coming to show us the extent, which was the whole of
+the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_593" id="Page_593">[Pg 593]</a></span> land of any use on this spot. Just as we got back we found our
+Opobo friends preparing to go to the village to see the king and also
+get permission to build on this land, but their surprise on being told
+by him that he had no land on the spot to give them I will leave you to
+imagine. But the Opobos at that time took a lot of beating, and they
+decided to build a house without getting the permission of any one, and
+an iron roofed house too, which was considered by the natives then a
+great thing. After the house had stood for some time, our consul being
+in the river, we had the disputed land brought before him and thoroughly
+discussed. After hearing evidence on both sides for two days, it was
+decided that it belonged to us, and the Opobos were ordered to remove
+their house. But before this settlement occurred we had a lot to contend
+with from them. They did all in their power to debar us from keeping our
+establishments open there, and for two or three years we had continual
+trouble with them, occasionally firing at our people; luckily they
+seldom hit any one. Then they tried competing with us in trading. This I
+did not mind, as I considered it a fair means of testing who was who. Ja
+Ja, I knew, was a very rich man, and if we attempted to follow them in
+their extravagant prices we should soon be ruined. My policy was to let
+them go ahead, which they did, paying almost twice as much for their
+produce as we could possibly afford to pay. This lasted a great deal
+longer than I anticipated, and I feel sure Ja Ja must have lost a deal
+of money. After about twelve months of this reckless trading we were
+left pretty much to ourselves at Okot, and being fairly well settled
+down I began to look about for a good beach to start my next
+establishment. I had not to look far. On the left bank of the river,
+about two and a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_594" id="Page_594">[Pg 594]</a></span> half miles down from Okot, was the landing beach of
+Eket. Here there is a rising cliff about fifty feet high, and I had
+often remarked when passing this spot, &ldquo;If I were going to build a house
+to live in here I should like to build it on this hill.&rdquo; The situation
+was so good, as it was right in an elbow of the river, and from the top
+of the hill you had a view of the river branching off both up and down
+at right angles. An opportunity occurring for me to start a house at
+Eket, I went and saw the people, who were very pleased for me to come
+among them. So a little house was built, and a young coloured assistant
+named William Sawyer placed in charge, who proved to be one of the best
+men I ever had in the country. He needed to be, too, for the Ekets were
+the most trying of any of the peoples we had to deal with. I never left
+my stations for any length of time. Once or twice a week I visited them,
+but no matter how short a time I was away there was always a grievance
+to be settled at Eket. Poor Sawyer had a terrible time; the people had
+an idea they could do as they liked with the factory keeper, and would
+often walk off with the goods without paying for them, which Mr. Sawyer
+naturally objected to, usually ending in a free fight, sometimes my
+people coming off second best. The trade at that time at Eket was not
+large, although it was a good one, and I did not want to give it up if
+it could be helped. But my patience came to an end when I arrived upon
+the scene one day and found Mr. Sawyer had been terribly handled the day
+before. There had been a big row, and I could see by his face he had had
+very much the worst of the fight. I felt I could not allow this any
+longer, so summoned a meeting of all the chiefs and people. We had a
+very large meeting, one of the largest I ever remember, and after<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_595" id="Page_595">[Pg 595]</a></span>
+explaining to them my reason for calling them together, told them it was
+my intention to close the little house and go to some people higher up
+the river, who would be pleased for us to come among them, and would not
+ill-use my people as the Ekets were doing, and showing them how badly
+they had treated Mr. Sawyer, who had done nothing more than his duty in
+trying to protect the property that was under his care, and which they
+seemed to think they had a better right to than he. When they had heard
+my complaint and warning to close the house, the old and ever respected
+chief of all the Ekets rose to his feet. The people seeing this, there
+was silence in a moment (which every one knows who has happened to have
+been present at an African palaver is indeed a rarity), he being much
+loved and reverenced in his own town. As soon as he started I felt we
+were going to hear something worth hearing, and we did, for if ever
+there was a born statesman this was one. He said, &ldquo;We have heard with
+sorrow of the way in which your people have been so ill-used by our
+people, and it is a shame to us a stranger should be so treated who is
+trying to do his best to bring business among us. Not only have you
+brought a business to us, where we can come and exchange our produce for
+our requirements, but you have opened our eyes to the light, as it were,
+and we have no intention that you should leave us. You have been sent to
+us by Abassy (which means God), and he will never let you leave us. Your
+trade will grow in such a way that you will see here on this beach far
+more trade than you will be able to cope with, so cast away from your
+mind the thought of leaving us. The disturbances that have been going on
+we will stop. It is not our wish that it has been so; it is the young
+boys of the village who know no better. We<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_596" id="Page_596">[Pg 596]</a></span> will put a stop to it in
+such a way that you will find your people from this time will have but
+little to complain about.&rdquo; After such a speech you may be sure I gave up
+all thought of leaving the Eket people, and I need scarcely tell you
+that this same spot has become the centre of the whole of the trade of
+this river. The words spoken by the venerable and, I believe, good old
+chief came as true as the day. We did see often and often more trade
+than we could cope with, and the establishment grew in such a way that
+the natives themselves often used to wonder. I never had anything to do
+with a more prosperous undertaking in Africa, and to-day there are few
+establishments on the West Coast that can surpass it, either in its
+quiet, steady trade or healthy climate. I used to say one could live as
+long as they liked. On the hill there is a very fine house, with acres
+and acres of good land at the back of it, while at the foot of the hill
+are all the stores and the shop where the daily work and trade goes on
+year in year out.</p>
+
+<p>Several very remarkable incidents happened here. One evening, just as we
+were going to dinner, a woman came and stood a little way from the
+house. I could see that she was crying bitterly and evidently in great
+distress. &ldquo;What is the matter?&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;Affya (that is her brother) is
+dying, and I want you to come and see him before it is too late.&rdquo; Now
+Affya was one of the finest young fellows at Eket, and one whom I felt
+would be a sad loss to a people who wanted so much leading and
+governing, as it were. So I lost no time, but went off at once with the
+woman to see if I could do anything. On our arrival at the house things
+looked bad enough, and I feared the worst when I saw him laid out, as
+every one there thought, for dead&mdash;the finest young fellow at Eket. I
+fell on my knees by his side and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_597" id="Page_597">[Pg 597]</a></span> prayed as earnestly as man could to
+our Heavenly Father, and begged for this life to be spared to us. All at
+once he moved as though suddenly aroused from sleep, and in a moment I
+had him up and on the back of one of my boys, and away to Eket House as
+fast as possible, and laid him on the verandah to sleep and rest free
+from the close and stuffy hut he had been in before. After a little
+nourishment he slept all night. I kept watch near him, and next morning
+what was my surprise when he told me he was feeling quite strong and
+able to walk back to the village. This I allowed him to do after the sun
+had got well high, as I could plainly see the lad was out of all danger.
+Should these lines ever get into the hands of that lad, for lad he will
+always be to me, I feel very sure he will say, &ldquo;Yes, this wonderful
+returning to life did indeed happen to me, Affya, son of Uso, at Eket,
+at the village of Usoniyong, in the month of July, 1892.&rdquo; This is one of
+the many incidents that occurred whilst I was in charge at Eket and the
+Qua Iboe River. Another evening, just after dinner, my steward came to
+me saying there was a rat under the house (our house stood on iron
+columns). &ldquo;A rat,&rdquo; I said; &ldquo;what do you mean?&rdquo; &ldquo;Well, a small woman.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Go and bring her up; do not be afraid.&rdquo; He looked at me as much as to
+say you will be afraid when I do bring her up. Presently he appeared
+with a child in his arms, such a sight I never shall forget&mdash;almost
+starved to death, and covered with marks where she had been burnt with
+fire-sticks. This poor little thing, after wandering many days in the
+wood, at last found her way to our house. She was too ill to have
+anything done to her that evening, so I had a bed made for her in the
+sitting-room, close to my door, so that I could hear should she get
+frightened in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_598" id="Page_598">[Pg 598]</a></span> the night. The little thing woke up many times, but was
+soon off to sleep again when I had patted and spoken to it. The next day
+we had her seen to, the steward boy set about and made her some dresses,
+and after a warm bath and plenty of food, in a few days the little girl
+was the life of our house. The poor little thing had been left without
+father or mother, and had become dependent upon an uncle, or some other
+relative, who had ill-used her in such a terrible manner that he had
+left her for dead. How she ever found strength to get to our house was
+almost a mystery.</p>
+
+<p>After being with us for twelve months, some other relatives laid claim
+to her, and as I was just leaving for England, I allowed them to take
+her, but not without making four or five of the principal chiefs
+responsible for her welfare. She will now be a grown woman, but will
+look back upon those happy months with pleasure, I feel sure.</p>
+
+<p>Another incident may be of interest&mdash;quite a change of scene&mdash;showing
+you how you may be as kind and as good to a people as it is possible to
+be, yet you must always be ready to defend yourself at a moment&rsquo;s
+notice, which will be seen from the following circumstances. We had been
+troubled for some time past with night robberies, not very serious at
+first, but they became more frequent than I cared about. I gave the
+matter serious attention, but we could not trace the thieves, do what we
+would; the strange thing was, that as soon as a robbery had been
+committed, a native, a sort of half slave, was sure to be seen about the
+beach putting on what seemed to me a sort of bravado manner; but, of
+course, he never knew anything about the people who had been tampering
+with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_599" id="Page_599">[Pg 599]</a></span> the premises, and he always appeared to be surprised to think that
+any one should do such a thing, but at last matters came to a climax;
+our plantain trees had been cut down, and a whole lot of fine plantains
+stolen, as well as a lot of wire fencing. I was vexed to the extreme
+when this dastardly work was brought to my notice. But what was my
+surprise, no sooner had my lad reported the matter to me, when along
+walked the very man I have just described, looking as bold as brass.
+Said I to myself, &ldquo;If you have not done this stealing you know something
+about it, and you will have to give an account of your movements before
+you leave these premises.&rdquo; So I sent orders to have him immediately put
+under arrest, which was done, and he was given to understand that until
+the thieves, whoever they were, had been brought to justice, he would
+have to remain under arrest.</p>
+
+<p>This was an unexpected blow for my friend, but he proved one too many
+for my people. He managed to get the best side of his keeper, and
+slipped; next morning we had no prisoner, the bird had flown. I knew he
+would work no good for us in the villages, neither did he; he went from
+village to village, right through the Eket country, telling the people
+the most dreadful things, and the most abominable lies, of what had been
+done to him the short time he was our prisoner; so much so, that he got
+the people quite furious against me and my people. Just as an agitator
+will work up strife in England if he is not checked, so it was with this
+man; he got every village to declare war against me. This went on for
+three or four days, until he got them all to concentrate themselves.
+They were all brought one night to within a quarter of a mile of our
+establishment; here they had their war dances<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_600" id="Page_600">[Pg 600]</a></span> all night, yet I did not
+think there was any likelihood of their attacking us. Still, for a
+couple of days things did not appear right, the people seemed strange in
+their manner; so I thought it not wise to be caught napping, and I made
+some preparations for an attack if we were to have one, and had the
+Gatling gun placed in position at the rear of the house. This I felt was
+quite enough to defend the house, if I could but get a fair chance to
+use it, although I was in hope I should not be called upon to do so.</p>
+
+<p>We had not long to wait, for at 5.30 in the morning after a continuous
+beating of drums all night, I got up and walked out on the verandah,
+which was my usual custom, not thinking we were going to be attacked,
+but when I looked round, the wood and bush seemed to be alive with
+people, and some of them were already advancing towards the house, while
+one chief, more daring than the others, came on near enough for me to
+speak to him. Seeing this unexpected development of affairs, and the
+suspicious look of my friend near at hand, I called to my boy, who was
+near, to bring my revolver, and no sooner had the chief got within
+twenty paces or so of the house, when I called upon him to stop and tell
+me what was their mission so early in the morning. He said they had come
+to talk over the matter of the man I had imprisoned. But I said this is
+not the time of day we usually talk over matters we may have in
+dispute&mdash;the afternoon being always the recognised time. &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said my
+friend, &ldquo;but we want to settle matters now.&rdquo; &ldquo;All right,&rdquo; I said, and
+with that I held my revolver at his head, and ordered him to stand, and
+not move an inch, or I would shoot him dead on the spot. The people at
+the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_601" id="Page_601">[Pg 601]</a></span> back, seeing what was taking place, began to move towards the
+house. I said to my boy, &ldquo;run to the beach and tell Mr. Sawyer to come
+up.&rdquo; This was my coloured assistant, whom I knew I could trust. The lad
+was away, and Mr. Sawyer at my side before the people had got too near.
+&ldquo;What am I to do, sir?&rdquo; &ldquo;Take this revolver and hold it to that man&rsquo;s
+head, whilst I jump to the Gatling; if he moves, shoot him down.&rdquo; There
+was not half a move in him, and in a moment I was at the Gatling. By
+this time there was a general move forward from all parts of the bush,
+but no sooner did this black mass see I was at the gun, and determined
+to fight or die, quicker than I can write these words, I saw the whole
+body fall back in dismay. There was my opportunity. I jumped from the
+Gatling, went straight to the people, and demanded of them what they
+wanted to do. Their answer was&mdash;&ldquo;We don&rsquo;t know; we are a lot of fools,
+and we have lost our heads; send us back, we have no business to come to
+fight against you, and we don&rsquo;t want to.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>By seven o&rsquo;clock that morning the trade was going on in our
+establishment as though nothing had happened. This little incident I
+have always described as a bloodless battle, won in a few moments; yes,
+in almost less time than it has taken me to write its description. This
+matter we finally settled, after holding a large meeting with all the
+chiefs and people. The laws of these people are very definite; you must
+have absolute proof of a person&rsquo;s guilt, before you can even accuse him.
+I had to sit as judge over my own case, which was rather an unfair
+position for one to be placed in. But as the laws are definite it was
+simple enough to decide. The question was&mdash;&ldquo;Had I any proof that this
+man was one of the thieves, or in any<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_602" id="Page_602">[Pg 602]</a></span> way connected with the affair?&rdquo; I
+had not; my evidence was purely suppositional. This ended the matter. I
+was in the wrong, therefore I had no alternative but to put a fine upon
+myself, which I did, and was very pleased to end what had nearly cost me
+my life, and probably also a number of my people. After this affairs
+went on merrily at Eket.</p>
+
+<p>There was a place called Okon some few miles up the river from Eket, and
+here I proposed to start another establishment, so had made all
+preparations at Ibuno for that purpose, and left the latter place with
+my boat, people, provisions and materials. We arrived at Okot overnight,
+intending to sleep there, as it was the nearest beach to Okon. All went
+well until the next morning, when we were preparing to start. My factory
+keeper at Okot came to me in the most serious manner possible, wanting
+to know if I really meant going to Okon. I said &ldquo;Certainly, we have come
+up for the purpose.&rdquo; &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I think you had better not go;
+there are very nasty rumours about here that it is intended to do you
+some harm if you should attempt to open up at Okon; in other words, men
+have been appointed to take your life.&rdquo; &ldquo;All right,&rdquo; I said; &ldquo;we must
+take our chance; we shall not turn back until we have tried.&rdquo; So away we
+went, I in a small boat with a few boys, the others in another boat with
+the etceteras. We arrived at Okon and landed our goods, but we found a
+number of Ja Ja&rsquo;s people had arrived before us. I took no notice of them
+any more than passing the time of day. However, I must confess <a name="CORR11" id="CORR11"><ins class="correction" title="original: I did not like their demeanour">I did not like
+their demeanour.</ins></a> Nothing was said and our provisions were safely
+housed in a native shanty. Here I intended to remain while building our
+own house. The timber, iron and other goods were<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_603" id="Page_603">[Pg 603]</a></span> placed on the spot we
+intended to occupy. This done, I started off with a couple of boys to
+acquaint the king and the people of the village of our arrival, and to
+get the king or some of his chiefs to come down and allot me the land I
+required. We had been in the village some little time, and matters were
+well-nigh settled, when all at once there was a general stampede from
+the meeting house, and just at that moment I heard a regular fusilade of
+guns, and in came running one of my people from the beach, nearly
+frightened to death. &ldquo;Massa, massa, come quick to the beach; Ja Ja&rsquo;s men
+have burnt down the house and want to shoot us all, and all our <a name="CORR12" id="CORR12"><ins class="correction" title="goods are in their hands.">goods
+are in their hands.&rdquo;</ins></a> By this time a lot of Ja Ja&rsquo;s men were in the
+village, and I was left absolutely alone with the exception of my own
+boys and the one that had run up from the beach. Every native had rushed
+to his compound as soon as the firing had commenced. I turned to my
+boys, told them not to fire, but to keep cool, do as I told them, and be
+ready to protect themselves if any one attacked them, not else. So down
+we slowly walked to the beach. Here was a sight for me! All my goods
+thrown to the four winds, my house burnt to the ground, and about a
+hundred or more of Ja Ja&rsquo;s or Opobo men arranged up in line, every man
+with his rifle and cutlass, ready to fight, which they evidently
+anticipated I should do as soon as I appeared on the scene; but this I
+had no intention of doing. To attempt to show fight against such odds
+would have been simply suicidal, so I made up my mind to show the best
+front possible under the circumstances, called my boys, placed them in
+equal numbers on either side of me, with our backs to the bush and
+facing our would-be enemies. I then inquired what they wished to do.
+Drawing my revolver, which was a six<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_604" id="Page_604">[Pg 604]</a></span> chambered one, I held it up. &ldquo;If
+you want my life you may have it, but, <span class="fakesc">FIRST</span>, <i>let me tell you, inside
+this small gun I hold six men&rsquo;s lives; those six men I</i> <span class="fakesc">WILL</span> <i>have</i>,
+then you may have me.&rdquo; Not a word was uttered. Then I said, &ldquo;If you do
+not want that, I and my people will leave you here in possession of
+these goods and the house that you have already partly destroyed.&rdquo; With
+this I ordered my boys to the boats, to which we went quietly and in
+order, leaving our Opobo friends dumbfounded and baulked of the main
+object of their mission.</p>
+
+<p>When we had got well clear of the beach I was thankful indeed, for never
+was a man nearer death than I was at that time, I think. We went down to
+Ibuno as fast as our boats could go, our boys singing as Kroo boys can
+sing when they feel themselves free from danger. I only stayed a few
+hours at Ibuno. As soon as the tide served I made right away to Old
+Calabar to lay the whole affair before H.M. Consul. After this I felt I
+had done my duty in the matter of the Opobo business. The affair was, of
+course, settled against the Opobos, and they had to leave the Okon beach
+to us absolutely.</p>
+
+<p>I must not deal with the rough side only of pioneer life in West Africa,
+so I think I will just touch upon one of the many kindnesses shown to me
+by the Ibunos during these troublous times. The Qua Iboe bar, like many
+others along the coast, more so in this particular part, is very
+treacherous, being composed of quicksand. It is always on the move, so
+the channel changes from place to place. Sometimes you go in and out at
+one side, sometimes at the other, and sometimes straight through the
+centre. These moving sands require a great deal of careful watching and
+constant surveying, which I used to invariably see to and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_605" id="Page_605">[Pg 605]</a></span> do myself
+about once a fortnight. While out on this work one day, with four boys
+and Mr. Williams, who at that time had a small establishment at Ibuno,
+and was as anxious as I was to know the true position of the channel, we
+were both working small sailing craft&mdash;we had not risen to a steamer
+then&mdash;(now there is, and has been for a considerable time, one working
+the same river), and started off, the weather being fairly fine, and to
+all appearances the sea very quiet. All went well with us going out. I
+got soundings right through the channel, and after passing safely we
+turned our boat about to come back into the river again. Along we came
+until we got right into the centre of the bar, then suddenly a sea took
+us, and before any one could speak the boat was over. We were under
+water and the boat on top of us. Being a good swimmer, I was not afraid,
+but immediately dived down and came up alongside the boat. My boys were
+round me like a swarm of fish, not knowing whether I could swim or not.
+I soon put their minds at rest and told them not to trouble about me,
+but to get everything together belonging to the boat and get her
+righted. This done, &ldquo;Now,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;if you will all keep your heads and
+do as you are told, we shall get the boat and ourselves through all
+right.&rdquo; So we divided, three on one side, three on the other, and swam
+with the boat until we reached the beach, which was about a mile and a
+half distant, and I can tell you took us some considerable time. Before
+we landed we had been something like three hours in the water, which is
+no small matter anywhere, much less in West Africa, where one is not
+always in the best of condition. Mr. Williams got very frightened and, I
+think, was in doubt once or twice as to whether we should reach the
+shore; but we did, and were truly thankful, and although<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_606" id="Page_606">[Pg 606]</a></span> we did not
+openly show it, we gave none the less hearty thanks from our inmost
+hearts. After landing we righted our boat and paddled off up river to
+our factory. Here we arrived before any of the natives knew what had
+happened. Our boys soon put the news about, as they felt they had had a
+marvellous escape. Mr. Williams and I drank as much brandy as we could
+manage, then I jumped into bed and remained until the next morning. I
+believe he did the same too. At daylight I awoke and felt, to my
+surprise, as well as I ever felt in my life. Being so long in the water,
+I fully anticipated a severe attack of fever next day, but it wasn&rsquo;t so,
+and I was about my business as though nothing had happened. I don&rsquo;t
+think I should have thought any more about it had not the Ibunos so
+forcibly reminded me of the danger we really had passed through. After
+having so many narrow escapes this one appeared to pass as a matter of
+ordinary occurrence. Not so to them; the afternoon of the day after the
+accident, while I was out about the work, I saw an unusual number of
+natives going to the house, each little contingent carrying baskets of
+yams and fish. I had not long to wait before one of my boys came to tell
+me the Ibuno people wished to speak with me at the house. I went to them
+at once. Here was my dining room full of natives, and in the centre a
+pile of yams two or three feet high, and fish, the very finest that had
+been caught that day, as well as some very beautiful dried fish, enough
+to last me and my people, I should think, a month or more. This sight
+took me rather by surprise, not quite knowing what was about to take
+place. I took the chair which was placed for me and waited. All being
+quiet, one of the chiefs rose up and said, &ldquo;We know you are somewhat
+surprised to see all us villagers here to-day, and also the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_607" id="Page_607">[Pg 607]</a></span> food we
+have brought with us which is now in front of you, but we have come to
+tell you how sorry we all were, men, women and children throughout our
+villages, when we heard you had been thrown into the sea, and all had
+such a narrow escape of losing your lives. We are all the more sorry to
+think that not one of our people were able to render you the slightest
+assistance. Had we seen you or known what was taking place every canoe
+would have come to your aid, but we did not, and while we were sitting
+comfortably in our houses you were struggling in the water. To us this
+has been a grief, and to show you how thankful we are to think you have
+been preserved to us through this danger and many others, we have
+brought for your acceptance the best we can offer you. We are but poor,
+as you know, but these gifts come from our hearts as a present to you
+and a thank-offering to our Father in Heaven who has been pleased to
+restore you to us unhurt. We are, we must tell you, thankful in more
+ways than one for your deliverance, because had you been lost our great
+enemy Ja Ja would at once have said his Ju Ju had worked that it should
+be so.&rdquo; With this he sat down.</p>
+
+<p>For me to attempt to express what I felt at that moment would be
+impossible; I must say I felt a very unpleasant feeling in my throat,
+and I don&rsquo;t know but that some of the water I had had too much of the
+day before was having a good try to assert itself. If it had, it was not
+to be wondered at; for any one would have to have been hard indeed if
+such kindness did not touch them; even the strongest of us are bound
+sometimes to give way for a moment. I did not attempt to hide from them
+the fulness of my heart, and the gratitude I felt for such kindness,
+where I least expected it. I told them I<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_608" id="Page_608">[Pg 608]</a></span> had not thought much of the
+accident, but I was thankful to think my life and my people had been
+spared, and I only hoped I should live to show them how their great
+kindness would ever be remembered by me, and would not be forgotten as
+long as life lasted. After general thanks our meeting broke up and
+ended, but has never been forgotten.</p>
+
+<p>After we had got fairly well established and our trade began to develop
+itself, our firm at Liverpool chartered a small brig, with a general
+cargo of goods for us, which in due time I was notified of. Now this was
+a great event, not only for us, but for the river, as this would be the
+first sailing ship that had ever entered the Qua Iboe to bring in and
+take out a cargo direct. Everything that had been done before this was
+by small craft, and transhipped at one of the main rivers; so I was very
+anxious that the arrival of this ship should be made as complete a
+success as possible. I knew it would be next to impossible to bring her
+in right over the bar, as deeply laden as she would be from England, as
+our depth of water was not more than 8 ft. 6 in. to 9 ft. at spring
+tides, and this vessel would draw from 10 to 11 ft. at the very least.</p>
+
+<p>In due time the little ship was sighted off the bar. As soon as the tide
+made, I put off to her to receive her letters, and to give the captain
+instructions as to what I wished him to do. On arriving alongside, the
+first thing I found was that her draft of water was 11 ft., so I told
+the captain he could not possibly go into the river with that draft, so
+we decided to lighten her all we could; I left again for the shore to
+make all the necessary arrangements to this end. The next morning our
+boats were started off out; the day being fine they all got alongside<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_609" id="Page_609">[Pg 609]</a></span>
+without much trouble, and brought away as much as they could carry,
+which was not more than about twenty tons; this from 200 did not make
+much impression on the ship&rsquo;s draught. Next day all the boats were again
+despatched; this time the weather was anything but favourable, and, to
+my dismay, while all the boats crossed the bar in safety, not one could
+get to the ship; the wind and current being so strong down from the
+westward against them, they all fell away to leeward. When night came on
+they anchored, as they could neither get to the ship nor back to the
+river; here they were without food or fire. All remained until the next
+day, when the weather, if anything, was worse; so when evening came and
+they all found it was useless trying to get back into the river or to
+the ship, and being without food, they all ran before the wind for the
+Old Calabar River, which was some twenty-five miles to the mouth, then
+about thirty-five miles more of river, until they got to our
+establishment there; here they eventually arrived nearly starved; while
+I, with only one boy, was left at the Ibuno factory in a dreadful state
+of mind, as you may imagine, wondering what had happened to our people,
+and also what was to be done with the ship and cargo. The spring tides
+were upon us, and the vessel either had to come in at once, or remain
+out another fortnight, and be under demurrage, which meant a very
+serious matter for us. Being our first ship, it was most unfortunate.
+The only thing to do was to bring her in as she stood. This had to be
+done at all costs; so I at once got Mr. Williams, who, by-the-bye, was
+generally to the fore in time of need, to lend me his boat, with three
+of his boys; these, with my one, made up some sort of a crew. Away we
+went, and got safely out. On the way I had a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_610" id="Page_610">[Pg 610]</a></span> good survey of the bar, so
+as to get every inch of the water it was possible. This carefully done,
+we arrived alongside the ship, and no one was more surprised than the
+captain, when I told him I had come out to take his ship into the river,
+if he was ready. &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;if you will undertake to do it.&rdquo; &ldquo;I
+will,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;You work your ship as I tell you, and we shall get in
+all right, I feel confident.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The order was given to loose all sails and heave anchor, which was done
+in a very short time. As the tide was near to being high, there was no
+time to be lost. We were soon under way, and our little craft, with all
+sails set, bounding for the bar. I had my channel to a nicety; over we
+went, to my astonishment, without a touch. The relief I felt when this
+was passed, I am unable to describe. In a short time the first ship that
+had ever entered Qua Iboe River from England direct was anchored off our
+factory. The natives crowded down to see this, to them, wonderful sight,
+and when I landed I was immediately carried on the shoulders of some of
+the crowd up to my house. The delight in the river that evening was
+great indeed; so much so, that I shall not easily forget that event.</p>
+
+<p>Still, my troubles were not quite at an end, for while we had the ship
+in, we had no one to discharge her cargo; but &ldquo;necessity being the
+mother of invention,&rdquo; I called the chiefs of the village together, and
+told them of my position. One boy was all I had, and the cargo must come
+out of the ship. &ldquo;All right,&rdquo; they said, &ldquo;show our people what has to be
+done; we will discharge the ship.&rdquo; Next morning our beach was alive with
+people, and by the evening of the next day she was completely
+discharged<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_611" id="Page_611">[Pg 611]</a></span> and ready for homeward cargo. We could now afford to take
+more time. The next thing was to commence loading; this we had got well
+on with, when our people returned. After this we were not long in
+getting our ship ready for going out over the bar again, which was done
+as successfully as she was brought in. After getting her clear we ran
+her to Old Calabar to complete her loading for England. This ended our
+first ship, others followed after, one of which got left on the bar a
+wreck, and another turned back and was condemned in the river. We soon
+gave up the idea of working sailing ships. A small steamer was bought,
+and after this things went fairly well.</p><hr class="chap" /><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_612" id="Page_612">[Pg 612]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2><a name="APPENDIX_III" id="APPENDIX_III"></a>APPENDIX III</h2>
+
+<h3>TRADE GOODS USED IN THE EARLY TRADE WITH AFRICA AS GIVEN BY BARBOT AND
+OTHER WRITERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. BY M. H. KINGSLEY</h3>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Those used in trade by the Senga Company of Senegal at St. Lewis and
+Goree and their dependent factories of Rufisco, Camina, Juala, Gamboa
+(Gambia), <i>circa</i> 1677.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;For the convenience of trade between the French at the Senega and the
+natives, all European goods are reduced to a certain standard, viz.,
+hides, bars, and slaves, for the better understanding whereof I give
+some instances. One bar of iron is reckoned as worth 8 hides, 1 cutlace
+the same, 1 cluster of bugles weighing 4&frac14; lbs. as 3 hides, 1 bunch of
+false pearls 20 hides, 1 bunch of Gallet 4 hides, 1 hogshead of brandy
+from 150 to 160 hides. Bugles are very small glass beads, and mostly
+made at Venice, and sold in strings and clusters. At Goree the same
+goods bear not quite so good a rate, as, for example, a hogshead of
+brandy brings but 140 hides, 1 lb. of gunpowder 2 hides, 1 piece of
+eight 5 hides, 1 oz. of coral 7 or 8 hides, 1 oz. of crystal 1 hide, an
+ounce of yellow amber 2 hides.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;A slave costs from 12 to 14 bars of iron, and sometimes 16, at Porto
+d&rsquo;Ali 18 to 20, and much more at Gamboa,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_613" id="Page_613">[Pg 613]</a></span> according to the number of
+ships, French, English, Portuguese, and Dutch, which happen to be there
+at the same time. The bar of iron is rated at 6 hides.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Besides these, which are the most staple commodities, the French import
+common red, blue, and scarlet cloth, silver and brass rings or
+bracelets, chains, little bells, false crystal, ordinary and coarse
+hats, <i>Dutch</i> pointed knives, pewter dishes, silk sashes with false gold
+and silver fringes, blue serges, <i>French</i> paper, steels to strike fire,
+<i>English</i> sayes, <i>Roan</i> linen, salamporis, platillies, blue callicoes,
+taffeties, chintzs, cawris or shells, by the French called <i>bouges</i>,
+coarse north, red cords called <i>Bure</i>, lines, shoes, fustian, red
+worsted caps, worsted fringe of all colours, worsted of all kinds in
+skeins, basons of several sizes, brass kettles, yellow amber, maccatons,
+that is, beads of two sorts, pieces of eight of the old stamp, some
+pieces of 28 sols value, either plain or gilt, Dutch cutlaces, straight
+and bow&rsquo;d, and clouts, galet, martosdes, two other sorts of beads of
+which the blacks make necklaces for women, white sugar, musket balls,
+iron nails, shot, white and red frize, looking-glasses in plain and gilt
+frames, cloves, cinnamon, scissors, needles, coarse thread of sundry
+colours, but chiefly red, yellow, and white, copper bars of a pound
+weight, ferrit, men&rsquo;s shirts, coarse and fine, some of them with bone
+lace about the neck, breast, and sleeves, <i>Haerlem</i> cloths, <i>Coasveld</i>
+linen, <i>Dutch</i> mugs, white and blue, <i>Leyden</i> rugs or blankets,
+<i>Spanish</i> leather shoes, brass trumpets, round padlocks, glass bottles
+with a tin rim at the mouth, empty trunks or chests, and a sort of bugle
+called Pezant, but above all, as was said above, great quantities of
+brandy, and iron in bars; particularly at Goree the company imports
+10,000 or more every year of those which are made in their<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_614" id="Page_614">[Pg 614]</a></span> province of
+<i>Brittany</i>, all short and thin, which is called in London narrow flat
+iron, or half flat iron in Sweden, but each bar shortened or cut off at
+one end to about 16 to 18 inches, so that about 80 of these bars weigh a
+ton English. It is to be observed that such voyage-iron, as it is called
+in London, is the only sort and size used throughout all Nigritia,
+Guinea, and West Ethiopia in the way of trade. Lastly, a good quantity
+of Cognac brandy, both in hogsheads and rundlets, single and double, the
+double being 8, the single 4 gallons.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The principal goods the French have in return for these commodities
+from the <i>Moors</i> and <i>Blacks</i> are slaves, gold dust, elephants&rsquo; teeth,
+beeswax, dry and green hides, gum-arabic, ostrich feathers, and several
+other odd things, as ambergris, cods of musk, tygers&rsquo; and goats&rsquo; skins,
+provisions, bullocks, sheep, and teeth of sea-horses (hippopotamus).&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The main trade of the Senga or Senegal Company seems to have been gum
+and slaves in these regions. Gold dust they got but little of in
+Senegal, the Portuguese seeming to have been the best people to work
+that trade. The ivory was, according to Barbot, here mainly that picked
+up in woods, and scurfy and hollow, or, as we should call it, kraw kraw
+ivory, the better ivory coming from the Qua Qua Ivory Coast. Hides,
+however, were in the seventeenth century, as they are now, a regular
+line in the trade of Senegambia, and the best hides came from the
+Senegal River, the inferior from Rufisco and Porto d&rsquo;Ali. Barbot says:
+&ldquo;They soak or dye these hides as soon as they are flayed from the beast,
+and presently expose them to the air to dry; which, in my opinion, is
+the reason why, wanting the true first seasoning, they are apt to
+corrupt and breed worms if not looked after and often beaten with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_615" id="Page_615">[Pg 615]</a></span> a
+stick or wand, and then laid up in very dry store houses.&rdquo; I have no
+doubt Barbot is right, and that there is not enough looking after done
+to them now a days, so that the worms have their <a name="CORR13" id="CORR13"><ins class="correction" title="original: own way too much,">own way too much.</ins></a></p>
+
+<p>The African hides were held in old days inferior to those shipped from
+South America, both in thickness and size, and were used in France
+chiefly to cover boxes with; but in later times, I am informed, they
+were sought after and split carefully into two slices, serving to make
+kid for French boots.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The French reckoned the trade of the Senga Company to yield 700 or 800
+per cent, advance upon invoice of their goods, and yet their Senga
+Company, instead of thriving, has often brought a noble to ninepence.
+Nay, it has broken twice in less than thirty years, which must be
+occasioned by the vast expense they are at in Europe, Africa, and
+America, besides ill-management of their business; but this is no more
+than the common fate of Dutch and English African Companies, as well as
+that to make rather loss than profit, because their charges are greater
+than the trade can bear, in maintaining so many ports and other forts
+and factories in Africa, which devour all the profits.&rdquo; I quote this of
+Barbot as an interesting thing, considering the present state of West
+Coast Colonial finance.</p>
+
+<h3>GAMBIA TRADE, 1678.</h3>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The factors of the English Company at James Fort, and those of the
+French at Albreda and other places, drive a very great trade in that
+country all along the river in brigantines, sloops, and canoes,
+purchasing&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Elephants&rsquo; teeth, beeswax, slaves, pagnos (country-made<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_616" id="Page_616">[Pg 616]</a></span> clothes),
+hides, gold and silver, and goods also found in the Sengal trade.</p>
+
+<p>In exchange they give the <i>Blacks</i>&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Bars of iron, drapery of several sorts, woollen stuffs and cloth, linen
+of several sorts, coral and pearl, brandy or rum in anchors, firelocks,
+powder, ball and shot, Sleysiger linen, painted callicoes of gay
+colours, shirts, gilded swords, ordinary looking-glasses, salt, hats,
+<i>Roan</i> caps, all sorts and sizes of bugles, yellow amber, rock crystal,
+brass pans and kettles, paper, brass and pewter rings, some of them
+gilt, box and other combs, <i>Dutch</i> earthen cans, false ear-rings,
+satalaes, and sabres or cutlaces, small iron and copper kettles, <i>Dutch</i>
+knives called <i>Bosmans</i>, hooks, brass trumpets, bills, needles, thread
+and worsted of several colours.&rdquo; This selection practically covered the
+trade up to Sierra Leone.</p>
+
+<h3>SIERRA LEONE, 1678.</h3>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Exports.&mdash;Elephants&rsquo; teeth, slaves, santalum wood, a little gold, much
+beeswax with some pearls, crystal, long peppers, ambergris, &amp;c. The
+ivory here was considered the best on the West Coast, being, says
+Barbot, very white and large, have had some weighing 80 to 100 lbs., at
+a very modest rate 80 lbs. of ivory for the value of five livres
+<i>French</i> money, in coarse knives and other such toys. The gold purchased
+in Sierra Leone, the same authority states, comes from Mandinga and
+other remote countries towards the Niger or from South Guinea by the
+River Mitomba. The trade selection was: French brandy or rum, iron bars,
+white callicoes, Sleysiger linen, brass kettles, earthen cans, all sorts
+of glass buttons, brass rings or<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_617" id="Page_617">[Pg 617]</a></span> bracelets, bugles and glass beads of
+sundry colours, brass medals, earrings, <i>Dutch</i> knives, <i>Bosmans</i>, first
+and second size, hedging bills and axes, coarse laces, crystal beads,
+painted callicoes (red) called chintz, oil of olive, small duffels,
+ordinary guns, muskets and fuzils, gunpowder, musket balls and shot, old
+sheets, paper, red caps, men&rsquo;s shirts, all sorts of counterfeit pearls,
+red cotton, narrow bands of silk stuffs or worsted, about half a yard
+broad for women, used about their waists.</p>
+
+<p>The proper goods to purchase, the cam wood and elephants&rsquo; teeth in
+Sherboro&rsquo; River, are chiefly these:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Brass basons and kettles, pewter basons, and tankards, iron bars,
+bugles, painted callicoes, <i>Guinea</i> stuffs or cloths, <i>Holland</i> linen or
+cloth, muskets, powder, and ball. A ship may in two months time out and
+home purchase here fifty-six tons of cam wood and four tons of
+elephants&rsquo; teeth or more.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The trade selection for the Pepper Coast was practically the same as for
+Sierra Leone, only less extensive and cheaper in make, and had a special
+line in white and blue large beads. The main export was Manequette
+pepper and rice, the latter of which was to be had in great quantity but
+poor quality at about a halfpenny a pound; and there was also ivory to
+be had, but not to so profitable an extent as on the next coast, the
+Ivory. The same selection of goods was used for the Ivory Coast trade as
+those above-named, with the addition of Contaccarbe or Contabrode,
+namely, iron rings, about the thickness of a finger which the blacks
+wear about their legs with brass bells, as they do the brass rings or
+bracelets about their arms in the same manner. The natives here also
+sold country-made cloths, which were bought by the factors to use in
+trade<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_618" id="Page_618">[Pg 618]</a></span> in other districts, mainly the Gold Coast; the Ivory Coast cloths
+come from inland districts, those sold at Cape La Hou are of six
+stripes, three French ells and a half long, and very fine; those from
+Corby La Hou of five stripes, about three ells long, and coarser. They
+also made &ldquo;clouts&rdquo; of a sort of hemp, or plant like it, which they dye
+handsomely, and weave very artificially.</p>
+
+<h3>THE GOLD COAST.</h3>
+
+<p>This coast has, from its discovery in the 15th century to our own day,
+been the chief trade region in the Bight of Benin; and Barbot states
+that the amount of gold sent from it to Europe in his day was Ŗ240,000
+value per annum.</p>
+
+<p>The trade selection for the Gold Coast trade in the 17th and 18th
+centuries is therefore very interesting, as it gives us an insight into
+the manufactures exported by European traders at that time, and of a
+good many different kinds; for English, French, Portuguese, Dutch, Danes
+and Brandenburghers were all engaged in the Gold Coast trade, and each
+took out for barter those things he could get cheapest in his own
+country.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The <i>French</i> commonly,&rdquo; says Barbot, &ldquo;carry more brandy, wine, iron,
+paper, firelocks, &amp;c., than the <i>English</i> or <i>Dutch</i> can do, those
+commodities being cheaper in <i>France</i>, as, on the other hand, they (the
+<i>English</i> and <i>Dutch</i>) supply the Guinea trade with greater quantities
+of linen, cloth, bugles, copper basons and kettles, wrought pewter,
+gunpowder, sayes, perpetuanas, chintzs, cawris, old sheets, &amp;c., because
+they can get these wares from <i>England</i> or <i>Holland</i>.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The <i>French</i> commonly compose their cargo for the Gold<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_619" id="Page_619">[Pg 619]</a></span> Coast trade to
+purchase slaves and gold dust; of brandy, white and red wine, ros solis,
+firelocks, muskets, flints, iron in bars, white and red contecarbe, red
+frize, looking glasses, fine coral, sarsaparilla, bugles of sundry sorts
+and colours and glass beads, powder, sheets, tobacco, taffeties, and
+many other sorts of silks wrought as brocardels, velvets, shirts, black
+hats, linen, paper, laces of many sorts, shot, lead, musket balls,
+callicoes, serges, stuffs, &amp;c., besides the other goods for a true
+assortment, which they have commonly from <i>Holland</i>.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The <i>Dutch</i> have <i>Coesveld</i> linen, Slezsiger lywat, old sheets,
+<i>Leyden</i> serges, dyed indigo-blue, perpetuanas, green, blue and purple,
+<i>Konings-Kleederen</i>, annabas, large and narrow, made at <i>Haerlem</i>;
+<i>Cyprus</i> and <i>Turkey</i> stuffs, <i>Turkey</i> carpets, red, blue and yellow
+cloths, green, red and white <i>Leyden</i> rugs, silk stuffs blue and white,
+brass kettles of all sizes, copper basons, <i>Scotch</i> pans, barbers&rsquo;
+basons, some wrought, others hammered, copper pots, brass locks, brass
+trumpets, pewter, brass and iron rings, hair trunks, pewter dishes and
+plates (of a narrow brim), deep porringers, all sorts and sizes of
+fishing hooks and lines, lead in sheets and in pipes, 3 sorts of <i>Dutch</i>
+knives, <i>Venice</i> bugles and glass beads of sundry colours and sizes,
+sheep skins, iron bars, brass pins long and short, brass bells, iron
+hammers, powder, muskets, cutlaces, cawris, chintz, lead balls and shot,
+brass cups with handles, cloths of <i>Cabo Verdo</i>, <i>Qua Qua</i>, <i>Ardra</i> and
+<i>Rio Forcada</i>, blue coral, <i>alias</i> akory from Benin, strong waters and
+abundance of other wares, being near 160 sorts, as a <i>Dutchman</i> told
+me.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>I am sorry Barbot broke down just when he seemed going strong with this
+list, and I was out of breath checking the indent, and said &ldquo;other
+wares,&rdquo; but I cannot help<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_620" id="Page_620">[Pg 620]</a></span> it, and beg to say that this is the true
+assortment for the Gold Coast trade in 1678. The English selection
+&ldquo;besides many of the same goods above mentioned have tapseils, broad and
+narrow, nicanees fine and coarse, many sorts of chintz or <i>Indian</i>
+callicoes printed, tallow, red painting colours, <i>Canary</i> wine, sayes,
+perpetuanas inferior to the <i>Dutch</i> and sacked up in painted tillets
+with the <i>English</i> arms, many sorts of white callicoes, blue and white
+linen, <i>China</i> satins, <i>Barbadoes</i> rum, other strong waters and spirits,
+beads of all sorts, buckshaws, <i>Welsh</i> plain, boy-sades, romberges,
+clouts, gingarus, taffeties, amber, brandy, flower, <i>Hamburgh</i> brawls,
+and white, blue and red chequered linen, narrow <i>Guinea</i> stuffs
+chequered, ditto broad, old hats, purple beads. The <i>Danes</i>,
+<i>Brandenburghers</i> and <i>Portuguese</i> provide their cargoes in <i>Holland</i>
+commonly consisting of very near the same sort of wares as I have
+observed the <i>Dutch</i> make up theirs, the two former having hardly
+anything of their own proper to the trade of the Gold Coast besides
+copper and silver, either wrought or in bullion or in pieces of eight,
+which are a commodity also there.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The <i>Portuguese</i> have most of their cargoes from <i>Holland</i> under the
+name of <i>Jews</i> residing there, and they add some things of the product
+of <i>Brazil</i>, as tobacco, rum, tame cattle, <i>St. Tome</i> cloth, others from
+<i>Rio Forcado</i> and other circumjacent places in the Gulf of Guinea.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<h3>USE MADE OF EUROPEAN GOODS BY THE NATIVES OF THE GOLD COAST. BARBOT.</h3>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The broad linen serves to adorn themselves and their dead men&rsquo;s
+sepulchers within, they also make clouts thereof. The narrow cloth to
+press palm oil; in old sheets they wrap<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_621" id="Page_621">[Pg 621]</a></span> themselves at night from head
+to foot. The copper basons to wash and shave. The <i>Scotch</i> pans serve in
+lieu of butchers&rsquo; tubs when they kill hogs or sheep, from the iron bars
+the smiths forge out all their weapons, country and household tools and
+utensils; of frize and perpetuanas, they make girts 4 fingers broad to
+wear about their waists and hang their sword, dagger, knife and purse of
+money or gold, which purse they commonly thrust between the girdle and
+their body. They break <i>Venice</i> coral into 4 or 5 parts, which
+afterwards they mould into any form on whetstones and make strings or
+necklaces which yield a considerable profit; of 4 or 5 ells of <i>English</i>
+or <i>Leyden</i> serges, they make a kind of cloak to wrap about their
+shoulders and stomachs. Of chintz, perpetuanas, printed callicoes,
+tapsiels and nicanees, are made clouts to wear round their middles. The
+wrought pewter, as dishes, basons, porringers, &amp;c., serve to eat their
+victuals out of, muskets, firelocks and cutlaces they use in war; brandy
+is more commonly spent at their feasts, knives to the same purposes as
+we use them. With tallow they anoint their bodies from head to toe and
+even use it to shave their beards instead of soap. Fishing hooks for the
+same purpose as with us. <i>Venice</i> bugles, glass beads and contacarbe,
+serve all ages and sexes to adorn their heads, necks, arms and legs very
+extravagantly, being made into strings; and sarsaparilla.&rdquo;&mdash;Well, I
+think I have followed Barbot enough for the present on this point, and
+turn to his description of the dues the natives have to pay to native
+authorities on goods bought of Europeans, which amounted to 3 per cent.
+paid to the proper officers; the kings of the land have at each port
+town, and even fishes, if it exceeds a certain quantity pays 1 in 5;
+these duties are paid either in coin or value. Up the inland they pay no
+duty on river fish,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_622" id="Page_622">[Pg 622]</a></span> but are liable to pay a capitation fee of one
+shilling per head for the liberty of passing down to the sea-shore
+either to traffic or attend the markets with their provisions or other
+sorts of the product of the land, and pay nothing at their return home,
+goods or no goods, unless they by chance leave their arms in the
+village, then the person so doing is to pay one shilling.</p>
+
+<p>The collectors account quarterly with their kings, and deliver up what
+each has received in gold at his respective post, but the fifth part of
+the fish they collect is sent to the king as they have it, and serves to
+feed his family.</p>
+
+<p>No fisherman is allowed to dispose of the first fish he has caught till
+the duty is paid, but are free to do it aboard ships, which perhaps may
+be one reason why so many of them daily sell such quantities of their
+fish to the seafaring men.</p>
+
+<p>Barbot, remarking on this Gold Coast trade, says: &ldquo;The Blacks of the
+Gold Coast, having traded with Europeans ever since the 14th century,
+are very well skilled in the nature and proper qualities of all European
+wares and merchandize vended there; but in a more particular manner
+since they have so often been imposed on by the Europeans, who in former
+ages made no scruple to cheat them in the quality, weight and measures
+of their goods which at first they received upon content, because they
+say it would never enter into their thoughts that white men, as they
+call the Europeans, were so base as to abuse their credulity and good
+opinion of us. But now they are <a name="CORR14" id="CORR14"><ins class="correction" title="original: perpetually on, their guard">perpetually on their guard</ins></a> in that
+particular, examine and search very narrowly all our merchandize, piece
+by piece, to see each the quality and measure contracted for by samples;
+for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_623" id="Page_623">[Pg 623]</a></span> instance, if the cloth is well made and strong, whether dyed at
+<i>Haerlem</i> or <i>Leyden</i>&mdash;if the knives be not rusty&mdash;if the basons,
+kettles, and other utensils of brass and pewter are not cracked or
+otherwise faulty, or strong enough at the bottom. They measure iron bars
+with the sole of the foot&mdash;they tell over the strings of contacarbel,
+taste and prove brandy, rum or other liquors, and will presently
+discover whether it is not adulterated with fresh or salt water or any
+other mixture, and in point of French brandy will prefer the brown
+colour in it. In short they examine everything with as much prudence and
+ability as any European can do.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The goods sold by <i>English</i> and <i>Dutch</i>, <i>Danes</i>, <i>Brandenburghers</i>,
+&amp;c., ashore, out of these settlements are generally about 25 per cent.
+dearer to the Blacks than they get aboard ships in the Roads; the
+supercargoes of the ships commonly falling low to get the more customers
+and make a quicker voyage, for which reason the forts have very little
+trade with the Blacks during the summer season, which fills the coast
+with goods by the great concourse of ships at that time from several
+ports of Europe; and as the winter season approaches most of them
+withdraw from the coast, and so leave elbow room for the fort factors to
+trade in their turn during that bad season.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;In the year 1682 the gold trade yielded hardly 45 per cent. to our
+French ships, clear of any charges; but that might be imputed to the
+great <a name="CORR15" id="CORR15"><ins class="correction" title="original: mumber">number</ins></a> of trading ships of several European nations which happened
+to be at that time on the coast, whereof I counted 42 in less than a
+month&rsquo;s time: had the number been half as great that trade would have
+appeared 60 per cent. or more, and if a cargo were properly composed it
+might well clear 70 per<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_624" id="Page_624">[Pg 624]</a></span> cent. in a small ship sailing with little
+charge, and the voyage directly home from this coast not to exceed 7 or
+8 months out and home, if well managed.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>These observations of Barbot&rsquo;s are alike interesting and instructive,
+and in principle applicable to the trade to-day. Do not imagine that
+Barbot was an early member of the Aborigines&rsquo; Protection Society when he
+holds forth on the way in which Europeans &ldquo;in former ages&rdquo; basely dealt
+with the angelic confidence of the Blacks. One of his great charms is
+the different opinions on general principles, &amp;c., he can hold without
+noticing it himself: of course this necessitates your reading Barbot
+right through, and that means 668 pages folio in double column, or
+something like 2,772 pages of a modern book; but that&rsquo;s no matter, for
+he is uniformly charming and reeks with information.</p>
+
+<p>Well, there are other places in Barbot where he speaks, evidently with
+convictions, of &ldquo;this rascal fellow Black,&rdquo; &amp;c. and gives long accounts
+of the way in which the black man cheats with false weights and
+measures, and adulterates; and if you absorb the whole of his
+information and test it against your own knowledge, and combine it with
+that of others, I think you will come to the conclusion that it is not
+necessary for the philanthropist to fidget about the way the European
+does his side to the trade; the moralist may drop a large and heavy tear
+on both white and black, but that is all that is required from him.
+Unfortunately this is not all that is done nowadays: the black has got
+hold of Governmental opinion, and just when he is more than keeping his
+end up in commercial transactions, he has got the Government to handicap
+his white fellow-trader with a mass of heavy dues and irritating
+restrictions, which will end most<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_625" id="Page_625">[Pg 625]</a></span> certainly in stifling trade. My firm
+conviction is that black and white traders should be left to settle
+their own affairs among themselves.</p>
+
+<h3>SELECTION OF GOODS FOR FIDA OR ONIDAH, CALLED BY THE FRENCH JUIDA, NOW
+KNOWN AS DAHOMEY, WITH MAIN SEAPORT WHYDAH.</h3>
+
+<p>The French opened trade in this district in 1669, when the Dutch were
+already there.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The main export of this coast was &lsquo;slaves, cotton cloth, and blue
+stones, called agoy or accory, very valuable on the Gold Coast.&rsquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The best commodity the Europeans can carry thither to purchase is
+Boejies or cawries, so much valued by the natives, being the current
+coin there and at Popo, Fida, Benin and other countries further east,
+without which it is scarcely possible to traffic there. Near to Boejies
+the flat iron bars for the round or square will not do, and again next
+to iron, fine long coral, <i>China</i> sarcenets, gilt leather, white damask
+and red, red cloth with large lists, copper bowls or cups, brass rings,
+<i>Venice</i> beads or bugles of several colours, agalis, gilded looking
+glasses, <i>Leyden</i> serges, platilles, linen morees, salampores, red
+chints, broad and narrow tapsiels, blue canequins, broad gunez and
+narrow (a sort of linen), double canequins, French brandy in ankers or
+half-ankers <a name="CORR16" id="CORR16"><ins class="correction" title="(the anker being a 16 gallon rundlet">(the anker being a 16 gallon rundlet)</ins></a>, canary and malmsey,
+black caudebec hats, Italian taffeties, white or red cloth of gold or
+silver, <i>Dutch</i> knives, <i>Bosmans</i>, striped armoizins, with white or
+flowered, gold and silver brocadel, firelocks, muskets, gunpowder, large
+beads from <i>Rouen</i>, white flowered sarcenets, <i>Indian</i> armorzins and
+damask napkins,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_626" id="Page_626">[Pg 626]</a></span> large coral earrings, cutlaces gilded and broad, silk
+scarfs large umbrellors, pieces of eight, long pyramidal bells.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>All the above-mentioned goods are also proper for the trade in <i>Benin</i>,
+<i>Rio Lagos</i> and all along the coast to <i>Rio Gabon</i>.</p>
+
+<h3>BENIN TRADE GOODS.</h3>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Exports, 1678: cotton cloths like those of <i>Rio Lagos</i>, women slaves,
+for men slaves (though they be all foreigners, for none of the natives
+can be sold as such) are not allowed to be exported, but must stay
+there; jasper stones, a few tigers&rsquo; or leopards&rsquo; skins, acory or blue
+coral, elephants&rsquo; teeth, some pieminto, or pepper. The blue coral grows
+in branching bushes like the red coral at the bottom of the rivers and
+lakes in Benin, which the natives have a peculiar art to grind or work
+into beads like olives, and is a very profitable merchandise at the Gold
+Coast, as has been observed.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The Benin cloths are of 4 bands striped blue and white, an ell and a
+half long, only proper for the trade at <i>Sabou river</i> and at <i>Angola</i>,
+and called by the blacks <i>monponoqua</i> and the blue narrow cloths
+<i>ambasis</i>; the latter are much inferior to the former every way, and
+both sorts made in the inland country.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The European goods are these: cloths of gold and silver, scarlet and
+red cloth, all sorts of calicoes and fine linen, <i>Haerlem</i> stuffs with
+large flowers and well starched, iron bars, strong spirits, rum and
+brandy, beads or bugles of several colours, red velvet, and a good
+quantity of Boejies, cawries as much as for the Ardra (Fida) trade being
+the money of the natives, as well as them; false pearls, Dutch<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_627" id="Page_627">[Pg 627]</a></span> cans
+with red streaks at one end, bright brass large rings from 5 to 5&frac12;
+ounces weight each, earrings of red glass or crystal, gilt looking
+glasses, crystal, &amp;c.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<h3>OUWERE (NOW CALLED WARRI) TRADE, AND THE NEW CALABAR TRADE, 1678.</h3>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Exports mainly slaves and fine cloths from New Calabar district and
+Ouwere. &lsquo;The principal thing that passes in Calabar as current money
+among the natives is brass rings for the arms or legs, which they call
+<i>bochie</i>, and they are so nice in the choice of them, that they will
+often turn over a whole cask before they find 2 to please their fancy.&rsquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The <i>English</i> and <i>Dutch</i> import there a great deal of copper in small
+bars, round and equal, about 3 feet long, weighing about 1&frac14; lbs.,
+which the blacks of Calabary work with much art, splitting the bar into
+3 parts from one end to the other, which they polish as fine as gold,
+and twist the 3 pieces together very ingeniously into cords to make what
+form of arm rings they please.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<h3>OLD CALABAR TRADE, 1678.</h3>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The most current goods of Europe for the trade of Old Calabar to
+purchase slaves and elephants&rsquo; teeth are iron bars, in quality and
+chiefly, copper bars, blue rags, cloth and striped <i>Guinea</i> clouts of
+many colours, horse bells, hawks&rsquo; bells, rangoes, pewter basons of 1, 2,
+3 and 4 lbs. weight, tankards of ditto of 1, 2, and 3 lbs. weight, beads
+very small and glazed yellow, green, purple and blue, purple copper
+armlets or arm rings of <i>Angola</i> make, but this last sort of goods is
+peculiar to the <i>Portuguese</i>.&rdquo;</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_628" id="Page_628">[Pg 628]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The blacks there reckon by copper bars, reducing all sorts of goods to
+such bars; for example, 1 bar of iron, 4 copper bars; a man slave for 38
+and a woman slave for 37 or 36 copper bars.</p>
+
+<h3>TRADE OF RIO DEL REY, AMBOZES COUNTRY, CAMARONES RIVER, AND DOWN TO RIO
+GABON.</h3>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The <i>Dutch</i> have the greatest share in the trade here in yachts sent
+from Mina on the Gold Coast, whose cargo consists mostly of small copper
+bars of the same sort as mentioned at Old Calabar, iron bars, coral,
+brass basons, of the refuse goods of the Gold Coast, bloom coloured
+beads or bugles and purple copper armlets or rings made at <i>Loanda</i> in
+<i>Angola</i>, and presses for lemons and oranges. In exchange for which they
+yearly export from thence 400 or 500 slaves, and about 10 or 12 tons
+weight of fine large teeth, 2 or 3 of which commonly weigh above a
+hundredweight, besides accory, javelins and some sorts of knives which
+the blacks there make to perfection, and are proper for the trade of the
+Gold Coast.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;<i>Ambozes</i> country, situated between the <i>Rio del Rey</i> and <i>Rio
+Camarones</i>, is very remarkable for the immense height of the mountains
+it has near the sea-shore, which the Spaniards call <i>Alta Tierra de
+Ambozi</i>, and reckon some of them as high as the <i>Pike of Teneriffe</i>
+(this refers to the great Camaroon, 13,760 feet). Trade in teeth, accory
+and slaves, for iron and copper bars, brass pots and kettles, hammered
+bugles or beads, bloom colour purple, orange and lemon colour, ox horns,
+steel files, &amp;c.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The trade in the Rio Gabon at this time was inferior to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_629" id="Page_629">[Pg 629]</a></span> that at Cape
+Lopez. Indeed, the ascendency the Gaboon trade attained to in the middle
+parts of this 19th century was an artificial one, the natural outlet for
+the trade being the districts round the mouth of the Ogowé river, which
+penetrates through a far greater extent of country than the rivers
+Rembwe and Ncomo, which form the Gaboon estuary or <i>Rio Gabon</i> of
+Barbot.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Great numbers of ships ran to <i>Cape Lopez Gonzalves</i> in the seventeenth
+century, and did a pretty brisk trade in cam wood, beeswax, honey and
+elephants&rsquo; teeth, of which last a ship may sometimes purchase three or
+four thousand-weight of good large ones and sometimes more, and there is
+always an abundance of wax; all which the Europeans purchase for knives
+called <i>Bosmans</i>, iron bars, beads, old sheets, brandy, malt, spirits or
+rum, axes, the shells called cauris, annabas, copper bars, brass basons,
+from eighteen-pence to two shillings apiece, firelocks, muskets, powder,
+ball, small shot, &amp;c.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<h3>SELECTION OF GOODS FOR THE ISLANDS FERNANDO PO, ST. THOMAS&rsquo;S, PRINCE&rsquo;S,
+AND ANNOBON.</h3>
+
+<p>There were about 150 ships per annum calling and trading at San Tomé in
+the seventeenth century. The goods in &ldquo;<i>French</i> ships particularly
+consist in <i>Holland</i> cloth or linen as well as of <i>Rouen</i> and
+<i>Brittany</i>, thread of all colours, serges, silk stockings, fustians,
+<i>Dutch</i> knives, iron, salt, olive oil, copper in sheets or plates, brass
+kettles, pitch, tar, cordage, sugar forms (from 20 to 30 lbs. apiece),
+brandy, all kinds of strong liquors and spirits, <i>Canary</i> wines, olives,
+carpets, fine flour, butter, cheese, thin shoes,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_630" id="Page_630">[Pg 630]</a></span> hats, shirts, and all
+sorts of silks out of fashion in <i>Europe</i>, hooks, &amp;c., of each sort a
+little in proportion.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>In connection with this now but little considered island of San Tomé, so
+called from having been discovered in the year 1472, under the direction
+of Henry the Navigator, on the feast day of the Apostle Thomas, there is
+an interesting bit of history, which has had considerable bearing on the
+culture of the Lower Congo regions.</p>
+
+<p>The Portuguese, observing the fertility of the soil of this island,
+decided to establish a colony there for the convenience of trading in
+the Guinea regions; but the climate was so unwholesome that an abundance
+of men died before it was well settled and cultivated. &ldquo;Violent fevers
+and cholicks that drove them away soon after they were set a-shore.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The first design of settling there was in the year 1486 but perceiving
+how many perished in the attempt, and that they could better agree with
+that of the continent on the coast of Guinea, it was resolved by King
+Jaõ II. of Portugal that all the Jews within his dominions, which were
+vastly numerous, should be obliged to receive baptism, or upon refusal
+be transported to the coast of Guinea, where the Portuguese had already
+several considerable settlements and a good trade, considering the time
+since its first discovery.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;A few years after such of those Jews as had escaped the malignant air,
+were forced away to this Isle of San Tomé; these married to black women,
+fetched from Angola in great numbers, with near 3,000 men of the same
+country.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;From these Jews married to black women in process of time proceeded
+mostly that brood of mulattos at this day inhabiting the island. Most of
+them boast of being descended from the Portuguese; and their
+constitution is by<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_631" id="Page_631">[Pg 631]</a></span> nature much fitter to bear with the malignity of the
+air.&rdquo; (For a full account of this matter see the <i>History of Portugal</i>
+by Faria y Sousa, p. 304.)</p>
+
+<p>San Tomé is now very flourishing, on account of its soil being suited to
+cocoa and coffee, and there are to-day there plenty of full-blooded
+Portuguese; but the old strain of Jewish mulattos still exists and is
+represented by individuals throughout all the coast regions of West
+Africa. Moreover, these mulattos secured in the seventeenth century a
+monopoly for Portugal of the slave trade in the Lower Congo, and I
+largely ascribe the prevalence of customs identical with those mentioned
+in the Old Testament that you find among the Fjort tribes to their
+influence, although you always find such customs represented in all the
+native cultures in West Africa (presumably because the West African
+culture is what the Germans would call the <i>urstuff</i>), but I fancy in no
+culture are they so developed as among the Fjorts.<a name="FNanchor_94_95" id="FNanchor_94_95"></a><a href="#Footnote_94_95" class="fnanchor">[94]</a></p>
+
+<h3>TRADE GOODS FOR CONGO AND CABENDA, 1700.</h3>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Blue bafts, a piece containing 6 yards and of a deep almost black
+colour, and is measured either with a stick of 27 inches, of which 8
+sticks make a piece, or by a lesser stick, 18 inches long, 12 of which
+are accounted a piece, <i>Guinea</i> stuffs, 2 pieces to make a piece,
+tapseils have the same measure as blue bafts.</p>
+
+<p>Nicanees, the same measure.</p>
+
+<p>Black bays, 2&frac12; yards for a piece, measured by 5 sticks of 18 inches
+each.</p>
+
+<p>Annabasses, 10 to the piece.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_632" id="Page_632">[Pg 632]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Painted callicoes, 6 yards to the piece.</p>
+
+<p>Blue paper Slesia, 1 piece for a piece. Scarlet, 1 stick of 18 inches or
+&frac12; a yard is accounted a piece.</p>
+
+<p>Muskets, 1 for a piece.</p>
+
+<p>Powder, the barrel or rundlet of 7 lbs. goes for a piece.</p>
+
+<p>Brass basons, 10 for a piece. We carry thither the largest.</p>
+
+<p>Pewter basons of 4, 3, 2 and 1 lb. The No. 4 goes 4 to the piece, and
+those of 1 lb. 8 to a piece.</p>
+
+<p>Blue perpetuanas have become but of late in great demand, they are
+measured as blue bafts, 6 yards making the piece.</p>
+
+<p>Dutch cutlaces are the most valued because they have 2 edges, 2 such go
+for a piece.</p>
+
+<p>Coral, the biggest and largest is much more acceptable here than small
+coral, which the Blacks value so little that they will hardly look on
+it, usually 1&frac12; oz. is computed a piece.</p>
+
+<p><i>Memorandum.</i> A whole piece of blue bafts contains commonly 18&frac12;
+yards, however some are shorter and others exceed.</p>
+
+<p><i>Pentadoes.</i> Commonly contain 9 or 9&frac12; to the piece.</p>
+
+<p><i>Tapseils.</i> The piece usually holds 15 yards.</p>
+
+<p><i>Nicanees.</i> The piece is 9 or 9&frac12; yards long.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>The main export of Congo was slaves and elephants&rsquo; teeth and grass
+clothes called Tibonges, were used by the Portuguese as at Loando in
+Angola. Some of them single marked with the arms of Portugal, and others
+double marked, and some unmarked.</p>
+
+<p>The single marked cloth was equal in value to 4 unmarked, equal to about
+8 pence.</p><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_633" id="Page_633">[Pg 633]</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>TRADE GOODS FOR SAN PAUL DO LOANDA.</h3>
+
+<p>&ldquo;Cloths with red lists, great ticking with long stripes and fine wrought
+red kerseys, <i>Silesia</i> and other fine linen, fine velvet, small and
+great gold and silver laces, broad black bays, <i>Turkish</i> tapestry or
+carpets, white and all sorts of coloured yarns, blue and black beads,
+stitching and sewing silk, <i>Canary</i> wines, brandy, linseed oil, seamen&rsquo;s
+knives, all sorts of spices, white sugar and many other commodities and
+trifles as great fish-hooks, pins a finger long, ordinary pins, needles
+and great and small hawks&rsquo; bells.</p>
+
+<p>&ldquo;The <i>English</i> compose their cargoes generally of brass, basons,
+annabasses, blue bafts, paper, brawls, <i>Guinea</i> stuffs, muskets, powder,
+nicanees, tapseils, scarlet, <i>Slesia&rsquo;s</i>, coral, bags, wrought pewter,
+beads, pentedoes, knives, spirits, &amp;c., all sorts of haberdashery,
+silks, linens, shirts, hats, shoes, &amp;c., wrought pewter plates, dishes,
+porringers, spoons of each a little assortment are also very probably
+vended among the <i>Portuguese</i>, and also all manner of native made cloths
+from other parts of <i>Guinea</i> fetch good prices in <i>Angola</i>.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 512px;">
+<a href="images/ill-053large.jpg">
+<img src="images/ill-053a_small.jpg" width="512" height="650" alt="Tropical West Africa" />
+<span class="caption">TROPICAL WEST AFRICA.</span>
+</a>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_634" id="Page_634">[Pg 634]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_94_95" id="Footnote_94_95"></a><a href="#FNanchor_94_95"><span class="label">[94]</span></a> For the reasons for the unhealthiness of this island see
+<i>Travels in West Africa</i> (Macmillan), p. 46.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+<h2><a name="INDEX" id="INDEX"></a>INDEX</h2><p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_635" id="Page_635">[Pg 635]</a></span></p>
+
+<div>
+<ul class="index">
+<li class="ifrst">A</li>
+  <li class="indx">Abiabok, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>, <a href="#Page_180">180-184</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Abiadiong, <a href="#Page_180">180</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Abiadiong, <a href="#Page_180">180</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Abonema (<i>see</i> New Calabar)</li>
+  <li class="indx">Abrah, oracle at, <a href="#Page_172">172</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Administration (<i>see</i> Crown Colony)</li>
+  <li class="indx">Adultery laws, <a href="#Page_434">434</a>, <a href="#Page_454">454</a>, <a href="#Page_536">536</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">African&mdash;</li>
+      <li class="isub1">acclimatisation of, West Indians, <a href="#Page_53">53</a>-<a href="#Page_54">54</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">agriculture, <a href="#Page_341">341</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">nature of, <a href="#Page_63">63</a>, <a href="#Page_124">124</a>, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>-<a href="#Page_178">178</a>, <a href="#Page_373">373</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Alemba rapid fetish, <a href="#Page_177">177</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Alumah, King, <a href="#Page_458">458</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Amachree, King, <a href="#Page_500">500</a>, <a href="#Page_503">503</a>, <a href="#Page_505">505</a></li>
+  <li class="indx"><i>Amomum</i>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Anamaquoa, <a href="#Page_82">82</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Ancestor Worship, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>-<a href="#Page_135">135</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Andoni, <a href="#Page_538">538</a>-<a href="#Page_540">540</a>, <a href="#Page_553">553</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Angola, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>, <a href="#Page_283">283</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Animal deities, <a href="#Page_513">513</a>, <a href="#Page_515">515</a> (<i>see</i> Snake and Shark)</li>
+  <li class="indx">Ants&mdash;</li>
+      <li class="isub1">Driver, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>-<a href="#Page_33">33</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1"><i>Myriaica molesta</i>, <a href="#Page_33">33</a>, <a href="#Page_34">34</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Apothecary, <a href="#Page_180">180</a>-<a href="#Page_184">184</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Ashantee, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>, <a href="#Page_368">368</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Assini, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>, <a href="#Page_83">83</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Atlantis, <a href="#Page_227">227</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Ayzingo, <a href="#Page_108">108</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Azambuja, <a href="#Page_258">258</a></li>
+<li class="ifrst">B</li>
+  <li class="indx">Bafangh, <a href="#Page_152">152</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Bakele, <a href="#Page_186">186</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Bantu, <a href="#Page_231">231</a> (<i>see</i> Negro)</li>
+  <li class="indx">Bar, custom, <a href="#Page_523">523</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Barbot, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_69">69</a>, and <a href="#APPENDIX_III">Appendix III.</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Basel mission, <a href="#Page_110">110</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Bastian, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Baths, medical, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>, <a href="#Page_183">183</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Bence Island, <a href="#Page_36">36</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Benga, <a href="#Page_90">90</a>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Benguella, <a href="#Page_210">210</a>, <a href="#Page_286">286</a>-<a href="#Page_287">287</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Benin, Bight of, <a href="#Page_4">4</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">fetish of, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>-<a href="#Page_144">144</a> (<i>see</i> <a href="#APPENDIX_I">Appendix I</a>)</li>
+      <li class="isub1">natives of kingdom, <a href="#Page_448">448</a>-<a href="#Page_468">468</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Binger, <a href="#Page_83">83</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Bob Manuel, King, <a href="#Page_507">507</a>, <a href="#Page_509">509</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Bonny, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>, <a href="#Page_495">495</a>-<a href="#Page_509">509</a>, <a href="#Page_510">510</a>, &ldquo;free,&rdquo; <a href="#Page_516">516</a>, <a href="#Page_540">540</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Brahmanism, <a href="#Page_119">119</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Brass River, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_468">468</a>-<a href="#Page_491">491</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Bristol, <a href="#Page_83">83</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Brohemie, <a href="#Page_458">458</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Brüe Sieur, <a href="#Page_271">271</a>-<a href="#Page_273">273</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Burial Customs, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>-<a href="#Page_150">150</a>, <a href="#Page_452">452</a>-<a href="#Page_455">455</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Bush fighting, <a href="#Page_319">319</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">soul, <a href="#Page_208">208</a>, <a href="#Page_209">209</a></li>
+<li class="ifrst">C</li>
+  <li class="indx">Cabinda, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a href="#Page_186">186</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Calabar, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>-<a href="#Page_142">142</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">fetish, <a href="#Page_144">144</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">history, <a href="#Page_552">552</a>-<a href="#Page_561">561</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">New, <a href="#Page_491">491</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Cameroons, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_231">231</a>, <a href="#Page_236">236</a>, <a href="#Page_238">238</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Canoes, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>-<a href="#Page_101">101</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Catfish, <a href="#Page_96">96</a>, <a href="#Page_97">97</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Centipedes, <a href="#Page_81">81</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Chamberlain, Rt. Honble. J., <a href="#Page_307">307</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Chambers of Commerce, <a href="#Page_323">323</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Charms, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>-<a href="#Page_169">169</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_636" id="Page_636">[Pg 636]</a></span></li>
+  <li class="indx">Chiloango, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>-<a href="#Page_112">112</a></li>
+  <li class="indx"><a name="CORR17" id="CORR17"></a><ins class="correction" title="Clerks, 329, 357,">Clerks, <a href="#Page_329">329</a>, <a href="#Page_357">357</a></ins></li>
+  <li class="indx">Coinage, native, <a href="#Page_82">82</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Colonial Office, <a href="#Page_305">305</a>, <a href="#Page_324">324</a>-<a href="#Page_330">330</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Comey, <a href="#Page_444">444</a>, <a href="#Page_447">447</a>, <a href="#Page_523">523</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Competition, <a href="#Page_417">417</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Comte, <a href="#Page_115">115</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Congo&mdash;</li>
+      <li class="isub1">Belge, <a href="#Page_54">54</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">River, <a href="#Page_102">102</a>, <a href="#Page_238">238</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Cookey Gam, King, <a href="#Page_497">497</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Corisco, <a href="#Page_89">89</a>-<a href="#Page_90">90</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Crabs, <a href="#Page_105">105</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Crocodiles, <a href="#Page_2">2</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">worship of, <a href="#Page_140">140</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Crown Colony, <a href="#Page_317">317</a>, <a href="#Page_319">319</a>, <a href="#Page_326">326</a>, <a href="#Page_361">361</a>, <a href="#Page_366">366</a>, <a href="#Page_390">390</a>, <a href="#Page_417">417</a>-<a href="#Page_418">418</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">statistics, <a href="#Page_348">348</a>, <a href="#Page_357">357</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Crowther&mdash;</li>
+      <li class="isub1">Bishop, <a href="#Page_481">481</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">Archdeacon, <a href="#Page_487">487</a>, <a href="#Page_509">509</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">&ldquo;Customs,&rdquo; native, <a href="#Page_451">451</a> (<i>see</i> Fetish)</li>
+      <li class="isub1">fiscal, <a href="#Page_408">408</a>, <a href="#Page_410">410</a>, <a href="#Page_413">413</a>, <a href="#Page_444">444</a>, <a href="#Page_447">447</a></li>
+<li class="ifrst">D</li>
+  <li class="indx">Dahomey&mdash;</li>
+      <li class="isub1">fetish, <a href="#Page_144">144</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">fiscal, <a href="#Page_347">347</a>-<a href="#Page_348">348</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Danfodio, <a href="#Page_278">278</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Dash, <a href="#Page_446">446</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">De Brosses, <a href="#Page_114">114</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Debtors, <a href="#Page_431">431</a>, <a href="#Page_433">433</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Dennett, R. E., <a href="#Page_154">154</a>, <a href="#Page_183">183</a>, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>, <a href="#Page_192">192</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">De Zurara, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>, <a href="#Page_253">253</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Dieppe, <a href="#Page_256">256</a>, <a href="#Page_261">261</a>-<a href="#Page_263">263</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Diplomacy, <a href="#Page_280">280</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Direct taxation, <a href="#Page_331">331</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Disease (<i>see</i> Doctor)</li>
+      <li class="isub1">ague, <a href="#Page_184">184</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">boisi, <a href="#Page_184">184</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">fvuma, <a href="#Page_184">184</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">hysteria, <a href="#Page_188">188</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">leprosy, <a href="#Page_184">184</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">malignant melancholy, <a href="#Page_188">188</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">pneumonia, <a href="#Page_188">188</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">small-pox, <a href="#Page_184">184</a>-<a href="#Page_188">188</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">soul, diseases of, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>, <a href="#Page_209">209</a>, <a href="#Page_213">213</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">worms, <a href="#Page_184">184</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">yaws, <a href="#Page_187">187</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Doctor (<i>see</i> Apothecary)</li>
+      <li class="isub1">clinical, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>-<a href="#Page_219">219</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">witch, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>, <a href="#Page_180">180</a>, <a href="#Page_182">182</a>, <a href="#Page_213">213</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Dream-soul, <a href="#Page_205">205</a>, <a href="#Page_207">207</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Drum fish, <a href="#Page_108">108</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Duppy, <a href="#Page_68">68</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Dutch, <a href="#Page_262">262</a>, <a href="#Page_268">268</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Dye wood, <a href="#Page_78">78</a></li>
+<li class="ifrst">E</li>
+  <li class="indx">Eboes, <a href="#Page_138">138</a> (<i>see</i> Ibo)</li>
+  <li class="indx">Ebony, <a href="#Page_78">78</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Ebumtup, <a href="#Page_214">214</a></li>
+  <li class="indx"><i>Edinburgh Review</i>, <a href="#Page_157">157</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Egbo (<i>see</i> Law God)</li>
+  <li class="indx">Electrical fish, <a href="#Page_107">107</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Ellis, Sir A. B., <a href="#Page_115">115</a>-<a href="#Page_116">116</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>, <a href="#Page_134">134</a>-<a href="#Page_139">139</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Elmina, <a href="#Page_257">257</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Emanequetta, <a href="#Page_57">57</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Expenditure (<i>see</i> Crown Colony)</li>
+  <li class="indx">Exports, <a href="#Page_334">334</a></li>
+<li class="ifrst">F</li>
+  <li class="indx">Face, throwing the, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>-<a href="#Page_167">167</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Familiar spirits, <a href="#Page_161">161</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Fangaree charms, <a href="#Page_164">164</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Father, making, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>-<a href="#Page_148">148</a>, <a href="#Page_451">451</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Fetish, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>-<a href="#Page_179">179</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">&ldquo;customs,&rdquo; <a href="#Page_173">173</a>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>, 450</li>
+      <li class="isub1">days, <a href="#Page_171">171</a>, <a href="#Page_174">174</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">definitions of, <a href="#Page_113">113</a>, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a>, <a href="#Page_171">171</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">derivation of the word, <a href="#Page_114">114</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">gods and goddesses&mdash;</li>
+           <li class="isub2">Abassi-boom, <a href="#Page_155">155</a></li>
+           <li class="isub2">Mbuiri, <a href="#Page_118">118</a></li>
+           <li class="isub2">Nkala, <a href="#Page_118">118</a></li>
+           <li class="isub2">Nyankupong, <a href="#Page_155">155</a></li>
+           <li class="isub2">Nzambi <a href="#Page_118">118</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a></li>
+           <li class="isub2">Nzambi Mpungu, <a href="#Page_155">155</a></li>
+           <li class="isub2">Sasabonsum, <a href="#Page_117">117</a></li>
+           <li class="isub2">Srahmantin, <a href="#Page_137">137</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">House, description of, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_514">514</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">Man, <a href="#Page_168">168</a>, <a href="#Page_171">171</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">Schools of, <a href="#Page_137">137</a></li>
+           <li class="isub2">Calabar, <a href="#Page_144">144</a>, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>, <a href="#Page_160">160</a></li>
+           <li class="isub2">Mpongwe, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>, <a href="#Page_160">160</a></li>
+           <li class="isub2">Nkissism, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>-<a href="#Page_163">163</a></li>
+           <li class="isub2">Tshi and Ewe and Yoruba, <a href="#Page_139">139</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Fiscal arrangements, <a href="#Page_290">290</a> (<i>see</i> Crown Colony)<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_637" id="Page_637">[Pg 637]</a></span></li>
+  <li class="indx">Fish, quality of, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>, <a href="#Page_106">106</a>-<a href="#Page_109">109</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Fishing, appliances, <a href="#Page_101">101</a>-<a href="#Page_106">106</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">canoes, <a href="#Page_99">99</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">Native methods of, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>-<a href="#Page_109">109</a>, <a href="#Page_488">488</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Floating Islands, <a href="#Page_103">103</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">French, early exploration by the, <a href="#Page_250">250</a>, <a href="#Page_264">264</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">Statistics, Colonial, <a href="#Page_347">347</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Frogs, <a href="#Page_66">66</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Funerals, <a href="#Page_145">145</a>, <a href="#Page_452">452</a>-<a href="#Page_484">484</a></li>
+
+<li class="ifrst">G</li>
+  <li class="indx">Ga, <a href="#Page_138">138</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Gesture, <a href="#Page_237">237</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Ghagas, <a href="#Page_424">424</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Glamour, <a href="#Page_219">219</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Gods (<i>see</i> Fetish), <a href="#Page_141">141</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Goethe, <a href="#Page_121">121</a>-<a href="#Page_123">123</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Gorillae, <a href="#Page_235">235</a>, <a href="#Page_236">236</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Governor, <a href="#Page_305">305</a>, <a href="#Page_328">328</a>, <a href="#Page_365">365</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">native, <a href="#Page_450">450</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Grain Coast, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>-<a href="#Page_61">61</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">of Paradise, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>-<a href="#Page_61">61</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Guineamen, <a href="#Page_83">83</a></li>
+  <li class="indx">Günther, Dr., <a href="#Page_108">108</a></li>
+
+<li class="ifrst">H</li>
+<li class="indx">Hanno, <a href="#Page_231">231</a>-<a href="#Page_240">240</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Head cutting, <a href="#Page_525">525</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Hero worship, <a href="#Page_131">131</a>-<a href="#Page_134">134</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Hoheit, Landes and Ober, <a href="#Page_400">400</a>-<a href="#Page_405">405</a>, <a href="#Page_410">410</a></li>
+<li class="indx">House system, <a href="#Page_427">427</a>, <a href="#Page_475">475</a>-<a href="#Page_478">478</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Human sacrifices, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>-<a href="#Page_148">148</a></li>
+
+<li class="ifrst">I</li>
+<li class="indx">Ibbibios, <a href="#Page_138">138</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Igalwa, <a href="#Page_153">153</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Ijos, <a href="#Page_448">448</a>, <a href="#Page_460">460</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Immortal soul, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>, <a href="#Page_207">207</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Imports, <a href="#Page_334">334</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Inheritance, <a href="#Page_453">453</a>-<a href="#Page_475">475</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Insects, <a href="#Page_10">10</a>-<a href="#Page_11">11</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Islam and Fetish, <a href="#Page_127">127</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Ivory Coast, <a href="#Page_68">68</a>-<a href="#Page_73">73</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">trade of, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>-<a href="#Page_83">83</a>, <a href="#Page_347">347</a></li>
+
+<li class="ifrst">J</li>
+<li class="indx">Ja Ja, King, <a href="#Page_497">497</a>, <a href="#Page_522">522</a>, <a href="#Page_527">527</a>, <a href="#Page_540">540</a>-<a href="#Page_552">552</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Jakris, <a href="#Page_448">448</a>-<a href="#Page_457">457</a>, <a href="#Page_459">459</a>-<a href="#Page_460">460</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Jam, <a href="#Page_503">503</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Jannequin, <a href="#Page_248">248</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Jews, <a href="#Page_630">630</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Jobson, <a href="#Page_246">246</a>-<a href="#Page_247">247</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Ju Ju, <a href="#Page_114">114</a> (<i>see</i> Fetish)</li>
+      <li class="isub1">Long, <a href="#Page_439">439</a>, <a href="#Page_444">444</a>, <a href="#Page_461">461</a>, <a href="#Page_480">480</a>, <a href="#Page_498">498</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">trade, <a href="#Page_503">503</a></li>
+
+<li class="ifrst">K</li>
+<li class="indx">Kitty-Katty, <a href="#Page_64">64</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Kla, <a href="#Page_200">200</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Koromantin slaves, <a href="#Page_140">140</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Krumen, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>, <a href="#Page_412">412</a>, <a href="#Page_429">429</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Kufong, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Kwo Ibo, <a href="#Page_549">549</a>, <a href="#Page_552">552</a>, and Appendix II</li>
+
+<li class="ifrst">L</li>
+<li class="indx">Labat, <a href="#Page_131">131</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Lagos, colony, <a href="#Page_353">353</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Land, <a href="#Page_438">438</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Landana, <a href="#Page_194">194</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Law, John, <a href="#Page_271">271</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Law, native&mdash;</li>
+      <li class="isub1">adultery, <a href="#Page_434">434</a>, <a href="#Page_536">536</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">god society, <a href="#Page_160">160</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">property, <a href="#Page_371">371</a>, <a href="#Page_427">427</a>, <a href="#Page_439">439</a>, <a href="#Page_475">475</a>-<a href="#Page_478">478</a>.</li>
+<li class="indx">Leo Africanus, <a href="#Page_231">231</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Leopard worship, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Liberia, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>-<a href="#Page_54">54</a> (<i>see</i> Grain Coast)</li>
+<li class="indx">Loanda, <a href="#Page_108">108</a>, <a href="#Page_284">284</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Loango, <a href="#Page_212">212</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Lucan, Dr., <a href="#Page_194">194</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Lyall, Sir Alfred, on witchcraft, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>, <a href="#Page_158">158</a></li>
+
+<li class="ifrst">M</li>
+<li class="indx">Machinery, <a href="#Page_288">288</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Maine, Sir Henry, <a href="#Page_153">153</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Malagens, <a href="#Page_69">69</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Malignant melancholy, <a href="#Page_188">188</a>-<a href="#Page_189">189</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Manchester, <a href="#Page_288">288</a>, <a href="#Page_351">351</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Manilla, <a href="#Page_82">82</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Manioc, <a href="#Page_190">190</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_638" id="Page_638">[Pg 638]</a></span></li>
+<li class="indx">Markets, <a href="#Page_310">310</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Maxwell, Sir Wm., <a href="#Page_329">329</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Meleguetta Coast, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>-<a href="#Page_61">61</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Melli, <a href="#Page_244">244</a>-<a href="#Page_245">245</a>, <a href="#Page_426">426</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Mendi, <a href="#Page_164">164</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Merolla, <a href="#Page_197">197</a>, <a href="#Page_321">321</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Minstrels, <a href="#Page_149">149</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Missionary, <a href="#Page_320">320</a>, <a href="#Page_478">478</a>, <a href="#Page_509">509</a>, <a href="#Page_512">512</a>, <a href="#Page_556">556</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Mohammedanism and Fetish, <a href="#Page_126">126</a>-<a href="#Page_127">127</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Monrovia, <a href="#Page_46">46</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Monteiro, <a href="#Page_196">196</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Mpongwe, <a href="#Page_151">151</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Mungo Mah Lobeh, <a href="#Page_236">236</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Murder, <a href="#Page_454">454</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Music, <a href="#Page_64">64</a>-<a href="#Page_66">66</a></li>
+<li class="indx"><i>Mutterrecht</i>, <a href="#Page_437">437</a></li>
+
+<li class="ifrst">N</li>
+<li class="indx">Nassau, Dr., <a href="#Page_89">89</a>, <a href="#Page_130">130</a>, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>-<a href="#Page_153">153</a>, <a href="#Page_159">159</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Nana, <a href="#Page_451">451</a>, <a href="#Page_458">458</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Negro, <a href="#Page_420">420</a>-<a href="#Page_423">423</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Nganga bilongo (<i>see</i> Apothecary)</li>
+<li class="indx">Niger Company, <a href="#Page_279">279</a>, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>, <a href="#Page_360">360</a>, <a href="#Page_394">394</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Nkala, <a href="#Page_118">118</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Nkissism, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>-<a href="#Page_155">155</a>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Nyankupong, <a href="#Page_155">155</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Nzambi, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>-<a href="#Page_155">155</a>, <a href="#Page_159">159</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Nzambi Mpungu, <a href="#Page_118">118</a>, <a href="#Page_155">155</a></li>
+
+<li class="ifrst">O</li>
+<li class="indx">Obeah, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_219">219</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Ogi, <a href="#Page_138">138</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Ogowé, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>, <a href="#Page_102">102</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Oko Jumbo, King, <a href="#Page_522">522</a>, <a href="#Page_529">529</a>-<a href="#Page_532">532</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Ombuiri, <a href="#Page_116">116</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Opobo, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>, <a href="#Page_532">532</a>, <a href="#Page_540">540</a>-<a href="#Page_549">549</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Ordeal, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>, <a href="#Page_490">490</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Oru, <a href="#Page_160">160</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Oulof, <a href="#Page_273">273</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Ouwere, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_630">630</a></li>
+
+<li class="ifrst">P</li>
+<li class="indx">Palm oil, <a href="#Page_15">15</a> (<i>see</i> Appendix I)</li>
+<li class="indx">Panavia, <a href="#Page_152">152</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Paradise grains, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>-<a href="#Page_57">57</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Parliamentary resolution (1865), <a href="#Page_305">305</a>, <a href="#Page_307">307</a>, <a href="#Page_311">311</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Pepple, King, <a href="#Page_497">497</a>, <a href="#Page_510">510</a>, <a href="#Page_512">512</a>, <a href="#Page_517">517</a>-<a href="#Page_521">521</a>, <a href="#Page_526">526</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Pepper coast (<i>see</i> Grain)</li>
+<li class="indx">Ph&#339;nicians, <a href="#Page_227">227</a> (<i>see</i> Hanno)</li>
+<li class="indx">Police, <a href="#Page_333">333</a>, <a href="#Page_407">407</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Poorah, <a href="#Page_139">139</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Portuguese, <a href="#Page_114">114</a>, <a href="#Page_252">252</a>-<a href="#Page_256">256</a>, <a href="#Page_281">281</a>, <a href="#Page_290">290</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">stone monuments, <a href="#Page_259">259</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Post-mortem, <a href="#Page_211">211</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Priests, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>-<a href="#Page_141">141</a>, <a href="#Page_160">160</a>, <a href="#Page_169">169</a>-<a href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_499">499</a>, <a href="#Page_505">505</a> (<i>see</i> Fetish Man)</li>
+<li class="indx">Property&mdash;</li>
+      <li class="isub1">ancestral, <a href="#Page_428">428</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">family, <a href="#Page_428">428</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">private, <a href="#Page_428">428</a>-<a href="#Page_429">429</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">Stool, <a href="#Page_428">428</a></li>
+
+<li class="ifrst">R</li>
+<li class="indx">Railways, <a href="#Page_287">287</a>, <a href="#Page_350">350</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Religion, native (<i>see</i> Fetish)</li>
+<li class="indx">Revenue, <a href="#Page_309">309</a>, <a href="#Page_413">413</a> (<i>see</i> Crown Colony)</li>
+      <li class="isub1">native, <a href="#Page_444">444</a>-<a href="#Page_447">447</a>, <a href="#Page_523">523</a></li>
+
+<li class="ifrst">S</li>
+<li class="indx">Sails, <a href="#Page_100">100</a>-<a href="#Page_101">101</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Sataspes, <a href="#Page_228">228</a></li>
+<li class="indx">San Andrew, Rio, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Sanguin, <a href="#Page_274">274</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Sasabonsum, <a href="#Page_116">116</a>-<a href="#Page_117">117</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Scorpion, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_185">185</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Senegal, <a href="#Page_273">273</a>, <a href="#Page_275">275</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Shadow-soul, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>, <a href="#Page_207">207</a>-<a href="#Page_208">208</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Shake hand, <a href="#Page_446">446</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Shark, <a href="#Page_501">501</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Sierra Leone, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>, <a href="#Page_344">344</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">resources of, <a href="#Page_339">339</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Sisa, <a href="#Page_202">202</a>-<a href="#Page_205">205</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Sleep disease, <a href="#Page_189">189</a>-<a href="#Page_193">193</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">stages of, <a href="#Page_192">192</a>-<a href="#Page_193">193</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Small-pox, <a href="#Page_186">186</a>-<a href="#Page_188">188</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Smaltz, <a href="#Page_273">273</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Snake worship, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_483">483</a>-<a href="#Page_490">490</a>, <a href="#Page_456">456</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Sobo, <a href="#Page_457">457</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Societies, Secret, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>, <a href="#Page_170">170</a>, <a href="#Page_556">556</a>-<a href="#Page_566">566</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">(<i>see</i> Law God)</li>
+<li class="indx">Song-net, <a href="#Page_149">149</a>-<a href="#Page_150">150</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Soul, <a href="#Page_199">199</a>-<a href="#Page_200">200</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">Fetish view of the, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>-<a href="#Page_131">131</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_639" id="Page_639">[Pg 639]</a></span></li>
+      <li class="isub1">Division of the Human, <a href="#Page_200">200</a>-<a href="#Page_204">204</a></li>
+<li class="indx">South Africa, <a href="#Page_394">394</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Spiders, <a href="#Page_140">140</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Spinoza <a href="#Page_112">112</a>-<a href="#Page_113">113</a>, <a href="#Page_120">120</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Spirit and Matter, Native view of, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>-<a href="#Page_130">130</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Spirits, Classes of, <a href="#Page_130">130</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">Familiar, <a href="#Page_161">161</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">Touch of, <a href="#Page_133">133</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Srahmandazi, <a href="#Page_146">146</a>, <a href="#Page_151">151</a>, <a href="#Page_202">202</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Srahmantin, <a href="#Page_137">137</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Statesmanship, <a href="#Page_311">311</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Statistics, <a href="#Page_348">348</a>-<a href="#Page_357">357</a></li>
+
+<li class="ifrst">T</li>
+<li class="indx">Tchanga (Voudou), <a href="#Page_139">139</a></li>
+<li class="indx">&ldquo;Them,&rdquo; <a href="#Page_132">132</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Theopompus, <a href="#Page_226">226</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Timber, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>-<a href="#Page_80">80</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Timbuctoo, <a href="#Page_277">277</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Tom-toms, <a href="#Page_64">64</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Topping, <a href="#Page_525">525</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Tornadoes, <a href="#Page_18">18</a>-<a href="#Page_19">19</a>, <a href="#Page_47">47</a>-<a href="#Page_48">48</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Trade (<i>see</i> Crown Colony)</li>
+      <li class="isub1">gold, <a href="#Page_241">241</a>-<a href="#Page_246">246</a>, <a href="#Page_257">257</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">palm oil, <a href="#Page_354">354</a>-<a href="#Page_359">359</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">rubber, <a href="#Page_353">353</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">salt, <a href="#Page_242">242</a>-<a href="#Page_248">248</a>, <a href="#Page_339">339</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">timber, <a href="#Page_78">78</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">tobacco, <a href="#Page_248">248</a>, <a href="#Page_339">339</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Tshi, <a href="#Page_115">115</a>, <a href="#Page_137">137</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Twins, treatment of, <a href="#Page_148">148</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Tylor, Professor, <a href="#Page_115">115</a></li>
+
+<li class="ifrst">U</li>
+<li class="indx">Ukukiwe, <a href="#Page_160">160</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Umaru l&rsquo;Haji, <a href="#Page_278">278</a></li>
+
+<li class="ifrst">V</li>
+<li class="indx">Vegetation, <a href="#Page_32">32</a>-<a href="#Page_33">33</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Virtue, Native idea of, <a href="#Page_178">178</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Volta, <a href="#Page_96">96</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Voudou, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>-<a href="#Page_140">140</a></li>
+
+<li class="ifrst">W</li>
+<li class="indx">Wanga (Obeah), <a href="#Page_139">139</a>-<a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_219">219</a></li>
+<li class="indx">War, <a href="#Page_371">371</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Warri, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_459">459</a>, <a href="#Page_630">630</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Wealth, <a href="#Page_438">438</a></li>
+<li class="indx">&ldquo;Well-disposed ones,&rdquo; <a href="#Page_132">132</a></li>
+<li class="indx">West Africa, Political aspect of, <a href="#Page_310">310</a></li>
+<li class="indx">West Indies, <a href="#Page_302">302</a>, <a href="#Page_324">324</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Will Braid, <a href="#Page_493">493</a>-<a href="#Page_497">497</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Wills, <a href="#Page_436">436</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Winnebah, <a href="#Page_175">175</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Winnaboes, <a href="#Page_471">471</a>-<a href="#Page_474">474</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Witchcraft, <a href="#Page_157">157</a>-<a href="#Page_168">168</a></li>
+      <li class="isub1">law, <a href="#Page_430">430</a> (<i>see</i> Fetish)</li>
+
+<li class="ifrst">X</li>
+<li class="indx">Xylophonic instruments, <a href="#Page_65">65</a></li>
+
+<li class="ifrst">Y</li>
+<li class="indx">Yam custom, <a href="#Page_174">174</a>-<a href="#Page_175">175</a>, <a href="#Page_450">450</a></li>
+<li class="indx">Yaws, <a href="#Page_187">187</a></li>
+
+<li class="ifrst">Z</li>
+<li class="indx">Zaire, <a href="#Page_102">102</a></li>
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+<p><br /><br /><br /><br /></p>
+
+<p class="titlepage" style="font-size: 75%;">THE END</p>
+
+<p><br /><br /><br /><br /></p>
+
+<p class="titlepage" style="font-size: 75%;">RICHARD CLAY AND SONS, LIMITED: LONDON AND BUNGAY.</p>
+
+<p><br /><br /></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 650px;">
+<a href="images/ill-183large.jpg" title="The Niger Delta">
+<img src="images/ill-183a.jpg" width="650" height="474" alt="The Niger Delta" title="The Niger Delta" />
+<span class="caption">MAP OF THE NIGER DELTA.</span>
+</a>
+</div>
+
+<p><br /><br /><br /><br /></p>
+
+<div class="transnote">
+<p class="titlepage"><a name="trans_note" id="trans_note"><b>Transcriber&rsquo;s&nbsp;Note</b></a></p>
+
+<p>The following typographical errors/spelling errors have been corrected.</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="Errata">
+<colgroup> <col width="10%" /> <col width="30%" /> <col width="30%" /> <col width="30%" /> </colgroup>
+<tr><th align="right"> Page</th><th>As printed</th><th>As corrected</th><th>Comment</th></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdr"><a href="#CORR1a">38</a></td><td class="tdl">be took by locusts!</td><td class="tdl">be took by locusts!&rdquo;</td><td>added closing quote</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdr"><a href="#CORR1b">42</a></td><td class="tdl">You remember D&mdash;&mdash;?</td><td class="tdl">You remember D&mdash;&mdash;?&rdquo;</td><td>added closing quote</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdr"><a href="#CORR1">75</a></td><td class="tdl">regarding this affair,</td><td class="tdl">regarding this affair.</td><td>changed comma to period</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdr"><a href="#CORR2">86</a></td><td class="tdl">arives</td><td class="tdl">arrives</td><td>corrected</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdr"><a href="#CORR3">246</a></td><td class="tdl">Timbucto</td><td class="tdl">Timbuctoo</td><td class="tdl">changed to match other instances</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdr"><a href="#CORR4">255</a></td><td class="tdl">Bodajor</td><td class="tdl">Bojador</td><td>corrected</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdr"><a href="#FNanchor_54_55">287</a></td><td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td><td class="tdl">[54]</td><td class="tdl">Footnote 54 was unnumbered and is provided</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdr"><a href="#CORR5">289</a></td><td class="tdl">(about Ŗ6,400</td><td class="tdl">(about Ŗ6,400)</td><td class="tdl">added closing parenthesis</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdr"><a href="#CORR6">416</a></td><td class="tdl">sink&mdash;holes</td><td class="tdl">sink-holes</td><td class="tdl">em-dash to hyphen</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdr"><a href="#CORR7">485</a></td><td class="tdl">aniversaries</td><td class="tdl">anniversaries</td><td class="tdl">corrected</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdr"><a href="#CORR8">495</a></td><td class="tdl">gunpowder on the floor fo</td><td class="tdl">gunpowder on the floor of</td><td class="tdl">corrected</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdr"><a href="#CORR9">510</a></td><td class="tdl">number of 3,200,00 souls</td><td class="tdl">number of 3,200,000 souls</td><td class="tdl">added 0</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdr"><a href="#Footnote_91_92">[91]</a></td><td class="tdl">Monopolies, have led</td><td class="tdl">Monopolies have led</td><td class="tdl">removed extra comma</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdr"><a href="#CORR11">602</a></td><td class="tdl">I did not like their demeanour</td><td class="tdl">I did not like their demeanour.</td><td class="tdl">added missing period</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdr"><a href="#CORR12">603</a></td><td class="tdl">our goods are in their hands.</td><td class="tdl">our goods are in their hands.&rdquo;</td><td class="tdl">added closing quote</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdr"><a href="#CORR13">615</a></td><td class="tdl">own way too much,</td><td class="tdl">own way too much.</td><td class="tdl">changed comma to period</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdr"><a href="#CORR14">622</a></td><td class="tdl">perpetually on, their guard</td><td class="tdl"> perpetually on their guard</td><td class="tdl">removed spurious comma</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdr"><a href="#CORR15">623</a></td><td class="tdl">mumber</td><td class="tdl">number</td><td class="tdl">corrected</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdr"><a href="#CORR16">625</a></td><td class="tdl">the anker being a 16 gallon rundlet</td><td class="tdl">the anker being a 16 gallon rundlet)</td><td class="tdl">added closing parenthesis</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdr"><a href="#CORR17">636</a></td><td class="tdl">Clerks, 329, 357,</td><td class="tdl">Clerks, 329, 357</td><td class="tdl">removed comma at the end</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>The following words appear as variants and have been left as printed:</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="0" summary="Variants">
+<tr><td class="tdl">Ogowe (3)</td><td class="tdl">Ogowé (11)</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Filiaria perstans (1)</td><td class="tdl">Filaria perstans (1)</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">mütterrecht (1)</td><td class="tdl">mutterrecht(1)</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Bassambri (1)</td><td class="tdl">Basambri (1)</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>The following words appear with and without hyphens. The various
+spellings are left as printed. Where the printed text introduces
+a hyphen at end-of-line, the hyphen is retained only if that variant
+is otherwise predominant.</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="0" summary="Hyphenation">
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdl">Scott-Elliott</td>
+  <td class="tdl">Scott Elliot</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Sea-shore</td>
+     <td class="tdl">seashore</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">head-quarters</td>
+     <td class="tdl">headquarters</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">a-shore </td>
+    <td class="tdl">ashore</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">craw-fish</td>
+    <td class="tdl">crawfish</td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">fire-wood</td><td class="tdl">firewood</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">ear-rings</td><td class="tdl">earrings</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">head-man</td><td class="tdl">headman</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">inter-marriage</td><td class="tdl">intermarriage</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">ju-ju</td><td class="tdl">juju</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">re-captured</td><td class="tdl">recaptured</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">re-organized</td><td class="tdl">reorganized</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">sand-flies</td><td class="tdl">sandflies</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">middleman</td><td class="tdl">middle-man</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">sandbanks</td><td class="tdl">sand-banks</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Winna-boes</td><td class="tdl">Winnaboes</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">small-pox</td><td class="tdl">smallpox</td></tr>
+</table>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's West African studies, by Mary Henrietta Kingsley
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+</body>
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+Project Gutenberg's West African studies, by Mary Henrietta Kingsley
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: West African studies
+
+Author: Mary Henrietta Kingsley
+
+Release Date: February 13, 2012 [EBook #38870]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WEST AFRICAN STUDIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Clare Boothby, KD Weeks and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+    Transcriber's Notes: Printer's errors have been corrected.
+
+    Italics are indicated using _underscore_ characters. Bold
+    characters are indicated using =equal= characters. The 'oe'
+    ligature is represented with 'oe'.
+
+    Footnotes have been located at the end of each chapter.
+
+    Consult the Transcriber's Notes at the end of this text
+    for details.
+
+
+
+                      [Illustration: SIRIMBA PLAYERS, CONGO.]
+
+
+
+
+                             WEST AFRICAN STUDIES
+
+
+                                      BY
+
+                              MARY H. KINGSLEY
+
+                     AUTHOR OF "TRAVELS IN WEST AFRICA"
+
+
+                       _WITH ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAPS_
+
+
+  LONDON MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+
+                                    1899
+
+                           _All rights reserved_
+
+                      RICHARD CLAY AND SONS, LIMITED
+
+                             LONDON AND BUNGAY.
+
+
+
+
+                              TO MY BROTHER
+
+                            MR. C.G. KINGSLEY
+
+                     AND TO MY FRIEND WHO IS DEAD
+
+                              THIS BOOK IS
+
+                                Dedicated
+
+
+
+
+                         PREFACE TO THE READER
+
+
+I pray you who may come across this book to distinguish carefully
+between the part of it written by others and that written by me.
+
+Anything concerning West Africa written by M. le Comte C. de Cardi or
+Mr. John Harford, of Bristol, does not require apology and explanation;
+while anything written by me on this, or any subject, does. M. le Comte
+de Cardi possesses an unrivalled knowledge of the natives of the Niger
+Delta, gained, as all West Coasters know, by personal experience, and
+gained in a way whereby he had to test the truth of his ideas about
+these natives, not against things said concerning them in books, but
+against the facts themselves, for years; and depending on the accuracy
+of his knowledge was not a theory, but his own life and property. I have
+always wished that men having this kind of first-hand, well-tested
+knowledge regarding West Africa could be induced to publish it for the
+benefit of students, and for the foundation of a true knowledge
+concerning the natives of West Africa in the minds of the general
+public, feeling assured that if we had this class of knowledge
+available, the student of ethnology would be saved from many fantastic
+theories, and the general public enabled to bring its influence to bear
+in the cause of justice, instead of in the cause of fads. I need say
+nothing more regarding Appendix I.; it is a mine of knowledge concerning
+a highly developed set of natives of the true Negro stem, particularly
+valuable because, during recent years, we have been singularly badly off
+for information on the true Negro. It would not be too much to say that,
+with the exception of the important series of works by the late Sir A.
+B. Ellis, and a few others, so few that you can count them on the
+fingers of one hand, and Dr. Freeman's _Ashanti and Jaman_, published
+this year, we have practically had no reliable information on these, the
+most important of the races of Africa, since the eighteenth century. The
+general public have been dependent on the work of great East and Central
+African geographical explorers, like Dr. Livingstone, Mr. H. M. Stanley,
+Dr. Gregory, Mr. Scott Elliott, and Sir H. H. Johnston, men whose work
+we cannot value too highly, and whom we cannot sufficiently admire; but
+who, nevertheless, were not when describing Africans describing Negroes,
+but that great mixture of races existing in Central and East Africa
+whose main ingredient is Bantu. To argue from what you know about Bantus
+when you are dealing with Negroes is about as safe and sound as to argue
+from what you may know about Eastern Europeans when you are dealing with
+Western Europeans. Nevertheless, this fallacious method has been
+followed in the domain of ethnology and politics with, as might be
+expected, bad results. I am, therefore, very proud at being permitted by
+M. le Comte de Cardi to publish his statements on true Negroes; and I
+need not say I have in no way altered them, and that he is in no way
+responsible for any errors that there may be in the portions of this
+book written by me.
+
+Mr. John Harford, the man who first[1] opened up that still little-known
+Qua Ibo river, another region of Negroes, also requires no apology. I am
+confident that the quite unconscious picture of a West Coast trader's
+life given by him in Appendix II. will do much to remove the fantastic
+notions held concerning West Coast traders and the manner of life they
+lead out there; and I am convinced that if the English public had more
+of this sort of material it would recognise, as I, from a fairly
+extensive knowledge of West Coast traders, have been forced to
+recognise, that they are the class of white men out there who can be
+trusted to manage West Africa.
+
+I most sincerely wish that the whole of this book had been written by
+such men as the authors of Appendices I. and II. We are seriously in
+want of reliable information on West African affairs. It is a sort of
+information you can only get from resident white men, those who live in
+close touch with the natives, and who are forced to know the truth about
+them in order to live and prosper, and from scientific trained
+observers. The transient traveller, passing rapidly through such a
+region as West Africa, is not so valuable an informant as he may be in
+other regions of the Earth, where his observations can be checked by
+those of acknowledged authorities, and supplemented by the literature of
+the natives to whom he refers. For on West Africa, outside Ellis's
+region, there is no authority newer than the eighteenth century, and the
+natives have no written literature. You must, therefore, go down to
+_Urstuff_ and rely only on expert observers, whose lives and property
+depend on their observing well, or whose science trains them to observe
+carefully.
+
+Now of course I regard myself as one of the second class of these
+observers: did I not do so I would not dare speak about West Africa at
+all, especially in such company; but whatever I am or whatever I do,
+requires explanation, apology, and thanks.
+
+You may remember that after my return from a second sojourn in West
+Africa, when I had been to work at fetish and fresh-water fishes, I
+published a word-swamp of a book about the size of Norie's _Navigation_.
+Mr. George Macmillan lured me into so doing by stating that if I gave my
+own version of the affair I should remove misconceptions; and if I did
+not it was useless to object to such things as paragraphs in American
+papers to the effect that "Miss Kingsley, having crossed the continent
+of Africa, ascended the Niger to Victoria, and then climbed the Peak of
+Cameroon; she is shortly to return to England, when she will deliver a
+series of lectures on French art, which she has had great opportunities
+of studying." Well, thanks to Mr. Macmillan's kindness, I did publish a
+sort of interim report, called _Travels in West Africa_. It did not work
+out in the way he prophesied. It has led to my being referred to as "an
+intrepid explorer," a thing there is not the making of in me, who am
+ever the prey of frights, worries, and alarms; and its main effect, as
+far as I am personally concerned, has been to plunge me further still in
+debt for kindness from my fellow creatures, who, though capable of doing
+all I have done and more capable of writing about it in really good
+English, have tolerated that book and frequently me also, with
+half-a-dozen colds in my head and a dingy temper. Chief among all these
+creditors of mine I must name Mrs. J. R. Green, Mrs. George Macmillan,
+and Miss Lucy Toulmin Smith; but don't imagine that they or any other of
+my creditors approve of any single solitary opinion I express, or the
+way in which I express it. It is merely that I have the power of
+bringing out in my fellow-creatures, white or black, their virtues, in a
+way honourable to them and fortunate for me.
+
+I must here also acknowledge the great debt of gratitude I owe to Mr.
+John Holt, of Liverpool. A part of my work lies in the affairs of the
+so-called Bubies of Fernando Po, and no one knows so much about Fernando
+Po as Mr. Holt. He has also been of the greatest help to me in other
+ethnological questions, and has permitted me to go through his
+collections of African things most generously. It is, however, idle for
+me to attempt to chronicle my debt to Mr. Holt, for in every part of my
+work I owe him much. I do not wish you to think he is responsible for
+any of it, but his counsels have ever been on the side of moderation and
+generosity in adverse criticism. I honestly confess I believe I am by
+nature the very mildest of critics; but Mr. Holt and others think
+otherwise; and so, although I have not altered my opinions, I have
+restrained from publishing several developments of them, in deference to
+superior knowledge.
+
+I am also under a debt of gratitude to Professor Tylor. He also is not
+involved in my opinions, but he kindly permits me to tell him things
+that I can only "tell Tylor"; and now and again, as you will see in the
+Fetish question, he comes down on me with a refreshing firmness; in
+fact, I feel that any attempt at fantastic explanations of West African
+culture will not receive any encouragement from him; and it is a great
+comfort to a mere drudge like myself to know there is some one who
+cares for facts, without theories draping them.
+
+I will merely add that to all my own West Coast friends I remain
+indebted; and that if you ever come across any one who says I owe them
+much, you may take it as a rule that I do, though in all my written
+stuff I have most carefully ticketed its source.
+
+I now turn to the explanation and apology for this book, briefly.
+Apology for its literary style I do not make. I am not a literary man,
+only a student of West Africa. I am not proud of my imperfections in
+English. I would write better if I could, but I cannot. I find when I
+try to write like other people that I do not say what seems to me true,
+and thereby lose all right to say anything; and I am more convinced, the
+more I know of West Africa--my education is continuous and unbroken by
+holidays,--that it is a difficult thing to write about, particularly
+when you are a student hampered on all sides by masses of inchoate
+material, unaided by a set of great authors to whose opinions you can
+refer, and addressing a public that is not interested in the things that
+interest you so keenly and that you regard as so deeply important.
+
+In my previous book I most carefully confined myself to facts and
+arranged those facts on as thin a line of connecting opinion as
+possible. I was anxious to see what manner of opinion they would give
+rise to in the minds of the educated experts up here; not from a mere
+feminine curiosity, but from a distrust in my own ability to construct
+theories. On the whole this method has worked well. Ethnologists of
+different theories have been enabled to use such facts as they saw fit;
+but one of the greatest of ethnologists has grumbled at me, not for not
+giving a theory, but for omitting to show the inter-relationship of
+certain groups of facts, an inter-relationship his acuteness enabled him
+to know existed. Therefore I here give the key to a good deal of this
+inter-relationship by dividing the different classes of Fetishism into
+four schools. In order to do this I have now to place before you a good
+deal of material that was either crowded out of the other work or
+considered by me to require further investigation and comparison. As for
+the new statements I make, I have been enabled to give them this from
+the constant information and answers to questions I receive from West
+Africa. For the rest of the Fetish I remain a mere photographic plate.
+
+Regarding the other sections of this book, they are to me all subsidiary
+in importance to the Fetish, but they belong to it. They refer to its
+environment, without a knowledge of which you cannot know the thing.
+What Mr. Macmillan has ticketed as Introductory--I could not find a name
+for it at all--has a certain bearing on West African affairs, as showing
+the life on a West Coast boat. I may remark it is a section crowded out
+of my previous book; so, though you may not be glad to see it here, you
+must be glad it was not there.
+
+The fishing chapter was also cast out of _Travels in West Africa_.
+Critics whom I respect said it was wrong of me not to have explained how
+I came by my fishes. This made me fear that they thought I had stolen
+them, so I published the article promptly in the _National Review_, and,
+by the kindness of its editor, Mr. Maxse, I reprint it. It is the only
+reprint in this book.
+
+The chapter on Law contains all the material I have been so far able to
+arrange on this important study. The material on Criminal Law I must
+keep until I can go out again to West Africa, and read further in the
+minds of men in the African Forest Belt region; for in them, in that
+region, is the original text. The connection between Religion and Law I
+have not reprinted here, it being available, thanks to the courtesy of
+the Hibbert Trustees, in the _National Review_, September, 1897.
+
+I have left my stiffest bit of explanation and apology till the last,
+namely, that relating to the Crown Colony system, which is the thing
+that makes me beg you to disassociate from me every friend I have, and
+deal with me alone. I am alone responsible for it, the only thing for
+which I may be regarded as sharing the responsibility with others being
+the statistics from Government sources.
+
+It has been the most difficult thing I have ever had to do. I would have
+given my right hand to have done it well, for I know what it means if
+things go on as they are. Alas! I am hampered with my bad method of
+expression. I cannot show you anything clearly and neatly. I have to
+show you a series of pictures of things, and hope you will get from
+those pictures the impression which is the truth. I dare not set myself
+up to tell you the truth. I only say, look at it; and to the best of my
+ability faithfully give you, not an artist's picture, but a photograph,
+an overladen with detail, colourless version; all the time wishing to
+Heaven there was some one else doing it who could do it better, and then
+I know you would understand, and all would be well. I know there are
+people who tax me with a brutality in statement, I feel unjustly; and it
+makes me wonder what they would say if they had to speak about West
+Africa. It is a repetition of the difficulty a friend of mine and myself
+had over a steam launch called the Dragon Fly, whose internal health was
+chronically poor, and subject to bad attacks. Well, one afternoon, he
+and I had to take her out to the home-going steamer, and she had
+suffered that afternoon in the engines, and when she suffered anywhere
+she let you know it. We did what we could for her, in the interests of
+humanity and ourselves; we gave her lots of oil, and fed her with
+delicately-chopped wood; but all to but little avail. So both our
+tempers being strained when we got to the steamer, we told her what the
+other one of us had been saying about the Dragon Fly. The purser of the
+steamer thereon said "that people who said things like those about a
+poor inanimate steam launch were fools with a flaming hot future, and
+lost souls entirely." We realised that our observations had been
+imperfect; and so, being ever desirous of improving ourselves, we
+offered to put the purser on shore in the Dragon Fly. We knew she was
+feeling still much the same, and we wanted to know what he would say
+when jets of superheated steam played on him. He came, and they did; and
+when they did, you know, he said things I cannot repeat. Nevertheless,
+things of the nature of our own remarks, but so much finer of the kind,
+that we regarded him with awe when he was returning thanks to the "poor
+inanimate steam launch"; but it was when it came to his going ashore,
+gladly to leave us and her, that we found out what that man could say;
+and we morally fainted at his remarks made on discovering that he had
+been sitting in a pool of smutty oil, which she had insidiously treated
+him to, in order to take some of the stuffing out of him about the
+superior snowwhiteness of his trousers. Well, that purser went off the
+scene in a blue flame; and I said to my companion, "Sir! we cannot say
+things like that." "Right you are, Miss Kingsley," he said sadly; "you
+and I are only fit for Sunday school entertainments."
+
+It is thus with me about this Crown Colony affair. I know I have not
+risen to the height other people--my superiors, like the purser--would
+rise to, if they knew it; but at the same time, I may seem to those who
+do not know it, who only know the good intentions of England, and who
+regard systems as inanimate things, to be speaking harshly. I would not
+have mentioned this affair at all, did I not clearly see that our
+present method of dealing with tropical possessions under the Crown
+Colony system was dangerous financially, and brought with it suffering
+to the native races and disgrace to English gentlemen, who are bound to
+obey and carry out the orders given them by the system.
+
+Plotinus very properly said that the proper thing to do was to
+superimpose the idea upon the actual. I am not one of those who will
+ever tell you things are impossible, but I am particularly hopeful in
+this matter. England has an excellent idea regarding her duty to native
+races in West Africa. She has an excellent actual in the West African
+native to superimpose her idea upon. All that is wanted is the proper
+method; and this method I assure you that Science, true knowledge, that
+which Spinoza termed the inward aid of God, can give you. I am not
+Science, but only one of her brick-makers, and I beg you to turn to her.
+Remember you have tried to do without her in African matters for 400
+years, and on the road to civilisation and advance there you have
+travelled on a cabbage leaf.
+
+I have now only the pleasant duty of remarking that in this book I have
+said nothing regarding missionary questions. I do not think it will ever
+be necessary for me to mention those questions again except to
+Nonconformist missionaries. I say this advisedly, because, though I have
+not one word to retract of what I have said, the saying of it has
+demonstrated to me the fearless honesty and the perfect chivalry in
+controversy of the Nonconformist missions in England. As they are the
+most extensively interested in West Africa, if on my next stay out in
+West Africa I find anything I regard as rather wrong in missionary
+affairs I intend to have it out within doors; for I know that the
+Nonconformists will be clear-headed, and fight fair, and stick to the
+point.
+
+                                                      MARY H. KINGSLEY.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [1] Mr. McEachen first traded there in a hulk, but, after about two
+   years, withdrew in 1873. No trade was done in this river by white men
+   until Mr. Harford went in, since then it has continued.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                              PAGE
+   CHAPTER I
+   INTRODUCTORY                                                  1
+
+   CHAPTER II
+   SIERRA LEONE AND ITS SURROUNDINGS                            35
+
+   CHAPTER III
+   AFRICAN CHARACTERISTICS                                      62
+
+   CHAPTER IV
+   FISHING IN WEST AFRICA                                       88
+
+   CHAPTER V
+   FETISH                                                      112
+
+   CHAPTER VI
+   SCHOOLS OF FETISH                                           136
+
+   CHAPTER VII
+   FETISH AND WITCHCRAFT                                       156
+
+   CHAPTER VIII
+   AFRICAN MEDICINE                                            180
+
+   CHAPTER IX
+   THE WITCH DOCTOR                                            199
+
+   CHAPTER X
+   EARLY TRADE IN WEST AFRICA                                  220
+
+   CHAPTER XI
+   FRENCH DISCOVERY OF WEST AFRICA                             250
+
+   CHAPTER XII
+   COMMERCE IN WEST AFRICA                                     281
+
+   CHAPTER XIII
+   THE CROWN COLONY SYSTEM                                     301
+
+   CHAPTER XIV
+   THE CROWN COLONY SYSTEM IN WEST AFRICA                      314
+
+   CHAPTER XV
+   MORE OF THE CROWN COLONY SYSTEM                             324
+
+   CHAPTER XVI
+   THE CLASH OF CULTURES                                       363
+
+   CHAPTER XVII
+   AN ALTERNATIVE PLAN                                         392
+
+   CHAPTER XVIII
+   AFRICAN PROPERTY                                            420
+
+
+   APPENDIX
+
+   I. A SHORT DESCRIPTION OF THE NATIVES OF THE NIGER
+   COAST PROTECTORATE, WITH SOME ACCOUNT OF THEIR
+   CUSTOMS, RELIGION, TRADE, ETC. BY M. LE COMTE
+   C. N. DE CARDI                                              443
+
+   II. A VOYAGE TO THE AFRICAN OIL RIVERS TWENTY-FIVE
+   YEARS AGO. BY JOHN HARFORD                                  567
+
+   III. TRADE GOODS USED IN THE EARLY TRADE WITH AFRICA
+   AS GIVEN BY BARBOT AND OTHER WRITERS OF THE
+   SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. BY M. H. KINGSLEY.                     615
+
+
+   INDEX                                                       635
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+   SIRIMBA PLAYERS, CONGO                  _Frontispiece_.
+
+   SANTA CRUZ, TENERIFFE                   _To face page_       12
+
+   FOR PALM WINE                                "               63
+
+   SECRET SOCIETY LEAVING THE SACRED GROVE      "               69
+
+   JENGU DEVIL DANCE OF KING WILLIAM'S SLAVES,
+   SETTE CAMMA, NOVEMBER 9, 1888[A]             "               69
+
+   BATANGA CANOES                               "               89
+
+   FALLS ON THE TONGUE RIVER                    "              101
+
+   LOANDA CANOE WITH MAT SAILS.                 "              101
+
+   ST. PAUL DO LOANDA                           "              102
+
+   ROUND A KACONGO CAMP FIRE                    "              105
+
+   FANTEE NATIVES OF THE GOLD COAST             "              137
+
+   YORUBA                                       "              141
+
+   A CALABAR CHIEF                              "              145
+
+   NATIVES OF GABOON                            "              151
+
+   FJORT NATIVES OF KACONGO AND LOANGO          "              155
+
+   OIL RIVER NATIVES                            "              245
+
+   ST. PAUL DO LOANDA                           "              281
+
+   CLIFFS AT LOANDA                             "              285
+
+   DONDO ANGOLA                                 "              287
+
+   TRADING STORES                               "              289
+
+   ST. PAUL DO LOANDA                           "              291
+
+   IN AN ANGOLA MARKET                          "              297
+
+   A MAN OF SOUTH ANGOLA                        "              297
+
+   A HOUSA                                      "              420
+
+   HOUSE PROPERTY IN KACONGO                    "              423
+
+   BUBIES OF FERNANDO PO                        "              423
+
+   JA JA, KING OF OPOBO                         "              443
+
+   JA JA MAKING JU JU                           "              540
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [A] By permission of R. B. N. Walker, Esq.
+
+
+
+
+WEST AFRICAN STUDIES
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+INTRODUCTORY
+
+     Regarding a voyage on a West Coast boat, with some observations on
+     the natural history of mariners never before published; to which is
+     added some description of the habits and nature of the ant and
+     other insects, to the end that the new-comer be informed concerning
+     these things before he lands in Afrik.
+
+
+There are some people who will tell you that the labour problem is the
+most difficult affair that Africa presents to the student; others give
+the first place to the influence of civilisation on native races, or to
+the interaction of the interests of the various white Powers on that
+continent, or to the successful sanitation of the said continent, or
+some other high-sounding thing; but I, who have an acquaintance with all
+these matters, and think them well enough, as intellectual exercises,
+yet look upon them as slight compared to the problem of the West Coast
+Boat.
+
+Now life on board a West Coast steamer is an important factor in West
+African affairs, and its influence is far reaching. It is, indeed, akin
+to what the Press is in England, in that it forms an immense amount of
+public opinion. It is on board the steamer that men from one part of
+West Africa meet men from another part of West Africa--parts of West
+Africa are different. These men talk things over together without
+explaining them, and the consequence is confusion in idea and the
+darkening of counsel from the ideas so formed being handed over to
+people at home who practically know no part of the West Coast
+whatsoever.
+
+I had an example of this the other day, when a lady said to me in an
+aggrieved tone, after I had been saying a few words on swamps, "Oh, Miss
+Kingsley, but I thought it was wrong to talk about swamps nowadays, and
+that Africa was really quite dry. I have a cousin who has been to Accra
+and he says," &c. That's the way the formation of an erroneous opinion
+on West Africa gets started. Many a time have I with a scientific
+interest watched those erroneous opinions coming out of the egg on a
+West Coast boat. Say, for example, a Gold Coaster meets on the boat a
+River-man. River-man in course of conversation, states how, "hearing a
+fillaloo in the yard one night I got up and found the watchman going to
+sleep on the top of the ladder had just lost a leg by means of one
+crocodile, while another crocodile was kicking up a deuce of a row
+climbing up the crane." Gold Coaster says, "Tell that to the Marines."
+River-man says, "Perfect fact, Sir, my place swarms with crocodiles.
+Why, once, when I was," &c., &c. Anyhow it ends in a row. The Gold
+Coaster says, "Sir, I have been 7 years" (or 13 or some impressive
+number of years) "on the West Coast of Africa, Sir, and I have never
+seen a crocodile." River-man makes remarks on the existence of a toxic
+state wherein a man can't see the holes in a ladder, for he knows he's
+seen hundreds of crocodiles.
+
+I know Gold Coasters say in a trying way when any terrific account of
+anything comes before them, "Oh, that was down in the Rivers," and one
+knows what they mean. But don't you go away with the idea that a Gold
+Coaster cannot turn out a very decent tale; indeed, considering the
+paucity of their material, they often display the artistic spirit to a
+most noteworthy degree, but the net result of the conversation on a West
+African steamboat is error. Parts of it, like the curate's egg, are
+quite excellent, but unless you have an acquaintance with the various
+regions of the Coast to which your various informants refer, you cannot
+know which is which. Take the above case and analyse it, and you will
+find it is almost all, on both sides, quite true. I won't go bail for
+the crocodile up the crane, but for the watchman's leg and the watchman
+being asleep on the top of the ladder I will, for watchmen will sleep
+anywhere; and once when I was, &c., I myself saw certainly not less than
+70 crocodiles at one time, let alone smelling them, for they do swarm in
+places and stink always. But on the other hand the Gold Coaster might
+have remained 7, 13, or any other number of centuries instead of years,
+in a teetotal state, and yet have never seen a crocodile.
+
+It may seem a reckless thing to say, but I believe that the great
+percentage of steamboat talk is true; only you must remember that it is
+not stuff that you can in any way use or rely on unless you know
+yourself the district from which the information comes, and it must,
+like all information--like all specimens of any kind--be very carefully
+ticketed, then and there, as to its giver and its district. In this it
+is again like the English Press, wherein you may see a statement one day
+that everything is quite satisfactory, say in Uganda, and in the next
+issue that there has been a massacre or some unpleasantness. The two
+statements have in them the connecting thread of truth, that truth that,
+according to Fichte, is in all things. The first shows that it is the
+desire in the official mind that everything should be quite satisfactory
+to every one; the second, that practically this blessed state has not
+yet arrived--that is all.
+
+I need not, however, further dwell on this complex phase, and will turn
+to the high educational value of the West African steamboat to the young
+Coaster, holding that on the conditions under which the Coaster makes
+his first voyage out to West Africa largely depends whether or no he
+takes to the Coast. Strange as it is to me, who love West Africa, there
+are people who have really been there who have not even liked it in the
+least. These people, I fancy, have not been properly brought up in a
+suitable academy as I was.
+
+Doubtless a P. & O. is a good preparatory school for India, or a Union,
+or Castle liner for the Cape, or an Empereza Nacional simply superb for
+a Portuguese West Coast Possession, but for the Bights, especially for
+the terrible Bight of Benin, "where for one that comes out there are
+forty stay in," I have no hesitation in recommending the West Coast
+cargo boat. Not one of the best ships in the fleet, mind you; they are
+well enough to come home in, and so on, but you must go on a steamer
+that has her saloon aft on your first trip out or you will never
+understand West Africa.
+
+It was on such a steamer that I made my first voyage out in '93, when,
+acting under the advice of most eminent men, before whose names European
+Science trembles, I resolved that the best place to study early religion
+and law, and collect fishes, was the West Coast of Africa.
+
+On reaching Liverpool, where I knew no one and of which I knew nothing
+in '93, I found the boat I was to go by was a veteran of the fleet. She
+had her saloon aft, and I am bound to say her appearance was anything
+but reassuring to the uninitiated and alarmed young Coaster, depressed
+by the direful prophecies of deserted friends concerning all things West
+African. Dirt and greed were that vessel's most obvious attributes. The
+dirt rapidly disappeared, and by the time she reached the end of her
+trip out, at Loanda, she was as neat as a new pin, for during the voyage
+every inch of paint work was scraped and re-painted, from the red below
+her Plimsoll mark to the uttermost top of her black funnel. But on the
+day when first we met these things were yet to be. As for her greed, her
+owners had evidently then done all they could to satisfy her. She was
+heavily laden, her holds more full than many a better ship's; but no,
+she was not content, she did not even pretend to be, and shamelessly
+whistled and squarked for more. So, evidently just to gratify her, they
+sent her a lighter laden with kegs of gunpowder, and she grunted
+contentedly as she saw it come alongside. But she was not really
+entirely content even then, or satisfied. I don't suppose, between
+ourselves, any South West Coast boat ever is, and during the whole time
+I was on her, devoted to her as I rapidly became, I saw only too clearly
+that the one thing she really cared for was cargo. It was the criterion
+by which she measured the importance, nay the very excuse for existence,
+of a port. If she is ever sold to other owners and sent up the
+Mediterranean, she will anathematise Malta and scorn Naples. "What! no
+palm oil!" she'll say; "no rubber? Call yourself a port!" and tie her
+whistle string to a stanchion until the authorities bring off her papers
+and let her clear away. Every one on board her she infected with a
+commercial spirit. I am not by nature a commercial man myself, yet
+under her influence I found myself selling paraffin oil in cases in the
+Bights: and even to missionaries and Government officials travelling on
+her in between ports, she suggested the advisability of having out
+churches, houses, &c., in sections carefully marked with her name.
+
+As we ran down the Irish Channel and into the Bay of Biscay, the weather
+was what the mariners termed "a bit fresh." Our craft was evidently a
+wet ship, either because she was nervous and femininely flurried when
+she saw a large wave coming, or, as I am myself inclined to believe,
+because of her insatiable mania for shipping cargo. Anyhow, she
+habitually sat down in the rise of those waves, whereby, from whatever
+motive, she managed to ship a good deal of the Atlantic Ocean in various
+sized sections.
+
+Her saloon, as aforesaid, was aft, and I observed it was the duty, in
+order to keep it dry, of any one near the main door who might notice a
+ton or so of the fourth element coming aboard, to seize up three
+cocoa-fibre mats, shut three cabin doors and yell "Bill!" After doing
+this they were seemingly at full liberty to retire into the saloon and
+dam the Atlantic Ocean, and remark, "It's a dog's life at sea." I never
+noticed "Bill" come in answer to this performance, so I was getting to
+regard "Bill" as an invocation to a weather Ju Ju; but this was hasty,
+for one night in the Bay I was roused by a new noise, and on going into
+the saloon to see what it was, found the stewardess similarly engaged;
+mutually we discovered, in the dim light--she wasn't the boat to go and
+throw away money on electric--that it was the piano adrift off its dais,
+and we steered for it. Very cleverly we fielded _en route_ a palm in pot
+complete, but shipped some beer and Worcester sauce bottles that came at
+us from the rack over the table, whereby we got a bit messy and sticky
+about the hair and a trifle cut; nevertheless, undaunted we held our
+course and seized the instrument, instinctively shouting "Bill," and
+"Bill" came, in the form of a sandy-haired steward, amiable in nature
+and striking in costume.
+
+After the first three or four days, a calm despair regarding the fate of
+my various lost belongings and myself having come on me, and the weather
+having moderated, I began to make observations on what manner of men my
+fellow-passengers were. I found only two species of the genus Coaster,
+the Government official and the trading Agent, were represented; so far
+we had no Missionaries. I decided to observe those species we had
+quietly, having heard awful accounts of them before leaving England, but
+to reserve final judgment on them until they had quite recovered from
+sea-sickness and had had a night ashore. Some of the Agents soon revived
+sufficiently to give copious information on the dangers and mortality of
+West Africa to those on board who were going down Coast for the first
+time, and the captain and doctor chipped in ever and anon with a
+particularly convincing tale of horror in support of their statements.
+This used to be the sort of thing. One of the Agents would look at the
+Captain during a meal-time, and say, "You remember J., Captain?" "Knew
+him well," says the Captain; "why I brought him out his last time, poor
+chap!" then follows full details of the pegging-out of J., and his
+funeral, &c. Then a Government official who had been out before, would
+kindly turn to a colleague out for the first time, and say, "Brought any
+dress clothes with you?" The unfortunate new comer, scenting an allusion
+to a more cheerful phase of Coast life, gladly answers in the
+affirmative.
+
+"That's right," says the interlocutor; "you want them to wear at
+funerals. Do you know," he remarks, turning to another old Coaster, "my
+dress trousers did not get mouldy once last wet season."
+
+"Get along," says his friend, "you can't hang a thing up twenty-four
+hours without its being fit to graze a cow on."
+
+"Do you get anything else but fever down there?" asks a new comer,
+nervously.
+
+"Haven't time as a general rule, but I have known some fellows get kraw
+kraw."
+
+"And the Portuguese itch, abscesses, ulcers, the Guinea worm and the
+smallpox," observe the chorus calmly.
+
+"Well," says the first answerer, kindly but regretfully, as if it pained
+him to admit this wealth of disease was denied his particular locality;
+"they are mostly on the South-west Coast." And then a gentleman says
+parasites are, as far as he knows, everywhere on the Coast, and some of
+them several yards long. "Do you remember poor C.?" says he to the
+Captain, who gives his usual answer, "Knew him well. Ah! poor chap,
+there was quite a quantity of him eaten away, inside and out, with
+parasites, and a quieter, better living man than C. there never was."
+"Never," says the chorus, sweeping away the hope that by taking care you
+may keep clear of such things--the new Coaster's great hope. "Where do
+you call--?" says a young victim consigned to that port. Some say it is
+on the South-west, but opinions differ, still the victim is left assured
+that it is just about the best place on the seaboard of the continent
+for a man to go to who wants to make himself into a sort of complete
+hospital course for a set of medical students.
+
+This instruction of the young in the charms of Coast life is the
+faithfully discharged mission of the old Coasters on steamboats,
+especially, as aforesaid, at meal times. Desperate victims sometimes
+determine to keep the conversation off fever, but to no avail. It is in
+the air you breath, mentally and physically; one will mention a lively
+and amusing work, some one cuts in and observes "Poor D. was found dead
+in bed at C. with that book alongside him." With all subjects it is the
+same. Keep clear of it in conversation, for even a half hour, you
+cannot. Far better is it for the young Coaster not to try, but just to
+collect all the anecdotes and information you can referring to it, and
+then lie low for a new Coaster of your own to tell them to, and when
+your own turn comes, as come it will if you haunt the West Coast long
+enough, to peg out and be poor so and so yourself. For goodness sake die
+somewhere where they haven't got the cemetery on a hill, because going
+up a hill in shirt collars, &c., will cause your mourners to peg out
+too, at least this is the lesson I was taught in that excellent West
+Coast school.
+
+When, however, there is no new Coaster to instruct on hand, or he is
+tired for ten minutes of doing it, the old Coaster discourses with his
+fellow old Coasters on trade products and insects. Every attention
+should be given to him on these points. On trade products I will
+discourse elsewhere; but insects it is well that the new comer should
+know about before he sets foot on Africa. On some West Coast boats
+excellent training is afforded by the supply of cockroaches on board,
+and there is nothing like getting used to cockroaches early when your
+life is going to be spent on the Coast--but I need not detain you with
+them now, merely remarking that they have none of the modest reticence
+of the European variety. They are very companionable, seeking rather
+than shunning human society, nestling in the bunk with you if the
+weather is the least chilly, and I fancy not averse to light; it is true
+they come out most at night, but then they distinctly like a bright
+light, and you can watch them in a tight packed circle round the lamp
+with their heads towards it, twirling their antennae at it with evident
+satisfaction; in fact it's the lively nights those cockroaches have that
+keep them abed during the day. They are sometimes of great magnitude; I
+have been assured by observers of them in factories ashore and on moored
+hulks that they can stand on their hind legs and drink out of a quart
+jug, but the most common steamer kind is smaller, as far as my own
+observations go. But what I do object to in them is, that they fly and
+feed on your hair and nails and disturb your sleep by so doing; and you
+mayn't smash them--they make an awful mess if you do. As for insect
+powder, well, I'd like to see the insect powder that would disturb the
+digestion of a West African insect.
+
+But it's against the insects ashore that you have to be specially
+warned. During my first few weeks of Africa I took a general natural
+historical interest in them with enthusiasm as of natural history; it
+soon became a mere sporting one, though equally enthusiastic at first.
+Afterwards a nearly complete indifference set in, unless some wretch
+aroused a vengeful spirit in me by stinging or biting. I should say,
+looking back calmly upon the matter, that 75 per cent. of West African
+insects sting, 5 per cent. bite, and the rest are either permanently or
+temporarily parasitic on the human race. And undoubtedly one of the many
+worst things you can do in West Africa is to take any notice of an
+insect. If you see a thing that looks like a cross between a flying
+lobster and the figure of Abraxas on a Gnostic gem, do not pay it the
+least attention, never mind where it is; just keep quiet and hope it
+will go away--for that's your best chance; you have none in a stand-up
+fight with a good thorough-going African insect. Well do I remember, at
+Cabinda, the way insects used to come in round the hanging lamp at
+dinner time. Mosquitoes were pretty bad there, not so bad as in some
+other places, but sufficient, and after them hawking came a cloud of
+dragon-flies, swishing in front of every one's face, which was worrying
+till you got used to it. Ever and anon a big beetle, with a terrific
+boom on, would sweep in, go two or three times round the room and then
+flop into the soup plate, out of that, shake himself like a retriever
+and bang into some one's face, then flop on the floor. Orders were then
+calmly but firmly given to the steward boys to "catch 'em;" down on the
+floor went the boys, and an exciting hunt took place which sometimes
+ended in a capture of the offender, but always seemed to irritate a
+previously quiet insect population who forthwith declared war on the
+human species, and fastened on to the nearest leg. It is best, as I have
+said, to leave insects alone. Of course you cannot ignore driver ants,
+they won't go away, but the same principle reversed is best for them,
+namely, your going away yourself.
+
+One way and another we talked a good deal of insects as well as fever on
+the----, but she herself was fairly free from these until she got a
+chance of shipping; then, of course, she did her best--with the flea
+line at Canary, mixed assortment at Sierra Leone, scorpions and
+centipedes in the Timber ports, heavy cargo of the beetle and
+mangrove-fly line, with mosquitoes for dunnage, in the Oil Rivers; it
+was not till she reached Congo--but of that anon.
+
+We duly reached Canary. This port I had been to the previous year on a
+Castle liner, having, in those remote and dark ages, been taught to
+believe that Liverpool boats were to be avoided; I was, so far, in a
+state of mere transition of opinion from this view to the one I at
+present hold, namely, that Liverpool West African boats are quite the
+most perfect things in their way, and, at any rate, good enough for me.
+
+I need not discourse on the Grand Canary; there are many better
+descriptions of that lovely island, and likewise of its sister,
+Teneriffe, than I could give you. I could, indeed give you an account of
+these islands, particularly "when a West Coast boat is in from South,"
+that would show another side of the island life; but I forbear, because
+it would, perhaps, cause you to think ill of the West Coaster unjustly;
+for the West Coaster, when he lands on the island of the Grand Canary,
+homeward bound, and realises he has a good reasonable chance to see his
+home and England again, is not in a normal state, and prone to fall
+under the influence of excitement, and display emotions that he would
+not dream of either on the West Coast itself or in England. Indeed, it
+is not too much to say that on the Canary Islands a good deal of the
+erroneous prejudice against West Africa is formed; but this is not the
+place to go into details on the subject.
+
+It was not until we left Canary that my fellow passengers on
+the ---- realised that I was going to "the Coast." They had most civilly
+bidden me good-bye when they were ashore on the morning of our arrival
+at Las Palmas; and they were surprised at my presence on board at
+dinner, as attentive to their conversation as ever. They explained that
+they had regarded me at first as a lady missionary, until my failure,
+during a Sunday service in the Bay of Biscay, to rescue it from the
+dire confusion into which it had been thrown by an esteemed and able
+officer and a dutiful but inexperienced Purser caused them to regard me
+as only a very early visitor to Canary. Now they required explanation. I
+said I was interested in Natural History. "Botany," they said, "They had
+known some men who had come out from Kew, but they were all dead now."
+
+     [Illustration: SANTA CRUZ, TENERIFFE. [_To face page 12_]
+
+I denied a connection with Kew, and in order to give an air of
+definiteness to my intentions, remembering I had been instructed that
+"one of the worst things you can do in West Africa is to be indefinite,"
+I said I was interested in the South Antarctic Drift--I was in those
+days.
+
+They promptly fell into the pit of error that this was a gold mine
+speculation, and said they had "never heard of such a mine." I attempted
+to extricate them from this idea, and succeeded, except with a deaf
+gentleman who kept on sweeping into the conversation with yarns and
+opinions on gold mines in West Africa and the awful mortality among
+people who attended to such things, which naturally led to a prolonged
+discussion ending in a general resolution that people who had anything
+to do with gold mines generally died rather quicker even than men from
+Kew. Indeed, it took me days to get myself explained, and when it was
+accomplished I found I had nearly got myself regarded as a lunatic to go
+to West Africa for such reasons. But fortunately for me, and for many
+others who have ventured into this kingdom, the West African merchants
+are good-hearted, hospitable English gentlemen, who seem to feel it
+their duty that no harm they can prevent should happen to any one; and
+my first friends, among them my fellow passengers on the----, failing
+in inducing me to return from Sierra Leone, which they strongly
+advised, did their best to save me by means of education. The things
+they thought I "really ought to know" would make wild reading if
+published in extenso. Led by the kindest and most helpful of captains,
+they poured in information, and I acquired a taste for "facts"--any sort
+of facts about anything--a taste when applied to West African facts,
+that I fancy ranks with that for collecting venomous serpents; but to my
+listening to everything that was told me by my first instructors, and
+believing in it, undoubtedly I have often owed my life, and countless
+times have been enabled to steer neatly through shoaly circumstances
+ashore.
+
+Our captain was not a man who would deliberately alarm a new comer, or
+shock any one, particularly a lady; indeed, he deliberately attempted to
+avoid so doing. He held it wrong to dwell on the dark side of Coast
+life, he said, "because youngsters going out were frequently so
+frightened on board the boats that they died as soon as they got on
+shore of the first cold they got in the head, thinking it was Yellow
+Jack"; so he always started conversation at meal times with anecdotes of
+his early years on an ancestral ranch in America. One great charm about
+"facts" is that you never know but what they may come in useful; so I
+eagerly got up a quantity of very strange information on the conduct of
+the American cow. He would then wander away among the China Seas or the
+Indian Ocean, and I could pass an examination on the social habits of
+captains of sailing vessels that ran to Bombay in old days. Sometimes
+the discourse visited the South American ports, and I took on
+information that will come in very handy should I ever find myself
+wandering about the streets of Callao after dark, searching for a
+tavern. But the turn that serious conversation always drifted into was
+the one that interested me most, that relating to the Coast.
+Particularly interesting were those tales of the old times and the men
+who first established the palm oil trade. They were, many of them, men
+who had been engaged in the slave trade, and on the suppression thereof
+they turned their attention to palm oil, to which end their knowledge of
+the locality and of the native chiefs and their commercial methods was
+of the greatest help. Their ideas were possibly not those at present in
+fashion, but the courage and enterprise those men displayed under the
+most depressing and deadly conditions made me proud of being a woman of
+the nation that turned out the "Palm oil ruffians"--Drake, Hawkins, the
+two Roberts, Frobisher, and Hudson--it is as good as being born a
+foreign gentleman.
+
+There was one of these old coasters of the palm oil ruffian type who
+especially interested me. He is dead now. For the matter of that he died
+at a mature age the year I was born, and I am in hopes of collecting
+facts sufficient to enable me to publish his complete biography. He
+lived up a creek, threw boots at leopards, and "had really swell
+spittoons, you know, shaped like puncheons, and bound with brass." I am
+sure it is unnecessary for me to mention his name.
+
+Two of the old Coasters never spoke unless they had something useful and
+improving to say. They were Scotch; indeed, most of us were that trip,
+and I often used to wonder if the South Atlantic Ocean were broad enough
+for the accent of the "a," or whether strange sounds would ever worry
+and alarm Central America and the Brazils. For general social purposes
+these silent ones used coughs, and the one whose seat was always next to
+mine at table kept me in a state of much anxiety, for I used to turn
+round, after having been riveted to the captain's conversation for
+minutes, and find him holding some dish for me to help myself from; he
+never took the least notice of my apologies, and I felt he had made up
+his mind that, if I did it again, he should take me by the scruff of my
+neck some night and drop me overboard. He was an alarmingly powerfully
+built man, and I quite understood the local African tribe wishing to
+have him for a specimen. Some short time before he had left for home
+last trip, they had attempted to acquire his head for their local ju ju
+house, from mixed aesthetic and religious reasons. In a way, it was
+creditable of them, I suppose, for it would have caused them grave
+domestic inconvenience to have removed thereby at one fell swoop, their
+complete set of tradesmen; and as a fellow collector of specimens I am
+bound to admit the soundness of their methods of collecting! Wishing for
+this gentleman's head they shot him in the legs. I have never gone in
+for collecting specimens of hominidae but still a recital of the
+incident did not fire me with a desire to repeat their performance;
+indeed, so discouraged was I by their failure that I hesitated about
+asking him for his skeleton when he had quite done with it, though it
+was gall and wormwood to think of a really fine thing like that falling
+into the hands of another collector.
+
+The run from Canary to Sierra Leone takes about a week. That part of it
+which lies in the track of the N.E. Trade Winds, _i.e._, from Canary to
+Cape Verde, makes you believe Mr. Kipling when he sang--
+
+          "There are many ways to take
+          Of the eagle and the snake,
+          And the way of a man with a maid;
+          But the sweetest way for me
+          Is a ship upon the sea
+          On the track of the North-East trade."
+
+was displaying, gracefully, a sensible choice of things; but you only
+feel this outward bound to the West Coast. When you come up from the
+Coast, fever stricken, homeward bound, you think otherwise. I do not
+mean to say that owing to a disintegrating moral effect of West Africa
+you wish to pursue the other ways mentioned in the stanza, but you do
+wish the Powers above would send that wind to the Powers below and get
+it warmed. Alas! it is in this Trade Wind zone that most men die, coming
+up from the Coast sick with fever, and it is to the blame of the Trade
+Wind that you see obituary notices--"of fever after leaving Sierra
+Leone." Nevertheless, outward bound the thing is delightful, and
+dreadfully you feel its loss when you have run through it as you close
+in to the African land by Cape Verde. At any rate I did; and I began to
+believe every bad thing I had ever heard of West Africa, and straightway
+said to myself, what every man has said to himself who has gone there
+since Hanno of Carthage, "Why was I such a fool as to come to such an
+awful place?" It is the first meeting with the hot breath of the Bights
+that tries one; it is the breath of Death himself to many. You feel when
+first you meet it you have done with all else; not alone is it hot, but
+it smells--smells like nothing else. It does not smell all it can then;
+by and by, down in the Rivers, you get its perfection, but off Cape
+Verde you have to ask yourself, "Can I live in this or no?" and you
+have to leave it, like all other such questions, to Allah, and go on.
+
+We passed close in to Cape Verde, which consists of rounded hills having
+steep bases to the sea. From these bases runs out a low, long strip of
+sandy soil, which is the true cape. Beyond, under water, runs out the
+dangerous Almadia reef, on which were still, in '93, to be seen the
+remains of the _Port Douglas_, who was wrecked there on her way to
+Australia in '92. Her passengers were got ashore and most kindly treated
+by the French officers of Senegal; and finally, to the great joy and
+relief of their rescuers the said passengers were fetched away by an
+English vessel, and taken to what England said was their destination and
+home, Australia, but what France regarded as merely a stage on their
+journey to hell, to which port they had plainly been consigned.
+
+It was just south of Cape Verde that I met my first tornado. The weather
+had been wet in violent showers all the morning and afternoon. Our old
+Coasters took but little notice of it, resigning themselves to
+saturation without a struggle, previous experience having taught them it
+was the best thing to do, dryness being an unattainable state during the
+wet season, and "worrying one's self about anything one of the worst
+things you can do in West Africa." So they sat on deck calmly smoking,
+their new flannel suits, which were donned after leaving the trade
+winds, shrinking, and their colours running on to the other deck,
+uncriticised even by the First officer. He was charging about shouting
+directions and generally making that afternoon such a wild, hurrying
+fuss about "getting in awnings," "tricing up all loose gear," such as
+deck chairs, and so on, to permanent parts of the----, that, as nothing
+beyond showers had happened, and there was no wind, I began to feel
+most anxious about his mental state. But I soon saw that this activity
+was the working of a practical prophetic spirit in the man, and these
+alarms and excursions of his arose from a knowledge of what that low
+arch of black cloud coming off the land meant.
+
+We were surrounded by a wild, strange sky. Indeed, there seemed to be
+two skies, one upper, and one lower; for parts of it were showing
+evidences of terrific activity, others of a sublime, utterly indifferent
+calm. At one part of our horizon were great columns of black cloud,
+expanding and coalescing at their capitals. These were mounted on a
+background of most exquisite pale green. Away to leeward was a gigantic
+black cloud-mountain, across whose vast face were bands and wreaths of
+delicate white and silver clouds, and from whose grim depths every few
+seconds flashed palpitating, fitful, livid lightnings. Striding towards
+us came across the sea the tornado, lashing it into spray mist with the
+tremendous artillery of its rain, and shaking the air with its own
+thunder-growls. Away to windward leisurely boomed and grumbled a third
+thunderstorm, apparently not addressing the tornado but the
+cloud-mountain, while in between these phenomena wandered strange, wild
+winds, made out of lost souls frightened and wailing to be let back into
+Hell, or taken care of somehow by some one. This sort of thing naturally
+excited the sea, and all together excited the----, who, not being built
+so much for the open and deep sea as for the shoal bars of West African
+rivers, made the most of it.
+
+In a few seconds the wind of the tornado struck us, screaming through
+the rigging, eager for awnings or any loose gear, but foiled of its prey
+by the First officer, who stood triumphantly on a heap of them, like a
+defiant hen guarding her chickens.
+
+Some one really ought to write a monograph on the natural history of
+mariners. They are valuable beings, and their habits are exceedingly
+interesting. I myself, being already engaged in the study of other
+organisms, cannot undertake the work; however, I place my observations
+at the disposal of any fellow naturalist who may have more time, and
+certainly will have more ability.
+
+The sailor officer (_Nauta pelagius vel officinalis_) is metamorphic.
+The stage at which the specimen you may be observing has arrived is
+easily determined by the band of galoon round his coat cuff; in the
+English form the number of gold stripes increasing in direct ratio with
+rank. The galoon markings of the foreign species are frequently merely
+decorative, and in many foreign varieties only conditioned by the extent
+of surface available to display them and the ability of the individual
+to acquire the galoon wherewith to decorate himself.
+
+The English third officer, you will find, has one stripe, the second
+two, the first three, and the _imago_, or captain, four, the upper one
+having a triumphant twist at the top.
+
+You may observe, perhaps, about the ship sub-varieties, having a red
+velvet, or a white or blue velvet band on the coat cuff; these are
+respectively the Doctor, Purser, and Chief engineer; but with these
+sub-varieties I will not deal now, they are not essentially marine
+organisms, but akin to the amphibia.
+
+The metamorphosis is as clearly marked in the individual as in the
+physical characteristics. A third officer is a hard-working individual
+who has to do any thing that the other officers do not feel inclined
+to, and therefore rarely has time to wash. He in course of time becomes
+second officer, and the slave of the hatch. During this period of his
+metamorphosis he feels no compunction whatever in hauling out and
+dumping on the deck burst bacon barrels or leaking lime casks, actions
+which, when he reaches the next stage of development, he will regard as
+undistinguishable in a moral point of view from a compound commission of
+the seven deadly sins. For the deck, be it known, is to the First
+officer the most important thing in the cosmogony, and there is probably
+nothing he would not sacrifice to its complexion. One that I had the
+pleasure of knowing once lamented to me that he was not allowed by his
+then owners to spread a layer of ripe pineapples upon his precious idol,
+and let them be well trampled in and then lie a few hours, for this he
+assured me gave a most satisfactory bloom to a deck's complexion. Yet
+when this same man becomes a captain and grows another stripe round his
+cuffs, he no longer takes an active part in the ship's household
+affairs, that is his First officer's business, the ship's husband's
+affair; and should he have an inefficient First the captain expects Men
+and Nations to sympathise with him, just as a lady expects to be
+sympathised with over a bad housemaid.
+
+There are, however, two habits which are constant to all the species
+through each stage of transformation from roustabout to captain. One is
+a love of painting. I have never known an officer or captain who could
+pass a paint-pot, with the brush sticking temptingly out, without
+emotion. While, as for Jack, the happiest hours he knows seemingly are
+those he spends sitting on a slung plank over the side of his ocean
+home, with his bare feet dangling a few feet above the water as
+tempting bait for sharks, and the tropical sun blazing down on him and
+reflected back at him from the iron ship's side and from the oily ocean
+beneath. Then he carols forth his amorous lay, and shouts, "Bill, pass
+that paint-pot" in his jolliest tones. It is very rarely that a black
+seaman is treated to a paint-pot; all they are allowed to do is to knock
+off the old stuff, which they do in the nerveless way the African does
+most handicraft. The greatest dissipation of the black hands department
+consists in being allowed to knock the old stuff off the steam-pipe
+covers, donkey, and funnel. This is a delicious occupation, because,
+firstly, you can usually sit while doing it, and secondly, you can make
+a deafening din and sing to it.
+
+The other habit and the more widely known is the animistic view your
+seaman takes of Nature. Every article that is to a landsman an article
+and nothing more, is to him an individual with a will and mind of his
+own. I myself believe there is something in it. I feel sure that a
+certain hawser on board the ---- had a weird influence on the minds of
+all men who associated with it. It was used at Liverpool coming out of
+dock, but owing to the absence of harbours on the Coast it was not
+required again until it tied our ocean liner up to a tree stump at Boma,
+on the Congo. Nevertheless it didn't suit that hawser's views to be down
+below in the run and see nothing of life. It insisted on remaining on
+deck, and the officers gave in to it and said "Well, perhaps it was
+better so, it would rot if it went down below," so some days it abode on
+the quarter-deck, some days on the main, and now and again it would
+condescend to lie on the fo'castle, head in the sun. It had too its
+varying moods of tidiness, now neat and dandy coiled, now dishevelled
+and slummocky after association with the Kru boys.
+
+It is almost unnecessary to remark that the relationship between the
+First officer and the Chief engineer is rarely amicable. I certainly did
+once hear a First officer pray especially for a Chief engineer all to
+himself under his breath at a Sunday service; but I do not feel certain
+that this was a display of true affection. I am bound to admit that "the
+engineer is messy," which is magnanimous of me, because I had almost
+always a row of some kind on with the First officer, owing to other
+people upsetting my ink on his deck, whereas I have never fallen out
+with an engineer--on the contrary, two Chief engineers are amongst the
+most valued friends I possess.
+
+The worst of it is that no amount of experience will drive it into the
+head of the First officer that the engineer will want coal--particularly
+and exactly when the ship has just been thoroughly scrubbed and painted
+to go into port. I have not been at sea so long as many officers, yet I
+know that you might as well try and get a confirmed dipsomaniac past a
+grog shop as the engineer past, say the Canary Coaling Company; indeed
+he seems to smell the Dakar coal, and hankers after it when passing it
+miles out to sea. Then, again, if the engineer is allowed to have a coal
+deposit in the forehold it is a fresh blow and grief to the First
+officer to find he likes to take them as Mrs. Gamp did her stimulant,
+when she "feels dispoged," whether the deck has just been washed down or
+no.
+
+The cook, although he always has a blood feud on with the engineer
+concerning coals for the galley fire, which should endear him to the
+First officer, is morally a greater trial to the First than he is to his
+other victims. You see the cook has a grease tub, and what that means
+to the deck in a high sea is too painful to describe. So I leave the
+First officer with his pathetic and powerful appeals to the immortal
+gods to be told why it is his fate to be condemned to this "dog's life
+on a floating Hanwell lunatic asylum," commending him to the sympathetic
+consideration of all good housewives, for only they can understand what
+that dear good man goes through.
+
+After we passed Cape Verde we ran into the West African wet season rain
+sheet. There ought to be some other word than rain for that sort of
+thing. We have to stiffen this poor substantive up with adjectives, even
+for use with our own thunderstorms, and as is the morning dew to our
+heaviest thunder "torrential downpour of rain," so is that to the rain
+of the wet season in West Africa. For weeks it came down on us that
+voyage in one swishing, rushing cataract of water. The interspaces
+between the pipes of water--for it did not go into details with
+drops--were filled with gray mist, and as this rain struck the sea it
+kicked up such a water dust that you saw not the surface of the sea
+round you, but only a mist sea gliding by. It seemed as though we had
+left the clear cut world and entered into a mist universe. Sky, air, and
+sea were all the same, as our vessel swept on in one plane, just because
+she capriciously preferred it. Many days we could not see twenty yards
+from the ship. Once or twice another vessel would come out of the mist
+ahead, slogging past us into the mist behind, visible in our little
+water world for a few minutes only as a misty thing, and then we
+leisurely tramped on alone "o'er the viewless, hueless deep," with our
+horizon alongside.
+
+If you cleared your mind of all prejudice the thing was really not
+uncomfortable, and it seemed restful to the mind. As I used to be
+sitting on deck every one who came across me would say, "Wet, isn't it?
+Well, you see this is the wet season on the Coast"--or, "Damp, isn't it?
+Well, you see this is the wet season on the Coast"--and then they went
+away, and, I believe slept for hours exhausted by their educational
+efforts. After this they would come on deck and sit in their respective
+chairs, smoking, save that irrepressible deaf gentleman, who spent his
+time squirrel like between vivid activity and complete quiescence. You
+might pass the smoking room door and observe the soles of his shoes
+sticking out off the end of the settee with an air of perfect restful
+calm hovering over them, as if the owner were hibernating for the next
+six months. Within two minutes after this an uproar on the poop would
+inform the experienced ear that he was up and about again, and had found
+some one asleep on a chair and attacked him.
+
+It was during one of these days, furnishing reminiscences of Noah's
+flood, that conversation turned suddenly on Driver ants. One of the
+silent men, who had been sitting for an hour or so, with a countenance
+indicative of a contemplative acceptance of the penitential psalms,
+roused by one of the deaf man's rows, observed, "Paraffin is good for
+Driver ants." "Oh," said the deaf gentleman as he sat suddenly down on
+my ink-pot, which, for my convenience, was on a chair, "you wait till
+you get them up your legs, or sit down among them, as I saw Smith, when
+he was tired clearing bush. They took the tire out of him, he live for
+scratch one time. Smith was a pocket circus. You should have seen him
+get clear of his divided skirt. Oh lor! what price paraffin?"
+
+The conversation on the Driver ant now became general. As far as I
+remember, Mr. Burnand, who in _Happy Thoughts_ and _My Health_, gave
+much information, curious and interesting, on earwigs and wasps, omitted
+this interesting insect. So, perhaps, a _precis_ of the information I
+obtained may be interesting. I learnt that the only thing to do when you
+have got them on you is to adopt the course of action pursued by Brer
+Fox on that occasion when he was left to himself enough to go and buy
+ointment from Brer Rabbit, namely, make "a burst for the creek," water
+being the quickest thing to make them leave go. Unfortunately, the first
+time I had occasion to apply this short and easy method with the ant was
+when I was strolling about by Bell-Town with a white gentleman and his
+wife, and we strolled into Drivers. There were only two water-barrels in
+the vicinity, and my companions, being more active than myself, occupied
+them.
+
+While in West Africa you should always keep an eye lifting for Drivers.
+You can start doing it as soon as you land, which will postpone the
+catastrophe, not avoid it; for the song of the West Coaster to his enemy
+is truly, "Some day, some day, some day I shall meet you; Love, I know
+not when nor how." Perhaps, therefore, this being so, and watchfulness a
+strain when done deliberately, and worrying one of the worst things you
+can do in West Africa, it may be just as well for you to let things
+slide down the time-stream until Fate sends a column of the wretches up
+your legs. This experience will remain "indelibly limned on the tablets
+of your mind when a yesterday has faded from its page," or, as the
+modern school of psychologists would have it, "The affair will be
+brought to the notice of your sublimated consciousness, and that part of
+your mind will watch for Drivers without worrying you, and an automatic
+habit will be induced that will cause you never to let more than one eye
+roam spell-bound over the beauties of the African landscape; the other
+will keep fixed, turned to the soil at your feet."
+
+The Driver is of the species _Ponera_, and is generally referred to the
+species _anomma arcens_. The females and workers of these ants are
+provided with stings as well as well-developed jaws. They work both for
+all they are worth, driving the latter into your flesh, enthusiastically
+up to the hilt; they then remain therein, keeping up irritation when you
+have hastily torn their owner off in response to a sensation that is
+like that of red hot pinchers. The full-grown worker is about half an
+inch long, and without ocelli even. Yet one of the most remarkable among
+his many crimes is that he will always first attack the eyes of any
+victim. These creatures seem to have no settled home; no man has seen
+the beginning or end, as far as I know, of one of their long trains. As
+you are watching the ground you see a ribbon of glistening black, one
+portion of it lost in one clump of vegetation, the other in another, and
+on looking closer you see that it is an _acies instituta_ of Driver
+ants. If you stir the column up with a stick they make a peculiar
+fizzing noise, and open out in all directions in search of the enemy,
+which you take care they don't find.
+
+These ants are sometimes also called "visiting ants," from their habit
+of calling in quantities at inconvenient hours on humanity. They are
+fond of marching at night, and drop in on your house usually after you
+have gone to bed. I fancy, however, they are about in the daytime as
+well, even in the brightest weather; but it is certain that it is in
+dull, wet weather, and after dusk, that you come across them most on
+paths and open spaces. At other times and hours they make their way
+among the tangled ground vegetation.
+
+Their migrations are infinite, and they create some of the most
+brilliant sensations that occur in West Africa, replacing to the English
+exile there his lost burst water pipes of winter, and such like things,
+while they enforce healthy and brisk exercise upon the African.
+
+I will not enter into particulars about the customary white man's method
+of receiving a visit of Drivers, those methods being alike ineffective
+and accompanied by dreadful language. Barricading the house with a rim
+of red hot ashes, or a river of burning paraffin, merely adds to the
+inconvenience and endangers the establishment.
+
+The native method with the Driver ant is different: one minute there
+will be peace in the simple African home, the heavy-scented hot night
+air broken only by the rhythmic snores and automatic side slaps of the
+family, accompanied outside by a chorus of cicadas and bull frogs. Enter
+the Driver--the next moment that night is thick with hurrying black
+forms, little and big, for the family, accompanied by rats, cockroaches,
+snakes, scorpions, centipedes, and huge spiders animated by the one
+desire to get out of the visitors' way, fall helter skelter into the
+street, where they are joined by the rest of the inhabitants of the
+village, for the ants when they once start on a village usually make a
+regular house-to-house visitation. I mixed myself up once in a
+delightful knockabout farce near Kabinda, and possibly made the biggest
+fool of myself I ever did. I was in a little village, and out of a hut
+came the owner and his family and all the household parasites pell mell,
+leaving the Drivers in possession; but the mother and father of the
+family, when they recovered from this unwonted burst of activity, showed
+such a lively concern, and such unmistakable signs of anguish at having
+left something behind them in the hut, that I thought it must be the
+baby. Although not a family man myself, the idea of that innocent infant
+perishing in such an appalling manner roused me to action, and I joined
+the frenzied group, crying, "Where him live?" "In him far corner for
+floor!" shrieked the distracted parents, and into that hut I charged.
+Too true! There in the corner lay the poor little thing, a mere inert
+black mass, with hundreds of cruel Drivers already swarming upon it. To
+seize it and give it to the distracted mother was, as the reporter would
+say, "the work of an instant." She gave a cry of joy and dropped it
+instantly into a water barrel, where her husband held it down with a
+hoe, chuckling contentedly. Shiver not, my friend, at the callousness of
+the Ethiopian; that there thing wasn't an infant--it was a ham!
+
+These ants clear a house completely of all its owner's afflictions in
+the way of vermin, killing and eating all they can get hold of. They
+will also make short work of any meat they come across, but don't care
+about flour or biscuits. Like their patron Mephistopheles, however, they
+do not care for carrion, nor do they destroy furniture or stuffs. Indeed
+they are typically West African, namely, good and bad mixed. In a few
+hours they leave the house again on their march through the Ewigkeit,
+which they enliven with criminal proceedings. Yet in spite of the
+advantage they confer on humanity, I believe if the matter were put to
+the human vote, Africa would decide to do without the Driver ant.
+Mankind has never been sufficiently grateful to its charwomen, like
+these insect equivalents, who do their tidying up at supremely
+inconvenient times. I remember an incident at one place in the Lower
+Congo where I had been informed that "cork fever" was epidemic in a
+severe form among the white population. I was returning to quarters from
+a beetle hunt, in pouring rain; it was as it often is, "the wet season,"
+&c., when I saw a European gentleman about twenty yards from his
+comfortable-looking house seated on a chair, clad in a white cotton
+suit, umbrellaless, and with the water running off him as if he was in a
+douche bath. I had never seen a case of cork fever, but I had heard such
+marvellous and quaint tales of its symptoms that I thought--well,
+perhaps, anyhow, I would not open up conversation. To my remorse he
+said, as I passed him, "Drivers." Inwardly apologising, I outwardly
+commiserated him, and we discoursed. It was on this occasion that I saw
+a mantis, who is by way of being a very pretty pirate on his own
+account, surrounded by a mob of the blind hurrying Drivers who, I may
+remark, always attack like Red Indians in open order. That mantis
+perfectly well knew his danger, but was as cool as a cucumber, keeping
+quite quiet and lifting his legs out of the way of the blind enemies
+around him. But the chances of keeping six legs going clear, for long,
+among such brutes without any of them happening on one, were small, even
+though he only kept three on the ground at one time. So, being a devotee
+of personal courage, I rescued him--whereupon he bit me for my pains.
+Why didn't he fly? How can you fly, I should like to know, unless you
+have a jumping off place?
+
+Drivers are indeed dreadful. I was at one place where there had been a
+white gentleman and a birthday party in the evening; he stumbled on his
+way home and went to sleep by the path side, and in the morning there
+was only a white gentleman's skeleton and clothes.
+
+However, I will dwell no more on them now. Wretches that they are, they
+have even in spirit pursued me to England, causing a critic to observe
+that _brevi spatio interjecto_ is my only Latin, whereas the matter is
+this. I was once in distinguished society in West Africa that included
+other ladies. We had a distinguished native gentleman, who had had an
+European education, come to tea with us. The conversation turned on
+Drivers, for one of the ladies had the previous evening had her house
+invaded by them at midnight. She snatched up a blanket, wrapped herself
+round with it, unfortunately allowed one corner thereof to trail,
+whereby it swept up Drivers, and awful scenes followed. Then our visitor
+gave us many reminiscences of his own, winding up with one wherein he
+observed "_brevi spatio interjecto_, ladies; off came my breeches."
+After this we ladies all naturally used this phrase to describe rapid
+action.
+
+There is another ant, which is commonly called the red Driver, but it is
+quite distinct from the above-mentioned black species. It is an
+unwholesome-looking, watery-red thing with long legs, and it abides
+among trees and bushes. An easy way of obtaining specimens of this ant
+is to go under a mango or other fruit tree and throw your cap at the
+fruit. You promptly get as many of these insects as the most ardent
+naturalist could desire, its bite being every bit as bad as that of the
+black Driver.
+
+These red ones build nests with the leaves of the tree they reside on.
+The leaves are stuck together with what looks like spiders' webs. I have
+seen these nests the size of an apple, and sent a large one to the
+British Museum, but I have been told of many larger nests than I have
+seen. These ants, unfortunately for me who share the taste, are
+particularly devoted to the fruit of the rubber vine, and also to that
+of a poisonous small-leaved creeping plant that bears the most
+disproportionately-sized spiny, viscid, yellow fruit. It is very
+difficult to come across specimens of either of these fruits that have
+not been eaten away by the red Driver.
+
+It is a very fascinating thing to see the strange devices employed by
+many kinds of young seedlings and saplings to keep off these evidently
+unpopular tenants. They chiefly consist in having a sheath of
+exceedingly slippery surface round the lower part of the stem, which the
+ants slide off when they attempt to climb. I used to spend hours
+watching these affairs. You would see an ant dash for one of these
+protected stems as if he were a City man and his morning train on the
+point of starting from the top of the plant stem. He would get up half
+an inch or so because of the dust round the bottom helping him a bit,
+then, getting no holding-ground, off he would slip, and falling on his
+back, desperately kick himself right side up, and go at it again as if
+he had heard the bell go, only to meet with a similar rebuff. The plants
+are most forbearing teachers, and their behaviour in every way a credit
+to them. I hope that they may in time have a moral and educational
+effect on this overrated insect, enabling him to realise how wrong it is
+for him to force himself where he is not welcome; but a few more
+thousand years, I fear, will elapse before the ant is anything but a
+chuckleheaded, obstinate wretch. Nothing nowadays but his happening to
+fall off with his head in the direction of some other vegetable frees
+the slippery plant from his attempts. To this other something off he
+rushes, and if it happens to be a plant that does not mind him up he
+goes, and I have no doubt congratulates himself on having carried out
+his original intentions, understanding the world, not being the man to
+put up with nonsense and all that sort of thing, whereas it is the plant
+that manages him. Some plants don't mind ants knocking about among the
+grown-up leaves, but will not have them with the infants, and so cover
+their young stuff with a fur or down wherewith the ant can do nothing.
+Others, again, keep him and feed him with sweetstuff so that he should
+keep off other enemies from its fruit, &c. But I have not space to sing
+in full the high intelligence of West African vegetation, and I am no
+botanist; yet one cannot avoid being struck by it, it is so manifold and
+masterly.
+
+Before closing these observations I must just mention that tiny,
+sandy-coloured abomination _Myriaica molesta_. In South West Africa it
+swarms, giving a quaint touch to domestic arrangements. No reckless
+putting down of basin, tin, or jam-pot there, least of all of the
+sugar-basin, unless the said sugar-basin is one of those commonly used
+in those parts, of rough, violet-coloured glass, with a similar lid.
+Since I left South West Africa I have read some interesting observations
+of Sir John Lubbock's on the dislike of ants to violet colour. I wonder
+if the Portuguese of Angola observed it long ago and adopted violet
+glass for basins, or was it merely accidental and empirical. I suspect
+the latter, or they would use violet glass for other articles. As it is,
+everything eatable in a house there is completely insulated in
+water--moats of water with a dash of vinegar in it--to guard it from the
+ants from below; to guard from the ants from above, the same breed and
+not a bit better. Eatables are kept in swinging safes at the end of coir
+rope recently tarred. But when, in spite of these precautions, or from
+the neglect of them, you find, say your sugar, a brown, busy mass, just
+stand it in the full glare of the sun. Sun is a thing no ant likes, I
+believe, and it is particularly distasteful to ants with pale
+complexions; and so you can see them tear themselves away from their
+beloved sugar and clear off into a Hyde Park meeting smitten by a
+thunderstorm.
+
+This kind of ant, or a nearly allied species, is found in houses in
+England, where it is supposed they have been imported from the Brazils
+or West Indies in 1828. Possibly the Brazils got it from South West
+Africa, with which they have had a trade since the sixteenth century,
+most of the Brazil slaves coming out of Congo. It is unlikely that the
+importation was the other way about; for exotic things, whether plants
+or animals, do not catch on in Western Africa as they do in Australia.
+In the former land everything of the kind requires constant care to keep
+it going at all, and protect it from the terrific local circumstances.
+It is no use saying to animal or vegetable, "there is room for all in
+Africa"--for Africa, that is Africa properly so called--Equatorial West
+Africa, is full up with its own stuff now, crowded and fighting an
+internecine battle with the most marvellous adaptations to its
+environment.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+SIERRA LEONE AND ITS SURROUNDINGS
+
+     Concerning the perils that beset the navigator in the Baixos of St.
+     Ann, with some description of the country between the Sierra Leone
+     and Cape Palmas and the reasons wherefrom it came to be called the
+     Pepper, Grain, or Meleguetta Coast.
+
+
+It was late evening-time when the ---- reached that part of the South
+Atlantic Ocean where previous experience and dead reckoning led our
+captain to believe that Sierra Leone existed. The weather was too thick
+to see ten yards from the ship, so he, remembering certain captains who,
+under similar circumstances, failing to pick up the light on Cape Sierra
+Leone, had picked up the Carpenter Rock with their keels instead, let go
+his anchor, and kept us rolling about outside until the morning came.
+Slipperty slop, crash! slipperty slop, crash! went all loose gear on
+board all the night long; and those of the passengers who went in for
+that sort of thing were ill from the change of motion. The mist, our
+world, went gently into grey, and then black, growing into a dense
+darkness filled with palpable, woolly, wet air, thicker far than it had
+been before. This, my instructors informed me, was caused by the
+admixture of the "solid malaria coming off the land."
+
+However, morning came at last, and even I was on deck as it dawned, and
+was rewarded for my unwonted activity by a vision of beautiful, definite
+earth-form dramatically unveiled. No longer was the ---- our only
+material world. The mist lifted itself gently off, as it seemed, out of
+the ocean, and then separated before the morning breeze; one great mass
+rolling away before us upwards, over the land, where portions of it
+caught amongst the forests of the mountains and stayed there all day,
+while another mass went leisurely away to the low Bullam shore, from
+whence it came again after sunset to join the mountain and the ocean
+mists as they drew down and in from the sea, helping them to wrap up
+Freetown, Sierra Leone and its lovely harbour for the night.
+
+It was with a thrill of joy that I looked on Freetown harbour for the
+first time in my life. I knew the place so well. Yes; there were all the
+bays, Kru, English and Pirate; and the mountains, whose thunder rumbling
+caused Pedro do Centra to call the place Sierra Leona when he discovered
+it in 1462. And had not my old friend, Charles Johnson, writing in 1724,
+given me all manner of information about it during those delicious hours
+rescued from school books and dedicated to a most contentious study of
+_A General History of Robberies and Murders of the most Notorious
+Pyrates_? That those bays away now on my right hand "were safe and
+convenient for cleaning and watering;" and so on and there rose up
+before my eyes a vision of the society ashore here in 1724 that lived
+"very friendly with the natives--being thirty Englishmen in all; men who
+in some part of their lives had been either privateering, buccaneering,
+or pirating, and still retain and have the riots and humours common to
+that sort of life." Hard by, too, was Bence Island, where, according to
+Johnson, "there lives an old fellow named _Crackers_ (his true name he
+thinks fit to conceal), and who was formerly a noted buccaneer; he
+keeps the best house in the place, has two or three guns before his door
+with which he salutes his friends the pyrates when they put in, and
+lives a jovial life with them all the while they are there." Alas! no
+use to me was the careful list old Johnson had given me of the
+residents. They were all dead now, and I could not go ashore and hunt up
+"Peter Brown" or "John Jones," who had "one long boat and an Irish young
+man." Social things were changed in Freetown, Sierra Leone; but only
+socially, for the old description of it is, as far as scenery goes,
+correct to-day, barring the town. Whether or no everything has changed
+for the better is not my business to discuss here, nor will I detain you
+with any description of the town, as I have already published one after
+several visits, with a better knowledge than I had on my first call
+there.
+
+On one of my subsequent visits I fell in with Sierra Leone receiving a
+shock. We were sitting, after a warm and interesting morning spent going
+about the town talking trade, in the low long pleasant room belonging to
+the Coaling Company whose windows looked out over an eventful warehouse
+yard; for therein abode a large dog-faced baboon, who shied stones and
+sticks at boys and any one who displeased him, pretty nearly as well as
+a Flintshire man. Also in the yard were a large consignment of kola nuts
+packed as usual in native-made baskets, called bilys, lined inside with
+the large leaves of a Ficus and our host was explaining to my mariner
+companions their crimes towards this cargo while they defended
+themselves with spirit. It seemed that this precious product if not kept
+on deck made a point of heating and then going mildewed; while, if you
+did keep it on deck, either the First officer's minions went fooling
+about it with the hose, which made it swell up and burst and ruined it,
+or left it in unmitigated sun, which shrivelled it--and so on. This led,
+naturally, to a general conversation on cargo between the mariners and
+the merchants, during which some dreadful things were said about the way
+matches arrived, in West Africa and other things, shipped at shipper's
+own risk, let alone the way trade suffered by stowing hams next the
+boilers. Of course the other side was a complete denial of these
+accusations, but the affair was too vital for any of us to attend to a
+notorious member of the party who kept bothering us "to get up and look
+at something queer over King Tom."
+
+Now it was market day in Freetown; and market day there has got more
+noise to the square inch in it than most things. You feel when you first
+meet it that if it were increased a little more it would pass beyond the
+grasp of human ear, like the screech of that whistle they show off at
+the Royal Society's Conversazione. However, on this occasion the market
+place sent up an entire compound yell, still audible, and we rose as one
+man as the portly housekeeper, followed by the small, but able steward,
+burst into the room, announcing in excited tones, "Oh! the town be took
+by locusts! The town be took by locusts!" (_D.C. fortissimo_). And we
+attended to the incident; ousting the reporter of "the queer thing over
+King Tom" from the window, and ignoring his "I told you so," because he
+hadn't.
+
+This was the first cloud of locusts that had come right into the town in
+the memory of the oldest inhabitant, though they occasionally raid the
+country away to the North. I am informed that when the chiefs of the
+Western Soudan do not give sufficient gifts to the man who is locust
+king and has charge of them--keeping them in holes in the desert of
+Sahara--he lets them out in revenge. Certainly that year he let them out
+with a vengeance, for when I was next time down Coast in the Oil Rivers
+I was presented with specimens that had been caught in Old Calabar and
+kept as big curios.
+
+This Freetown swarm came up over the wooded hills to the South-West in a
+brown cloud of singular structure, denser in some parts than others,
+continually changing its points of greatest density, like one of
+Thompson's diagrams of the ultimate structure of gases, for you could
+see the component atoms as they swept by. They were swirling round and
+round upwards-downwards like the eddying snowflakes in a winter's storm,
+and the whole air rustled with the beat of the locusts' wings. They
+hailed against the steep iron roofs of the store-houses, slid down it,
+many falling feet through the air before they recovered the use of their
+wings--the gutters were soon full of them--the ducks in the yard below
+were gobbling and squabbling over the layer now covering the ground, and
+the baboon chattered as he seized handfuls and pulled them to pieces.
+
+Everybody took them with excitement, save the jack crows, who on their
+arrival were sitting sleeping on the roof ridge. They were horribly
+bored and bothered by the affair. Twice they flopped down and tried
+them. There they were lying about in gutters with a tempting garbagey
+look, but evidently the jack crows found them absolutely mawkish; so
+they went back to the roof ridge in a fuming rage, because the locusts
+battered against them and prevented them from sleeping.
+
+We left Sierra Leone on the ---- late in the afternoon, and ran out
+again into the same misty wet weather. The next morning the balance
+of our passengers were neither up early, nor lively when they were
+up; but to my surprise after what I had heard, no one had the
+much-prognosticated attack of fever. All day long we steamed onwards,
+passing the Banana Isles and Sherboro Island and the sound usually
+called Sherboro River.[2] We being a South-West Coast boat, did not call
+at the trading settlements here, but kept on past Cape St. Ann for the
+Kru coast.
+
+All day long the rain came down as if thousands of energetic--well, let
+us say--angels were hurriedly baling the waters above the firmament out
+into the ocean. Everything on board was reeking wet.
+
+You could sweep the moisture off the cabin panelling with your hand, and
+our clothes were clammy and musty, and the towels too damp on their own
+account to dry you. Why none of us started specialising branchiae I do
+not know, but feel that would have been the proper sort of breathing
+apparatus for such an atmosphere.
+
+The passengers were all at the tail end of their spirits, for Sierra
+Leone is the definite beginning of the Coast to the out-goer. You are
+down there when you leave it outward bound; it is indeed, the complement
+of Canary. Those going up out of West Africa begin to get excited at
+Sierra Leone; those going down into West Africa, particularly when it is
+the wet season, begin to get depressed. It did not, however, operate in
+this manner on me. I had survived Sierra Leone, I had enjoyed it; why,
+therefore, not survive other places, and enjoy them? Moreover, my
+scientific training, combined with close study of the proper method of
+carrying on the local conversation, had by now enabled me to understand
+its true spirit,--never contradict, and, if you can, help it onward.
+When going on deck about 6 o'clock that evening, I was alarmed to see
+our gallant captain in red velvet slippers. A few minutes later the
+chief officer burst on my affrighted gaze in red velvet slippers too. On
+my way hurriedly to the saloon I encountered the third officer similarly
+shod. When I recovered from these successive shocks, I carried out my
+mission of alarming the rest of the passengers, who were in the saloon
+enjoying themselves peacefully, and reported what I had seen. The old
+coasters, even including the silent ones, agreed with me that we were as
+good as lost so far as this world went; and the deaf gentleman went
+hurriedly on deck, we think "to take the sun,"--it was a way he had at
+any time of day, because "he had been studying about how to fix points
+for the Government--and wished to keep himself in practice."
+
+My fellow new-comers were perplexed; and one of them, a man who always
+made a point of resisting education, and who thought nothing of calling
+some of our instructor's best information "Tommy Rot!" said, "I don't
+see what can happen; we're right out at sea, and it's as calm as a
+millpond."
+
+"Don't you, my young friend? don't you?" sadly said an old Coaster.
+"Well, I'll just tell you there's precious little that can't happen, for
+we're among the shoals of St. Ann."
+
+The new-comers went on deck "just to look round;" and as there was
+nothing to be seen but a superb specimen of damp darkness, they returned
+to the saloon, one of them bearing an old chart sheet which he had
+borrowed from the authorities. Now that chart was not reassuring; the
+thing looked like an exhibition pattern of a prize shot gun, with the
+quantity of rocks marked down on it.
+
+"Look here," said an anxious inquirer; "why are some of these rocks
+named after the Company's ships?"
+
+"Think," said the calm old Coaster.
+
+"Oh, I say! hang it all, you don't mean to say they've been wrecked
+here? Anyhow, if they have they got off all right. How is it the 'Yoruba
+Rock' and the 'Gambia Rock?' The 'Yoruba' and the 'Gambia' are running
+now."
+
+"Those," explains the old Coaster kindly, "were the old 'Yoruba' and
+'Gambia.' The 'Bonny' that runs now isn't the old 'Bonny.' It's the way
+with most of them, isn't it?" he says, turning to a fellow old Coaster.
+"Naturally," says his friend. "But this is the old original, you know,
+and it's just about time she wrote up her name on one of these
+tombstones." "You don't save ships," he continues, for the instruction
+of the new-comers, attentive enough now; "that go on the Kru coast, and
+if you get ashore you don't save the things you stand up in--the natives
+strip you."
+
+"Cannibals!" I suggest.
+
+"Oh, of course they are cannibals; they are all cannibals, are natives
+down here when they get the chance. But, that does not matter; you see
+what I object to is being brought on board the next steamer that happens
+to call crowded with all sorts of people you know, and with a lady
+missionary or so among them, just with nothing on one but a flyaway
+native cloth. You remember D----?" "Well," says his friend. Strengthened
+by this support, he takes his turn at instructing the young critic,
+saying soothingly, "there, don't you worry; have a good dinner." (It was
+just being laid.) "For if you do get ashore the food is something
+beastly. But, after all, what with the sharks and the surf and the
+cannibals, you know the chances are a thousand to one that the worst
+will come to the worst and you live to miss your trousers."
+
+After dinner we new-comers went on deck to keep an eye on Providence,
+and I was called on to explain how the alarm had been given me by the
+footgear of the officers. I said, like all great discoveries, "it was
+founded on observation made in a scientific spirit." I had noticed that
+whenever a particularly difficult bit of navigation had to be done on
+our boat, red velvet slippers were always worn, as for instance, when
+running through the heavy weather we had met south of the Bay, on going
+in at Puerto de la Luz, and on rounding the Almadia reefs, and on
+entering Freetown harbour in fog. But never before had I seen more than
+one officer wearing them at a time, while tonight they were blazing like
+danger signals at the shore ends of all three.
+
+My opinion as to the importance of these articles to navigation became
+further strengthened by subsequent observations in the Bights of Biafra
+and Benin. We picked up rivers in them, always wore them when crossing
+bars, and did these things on the whole successfully. But once I was on
+a vessel that was rash enough to go into a difficult river--Rio del
+Rey--without their aid. That vessel got stuck fast on a bank, and, as
+likely as not, would be sticking there now with her crew and passengers
+mere mosquito-eaten skeletons, had not our First officer rushed to his
+cabin, put on red velvet slippers and gone out in a boat, energetically
+sounding around with a hand lead. Whereupon we got off, for clearly it
+was not by his sounding; it never amounted to more than two fathoms,
+while we required a good three-and-a-half. Yet that First officer, a
+truthful man, always, said nobody did a stroke of work on board that
+vessel bar himself; so I must leave the reader to escape if he can from
+believing it was the red velvet slippers that saved us, merely remarking
+that these invaluable nautical instruments were to be purchased at
+Hamburg, and were possibly only met with on boats that run to Hamburg
+and used by veterans of that fleet.
+
+If you will look on the map, not mine, but one visible to the naked eye,
+you will see that the Coast from Sierra Leone to Cape Palmas is the
+lower bend of the hump of Africa and the turning point into the Bights
+of Benin, Biafra and Panavia.
+
+Its appearance gives the voyager his first sample of those stupendous
+sweeps of monotonous landscapes so characteristic of Africa. From
+Sherboro River to Cape Mount, viewed from the sea, every mile looks as
+like the next as peas in a pod, and should a cruel fate condemn you to
+live ashore here in a factory you get so used to the eternal sameness
+that you automatically believe that nothing else but this sort of world,
+past, present, or future, can ever have existed: and that cities and
+mountains are but the memories of dreams. A more horrible life than a
+life in such a region for a man who never takes to it, it is impossible
+to conceive; for a man who does take to it, it is a kind of dream life,
+I am judging from the few men I have met who have been stationed here in
+the few isolated little factories that are established. Some of them
+look like haunted men, who, when they are among white men again, cling
+to their society: others are lazy, dreamy men, rather bored by it.
+
+The kind of country that produces this effect must be exceedingly simple
+in make: it is not the mere isolation from fellow white men that does
+it--for example, the handful of men who are on the Ogowe do not get
+like this though many of them are equally lone men, yet they are bright
+and lively enough. Anyhow, exceedingly simple in make as is this region
+of Africa from Sherboro to Cape Mount, it consists of four different
+things in four long lines--lines that go away into eternity for as far
+as eye can see. There is the band of yellow sand on which your little
+factory is built. This band is walled to landwards by a wall of dark
+forest, mounted against the sky to seaward by a wall of white surf;
+beyond that there is the horizon-bounded ocean. Neither the forest wall
+nor surf wall changes enough to give any lively variety; they just run
+up and down a gamut of the same set of variations. In the light of
+brightest noon the forest wall stands dark against the dull blue sky, in
+the depth of the darkest night you can see it stand darker still,
+against the stars; on moonlight nights and on tornado nights, when you
+see the forest wall by the lightning light, it looks as if it had been
+done over with a coat of tar. The surf wall is equally consistent, it
+may be bad, or good as surf, but it's generally the former, which merely
+means it is a higher, broader wall, and more noisy, but it's the same
+sort of wall making the same sort of noise all the time. It is always
+white; in the sunlight, snowy white, suffused with a white mist wherein
+are little broken, quivering bits of rainbows. In the moonlight, it
+gleams with a whiteness there is in nothing else on earth. If you can
+imagine a non-transparent diamond wall, I think you will get some near
+idea to it, and even on the darkest of dark nights you can still see the
+surf wall clearly enough, for it shows like the ghost of its daylight
+self, seeming to have in it a light of its own, and you love or hate it.
+Night and day and season changes pass over these things, like
+reflections in a mirror, without altering the mirror frame; but nothing
+comes that ever stills for one-half second the thunder of the surf-wall
+or makes it darker, or makes the forest-wall brighter than the rest of
+your world. Mind you, it is intensely beautiful, intensely soothing,
+intensely interesting if you can read it and you like it, but life for a
+man who cannot and does not is a living death.
+
+But if you are seafaring there is no chance for a brooding melancholy to
+seize on you hereabouts, for you soon run along this bit of coast and
+see the sudden, beautiful headland of Cape Mount, which springs aloft in
+several rounded hills a thousand and odd feet above the sea and looking
+like an island. After passing it, the land rapidly sinks again to the
+old level, for a stretch of another 46 miles or so when Cape
+Mesurado,[3] rising about 200 feet, seems from seaward to be another
+island.
+
+The capital of the Liberian Republic, Monrovia, is situated on the
+southern side of the river Mesurado, and right under the high land of
+the Cape, but it is not visible from the roadstead, and then again comes
+the low coast, unrolling its ribbon of sandy beach, walled as before
+with forest wall and surf, but with the difference that between the sand
+beach and the forest are long stretches of lagooned waters. Evil
+looking, mud-fringed things, when I once saw them at the end of a hard,
+dry season, but when the wet season's rains come they are transformed
+into beautiful lakes; communicating with each other and overflowing by
+shallow channels which they cut here and there through the sand-beach
+ramparts into the sea.
+
+The identification of places from aboard ship along such a coast as this
+is very difficult. Even good sized rivers doubling on themselves sneak
+out between sand banks, and make no obvious break in surf or forest
+wall. The old sailing direction that gave as a landmark the "Tree with
+two crows on it" is as helpful as any one could get of many places here,
+and when either the smoke season or the wet season is on of course you
+cannot get as good as that. But don't imagine that unless the navigator
+wants to call on business, he can "just put up his heels and blissfully
+think o' nowt," for this bit of the West Coast of Africa is one of the
+most trying in the world to work. Monotonous as it is ashore, it is
+exciting enough out to sea in the way of the rocks and shoals, and an
+added danger exists at the beginning and end of the wet, and the
+beginning of the dry, in the shape of tornadoes.[4] These are sudden
+storms coming up usually with terrific violence; customarily from the
+S.E. and E., but sometimes towards the end of the season straight from
+S. More slave ships than enough have been lost along this bit of coast
+in their time, let alone decent Bristol Guineamen into the bargain,
+owing to "a delusion that occasionally seized inexperienced commanders
+that it was well to heave-to for a tornado, whereas a sailing ship's
+best chance lay in her heels." It was a good chance too, for owing to
+the short duration of this breed of hurricane and their terrific rain,
+there accompanies them no heavy sea, the tornado-rain ironing the ocean
+down; so if, according to one of my eighteenth century friends, you see
+that well-known tornado-cloud arch coming, and you are on a Guineaman,
+for your sins, "a dray of a vessel with an Epping Forest of sea growth
+on her keel, and two-thirds of the crew down with fever or dead of it,
+as likely they will be after a spell on this coast," the sooner you get
+her ready to run the better, and with as little on her as you can do
+with. If, however, there be a white cloud inside the cloud-arch you must
+strip her quick and clean, for that tornado is going to be the worst
+tornado you were ever in.
+
+Nevertheless, tornadoes are nothing to the rocks round here. At the
+worst, there are but two tornadoes a day, always at tide turn, only at
+certain seasons of the year, and you can always see them coming; but it
+is not that way with the rocks. There is at least one to each quarter
+hour in the entire twenty-four. They are there all the year round, and
+more than one time in forty you can't see them coming. In case you think
+I am overstating the case, I beg to lay before you the statement
+concerning rocks given me by an old captain, who was used to these seas
+and never lost a ship. I had said something flippant about rocks, and he
+said, "I'll write them down for you, missy." This is just his statement
+for the chief rocks between Junk River and Baffu; not a day's steamer
+run. "Two and three quarters miles and six cables N.W. by W. from Junk
+River there is 'Hooper's Patch,' irregular in shape, about a mile long
+and carrying in some places only 2-1/2 fathoms of water. There is
+another bad patch about a mile and a-half from Hooper's, so if you have
+to go dodging your way into Marshall, a Liberian settlement, great
+caution and good luck is useful. In Waterhouse Bay there's a cluster of
+pinnacle rocks all under water, with a will-o'-the wisp kind of buoy,
+that may be there or not to advertise them. One rock at Tobokanni has
+the civility to show its head above water, and a chum of his, that lies
+about a mile W. by S. from Tobokanni Point, has the seas constantly
+breaking on it.
+
+The coast there is practically reefed for the next eight miles, with a
+boat channel near the shore. But there is a gap in this reef at Young
+Sesters, through which, if you handle her neatly, you can run a ship in.
+In some places this reef of rock is three-quarters of a mile out to sea.
+Trade Town is the next place where you may now call for cargo. Its
+particular rock lies a mile out and shows well with the sea breaking on
+it. After Trade Town the rocks are more scattered, and the bit of coast
+by Kurrau River rises in cliffs 40 to 60 feet high. The sand at their
+base is strewn with fallen blocks on which the surf breaks with great
+force, sending the spray up in columns; and until you come to Sestos
+River the rocks are innumerable, but not far out to sea, so you can keep
+outside them unless you want to run in to the little factory at Tembo.
+Just beyond Sestos River, three-quarters of a mile S.S.W. of Fen River,
+there are those Fen rocks on which the sea breaks, but between these and
+the Manna rocks, which are a little more than a mile from shore N.W. by
+N. from Sestos River, there are any quantity of rocks marked and not
+marked on the chart. These Manna rocks are a jolly bad lot, black, and
+only a few breaking, and there is a shoal bank to the S.E. of these for
+half a mile, then for the next four miles, there are not more than 70
+hull openers to the acre. Most of them are not down on the chart, so
+there's plenty of opportunity now about for you to do a little African
+discovery until you come to Sestos reef, off a point of the same name,
+projecting half a mile to westwards with a lot of foul ground round it.
+Spence rock which breaks, is W. two-thirds S., distant 1-1/4 miles from
+Sestos Point; within 5 miles of it is the rock which _The Corisco_
+discovered in 1885. It is not down on the chart yet, all these set of
+rocks round Sestos are sharp too, so the lead gives you no warning, and
+you are safer right-away from them. Then there's a very nasty one called
+Diabolitos, I expect those old Portuguese found it out, it's got a lot
+of little ones which extend 2 miles and more to seaward. There is
+another devil rock off Bruni, called by the natives Ba Ya. It stands 60
+feet above sea-level, and has a towering crown of trees on it. It is a
+bad one is this, for in thick weather, as it is a mile off shore and
+isolated, it is easily mistaken, and so acts as a sort of decoy for the
+lot of sunken devil rocks which are round it. Further along towards
+Baffu there are four more rocks a mile out, and forest ground on the
+way."
+
+I just give you this bit of information as an example, because I happen
+to have this rough rock list of it; but a little to the east the rocks
+and dangers of the Kru Coast are quite as bad, both in quantity and
+quality, indeed, more so, for there is more need for vessels to call. I
+often think of this bit of coast when I see people unacquainted with the
+little local peculiarities of dear West Africa looking at a map thereof
+and wondering why such and such a Bay is not utilised as a harbour, or
+such and such a river not navigated, or this, that and the other bit of
+Coast so little known of and traded with. Such undeveloped regions have
+generally excellent local reasons, reasons that cast no blame on white
+man's enterprise or black man's savagery. They are rock-reefed coast or
+barred rivers, and therefore not worth the expense to the trader of
+working them, and you must always remember that unless the trader opens
+up bits of West Africa no one else will. It may seem strange to the
+landsman that the navigator should hug such a coast as the shoals (the
+_Bainos_ as the old Portuguese have it) of St. Ann--but they do. If you
+ask a modern steamboat captain he will usually tell you it is to save
+time, a statement that the majority of the passengers on a West Coast
+boat will receive with open derision and contempt, holding him to be a
+spendthrift thereof; but I myself fancy that hugging this coast is a
+vestigial idea. In the old sailing-ship days, if you ran out to sea far
+from these shoals you lost your wind, and maybe it would take you five
+mortal weeks to go from Sierra Leone to Cape Mount or _Wash Congo_, as
+the natives called it in the 17th century.
+
+Off the Kru Coast, both West Coast and South-West Coast steamers and
+men-o'-war on this station, call to ship or unship Krumen. The character
+of the rocks, of which I have spoken,--their being submerged for the
+most part, and pinnacles--increases the danger considerably, for a ship
+may tear a wound in herself that will make short work of her, yet unless
+she remains impaled on the rock, making, as it were, a buoy of herself,
+that rock might not be found again for years.
+
+This sort of thing has happened many times, and the surveying vessels,
+who have been instructed to localise the danger and get it down on the
+chart, have failed to do so in spite of their most elaborate efforts;
+whereby the more uncharitable of the surveying officers are led in their
+wrath to hold that the mercantile marine officers who reported that rock
+and gave its bearings did so under the influence of drink, while the
+more charitable and scientifically inclined have suggested that
+elevation and subsidence are energetically and continually at work
+along the Bight of Benin, hoisting up shoals to within a few feet of the
+surface in some places and withdrawing them in others to a greater
+depth.
+
+The people ashore here are commonly spoken of as Liberians and Kruboys.
+The Liberians are colonists in the country, having acquired settlements
+on this coast by purchase from the chiefs of the native tribes. The idea
+of restoring the Africans carried off by the slave trade to Africa
+occurred to America before it did to England, for it was warmly
+advocated by the Rev. Samuel Hoskins, of Newport, Rhode Island, in 1770,
+but it was 1816 before America commenced to act on it, and the first
+emigrants embarked from New York for Liberia in 1820. On the other hand,
+though England did not get the idea until 1787, she took action at once,
+buying from King Tom, through the St George's Bay Company, the land at
+Sierra Leone between the Rochelle and Kitu River. This was done on the
+recommendation of Mr. Smeatham. The same year was shipped off to this
+new colony the first consignment of 460 free negro servants and 60
+whites; out of those 400 arrived and survived their first fortnight, and
+set themselves to build a town called Granville, after Mr. Granville
+Sharpe, whose exertions had resulted in Lord Mansfield's epoch-making
+decision in the case of Somerset _v._ Mr. J. G. Stewart, his master,
+_i.e._, that no slave could be held on English soil.
+
+The Liberians were differently situated from their neighbours at Sierra
+Leone in many ways; in some of these they have been given a better
+chance than the Africans sent to Sierra Leone--in other ways not so good
+a chance. Neither of the colonies has been completely successful.
+
+I hold the opinion that if those American and English philanthropists
+could not have managed the affair better than they did, they had better
+have confined their attention to talking, a thing they were naturally
+great on, and left the so-called restoration of the African to his
+native soil alone. For they made a direful mess of the affair from a
+practical standpoint, and thereby inflicted an enormous amount of
+suffering and a terrible mortality on the Africans they shipped from
+England, Canada, and America; the tradition whereof still clings to the
+colonies of Liberia and Sierra Leone, and gravely hinders their
+development by the emigration of educated, or at any rate civilised,
+Africans now living in the West Indies and the Southern States of
+America.
+
+I am aware that there are many who advocate the return to Africa of the
+Africans who were exported from the West Coast during the slavery days.
+But I cannot regard this as a good or even necessary policy, for two
+reasons. One is that those Africans were not wanted in West Africa. The
+local supply of African is sufficient to develop the country in every
+way. There are in West Africa now, Africans thoroughly well educated, as
+far as European education goes, and who are quite conversant with the
+nature of their own country and with the language of their
+fellow-countrymen. There are also any quantity of Africans there who,
+though not well educated, are yet past-masters in the particular culture
+which West Africa has produced on its inhabitants.
+
+The second reason is that the descendants of the exported Africans have
+seemingly lost their power of resistance to the malarial West Coast
+climate. This a most interesting subject, which some scientific
+gentleman ought to attend to, for there is a sufficient quantity of
+evidence ready for his investigation. The mortality among the Africans
+sent to Sierra Leone and Liberia has been excessive, and so also has
+been that amongst the West Indians who went to Congo Belge, while the
+original intention of the United Presbyterian Mission to Calabar had to
+be abandoned from the same cause. In fact it looks as if the second and
+third generation of deported Africans had no greater power of resistance
+to West Africa than the pure white races; and, such being the case, it
+seems to me a pity they should go there. They would do better to bring
+their energies to bear on developing the tropical regions of America and
+leave the undisturbed stock of Africa to develop its own.
+
+However, we will not go into that now. I beg to refer you to Bishop
+Ingram's _Sierra Leone after a Hundred Years_, for the history of
+England's philanthropic efforts. I may some day, perhaps, in the remote
+future, write myself a book on America's effort, but I cannot write it
+now, because I have in my possession only printed matter--a wilderness
+of opinion and a mass of abuse on Liberia as it is. No sane student of
+West Africa would proceed to form an opinion on any part of it with such
+stuff and without a careful personal study of the thing as it is.
+
+The natives of this part of the West coast, the aboriginal ones, as Mrs.
+Gault would call them, are a different matter. You can go and live in
+West Africa without seeing a crocodile or a hippopotamus or a mountain,
+but no white man can go there without seeing and experiencing a Kruboy,
+and Kruboys are one of the main tribes here. Kruboys are, indeed, the
+backbone of white effort in West Africa, and I think I may say there is
+but one man of all of us who have visited West Africa who has not paid a
+tribute to the Kruboy's sterling qualities. Alas! that one was one of
+England's greatest men. Why he painted that untrue picture of them I do
+not know. I know that on this account the magnificent work he did is
+discredited by all West Coasters. "If he said that of Kruboys," say the
+old coasters, "how can he have known or understood anything?" It is a
+painful subject, and my opinion on Kruboys is entirely with the old
+coasters, who know them with an experience of years, not with the
+experience of any man, however eminent, who only had the chance of
+seeing them for a few weeks, and whose information was so clearly drawn
+from vitiated sources. All I can say in defence of my great fellow
+countryman is that he came to West Africa from the very worst school a
+man can for understanding the Kruboy, or any true Negro, namely, from
+the Bantu African tribes, and that he only fell into the error many
+other great countrymen of mine have since fallen into, whereby there is
+war and misunderstanding and disaffection between our Government and the
+true Negro to-day, and nothing, as far as one can see, but a grievous
+waste of life and gold ahead.
+
+The Kruboy is indeed a sore question to all old coasters. They have
+devoted themselves to us English, and they have suffered, laboured,
+fought, been massacred, and so on with us for generation after
+generation. Many a time Krumen have come to me when we have been
+together in foreign possessions and said, "Help us, we are Englishmen."
+They have never asked in vain of me or any Englishman in West Africa,
+but recognition of their services by our Government at home is--well,
+about as much recognition as most men get from it who do good work in
+West Africa. For such men are a mere handful whom Imperialism can
+neglect with impunity, and, even if it has for the moment to excuse
+itself for so doing, it need only call us "traders." I say us, because I
+am vain of having been, since my return, classed among the Liverpool
+traders by a distinguished officer.
+
+This part of Western Africa from Sierra Leone to Cape Palmas was known
+to the geographers amongst the classics as _Leuce AEthiopia_: to their
+successors as the Grain or Pepper or Meleguetta Coast. I will discourse
+later of the inhabitants, the Kru, from an ethnological standpoint,
+because they are too interesting and important to be got in here. The
+true limits of the Grain coast are from the River Sestros to Growy, two
+leagues east of Cape Palmas according to Barbot, and its name came from
+the fact that it was hereabouts that the Portuguese, on their early
+expeditions in the 15th century, first came across grains of paradise, a
+circumstance that much excited those navigators at the time and
+encouraged them to pursue their expeditions to this region, for grains
+of paradise were in those days much valued and had been long known in
+European markets.
+
+These euphoniously-named spices are the seeds of divers amomums, or in
+lay language, cardamum--_Amomum Meleguetta_ (Roscoe) or as Pereira has
+it, _Amomum granum Paradisi_. Their more decorative appellation "grains
+of Paradise" is of Italian origin, the Italians having known and valued
+this spice, bought it, and sold it to the rest of Europe at awful prices
+long before the Portuguese, under Henry the Navigator, visited the West
+African Coast. The Italians had bought the spice from the tawny Moors,
+who brought it, with other products of West Africa across the desert to
+the Mediterranean port Monte Barca by Tripoli.
+
+The reason why this African cardamum received either the name of grains
+of Paradise or of Meleguetta pepper is, like most African things, wrapt
+in mystery to a certain extent. Some authorities hold they got the first
+name on their own merits. Others that the Italian merchants gave it them
+to improve prices. Others that the Italians gave it them honestly enough
+on account of their being nice, and no one knowing where on earth
+exactly they came from, said, therefore, why not say Paradise? It is
+certain, however, that before the Portuguese went down into the unknown
+seas and found the Pepper coast that the Italians knew those peppers
+came from the country of Melli, but as they did not know where that was,
+beyond that it was somewhere in Africa, this did not take away the sense
+of romance from the spice.
+
+As for their name Meleguetta, an equal divergence of opinion reigns. I
+myself think the proper word is meneguetta. The old French name was
+maneguilia, and the name they are still called by at Cape Palmas in the
+native tongue is Emanequetta. The French claim to have brought peppers
+and ivory from the River Sestros as early as 1364, and the River Sestros
+was on the seaboard of the kingdom of Mene, but the termination quetta
+is most probably a corruption of the Portuguese name for pepper. But, on
+the other hand, the native name for them among the Sestros people is
+Waizanzag. And therefore, the whole name may well be European, and just
+as well called meleguetta as meneguetta, because the kingdom of Mene was
+a fief of the Empire of Melli when the Portuguese first called at
+Sestros. The other possible derivation is that which says mele is a
+corruption of the Italian name for Turkey millet, _Melanga_, a thing
+the grains rather resemble. Another very plausible derivation is that
+the whole word is Portuguese in origin, but a corruption of _mala gens_,
+the Portuguese having found the people they first bought them of a bad
+lot, and so named the pepper in memory thereof. This however is
+interestingly erroneous and an early example of the danger of
+armchairism when dealing with West Africa. For the coast of the
+_malegens_ was not the coast the Portuguese first got the pepper from,
+but it was that coast just to the east of the Meleguetta, where all they
+got was killing and general unpleasantness round by the Rio San Andrew,
+Drewin way, which coast is now included in the Ivory.
+
+The grains themselves are by no means confined to the Grain Coast, but
+are the fruit of a plant common in all West African districts,
+particularly so on Cameroon Mountain, where just above the 3,000 feet
+level on the east and southeast face you come into a belt of them, and
+horrid walking ground they make. I have met with them also in great
+profusion in the Sierra del Crystal; but there is considerable
+difference in the kinds. The grain of Paradise of commerce is, like that
+of the East Indian cardamom, enclosed in a fibrous capsule, and the
+numerous grains in it are surrounded by a pulp having a most pleasant,
+astringent, aromatic taste. This is pleasant eating, particularly if you
+do not manage to chew up with it any of the grains, for they are
+amazingly hot in the mouth, and cause one to wonder why Paradise instead
+of Hades was reported as their "country of origin."
+
+The natives are very fond of chewing the capsule and the inner bark of
+the stem of the plant. They are, for the matter of that, fond of
+chewing anything, but the practice in this case seems to me more
+repaying than when carried on with kola or ordinary twigs.
+
+Two kinds of meleguetta pepper come up from Guinea. That from Accra is
+the larger, plumper, and tougher skinned, and commands the higher price.
+The capsule, which is about 2 inches long by 1 inch in breadth, is more
+oval than that of the other kind, and the grains in it are round and
+bluntly angular, bright brown outside, but when broken open showing a
+white inside. The other kind, the ordinary Guinea grain of commerce,
+comes from Sierra Leone and Liberia. They are devoid of the projecting
+tuft on the umbilicus. The capsule is like that of the Accra grain. When
+dry, it is wrinkled, and if soaked does not display the longitudinal
+frill of the Javan _Amomum maximum_, which it is sometimes used to
+adulterate. This common capsule is only about 1-1/2 inches long and 1/2
+an inch in diameter, but the grain when broken open is also white like
+the Accra one. There are, however, any quantity on Cameroons of the
+winged Javan variety, but these have so far not been exported.
+
+The plants that produce the grains are zingiberaceous, cane-like in
+appearance, only having broader, blunter leaves than the bamboo. The
+flower is very pretty, in some kinds a violet pink, but in the most
+common a violet purple, and they are worn as marks of submission by
+people in the Oil Rivers suing for peace. These flowers, which grow
+close to the ground, seeming to belong more to the root of the plant
+than the stem, or, more properly speaking, looking as if they had
+nothing to do with the graceful great soft canes round them, but were a
+crop of lovely crocus-like flowers on their own account, are followed by
+crimson-skinned pods enclosing the black and brown seeds wrapped in
+juicy pulp, quite unlike the appearance they present when dried or
+withered.
+
+There is only a small trade done in Guinea grains now, George III. (Cap.
+58) having declared that no brewer or dealer in wine shall be found in
+possession of grains of Paradise without paying a fine of L200, and that
+if any druggist shall sell them to a brewer that druggist shall pay a
+fine of L500 for each such offence.
+
+The reason of this enactment was the idea that the grains were
+poisonous, and that the brewers in using them to give fire to their
+liquors were destroying their consumers, His Majesty's lieges. As far as
+poison goes this idea was wrong, for Meleguetta pepper or grains of
+Paradise are quite harmless though hot. Perhaps, however, some
+consignment may have reached Europe with poisonous seeds in it. I once
+saw four entirely different sorts of seeds in a single sample. That is
+the worst of our Ethiopian friends, they adulterate every mortal thing
+that passes through their hands. I will do them the justice to say they
+usually do so with the intellectually comprehensible end in view of
+gaining an equivalent pecuniary advantage by it. Still it is
+commercially unsound of them; for example for years they sent up the
+seeds of the _Kickia Africana_ as an adulteration for _Strophantus_,
+whereas they would have made more by finding out that the _Kickia_ was a
+great rubber-producing tree. They will often take as much trouble to put
+in foreign matter as to get more legitimate raw material. I really fancy
+if any one were to open up a trade in Kru Coast rocks, adulteration
+would be found in the third shipment. It is their way, and legislation
+is useless. All that is necessary is that the traders who buy of them
+should know their business and not make infants of themselves by
+regarding the African as one or expecting the government to dry nurse
+them.
+
+In private life the native uses and values these Guinea grains highly,
+using them sometimes internally sometimes externally, pounding them up
+into a paste with which they beplaster their bodies for various aches
+and pains. For headache, not the sequelae of trade gin, but of malaria,
+the forehead and temples are plastered with a stiff paste made of Guinea
+grain, hard oil, chalk, or some such suitable medium, and it is a most
+efficacious treatment for this fearfully common complaint in West
+Africa. But the careful ethnologist must not mix this medicinal plaster
+up with the sort of prayerful plaster worn by the West Africans at time
+for Ju Ju, and go and mistake a person who is merely attending to his
+body for one who is attending to his soul.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [2] This word is probably a corruption of the old name for this
+   district, Cerberos.
+
+   [3] The derivation of this name given by Barbot is from _misericordia_.
+   "As some pretend on occasion of a Portuguese ship cast away near the
+   little river Druro, the men of that ship were assaulted by the negroes,
+   which made the Portuguese cry for quarter, using the word
+   _misericordia_, from which by corruption mesurado."
+
+   [4] Tornado is possibly a corruption from the Portuguese _trovado_, a
+   thunderstorm; or from _tornado_, signifying returned; but most likely
+   it comes from the Spanish _torneado_, signifying thunder.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+AFRICAN CHARACTERISTICS
+
+     Containing some account of the divers noises of Western Afrik and
+     an account of the country east of Cape Palmas, and other things; to
+     which is added an account of the manner of shipping timber; of the
+     old Bristol trade; and, mercifully for the reader, a leaving off.
+
+
+When we got our complement of Krumen on board, we proceeded down Coast
+with the intention of calling off Accra. I will spare you the
+description of the scenes which accompany the taking on of Kruboys; they
+have frequently been described, for they always alarm the
+new-comer--they are the first bit of real Africa he sees if bound for
+the Gold Coast or beyond. Sierra Leone, charming, as it is, has a sort
+of Christy Minstrel air about it for which he is prepared, but the
+Kruboy as he comes on board looks quite the Boys' Book of Africa sort of
+thing; though, needless to remark, as innocent as a lamb, bar a tendency
+to acquire portable property. Nevertheless, Kruboys coming on board for
+your first time alarm you; at any rate they did me, and they also
+introduced me to African noise, which like the insects is another most
+excellent thing, that you should get broken into early.
+
+Woe! to the man in Africa who cannot stand perpetual uproar. Few things
+surprised me more than the rarity of silence and the intensity of it
+when you did get it. There is only that time which comes between
+10.30 A.M. and 4.30 P.M., in which you can look for anything like the
+usual quiet of an English village. We will give Man the first place in
+the orchestra, he deserves it. I fancy the main body of the lower
+classes of Africa think externally instead of internally. You will hear
+them when they are engaged together on some job--each man issuing the
+fullest directions and prophecies concerning it, in shouts; no one
+taking the least notice of his neighbours. If the head man really wants
+them to do something definite he fetches those within his reach an
+introductory whack; and even when you are sitting alone in the forest
+you will hear a man or woman coming down the narrow bush path chattering
+away with such energy and expression that you can hardly believe your
+eyes when you learn from them that he has no companion.
+
+     [Illustration: FOR PALM WINE. [_To face page 63._]
+
+Some of this talking is, I fancy, an equivalent to our writing. I know
+many English people who, if they want to gather a clear conception of an
+affair write it down; the African not having writing, first talks it
+out. And again more of it is conversation with spirit guardians and
+familiar spirits, and also with those of their dead relatives and
+friends, and I have often seen a man, sitting at a bush fire or in a
+village palaver house, turn round and say, "You remember that, mother?"
+to the ghost that to him was there.
+
+I remember mentioning this very touching habit of theirs, as it seemed
+to me, in order to console a sick and irritable friend whose cabin was
+close to a gangway then in possession of a very lively lot of Sierra
+Leone Kruboys, and he said, "Oh, I daresay they do, Miss Kingsley; but
+I'll be hanged if Hell is such a damned way off West Africa that they
+need shout so loud."
+
+The calm of the hot noontide fades towards evening time, and the noise
+of things in general revives and increases. Then do the natives call in
+instrumental aid of diverse and to my ear pleasant kinds. Great is the
+value of the tom-tom, whether it be of pure native origin or constructed
+from an old Devos patent paraffin oil tin. Then there is the
+kitty-katty, so called from its strange scratching-vibrating sound,
+which you hear down South, and on Fernando Po, of the excruciating mouth
+harp, and so on, all accompanied by the voice.
+
+If it be play night, you become the auditor to an orchestra as strange
+and varied as that which played before Shadrach, Meshech, and Abednego.
+I know I am no musician, so I own to loving African music, bar that
+Fernandian harp! Like Benedick, I can say, "Give me a horn for my money
+when all is done," unless it be a tom-tom. The African horn, usually
+made of a tooth of ivory, and blown from a hole in the side, is an
+instrument I unfortunately cannot play on. I have not the lung capacity.
+It requires of you to breathe in at one breath a whole S.W. gale of wind
+and then to empty it into the horn, which responds with a preliminary
+root-too-toot before it goes off into its noble dirge bellow. It is a
+fine instrument and should be introduced into European orchestras, for
+it is full of colour. But I think that even the horn, and certainly all
+other instruments, savage and civilised, should bow their heads in
+homage to the tom-tom, for, as a method of getting at the inner soul of
+humanity where are they compared with that noble instrument! You doubt
+it. Well go and hear a military tattoo or any performance on kettle
+drums up here and I feel you will reconsider the affair; but even then,
+remember you have not heard all the African tom-tom can tell you. I
+don't say it's an instrument suited for serenading your lady-love with,
+but that is a thing I don't require of an instrument. All else the
+tom-tom can do, and do well. It can talk as well as the human tongue. It
+can make you want to dance or fight for no private reason, as nothing
+else can, and be you black or white it calls up in you all your
+Neolithic man.
+
+Many African instruments are, however, sweet and gentle, and as mild as
+sucking doves, notably the xylophonic family. These marimbas, to use
+their most common name, are all over Africa from Senegal to Zambesi.
+Their form varies with various tribes--the West African varieties almost
+universally have wooden keys instead of iron ones like the East African.
+Personally, I like the West African best; there is something exquisite
+in the sweet, clear, water-like notes produced from the strips of soft
+wood of graduated length that make the West African keyboard. All these
+instruments have the sound magnified and enriched by a hollow wooden
+chamber under their keyboard. In Calabar this chamber is one small
+shallow box, ornamented, as most wooden things are in Calabar, with
+poker work--but in among the Fan, under the keyboard were a set of
+calabashes, and in the calabashes one hole apiece and that hole covered
+carefully with the skin of a large spider. While down in Angola you met
+the xylophone in the imposing form you can see in the frontispiece to
+this volume. Of the orchid fibre-stringed harp, I have spoken elsewhere,
+and there remains but one more truly great instrument that I need
+mention. I have had a trial at playing every African instrument I have
+come across, under native teachers, and they have assured me that, with
+application, I should succeed in becoming a rather decent performer on
+the harp and xylophone, and had the makings of a genius for the tom-tom,
+but my greatest and most rapid triumph was achieved on this other
+instrument. I picked up the hang of the thing in about five minutes, and
+then, being vain, when I returned to white society I naturally desired
+to show off my accomplishment, but met with no encouragement
+whatsoever--indeed my friends said gently, but firmly, that if I did it
+again they should leave, not the settlement merely, but the continent,
+and devote their remaining years to sweeping crossings in their native
+northern towns--they said they would rather do this than hear that
+instrument played again by any one.
+
+This instrument is made from an old powder keg, with both ends removed;
+a piece of raw hide is tied tightly round it over what one might call a
+bung-hole, while a piece of wood with a lump of rubber or fastening is
+passed through this hole. The performer then wets his hand, inserts it
+into the instrument, and lightly grasps the stick and works it up and
+down for all he is worth; the knob beats the drum skin with a beautiful
+boom, and the stick gives an exquisite screech as it passes through the
+hole in the skin which the performer enhances with an occasional howl or
+wail of his own, according to his taste or feeling. There are other
+varieties of this instrument, some with one end of the cylinder covered
+over and the knob of the stick beating the inside, but in all its forms
+it is impressive.
+
+Next in point of strength to the human vocal and instrumental performers
+come frogs. The small green one, whose note is like that of the
+cricket's magnified, is a part-singer, but the big bull frog, whose
+tones are all his own, sings in Handel Festival sized choruses. I don't
+much mind either of these, but the one I hate is a solo frog who seems
+eternally engaged at night in winding up a Waterbury watch. Many a night
+have I stocked thick with calamity on that frog's account; many a night
+have I landed myself in hailing distance of Amen Corner from having gone
+out of hut, or house, with my mind too full of the intention of
+flattening him out with a slipper, to think of driver ants, leopards, or
+snakes. Frog hunting is one of the worst things you can do in West
+Africa.
+
+Next to frogs come the crickets with their chorus of "she did, she
+didn't," and the cicadas, but they knock off earlier than frogs, and
+when the frogs have done for the night there is quiet for the few hours
+of cool, until it gets too cool and the chill that comes before the dawn
+wakes up the birds, and they wake you with their long, mellow,
+exquisitely beautiful whistles.
+
+The aforesaid are everyday noises in West Africa, and you soon get used
+to them or die of them; but there are myriads of others that you hear
+when in the bush. The grunting sigh of relief of the hippos, the strange
+groaning, whining bark of the crocodiles, the thin cry of the bats, the
+cough of the leopards, and that unearthly yell that sometimes comes out
+of the forest in the depths of dark nights. Yes, my naturalist friends,
+it's all very well to say it is only a love-lorn, innocent little
+marmoset-kind of thing that makes it. I know, poor dear, Softly, Softly,
+and he wouldn't do it. Anyhow, you just wait until you hear it in a
+shaky little native hut, or when you are spending the night, having been
+fool enough to lose yourself, with your back against a tree quite alone
+and that yell comes at you with its agony of anguish and appeal out of
+that dense black world of forest which the moon, be she never so strong,
+cannot enlighten, and which looks all the darker for the contrast of
+the glistening silver mist that shows here and there in the clearings,
+or over lagoon, or river, wavering twining, rising and falling; so full
+of strange motion and beauty, yet, somehow, as sinister in its way as
+the rest of your surroundings, and so deadly silent. I think if you hear
+that yell cutting through this sort of thing like a knife and sinking
+despairingly into the surrounding silence, you will agree with me that
+it seems to favour Duppy, and that, perchance, the strange red patch of
+ground you passed at the foot of the cotton tree before night came down
+on you, was where the yell came from, for it is red and damp and your
+native friends have told you it is so because of the blood whipped off a
+sasa-bonsum and his victims as he goes down through it to his
+under-world home.
+
+Seen from the sea, the Ivory Coast is a relief to the eye after the dead
+level of the Grain Coast, but the attention of the mariner to rocks has
+no practical surcease; and there is that submarine horror for sailing
+ships, the Bottomless pit. They used to have great tragedies with it in
+olden times, and you can still, if you like, for that matter; but the
+French having a station 15 miles to the east of it at Grand Bassam would
+nowadays prevent your experiencing the action of this phenomenon
+thoroughly, and getting not only wrecked but killed by the natives
+ashore, though they are a lively lot still.
+
+Now although this is not a manual of devotion, I must say a few words on
+the Bottomless pit. All along the West Coast of Africa there is a great
+shelving bank, submarine, formed by the deposit of the great mud-laden
+rivers and the earth-wash of the heavy rains. The slope of what the
+scientific term the great West African bank is, on the whole, very
+regular, except opposite Piccaninny Bassam, where it is cut right
+through by a great chasm, presumably the result of volcanic action. This
+chasm commences about 15 miles from land and is shaped like a V, with
+the narrow end shorewards. Nine miles out it is three miles wider and
+2,400 feet deep, at three miles out the sides are opposite each other
+and there is little more than a mile between them, and the depth is
+1,536 feet; at one mile from the beach the chasm is only a quarter of a
+mile wide and the depth 600 feet--close up beside the beach the depth is
+120 feet. The floor of this chasm is covered with grey mud, and some
+five miles out the surveying vessels got fragments of coral rock.
+
+     [Illustration: SECRET SOCIETY LEAVING THE SACRED GROVE]
+
+     [Illustration: JENGU DEVIL DANCE OF KING WILLIAM'S SLAVES,
+               SETTE CAMMA, NOV. 9, 1888. [_To face page 69._]
+
+The sides of this submarine valley seem almost vertical cliffs, and
+herein lies its danger for the sailing ship. The master thereof, in the
+smoke or fog season (December-February), may not exactly know to a mile
+or so where he is, and being unable to make out Piccaninny Bassam, which
+is only a small native village on the sand ridge between the surf and
+the lagoon, he lets go his anchor on the edge of the cliffs of this
+Bottomless pit. Then the set of the tide and the onshore breeze cause it
+to drag a little, and over it goes down into the abyss, and ashore he is
+bound to go. In old days he and his ship's crew formed a welcome change
+in the limited dietary of the exultant native. Mr. Barbot, who knew them
+well, feelingly remarks, "it is from the bloody tempers of these brutes
+that the Portuguese gave them the name of Malagens for they eat human
+flesh," and he cites how "recently they have massacred a great number of
+Portuguese, Dutch and English, who came for provisions and water, not
+thinking of any treachery, and not many years since, (that is to say,
+in 1677) an English ship lost three of its men; a Hollander fourteen;
+and, in 1678, a Portuguese, nine, of whom nothing was ever heard since."
+
+From Cape Palmas until you are past the mouth of the Taka River (St.
+Andrew) the coast is low. Then comes the Cape of the Little Strand
+(Caboda Prazuba), now called, I think, Price's Point. To the east of
+this you will see ranges of dwarf red cliffs rising above the beach and
+gradually increasing in height until they attain their greatest in the
+face of Mount Bedford, where the cliff is 280 feet high. The Portuguese
+called these Barreira Vermelhas; the French, Kalazis Rouges; and the
+Dutch, Roode Kliftin, all meaning Red Cliffs. The sand at their feet is
+strewn with boulders, and the whole country round here looks fascinating
+and interesting. I regret never having had an opportunity of seeing
+whether those cliffs had fossils on them, for they seem to me so like
+those beloved red cliffs of mine in Kacongo which have. The
+investigation, however, of such makes of Africa is messy. Those Kacongo
+cliffs were of a sort of red clay that took on a greasy slipperiness
+when they were wet, which they frequently were on account of the little
+springs of water that came through their faces. When pottering about
+them, after having had my suspicions lulled by twenty or thirty yards of
+crumbly dryness, I would ever and anon come across a water spring, and
+down I used to go--and lose nothing by it, going home in the evening
+time in what the local natives would have regarded as deep mourning for
+a large family--red clay being their sign thereof. The fossils I found
+in them were horizontally deposed layers of clam shells with regular
+intervals, or bands, of red clay, four or five feet across; between the
+layers some of the shell layers were 40 or more feet above the present
+beach level. Identical deposits of shell I also found far inland in Ka
+Congo, but that has nothing to do with the Ivory Coast.
+
+Inland, near Drewin, on the Ivory Coast, you can see from the sea
+curious shaped low hills; the definite range of these near Drewin is
+called the Highland of Drewin; after this place they occur frequently
+close to the shore, usually isolated but now and again two or three
+together, like those called by sailors the Sisters. I am much interested
+in these peculiar-shaped hills that you see on the Ivory and Gold Coast,
+and again, far away down South, rising out of the Ouronuogou swamp, and
+have endeavoured to find out if any theories have been suggested as to
+their formation, but in vain. They look like great bubbles, and run from
+300 to 2,000 feet.
+
+The red cliffs end at Mount Bedford and the estuary of the Fresco River,
+and after passing this the coast is low until you reach what is now
+called the district of Lahu, a native sounding name, but really a
+corruption from its old French name La-Hoe or Hou.
+
+You would not think, when looking at this bit of coast from the sea,
+that the strip of substantial brown sand beach is but a sort of viaduct,
+behind which lies a chain of stagnant lagoons. In the wet season, these
+stretches of dead water cut off the sand beach from the forest for as
+much as 40 miles and more.
+
+Beyond Mount La-Hou on this sand strip there are many native
+villages--each village a crowded clump of huts, surrounded by a grove of
+coco palm trees, each tree belonging definitely to some native family or
+individual, and having its owner's particular mark on it, and each grove
+of palm trees slanting uniformly at a stiff angle, which gives you no
+cause to ask which is the prevailing wind here, for they tell you bright
+and clear, as they lean N.E., that the S.W. wind brought them up to do
+so.
+
+Groves of coco palms are no favourites of mine. I don't like them. The
+trees are nice enough to look on, and nice enough to use in the divers
+ways you can use a coco-nut palm; but the noise of the breeze in their
+crowns keeps up a perpetual rattle with their hard leaves that sounds
+like heavy rain day and night, so that you feel you ought to live under
+an umbrella, and your mind gets worried about it when you are not
+looking after it with your common sense.
+
+Then the natives are such a nuisance with coco-nuts. For a truly
+terrific kniff give me even in West Africa a sand beach with coco-nut
+palms and natives. You never get coco-nut palms without natives, because
+they won't grow out of sight of human habitation. I am told also that
+one coco will not grow alone; it must have another coco as well as human
+neighbours, so these things, of course, end in a grove. It's like
+keeping cats with no one to drown the kittens.
+
+Well, the way the smell comes about in this affair is thus. The natives
+bury the coco-nuts in the sand, so as to get the fibre off them. They
+have buried nuts in that sand for ages before you arrive, and the nuts
+have rotted, and crabs have come to see what was going on, a thing crabs
+will do, and they have settled down here and died in their generations,
+and rotted too. The sandflies and all manner of creeping things have
+found that sort of district suits them, and have joined in, and the
+natives, who are great hands at fishing, have flung all the fish offal
+there, and there is usually a lagoon behind this sort of thing which
+contributes its particular aroma, and so between them the smell is a
+good one, even for West Africa.
+
+The ancient geographers called this coast Ajanginal AEthiope, and the
+Dutch and French used to reckon it from Growe, where the Melaguetta
+Coast ends. Just east of Cape Palmas, to the Rio do Sweiro da Costa,
+where they counted the Gold Coast to begin, the Portuguese divided the
+coast thus. The Ivory, or, as the Dutchmen called it, the Tand Kust,
+from Gowe to Rio St. Andrew; the Malaguetta from St. Andrew to the Rio
+Lagos;[5] and the Quaqua from the Rio Lagos to Rio de Sweiro da Costa,
+which is just to the east of what is now called Assini.
+
+It is undoubtedly one of the most interesting and nowadays least known
+bits of the coast of the Bight of Benin; but, taken altogether, with my
+small knowledge of it, I do not feel justified in recommending the Ivory
+Coast as either a sphere for emigration or a pleasure resort.
+Nevertheless, it is a very rich district naturally, and one of the most
+amusing features of West African trade you can see on a steamboat is to
+watch the shipping of timber therefrom.
+
+This region of the Bight of Benin is one of enormous timber wealth, and
+the development of this of late years has been great, adding the name of
+Timber Ports to the many other names this particular bit of West Africa
+bears, the Timber Ports being the main ports of the French Ivory Coast,
+and the English port of Axim on the Gold Coast.
+
+The best way to watch the working of this industry is to stay on board
+the steamer; if by chance you go on shore when this shipping of mahogany
+is going on you may be expected to help, or get out of the way, which is
+hot work, or difficult. The last time I was in Africa we on the----
+shipped 170 enormous bulks of timber. These logs run on an average 20 to
+30 feet long and 3 to 4 feet in diameter. They are towed from the beach
+to the vessel behind the surf boats, seven and eight at a time, tied
+together by a rope running through rings called dogs, which are driven
+into the end of each log, and when alongside, the rope from the donkey
+engine crane is dropped overboard, and passed round the log by the
+negroes swimming about in the water regardless of sharks and as agile as
+fish. Then, with much uproar and advice, the huge logs are slowly heaved
+on board, and either deposited on the deck or forthwith swung over the
+hatch and lowered down. It is almost needless to remark that, with the
+usual foresight of men, the hatch is of a size unsuited to the log, and
+therefore, as it hangs suspended, a chorus of counsel surges up from
+below and from all sides.
+
+The officer in command on this particular hatch presently shouts "Lower
+away," waving his hand gracefully from the wrist as though he were
+practising for piano playing, but really to guide Shoo Fly, who is
+driving the donkey engine. The tremendous log hovers over the hatch, and
+then gradually, "softly, softly," as Shoo Fly would say, disappears into
+the bowels of the ship, until a heterogeneous yell in English and Kru
+warns the trained intelligence that it is low enough, or more probably
+too low. "Heave a link!" shouts the officer, and Shoo Fly and the donkey
+engine heaveth. Then the official hand waves, and the crane swings round
+with a whiddle, whiddle, and there is a moment's pause, the rope
+strains, and groans, and waits, and as soon as the most important and
+valuable people on board, such as the Captain, the Doctor, and myself,
+are within its reach to give advice, and look down the hatch to see
+what is going on, that rope likes to break and comes clawing at us a
+mass of bent and broken wire, and as we scatter, the great log goes with
+a crash into the hold. Fortunately, the particular log I remember as
+indulging in this catastrophe did not go through the ship's bottom, as I
+confidently expected it had at the time, nor was any one killed, such a
+batch of miraculous escapes occurring for the benefit of the officer and
+men below as can only be reasonably accounted for by their having
+expected this sort of thing to happen.
+
+Quaint are the ways of mariners at times. That time they took on
+quantities of great logs at the main gangway, well knowing that they
+would have to go down the hatch aft, and that this would entail hauling
+them along the narrow alley ways. This process was effected by rigging
+the steam winches aft, then two sharp hooks connected together by a
+chain at the end of the wire hawser were fixed into the head of the log,
+and the word passed "Haul away," water being thrown on the deck to make
+the logs slip easier over it, and billets of wood put underneath the log
+with the same intention, and the added hope of saving the deck from
+being torn by the rough hewn, hard monster.
+
+Now there are two superstitions rife regarding this affair. The first
+is, that if you hitch the hooks lightly into each side of the log's head
+and then haul hard, the weight of the log will cause the hooks to get
+firmly and safely embedded in it. The second is, that the said weight
+will infallibly keep the billets under it in due position.
+
+Nothing short of getting himself completely and permanently killed
+shakes the mariner's faith in these notions. What often happens is this.
+When the strain is at its highest the hooks slip out of the wood, and
+try and scalp any one that's handy, and now and again they succeed.
+There was a man helping that day at Axim whom the Doctor said had only
+last voyage fell a victim to the hooks; they slipped out of the head of
+the log and played round his own, laying it open to the bone at the
+back, cutting him over the ears and across the forehead, and if that man
+had not had a phenomenally thick skull he must have died. But no, there
+he was on this voyage as busy as ever with the timber, close to those
+hooks, and evidently with his superstitious trust in the invariable
+embedding of hooks in timber unabated one fraction.
+
+Sometimes the performance is varied by the hauling rope itself parting
+and going up the alley way like a boa constrictor in a fit, whisking up
+black passengers and boxes full of screaming parrots in its path from
+places they had placed themselves, or been placed in, well out of its
+legitimate line of march. But the day it succeeds in clawing hold of and
+upsetting the cook's grease tub, which lives in the alley-way, that is
+the day of horror for the First officer and the inauguration of a period
+of ardent holystoning for his minions.
+
+Should, however, the broken rope fail to find, as the fox-hunters would
+say, in the alley-way, it flings itself in a passionate embrace round
+the person of the donkey engine aft, and gives severe trouble there. The
+mariners, with an admirable faith and patience, untwine it, talking
+seriously to it meanwhile, and then fix it up again, may be with more
+care, and the shout, "Heave away!"--goes forth again; the rope groans
+and creaks, the hooks go in well on either side of the log, and off it
+moves once more with a graceful, dignified glide towards its
+destination. The Bo'sun and Chips with their eyes on the man at the
+winch, and let us hope their thoughts employed in the penitential
+contemplation of their past sins, so as to be ready for the consequences
+likely to arise for them if the rope parts again, do not observe the
+little white note--underbill--as a German would call it, which is
+getting nearer and nearer the end of the log, which has stuck to the
+deck. In a few moments the log is off it, and down on Chips' toes, who
+returns thanks with great spontaneity, in language more powerful then
+select. The Bo'sun yells, "Avast heaving, there!" and several other
+things, while his assistant Kruboys, chattering like a rookery when an
+old lady's pet parrot has just joined it, get crowbars and raise up the
+timber, and the Carpenter is a free man again, and the little white
+billet reinstated. "Haul away," roars the Bo'sun, "Abadeo Na nu de um
+oro de Kri Kri," join in the hoarse-voiced Kruboys, "Ji na oi," answers
+the excited Shoo Fly, and off goes that log again. The particular log
+whose goings on I am chronicling slewed round at this juncture with the
+force of a Roman battering ram, drove in the panel of my particular
+cabin, causing all sorts of bottles and things inside to cast themselves
+on the floor and smash, whereby I, going in after dark, got cut. But no
+matter, that log, one of the classic sized logs, was in the end safely
+got up the alley-way and duly stowed among its companions. For let West
+Africa send what it may, be it never so large or so difficult, be he
+never so ill-provided with tackle to deal with it, the West Coast
+mariner will have that thing on board, and ship it--all honour to his
+determination and ability.
+
+The varieties of timber chiefly exported from the West African timber
+ports are _Oldfieldia Africana_, of splendid size and texture, commonly
+called mahogany, but really teak, Bar and Camwood and Ebony. Bar and
+Cam are dye-woods, and, before the Anilines came in these woods were in
+great request; invaluable they were for giving the dull rich red to
+bandana handkerchiefs and the warm brown tints to tweed stuffs. Camwood
+was once popular with cabinet makers and wood-turners here, but of late
+years it has only come into this market in roots or twisty bits--all the
+better these for dyeing, but not for working up, and so it has fallen
+out of demand among cabinet makers in spite of its beautiful grain and
+fine colour, a pinky yellow when fresh cut, deepening rapidly on
+exposure to the air into a rich, dark red brown. Amongst old Spanish
+furniture you will find things made from Camwood that are a joy to the
+eye. There has been some confusion as to whether Bar and Camwood are
+identical--merely a matter of age in the same tree or no--but I have
+seen the natives cutting both these timbers, and they are quite
+different trees in the look of them, as any one would expect from seeing
+a billet of Bar and one of Cam; the former is a light porous wood and
+orange colour when fresh cut, while 500 billets of Bar and only 150 to
+200 of Cam go to the ton.
+
+There are many signs of increasing enterprise in the West African timber
+trade, but so far this form of wealth has barely been touched, so vast
+are the West African forests and so varied the trees therein. At present
+it, like most West African industries, is fearfully handicapped by the
+deadly climate, the inferiority and expensiveness of labour, and the
+difficulties of transport.
+
+At present it is useless to fell a tree, be it ever so fine, if it is
+growing at any distance from a river down which you can float it to the
+sea beach, for it would be impossible to drag it far through the
+Liane-tangled West African forest.
+
+Indeed, it is no end of a job to drag a decent-sized log even two
+hundred yards or so to a river. The way it is done is this. When felling
+the tree you arrange that its head shall fall away from the river, then
+trim off the rough stuff and hew the heavy end to a rough point, so that
+when the boys are pully-hauling down the slope--you must have a
+slope--to the bank, it may not only be able to pierce the opposing
+undergrowth spearwise more easily than if its end were flat or jagged,
+but also by the fact of its own weight it may help their exertions.
+
+I have seen one or two grand scenes on the Ogowe with trees felled on
+steep mountain sides, wherein you had only got to arrange these
+circumstances, start your log on its downward course to the river, get
+out of the fair way of it, and leave the rest to gravity, which carried
+things through in grand style, with a crashing rush and a glorious
+splash into the river. You had, of course, to take care you had a clear
+bank and not one fringed with dead-trees, into which your mighty spear
+would embed itself and also to have a canoe load of energetic people to
+get hold of the log and keep it out of the current of that lively Ogowe
+river, or it would go off to Kama Country express. But this work on
+timber was far easier than that on the Gold or Ivory Coasts, whence most
+timber comes to Europe, and where the make of the country does not give
+you so fully the assistance of steep gradients.
+
+After what I have told you about the behaviour of these great baulks on
+board ship you will not imagine that the log behaves well during its
+journey on land. Indeed, my belief in the immorality of inanimate nature
+has been much strengthened by observing the conduct of African timber.
+Nor am I alone in judging it harshly, for an American missionary once
+said to me, "Ah! it will be a grand day for Africa when we have driven
+out all the heathen devils; they are everywhere, not only in graven
+images, but just universally scattered around." The remark was made on
+the occasion of a floor that had been laid down by a mission carpenter
+coming up on its own account, as native timber floors laid down by
+native carpenters customarily come, though the native carpenter lays
+Norway boards well enough.
+
+When, after much toil and tribulation and uproar, the log has been got
+down to the river and floated, iron rings are driven into it, and it is
+branded with its owner's mark. Then the owner does not worry himself
+much about it for a month or so, but lets it float its way down and
+soak, and generally lazy about until he gets together sufficient of its
+kind to make a shipment.
+
+One of the many strange and curious things they told me of on the West
+Coast was that old idea that hydrophobia is introduced into Europe by
+means of these logs. There is, they say, on the West Coast of Africa a
+peculiarly venomous scorpion that makes its home on the logs while they
+are floating in the river, three-parts submerged on account of weight,
+and the other part most delightfully damp and cool to the scorpion's
+mind. When the logs get shipped frequently the scorpion gets shipped
+too, and subsequently comes out in the hold and bites the resident rats.
+So far I accept this statement fully, for I have seen more than enough
+rats and scorpions in the hold, and the West Coast scorpions are
+particularly venomous, but feeling that in these days it is the duty of
+every one to keep their belief for religious purposes, I cannot go on
+and in a whole souled way believe that the dogs of Liverpool, Havre,
+Hamburg, and Marseilles worry the said rats when they arrive in dock,
+and, getting bitten by them, breed rabies.
+
+Nevertheless, I do not interrupt and say, "Stuff," because if you do
+this to the old coaster he only offers to fight you, or see you
+shrivelled, or bet you half-a-crown, or in some other time-honoured way
+demonstrate the truth of his assertion, and he will, moreover, go on and
+say there is more hydrophobia in the aforesaid towns than elsewhere, and
+as the chances are you have not got hydrophobia statistics with you, you
+are lost. Besides, it's very unkind and unnecessary to make a West
+Coaster go and say or do things which will only make things harder for
+him in the time "to come," and anyhow if you are of a cautious, nervous
+disposition you had better search your bunk for scorpions, before
+turning in, when you are on a vessel that has got timber on board, and
+the chances are that your labours will be rewarded by discovering
+specimens of this interesting animal.
+
+Scorpions and centipedes are inferior in worrying power to driver ants,
+but they are a feature in Coast life, particularly in places--Cameroons,
+for example. If you see a man who seems to you to have a morbid caution
+in the method of dealing with his hat or folded dinner napkin, judge him
+not harshly, for the chances are he is from Cameroon, where there are
+scorpions--scorpions of great magnitude and tough constitutions, as was
+demonstrated by a little affair up here that occurred in a family I
+know.
+
+The inhabitants of the French Ivory Coast are an exceedingly industrious
+and enterprising set of people in commercial matters, and the export and
+import trade is computed by a recent French authority at ten million
+francs per annum. No official computation, however, of the trade of a
+Coast district is correct, for reasons I will not enter into now.
+
+The native coinage equivalent here is the manilla--a bracelet in a state
+of sinking into a more conventional token. These manillas are made of an
+alloy of copper and pewter, manufactured mainly at Birmingham and
+Nantes, the individual value being from 20 to 25 centimes.
+
+Changes for the worse as far as English trade is concerned have passed
+over the trade of the Ivory Coast recently, but the way, even in my
+time, trade was carried on was thus. The native traders deal with the
+captains of the English sailing vessels and the French factories, buying
+palm oil and kernels from the bush people with merchandise, and selling
+it to the native or foreign shippers. They get paid in manillas, which
+they can, when they wish, get changed again into merchandise either at
+the factory or on the trading ship. The manilla is, therefore, a kind of
+bank for the black trader, a something he can put his wealth into when
+he wants to store it for a time.
+
+They have a singular system of commercial correspondence between the
+villages on the beach and the villages on the other side of the great
+lagoon that separates it from the mainland. Each village on the shore
+has its particular village on the other side of the lagoon, thus Alindja
+Badon is the interior commercial centre for Grand Jack on the beach,
+Abia for Anamaquoa, or Half Jack, and so on. Anamaquoa is only separated
+from its sister village by a little lagoon that is fordable, but the
+other towns have to communicate by means of canoes.
+
+Grand Bassam, Assini, and Half Jack are the most important places on the
+Ivory Coast. The main portion of the first-named town is out of sight
+from seaboard, being some five miles up the Costa River, and all you can
+see on the beach are two large but lonesome-looking factories. Half
+Jack, Jack a Jack, or Anamaquoa--there is nothing like having plenty of
+names for one place in West Africa, because it leads people at home who
+don't know the joke to think there is more of you than there naturally
+is--gives its name to the bit of coast from Cape Palmas to Grand Bassam,
+this coast being called the Half Jack, or quite as often the Bristol
+Coast, and for many years it was the main point of call for the
+Guineamen, old-fashioned sailing vessels which worked the Bristol trade
+in the Bights.
+
+This trade was established during the last century by Mr. Henry King, of
+Bristol, for supplying labour to the West Indies, and was further
+developed by his two sons, Richard, who hated men-o'-war like a quaker,
+and William who loved science, both very worthy gentlemen. After their
+time up till when I was first on the Coast, this firm carried on trade
+both on the Bristol Coast and down in Cameroon, which in old days bore
+the name of Little Bristol-in-Hell, but now the trade is in other hands.
+
+According to Captain Binger, there are now about 30 sailing ships still
+working the Ivory Coast trade, two of them the property of an energetic
+American captain, but the greater part belonging to Bristol. Their
+voyage out from Bristol varies from 60 to 90 days, according as you get
+through the Horse latitudes--so-called from the number of horses that
+used to die in this region of calms when the sailing vessels bringing
+them across from South America lay week out and week in short alike of
+wind and water.
+
+In old days, when the Bristol ship got to the Coast she would call at
+the first village on it. Then the native chiefs and head men would come
+on board and haggle with the captain as to the quantity of goods he
+would let them have on trust, they covenanting to bring in exchange for
+them in a given time a certain number of slaves or so much produce. This
+arrangement being made, off sailed the Guineaman to his next village,
+where a similar game took place all the way down Coast to Grand Bassam.
+
+When she had paid out the trust goods to the last village, she would
+stand out to sea and work back to her first village of call on the
+Bristol Coast to pick up the promised produce, this arrangement giving
+the native traders time to collect it. In nine cases out of ten,
+however, it was not ready for her, so on she went to the next. By this
+time the Guineaman would present the spectacle of a farmhouse that had
+gone mad, grown masts, and run away to sea; for the decks were protected
+from the burning sun by a well-built thatch roof, and she lounged along
+heavy with the rank sea growth of these seas. Sometimes she would be
+unroofed by a tornado, sometimes seized by a pirate parasitic on the
+Guinea trade, but barring these interruptions to business she called
+regularly on her creditors, from some getting the promised payment, from
+others part of it, from others again only the renewal of the promise,
+and then when she had again reached her last point of call put out to
+sea once more and worked back again to the first creditor village. In
+those days she kept at this weary round until she got in all her debts,
+a process that often took her four or five years, and cost the lives of
+half her crew from fever, and then her consorts drafted a man or so on
+board her and kept her going until she was full enough of pepper, gold,
+gum, ivory, and native gods to sail for Bristol. There, when the
+Guineaman came in, were grand doings for the small boys, what with
+parrots, oranges, bananas, &c., but sad times for most of those whose
+relatives and friends had left Bristol on her.
+
+In much the same way, and with much the same risks, the Bristol Coast
+trade goes on now, only there is little of it left, owing to the French
+system of suppressing trade. Palm oil is the modern equivalent to
+slaves, and just as in old days the former were transhipped from the
+coasting Guineamen to the transatlantic slavers, so now the palm oil is
+shipped off on to the homeward bound African steamers, while, as for the
+joys and sorrows, century-change affects them not. So long as Western
+Africa remains the deadliest region on earth there will be joy over
+those who come up out of it; heartache and anxiety over those who are
+down there fighting as men fought of old for those things worth the
+fighting, God, Glory and Gold; and grief over those who are dead among
+all of us at home who are ill-advised enough to really care for men who
+have the pluck to go there.
+
+During the smoke season when dense fogs hang over the Bight of Benin,
+the Bristol ships get very considerably sworn at by the steamers. They
+have letters for them, and they want oil off them; between ourselves,
+they want oil off every created thing, and the Bristol boat is not easy
+to find. So the steamer goes dodging and fumbling about after her,
+swearing softly about wasting coal all the time, and more harshly still
+when he finds he has picked up the wrong Guineaman, only modified if she
+has stuff to send home, stuff which he conjures the Bristol captain by
+the love he bears him to keep, and ship by him when he is on his way
+home from windward ports, or to let him have forthwith.
+
+Sometimes the Bristolman will signal to a passing steamer for a doctor.
+The doctors of the African and British African boats are much thought of
+all down the Coast, and are only second in importance to the doctor on
+board a telegraph ship, who, being a rare specimen, is regarded as,
+_ipso facto_, more gifted, so that people will save up their ailments
+for the telegraph ship's medical man, which is not a bad practice, as it
+leads commonly to their getting over those ailments one way or the other
+by the time the telegraph ship arrives. It is reported that one day one
+of the Bristolmen ran up an urgent signal to a passing mail steamer for
+a doctor, and the captain thereof ran up a signal of assent, and the
+doctor went below to get his medicines ready. Meanwhile, instead of
+displaying a patient gratitude, the Bristolman signalled "Repeat
+signal." "Give it 'em again," said the steamboat captain, "those
+Bristolmen ain't got no Board schools." Still the Bristolman kept
+bothering, running up her original signal, and in due course off went
+the doctor to her in the gig. When he returned his captain asked him,
+saying, "Pills, are they all mad on board that vessel or merely drunk as
+usual?" "Well," says the doctor, "that's curious, for it's the very same
+question Captain N. has asked me about you. He is very anxious about
+your mental health, and wants to know why you keep on signalling 'Haul
+to, or I will fire into you,'" and the story goes that an investigation
+of the code and the steamer's signal supported the Bristolman's reading,
+and the subject was dropped in steam circles.
+
+Although the Bristolmen do not carry doctors, they are provided with
+grand medicine chests, the supply of medicines in West Africa being
+frequently in the inverse ratio with the ability to administer them
+advantageously.
+
+Inside the lid of these medicine chests is a printed paper of
+instructions, each drug having a number before its name, and a hint as
+to the proper dose after it. Thus, we will say, for example, 1 was
+jalap; 2, calomel; 3, croton oil; and 4, quinine. Once upon a time there
+was a Bristol captain, as good a man as need be and with a fine head on
+him for figures. Some of his crew were smitten with fever when he was
+out of number 4, so he argues that 2 and 2 are 4 all the world over, but
+being short of 2, it being a popular drug, he further argues 3 and 1
+make 4 as well, and the dose of 4 being so much he makes that dose up
+out of jalap and croton oil. Some of the patients survived; at least, a
+man I met claimed to have done so. His report is not altogether
+reproducible in full, but, on the whole, the results of the treatment
+went more towards demonstrating the danger of importing raw abstract
+truths into everyday affairs than to encouraging one to repeat the
+experiment of arithmetical therapeutics.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [5] No connection with the Colony of Lagos.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+FISHING IN WEST AFRICA.
+
+
+There is one distinctive charm about fishing--its fascinations will
+stand any climate. You may sit crouching on ice over a hole inside the
+arctic circle, or on a Windsor chair by the side of the River Lea in the
+so-called temperate zone, or you may squat in a canoe on an equatorial
+river, with the surrounding atmosphere 45 per cent. mosquito, and if you
+are fishing you will enjoy yourself; and what is more important than
+this enjoyment, is that you will not embitter your present, nor endanger
+your future, by going home in a bad temper, whether you have caught
+anything or not, provided always that you are a true fisherman.
+
+This is not the case with other sports; I have been assured by
+experienced men that it "makes one feel awfully bad" when, after
+carrying for hours a very heavy elephant gun, for example, through a
+tangled forest you have got a wretched bad chance of a shot at an
+elephant; and as for football, cricket, &c., well, I need hardly speak
+of the unchristian feelings they engender in the mind towards umpires
+and successful opponents.
+
+     [Illustration: BATANGA CANOES. _To face page 89._]
+
+Being, as above demonstrated, a humble, but enthusiastic, devotee of
+fishing--I dare not say, as my great predecessor Dame Juliana Berners
+says, "with an angle," because my conscience tells me I am a born
+poacher,--I need hardly remark that when I heard, from a reliable
+authority at Gaboon, that there were lakes in the centre of the island
+of Corisco, and that these fresh-water lakes were fished annually by
+representative ladies from the villages on this island, and that their
+annual fishing was just about due, I decided that I must go there
+forthwith. Now, although Corisco is not more than twenty miles out to
+sea from the Continent, it is not a particularly easy place to get at
+nowadays, no vessels ever calling there; so I got, through the kindness
+of Dr. Nassau, a little schooner and a black crew, and, forgetting my
+solemn resolve, formed from the fruits of previous experiences, never to
+go on to an Atlantic island again, off I sailed. I will not go into the
+adventures of that voyage here. My reputation as a navigator was great
+before I left Gaboon. I had a record of having once driven my bowsprit
+through a conservatory, and once taken all the paint off one side of a
+smallpox hospital, to say nothing of repeatedly having made attempts to
+climb trees in boats I commanded, but when I returned, I had surpassed
+these things by having successfully got my main-mast jammed up a tap,
+and I had done sufficient work in discovering new sandbanks, rock
+shoals, &c., in Corisco Bay, and round Cape Esterias, to necessitate, or
+call for, a new edition of _The West African Pilot_.
+
+Corisco Island is about three miles long by 1-3/4 wide: its latitude
+0 deg.56 N., long. 9 deg.20-1/2 E. Mr. Winwood Reade was about the last
+traveller to give a description of Corisco, and a very interesting
+description it is. He was there in the early sixties, and was evidently
+too fully engaged with a drunken captain and a mad Malay cook to go
+inland. In his days small trading vessels used to call at Corisco for
+cargo, but they do so no longer, all the trade in the Bay now being
+carried on at Messrs. Holt's factory on Little Eloby Island (an island
+nearer in shore), and on the mainland at Coco Beach, belonging to
+Messrs. Hatton and Cookson.
+
+In Winwood Reade's days, too, there was a settlement of the American
+Presbyterian Society on Corisco, with a staff of white men. This has
+been abandoned to a native minister, because the Society found that
+facts did not support their theory that the island would be more healthy
+than the mainland, the mortality being quite as great as at any
+continental station, so they moved on to the continent to be nearer
+their work. The only white people that are now on Corisco are two
+Spanish priests and three nuns; but of these good people I saw little or
+nothing, as my headquarters were with the Presbyterian native minister,
+Mr. Ibea, and there was war between him and the priests.
+
+The natives are Benga, a coast tribe now rapidly dying out. They were
+once a great tribe, and in the old days, when the slavers and the
+whalers haunted Corisco Bay, these Benga were much in demand as crew
+men, in spite of the reputation they bore for ferocity. Nowadays the
+grown men get their living by going as travelling agents for the white
+merchants into the hinterland behind Corisco Bay, amongst the very
+dangerous and savage tribes there, and when one of them has made enough
+money by this trading, he comes back to Corisco, and rests, and
+luxuriates in the ample bosom of his family until he has spent his
+money--then he gets trust from the white trader, and goes to the Bush
+again, pretty frequently meeting there the sad fate of the pitcher that
+went too often to the well, and getting killed by the hinterlanders.
+
+On arriving at Corisco Island, I "soothed with a gift, and greeted with
+a smile" the dusky inhabitants. "Have you got any tobacco?" said they.
+"I have," I responded, and a friendly feeling at once arose. I then
+explained that I wanted to join the fishing party. They were quite
+willing, and said the ladies were just finishing planting their farms
+before the tornado season came on, and that they would make the
+peculiar, necessary baskets at once. They did not do so at once in the
+English sense of the term, but we all know there is no time south of
+40 deg., and so I waited patiently, walking about the island.
+
+Corisco is locally celebrated for its beauty. Winwood Reade says: "It is
+a little world in miniature, with its miniature forests, miniature
+prairies, miniature mountains, miniature rivers, and miniature
+precipices on the sea-shore." In consequence partly of these things, and
+partly of the inhabitants' rooted idea that the proper way to any place
+on the island is round by the sea-shore, the paths of Corisco are as
+strange as several other things are in latitude 0, and, like the other
+things, they require understanding to get on with.
+
+They start from the beach with the avowed intention of just going round
+the next headland because the tide happens to be in too much for you to
+go along by the beach; but, once started, their presiding genii might
+sing to the wayfarer Mr. Kipling's "The Lord knows where we shall go,
+dear lass, and the Deuce knows what we shall see." You go up a path off
+the beach gladly, because you have been wading in fine white sand over
+your ankles, and in banks of rotten and rotting seaweed, on which
+centipedes, and other catamumpuses, crawl in profusion, not to mention
+sand-flies, &c., and the path makes a plunge inland, as much as to say,
+"Come and see our noted scenery," and having led you through a miniature
+swamp, a miniature forest, and a miniature prairie, "It's a pity," says
+the path, "not to call at So-and-so's village now we are so near it,"
+and off it goes to the village through a patch of grass or plantation.
+It wanders through the scattered village calling at houses, for some
+time, and then says, "Bless me, I had nearly forgotten what I came out
+for; we must hurry back to that beach," and off it goes through more
+scenery, landing you ultimately about fifty yards off the place where
+you first joined it, in consequence of the South Atlantic waves flying
+in foam and fury against a miniature precipice--the first thing they
+have met that dared stay their lordly course since they left Cape Horn
+or the ice walls of the Antarctic.
+
+At last the fishing baskets were ready, and we set off for the lakes by
+a path that plunged into a little ravine, crossed a dried swamp, went up
+a hill, and on to an open prairie, in the course of about twenty
+minutes. Passing over this prairie, and through a wood, we came to
+another prairie, like most things in Corisco just then (August), dried
+up, for it was the height of the dry season. On this prairie we waited
+for some of the representative ladies from other villages to come up;
+for without their presence our fishing would not have been legal. When
+you wait in West Africa it eats into your lifetime to a considerable
+extent, and we spent half-an-hour or so standing howling, in prolonged,
+intoned howls, for the absent ladies, notably grievously for On-gou-ta,
+and when they came not, we threw ourselves down on the soft, fine,
+golden-brown grass, in the sun, and all, with the exception of myself,
+went asleep. After about two and a half hours I was aroused from the
+contemplation of the domestic habits of some beetles, by hearing a
+crackle, crackle, interspersed with sounds like small pistols going off,
+and looking round saw a fog of blue-brown smoke surmounting a
+rapidly-advancing wall of red fire.
+
+I rose, and spread the news among my companions, who were sleeping, with
+thumps and kicks. Shouting at a sleeping African is labour lost. And
+then I made a bee-line for the nearest green forest wall of the prairie,
+followed by my companions. Yet, in spite of some very creditable sprint
+performances on their part, three members of the band got scorched.
+Fortunately, however, our activity landed us close to the lakes, so the
+scorched ones spent the rest of the afternoon sitting in mud-holes,
+comforting themselves with the balmy black slime. The other ladies
+turned up soon after this, and said that the fire had arisen from some
+man having set fire to a corner of the prairie some days previously, to
+make a farm; he had thought the fire was out round his patch, whereas it
+was not, but smouldering in the tussocks of grass, and the wind had
+sprung up that afternoon from a quarter that fanned it up. I said,
+"People should be very careful of fire," and the scorched ladies
+profoundly agreed with me, and said things I will not repeat here,
+regarding "that fool man" and his female ancestors.
+
+The lakes are pools of varying extent and depth, in the bed-rock[6] of
+the island, and the fact that they are surrounded by thick forests on
+every side, and that the dry season is the cool season on the Equator,
+prevents them from drying up.
+
+Most of these lakes are encircled by a rim of rock, from which you jump
+down into knee-deep black slime, and then, if you are a representative
+lady, you waddle, and squeal, and grunt, and skylark generally on your
+way to the water in the middle. If it is a large lake you are working,
+you and your companions drive in two rows of stakes, cutting each other
+more or less at right angles, more or less in the middle of the lake, so
+as to divide it up into convenient portions. Then some ladies with their
+specially shaped baskets form a line, with their backs to the bank, and
+their faces to the water-space, in the enclosure, holding the baskets
+with one rim under water. The others go into the water, and splash with
+hands, and feet, and sticks, and, needless to say, yell hard all the
+time. The naturally alarmed fish fly from them, intent on getting into
+the mud, and are deftly scooped up by the peck by the ladies in their
+baskets. In little lakes the staking is not necessary, but the rest of
+the proceedings are the same. Some of the smaller lakes are too deep to
+be thus fished at all, being, I expect, clefts in the rock, such as you
+see in other parts of the island, sometimes 30 or 40 feet deep.
+
+The usual result of the day's fishing is from twelve to fifteen bushels
+of a common mud-fish,[7] which is very good eating. The spoils are
+divided among the representative ladies, and they take them back to
+their respective villages and distribute them. Then ensues, that same
+evening, a tremendous fish supper, and the fish left over are smoked
+and carefully kept as a delicacy, to make sauce with, &c., until the
+next year's fishing day comes round.
+
+The waters of West Africa, salt, brackish, and fresh abound with fish,
+and many kinds are, if properly cooked, excellent eating. For culinary
+purposes you may divide the fish into sea-fish, lagoon-fish and
+river-fish; the first division, the sea-fish, are excellent eating, and
+are in enormous quantities, particularly along the Windward Coast on the
+Great West African Bank. South of this, at the mouths of the Oil rivers,
+they fall off, from a culinary standpoint, though scientifically they
+increase in charm, as you find hereabouts fishes of extremely early
+types, whose relations have an interesting series of monuments in the
+shape of fossils, in the sandstone; but if primeval man had to live on
+them when they were alive together, I am sorry for him, for he might
+just as well have eaten mud, and better, for then he would not have run
+the risk of getting choked with bones. On the South-West Coast the
+culinary value goes up again; there are found quantities of excellent
+deep-sea fish, and round the mouths of the rivers, shoals of bream and
+grey mullet.
+
+The lagoon-fish are not particularly good, being as a rule supremely
+muddy and bony; they have their uses, however, for I am informed that
+they indicate to Lagos when it may expect an epidemic; to this end they
+die, in an adjacent lagoon, and float about upon its surface, wrong side
+up, until decomposition does its work. Their method of prophecy is a
+sound one, for it demonstrates (_a_) that the lagoon drinking water is
+worse than usual; (_b_) if it is not already fatal they will make it so.
+
+The river-fish of the Gold Coast are better than those of the mud-sewers
+of the Niger Delta, because the Gold Coast rivers are brisk sporting
+streams, with the exception of the Volta, and at a short distance inland
+they come down over rocky rapids with a stiff current. The fish of the
+upper waters of the Delta rivers are better than those down in the
+mangrove-swamp region; and in the South-West Coast rivers, with which I
+am personally well acquainted, the up-river fish are excellent in
+quality, on account of the swift current. I will however leave culinary
+considerations, because cooking is a subject upon which I am liable to
+become diffuse, and we will turn to the consideration of the sporting
+side of fishing.
+
+Now, there is one thing you will always hear the Gold Coaster (white
+variety) grumbling about, "There is no sport." He has only got himself
+to blame. Let him try and introduce the Polynesian practice of swimming
+about in the surf, without his clothes, and with a suitable large, sharp
+knife, slaying sharks--there's no end of sharks on the Gold Coast, and
+no end of surf. The Rivermen have the same complaint, and I may
+recommend that they should try spearing sting-rays, things that run
+sometimes to six feet across the wings, and every inch of them wicked,
+particularly the tail. There is quite enough danger in either sport to
+satisfy a Sir Samuel Baker; for myself, being a nervous, quiet, rational
+individual, a large cat-fish in a small canoe supplies sufficient
+excitement.
+
+The other day I went out for a day's fishing on an African river. I and
+two black men, in a canoe, in company with a round net, three stout
+fishing-lines, three paddles, Dr. Guenther's _Study of Fishes_, some bait
+in an old Morton's boiled-mutton tin, a little manioc, stinking awfully
+(as is its wont), a broken calabash baler, a lot of dirty water to sit
+in, and happy and contented minds. I catalogue these things because
+they are either essential to, or inseparable from, a good day's sport in
+West Africa. Yes, even _I_, ask my vict----friends down there, I feel
+sure they will tell you that they never had such experiences before my
+arrival. I fear they will go on and say, "Never again!" and that it was
+all my fault, which it was not. When things go well they ascribe it, and
+their survival, to Providence or their own precautions; when things are
+merely usual in horror, it's my fault, which is a rank inversion of the
+truth, for it is only when circumstances get beyond my control, and
+Providence takes charge, that accidents happen. I will demonstrate this
+by continuing my narrative. We paddled away, far up a mangrove creek,
+and then went up against the black mud-bank, with its great network of
+grey-white roots, surmounted by the closely-interlaced black-green
+foliage. Absolute silence reigned, as it can only reign in Africa in a
+mangrove swamp. The water-laden air wrapped round us like a warm, wet
+blanket. The big mangrove flies came silently to feed on us and leave
+their progeny behind them in the wounds to do likewise. The stink of the
+mud, strong enough to break a window, mingled fraternally with that of
+the sour manioc.
+
+I was reading, the negroes, always quiet enough when fishing, were
+silently carrying on that great African native industry--scratching
+themselves--so, with our lines over side, life slid away like a
+dreamless sleep, until the middle man hooked a cat-fish. It came on
+board with an awful grunt, right in the middle of us; flop, swish,
+scurry and yell followed; I tucked the study of fishes in general under
+my arm and attended to this individual specimen, shouting "Lef em, lef
+em; hev em for water one time, you sons of unsanctified house
+lizards,"[8] and such like valuable advice and admonition. The man in
+the more remote end of the canoe made an awful swipe at the 3 ft.-long,
+grunting, flopping, yellow-grey, slimy, thing, but never reached it
+owing to the paddle meeting in mid-air with the flying leg of the man in
+front of him, drawing blood profusely. I really fancy, about this time,
+that, barring the cat-fish and myself, the occupants of the canoe were
+standing on their heads, with a view of removing their lower limbs from
+the terrible pectoral and dorsal fins, with which our prey made such
+lively play.
+
+"_Brevi spatio interjecto_," as Caesar says, in the middle of a bad
+battle, over went the canoe, while the cat-fish went off home with the
+line and hook. One black man went to the bank, whither, with a blind
+prescience of our fate, I had flung, a second before, the most valuable
+occupant of the canoe, _The Study of Fishes_. I went personally to
+investigate fluvial deposit _in situ_. When I returned to the
+surface--accompanied by great swirls of mud and great bubbles of the
+gases of decomposition I had liberated on my visit to the bottom of the
+river--I observed the canoe floating bottom upwards, accompanied by
+Morton's tin, the calabash, and the paddles, while on the bank one black
+man was engaged in hauling the other one out by the legs; fortunately
+this one's individual god had seen to it that his toes should become
+entangled in the net, and this floated, and so indicated to his
+companion where he was, when he had dived into the mud and got fairly
+embedded.
+
+Now it's my belief that the most difficult thing in the world is to
+turn over a round-bottomed canoe that is wrong side up, when you are in
+the water with the said canoe. The next most difficult thing is to get
+into the canoe, after accomplishing triumph number one, and had it not
+been for my black friends that afternoon, I should not have done these
+things successfully, and there would be by now another haunted creek in
+West Africa, with a mud and blood bespattered ghost trying for ever to
+turn over the ghost of a little canoe. However, all ended happily. We
+collected all our possessions, except the result of the day's
+fishing--the cat-fish--but we had had as much of him as we wanted, and
+so, adding a thankful mind to our contented ones, went home.
+
+None of us gave a verbatim report of the incident. I held my tongue for
+fear of not being allowed out fishing again, and I heard my men giving a
+fine account of a fearful fight, with accompanying prodigies of valour,
+that we had had with a witch crocodile. I fancy that must have been just
+their way of putting it, because it is not good form to be frightened by
+cat-fish on the West Coast, and I cannot for the life of me remember
+even having seen a witch crocodile that afternoon.
+
+I must, however, own that native methods of fishing are usually safe,
+though I fail to see what I had to do in producing the above accident.
+The usual method of dealing with a cat-fish is to bang him on the head
+with a club, and then break the spiny fins off, for they make nasty
+wounds that are difficult to heal, and very painful.
+
+The native fishing-craft is the dug-out canoe in its various local
+forms. The Accra canoe is a very safe and firm canoe for work of any
+sort except heavy cargo, and it is particularly good for surf; it is,
+however, slower than many other kinds. The canoe that you can get the
+greatest pace out of is undoubtedly the Adooma, which is narrow and
+flat-bottomed, and simply flies over the water. The paddles used vary
+also with locality, and their form is a mere matter of local fashion,
+for they all do their work well. There is the leaf-shaped Kru paddle,
+the trident-shaped Accra, the long-lozenged Niger, and the long-handled,
+small-headed Igalwa paddle; and with each of these forms the native, to
+the manner born, will send his canoe flying along with that unbroken
+sweep I consider the most luxurious and perfect form of motion on earth.
+
+It is when it comes to sailing that the African is inferior. He does not
+sail half as much as he might, but still pretty frequently. The
+materials of which the sails are made vary immensely in different
+places, and the most beautiful are those at Loanda, which are made of
+small grass mats, with fringes, sewn together, and are of a warm, rich
+sand-colour. Next in beauty comes the branch of a palm, or other tree,
+stuck in the bows, and least in beauty is the fisherman's own damaged
+waist-cloth. I remember it used to seem very strange to me at first, to
+see my companion in a canoe take off his clothing and make a sail with
+it, on a wind springing up behind us. The very strangest sail I ever
+sailed under was a black man's blue trousers, they were tied waist
+upwards to a cross-stick, the legs neatly crossed, and secured to the
+thwarts of the canoe. You cannot well tack, or carry out any neat
+sailing evolutions with any of the African sails, particularly with the
+last-named form. The shape of the African sail is almost always in
+appearance a triangle, and fastened to a cross-stick which is secured to
+an upright one. It is not the form, however, that prevents it from being
+handy, but the way it is put up, almost always without sheets, for
+river and lake work, and it is tied together with tie tie--bush rope. If
+you should personally be managing one, and trouble threatens, take my
+advice, and take the mast out one time, and deal with that tie tie
+palaver at your leisure. Never mind what people say about this method
+not being seaman-like--you survive.
+
+     [Illustration: FALLS ON THE TONGUE RIVER.]
+
+     [Illustration: LOANDA CANOE WITH MAT SAILS. [_To face page 101._]
+
+The mat sails used for sea-work are spread by a bamboo sprit. There is a
+single mast, to the head of which the sail is either hoisted by means of
+a small line run through the mast, or, more frequently, made fast with a
+seizing. Such a sail is worked by means of a sheet and a brace on the
+sprit, usually by one man, whose companion steers by a paddle over the
+stern; sometimes, however, one man performs both duties. Now and again
+you will find the luff of the sail bowlined out with another stick. This
+is most common round Sierra Leone.
+
+The appliances for catching fish are, firstly, fish traps, sometimes
+made of hollow logs of trees, with one end left open and the other
+closed. One of these is just dropped alongside the bank, left for a week
+or so, until a fish family makes a home in it, and then it is removed
+with a jerk. Then there are fish-baskets made from split palm-stems tied
+together with tie tie; they are circular and conical, resembling our
+lobster pots and eel baskets, and they are usually baited with lumps of
+kank soaked in palm-oil. Then there are drag nets made of pineapple
+fibre, one edge weighted with stones tied in bunches at intervals; as a
+rule these run ten to twenty-five feet long, but in some places they are
+much longer. The longest I ever saw was when out fishing in the lovely
+harbour of San Paul de Loanda. This was over thirty feet and was
+weighted with bunches of clam shells, and made of European yarn, as
+indeed most nets are when this is procurable by the natives, and it was
+worked by three canoes which were being poled about, as is usual in
+Loanda Harbour. Then there is the universal hook and line, the hook
+either of European make or the simple bent pin of our youth.
+
+But my favourite method, and the one by which I got most of my fish up
+rivers or in creeks is the stockade trap. These are constructed by
+driving in stakes close together, leaving one opening, not in the middle
+of the stockade, but towards the up river end. In tidal waters these
+stockades are visited daily, at nearly low tide, for the high tide
+carries the fish in behind the stockade, and leaves them there on
+falling. Up river, above tide water, the stockades are left for several
+days, in order to allow the fish to congregate. Then the opening is
+closed up, the fisher-women go inside and throw out the water and
+collect the fish. There is another kind of stockade that gives great
+sport. During the wet season the terrific rush of water tears off bits
+of bank in such rivers as the Congo, and Ogowe, where, owing to the
+continual fierce current of fresh water the brackish tide waters do not
+come far up the river, so that the banks are not shielded by a great
+network of mangrove roots. In the Ogowe a good many of the banks are
+composed of a stout clay, and so the pieces torn off hang together, and
+often go sailing out to sea, on the current, waving their bushes, and
+even trees, gallantly in the broad Atlantic, out of sight of land. Bits
+of the Congo Free State are great at seafaring too, and owing to the
+terrific stream of the great Zaire, which spreads a belt of fresh water
+over the surface of the ocean 200 miles from land, ships fall in with
+these floating islands, with their trees still flourishing. The Ogowe
+is not so big as the Congo, but it is a very respectable stream even
+for the great continent of rivers, and it pours into the Atlantic, in
+the wet season, about 1,750,000 cubic feet of fresh water per second, on
+which float some of these islands. But by no means every island gets out
+to sea, many of them get into slack water round corners in the Delta
+region of the Ogowe and remain there, collecting all sorts of _debris_
+that comes down on the flood water, getting matted more and more firm by
+the floating grass, every joint of which grows on the smallest
+opportunity. In many places these floating islands are of considerable
+size; one I heard of was large enough to induce a friend of mine to
+start a coffee plantation on it; unfortunately the wretched thing came
+to pieces when he had cut down its trees and turned the soil up. And one
+I saw in the Karkola river, was a weird affair. It was in the river
+opposite our camp, and very slowly, but perceptibly it went round and
+round in an orbit, although it was about half an acre in extent. A good
+many of these bits of banks do not attain to the honour of becoming
+islands, but get on to sand-banks in their early youth, near a native
+town, to the joy of the inhabitants, who forthwith go off to them, and
+drive round them a stockade of stakes firmly anchoring them. Thousands
+of fishes then congregate round the little island inside the stockade,
+for the rich feeding in among the roots and grass, and the affair is
+left a certain time. Then the entrance to the stockade is firmly closed
+up, and the natives go inside and bale out the water, and catch the fish
+in baskets, tearing the island to pieces, with shouts and squeals of
+exultation. It's messy, but it is amusing, and you get tremendous
+catches.
+
+     [Illustration: ST. PAUL DO LOANDA. [_To face page 102._]
+
+A very large percentage of fish traps are dedicated to the capture of
+shrimp and craw-fish, which the natives value highly when smoked, using
+them to make a sauce for their kank; among these is the shrimp-basket.
+These baskets are tied on sticks laid out in parallel lines of
+considerable extent. They run about three inches in diameter, and their
+length varies with the place that is being worked. The stakes are driven
+into the mud, and to each stake is tied a basket with a line of tie tie,
+the basket acting as a hat to the stake when the tide is ebbing; as the
+tide comes in, it lowers the basket into the current and carries into
+its open end large quantities of shrimps, which get entangled and packed
+by the force of the current into the tapering end of the basket, which
+is sometimes eight or ten feet from the mouth. You can always tell where
+there is a line of these baskets by seeing the line of attendant
+sea-gulls all solemnly arranged with their heads to win'ard, sea-gull
+fashion.
+
+Another device employed in small streams for the capture of either
+craw-fish or small fish is a line of calabashes, or earthen pots with
+narrow mouths; these are tied on to a line, I won't say with tie tie,
+because I have said that irritating word so often, but still you
+understand they are; this line is tied to a tree with more, and carried
+across the stream, sufficiently slack to submerge the pots, and then to
+a tree on the other bank, where it is secured with the same material. A
+fetish charm is then secured to it that will see to it, that any one who
+interferes with the trap, save the rightful owner, will "swell up and
+burst," then the trap is left for the night, the catch being collected
+in the morning.
+
+Single pots, well baited with bits of fish and with a suitable stone in
+to keep them steady, are frequently used alongside the bank. These are
+left for a day or more, and then the owner with great care, crawls
+along the edge of the bank and claps on a lid and secures the prey.
+
+     [Illustration: ROUND A KACONGO CAMP FIRE. [_To face page 105._]
+
+Hand nets of many kinds are used. The most frequent form is the round
+net, weighted all round its outer edge. This is used by one man, and is
+thrown with great deftness and grace, in shallow waters. I suppose one
+may hardly call the long wreaths of palm and palm branches, used by the
+Loango and Kacongo coast native for fishing the surf with, nets, but
+they are most effective. When the Calemma (the surf) is not too bad, two
+or more men will carry this long thick wreath out into it, and then drop
+it and drag it towards the shore. The fish fly in front of it on to the
+beach, where they fall victims to the awaiting ladies, with their
+baskets. Another very quaint set of devices is employed by the Kruboys
+whenever they go to catch their beloved land and shore crabs. I remember
+once thinking I had providentially lighted on a beautiful bit of ju-ju;
+the whole stretch of mud beach had little lights dotted over it on the
+ground. I investigated. They were crab-traps. "Bottle of Beer," "The
+Prince of Wales," "Jane Ann," and "Pancake" had become--by means we will
+not go into here--possessed of bits of candle, and had cut them up and
+put in front of them pieces of wood in an ingenious way. The crab, a
+creature whose intelligence is not sufficiently appreciated, fired with
+a scientific curiosity, went to see what the light was made of, and then
+could not escape, or perhaps did not try to escape, but stood
+spell-bound at the beauty of the light; anyhow, they fell victims to
+their spirit of inquiry. I have also seen drop-traps put for crabs round
+their holes. In this case the sense of the beauty of light in the crab
+is not relied on, and once in he is shut in, and cannot go home and
+communicate the result of his investigations to his family.
+
+Yet, in spite of all these advantages and appliances above cited, I
+grieve to say the West African, all along the Coast, decends to the
+unsportsmanlike trick of poisoning. Certain herbs are bruised and thrown
+into the water, chiefly into lagoons and river-pools. The method is
+effective, but I should doubt whether it is wholesome. These herbs cause
+the fish to rise to the surface stupefied, when they are scooped up with
+a calabash. Other herbs cause the fish to lie at the bottom, also
+stupefied, and the water in the pool is thrown out, and they are
+collected.
+
+More as a pastime than a sport I must class the shooting of the peculiar
+hopping mud-fish by the small boys with bows and arrows, but this is the
+only way you can secure them as they go about star-gazing with their
+eyes on the tops of their heads, instead of attending to baited hooks,
+and their hearing (or whatever it is) is so keen that they bury
+themselves in the mud-banks too rapidly for you to net them. Spearing is
+another very common method of fishing. It is carried on at night, a
+bright light being stuck in the bow of the canoe, while the spearer
+crouching, screens his eyes from the glare with a plantain leaf, and
+drops his long-hafted spear into the fish as they come up to look at the
+light. It is usually the big bream that are caught in this way out in
+the sea, and the carp up in fresh water.
+
+The manners and customs of many West African fishes are quaint. I have
+never yet seen that fish the natives often tell me about that is as big
+as a man, only thicker, and which walks about on its fins at night, in
+the forest, so I cannot vouch for it; nor for that other fish that hates
+the crocodile, and follows her up and destroys her eggs, and now and
+again dedicates itself to its hate, and goes down her throat, and then
+spreads out its spiny fins and kills her.
+
+The fish I know personally are interesting in quieter ways. As for
+instance the strange electrical fish, which sometimes have sufficient
+power to kill a duck and which are much given to congregating in sunken
+boats, causing much trouble when the boat has to be floated again,
+because the natives won't go near them, to bail her out.
+
+Then there is that deeply trying creature the Ning Ning fish, who, when
+you are in some rivers in fresh water and want to have a quiet night's
+rest, just as you have tucked in your mosquito bar carefully and
+successfully, comes alongside and serenades you, until you have to get
+up and throw things at it with a prophetic feeling, amply supported by
+subsequent experience, that hordes of mosquitos are busily ensconcing
+themselves inside your mosquito bar. What makes the Ning Ning--it is
+called after its idiotic song--so maddening is that it never seems to be
+where you have thrown the things at it. You could swear it was close to
+the bow of the canoe when you shied that empty soda-water bottle or that
+ball of your precious indiarubber at it, but instantly comes "ning,
+ning, ning" from the stern of the canoe. It is a ventriloquist or goes
+about in shoals, I do not know which, for the latter and easier
+explanation seems debarred by their not singing in chorus; the
+performance is undoubtedly a solo; any one experienced in this fish soon
+finds out that it is not driven away or destroyed by an artillery of
+missiles, but merely lies low until its victim has got under his
+mosquito curtain, and resettled his mosquito palaver,--and then back it
+comes with its "ning ning."
+
+A similar affliction is the salt-water drum-fish, with its "bum-bum."
+Loanda Harbour abounds with these, and so does Chiloango. In the bright
+moonlight nights I have looked overside and seen these fish in a wreath
+round the canoe, with their silly noses against the side, "bum-bumming"
+away; whether they admire the canoe, or whether they want it to come on
+and fight it out, I do not know, because my knowledge of the different
+kinds of fishes and of their internal affairs is derived from Dr.
+Guenther's great work, and that contains no section on ichthyological
+psychology. The West African natives have, I may say, a great deal of
+very curious information on the thoughts of fishes, but, much as I liked
+those good people, I make it a hard and fast rule to hold on to my
+common-sense and keep my belief for religious purposes when it comes to
+these deductions from natural phenomena--not that I display this mental
+attitude externally, for there is always in their worst and wildest
+fetish notions an underlying element of truth. The fetish of fish is too
+wide a subject to enter on here, it acts well because it gives a close
+season to river and lagoon fish; the natives round Lake Ayzingo, for
+example, saying that if the first fishes that come up into the lake in
+the great dry season are killed, the rest of the shoal turn back, so on
+the arrival of this vanguard they are treated most carefully, talked to
+with "a sweet mouth," and given things. The fishes that form these
+shoals are _Hemichromis fasciatus_ and _Chromis ogowensis_.
+
+I know no more charming way of spending an afternoon than to leisurely
+paddle alone to the edge of the Ogowe sand bank in the dry season, and
+then lie and watch the ways of the water-world below. If you keep quiet,
+the fishes take no notice of you, and go on with their ordinary
+avocations, under your eyes, hunting, and feeding, and playing, and
+fighting, happily and cheerily until one of the dreaded raptorial fishes
+appears upon the scene, and then there is a general scurry. Dreadful
+warriors are the little fishes that haunt sand banks (_Alestis
+Kingsleyae_) and very bold, for when you put your hand down in the water,
+with some crumbs, they first make two or three attempts to frighten it,
+by sidling up at it and butting, but on finding there's no fight in the
+thing, they swagger into the palm of your hand and take what is to be
+got with an air of conquest; but before the supply is exhausted, there
+always arises a row among themselves, and the gallant bulls, some two
+inches long, will spin round and butt each other for a second or so, and
+then spin round again, and flap each other with their tails, their
+little red-edged fins and gill-covers growing crimson with fury. I never
+made out how you counted points in these fights, because no one ever
+seemed a scale the worse after even the most desperate duels.
+
+Most of the West Coast tribes are inveterate fishermen. The Gold Coast
+native regards fishing as a low pursuit, more particularly
+oyster-fishing, or I should say oyster-gathering, for they are collected
+chiefly from the lower branches of the mangrove-trees; this occupation
+is, indeed, regarded as being only fit for women, and among all tribes
+the villages who turn their entire attention to fishing are regarded as
+low down in the social scale. This may arise from fetish reasons, but
+the idea certainly gains support from the conduct of the individual
+fisherman. Do not imagine Brother Anglers, that I am hinting that the
+Gentle Art is bad for the moral nature of people like you and me, but I
+fear it is bad for the African. You see, the African, like most of us,
+can resist anything but temptation--he will resist attempts to reform
+him, attempts to make him tell the truth, attempts to clothe, and keep
+him tidy, &c., and he will resist these powerfully; but give him real
+temptation and he succumbs, without the European preliminary struggle.
+He has by nature a kleptic bias, and you see being out at night fishing,
+he has chances--temptations, of succumbing to this--and so you see a man
+who has left his home at evening with only the intention of spearing
+fish, in his mind, goes home in the morning pretty often with his
+missionary's ducks, his neighbours' plantains, and a few odd trifles
+from the trader's beaches, in his canoe, and the outer world says "Dem
+fisherman, all time, all same for one, with tief man."[9]
+
+The Accras, who are employed right down the whole West Coast, thanks to
+the valuable education given them by the Basel Mission as cooks,
+carpenters, and coopers, cannot resist fishing, let their other
+avocations be what they may. A friend of mine the other day had a new
+Accra cook. The man cooked well, and my friend vaunted himself, and was
+content for the first week. At the beginning of the second week the
+cooking was still good, but somehow or other, there was just the
+suspicion of a smell of fish about the house. The next day the suspicion
+merged into certainty. The third day the smell was insupportable, and
+the atmosphere unfit to support human life, but obviously healthy for
+flies.
+
+The cook was summoned, and asked by Her Britannic Majesty's
+representative "Where that smell came from?" He said he "could not smell
+it, and he did not know." Fourth day, thorough investigation of the
+premises revealed the fact that in the back-yard there was a large
+clothes-horse which had been sent out by my friend's wife to air his
+clothes; this was literally converted into a screen by strings of fish
+in the process of drying, _i.e._, decomposing in the sun.
+
+The affair was eliminated from the domestic circle and cast into the
+Ocean by seasoned natives; and awful torture in this world and the next
+promised to the cook if he should ever again embark in the fish trade.
+The smell gradually faded from the house, but the poor cook, bereaved of
+his beloved pursuit, burst out all over in boils, and took to religious
+mania and drink, and so had to be sent back to Accra, where I hope he
+lives happily, surrounded by his beloved objects.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [6] Specimens of rock identified by the Geological Survey, London, as
+   cretaceous, and said by other geologists up here to be possibly
+   Jurassic.
+
+   [7] _Clarias laviaps._
+
+   [8] Translation: "Leave it alone! Leave it alone! Throw it into the
+   water at once! What did you catch it for?"
+
+   [9] Translation: "All fishermen are thieves."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+FETISH.
+
+     Wherein the student of Fetish determines to make things quite clear
+     this time, with results that any sage knowing the subject and the
+     student would have safely prophesied; to which is added some
+     remarks concerning the position of ancestor worship in West Africa.
+
+
+The final object of all human desire is a knowledge of the nature of
+God. The human methods, or religions, employed to gain this object are
+divisible into three main classes, inspired--
+
+_Firstly_, the submission to and acceptance of a direct divine message.
+
+_Secondly_, the attempt by human intellectual power to separate the
+conception of God from material phenomena, and regard Him as a thing
+apart and unconditioned.
+
+_Thirdly_, the attempt to understand Him as manifest in natural
+phenomena.
+
+I personally am constrained to follow this last and humblest method, and
+accept as its exposition Spinoza's statement of it, "Since without God
+nothing can exist or be conceived, it is evident that all natural
+phenomena involve and express the conception of God, as far as their
+essence and perfection extends. So we have a greater and more perfect
+knowledge of God in proportion to our knowledge of natural phenomena.
+Conversely (since the knowledge of an effect through a cause is the same
+thing as the knowledge of a particular property of a cause), the greater
+our knowledge of natural phenomena the more perfect is our knowledge of
+the essence of God which is the cause of all things."[10] But I have a
+deep respect for all other forms of religion and for all men who truly
+believe, for in them clearly there is this one great desire of the
+knowledge of the nature of God, and "_Ein guter Mensch in seinem dunkeln
+Drange Ist sich des rechten Weges wohl bewuszt._" Nevertheless the most
+tolerant human mind is subject to a feeling of irritation over the
+methods whereby a fellow-creature strives to attain his end,
+particularly if those methods are a sort of heresy to his own, and
+therefore it is a most unpleasant thing for any religious-minded person
+to speak of a religion unless he either profoundly believes or
+disbelieves in it. For, if he does the one, he has the pleasure of
+praise; if he does the other, he has the pleasure of war, but the thing
+in between these is a thing that gives neither pleasure; it is like
+quarrelling with one's own beloved relations. Thus it is with Fetish and
+me. I cannot say I either disbelieve or believe in it, for, on the one
+hand, I clearly see it is a religion of the third class; but, on the
+other, I know that Fetish is a religion that is regarded by my fellow
+white men as the embodiment of all that is lowest and vilest in man--not
+altogether without cause. Before speaking further on it, however, I must
+say what I mean by Fetish, for "the word of late has got ill sorted."
+
+I mean by Fetish the religion of the natives of the Western Coast of
+Africa, where they have not been influenced either by Christianity or
+Mohammedanism. I sincerely wish there were another name than Fetish
+which we could use for it, but the natives have different names for
+their own religion in different districts, and I do not know what other
+general name I could suggest, for I am sure that the other name
+sometimes used in place of Fetish, namely Juju, is, for all the fine
+wild sound of it, only a modification of the French word for toy or
+doll, _joujou_. The French claim to have visited West Africa in the
+fourteenth century, prior to the Portuguese, and whether this claim can
+be sustained on historic evidence or no, it is certain that the French
+have been on the Coast in considerable numbers since the fifteenth
+century, and no doubt have long called the little objects they saw the
+natives valuing so strangely _joujou_, just as I have heard many a
+Frenchman do down there in my time. Therefore, believing Juju to mean
+doll or toy, I do not think it is so true a word as Fetish; and, after
+all, West Africa has a prior right to the use of this word Fetish, for
+it has grown up out of the word _Feitico_ used by the Portuguese
+navigators who rediscovered West Africa with all its wealth and worries
+for modern Europe. These worthy voyagers, noticing the veneration paid
+by Africans to certain objects, trees, fish, idols, and so on, very
+fairly compared these objects with the amulets, talismans, charms, and
+little images of saints they themselves used, and called those things
+similarly used by the Africans _Feitico_, a word derived from the Latin
+_factitius_, in the sense magically artful. Modern French and English
+writers have adopted this word from the Portuguese; but it is a modern
+word in its present use. It is not in Johnson, and the term _Fetichisme_
+was introduced by De Brosses in his remarkable book, _Du Culte des Dieux
+fetiches_, 1760; but doubtless, as Professor Tylor points out, it has
+obtained a great currency from Comte's use of it to denote a general
+theory of primitive religion. Professor Tylor, most unfortunately for us
+who are interested in West African religion, confines the use of the
+word to one department of his theory of animism only--namely to the
+doctrine of spirits embodied in, or attached to, or conveying influence
+through certain material objects.[11]
+
+I do not in the least deny Professor Tylor's right to use the word
+Fetish[12] in that restricted sense in his general study of comparative
+religion. I merely wish to mention that you cannot use it in this
+restricted sense, but want the whole of his grand theory of animism
+wherewith to describe the religion of the West Africans. For although
+there is in that religion a heavy percentage of embodied spirits, there
+is also a heavier percentage of unembodied spirits--spirits that have no
+embodiment in matter and spirits that only occasionally embody
+themselves in matter.
+
+Take, for example, the gods of the Ewe and Tshi.[13] There is amongst
+them Tando, the native high god of Ashantee. He appears to his
+priesthood as a giant, tawny skinned, lank haired, and wearing the
+Ashantee robe. But when visiting the laity, on whom he is exceedingly
+hard, he comes in pestilence and tempest, or, for more individual
+village visitations, as a small and miserable boy, desolate and crying
+for help and kindness, which, when given to him, Tando repays by killing
+off his benefactors and their fellow-villagers with a certain disease.
+This trick, I may remark, is not confined to Tando, for several other
+West African gods use it when sacrifices to them are in arrears; and I
+am certain it is more at the back of outcast children being neglected
+than is either sheer indifference to suffering or cruelty. Because,
+fearing the disease, your native will be far more likely to remember he
+is in debt to the god and go and pay an instalment, than to take in that
+child whom he thinks is the god who has come to punish.
+
+But you have only to look through Ellis's important works, the
+"Tshi-speaking, Ewe-speaking, and Yoruba-speaking peoples of the West
+Coast of Africa," to find many instances of the gods of Fetish who do
+not require a material object to manifest themselves in. And I, while in
+West Africa, have often been struck by incidents that have made this
+point clear to me. When I have been out with native companions after
+nightfall, they pretty nearly always saw an apparition of some sort,
+frequently apparitions of different sorts, in our path ahead. Then came
+a pause, and after they had seen the apparition vanish, on we went--not
+cheerily, however, until we were well past the place where it had been
+seen. This place they closely examined, and decided whether it was an
+Abambo, or Manu, or whatever name these spirit classes had in their
+local language, or whether it was something worse that had been there,
+such as a Sasabonsum or Ombuiri.
+
+They knew which it was from the physical condition of the spot. Either
+there was nothing there but ordinary path stuff; or there was white ash,
+or there was a log or rock, or tree branch, and the reason for the
+different emotion with which they regarded this latter was very simple,
+for it had been an inferior class spirit, one that their charms and
+howled incantations could guard them against. When there was ash, it had
+been a witch destroyed by the medicine they had thrown at it, or a
+medium class spirit they could get protection from "in town." But if "he
+left no ash" the rest of our march was a gloomy one; it was a bad
+business, and unless the Fetish authorities in town chose to explain
+that it was merely a demand for so much white calico, or a goat, &c.,
+some one of our party would certainly get ill.
+
+Well do I remember our greatest terror when out at night on a forest
+path. I believe him to have been a Sasabonsum, but he was very widely
+distributed--that is to say we dreaded him on the forest paths round
+Mungo Mah Lobeh; we confidently expected to meet him round Calabar; and,
+to my disgust, for he was a hindrance, when I thought I had got away
+from his distribution zone, down in the Ogowe region, coming home one
+night with a Fan hunter from Fula to Kangwe, I saw some one coming down
+the path towards us, and my friend threw himself into the dense bush
+beside the path so as to give the figure a wide berth. It was the old
+symptom. You see what we object to in this spirit is that one side of
+him is rotting and putrifying, the other sound and healthy, and it all
+depends on which side of him you touch whether you see the dawn again or
+no. Such being the case, and African bush paths being narrow, this
+spirit helps to make evening walks unpopular, for there are places in
+every bush path where, if you meet him, you must brush against
+him--places where the wet season's rains have made the path a narrow
+ditch, with clay incurved walls above your head--places where the path
+turns sharply round a corner--places where it runs between rock walls.
+Such being the case, the risk of rubbing against his rotting side is
+held to be so great that it is best avoided by staying at home in the
+village with your wives and families, and playing the tom-tom or the
+orchid-fibre-stringed harp, or, if you are a bachelor, sitting in the
+village club-house listening to the old ones talking like retired
+Colonels. Yet however this may be, I should hesitate to call this
+half-rotten individual "a material object." Sometimes we had merry
+laughs after these meetings, for he was only So-and-so from the
+village--it was not him. Sometimes we had cold chills down the back, for
+we lost sight of him; under our eyes he went and he left no ash.
+
+Take again Mbuiri of the Mpongwe, who comes in the form usually of a
+man; or Nkala, who comes as a crab; or the great Nzambi of the
+Fjort--they leave no ash--and so on. This subject of apparition-forms is
+a very interesting one, and requires more investigation. For such gods
+as Nzambi Mpungu do not appear to human beings on earth at all, except
+in tempest and pestilence. The great gods next in order leave no ash.
+The witch, if he or she be destroyed, does leave ash, and the ordinary
+middle and lower class spirits leave the thing they have been in, so
+unaltered by their use of it that no one but a witch doctor can tell
+whether or no it has been possessed by a spirit.
+
+You see therefore Fetish is in a way complex and cannot be got into
+"worship of a material object." There is no worship in West Africa of a
+material not so possessed, for material objects are regarded as in
+themselves so low down in the scale of things that nothing of the human
+grade would dream of worshipping them. Moreover, apart from these
+apparitions, I do not think you can accurately use the word Fetish in
+its restricted sense to include the visions seen by witch-doctors, or
+incantations made of words possessing power in themselves, and yet these
+things are part and parcel of Fetish. In fact, not being a comparative
+ethnologist, but a student of West African religion, I wish to goodness
+those comparative ethnologists would get another word of their own,
+instead of using our own old West Coast one.
+
+It is, however, far easier to state what Fetish is not, than to state
+what it is. Although a Darwinian to the core, I doubt if evolution in a
+neat and tidy perpendicular line, with Fetish at the bottom and
+Christianity at the top, represents the true state of things. It seems
+to me--I have no authority to fortify my position with, so it is only
+me--that things are otherwise in this matter. That there are lines of
+development in religious ideas, and that no form of religious idea is a
+thing restricted to one race, I will grant; but if you will make a
+scientific use of your imagination, most carefully on the lines laid
+down for that exercise by Professor Tyndall, I think you would see that
+the higher form of the Fetish idea is Brahmanism; and that the highest
+possible form it could attain to is shown by two passages in the works
+of absolutely white people to have already been reached,--first in that
+passage from a poem by an author, whose name I have never known, though
+I have known the lines these five-and-twenty years--
+
+          "God of the granite and the rose,
+          Soul of the lily and the bee,
+          The mighty tide of being flows
+          In countless channels, Lord, from Thee.
+          It springs to life in grass and flowers,
+          Through every range of Being runs,
+          And from Creation's mighty towers,
+          Its glory flames in stars and suns"--
+
+and secondly in this statement by Spinoza--"By the help of God, I mean
+the fixed and unchangeable order of nature, or chain of natural events,
+for I have said before and shown elsewhere that the universal laws of
+nature, according to which all things exist and are determined, are only
+another name for the eternal decrees of God, which always involves
+eternal truth and necessity, so that to say everything happens according
+to natural laws, and to say everything is ordained by the decree and
+ordinance of God, is to say the same thing. Now, since the power in
+nature is identical with the power of God, by which alone all things
+happen and are determined, it follows that whatsoever man as a part of
+nature provides himself with to aid and preserve his existence, or
+whatsoever nature affords him without his help, is given him solely by
+the Divine power acting either through human nature or through external
+circumstances. So whatever human nature can furnish itself with by its
+own efforts to preserve its existence may be fitly termed the inward aid
+of God, whereas whatever else accrues to man's profit from outward
+causes may be called the external aid of God."[14]
+
+Now both these utterances are magnificent Fetish, and because I accept
+them as true, I have said I neither believe nor disbelieve in Fetish. I
+could quote many more passages from acknowledged philosophers,
+particularly from Goethe. If you want, for example, to understand the
+position of man in Nature according to Fetish, there is, as far as I
+know, no clearer statement of it made than is made by Goethe in his
+superb _Prometheus_. By all means read it, for you cannot know how
+things really stand until you do.
+
+This was brought home to me very keenly when I was first out in West
+Africa. I had made friends with a distinguished witch doctor, or, more
+correctly speaking, he had made friends with me. I was then living in a
+deserted house the main charm of which was that it was the house that
+Mr. H. M. Stanley had lived in while he was waiting for a boat home
+after his first crossing Africa. This charm had not kept the house tidy,
+and it was a beetlesome place by day, while after nightfall, if you
+wanted to see some of the best insect society in Africa, and have
+regular Walpurgis all round, you had only got to light a lamp; but these
+things were advantageous to an insect collector like myself, therefore I
+lodge no complaint against the firm of traders to whom that house
+belongs. Well, my friend the witch doctor used to call on me, and I
+apologetically confess I first thought his interest in me arose from
+material objects. I wronged that man in thought, as I have many others,
+for one night, about 11 p.m., I heard a pawing at the shutters--my
+African friends don't knock. I got up and opened the door, and there he
+was. I made some observations, which I regret now, about tobacco at that
+time of night, and he said, "No. You be big man, suppose pusson sick?" I
+acknowledged the soft impeachment. "Pusson sick too much; pusson live
+for die. You fit for come?" "Fit," said I. "Suppose you come, you no
+fit to talk?" said he. "No fit," said I, with a shrewd notion it was one
+of my Portuguese friends who was ill and who did not want a blazing
+blister on, a thing that was inevitable if you called in the local
+regular white medical man, so, picking up a medicine-case, I went out
+into the darkness with my darker friend. After getting outside the
+closed ground he led the way towards the forest, and I thought it was
+some one sick at the Roman Catholic mission. On we went down the path
+that might go there; but when we got to where you turn off for it, he
+took no heed, but kept on, and then away up over a low hill and down
+into deeper forest still, I steering by his white cloth. But Africa is
+an alarming place to walk about in at night, both for a witch doctor who
+believes in all his local forest devils, and a lady who believes in all
+the local material ones, so we both got a good deal chipped and frayed
+and frightened one way and another; but nothing worse happened than our
+walking up against a python, which had thoughtfully festooned himself
+across the path, out of the way of ground ants, to sleep off a heavy
+meal. My eminent friend, in the inky darkness and his hurry to reach his
+patient, failed to see this, and went fair up against it. I, being close
+behind, did ditto. Then my leader ducked under the excited festoon and
+went down the path at headlong speed, with me after him, alike terrified
+at losing sight of his guiding cloth and at the python, whom we heard
+going away into the bush with that peculiar-sounding crackle a big snake
+gives when he is badly hurried.
+
+Finally we reached a small bush village, and on the ground before one of
+the huts was the patient extended, surrounded by unavailing, wailing
+women. He was suffering from a disease common in West Africa, but
+amenable to treatment by European drugs, which I gave to the medical
+man, who gave them to his patient with proper incantations and a few
+little things of his own that apparently did not hinder their action. As
+soon as the patient had got relief, my friend saw me home, and when we
+got in, I said, Why did you do this, that and the other, as is usual
+with me, and he sat down, looked far away, and talked for an hour,
+softly, wordily and gently; and the gist of what that man talked was
+Goethe's _Prometheus_. I recognised it after half an hour, and when he
+had done, said, "You got that stuff from a white man." "No, sir," he
+said, "that no be white man fash, that be country fash, white man no fit
+to savee our fash." "Aren't they, my friend?" I said; and we parted for
+the night, I the wiser for it, he the richer.
+
+Now, I pray you, do not think I am saying that there is a "wisdom
+religion" in Fetish, or anything like that, or that Fetish priests are
+Spinozas and Goethes--far from it. All that it seems to me to be is a
+perfectly natural view of Nature, and one that, if you take it up with
+no higher form of mind in you than a shrewd, logical one alone, will, if
+you carry it out, lead you necessarily to paint a white chalk rim round
+one eye, eat your captive, use Woka incantations for diseases, and dance
+and howl all night repeatedly, to the awe of your fellow-believers, and
+the scandal of Mohammedan gentlemen who have a revealed religion.
+
+Moreover, the mind-form which gets hold of this truth that is in all
+things, makes a great difference in the form in which the religion works
+out. For instance, to a superficial observer, it would hardly seem
+possible that a Persian and a Mahdist were followers of the same
+religion, or that a Spaniard and an English Broad Churchman were so.
+And yet it seems to me that it is only this class of difference that
+exists between the African, the Brahmanist, and the Shintoist.
+
+Another and more fundamental point to be considered is the influence of
+physical environment on religions, particularly these Nature religions.
+
+The Semitic mind, which had never been kept quite in its proper place by
+Natural difficulties, gave to man in the scheme of Creation a
+pre-eminence that deeply influences Europeans, who have likewise not
+been kept in their place owing to the environments of the temperate
+zone. On the other hand, the African race has had about the worst set of
+conditions possible to bring out the higher powers of man. He has been
+surrounded by a set of terrific natural phenomena, combined with a good
+food supply and a warm and equable climate. These things are not enough
+in themselves to account for his low-culture condition, but they are
+factors that must be considered. Then, undoubtedly, the nature of the
+African's mind is one of the most important points. It may seem a
+paradox to say of people who are always seeing visions that they are not
+visionaries; but they are not.
+
+The more you know the African, the more you study his laws and
+institutions, the more you must recognise that the main characteristic
+of his intellect is logical, and you see how in all things he uses this
+absolutely sound but narrow thought-form. He is not a dreamer nor a
+doubter; everything is real, very real, horribly real to him. It is
+impossible for me to describe it clearly, but the quality of the African
+mind is strangely uniform. This may seem strange to those who read
+accounts of wild and awful ceremonials, or of the African's terror at
+white man's things; but I believe you will find all people experienced
+in dealing with uncultured Africans will tell you that this alarm and
+brief wave of curiosity is merely external, for the African knows the
+moment he has time to think it over, what that white man's thing really
+is, namely, either a white man's Juju or a devil.
+
+It is this power of being able logically to account for everything that
+is, I believe, at the back of the tremendous permanency of Fetish in
+Africa, and the cause of many of the relapses into it by Africans
+converted to other religions; it is also the explanation of the fact
+that white men who live in districts where death and danger are everyday
+affairs, under a grim pall of boredom, are liable to believe in Fetish,
+though ashamed of so doing. For the African, whose mind has been soaked
+in Fetish during his early most impressionable years, the voice of
+Fetish is almost irresistible when affliction comes on him. Sudden
+dangers or terror he can face with his new religion, because he is not
+quick at thinking. But give him time to think when under the hand of
+adversity, and the old explanation that answered it all comes back. I
+know no more distressing thing than to see an African convert brought
+face to face with that awful thing we are used to, the problem of an
+omnipotent God and a suffering world. This does not worry the African
+convert until it hits him personally in grief and misery. When it does,
+and he turns and calls upon the God he has been taught will listen, pity
+and answer, his use of what the scoffers at the converted African call
+"catch phrases" is horribly heartrending to me, for I know how real,
+terribly real, the whole thing is to him, and I therefore see the
+temptation to return to those old gods--gods from whom he never expected
+pity, presided over by a god that does not care. All that he had to do
+with them was not to irritate them, to propitiate them, to buy their
+services when wanted, and, above all, to dodge and avoid them, while he
+fought it out and managed devils at large. Risky work, but a man is as
+good as a devil any day if he only takes proper care; and even if any
+devil should get him unaware--kill him bodily--he has the satisfaction
+of knowing he will have the power to make it warm for that devil when
+they meet on the other side.
+
+There is something alluring in this, I think, to any make of human mind,
+but particularly so to the logical, intensely human one possessed by the
+West African. Therefore, when wearied and worn out by confronting things
+that he cannot reconcile, and disappointed by unanswered prayers, he
+turns back to his old belief entirely, or modifies the religion he has
+been taught until it fits in with Fetish, and is gradually absorbed by
+it.
+
+It is often asked whether Christianity or Mohammedanism is to possess
+Africa--as if the choice of Fate lay between these two things alone. I
+do not think it is so, at least it is not wise for a mere student to
+ignore the other thing in the affair, Fetish, which is as it were a sea
+wherein all things suffer a sea change. For remember it is not
+Christianity alone that becomes tinged with Fetish, or gets engulfed and
+dominated by it. Islam, when it strikes the true heart of Africa, the
+great Forest Belt region, fares little better though it is more recent
+than Christianity, and though it is preached by men who know the make of
+the African mind. Islam is in its blueth-period now in all the open
+parts, even on the desert regions of Africa from its Mediterranean shore
+to below the Equator, but so far it has beaten up against the Forest
+Belt like a sea on a sand beach. It has crossed the Forest Belt by the
+Lakes, it has penetrated it in channels, but in those channels the
+waters of Islam are, recent as their inroad there is, brackish.
+
+Therefore I make no pretence at prophesying which of these great
+revealed religions will ultimately possess Africa; but it is an
+interesting point to notice what has been the reason of the great power
+of immediate appeal to the African which they both possess.
+
+The African has a great over-God, and below him lesser spirits,
+including man; but the African has not in West Africa, nor so far as I
+have been able to ascertain elsewhere in the whole Continent, a God-man,
+a thing that directly connects man with the great over-God. This thing
+appeals to the African when it is presented to him by Christianity and
+Islam.
+
+It is, I am quite aware, not doctrinally true to say that Islam offers
+him a God-man, nevertheless in Mohammed practically it does so, and that
+too in a more easily believable form--by easily I do not mean that it is
+necessarily true. Moreover it minimises the danger of death in a more
+definite way, more in keeping with his own desires, and it is more
+reconcilable with his conscience in the treatment of life as he has to
+live it. Most of the higher class Africans are traders. Islam gives an
+easier, clearer line of rectitude to a trader than its great rival in
+Africa--under African conditions.
+
+There are many who will question whether conscience is a sufficiently
+large factor in an African mind for us to think of taking it into
+account, but whether you call it conscience, or religious bent, or fear,
+the factor is a large one. An African cannot say, as so many Europeans
+evidently easily can, "Oh, that is all right from a religious point of
+view, but one must be practical, you know"; and it is this factor that
+makes me respect the African deeply and sympathise with him, for I have
+this same unmanageable hindersome thing in my own mind, which you can
+call anything you like; I myself call it honour. Now conscience when
+conditioned by Christianity is an exceedingly difficult thing for a
+trader to manage satisfactorily to himself. A mass of compromises have
+to be made with the world, and a man who is always making compromises
+gets either sick of them or sick of the thing that keeps on nagging at
+him about them, or he becomes merely gaseous-minded all round. There are
+some few in all races of men who can think comfortably
+
+          "That conscience, like a restive horse,
+          Will stumble if you check his course,
+          But ride him with an easy rein,
+          And rub him down with worldly gain,
+          He'll carry you through thick and thin,
+          Safe, although dirty, 'till you win,"
+
+but such men are in Africa a very small minority, and so it falls out
+that most men engaged in trade revert to Fetish, or become lax as Church
+members, or embrace Islam.
+
+I think, if you will consider the case, you will see that the
+workability of Islam is one of the chief reasons of its success in
+Africa. It is, from many African points of view, a most inconvenient
+religion, with its Rahmadhizan, bound every now and again to come in the
+height of the dry season; its restrictions on alcoholic drinks and
+gambling; but, on the whole it is satisfying to the African conscience.
+Moreover, like Christianity, it lifts man into a position of paramount
+importance in Creation. He is the thing God made the rest for. I have
+often heard Africans say, "It does a man good to know God loves him; it
+makes him proud too much." Well, at any rate it is pleasanter than
+Fetish, where man, in company with a host of spirits, is fighting for
+his own hand, in an arena before the gods, eternally.
+
+We will now turn to the consideration of the status of the human soul in
+pure Fetish, that is to say in Fetish that is common to all the
+different schools of West African Fetishism.
+
+What strikes a European when studying it is the lack of gaps between
+things. To the African there is perhaps no gap between the conception of
+spirit and matter, animate or inanimate. It is all an affair of
+grade--not of essential difference in essence. At the head of existence
+are those beings who can work without using matter, either as a constant
+associate or as an occasional tool--do it all themselves, as an African
+would say. Beneath this grade there are many grades of spirits, who
+occasionally or habitually, as in the case of the human grade, are
+associated with matter, and at the lower end of the scale is what we
+call matter, but which I believe the West African regards as the same
+sort of stuff as the rest, only very low--so low that practically it
+doesn't matter; but it is spirits, the things that cause all motion, all
+difficulties, dangers and calamities, that do matter and must be thought
+about, for they are _real_ things whether "they live for thing" or no.
+
+The African and myself are also in a fine fog about form, but I will
+spare you that point, for where that thing comes from, often so quickly
+and silently, and goes, often so quickly and silently, too, under our
+eyes, everlastingly, that thing on which we all so much depend at every
+moment of our lives, that thing we are quite as conscious of as light
+and darkness, heat or cold, yet which makes a thing no heavier in one
+shape than in another,--is altogether too large a subject to touch on
+now. Yet, remember it is a most important part of practical Fetish, for
+on it depends divination and heaps of such like matters, that are parts
+of both the witch doctor and the Fetish priest's daily work.
+
+One of the fundamental doctrines of Fetish is that the connection of a
+certain spirit with a certain mass of matter, a material object, is not
+permanent; the African will point out to you a lightning-stricken tree
+and tell you that its spirit has been killed; he will tell you when the
+cooking pot has gone to bits that it has lost its spirit; if his weapon
+fails it is because some one has stolen or made sick its spirit by means
+of witchcraft. In every action of his daily life he shows you how he
+lives with a great, powerful spirit world around him. You will see him
+before starting out to hunt or fight rubbing medicine into his weapons
+to strengthen the spirits within them, talking to them the while;
+telling them what care he has taken of them, reminding them of the gifts
+he has given them, though those gifts were hard for him to give, and
+begging them in the hour of his dire necessity not to fail him. You will
+see him bending over the face of a river talking to its spirit with
+proper incantations, asking it when it meets a man who is an enemy of
+his to upset his canoe or drown him, or asking it to carry down with it
+some curse to the village below which has angered him, and in a thousand
+other ways he shows you what he believes if you will watch him
+patiently.
+
+It is a very important point in the study of pure Fetish to gain a clear
+conception of this arrangement of things in grades. As far as I have
+gone I think I may say fourteen classes of spirits exist in Fetish. Dr.
+Nassau of Gaboon thinks that the spirits commonly affecting human
+affairs can be classified fairly completely into six classes.[15]
+
+Regarding the Fetish view of the state and condition of the human soul
+there are certain ideas that I think I may safely say are common to the
+various cults of Fetish, both Negro and Bantu, in Western Africa.
+Firstly, the class of spirits that are human souls always remain human
+souls. They do not become deified, nor do they sink in grade. I am aware
+that here I am on dangerous ground so I am speaking carefully.[16] An
+eminent authority, when criticising my statements,[17] dwelt upon their
+heterodoxy on this point, saying however, "We may throw out the
+conjecture that in remote and obscure West Africa men do not reach the
+necessary pitch of renown for mighty deeds or sanctity that qualifies
+them in larger countries for elevation after death to high places among
+recognised divinities."
+
+This conjecture I quite accept as an explanation of the non-deification
+of human beings in West Africa, and I think, taken in conjunction with
+the grade conception, it fairly explains why West Africa has not what
+undoubtedly other regions of the world have in their religions, deified
+ancestors.
+
+After having had my attention drawn to the strangeness of this
+non-deification of ancestors, I did my best to work the subject out in
+order to see if by any chance I had badly observed it. I consulted the
+accounts of West African religions given by Labat, Bosman, Bastian and
+Ellis, and to my great pleasure found that the three first said nothing
+against my statements, and that Sir A. B. Ellis had himself said the
+same thing in his _Ewe Speaking People_. Moreover, I sent a circular
+written on this point to people in West Africa whom I knew had
+opportunities of knowing the facts as at present existing,--the answers
+were unanimous with Ellis and myself.
+
+Nevertheless, mind, you will find something that looks like worship of
+ancestors in West Africa. Only it is no more worship, properly so
+called, than our own deference to our living, elderly, and influential
+relations.
+
+In almost all Western African districts (it naturally does not show
+clearly in those where reincarnation is believed to be the common and
+immediate lot of all human spirits) is a class of spirits called "the
+well disposed ones," and this class is clearly differentiated from
+"them," the generic name used for non-human spirits. These "well
+disposed ones" are ancestors, and they do what they can to benefit their
+particular village or family, acting in conjunction with the village or
+family Fetish, who is not a human spirit, nor an ancestor. But the
+things given to ancestors are gifts, not in the proper sense of the word
+sacrifices, for the well disposed ones are not gods even of the rank of
+a Sasabonsum or an Ombuiri.
+
+In an extremely interesting answer to my inquiries that I received from
+Mr. J. H. Batty, of Cape Coast, who had kindly submitted my questions to
+a native gentleman well versed in affairs, the statement regarding
+ancestors is, "The people believe that the spirits of their departed
+relations exercise a guardian care over them, and they will frequently
+stand over the graves of their deceased friends and invoke their
+spirits to protect them and their children from harm. It is imagined
+that the spirit lingers about the house some time after death. If the
+children are ill the illness is ascribed to the spirit of the deceased
+mother having embraced them. Elderly women are often heard to offer up a
+kind of prayer to the spirit of a departed parent, begging it either to
+go to its rest, or to protect the family by keeping off evil spirits,
+instead of injuring the children or other members of the family by its
+touch. The ghosts of departed enemies are considered by the people as
+bad spirits, who have power to injure them."
+
+In connection with this fear of the ancestor's ghost hurting members of
+its own family, particularly children, I may remark it has several times
+been carefully explained to me that this "touching" comes not from
+malevolence, but from loneliness and the desire to have their company. A
+sentimental but inconvenient desire that the living human cannot give in
+to perpetually, though big men will accede to their ancestor's desire
+for society by killing off people who may serve or cheer him. This
+desire for companionship is of course immensely greater in the spirit
+that is not definitely settled in the society of spiritdom, and it is
+therefore more dangerous to its own belongings, in fact to all living
+society, while it is hanging about the other side of the grave, but this
+side of Hades. Thus I well remember a delicious row that arose primarily
+out of trade matters, but which caused one family to yell at another
+family divers remarks, ending up with the accusation, "You
+good-for-nothing illegitimate offspring of house lizards, you don't bury
+your ditto ditto dead relations, but leave them knocking about anyhow, a
+curse to Calabar." Naturally therefore the spirit of a dead enemy is
+feared because it would touch for the purpose of getting spirit slaves;
+therefore it follows that powerful ancestors are valued when they are on
+the other side, for they can keep off the dead enemies. A great chief's
+spirit is a thoroughly useful thing for a village to keep going, and in
+good order, for it conquered those who are among the dead with it, and
+can keep them under, keep them from aiding their people in the fights
+between its living relations and itself and them, with its slave spirit
+army. I ought to say that it is customary for the living to send the
+dead out ahead of the army, to bear the brunt in the first attack.
+
+Ancestor-esteem you will find at its highest pitch in West Africa under
+the school of Fetish that rules the Tshi and Ewe peoples. Ellis gives
+you a full description of it for Ashanti and Dahomey.[18] The next
+district going down coast is the Yoruba one; but Yoruba has been so long
+under the influence of Mahometanism that its Fetish, judging from
+Ellis's statement in his _Yoruba Speaking People_, is deeply tinged with
+it. I have no personal acquaintance with Yorubaland, but have no
+hesitation for myself in accepting his statements from the accuracy I
+have found them, by personal experience with Tshi and Ewe people, to
+possess. Below Yoruba comes a district, the Oil Rivers, where, alas,
+Ellis did not penetrate, and where no ethnologist, unless you will
+graciously extend the term to me, has ever cautiously worked.
+
+In this district you have a school where reincarnation is strongly
+believed in, a different school of Fetish to that of Tshi and Ewe, a
+class of human ghosts called the well-disposed ones. And these are
+ancestors undoubtedly. They do not show up clearly in those districts
+where reincarnation is believed to be the common lot of all human
+souls. Nevertheless, they are clear enough even there, as I will
+presently attempt to explain.
+
+These ancestor spirits have things given to them for their consolation
+and support, and in return they do what they can to benefit and guard
+their own villages and families. Nevertheless, the things given to the
+well-disposed ones are not as things sacrificed to gods. Nor are the
+well-disposed ones gods, even of the grade of a Sasabonsum or an
+Ombuiri. It is a low down thing to dig up your father--i.e., open his
+grave and take away the things in it that have been given him. It will
+get you cut by respectable people, and rude people when there is a
+market-place row on will mention it freely; but it won't bring on a
+devastating outbreak of small-pox in the whole district.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [10] Of the Divine Law, _Tractatus Theologico Politicus_, Spinoza.
+
+   [11] _Primitive Culture_, E. B. Tylor, p. 144.
+
+   [12] Professor Tylor kindly allowed me to place this statement before
+   him, and he says that as the word Fetish, with the sense of the use
+   of bones, claws, stones, and such objects as receptacles of spiritual
+   influences, has had nearly two centuries of established usage, it
+   would not be easy to set it aside, and he advises me to use the term
+   West African religion, or in some way make my meaning clear without
+   expecting to upset the established nomenclature of comparative
+   ethnology.
+
+   [13] This word is pronounced by the natives and by people knowing them,
+   Cheuwe, as Ellis undoubtedly knew, but presumably he spelt it Tshi to
+   please the authorities.
+
+   [14] _The Vocation of the Hebrews_, Spinoza.
+
+   [15] See _Travels in West Africa_, by M. H. Kingsley. Macmillan & Co.
+   1897.
+
+   [16] For further details see _Travels in West Africa_, p. 444.
+
+   [17] "Origins and Interpretations of Primitive Religions." _Edinburgh
+   Review_, July, 1897, p. 219.
+
+   [18] _The Tshi Speaking, Ewe Speaking and Yoruba Speaking People of
+   West Africa._--A. B. Ellis.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+SCHOOLS OF FETISH
+
+     Wherein the student, thinking things may be made clearer if it be
+     perceived that there are divers schools of Fetish, discourses on
+     the schools of West African religious thought.
+
+
+As I have had occasion to refer to schools of Fetish, and as that is a
+term of my own, I must explain why I use it, and what I mean by it, in
+so far as I am able. When travelling from district to district you
+cannot fail to be struck by the difference in character of the native
+religion you are studying. My own range on the West Coast is from Sierra
+Leone to Loanda; and here and there in places such as the Oil Rivers,
+the Ogowe, and the Lower Congo, I have gone inland into the heart of
+what I knew to be particularly rich districts for an ethnologist. I make
+no pretence to a thorough knowledge of African Fetish in all its
+schools, but I feel sure no wandering student of the subject in Western
+Africa can avoid recognising the existence of at least four distinct
+forms of development of the Fetish idea. They have, every one of them,
+the underlying idea I have attempted to sketch as pure Fetish when
+speaking of the position of the human soul; and yet they differ. And I
+believe much of the confusion which is supposed to exist in African
+religious ideas is a confusion only existing in the minds of cabinet
+ethnologists from a want of recognition of the fact of the existence of
+these schools.
+
+     [Illustration: FANTEE NATIVES OF THE GOLD COAST.
+                     [_To face page 137._]
+
+For example, suppose you take a few facts from Ellis and a few from
+Bastian and mix, and call the mixture West African religion, you do much
+the same sort of thing as if you took bits from Mr. Spurgeon's works,
+and from those of some eminent Jesuit and of a sound Greek churchman,
+and mixed them and labelled it European religion. The bits would be all
+right in themselves, but the mixture would be a quaint affair.
+
+As far as my present knowledge of the matter goes, I should state that
+there were four main schools of West African Fetish: (1) the Tshi and
+Ewe school, Ellis' school; (2) the Calabar school; (3) the Mpongwe
+school; (4) Nkissism or the Fjort school. Subdivisions of these schools
+can easily be made, but I only make the divisions on the different main
+objects of worship, or more properly speaking, the thing each school
+especially endeavours to secure for man. The Tshi and Ewe school is
+mainly concerned with the preservation of life; the Calabar school with
+attempting to enable the soul successfully to pass through death; the
+Mpongwe school with the attainment of material prosperity; while the
+school of Nkissi is mainly concerned with the worship of the mystery of
+the power of Earth--Nkissi-nsi. You will find these divers things
+worshipped, or, rather, I would say cultivated, in all the schools of
+Fetish, but in certain schools certain ideas are predominant. Look at
+Srahmantin of the Tshi people, and at Nzambi of the Fjort. Both these
+ladies know where the animals go to drink, what they say to each other,
+where their towns are, and what not; also they both know what the
+forest says to the wind and the rain, and all the forests' own small
+talk in the bargain, and, therefore, also the inner nature of all these
+things; and both, like other ladies, I have heard prefer gentlemen's
+society. Women they have a tendency to be hard on, but either Srahmantin
+or Nzambi think nothing of taking up a man's time, making him neglect
+his business or his family affairs, or both together, by keeping him in
+the bush for a month or so at a time, teaching him things about
+medicines, and finally sending him back into town in so addlepated a
+condition that for months he hardly knows who he exactly is. When he
+comes round, however, if he has any sense, he sets up in business as a
+medical man; sometimes, however, he just remains merely crackey. Such a
+man was my esteemed Kefalla.
+
+But look how different under different schools is the position of
+Srahmantin and Nzambi. Srahmantin is only propitiated by doctors and
+hunters; by all respectable, busy, family men forced to go through
+forests, she is simply dreaded, while Nzambi, the great Princess,
+entirely dominates the whole school of Nkissism.
+
+From what cause or what series of causes the predominance of these
+different things has come, I do not know, unless it be from different
+natural environment and different race. It is certainly not a mere
+tribal affair, for there are many different tribes under each school.
+For example, I do not think you need make more than a subdivision
+between the Tshi, the Ga or Ogi and the Ewe peoples' Fetish, nor more
+than a subdivision between those of the Eboes and the Ibbibios, or those
+of the Fjort and Mussurongoes; but we want more information before it
+would be quite safe to dogmatise.
+
+It is impossible in the present state of our knowledge to give exact
+geographical limits of the different schools of Fetish, and I therefore
+only sketch their geographical distribution in Western Africa, from
+Sierra Leone to Loanda, hoping thereby to incite further research.
+
+Sierra Leone and its adjacent districts have not been studied by an
+ethnologist. We have only scattered information regarding the religion
+there; and unfortunately the observations we have on it mainly bear on
+the operations of the secret societies, which in these regions have
+attained to much power, and are usually though erroneously grouped under
+the name of Poorah. Poorah, like all secret societies, is intensely
+interesting, for it is the manifestation of the law form of Fetish; but
+secret societies are pure Fetish, and common to all districts. All that
+we can gather from the scattered observations on the rest of the Fetish
+in this region is that it is allied to the Fetish school of the
+Tshi-speaking people.
+
+Next to this unobserved district, we come to the well-observed districts
+of the Tshi, Ewe, and Yoruba-speaking people--Ellis's region.
+
+It may seem unwise for me to attempt to group these three together and
+call them one school, because from this one district we have two
+distinct cults of Fetish in the West Indies, Voudou and Obeah (Tchanga
+and Wanga). Voudou itself is divided into two sects, the white and the
+red--the first, a comparatively harmless one, requiring only the
+sacrifice of, at the most, a white cock or a white goat, whereas the red
+cult only uses the human sacrifice--the goat without horns. Obeah, on
+the other hand, kills only by poison--does not show the blood at all.
+And there is another important difference between Voudou and Obeah, and
+that is that Voudou requires for the celebration of its rites a
+priestess and a priest. Obeah can be worked by either alone, and is not
+tied to the presence of the snake. Both these cults have sprung from
+slaves imported from Ellis's district, Obeah from slaves bought at
+Koromantin mainly, and Voudou from those bought at Dahomey.
+Nevertheless, it seems to me these good people have differentiated their
+religion in the West Indies considerably; for example, in Obeah the
+spider (_anansi_) has a position given it equal to that of the snake in
+Voudou. Now the spider is all very well in West Africa; round him there
+has grown a series of most amusing stories, always to be told through
+the nose, and while you crawl about; but to put him on a plane with the
+snake in Dahomey is absurd; his equivalent there is the turtle, also a
+focus for many tales, only more improper tales, and not half so amusing.
+
+The true importance and status of the snake in Dahomey is a thing hard
+to fix. Personally I believe it to be merely a case of especial
+development of a local ju-ju. We all know what the snake signifies, and
+instances of its attaining a local eminence occur elsewhere. At Creek
+Town, in Calabar, and Brass River it is more than respected. It is an
+accidental result of some bit of history we have lost, like the worship
+of the crocodile at Dixcove and in the Lower Congo. Whereas it is clear
+that the general respect, amounting to seeming worship, of the leopard
+is another affair altogether, for the leopard is the great thing in all
+West African forests, and forests and surf are the great things in
+Western Africa--the lines of perpetual danger to the life of man.
+
+     [Illustration: YORUBA. [_To face page 141._]
+
+But there is a remarkable point that you cannot fail to notice in the
+Fetish of these three divisions of true Negro Fetish studied by
+Ellis, namely, that what is one god in Yoruba you get as several gods
+exercising one particular function in Dahomey, as hundreds of gods on
+the Gold Coast. Moreover, all these gods in all these districts have
+regular priests and priestesses in dozens, while below Yoruba regular
+priests and priestesses are rare. There the officials of the law
+societies abound, and there are Fetish men, but these are different
+people to the priests of Bohorwissi and Tando.
+
+I do not know Yoruba land personally, but have had many opportunities of
+inquiring regarding its Fetish from educated and uneducated natives of
+that country whom I have met down Coast as traders and artisans.
+Therefore, having found nothing to militate against Ellis's statements,
+I accept them for Yoruba as for Dahomey and the Gold Coast; and my great
+regret is that his careful researches did not extend down into the
+district below Yoruba--the district I class under the Calabar
+school--more particularly so because the districts he worked at are all
+districts where there has been a great and long-continued infusion of
+both European and Mohammedan forms of thought, owing to the
+four-hundred-year-old European intercourse on the seaboard, and the even
+older and greater Mohammedan influence from the Western Soudan; whereas
+below these districts you come to a region of pure Negro Fetish that has
+undergone but little infusion of alien thought.
+
+Whether or no to place Benin with Yoruba or with Calabar is a problem.
+There is, no doubt, a very close connection between it and Yoruba. There
+is also no doubt that Benin was in touch, even as late as the
+seventeenth century, with some kingdom of the higher culture away in the
+interior. It may have been Abyssinia, or it may have been one of the
+cultured states that the chaos produced by the Mohammedan invasion of
+the Soudan destroyed. In our present state of knowledge we can only
+conjecture, I venture to think, idly, until we know more. The only thing
+that is certain is that Benin was influenced as is shown by its art
+development. Benin practically broke up long before Ashantee or Dahomey,
+for, as Proyart[19] remarks, "many small kingdoms or native states which
+at the present day share Africa among them were originally provinces
+dependent on other kingdoms, the particular governors of which usurped
+the sovereignty." Benin's north-western provinces seem to have done
+this, possibly with the assistance of the Mohammedanised people who came
+down to the seaboard seeking the advantages of white trade; and Benin
+became isolated in its forest swamps, cut off from the stimulating
+influence of successful wars, and out of touch with the expanding
+influence of commerce, and devoted its attention too much to Fetish
+matters to be healthy for itself or any one who fell in with it. It is
+an interesting point in this connection to observe that we do not find
+in the accounts given by the earlier voyagers to Benin city anything
+like the enormous sacrifice of human life described by visitors to it of
+our own time. Other districts round Calabar, Bonny, Opobo, and so on,
+have human sacrifice as well, but they show no signs of being under
+Benin in trade matters, in which Benin used to be very strict when it
+had the chance. In fact, whatever respect they had for Benin was a
+sentimental one, such as the King of Kongo has, and does not take the
+practical form of paying taxes.
+
+The extent of the direct influence of Benin away into the forest belt to
+the east and south I do not think at any time was great. Benin was
+respected because it was regarded as possessing a big Fetish and great
+riches. In recent years it was regarded by people discontented with
+white men as their great hope, from its power to resist these being
+greater than their own. Nevertheless, the adjacent kingdom of Owarie
+(Warri), even in the sixteenth century, was an independent kingdom. So
+different was its Fetish from that of Benin that Warri had not then, and
+has not to this day, human sacrifice in its religious observances, only
+judicial and funeral killings.
+
+Considering how very easily Africans superficially adopt the religious
+ideas of alien people with whom they have commercial intercourse, we
+must presume that the people who imported the art of working in metals
+into Benin also imported some of their religion. The relics of religion,
+alien to Fetish, that show in Benin Fetish are undoubtedly Christian.
+Whether these relics are entirely those of the Portuguese Roman Catholic
+missions, or are not also relics of some earlier Christian intercourse
+with Western Soudan Christianised states existing prior to the
+Mohammedan invasion of Northern Africa, is again a matter on which we
+require more information. But just as I believe some of the metal
+articles found in Benin to be things made in Birmingham, some to be old
+Portuguese, some to be native castings, copies of things imported from
+that unknown inland state, and some to be the original inland state
+articles themselves, so do I believe the relics of Christianity in the
+Fetish to be varied in origin, all alike suffering absorption by the
+native Fetish.
+
+There is no doubt that up to the last twenty years the three great
+Fetish kings in Western Africa were those of Ashantee, Dahomey, and
+Benin. Each of these kings was alike believed by the whole of the people
+to have great Fetish power in his own locality. In the time of which we
+have no historical record--prior to the visits of the first white
+voyagers in the fifteenth century--there is traditional record of the
+King of Benin fighting with his cousin of Dahomey. Possibly Dahomey beat
+him badly; anyhow something went seriously wrong with Benin as a
+territorial kingdom, before its discovery by modern Europe.
+
+I now turn to the Fetish of the Oil Rivers which I have called the
+Calabar school. The predominance of the belief there in reincarnation
+seems to me sufficient to separate it from the Gold Coast and Dahomey
+Fetish. Funeral customs, important in all Negro Fetish, become in the
+Calabar school exceedingly so. A certain amount of care anywhere is
+necessary to successfully establish the human soul after death, for the
+human soul strongly objects to leaving material pleasures and
+associations and going to, at best, an uninteresting under-world; but
+when you have not only got to send the soul down, but to bring it back
+into the human form again, and not any human form at that, but one of
+its own social status and family, the thing becomes more complicated
+still; and to do it so engrosses human attention, and so absorbs human
+wealth, that you do not find under the Calabar school a multitude of
+priest-served gods as you do in Dahomey and on the Gold Coast. Mind you,
+so far as I could make out while in the Calabar districts myself, the
+equivalents of those same gods, were quite believed in; but they were
+neglected in a way that would have caused them in Dahomey, where they
+have been taught to fancy themselves to wreck the place. Not only is
+care taken to send a soul down, but means are taken to see whether or no
+it has duly returned; for keeping a valuable soul, like that of a great
+Fetish proficient who could manage outside spirits, or that of a good
+trader, is a matter of vital importance to the prosperity of the Houses,
+so when such a soul has left the House in consequence of some sad
+accident or another, or some vile witchcraft, the babies that arrive to
+the House are closely watched. Assortments of articles belonging to
+deceased members of the house are presented to it, and then, according
+to the one it picks out, it is decided who that baby really is--See,
+Uncle so-and-so knows his own pipe, &c.--and I have often heard a mother
+reproaching a child for some fault say, "Oh, we made a big mistake when
+we thought you were so-and-so." I must say I think the absence of the
+idea of the deification of ancestors in West Africa shows up
+particularly strongly in the Calabar school, for herein you see so
+clearly that the dead do not pass into a higher, happier state--that the
+soul separate from the body is only a part of that thing we call a human
+being, and in West Africa the whole is greater than a part, even in this
+matter.
+
+     [Illustration: A CALABAR CHIEF. [_To face page 145._]
+
+The pathos of the thing, when you have grasped the underlying idea, is
+so deep that the strangeness of it passes away, and you almost forget to
+hate the horrors of the slaughter that hang round Oil River funeral
+customs, or, at any rate, you understand the tenacity you meet with here
+of the right to carry out killing at funerals, a greater tenacity than
+confronted us in Gold Coast or Dahomey regions, because a different idea
+is involved in the affair. On the Gold Coast, for example, you can
+substitute wealth for the actual human victim, because with wealth the
+dead soul could, after all, make itself comfortable in Srahmandazi, but
+not so in the Rivers. Without slaves, wives, and funds, how can the dead
+soul you care for speak with the weight of testimony of men as to its
+resting place or position? Rolls of velvet or satin, and piles of
+manillas or doubloons alone cannot speak; besides, they may have been
+stolen stuff, and the soul you care for may be put down by the
+authorities as a mere thieving slave, a sort of mere American gold bug
+trying to pass himself off as a duke--or a descendant of General
+Washington--which would lead to that soul being disgraced and sent back
+in a vile form. Think how you yourself, if in comfortable circumstances,
+belonging to a family possessing wealth and power, would like father,
+mother, sister, or brother of yours who by this change of death had just
+left these things, to go down through death, and come back into life in
+a squalid slum!
+
+We meet in this school, however, with a serious problem--namely, what
+does become of dead chiefs? It is a point I will not dogmatise on, but
+it certainly looks as if the Calabar under-world was a most aristocratic
+spot, peopled entirely by important chiefs and the retinues sent down
+with them--by no means having the fine mixed society of Srahmandazi.
+
+The Oil River deceased chief is clearly kept as a sort of pensioner. The
+chief who succeeds him in his headship of the House is given to "making
+his father" annually. It is not necessarily his real father that he
+makes, but his predecessor in the headmanship--a slave succeeding to a
+free man would "make his father" to the dead free man, and so on. This
+function undoubtedly consists in sending his predecessor a big subsidy
+for his support, and consolation in the shape of slaves and goods. I may
+as well own I have long had a dark suspicion regarding this matter--a
+suspicion as to where those goods went. Their proper destination, of
+course, should be the under-world. Thither undoubtedly on the Gold Coast
+they would go; but when sent in the Rivers I do not think they go so
+far. In fact, to make a clean breast of it, I do not believe big chiefs
+are properly buried in the Oil Rivers at all. I think they are, for
+political purposes, kept hanging about outside life, but not inside
+death, by their diplomatic successors. I feel emboldened to say this by
+what my friend, Major Leonard, Vice-Consul of the Niger Coast
+Protectorate, recently told me. When he was appointed Vice-Consul, and
+was introducing himself to his chiefs in this capacity, one chief he
+visited went aside to a deserted house, opened the door, and talked to
+somebody inside; there was not any one in material form inside, only the
+spirit of his deceased predecessor, and all the things left just as they
+were when he died; the live chief was telling the dead chief that the
+new Consul was come, &c.
+
+The reason, that is the excuse, for this seemingly unprincipled conduct
+in not properly burying the chief, so that he may be reincarnated to a
+complete human form, lies in the fact that he would be a political
+nuisance to his successor if he came back promptly; therefore he is kept
+waiting.
+
+From first-class native informants I have had fragments of accounts of
+making-father ceremonies. Particularly interesting have been their
+accounts of what the live chief says to the dead one. Much of it, of
+course, is, for diplomatic reasons, not known outside official circles.
+But the general tone of these communications is well known to be of a
+nature to discourage the dead chief from returning, and to reconcile
+him to his existing state. Things are not what they were here. The price
+of oil is down, women are ten times more frivolous, slaves ten times
+more trying, white Consul men abound, also their guns are more deadly
+than of old, this new Consul looks worse than the last, there is nothing
+but war and worry for a chief nowadays. The whole country is going to
+the dogs financially and domestically, in fact, and you are much better
+off where you are. Then come petitions for such help as the ghost chief
+and his ghost retinue can give.
+
+This, I think, explains why chiefs' funeral customs in the Rivers differ
+in kind, not merely in grade, from those of big trade boys or other
+important people, and also accounts for their repetition at intervals.
+Big trade boys, and the slaves and women sent down with them, return to
+a full human form more or less promptly; mere low grade slaves, slaves
+that cannot pull a canoe, _i.e._, provide a war canoe for the service of
+the House out of their own private estate, are not buried at all--they
+are thrown away, unless they have a mother who will bury them. They will
+come back again all right as slaves, but then that is all they are fit
+for.
+
+Then we have left very interesting sections of the community to consider
+from a funeral rite point of view--namely, those in human form who are
+not, strictly speaking, human beings, and those who, though human, have
+committed adultery with spirits--women who bear twins or who die in
+child-birth. These sinners, I may briefly remark, are neither buried nor
+just thrown away; they are, as far as possible, destroyed. But with the
+former class the matter is slightly different. Children, for example,
+that arrive with ready cut teeth, will in a strict family be killed or
+thrown away in the bush to die as they please; but the feeling against
+them is not really keen. They may, if the mother chooses to be bothered
+with them, be reared; but the interesting point is that any property
+they may acquire during life has no legal heir whatsoever. It must be
+dissipated, thrown away. This shows clearly that such individuals are
+not human, and, moreover, they are not buried nor destroyed at death;
+they are just thrown away. There is no particular harm in them as there
+is in the sin-stained twins.
+
+The only class in West Africa I have found that are like these spirit
+humans is that strange class, the minstrels. I wish I knew more about
+these people. Were it not that Mr. F. Swanzy possesses material evidence
+of their existence, in the shape of the most superb song-net, I should
+hesitate to mention them at all. Some of my French friends, however,
+tell me they have seen them in Senegal, and I venture to think that
+region must be their headquarters. I have seen one in Accra, one in
+Sierra Leone, two on board steamers, and one in Buana town, Cameroon.
+Briefly, these are minstrels who frequent market towns, and for a fee
+sing stories. Each minstrel has a song-net--a strongly made net of a
+fishing net sort. On to this net are tied all manner and sorts of
+things, pythons' back bones, tobacco pipes, bits of china, feathers,
+bits of hide, birds' heads, reptiles' heads, bones, &c., &c., and to
+every one of these objects hangs a tale. You see your minstrel's net,
+you select an object and say how much that song. He names an exorbitant
+price; you haggle; no good. He won't be reasonable, say over the python
+bone, so you price the tobacco pipe--more haggle; finally you settle on
+some object and its price, and sit down on your heels and listen with
+rapt attention to the song, or, rather, chant. You usually have
+another. You sort of dissipate in novels, in fact. I do not say it's
+quiet reading, because unprincipled people will come headlong and listen
+when you have got your minstrel started, without paying their
+subscription. Hence a row, unless you are, like me, indifferent to other
+people having a little pleasure.
+
+These song-nets, I may remark, are not of a regulation size. I have
+never seen on the West Coast anything like so superb a collection of
+stories as Mr. Swanzy has tied on that song-net of his--Woe is me!
+without the translating minstrel, a cycle of dead songs that must have
+belonged to a West African Shakespeare. The most impressive song-net
+that I saw was the one at Buana. Its owner I called Homer on the spot,
+because his works were a terrific two. Tied on to his small net were a
+human hand and a human jaw bone. They were his only songs. I heard them
+both regardless of expense. I did not understand them, because I did not
+know his language; but they were fascinating things, and the human hand
+one had a passage in it which caused the singer to crawl on his hands
+and knees, round and round, stealthily looking this side and that,
+giving the peculiar leopard questing cough, and making the leopard mark
+on the earth with his doubled-up fist. Ah! that was something like a
+song! It would have roused a rock to enthusiasm; a civilised audience
+would have smothered its singer with bouquets. I--well, the headman with
+me had to interfere and counsel moderation in heads of tobacco.
+
+But what I meant to say about these singers was only this. They are not
+buried as other people are; they are put into trees when they are
+dead--may be because they are "all same for one" with those singers the
+birds. I do not know, I only hope Homer is still extant, and that
+some more intelligent hearer than I will meet with him.
+
+     [Illustration: NATIVES OF GABOON. [_To face page 151._]
+
+The southern boundary of the Calabar school of Fetish lies in narrower
+regions than the boundary between it and Ellis's school in the north. I
+venture to think that this may in a measure arise from there being in
+the southern region the additional element of difference of race. For
+immediately below Calabar in the Cameroon territory the true Negro meets
+the Bantu. In Cameroon in the tribes of the Dualla stem we have a people
+speaking a Bantu language, and having a Bantu culture, yet nevertheless
+having a great infusion of pure Negro blood, and largely under the
+dominion of the true Negro thought form.
+
+I own that of all the schools of Fetish that I know, the Calabar school
+is the one that fascinates me most. I like it better than Ellis's
+school, wherein the fate of the soul after death is a life in a shadow
+land, with shadows for friends, lovers, and kinsfolk, with the shadows
+of joys for pleasures, the shadows of quarrels for hate--a thing that at
+its best is inferior to the wretchedest full-life on earth. Yet this
+settled shadow-land of Srahmandazi or Gboohiadse is a better thing than
+the homeless drifting state of the soul in the school below
+Calabar--namely, the school I have ventured to term the Mpongwe school.
+To the brief consideration of this school we will now turn.
+
+In between the strongly-marked Calabar school and the strongly-marked
+school of Nkissism of Loango Kacongo, and Bas Congo there exists a
+school plainly differing from both. This region is interesting for many
+reasons, chief amongst which is that it is the sea-board region of the
+great African Forest belt. Tribe after tribe come down into it, flourish
+awhile, and die, uninfluenced by Mohammedan or European culture. The
+Mohammedans in Africa as aforesaid have never mastered the western
+region of the forest belt; and the Europeans have never, in this region
+between Cameroon and Loango, established themselves in force. It is
+undoubtedly the wildest bit of West Africa.
+
+The dominant tribes here have, for as far back as we can get
+evidence--some short four hundred years--been tribes of the Mpongwe
+stem--the so-called noble tribes. To-day they are dying--going off the
+face of the earth, leaving behind them nothing to bear testimony in this
+world to their great ability, save the most marvellously beautiful
+language, the Greek of Africa, as Dr. Nassau calls it, and the impress
+of their more elaborate thought-form on the minds of the bush tribes
+that come into contact with them. Their last pupils are the great
+Bafangh, now supplanting them in the regions of the Bight of Panavia.
+
+From their influence I think the school of Fetish of this region is
+perhaps best called the Mpongwe school, though I do not altogether like
+the term, because I believe the Mpongwe stem to be in origin pure Negro,
+and the Fetish school they have elaborated and co-ordinated is Bantu in
+thought-form, just as the language they have raised to so high a pitch
+of existence is in itself a Bantu language. Yet the Mpongwe are rulers
+of both these things, and they will thereby leave imprinted on the minds
+of their supplanters in the land the mark of their intelligence.
+
+I have said the predominant idea in this Mpongwe school is the securing
+of material prosperity. That is to say this is the part of pure Fetish
+that receives more attention than other parts of pure Fetish in this
+school; but it attains to no such definite predominance as funeral rites
+do in the Calabar school, or the preservation of life in Ellis's
+school. One might, however, quite fairly call the Mpongwe school the
+trade-charm school, great as trade charms are in all West African
+Fetish.
+
+This lack of a predominance sufficient to dwarf other parts of pure
+Fetish makes the Mpongwe school particularly interesting and valuable to
+a student; it is a magnificent school to study your pure Fetish in, as
+none of it is here thrown by a predominant factor into the background of
+thought, and left in a neglected state.
+
+It is of this school that you will find Dr. Nassau's classification of
+spirits, and all the other observations of his that I have quoted of
+things absolutely believed in by the natives, and also all the Mpongwe,
+Benga, Igalwa, Ncomi, and Fetish I have attempted to describe.[20]
+
+It has no gods with proper priests. Human beings are here just doing
+their best to hold their own with the spirit world, getting spirits
+under their control as far as possible, and dealing with the rest of
+them diplomatically. This state I venture to think is Fetish in a very
+early form, a form through which the now elaborate true Negro Fetish
+must have passed before reaching its present co-ordinated state. How
+long ago it was when the true Negro was in this stage I will not venture
+to conjecture. Sir Henry Maine, of whom I am a very humble follower,
+says, "Nothing moves that is not Greek." This is a hard saying to
+accept, but the truth of it grows on you when you are studying things
+such as these, and you are forced to acknowledge that they at any rate
+have a slow rate of development--sometimes indeed it seems that there is
+a mere wave motion of thought among all men rising here and there when
+in the hands of superior tribes, like the Mpongwe for example, to a
+wave crest destined on their extinction to fall again. Now and again as
+a storm on the sea, the impulse of a revealed religion sweeps down on to
+this ocean of nature philosophy, elevates it or confuses it according to
+the initial profundity of it. If you have ever seen the difference
+between a deep sea storm and an esturial storm, you will know what I
+mean. Yet this has nothing to do with the truth or falsity of the Fetish
+thought-form, but merely has a bearing on the quality of the minds that
+deal with it, as it must on all minds not under the influence of a
+revealed religion; and I now turn, in conclusion of this brief
+consideration of the schools of Fetish in West Africa, to the next
+school to the Mpongwe, namely, the school of Nkissism. I need not go
+into details concerning it here; you have them at your command in the
+two great works of Bastian, _An Expedition under Loango Kueste und Besuch
+in San Salvador_, and in Mr. R. E. Dennett's _Folk Lore of the Fjorts_,
+published by the liberality of the Folk Lore Society, and also his
+former book, _Seven Years among the Fjorts_.[21]
+
+     [Illustration: FJORT NATIVES OF KACONGO AND LOANGO.
+                     [_To face page 155._]
+
+The predominant feature in this school is undoubtedly the extra
+recognition given to the mystery of the power of the earth, Nkissi 'nsi.
+Here you find the earth goddess Nzambi the paramount feature in the
+Fetish; from her the Fetish priests have their knowledge of the proper
+way to manage and communicate with lower earth spirits, round her circle
+almost all the legends, in her lies the ultimate human hope of help and
+protection. Nzambi is too large a subject for us to enter into here. She
+is the great mother, but she is not absolute in power. She is not one of
+the forms of the great unheeding over-lord of gods, like Nyankupong,
+or Abassi-boom; the equivalent to him, is her husband Nzambi Mpungu,
+among the followers of Nkissism; but the predominance given in this
+school to the great Princess Nzambi has had two effects that must be
+borne in mind in studying the region from Loango to the south bank of
+Congo. Firstly, it apparently led to Nzambi being confused by the
+natives with the Holy Virgin, when they were under the tuition of the
+Roman Catholic missionaries during the sixteenth and seventeenth
+centuries; hence Nzambi's cult requires to be studied with the greatest
+care at the present day. Secondly, partly in consequence of the native
+predominance given to her, and partly in the predominance she has gained
+from the aforesaid confusion, women have a very singular position, a
+superior one to that which they have in other schools; this you will see
+by reading the stories collected by Mr. Dennett. I will speak no further
+now concerning these schools of Fetish, for Nkissism is the most
+southern of the West African schools, its domain extending over the
+whole of the regions once forming the kingdom of Kongo down to Angola.
+Below Angola, on the West Coast, you come to the fringing zone of the
+Kalahi desert, and to those interesting people the Bushmen, of whose
+religion I am unable, with any personal experience, to speak. Below them
+you strike South Africa. South Africa is South Africa; West Africa is
+West Africa. Of the former I know nothing, of the latter alas! only a
+tenth part of what I should wish to know, so I return to pure Fetish and
+to its bearing on witchcraft.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [19] _History of Loango_, by the Abbe Proyart, 1776. Pinkerton, vol.
+   xvi., p. 587.
+
+   [20] _Travels in West Africa._ Fetish Chapters.
+
+   [21] Sampson Low and Co.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+FETISH AND WITCHCRAFT
+
+     Wherein the student having by now got rather involved in things in
+     general, is constrained to discourse on witchcraft and its position
+     in West African religious thought, concluding with the conviction
+     that Fetish is quite clear though the student has not succeeded in
+     making it so.
+
+
+Now, here we come to a very interesting question: What is witchcraft in
+itself? Conversing freely with the Devil, says Christendom, firmly; and
+taking the Devil to mean the Spirit of Evil, I am bound to think
+Christendom is in a way scientifically quite right, though the accepted
+scientific definition of witchcraft at present is otherwise, and holds
+witchcraft to be conversing with Natural Science, which of course I
+cannot accept as the Devil. Thus I cannot reconcile the two definitions
+should they mean the same thing; and so I am here really in the position
+of being at one in opinion with the Roman Catholic missionaries of the
+fifteenth century, who, as soon as they laid eyes on my friend the
+witch-doctor, recognised him and his goings on as a mass of witchcraft,
+and went for the whole affair in an exceeding game way.
+
+But let us take the accepted view, that first propounded by Sir Alfred
+Lyall; and I humbly beg it to be clearly understood I am only speaking
+of the bearing of that view on Fetish in West Africa. I was of course
+fully aware of the accepted view of the innate antagonism between
+religion and witchcraft when I published in a deliberately scattered
+form some of my observations on Fetish, being no more desirous of giving
+a mental lead to white men than to black, but only wistful to find out
+what they thought of things as they are. The consequence of this action
+of mine has been, I fear, on the whole a rather more muddled feeling in
+the white mind regarding Fetish than ever heretofore existed; a feeling
+that, if what I said was true, (and in this matter of Fetish information
+no one has gainsaid the truth of it), West African religion was more
+perplexing than it seemed to be when regarded as a mere degraded brutal
+superstition or childish foolishness.
+
+However, one distinguished critic has tackled my Fetish, and gallantly:
+the writer in the _Edinburgh Review_. With his remarks on our heresy
+regarding the deification of ancestors I have above attempted to deal,
+owning he is quite right--we do not believe in deified ancestors. I now
+pass on to his other important criticism, and again own he is quite
+right, and that "witchcraft and religious rites in West Africa are
+originally indistinguishable."[22] This is evidently a serious affair
+for West Africa and me, so I must deal with it carefully, and first
+quote my critic's words following immediately those just cited. "If this
+is correct there can be no doubt that such a confusion of the two ideas
+that in their later forms not only stand widely apart, but are always
+irreconcilably hostile, denotes the very lowest stage of aboriginal
+superstition wherever it prevails, for it has been held that, although
+the line between abject fetishism and witchcraft may be difficult to
+trace in the elementary stages, yet from the beginning a true
+distinction can invariably be recognised. According to this theory, the
+witch is more nearly allied with rudimentary science than with
+priestcraft, for he relies not upon prayer, worship, or propitiation of
+divinities, but upon his own secret knowledge and experience of the
+effect producible by certain tricks and mysterious devices upon the
+unseen powers, over whom he has obtained a sort of command. Instead of
+serving like a priest these powers, he is enabled by his art to make
+them serve him, and it is for this reason that his practices very soon
+become denounced and detested by the priesthood."
+
+Now there are many interesting points to be considered in West Africa
+bearing on the above statement of Sir Alfred Lyall's theory of the
+nature of witchcraft,--points which I fancy, if carefully considered,
+would force upon us the strange conclusion that, accepting this theory
+as a general statement of the nature of witchcraft, there was no
+witchcraft whatever in West Africa, nothing having "a true distinction"
+in the native mind from religion. You may say there is no religion and
+it's all witchcraft, but this is a superficial view to take; you see the
+orthodox Christian view of witchcraft contains in it an element not
+present in the West African affair; the Christian regards the witch with
+hatred as one knowing good, yet choosing evil. The West African has not
+this choice in his mind; he has to deal with spirits who are not, any of
+them, up to much in the way of virtue viewed from a human standpoint. I
+don't say they are all what are called up here devils; a good many of
+them are what you might call reasonable, respectable, easy-going sort of
+people; some are downright bad; in fact, I don't think it would be
+going too far to say that they are all downright bad if they get their
+tempers up or take a dislike to a man; there is not one of them
+beneficent to the human race at large. Nzambi is the nearest approach to
+a beneficent deity I have come across, and I feel she owes much of this
+to the confusion she profits by, and the Holy Virgin suffers from, in
+the regions under Nkissism; but Nzambi herself is far from morally
+perfect and very difficult tempered at times. You need not rely on me in
+this matter; take the important statement of Dr. Nassau: "Observe, these
+were distinctly prayers, appeals for mercy, agonising protests; but
+there was no praise, no love, no thanks, no confession of sin."[23] He
+was speaking regarding utterances made down there in the face of great
+afflictions and sorrow; and there was no praise, because there was no
+love, I fancy; no thanks because what good was done to the human being
+was a mere boughten thing he had paid for. No confession of sin, because
+the Fetish believer does not hold he lives in a state of sin, but that
+it is a thing he can commit now and again if he is fool enough. Sin to
+him not being what it is to us, a vile treason against a loving Father,
+but a very ill-advised act against powerful, nasty-tempered spirits.
+Herein you see lies one difference between the Christian and the Fetish
+view,--a fundamental one, that must be borne in mind.
+
+Then in the above-quoted passage you will observe that the dislike to
+witchcraft is traced in a measure to the action of priesthoods. This
+hatred is undoubted. But witchcraft is as much hated in districts in
+West Africa where there are no organised priesthoods as in districts
+where there are--in the regions under the Calabar and Mpongwe schools,
+for example, where the father of the house is the true priest to the
+family, where what looks like a priesthood, but which is a law god-cult
+only--the secret society--is the dominant social thing. Now this law
+god-cult affair, Purroh, Oru, Egbo, Ukukiwe, etc., etc., call it what
+you please, it's all the same thing, is not the organisation that makes
+war on witchcraft in West Africa. It deals with it now and then, if it
+is brought under its official notice; but it is not necessary that this
+should be done; summary methods are used with witches. It just appeals
+at once to ordeal, any one can claim it. You can claim it, and
+administer it yourself to yourself, if you are the accused party and in
+a hurry. A. says to you, "You're a witch." "I'm not," you ejaculate. I
+take the bean; down it goes; you're sick or dead long before the
+elaborate mechanism of the law society has heard of the affair. Of
+course, if you want to make a big palaver and run yourself and your
+accuser into a lot of expense you can call in the society; but you
+needn't. From this and divers things like it I do not think the hatred
+of witchcraft in West Africa at large has anything originally to do with
+the priesthood. You will say, but there is the hatred of witchcraft in
+West Africa. You have only to shout "_Ifot_" at a man or woman in
+Calabar, or "_Ndo tchi_" in Fjort-land, and the whole population, so
+good-tempered the moment before, is turned bloodthirsty. Witches are
+torn to bits, destroyed in every savage way, when the ordeal has
+conclusively proved their guilt--mind you, never before. Granted; but I
+believe this to be just a surging up of that form of terror called hate.
+
+I am old enough to remember the dynamite scares up here, and the Jack
+the Ripper incidents; then it was only necessary for some one to call
+out, "Dynamiter" or "Jack the Ripper" at a fellow-citizen, and up surged
+our own people, all same for one with those Africans, only our people,
+not being so law-governed, would have shredded the accused without
+ordeal, had we not possessed that great factor in the formation of
+public virtue, the police, who intervened, carried away the accused to
+the ordeal--the police court--where the affair was gone into with
+judicial calm. Honestly, I don't believe there is the slightest mystic
+revulsion against witchcraft in West Africa; public feeling is always at
+bursting-point on witches, their goings-on are a constant danger to
+every peaceful citizen's life, family, property, and so on, and when the
+general public thinks it's got hold of one of the vermin it goes off
+with a bang; but it does not think for one moment that the witch is _per
+se_ in himself a thing apart; he is just a bad man too much, who has
+gone and taken up with spirits for illegitimate purposes. The mere
+keeping of a familiar power, which under Christendom is held so vile a
+thing, is not so held in West Africa. Everyone does it; there is not a
+man, woman, or child who has not several attached spirits for help and
+preservation from danger and disease. It is keeping a spirit for bad
+purposes only that is hateful. It is one thing to have dynamite in the
+hand of the government or a mining company for reasonable reasons, quite
+another to have it in the hands of enemies to society; and such an enemy
+is a witch who trains the spirits over which he has got control to
+destroy his fellow human beings' lives and properties.
+
+The calling in of ordeal to try the witch before destroying him has many
+interesting points. The African, be it granted, is tremendously under
+the dominion of law, and it is the law that such trials should take
+place before execution; but there is also involved in it another
+curious fact, and that is that the spirit of the ordeal is held to be
+able to manage and suppress the bad spirits trained by the witch to
+destruction. Human beings alone can collar the witch and destroy him in
+an exemplary manner, but spiritual aid is required to collar the witch's
+devil, or it would get adrift and carry on after its owner's death.
+Regarding ordeal affairs I will speak when dealing with legal procedure.
+
+Such being the West African view of witchcraft, I venture to think there
+are in this world divers reasons for hating witchcraft. There is the
+fetish one, that he is an enemy to society; there is the priesthood one,
+that he is a sort of quack or rival practitioner--under this head of
+priesthood aversion for witchcraft I think we may class the witchcraft
+that is merely a hovering about of the old religion which the priesthood
+of an imported religion are anxious to stamp out; and there is that
+aversion to witchcraft one might call the Protestant aversion, which
+arises from the feeling that it is a direct sin against God Himself.
+This latter feeling has been the cause of as violent a persecution of
+witches, witness the action of King James I. and that of the Quakers in
+America, as any West African has ever presented to the world. Throughout
+all these things the fact remains, that whether black, white, or yellow,
+the witch is a bad man, a murderer in the eyes of Allah as well as those
+of humanity.
+
+That all witches act by means of poison alone would be too hasty a thing
+to say, because I think we need hardly doubt that the African is almost
+as liable to die from a poisonous idea put into his mind as a poisonous
+herb put into his food; indeed, I do not know that in West Africa we
+need confine ourselves to saying natives alone do this, for white men
+sink and die under an idea that breaks their spirit. All the vital
+powers are required there to resist the depressing climate. If they are
+weakened seriously in any way, death is liable to ensue. The profound
+belief in the power of a witch causes a man who knows, say, that either
+a nail has been driven into an Nkiss down on the South-West coast, or
+the Fangaree drum beaten on him up in the Sierra Leone region, to
+collapse under the terror of it, and I own I can see no moral difference
+between the guilt of the man or woman who does these things with the
+intent to slay a fellow-citizen and that of one who puts bush into his
+chop--both mean to kill and do kill, but both methods are good West
+African witchcraft. The latter may seem to be an incipient form of
+natural science, but it seems to me--I say it humbly--that the West
+African incipient scientist is not the local witch, but that highly
+respectable gentleman or lady, the village apothecary, the _Nganga
+bilongo_ or the _Abiabok_. The means of killing in vogue in West African
+witchcraft without the direct employment of poison are highly
+interesting, but I think it would serve no good purpose for me to give
+even the few I know in detail. There is one interesting point in this
+connection. I have said that in order to make a charm efficacious
+against a particular person you must have preferably some of his blood
+in your possession, or, failing that, some hair or nail clipping;
+failing these, some articles belonging intimately to him--a piece of his
+loin-cloth, or, under the school of Nkissi, a bit of his iron. This I
+believe to hold good for all true fetish charms; but we have in the
+Bight of Benin charms which are under the influence of a certain amount
+of Mohammedan ideas--for example, the deadly charms of the Kufong
+society. This class of charm does not require absolutely a bit of
+something nearly connected with the victim, but nevertheless it cannot
+act at a great distance, or without the element of personal connection.
+Take the Fangaree charm, for example, to be found among the Mendi
+people, and all the neighbouring peoples who are liable to go in for
+Kufong.
+
+Fangaree is the name of a small drum that is beaten by a hammer made of
+bamboo. The uses of this drum are wide and various, but it also gives
+its name to the charm, because the charm, like the drum, is beaten with
+a similar stick. The charm stuff itself is made of a dead man's bone, of
+different herbs smoked over a fire and powdered the same day, ants'-hill
+earth, and charcoal. This precious mixture is made into a parcel; that
+parcel is placed on a frame made of bamboo sticks. On the top of the
+charm a small live animal--an insect, I am informed, will do--is secured
+by a string passing over it, and the charm is fixed with wooden forks
+into the ground on either side. This affair is placed by the murderer
+close to a path the victim will pass along, and the murderer sits over
+it, waiting for him to come. When he comes, he is allowed to pass just
+by, and then his enemy breaks a dry bamboo stick; the noise causes the
+victim to turn and look in the direction of the noise--_i.e._ on to the
+charm--and then the murderer hits the live animal on it, calling his
+victim's name, and the charm is on him. If the animal is struck on the
+head, the victim's head is affected, and he has violent fits until "he
+dies from breaking his neck" in one of them; if the animal is struck to
+tailwards, the victim gets extremely ill, but in this latter case he can
+buy off the charm and be cured by a Fangaree man. A similar arrangement
+is in working order under some South-West coast murder societies I am
+acquainted with. The interesting point, however, is the necessity of
+establishing the personal connection between the victim and the charm
+by means of making him look on the charm and calling his name. Without
+his looking it's no good. Hence it comes that it is held unwise to look
+behind when you hear a noise o'night in the bush; indeed, no cautious
+person, with sense in his head and strength in his legs, would dream of
+doing this unless caught off guard. In connection also with this turning
+the face being necessary to the working of the Fangaree charm, there is
+another charm that is worked under Kufong, according to several natives
+from its region--the hinterland of Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Ivory
+Coast--with whom I have associated when we have both been far from our
+respective homes away in South-West Africa. It is a charm I have never
+met with as indigenous in the South-West or Oil Rivers Fetish, and I
+think it has a heavier trace of Mohammedan influence in it than the
+Fangaree charm. The way it works is this. A man wants to kill you
+without showing blood. Only leopard society men do that, and your enemy,
+we will presume, is not a leopard. So he throws his face on you by a
+process I need not enter into. You hardly know anything is wrong at
+first; by-and-by you notice that every scene that you look on, night or
+day, has got that face in it, not a filmy vision of a thing, but quite
+material in appearance, only it's in abnormal places for a face to be,
+and it is a face only. It may be on the wall, or amongst the roof poles,
+or away in a corner of the hut floor; outdoors it is the same--the face
+is first always, there just where you can see it. Some of my informants
+hold that it keeps coming closer to you as time goes on; but others say
+no; it keeps at one distance all the time. This, however, is a minor
+point; it is its being there that gets to matter. It is in amongst the
+bushes at the side of the path, or in the water of the river, or at the
+end of your canoe, or in the oil in the pots, or in the Manchester
+cottons in the factory shop. Wherever you look, there it is. In a way
+it's unobtrusive, it does not spread itself out, or make a noise, or
+change, yet, sooner or later, in every place, you cannot miss seeing it.
+At first you think, by changing your environment--going outdoors, coming
+in, going on a journey, mixing with your fellow-men, or avoiding
+them--you can get rid of the thing; but you find, when you look
+round,--a thing you are certain to do when the charm has got its
+grip,--for sure that face is there as usual. Now this sort of thing
+tells on the toughest in time, and you get sick of life when it has
+always got that face mixed up in it, so sick that you try the other
+thing--death. This is an ill-advised course, but you do not know in time
+that, when you kill yourself, you will find that on the other side, in
+the other thing, you will see nothing but that face, that unchanging
+silent face you are so sick of. The Kufong man who has thrown his face
+at you knows, and when he hears of your suicide he laughs. Naturally you
+cannot know, because you are not a Kufong man, or the charm could not be
+put on you. What you "can do in this here most awful go," as Mr. Squeers
+would say, I am unfortunately not able to tell you. I made many
+inquiries from men who know "the face," who had had it happen on people
+in their families, and so on, but in answer to my inquiries as to why
+the afflicted did not buy it off, what charms there were against it, and
+so forth, I was always told it was a big charm, that the man who put it
+on lost something of himself by so doing, so it was never put on except
+in cases of great hatred that would stick at nothing and would kill;
+also that it was of no real use for the victim to kill his charmer,
+though that individual, knowing the pleasure so doing would afford his
+victim, takes good care to go on a journey, and to keep out of the way
+until the charm has worked out in suicide. There is a certain amount of
+common sense in this proceeding which is undoubtedly true African, but
+there is a sort of imaginative touch which makes me suspect Mohammedan
+infusion; anyhow, I leave you to judge for yourself whether,
+presupposing you accept the possibility of a man doing such a thing to
+you or to any one you love, you think he can be safely ignored, or
+whether he is not an enemy to society who had better be found out and
+killed--killed in a showy way. Personally I favour the latter course.
+
+There is but one other point in witchcraft in West Africa that I need
+now detain you with, and that is why a person killed by witchcraft
+suffers more than one who dies of old age, for herein lies another
+reason for this hatred of witchcraft. Every human soul in West Africa
+throughout all the Fetish schools is held to have a certain proper time
+of incarnation in a human body, whether it be one incarnation or endless
+series of incarnations; anything that cuts that incarnation period short
+inconveniences the soul, to say the least of it. Under Ellis's school,
+and I believe throughout all the others, the soul that lives its life in
+a body fully through is held happy; it is supposed to have learnt its
+full lesson from life, and to know the way down to the shadow-land home
+and all sorts of things. Hence also comes the respect for the aged,
+common throughout all West Africa. They are the knowing ones. Such an
+one was the late Chief Long John of Bonny. Now if this process of
+development is checked by witchcraft and the soul is prematurely driven
+from the body, it does not know all that it should, and its condition
+is therefore miserable. It is, as it were, sent blind, or deaf, or lame
+into the spirit-land. This is a thing not only dreaded by individuals
+for themselves, but hated for those they love; hence the doer of it is a
+hated thing. You must remember that when you get keen hatred you must
+allow for keen affection, it is not human to have one without the other.
+That the Africans are affectionate I am fully convinced. This affection
+does not lie precisely on the same lines as those of Europeans, I allow.
+It is not with them so deeply linked with sex; but the love between
+mother and child, man and man, brother and sister, woman and woman, is
+deep, true, and pure, and it must be taken into account in observing
+their institutions and ideas, particularly as to this witchcraft where
+it shows violently and externally in hatred only to the superficial
+observer. I well remember gossiping with a black friend in a plantation
+in the Calabar district on witchcraft, and he took up a stick and struck
+a plant of green maize, breaking the stem of it, saying, "There, like
+that is the soul of a man who is witched, it will not ripen now."
+
+We will now turn to the consideration of that class whose business in
+life is mainly to guard the community from witchcraft and from
+miscellaneous evil spirits acting on their own initiative, the Fetish
+Men of West Africa, namely, those men and women who devote their lives
+to the cult of West African religion. Such people you find in every West
+African district; but their position differs under different schools,
+and it is in connection with them that we must recognise the differences
+in the various schools, remembering that the form of Fetish makes the
+form of Fetish Man, not the Fetish Man the form of Fetish. He may, as it
+were, embroider it, complicate it, mystify it, as is the nature of all
+specialists in all professions, but primarily he is under it, at any
+rate in West Africa, where you find the Fetish man in every district,
+but in every district in a different form. For example, look at him
+under the Ellis school. Where there are well-defined gods, there your
+Fetish Man is quite the priest, devoting himself to the cult of one god
+publicly, probably doing a little general practice into the bargain with
+other minor spirits. To the laity he of course advertises the god he
+serves as the most reliably important one in the neighbourhood; but it
+has come under my notice, and you will find under Ellis's, that if the
+priest of a god gets personally unwell and finds his own deity
+ineffective, he will apply for aid to a professional brother who serves
+another god. Below Ellis's school, in the Calabar school, your Fetish
+Man is somewhat different; the gods are not so definite or esteemed, and
+the Fetish Man is becoming a member of a set of men who deal with gods
+in a lump, and have the general management of minor spirits. Below this
+school, in the Mpongwe, the Fetish Man is even less specialised as
+regards one god; he is here a manager of spirits at large, with the
+assistance of a strong spirit with whom he has opened up communication.
+Below this school, in that of Nkissi, the Fetish Man becomes more truly
+priest-like--he is the Nganga of an Nkiss; but nevertheless his position
+is a different one to that of the priest in Ellis's school; here he is
+in a better position than in the Mpongwe school, but in an inferior one
+to that in Ellis's, where he is not the lone servitor or manager for a
+god, but a member of a powerful confraternity. You must bear in mind, of
+course, that the Fetish Man is always, from a lay standpoint, a highly
+important person; but professionally, I cannot but think, a priest say
+of Tando in Ashantee or of Shango in Dahomey, is of a higher grade than
+a Nganga to an Nkiss, certainly far higher than a Fetish Man under the
+Mpongwe school, where every house father and every village chief does a
+lot of his own Fetish without professional assistance. Of course chiefs
+and house fathers do a certain amount in all districts--in fact, in West
+Africa every man and woman does a certain amount of Fetish for himself;
+but where, as in Ellis's school, you get a regular set of priests and
+plenty of them, the religion falls into their hands to a greater extent.
+I feel that the study of the position of Fetish-Men is deserving of
+great attention. I implore the student who may take it up to keep the
+Fetish Man for practical purposes distinct from the gentleman who
+represents the law god-cult--the secret tribal society. If you persist
+in mixing them, you will have in practical politics as fine a mess as if
+you mixed up your own Bench of Bishops with the Woolsack. I beg to
+contribute to the store of knowledge on this point sundry remarks sent
+me on most excellent native authority from the Gold Coast:--
+
+"The inhabitants of Cape Coast must congratulate themselves that they
+enjoy the protection of seventy-seven fetishes. Every town (and this
+town) has one fetish house or temple, often built in a square or oblong
+form of mud or swish, and thatched over, or constructed of sticks or
+poles placed in a circular form and thatched. In these temples several
+images are generally placed. Every Fetish-Man or priest, moreover, has
+his private fetishes in his own house, one of a bird, stones encased by
+string, large lumps of cinder from an iron furnace, calabashes, and
+bundles of sticks tied together with string. All these are stained with
+red ochre and rubbed over with eggs. They are placed on a square
+platform and shrouded from the vulgar gaze.
+
+"The fetishes are regarded as spiritual intelligent beings who make the
+remarkable objects of nature their residence or enter occasionally into
+the images and other artificial representations which have been duly
+consecrated by certain ceremonies. It is the belief of this people that
+the fetishes not unfrequently render themselves visible to mortals. Thus
+the great fetish of the rock on which Cape Coast Castle stands is said
+to come forth at night in human form, but of superhuman size, and to
+proceed through the town dressed in white to chase away evil spirits.
+
+"In all the countries along the Coast (Gold) the regular fetish day is
+Tuesday. The fishermen would expect that, were they to go out on that
+day, it would spoil their fishing.
+
+"The priest's office may in some cases be hereditary, but it is not
+uniformly so, for the children of Fetish-Men sometimes refuse to devote
+themselves to the pursuits of their parents and engage in other
+occupations. Any one may enter the office after suitable training, and
+parents who desire that their children may be instructed in its
+mysteries place them with a Fetish-Man, who receives a premium for each.
+The order of Fetish-Men is further augmented by persons who declare that
+the fetish has suddenly seized on them. A series of convulsive and
+unnatural bodily distortions establish their claim. Application is made
+to the fetish for counsel and aid in every domestic and public
+emergency. When persons find occasion to consult a private Fetish-Man,
+they take a present of gold-dust and rum and proceed to his house. He
+receives the presents, and either puts a little of the rum on the head
+of every image or pours a small quantity on the ground before the
+platform as an offering to the whole pantheon; then, taking a brass pan
+with water in it, he sits down with the pan between him and the
+fetishes, and his inquirers also seat themselves to await the result.
+Having made these preparatory arrangements, looking earnestly into the
+water, he begins to snap his fingers, and addressing the fetish, extols
+his power, telling him that the people have arrived to consult him, and
+requesting him to come and give the desired answer. After a time the
+fetish-man is wrought up into a state of fury. He shakes violently and
+foams at the mouth; this is to intimate that the fetish was come home
+and that he himself is no longer the speaker, but the fetish, who uses
+his mouth and speaks by him. He now growls like a tiger and asks the
+people if they have brought rum, requiring them at the same time to
+present it to him. He drinks, and then inquires for what purpose they
+have sent for him. If a relative is ill, they reply that such a member
+of their family is sick and they have tried all the means they could
+devise to restore him, but without success, and they, knowing he is a
+great fetish, have come to ask his aid, and beg him to teach them what
+they should do. He then speaks kindly to them, expresses a hope that he
+shall be able to help them, and says, "I go to see." It is imagined that
+the fetish then quits the priest, and, after a silence of a few minutes,
+he is supposed to return, and gives his response to the inquirers.
+
+"In cases of great difficulty the oracle at Abrah is the last resort of
+the Fantees. This notable oracle is always consulted at night. They find
+a large fire made upon the ground, and the presents they have brought
+they place in the hands of the priests who are in attendance. They are
+then directed to elevate their presents above their heads and to fix
+their eyes steadfastly upon the ground, for should they look up, the
+fetish, it is said, would inflict blindness on them for their
+sacrilegious gaze. After a time the oracle gives a response in a shrill,
+small voice intended to convey the idea that it proceeds from an
+unearthly source, and the inquirers, having obtained the end of their
+visit, then depart.
+
+"In cases of bodily affliction the fetish orders medical preparations
+for the patient. If the malady of the patient does not appear to yield
+to such applications, the fetish is again consulted, and in some cases,
+as a further expedient, the priest takes a fowl and ties it to a stick,
+by which operation it is barbarously squeezed to death. The stick is
+then placed in the path leading to the house for the purpose of
+deterring evil spirits from approaching it. When the patient is a rich
+man, several sheep are sacrificed, and he is fetished until the last
+moment arrives amidst the howls of a number of old Fetish Women, who
+continue to besmear with eggs and other medicine the walls and doorposts
+of his house and everything that is around him until he has ceased to
+breathe."
+
+Not only does the African depart from life under the care of
+Fetish-Men--and, as my valued correspondent ungallantly remarks, "old
+fetish-women"--but he is met, as it were, by them on his arrival. My
+correspondent says "as soon as the child is born the Fetish-Man binds
+certain fetish preparations round his limbs, using at the same time a
+form of incantation or prayer. This is done to fortify the infant
+against all kinds of evil. On the eighth day after the birth, the father
+of the child, accompanied by a number of friends, proceeds to the house
+of the mother. If he be a rich man, he takes with him a gallon of ardent
+spirits to be used on the festive occasion. On arriving at the house,
+the friends form a circle round the father, who delivers a kind of
+address in which he acknowledges the kindness of the gods for giving him
+the child, and calls upon those present also to thank the fetishes on
+his account; then, taking the child in his arms, he squirts upon it a
+little spirit from his mouth, pronouncing the name by which it is to be
+called. A second name which the child usually takes is that of the day
+of the week on which it is born. The following are the names of the days
+in the Fanti language, varied in their orthography according to the sex
+of the child:--
+
+                      Male.     Female.
+
+          Sunday      Quisi     Akosua.
+
+          Monday      Kujot     Ajua.
+
+          Tuesday     Quabina   Abmaba.
+
+          Wednesday   Quaku     Ekua.
+
+          Thursday    Quahu     Aba.
+
+          Friday      Kufi      Efua.
+
+          Saturday    Qamina    Ama.
+
+Those ceremonials called on the Coast "customs" are the things that show
+off the Fetish-Man at the best in more senses of the word than one. We
+will take the yam custom. The intentions of these yam customs are
+twofold--firstly they are a thanksgiving to the fetishes for allowing
+their people to live to see the new yams, and for the new yams, but they
+are also institutions to prevent the general public eating the new yam
+before it's ready. The idea is, and no doubt rightly, that unripe yams
+are unwholesome, and the law is that no new yams must be eaten until the
+yam custom is made. The Fetish-Men settle when the yams are in a fit
+state to pass into circulation, and then make the custom. It generally
+occurs at the end of August, but is sometimes kept back until the
+beginning of September. In Fantee all the inhabitants of the towns
+assemble under the shade of the grove adjoining the fetish hut, and a
+sheep and a number of fowls are killed, part of their flesh is mixed
+with boiled yams and palm-oil, and a portion of this mixture is placed
+on the heads of the images, and the remainder is thrown about before the
+fetish hut as a peace-offering to the deities.
+
+At Winnebah, on the Gold Coast, there is an interesting modification in
+the yam custom. The principal fetish of that place, it is believed, will
+not be satisfied with a sheep, but he must have a deer brought alive to
+his temple, and there sacrificed. Accordingly on the appointed day every
+year when the custom is to be celebrated, almost all the inhabitants
+except the aged and infirm go into the adjoining country--an open
+park-like country, studded with clumps of trees. The women and children
+look on, give good advice, and shriek when necessary, while the men beat
+the bush with sticks, beat tom-toms, and halloo with all their might.
+While thus engaged, my correspondent remarks in his staid way,
+"sometimes a leopard starts forth, but it is usually so frightened with
+the noise and confusion that it scampers off in one direction as fast as
+the people run from it in another. When a deer is driven out, the chase
+begins, the people try to run it down, flinging sticks at its legs. At
+last it is secured and carried exultingly to the town with shoutings and
+drummings. On entering the town they are met by the aged people carrying
+staves, and, having gone in procession round the town, they proceed to
+the fetish house, where the animal is sacrificed, and partly offered to
+the fetish, partly eaten by the priests."
+
+These yam customs are at their fullest in the Benin Bights, but you get
+a custom made for the new yam in all the districts lower down. These
+customs have long been credited with being stained by human sacrifices.
+Not altogether unjustly. You can always read human sacrifice for goats
+and fowls when you are considering a district inhabited by true Negroes,
+and the occasion is an important one, because in West Africa a human
+sacrifice is the most persuasive one to the fetishes. It is just with
+them as with a chief--if you want to get some favour from him you must
+give him a present. A fowl or a goat or a basket of vegetables, or
+anything like that is quite enough for most favours, but if you want a
+big thing, and want it badly, you had better give him a slave, because
+the slave is alike more intrinsically valuable and also more useful. So
+far as I know, all human beings sacrificed pass into the service of the
+fetish they are sacrificed to. They are not merely killed that he may
+enjoy their blood, but that he may have their assistance. Fetishes have
+much to do, and an extra pair of hands is to them always acceptable. As
+for the importance of these harvest customs to the general system of
+Fetish, I think in West Africa it is small. The goings on, the
+licentiousness and general jollification that accompany them, upsetting
+law and order for days, give them a fallacious look of importance; but I
+think far more really near the heart of the Fetish thought-form is the
+lonely man who steals at night into the forest to gain from Sasabonsom a
+charm, and the woman who, on her way back from market, throws down
+before the fetish houses she passes a scrap of her purchases; compared
+to the cult of the law-god, well, yam customs are dirty water price,
+palaver, and insignificant politically.
+
+I have dealt here with Fetish as far as the position of the human being
+is concerned, because this phase may make it more comprehensible to my
+fellow white men who regard the human being as the main thing in the
+created universe, but I must beg you to remember that this idea of the
+importance of the human race is not held by the African. The individual
+is supremely important to himself, and he values his friends and
+relations and so on, but abstract affection for humanity at large or
+belief in the sanctity of the lives of people with whom he is unrelated
+and unacquainted, the African barely possesses. He is only capable of
+feeling this abstract affection when under the influence of one of the
+great revealed religions which place the human being higher in the scale
+of Creation. This comes from no cruelty of mind _per se_, but is the
+result of the hardness of the fight he has to fight against the world;
+and possessing this view of the equal, if not greater importance of many
+of the things he sees round him, the African conceives these things also
+have their fetish--a fetish on the same ground idea, but varying from
+human fetish. The politics of Mungo mah Lobeh, the mountain, with the
+rest of nature, he believes to exist. The Alemba rapid has its affairs
+clearly, but the private matters of these very great people are things
+the human being had better keep out of; and it is advisable for him to
+turn his attention to making terms with them and go into their presence
+with his petition when their own affairs are prosperous, when their
+tempers are not as it were up over some private ultra-human affair of
+their own. I well remember the opinions expressed by my companions
+regarding the folly--mine, of course--of obtruding ourselves on Mungo
+when that noble mountain was vexed too much, and the opinion expressed
+by an Efik friend in a tornado that came down on us. Well, there you
+have this difference. I instinctively say "us." She did not think we
+were objects of interest to the tornado or the forest it was scourging.
+She took it they had a sort of family row on, and we might get hit with
+the bits, therefore it was highly unfortunate that we were present at
+the meeting. Again, it is the same with the surf. The boat-boys see it's
+in a nasty temper, they keep out of it, it may be better to-morrow, then
+it will tolerate them, for it has no real palaver with them
+individually. Of course you can go and upset the temper of big nature
+spirits, but when you are not there they have their own affairs.
+
+Hence it comes that we have in Fetish a religion in which its believers
+do not hold that devotion to religion constitutes Virtue. The ordinary
+citizen is held to be most virtuous who is least mixed up in religious
+affairs. He can attain Virtue, the love and honour of his fellow-men, by
+being a good husband and father, an honest man in trade, a just man in
+the palaver-house, and he must, for the protection of his interests,
+that is to say, not only his individual well-being, but the well-being
+of those dependent on him, go in to a certain extent for religious
+practices. He must associate with spirits because spirits are in all
+things and everywhere and over everything; and the good citizen deals
+with the other spirits as he deals with that class of spirits we call
+human beings; he does not cheat the big ones of their dues; he spills a
+portion of his rum to them; he gives them their white calicoes; he
+treats his slave spirits honourably, and he uses his slave spirits for
+no bad purpose, and if any great grief falls on him he calls on the
+great over-lord of gods, mentioning these things. But men are not all
+private citizens; there are men whose destiny puts them in high
+places--men who are not only house fathers but who are tribe fathers.
+They, to protect and further the interests of those under them, must
+venture greatly and further, and deal with more powerful spirits, as it
+were, their social equals in spiritdom. These good chiefs in their
+higher grade dealings preserve the same clean-handed conduct. And
+besides these there are those men, the Fetish men, who devote their
+lives to combating evil actions through witches and miscellaneous
+spirits who prey on mankind. These men have to make themselves important
+to important spirits. It is risky work for them, for spirits are a risky
+set to deal with. Up here in London, when I have to deal with a spirit
+as manifest in the form of an opinion, or any big mind-form incarnate in
+one man, or in thousands, I often think of an African friend of mine who
+had troubles, and I think sympathetically, for his brother explained the
+affair to me. He was an educated man. "You see," he said, "my brother's
+got a strong Ju Ju, but it's a damned rocky Ju Ju to get on with."
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [22] July, 1897, p. 221.
+
+   [23] _Travels in West Africa._ (Macmillan, 1897, p. 453.)
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+AFRICAN MEDICINE
+
+     Mainly from the point of view of the native apothecary, to which is
+     added some account of the sleep disease and the malignant
+     melancholy.
+
+
+There is, as is in all things West African, a great deal of fetish
+ceremonial mixed up with West African medical methods. Underlying them
+throughout there is the fetish form of thought; but it is erroneous to
+believe that all West African native doctors are witch doctors, because
+they are not. One of my Efik friends, for example, would no more think
+of calling in a witch doctor for a simple case of rheumatism than you
+would think of calling in a curate or a barrister; he would just call in
+the equivalent to our general practitioner, the abiabok. If he grew
+worse instead of better, he would then call in his equivalent to our
+consulting physician, the witch doctor, the abiadiong. But if he started
+being ill with something exhibiting cerebral symptoms he would have in
+the witch doctor at once.
+
+This arises from the ground principle of all West African physic.
+Everything works by spirit on spirit, therefore the spirit of the
+medicine works on the spirit of the disease. Certain diseases are
+combatable by certain spirits in certain herbs. Other diseases are
+caused by spirits not amenable to herb-dwelling spirits; they must be
+tackled by spirits of a more powerful grade. The witch doctor who
+belongs to the school of Nkissism will become more profound on this
+matter still, and will tell you all herbs, indeed everything that comes
+out of the Earth, have in them some of the power of the Earth, Nkissi
+nisi; but the general view is the less concrete one--that it is a matter
+of only certain herbs having power. This I have been told over and over
+again in various West Coast tongues by various West African physicians,
+and in it lies the key to their treatment of disease--a key without
+which many of their methods are incomprehensible, but which shows up
+most clearly in the methods of the witch doctor himself. In the practice
+of the general practitioner, or, more properly speaking, the apothecary,
+it is merely a theory, just as a village chemist here may prescribe blue
+pill without worrying himself about its therapeutic action from a
+scientific point of view.
+
+Before I pass on to the great witch doctor, the
+physician, I must detain you with a brief account of the
+neglected-by-traveller-because-less-showy African village apothecary, a
+really worthy person, who exists in every West African district I know
+of; often, as in the Calabar and Bonny region, a doctor whose practice
+extends over a fair-sized district, wherein he travels from village to
+village. If he comes across a case, he sits down and does his best with
+it, may be for a fortnight or a month at a time, and when he has
+finished with it and got his fee, off he goes again. Big towns, of
+course, have a resident apothecary, but I never came across a town that
+had two apothecaries. It may be professional etiquette, but, though I
+never like to think evil of the Profession whatever colour its
+complexion may be, it may somehow be connected with a knowledge of the
+properties of herbs, for I observed when at Corisco that an apothecary
+from the mainland who was over there for a visit shrank from dining with
+the local medico.
+
+These apothecaries are, as aforesaid, learned in the properties of
+herbs, and they are the surgeons, in so far as surgery is ventured on. A
+witch doctor would not dream of performing an operation. Amongst these
+apothecaries there are lady doctors, who, though a bit dangerous in
+pharmacy, yet, as they do not venture on surgery, are, on the whole,
+safer than their _confreres_, for African surgery is heroic.
+
+Many of the apothecaries' medical methods are fairly sound, however. The
+Dualla practitioner is truly great on poultices for extracting foreign
+substances from wounds, such as bits of old iron cooking pot, a very
+frequent foreign substance for a man to get into him in West Africa,
+owing to pots being broken up and used as bullets. Almost incredible
+stories are told by black men and white in Cameroons concerning the
+efficiency of these poultices; one I heard from a very reliable white
+authority there of a man who had been shot with bits of iron pot in the
+thigh. The white doctor extracted several pieces, and declared he had
+got them all out; but the man went on suffering and could not walk, so
+finally a country doctor was called in, and he applied his poultice. In
+a few minutes he removed it, and on its face lay two pieces of iron pot.
+The white doctor said they had been in the poultice all the time, but he
+did not carry public opinion with him, for the patient recovered
+rapidly.
+
+The Negroes do not seem to me to go in for baths in medical treatment
+quite so much as the Bantu; they hold more with making many little
+incisions in the skin round a swollen joint, then encasing it with clay
+and keeping a carefully tended fire going under it. But the Bantu is
+given greatly to baths, accompanied by massage, particularly in the
+treatment of that great West African affliction, rheumatism. The Mpongwe
+make a bath for the treatment of this disease by digging a suitably
+sized hole in the ground and putting into it seven herbs--whereof I know
+the native names only, not the scientific--and in addition in go
+cardamoms and peppers. Boiling water is then plentifully poured over
+these, and the patient is laid on and covered with the parboiled green
+stuff. Next a framework of twigs is placed over him, and he is hastily
+clayed up to keep the steam in, only his head remaining above ground. In
+this bath he is sometimes kept a few hours, sometimes a day and a half.
+He is liable to give the traveller who may happen suddenly on him while
+under treatment the idea that he is an atrocity; but he is not; and when
+he is taken out of the bath-poultice he is rubbed and kneaded all over,
+plenty more hot water being used in the process, this indeed being the
+palladium of West Coast physic.
+
+The Fjort tribe do not bury their rheumatic patients until they are dead
+and all their debts paid, but they employ the vapour bath. My friend,
+Mr. R. E. Dennet, who has for the past eighteen years lived amongst the
+Fjort, and knows them as no other white man does, and knows also my
+insatiable thirst for any form of West African information, has kindly
+sent me some details of Fjort medical methods, which I give in his own
+words--"The Fjort have names for many diseases; aches are generally
+described as _tanta ki tanta_; they say the head suffers _Ntu tanta ki
+tanta_, the chest suffers _Mtima tanta ki tanta_, and so on. Rheumatism
+that keeps to the joints of the bones and cripples the sufferer is
+called _Ngoyo_, while ordinary rheumatism is called _Macongo_. They
+generally try to cure this disease by giving the sufferers vapour baths.
+They put the leaves of the _Nvuka_ into a pot of boiling water, and
+place the pot between the legs of the patient, who is made to sit up.
+They then cover up the patient and the pot with coverings.
+
+"They try to relieve the local pain by spluttering the affected part
+with chalk, pepper, and logwood, and the leaves of certain plants that
+have the power of blistering.
+
+"Small-pox they try to cure by smearing the body of the patient over
+with the pulped leaves of the mzeuzil. Palm oil is also used. These
+patients are taken to the woods, where a hut is built for them, or not,
+according to the wealth and desire of their relations. If poor they are
+often allowed to die of starvation. A kind of long thin worm that creeps
+about under the eyelid is called _Loyia_, and is skilfully extracted by
+many of the natives by means of a needle or piece of wood cut to a sharp
+point.
+
+"Blind boils they call _Fvuma_, and they cure them by splintering over
+them the pulped root _Nchechi_, mixed with red and white earth. Leprosy
+they call _Boisi_, ague _Chiosi_, matter from the ear _Mafina_, rupture
+_Sangafulla_. But diseases of the lungs, heart, liver, and spleen seem
+to puzzle the native leeches and many natives die from these terrible
+ills. Cupping and bleeding, which they do with the hollow horns of the
+goat and the sharpened horn of a kid, are the remedies usually resorted
+to.
+
+"All persons are supposed to have the power to give their enemies these
+different sicknesses. Amulets, frontlets, bracelets, and waistbands
+charged with medicines are also used as either charms or cures.
+
+"A woman who was stung by a scorpion went nearly mad, and, rushing into
+the river, tried to drown herself. I tried my best to calm her and cure
+her by the application of a few simple remedies, but she kept us awake
+all night, and we had to hold her down nearly the whole time. I called
+in a native surgeon to see if he could do anything, and he spluttered
+some medicine over her, and, placing himself opposite to her, shouted at
+her and the evil spirit that was in her. She became calmer, and the
+surgeon left us. As I was afraid of a relapse, I sent the woman to be
+cured in a town close by. The Princess of the town picked out the sting
+of the scorpion with a needle, and gave the woman some herbs, which
+acted as a strong purge, and cured her. As the Nganga bilongo
+(apothecary) is busy curing the patient, he generally has a white fowl
+tied to a string fastened to a peg in the ground close to him. I have
+described this in _Seven Years among the Fjort_."
+
+I think this communication of Mr. Dennett's is of much interest, and I
+hastily beg to remark that, if you have not got a devoted friend to hold
+you down all night, call in an apothecary in the morning time, and then
+hand you over to a Princess--things that are not always handy even in
+West Africa when you have been stung by a scorpion--things that, on the
+other hand, are always handy in West Africa--carbonate of soda applied
+promptly to the affected part will save you from wanting to drown
+yourself and much other inconvenience. The sting should be extracted
+regardless of the shedding of blood, carbonate of soda in hot water
+washed over the place, and then a poultice faced with carbonate of soda
+put on.
+
+Although I do not say these West African doctors possess any specific
+for rheumatism, it is an undoubted fact that the South-west Coast
+tribes, with their poultices and vapour baths, are very successful in
+treating it, more so than the true Negroes, with their clay plaster and
+baking method. Rheumatism is a disease the Africans seem especially
+liable to, whatever may be the local climate, whether it be that of the
+reeking Niger Delta, or the dry delightful climate of Cabinda; moreover,
+my friends who go whaling tell me the Bermuda negroes also suffer from
+rheumatism severely, and are "a perfect cuss," wanting to come and sit
+in the blood and blubber of fresh-killed whales. Small-pox is a vile
+scourge to Africa. The common treatment is to smear the body of the
+patient with the pulped leaves of the mzeuzil palm and with palm oil;
+but I cannot say the method is successful, save in preventing pitting,
+which it certainly does. The mortality from this disease, particularly
+among the South-west Coast tribes, is simply appalling. But it is
+extremely difficult to make the bush African realise that it is
+infectious, for he regards it as a curse from a great Nature spirit,
+sent in consequence of some sin, such as a man marrying within the
+restricted degree, or something of that kind. Mr. Dennett mentions
+small-pox patients being sent into the bush with more or less
+accommodation provided. Mr. Du Chaillu gave Mr. Fraser the idea that the
+Bakele tribe habitually drove their small-pox sick into the bush and
+neglected them, which certainly, from my knowledge of the tribe, I must
+say is not their constant habit by any means. I venture to think that
+this rough attempt at isolation among the Fjort is a remnant of the
+influence of the great Portuguese domination of the kingdom of Congo in
+the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, when the Roman
+Catholic missionaries got hold of the Fjort as no other West African has
+since been got hold of. Nevertheless the keeping of the sick in huts
+you will find in almost all districts in places--_i.e._ round the house
+of a great doctor. My friend Miss Mary Slessor, of Okyon, has the bush
+round her compound fairly studded with little temporary huts, each with
+a patient in. You see, distinguished doctors everywhere are a little
+uppish, and so their patients have to come to them. Such doctors are
+usually specialists, noted for a cure of some particular disease, and
+often patients will come to such a man from towns and villages a week's
+journey or more away, and then build their little shantie near his
+residence, and remain there while undergoing the cure.
+
+There is a prevalent Coast notion that white men do not catch small-pox
+from black, but I do not think this is, at any rate, completely true. I
+was informed when in Loanda that during an epidemic of it amongst the
+natives, every white man had had a more or less severe touch, and I have
+known of cases of white men having small-pox in other West Coast places,
+small-pox they must either have caught from natives or have made
+themselves, which is improbable. I fancy it is a matter connected with
+the vaccination state of the white, although there seem to be some
+diseases prevalent among natives from which whites are immune--the Yaws,
+for example.
+
+Less terrible in its ravages than small-pox, because it is far more
+limited in the number of its victims, is leprosy; still you will always
+find a case or so in a district. You will find the victims outcasts from
+society, not from a sense of its being an infectious disease, but
+because it is confounded with another disease, held to be a curse from
+an aggrieved Nature spirit. There was at Okyon when I was there a leper
+who lived in a regular house of his own, not a temporary hospital hut,
+but a house with a plantation. He led a lonely life, having no wife or
+family or slave; he was himself a slave, but not called on for
+service--it was just a lonely life. People would drop in on him and
+chat, and so on, but he did not live in town. There was also another one
+there, who had his own people round him, and to whom people would send
+their slaves, because he was regarded as a good doctor; but he also had
+his house in the bush, and not in town.
+
+Undoubtedly the diseases that play the greatest continuous havoc with
+black life in West Africa are small-pox, divers forms of pneumonia,
+heart-disease, and tetanus, the latter being largely responsible for the
+terrible mortality among children; but the two West African native
+diseases most interesting to the European on account of their
+strangeness, are the malignant melancholy and the sleep sickness, and
+strangely enough both these diseases seem to have their head centre in
+one region--the lower Congo. They occur elsewhere, but in this region
+they are constantly present, and now and again seem to take an epidemic
+form. Regarding the first-named, I am still collecting information, for
+I cannot tell whether the malignant melancholy of the lower Congo is one
+and the same with the hystero-hypochondria, the home-sickness of the
+true Negro. In the lower Congo I was informed that this malignant
+melancholy had the native name signifying throwing backwards, from its
+being the habit of the afflicted to throw themselves backwards into
+water when they attempted a drowning form of suicide.[24] They do not,
+however, confine themselves to attempts to drown themselves only, but
+are equally given to hanging, the constant thing about all their
+attempts being a lack of enthusiasm about getting the thing definitely
+done: the patient seems to potter at it, not much caring whether he does
+successfully hang or drown himself or no, but just keeps on, as if he
+could not help doing it. This has probably given rise to the native
+method of treating this disease--namely, holding a meeting of the
+patient's responsible relations, who point out elaborately to him the
+advantages of life over death, and enquire of him his reasons for
+hankering after the latter. If in spite of these representations he
+persists in a course of habitual suicide, he is knocked on the head and
+thrown into the river; for it is a nuisance to have a person about who
+is continually hanging himself to the house ridge pole and pulling the
+roof half off, or requiring a course of sensational rescues from
+drowning.
+
+The sleep disease[25] is also a strange thing. When I first arrived in
+Africa in 1893 there had just been a dreadful epidemic of it in the
+Kakongo and lower Congo region, and I saw a good many cases, and became
+much interested in it, and have ever since been trying to gather further
+information regarding it.
+
+Dr. Patrick Manson in his important paper[26] states that it has never
+been known to affect any one who has not at one time or another been
+resident within this area, and observes on its distribution that "it
+seems probable that as our knowledge of Africa extends, this disease
+will be found endemic here and there throughout the basins of the
+Senegal, the Niger, the Congo, and their affluents. We have no
+information of its existence in the districts drained by the Nile and
+the Zambesi, nor anywhere on the eastern side of the continent." As far
+as my own knowledge goes the centres of this disease are the Senegal and
+the Congo. I never saw a case in the Oil Rivers, nor could I hear of
+any, though I made every inquiry; the cases I heard of from Lagos and
+the Oil Rivers were among people who had been down as labourers, &c., to
+the Congo. What is the reason of this I do not know, but certainly the
+people of the lower Congo are much given to all kinds of diseases, far
+more so than those inhabiting the dense forest regions of Congo
+Francais, or the much-abused mangrove swamps of the Niger Delta.
+
+Dr. Manson says, "The sleeping sickness has been attributed to such
+things as sunstroke, beriberi, malaria, poison, peculiar foods, such as
+raw bitter manioc, and diseased grain; it is evident, however, that none
+of these things explains all the facts." In regard to this I may say I
+have often heard it ascribed to the manioc when in Kakongo, the idea
+being that when manioc was soaked in water surcharged with the poisonous
+extract, it had a bad effect. Certainly in Kakongo this was frequently
+the case in many districts where water was comparatively scarce. The
+pools used for soaking the root in stank, and the prepared root stank,
+in the peculiar way it can, something like sour paste, with a dash of
+acetic acid, and thereby the villages stank and the market-places ditto,
+in a way that could be of no use to any one except a person anxious to
+find his homestead in the dark; but Dr. Manson's suggestion is far more
+likely to be the correct one. Against it I can only urge that in some
+districts where I am informed by my medical friends that _Filaria
+perstans_ is very prevalent, such as Calabar, the Niger, and the Ogowe,
+sleeping sickness is not prevalent. Dr. Manson says "the fact that the
+disease can be acquired only in a comparatively limited area, suggests
+that the cause is similarly limited; and the fact that the disease may
+develop years after the endemic area has been quitted, suggests that the
+cause is of such a nature that it may be carried away from the endemic
+area and remain latent, as regards its disease-producing qualities for a
+considerable period; even for years." He then goes on to say, "_Filaria
+perstans_, so far as is known, is limited in its geographical
+distribution to Western Equatorial Africa--that is to say, it can be
+acquired there only--and it may continue in active life for many years
+after its human host has left the country in which alone it can be
+acquired. We also know that similar entozoa in their wanderings in the
+tissues by accident of location, or by disease, or injury of their
+organs, not infrequently give rise to grave lesions in their hosts. I
+therefore suggest that possibly _Filiaria perstans_ may in some way be
+responsible for the sleeping sickness. I know that this parasite is
+extremely common in certain sleeping sickness districts, and moreover, I
+have found it in the blood of a considerable number of cases of this
+disease--in six out of ten--including that described by Mackenzie. There
+are many difficulties in the way of establishing this hypothesis, but
+there is a sufficient inherent probability about it to make it well
+worth following up."
+
+The most important statement that I have been able to get regarding it
+so far, has been one sent me by Mr. R. E. Dennett; who says "The
+sleeping sickness though prevalent throughout Kakongo and Loango is most
+common in the north of Loango and the south of Kakongo, that is north of
+the river Quillou and among the Mussorongo.
+
+"What the cause of the sickness is, it is hard to say, but it is one of
+those scourges which is ever with us. The natives say any one may get
+it, that it is not hereditary, and only infectious in certain stages.
+They avoid the _dejecta_ of affected persons, but they do not force the
+native to live in the bush as they do a person affected by small-pox.
+
+"Pains in the head chiefly just above the nose are first experienced,
+and should these continue for a month or so it is to be expected that
+the disease is _Madotchila_, or the first stage of the sleeping
+sickness.
+
+"In the word _Madotchila_ we have the idea of a state of being poisoned
+or bewitched. At this stage the sickness is curable, but as the sick man
+will never admit that he has the sickness and will suffer excruciating
+pain rather than complain, and as it is criminal to suggest to the
+invalid or others that he is suffering from the dreadful disease, it
+often happens that it gets great hold of the afflicted and from time to
+time he falls down overcome by drowsiness.
+
+"Then he swells up and has the appearance of one suffering from dropsy,
+and this stage of the disease is called _Malazi_, literally meaning
+thousands (_Kulazi_ = one thousand, the verb _Koula_ to become great and
+_zi_ the productive fly.)
+
+"This appears to be the acute stage of the disease and death often
+occurs within eight days from the beginning of the swelling.
+
+"Then comes the stage _Ntolotolo_, meaning sleep or mock death.
+
+"The next stage is called _Tchela nxela nbela_, that is the knife
+cutting stage, referring to the operation of bleeding as part of the
+cure; and the last stage of the disease is called _Nlemba Ngombo_.
+_Lemba_ means to cease. The rites of _Lemba_ are those which refer to
+the marriage of a woman who swears to die with her husband or rather to
+cease to live at the same time as he does. _Ngombo_ is the name of the
+native grass cloth in which, before the _Nlele_ or cotton cloth of the
+white man appeared, the dead were wrapped previous to burial. Thus in
+the name _Nlemba Ngombo_ we have the meaning of marriage to the deathly
+winding sheet or shroud.
+
+"I remember how poor Sanda (a favourite servant of Mr. Dennett's, a
+mussorong boy) was taken sick with pains in his head which I at first
+mistook for simple headache. As he was of great service to me I kept him
+in the factory instead of sending him to town (the custom with invalids
+in Kakongo is that they should go to their town to be doctored). I
+purged him and gave him strong and continued doses of quinine and he got
+better; but from time to time he suffered from recurring headache and
+drowsiness, and on one occasion when I was vexed at finding him asleep
+and suspecting him of dissipation, was going to punish him, I was
+informed by another servant that the poor fellow was suffering from the
+sleeping sickness. I at once sent him to town with sufficient goods to
+pay his doctor's bill, and his relations did all in their power to have
+him properly cured, taking him many miles to visit certain Ngangas famed
+for the cure of this fell disease.
+
+"He came back to me well and happy. The next year however, the malady
+returned, and he went to town and gradually wasted away. They told me
+that sores upon one of his arms had caused him to lose a hand, which he
+lived to see buried before him. Sanda was of royal blood, so his body
+was taken across from the north bank to San Antonio or Sonio, on the
+south bank of the Congo, and there he was buried with his fathers.
+
+"Another sad case was that of a woman who lived in the factory.
+
+"As a child, it appeared afterwards, she had suffered from the disease,
+and had been cured by the good French doctor then resident in Landana
+(Dr. Lucan). I knew nothing of this at the time, and put her sickness
+down to drink, but got a doctor to see her. He could not make out what
+was the matter, but thought it might possibly be some nervous disease;
+altogether we were completely puzzled.
+
+"On one occasion during my absence she nearly tortured one of her
+children to death by stabbing her with a needle. On my return, and when
+I heard what she had done, I was very angry with her, and turned her out
+of the factory, and shortly afterwards the poor creature died in the
+swelling state of the disease.
+
+"Joao (a more or less civilised native) tells me that one of his wives
+was cured of this sleeping sickness. She was living with him in a white
+man's factory when she had it, and on one occasion fell upon a demijohn
+and cut her back open rather seriously--the white man cured her so far
+as the wound was concerned. A native doctor, a Nganga or Kakamucka,
+later on cured the sleeping sickness. He first gave her an emetic, then
+each day he gave her a kind of Turkish bath; that is, having boiled
+certain herbs in water, he placed her within the boiling decoction under
+a covering of cloth, making her perspire freely. Towards nightfall he
+poured some medicine up her nostrils and into her eyes, so that in the
+morning when she awoke, her eyes and nose were full of matter; at the
+same time he cupped and bled her in the locality of the pain in the
+head. What the medicines were I cannot say, neither will the Nganga tell
+any one save the man he means shall succeed him in his office.
+
+"The native doctors appear to know when the disease has become incurable
+and the life of the patient is merely a question of a few days, for once
+while I was at Chemongoanleo, on the lower Congo I heard the village
+carpenter hammering nails into planks, and asked my servant what they
+were doing. 'Building Buite's coffin,' he said. 'What, is he dead?' said
+I. 'No, but he must die soon,' he answered. This statement was confirmed
+by the relations of Buite who came to me for rum as my share towards his
+funeral expenses. Imagine my feelings when shortly after this Buite,
+swollen out of all likeness to his former self, crawled along to the
+shop and asked me for a gallon of rum to help him pay his doctor's bill.
+
+"A doctor of the Congo Free State began to take an interest in the
+sickness and asked me to persuade some one suffering from the disease to
+come and place himself under his care, promising that he would have a
+place apart made for him at the station, so that he could study the
+sickness and try to cure the poor fellow. After a good deal of trouble I
+got him a patient willing to remain with him, but owing to some red tape
+difficulty as to the supply of food for the sick man this doctor's good
+intentions came to nought. A Portuguese doctor here also gave his
+serious attention to the sleeping sickness, and it was reported that he
+had found a cure for it in some part of a fresh billy-goat. This good
+man wanted a special hospital to be built for him and a subsidy so that
+he might devote himself to the task he had undertaken. His Government,
+however, although its hospitals are far in advance of those of its
+neighbours on the Coast, could not see its way to erect such a place."
+
+All I need add to this is that I was informed that the disease when it
+had once definitely set in ran its fatal course in a year, but that when
+it came as an epidemic it was more rapidly fatal, sometimes only a
+matter of a few weeks, and it was this more acute form that was
+accompanied by wild delirium. Another native informant told me when it
+was bad it usually lasted only from twenty to forty days.
+
+Monteiro says the sleep disease was unknown south of the Congo until it
+suddenly attacked the town of Musserra, where he was told by the natives
+as many as 200 died of it in a few months. This was in 1870, and curious
+to say it did not spread to the neighbouring towns. Monteiro induced the
+natives to remove from the old town and the mortality decreased till the
+disease died out. "There was nothing in the old town to account for this
+sudden singular epidemic. It was beautifully clean and well-built on
+high dry ground, surrounded by mandioca plantations, the last place to
+all appearance to expect such a curious outbreak."[27]
+
+Monteiro also observes that "there is no cure known for it," but he is
+speaking for Angola, and I think this strengthens his statement that it
+is a comparatively recent importation there. For certainly there are
+cures, if not known, at any rate believed in, for the sleeping sickness
+in its own home Kakongo and Loango. There is a great difference in the
+diseases, flora and fauna, of the north and south banks of the
+Congo--whether owing to the difficulty of crossing the terrifically
+rapid and powerful stream of the great river I do not know. Still there
+was--more in former times than now--much intercourse between the natives
+of the two banks when the Portuguese discovered the Congo in 1487. The
+town called now San Antonio was the throne town of the kingdom of Kongo,
+and had nominally as provinces the two districts Kakongo and Loango,
+these provinces that are now the head centres of the sleep disease. Yet
+in the early accounts given of Kongo by the Catholic missionaries, who
+lived in Kongo among the natives, I have so far found no mention of the
+sleep disease. It is impossible to believe that Merolla, for example,
+could have avoided mentioning it if he had seen or heard of it.
+Merolla's style of giving information was, like my own, diffuse.
+Certainly we must remember that these Catholic missionaries were not
+much in Loango and Kakongo as those provinces had broken almost entirely
+away from the Kongo throne prior to the Portuguese arrival, so perhaps
+all we can safely say is that in the 15-17th centuries there was no
+sleep disease in the districts on the south bank of the Congo, and it
+was not anything like so notoriously bad in the districts on the north
+bank.
+
+Before quitting the apothecary part of this affair, I may just remark
+that if you, being white, of a nervous disposition, and merely in
+possession of an ordinary amount of medical knowledge, find yourself
+called in to doctor an African friend or acquaintance, you must be
+careful about hot poultices. I should say, _never_ prescribe hot
+poultices. An esteemed medical friend, since dead, told me that when he
+first commenced practice in West Africa he said to a civilised native
+who was looking after his brother--the patient--"Give him a linseed
+poultice made like this"--demonstration--"and mind he has it hot." The
+man came back shortly afterwards to say his brother had been very sick,
+but was no better, though every bit of the stuff had been swallowed so
+hot it had burnt his mouth. But swallowing the poultice is a minor
+danger to its exhibition. Even if you yourself see it put on outside,
+carefully, exactly where that poultice ought to be, the moment your back
+is turned the patient feeling hot gets into the most awful draught he
+can find, or into cold water, and the consequences are inflammation of
+the lungs and death, and you get the credit of it. The natives
+themselves you will find are very clever at doctoring in their own way,
+by no means entirely depending on magic and spells; and you will also
+find they have a strong predilection for blisters, cupping and bleeding,
+hot water and emetics; in all their ailments and on the whole it suits
+them very well. Therefore I pray you add your medical knowledge and your
+special drugs to theirs and for outside applications stick to blisters
+in place of hot poultices.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [24] An experienced medical man from West Africa informs me that he
+   considers the Africans very liable to hysterical disease, and he
+   attributes the throwing backwards to the patient's desire not to spoil
+   his or her face, a thing ladies are especially careful of, and says
+   that turning a lady face downwards on the sand is as efficacious in
+   breaking up the hysterical fit as throwing water over their clothes
+   is with us.
+
+   [25] Negro lethargy; Maladie du sommeil; Enfermedad del sueno; Nelavane
+   (Oulof); Dadane (Sereres); Toruahebue (Mendi); Ntolo (Fjort).
+
+   [26] _System of Medicine._ Volume II. Edited by Dr. Clifford Allbutt.
+   Macmillan & Co., 1897.
+
+   [27] _Angola and the River Congo._ Macmillan. Vol. i., p. 144.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE WITCH DOCTOR
+
+     African Medicine mainly from the point of view of the Witch Doctor.
+
+
+We will now leave the village apothecary and his methods, and turn to
+the witch doctor, the consulting physician. He of course knows all about
+the therapeutic action of low-grade spirits, such as dwell in herbs and
+so on; but he knows more--namely the actions of higher spirits on the
+human soul, and the disorders of the human soul into the bargain.
+
+The dogma that rules his practice is that in all cases of disease in
+which no blood is showing, the patient is suffering from something wrong
+in the soul. In order to lay this dogma fairly before you, I should here
+discourse on the nature of spirits unallied to the human soul--non-human
+spirits--and the nature of the human spirit itself; but as on the one
+hand, I cannot be hasty on such an important group of subjects, and, on
+the other, I cannot expect you to be anything else in such a matter, I
+forbear, and merely beg to remark that the African does not believe in
+anything being soulless, he regards even matter itself as a form of
+soul, low, because not lively, a thing other spirit forms use as they
+please--practically as the cloth of the spirit that uses it. This
+conception is, as far as I know, constant in both Negro and Bantu. I
+will therefore here deal only with what the African regards as merely
+one class of spirits--an important class truly, but above it there are
+at least two more important classes, while beneath it in grade there
+are, I think, about eleven, and equal to it, but differing in nature,
+several classes--I don't exactly know how many. This class of spirits is
+the human soul--the _Kla_ of the true Negro, the _Manu_ of the Bantu.
+These human souls are also of different grades, for one sort is believed
+to be existent before birth, as well as during life and after death,
+while other classes are not. There is more interesting stuff here, but I
+am determined to stick to my main point now--the medical. Well, the
+number of souls possessed by each individual we call a human being is
+usually held to be four--(1) the soul that survives, (2) the soul that
+lives in an animal away wild in the bush, (3) the shadow cast by the
+body, (4) the soul that acts in dreams. I believe that the more profound
+black thinkers hold that these last-named souls are only functions of
+the true soul, but from the witch doctor's point of view there are four,
+and he acts on this opinion when doctoring the diseases that afflict
+these souls of a man.
+
+The dream-soul is the cause of woes unnumbered to our African friend,
+and the thing that most frequently converts him into that desirable
+state, from a witch doctor's point of view of a patient. It is this way.
+The dream-soul is, to put it very mildly, a silly flighty thing. Off it
+goes when its owner is taking a nap, and gets so taken up with
+sky-larking, fighting, or gossiping with other dream-souls that
+sometimes it does not come home to its owner when he is waking up. So,
+if any one has to wake a man up great care must always be taken that it
+is done softly--softly, namely gradually and quietly, so as to give the
+dream-soul time to come home. For if either of the four souls of a man
+have their intercommunication broken, the human being possessing them
+gets very ill. We will take an example. A man has been suddenly roused
+by some cause or other before that dream-soul has had time to get into
+quarters. That human being feels very ill, and sends for the Witch
+Doctor. The medical man diagnoses the case as one of absence of
+dream-soul, instantly claps a cloth over the mouth and nose, and gets
+his assistant to hold it there until the patient gets hard on
+suffocated; but no matter, it's the proper course of treatment to
+pursue. The witch doctor himself gets ready as rapidly as possible
+another dream-soul, which if he is a careful medical man, he has brought
+with him in a basket. Then the patient is laid on his back and the
+cloths removed from the mouth and nose, and the witch doctor holds over
+them his hands containing the fresh soul, blowing hard at it so as to
+get it well into the patient. If this is successfully accomplished, the
+patient recovers. Occasionally, however, this fresh soul slips through
+the medical man's fingers, and before you can say "Knife" is on top of
+some 100-feet-high or more silk cotton tree, where it chirrups gaily and
+distinctly. This is a great nuisance. The patient has to be promptly
+covered up again. If the doctor has an assistant with him, that
+unfortunate individual has to go up the tree and catch the dream-soul.
+If he has no assistant, he has to send his power up the tree after the
+truant; doctors who are in full practice have generally passed the time
+of life when climbing up trees personally is agreeable. When, however,
+the thing has been re-captured and a second attempt to insert it is
+about to be made, it is held advisable to get the patient's friends and
+relatives to stand round him in a ring and howl lustily, while your
+assistant also howling lustily, but in a professional manner, beats a
+drum. This prevents the soul from bolting again, and tends to frighten
+it into the patient.
+
+In some obstinate cases of loss of dream-soul, however, the most
+experienced medical man will fail to get the fresh soul inserted. It
+clings to his fingers, it whisks back into the basket or into his hair
+or clothes, and it chirrups dismally, and the patient becomes convulsed.
+This is a grave symptom, but the diagnosis is quite clear. The patient
+has got a _sisa_ in him, so there is no room for the fresh soul.
+
+Now, a _sisa_ is a dreadful bad thing for a man to have in him, and an
+expensive thing to get out. It is the surviving soul of a person who has
+not been properly buried--not had his devil made, in fact. And as every
+human surviving soul has a certain allotted time of existence in a human
+body before it can learn the dark and difficult way down to Srahmandazi,
+if by mischance the body gets killed off before the time is up, that
+soul, unless properly buried and sent on the way to Srahmandazi, or any
+other Hades, under expert instruction given as to the path for the dead,
+becomes a _sisa_, and has to hang about for the remaining years of its
+term of bodily life.
+
+These _ensisa_ are held to be so wretchedly uncomfortable in this state
+that their tempers become perfect wrecks, and they grow utterly
+malignant, continually trying to get into a human body, so as to finish
+their term more comfortably. Now, a _sisa's_ chief chance of getting
+into a body is in whipping in when there is a hole in a man's soul
+chamber, from the absence of his own dream-soul. If a _sisa_ were a
+quiet, respectable soul that would settle down, it would not matter
+much, for the dream-soul it supplants is not of much account. But a
+_sisa_ is not. At the best, it would only live out its remaining term,
+and then go off the moment that term was up, and most likely kill the
+souls it had been sheltering with by bolting at an inconvenient moment.
+This was the verdict given on the death of a man I knew who, from what
+you would call faintness, fell down in a swamp and was suffocated.
+Inconvenient as this is, the far greater danger you are exposed to by
+having a _sisa_ in you lies in the chances being 10 to 1 that it is
+stained with blood, for, without being hard on these unfortunate
+unburied souls, I may remark that respectable souls usually get
+respectably buried, and so don't become _ensisa_. This blood which is
+upon it the devils that are around smell and go for, as is the nature of
+devils; and these devils whip in after the _sisa_ soul into his host in
+squads, and the man with such a set inside him is naturally very
+ill--convulsions, delirium, high temperature, &c., and the indications
+to your true witch doctor are that that _sisa_ must be extracted before
+a new dream-soul can be inserted and the man recover.
+
+But getting out a _sisa_ is a most trying operation. Not only does it
+necessitate a witch doctor sending in his power to fetch it _vi et
+armis_, it also places the medical man in a position of grave
+responsibility regarding its disposal when secured. The methods he
+employs to meet this may be regarded as akin to those of antiseptic
+surgery. All the people in the village, particularly babies and old
+people--people whose souls are delicate--must be kept awake during the
+operation, and have a piece of cloth over the nose and mouth, and every
+one must howl so as to scare the _sisa_ off them, if by mischance it
+should escape from the witch doctor. An efficient practitioner, I may
+remark, thinks it a great disgrace to allow a _sisa_ to escape from him;
+and such an accident would be a grave blow to his practice, for people
+would not care to call in a man who was liable to have this occur.
+However, our present medical man having got the _sisa_ out, he has still
+to deal with the question of its disposal before he can do anything
+more. The assistant blows a new dream soul into the patient, and his
+women see to him; but the witch doctor just holds on to the _sisa_ like
+a bulldog.
+
+Sometimes the disposal of the _sisa_ has been decided on prior to its
+extraction. If the patient's family are sufficiently well off, they
+agree to pay the doctor enough to enable him to teach the _sisa_ the way
+to Hades. Indeed, this is the course respectable medical men always
+insist on although it is expensive to the patient's family. But there
+are, I regret to say, a good many unprincipled witch doctors about who
+will undertake a case cheap.
+
+They will carry off with them the extracted _sisa_ for a small fee, then
+shortly afterwards a baby in the village goes off in tetanic
+convulsions. No one takes much notice of that, because it's a way babies
+have. Soon another baby is born in the same family--polygamy being
+prevalent, the event may occur after a short interval--well, after
+giving the usual anxiety and expense, that baby goes off in convulsions.
+Suspicion is aroused. Presently yet another baby appears in the family,
+keeps all right for a week may be, and then also goes off in
+convulsions. Suspicions are confirmed. The worm--the father, I
+mean--turns, and he takes the body of that third baby and smashes one of
+its leg bones before it is thrown away into the bush; for he knows he
+has got a wanderer soul--namely, a _sisa_, which some unprincipled
+practitioner has sent into his family. He just breaks the leg so as to
+warn the soul he is not a man to be trifled with, and will not have his
+family kept in a state of perpetual uproar and expense. It sometimes
+happens, however, in spite of this that, when his fourth baby arrives,
+that too goes off in convulsions. Thoroughly roused now, paterfamilias
+sternly takes a chopper and chops that infant's remains up extremely
+small, and it is scattered broadcast. Then he holds he has eliminated
+that _sisa_ from his family finally.
+
+I am informed, however, that the fourth baby to arrive in a family
+afflicted by a _sisa_ does not usually go off in convulsions, but that
+fairly frequently it is born lame, which shows that it is that wanderer
+soul back with its damaged leg. It is not treated unkindly but not taken
+much care of, and so rarely lives many years--from the fetish point of
+view, of course, only those years remaining of its term of bodily life
+out of which some witchcraft of man or some vengeance of a god cheated
+it.
+
+If I mention the facts that when a man wakes up in the morning feeling
+very stiff and with "that tired feeling" you see mentioned in
+advertisements in the newspapers, he holds that it arises from his own
+dream-soul having been out fighting and got itself bruised; and that if
+he wakes up in a fright, he will jump up and fire off his gun, holding
+that a pack of rag tag devils have been chasing his soul home and
+wishing to scare them off, I think I may leave the complaints of the
+dream-soul connected with physic and pass on to those connected with
+surgery.
+
+Now, devoted as I am to my West African friends, I am bound in the
+interests of Truth to say that many of them are sadly unprincipled.
+There are many witches, not witch doctors, remember, who make it a
+constant practice to set traps for dream-souls. Witches you will find
+from Sierra Leone to Cameroons, but they are extra prevalent on the
+Gold Coast and in Calabar.
+
+These traps are usually pots containing something attractive to the
+soul, and in this bait are concealed knives or fish-hooks--fish-hooks
+when the witch wants to catch the soul to keep, knives when the desire
+is just to injure it.
+
+In the case of the lacerated dream-soul, when it returns to its owner,
+it makes him feel very unwell; but the symptoms are quite different from
+those arising from loss of dream-soul or from a _sisa_.
+
+The reason for catching dream-souls with hooks is usually a low
+mercenary one. You see, many patients insist on having their own
+dream-soul put back into them--they don't want a substitute from the
+doctor's store--so of course the soul has to be bought from the witch
+who has got it. Sometimes, however, the witch is the hireling of some
+one intent on injuring a particular person and keen on capturing the
+soul for this purpose, though too frightened to kill his enemy outright.
+So the soul is not only caught and kept, but tortured, hung up over the
+canoe fire and so on, and thus, even if the patient has another
+dream-soul put in, so long as his original soul is in the hands of a
+torturer, he is uncomfortable.
+
+On one occasion, for example, I heard one of the Kru boys who were with
+me making more row in his sleep, more resounding slaps and snores and
+grunts than even a normal Kru boy does, and, resolving in my mind that
+what that young man really required was one of my pet pills, I went to
+see him. I found him asleep under a thick blanket and with a
+handkerchief tied over his face. It was a hot night, and the man and his
+blanket were as wet with sweat as if they had been dragged through a
+river. I suggested to head-man that the handkerchief muzzle should come
+off, and was informed by him that for several nights previously the man
+had dreamt of that savoury dish, crawfish seasoned with red pepper. He
+had become anxious, and consulted the head-man, who decided that
+undoubtedly some witch was setting a trap for his dream-soul with this
+bait, with intent, &c. Care was now being taken to, as it were, keep the
+dream-soul at home. I of course did not interfere and the patient
+completely recovered.
+
+We will now pass on to diseases arising from disorders in the other
+three souls of a man. The immortal or surviving soul is liable to a
+disease that its body suffered from during its previous time on earth,
+born again with it. Such diseases are quite incurable, and I only
+personally know of them in the Calabar and Niger Delta, where
+reincarnation is strongly believed in.
+
+Then come the diseases that arise from injury to the shadow-soul. It
+strikes one as strange at first to see men who have been walking, say,
+through forest or grass land on a blazing hot morning quite happily, on
+arrival at a piece of clear ground or a village square, most carefully
+go round it, not across, and you will soon notice that they only do this
+at noontime, and learn that they fear losing their shadow. I asked some
+Bakwiri I once came across who were particularly careful in this matter
+why they were not anxious about losing their shadows when night came
+down and they disappeared in the surrounding darkness, and was told that
+that was all right, because at night all shadows lay down in the shadow
+of the Great God, and so got stronger. Had I not seen how strong and
+long a shadow, be it of man or tree or of the great mountain itself, was
+in the early morning time? Ah me! I said, the proverb is true that says
+the turtle can teach the spider. I never thought of that.
+
+Murders are sometimes committed by secretly driving a nail or knife into
+a man's shadow, and so on; but if the murderer be caught red-handed at
+it, he or she would be forthwith killed, for all diseases arising from
+the shadow-soul are incurable. No man's shadow is like that of his own
+brother, says the proverb.
+
+Now we come to that very grave class of diseases which arise from
+disorders of the bush-soul. These diseases are not all incurable,
+nevertheless they are very intractable and expensive to cure. This
+bush-soul is, as I have said, resident in some wild animal in the
+forest. It may be in only an earth pig, or it may be in a leopard, and,
+quite providentially for the medical profession no layman can see his
+own soul--it is not as if it were connected with all earth pigs, or all
+leopards, as the case may be, but it is in one particular earth pig or
+leopard or other animal--so recourse must be had to medical aid when
+anything goes wrong with it. It is usually in the temper that the
+bush-soul suffers. It is liable to get a sort of aggrieved neglected
+feeling, and want things given it. When you wander about the wild gloomy
+forests of the Calabar region, you will now and again come across, far
+away from all human habitation or plantation, tiny huts, under whose
+shelter lies some offering or its remains. Those are offerings
+administered by direction of a witch doctor to appease a bush-soul. For
+not only can a witch doctor see what particular animal a man's bush-soul
+is in, but he can also see whereabouts in the forest that animal is.
+Still, these bush-souls are not easily appeased. The worst of it is that
+a man may be himself a quiet steady man, careful of his diet and
+devoted to a whole skin, and yet his bush-soul be a reckless blade,
+scorning danger, and thereby getting itself shot by some hunter or
+killed in a trap or pit; and if his bush-soul dies, the man it is
+connected with dies. Therefore if the hunter who has killed it can be
+found out--a thing a witch doctor cannot do unless he happens by chance
+to have had his professional eye on that bush-soul at the time of the
+catastrophe; because, as it were, at death the bush-soul ceases to
+exist--that hunter has to pay compensation to the family of the
+deceased. On the other hand, if the man belonging to the bush-soul dies,
+the bush-soul animal has to die too. It rushes to and fro in the
+forest--"can no longer find a good place." If it sees a fire, it rushes
+into that; if it sees a lot of hunters, it rushes among them--anyhow, it
+gets itself killed off.
+
+We will now turn our attention to that other great division of
+diseases--namely such as are caused only and directly by human agency.
+Those I have already detained you too long over are caused by spirits
+acting on their own account, for even in the case of the trapped
+dream-souls they are held themselves to have shown contributory
+negligence in getting hooked or cut in traps.
+
+The others arise from what is called witchcraft. You will often hear it
+said that the general idea among savage races is that death always
+arises from witchcraft; but I think, from what I have said regarding
+diseases arising from bush-souls' bad tempers, from contracting a
+_sisa_, from losing the shadow at high noon, and from, it may be, other
+causes I have not spoken of, that this generalisation is for West Africa
+too sweeping. But undoubtedly sixty per cent of the deaths are believed
+to arise from witchcraft. I would put the percentage higher, were it not
+for the terrible mortality from tetanus among children, which sometimes
+is and sometimes is not put down to witchcraft, and the mortality from
+smallpox and the sleep disease down south in Loango and Kakongo, those
+diseases not being in any case that I have had personal acquaintance
+with imputed to witchcraft at all. Indeed I venture to think that any
+disease that takes an epidemic form is regarded as a scourge sent by
+some great outraged Nature spirit, not a mere human dabbler in devils. I
+have dealt with witchcraft itself elsewhere, therefore now I only speak
+regarding it medically; and I think, roughly speaking, not absolutely,
+mind you, that the witching something _out_ of a man is the most common
+iniquity of witchcraft from Cape Juby to Cameroons, the region of the
+true Negro stock; while from Cameroons to Benguella--the limit of my
+knowledge to the south on the western side of the continent--the most
+common iniquity of witchcraft is witching something into him. As in the
+diseases arising from the loss of the dream-soul I have briefly dealt
+with the witching something out, I now turn to the witching something
+in.
+
+I well remember, in 1893, being then new to and easily alarmed by the
+West Coast, going into a village in Kakongo one afternoon and seeing
+several unpleasant-looking objects stuck on poles. Investigation showed
+they were the lungs, livers, or spleens of human beings; and local
+information stated that they were the powers of witches--witches that
+had been killed and, on examination, found to have inside them these
+things, dangerous to the state and society at large. Wherefrom it was
+the custom to stick up on poles these things as warnings to the general
+public not to harbour in their individual interiors things to use
+against their fellow-creatures. They mutely but firmly said, "See! if
+you turn witch, your inside will be stuck on a pole."
+
+I may remark that in many districts of the South-West coast and middle
+Congo it is customary when a person dies in an unexplainable way, namely
+without shedding blood, to hold a post-mortem. In some cases the
+post-mortem discloses the path of the witch through the victim--usually,
+I am informed, the injected witch feeds on the victim's lungs--in other
+cases the post-mortem discloses the witch power itself, demonstrating
+that the deceased was a keeper of witch power, or, as we should say, a
+witch.
+
+Once when I was at Batanga a woman dropped down on the beach and died.
+The usual post-mortem was held, and local feeling ran high. "She no
+complain, she no say nothing, and then she go die one time." The
+post-mortem disclosed what I think you would term a ruptured aneurism of
+the aorta, but the local verdict was "she done witch herself"--namely
+that she was a witch, who had been eaten by her own power, therefore
+there were great rejoicings over her death.
+
+This dire catastrophe is, however, liable to overtake legitimate medical
+men. All reasonable people in every clime allow a certain latitude to
+doctors. They are supposed to know things other people need not, and to
+do things, like dissections and such, that other people should not, and
+no one thinks any the worse of them. This is the case with the African
+physician, whom we roughly call the witch doctor, but whose full title
+is the combatant of the evils worked by witches and devils on human
+souls and human property. This medical man has, from the exigencies of
+his profession, to keep in his own inside a power, and a good strong one
+at that, which he can employ in his practice by sending it into
+patients to fetch out other witch powers, _sisas_, or any miscellaneous
+kind of devil that may have got into them. His position is totally
+different from that of the layman. He is known to possess a witch power,
+and the knowledge of how to employ it; but instead of this making him an
+object of aversion to his fellow-men, it secures for him esteem and
+honour, and the more terrifically powerful his power is known to be, the
+more respect he gains; for suppose you were taken ill by a real bad
+devil, you would prefer a medical man whose power was at least up to
+that devil's fighting weight.
+
+Nevertheless his having to keep the dangerous devil in his own inside
+exposes the witch doctor to grave personal danger, for if, from a
+particularly healthy season, or some notorious quack coming into his
+district, his practice falls off, and his power is thereby not kept fed,
+that unfortunate man is liable to be attacked by it. This was given me
+as the cause of the death of a great doctor in the Chiloango district,
+and I heard the same thing from the Ncomi district, so it is clear that
+many eminent men are cut off in the midst of their professional career
+in this way.
+
+As for what this power is like in its corporal form, I can only say that
+it is evidently various. One witch doctor I know just to the north of
+Loango always made it a practice to give his patients a brisk emetic as
+soon as he was called in, and he always found young crocodiles in the
+consequences. I remember seeing him in one case secure six lively young
+crocodiles that had apparently been very recently hatched. These were
+witch powers. Again, I was informed of a witch who was killed near the
+Bungo River having had found inside him a thing like a lizard, but with
+wings like a bat. The most peculiar form of witch power I have heard of
+as being found inside a patient was on the Ogowe from two native
+friends, both of them very intelligent, reliable men, one of them a
+Bible reader. They said that about two years previously a relation of
+theirs had been badly witched. A doctor had been called in, who
+administered an emetic, and there appeared upon the scene a strange
+little animal that grew with visible rapidity. An hour after its coming
+to light it crawled and got out of the basin, and finally it flew away.
+It had bat's wings and a body and tail like a lizard. This catawampus,
+my informant held, had been witched into the man when it was "small,
+small"--namely, very small. It might, they thought, have been given to
+their relation in some food or drink by an enemy, but for sure, if it
+had not been disturbed by that emetic, it would have grown up inside the
+man and have eaten its way out through his vitals.
+
+From the whole of the above statements I think I have shown you that if
+as a witch doctor you are called in to a patient who is ill, but who is
+not showing blood anywhere, your diagnosis will be that he has got some
+sort or another of devil the matter with him, and that the first
+indication is to find out who put that devil in, because, in the
+majority of cases, until you know this you can't get it out; the second
+is to get it out; the third is to prevent its getting adrift, and into
+some one else.
+
+I have only briefly sketched the ideas and methods of witch doctors in
+West Africa, in so far as treatment is concerned. The infinite variety
+of methods employed in detecting who has been the witch in a given case;
+the infinite variety of incantations and so on, I have no space to dwell
+on here, and will conclude by giving you a general sketch of the career
+of a witch doctor.
+
+We will start with the medical student stage. Now, every West African
+tribe has a secret society--two, in fact, one for men and one for women.
+Every free man has to pass through the secret society of his tribe. If
+during this education the Elders of this society discover that a boy is
+what is called in Calabar an _ebumtup_--a person who can see
+spirits--the elders of the society advise that he should be brought up
+to the medical profession. Their advice is generally taken, and the boy
+is apprenticed as it were to a witch doctor, who requires a good fee
+with him. This done, he proceeds with his studies, learns the difference
+between the dream-soul basket and the one _sisas_ are kept in--a mistake
+between the two would be on a par with mistaking oxalic acid for Epsom
+salts. He is then taught how to howl in a professional way, and, by
+watching his professor, picks up his bedside manner. If he can acquire a
+showy way of having imitation epileptic fits, so much the better. In
+fact, as a medical student, you have to learn pretty well as much there
+as here. You must know the dispositions, the financial position, little
+scandals, &c., of the inhabitants of the whole district, for these
+things are of undoubted use in divination and the finding of witches,
+and in addition you must be able skilfully to dispense charms, and know
+what babies say before their own mothers can. Then some day your
+professor and instructor dies, his own professional power eats him, or
+he tackles a disease-causing spirit that is one too many for him, and on
+you descend his paraphernalia and his practice.
+
+It is usual for a witch doctor to acquire for his power a member of one
+of the higher grade spirit classes--he does not acquire a human
+soul--and his successor usually, I think, takes the same spirit, or, at
+any rate, a member of the same class. This does not altogether limit
+you as a successor to a certain line of practice, but, as no one spirit
+can do all things, it tends to make you a specialist. I know a district
+where, if any one wanted a canoe charm, they went to one medical man; if
+a charm to keep thieves off their plantation, to another.
+
+This brings us to the practice itself, and it may be divided into two
+divisions. First, prophylactic methods, namely, making charms to protect
+your patient's wives, children, goats, plantations, canoes, &c. from
+damage, houses from fire, &c., &c., and to protect the patient himself
+from wild animals and all danger by land or water. This is a very paying
+part, but full of anxiety. For example, put yourself in the place of a
+Mpangwe medical friend of mine. You have with much trouble got a really
+valuable spirit to come into a paste made of blood and divers things,
+and having made it into a sausage form, and done it round with fibre
+wonderfully neatly, you have painted it red outside to please the
+spirits--because spirits like red, they think it's blood. Well, in a
+week or so the man you administered it to comes back and says "that
+thing's no good." His paddle has broken more often than before he had
+the thing. The amount of rocks, and floating trees, to say nothing of
+snags, is, he should say, about double the normal, whereby he has lost a
+whole canoe load of European goods, and, in short, he doesn't think much
+of you as a charm maker. Then he expectorates and sulks offensively. You
+take the charm, and tell him it was a perfectly good one when you gave
+it him, and you never had any complaints before, but you will see what
+has gone wrong with it. Investigation shows you that the spirit is
+either dead or absent. In the first case it has been killed by a
+stronger spirit of its own class; in the second, lured away by bribery.
+Now this clearly points to your patient's having a dangerous and
+powerful enemy, and you point it out to him and advise him to have a
+fresh and more powerful charm--necessarily more expensive--with as
+little delay as possible. He grumbles, but, realising the danger, pays
+up, and you make him another. The old one can be thrown away, like an
+empty pill-box.
+
+The other part of your practice--the clinical--consists in combating
+those witches who are always up to something--sucking blood of young
+children, putting fearful wild fowl into people to eat up their most
+valued viscera, or stealing souls o' nights, blighting crops, &c.
+
+Therefore you see the witch doctor's life is not an idle one; he has not
+merely to humbug the public and pocket the fees--or I should say "bag,"
+pockets being rare in this region--but he works very hard, and has his
+anxieties just like a white medical man. The souls that get away from
+him are a great worry. The death of every patient is a danger to a
+certain extent, because the patient's soul will be vicious to him until
+it is buried. But I must say I profoundly admire our West African witch
+doctors for their theory of _sisas_ as an explanation of their not
+always being able to insert a new soul into a patient, for by this
+theory they save themselves somewhat, and do not entail on themselves
+the treatment their brother medicos have to go through on the Nass River
+in British Columbia. According to Mr. Fraser, in that benighted Nass
+River district those native American doctors hold it possible that a
+doctor may swallow a patient's soul by mistake. This is their theory to
+account for the strange phenomenon of a patient getting worse instead of
+better when a doctor has been called in, and so the unfortunate doctor
+who has had this accident occur is made to stand over his patient while
+another medical man thrusts his fingers in his throat, another kneads
+him in the abdomen, and a third medical brother slaps him on the back.
+All the doctors present have to go through the same ordeal, and if the
+missing soul does not turn up, the party of doctors go to the head
+doctor's house to see if by chance he has got it in his box. All the
+things are taken out of the box, and if the soul is not there, the head
+doctor, the President of the College of Physicians, the Sir Somebody
+Something of the district, is held by his heels with his learned head in
+a hole in the floor, while the other doctors wash his hair. The water
+used is then taken and poured over the patient's head.
+
+I told this story to all the African witch doctors I knew. I fear, that
+being hazy in geography, they think it is the practice of the English
+medical profession; but, anyhow every one of them regarded the doctors
+of the Nass River as a set of superstitious savages, and imbeciles at
+that. Of course a medical man had to see to souls, but to go about in
+squads, administer rough emetics to themselves, instead of to the
+patients, and as for that head washing--well, people can be fool too
+much! None of them showed the slightest signs of adopting the British
+Columbia method, none of them showed even any signs of adopting my
+suggestion that they should go and teach those benighted brothers of
+theirs the theory of _insisa_.
+
+If you ask me frankly whether I think these African witch doctors
+believe in themselves, I think I must say, Yes; or perhaps it would be
+safer to say they believe in the theory they work by, for of that there
+can be very little doubt. I do not fancy they ever claim invincible
+power over disease; they do their best according to their lights. It
+would be difficult to see why they should doubt their own methods,
+because, remember, all their patients do not die; the majority recover.
+I am not putting this recovery down to their soul-treatment method, but
+to the village apothecary, who has usually been doctoring the patient
+with drugs before the so-called witch doctor is called in. Of course the
+apothecary does not get the credit of the cure in this case, but I fancy
+he deserves it. Another point to be remembered is that the Africans on
+the West Coast, at any rate, are far more liable than white men to many
+strange nervous disorders, especially to delirium, which often occurs in
+a comparatively slight illness. Why I do not pretend to understand; but
+I think in these nervous cases the bedside manners of a witch
+doctor--though strongly resembling that of the physician who attended
+the immortal Why Why's mother--may yet be really useful.
+
+As to the evil these witch doctors do in the matter of getting people
+killed for bewitching it is difficult to speak justly. I fancy that, on
+the whole, they do more good than harm, for remember witchcraft in these
+districts is no parlour game; in the eyes of Allah as well as man it is
+murder, for most of it is poison. Most witchcraft charms I know of among
+people who have not been in contact with Mohammedanism have always had
+that element of mixing something with the food or drink--even in that
+common, true Negro form of killing by witchcraft, putting medicine in
+the path, there is a poisoned spike as well as charm stuff. There can be
+no doubt that the witch doctor's methods of finding out who has poisoned
+a person are effective, and that the knowledge in the public mind of
+this detective power keeps down poisoning to a great extent. Of the
+safeguards against unjust accusation I will speak when treating of law.
+
+As to their using hypnotism, I suppose they do use something of the sort
+at times. West Indians, with whom I was always anxious to talk on the
+differences and agreements between Vodou and Obeah and their parent West
+African religion, certainly, in their description of what they called
+Wanga--and translated as Glamour--seemed to point to this; but for
+myself, save in the case of blood coming before, one case of which I
+witnessed, I have seen nothing beyond an enormously elaborated common
+sense. I dare not call it sound, because it is based on and developed
+out of animism, and of that and our white elaborated view I am not the
+judge, remembering you go the one way, I the other--which is the best,
+God knows.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+EARLY TRADE IN WEST AFRICA
+
+     Concerning the accounts given by classic writers of West Africa,
+     and of the method of barter called the Silent Trade.
+
+
+It is a generally received opinion that there are too many books in the
+world already. I cannot, however, subscribe to any Institution that
+proposes to alter this state of affairs, because I find no consensus of
+opinion as to which are the superfluous books; I have my own opinion on
+the point, but I feel I had better keep it to myself, for I find the
+very books I dislike--almost invariably in one-volume form, as this one
+is, though of a more connected nature than this is likely to be--are the
+well-beloved of thousands of my fellow human beings; and so I will
+restrict my enthusiasms in the matter of books to the cause of
+attempting to incite writers to give us more. If any one wants
+personally to oblige me he will forthwith write a masterly history of
+the inter-relationships--religious, commercial, and cultural--of the
+other races of the earth with the African, and he can put in as an
+appendix a sketch of the war conquest of Africa by the white races. I do
+not ask for a separate volume on this, because there will be so many on
+the others; moreover, it is such a kaleidoscopic affair, and its
+influence alike on both European, Asiatic, and African seems to me
+neither great nor good.
+
+For the past fifteen years I have been reading up Africa; and the effect
+of the study of this literature may best be summarised in Mr. Kipling's
+observation, "For to admire an' for to see, For to be'old this world so
+wide, It's never been no good to me, But I can't drop it if I tried."
+Wherein it has failed to be of good, I hastily remark, is that after all
+this fifteen years' reading, I found I had to go down into the most
+unfashionable part of Africa myself, to try to find out whatever the
+thing was really like, and also to discover which of my authors had been
+doing the heaviest amount of lying. It seemed clear to the meanest
+intelligence that this form of the darkening of counsel was fearfully
+prevalent among them, because of the way they disagreed about things
+among themselves. Of course I have so far only partially succeeded in
+both these matters; for, regarding the first, personal experience taught
+me that things differed with district; regarding the second, that all
+the people who have been to Africa and have written books on it have,
+off and on, told the truth, and that what seemed to the public who have
+not been there to be the most erroneous statements have been true in
+substance and in fact, and that those statements they have accepted
+immediately as true on account of their either flattering their vanity
+or comfortably explaining the reasons of the failure of their
+endeavours, have the most falsehood in them.
+
+There is another point I must mention regarding this material for that
+much wanted colossal work on the history of African relationships with
+the rest of the world--which I do not intend to write, but want written
+for me--and that is the superiority both in quality and quantity of the
+portion which relates to the Early History of the West Coast. Yet very
+little attention has been given in our own times to this. I might say no
+attention, were it not for Sir A. B. Ellis, that very noble man and
+gallant soldier, who did so much good work for England both with sword
+and pen. Just for the sake of the work being worth doing, not in the
+hope of reward; for twenty years' service and the publication of a
+series of books of great interest and importance taught him that West
+Africa was under a ban that it was beyond his power to remove;
+nevertheless he went on with his work unfaltering, if not uncomplaining,
+and died, in 1895, a young man, practically killed by the Warim
+incident--the true history of which has yet to be written. For the
+credit of my country, I must say that just before death he was knighted.
+
+I do not quote Colonel Ellis's works extensively, because, for one
+thing, it is the duty of people to read them first-hand, and as they are
+perfectly accessible there is no excuse for their not doing so; and, for
+another thing, I am in touch with the majority of the works from which
+he gathered his information regarding the early history, and with the
+natives from whom he gathered his ethnological information. There are
+certain points, I grant, on which I am unable to agree with him, such as
+the opinion he formed from his personal prejudices against the traders
+in West Africa; but in the main, regarding the regions with which he was
+personally acquainted and on which he wrote--the Bight of Benin
+regions--I am only too glad that there is Colonel Ellis for me to agree
+with.
+
+The fascination of West Africa's historical record is very great,
+bristling as it does with the deeds of brave men, bad and good, black
+and white. What my German friends would call the Blueth-period of this
+history is decidedly that period which was inaugurated by the great
+Prince Henry the Navigator; and no man who has ever read, as every man
+should read, Mr. Major's book on Prince Henry, can fail to want to know
+more still, and what happened down in those re-discovered Bights of
+Benin and Biafra after this Blueth-period closed. This can be done,
+mainly thanks to a Dutchman named Bosman, who was agent for the great
+Dutch house of the Gold Coast for many years circa 1698, and who wrote
+home to his uncle a series of letters of a most exemplary nature reeking
+with information on native matters and local politics, and suffused with
+a tender fear of shocking his aunt, which did not, however, seem in his
+opinion to justify him in suppressing important ethnological facts.
+
+Regarding the ethnological information we have of the Gold Coast
+natives, the most important works are those by the late Sir A. B. Ellis.
+His books are almost models of what books should be that are written by
+people studying native customs in their native land. We have also the
+results of scientific observers in the works of Buckhardt and Bastian,
+besides a mass of scattered information in the works of travellers,
+Bosman, Barbot, Labat, Mathews, Bowditch, Cruickshank, Winwood Reade, H.
+M. Stanley, Burton, Captain Canot, Captain Binger, and others, and quite
+recently a valuable contribution to our knowledge in Mr. Sarbar's _Fanti
+Customary Laws_.[28] I think that every student of the African form of
+thought should master these works thoroughly, and I fully grant their
+great importance; but, nevertheless, I am quite unable to agree with Mr.
+Jevons (_Introduction to the History of Religion_, p. 164) when he says,
+regarding Fetishism, that "it is certainly amongst the inhabitants of
+the Gold and Slave Coasts that the subject can best be studied." These
+two Coasts are, I grant, the best place for a student who is resident in
+Europe, and therefore dependent on the accounts given by others of the
+things he is dealing with, to draw his information from, because of the
+accuracy and extent of the information he can get from Ellis's work;
+but, apart from Ellis the value of these regions to an ethnologist is
+but small, and for an ethnologist who will go out to West Africa and
+study his material for himself, the whole of the Coast regions of the
+Benin Bight are but of tenth-rate importance, because of the great and
+long-continued infusion of both Mohammedan and European forms of thought
+into the original native thought-form that has taken place in these
+regions. This subject I will refer to later, and I will return now to
+the history, confining myself to the earlier portions of it, and to that
+which bears on the early development of trade.
+
+I sincerely wish I could go into full details regarding the whole
+history of the locality here, because I know my only chance of being
+allowed to do so is on paper, and it would be a great relief to my mind;
+but I forbear, experience having taught me that the subject, to put it
+mildly, is not of general interest. For example, person after person
+have I tried to illuminate and educate in the matter of our
+relationships with the Ashantees; always, alas, in vain. Before I have
+got half through they "hear a voice I cannot hear that's calling them
+away;" or remember something "that must be done at once;" or, worst of
+all, go off straightway to sleep, after once or twice feebly enquiring,
+"Where is that place?" Of course I am glad that my little knowledge has
+been the comfort it has to several people. Once, when I was
+homeward-bound along the Gold Coast, three gentlemen came on board very
+ill from fever, and homeward-bound, too. Their worst symptom was
+agonising insomnia. "Not a wink," they assured my friend the Irish
+purser, had they had "for a couple of months." "We'll soon put that
+right for you on board this boat," he said, in his characteristically
+kind and helpful manner. To my great surprise, that same afternoon he
+deliberately tackled me on the subject of the real reason that induced
+Osai Kwofi Kari Kari to cross the Prah in January, 1873. I was charmed
+at this unwonted display of interest in the subject, and hoped also to
+gain further information on it from those recently shipped Gold Coasters
+in the smoking-room. I was getting on fairly well with it; and my friend
+the purser, instead of having "some manifests to write out," as was
+usual with him, nobly battled with the intricacies of the subject for a
+good half hour and more; and then, just when I was in the middle of some
+topographical elucidation, accompanied by questions, up that purser
+rose, yawned and stretched himself, and hailed the doctor, who happened
+to be passing by. "What do you think of that, doctor?" he said, pointing
+to the settee. "Do them a power of good," says his compatriot the
+medico. Turning round, I saw the three victims of insomnia grouped
+together; the middle man had his head pillowed on the oilclothed top of
+the table, and reclining, more or less gracefully, against him on either
+side were his two companions, their half-smoked pipes fallen from their
+limp fingers--all profoundly, unquestionably asleep. "Oh, yes! of
+course, I was delighted," but not flattered; and, warned by this
+incident, I will here only say that should any one be really interested
+in the eventful history of the long struggle between the English,
+Portuguese, French, Dutch, and Brandenburgers, with each other and with
+the natives, for the possession of the country where the black man's
+gold came from, they will find a good deal about it in the works already
+cited; and should any medical man--the remedy is perhaps a little too
+powerful to be trusted in the hands of the laity--require it for the
+treatment of insomnia as above indicated, I recommend that part of it
+which bears on the Ashantee question in small but regular doses.
+
+Our earliest authorities mentioning Africa with the knowledge in them
+that it is surrounded by the ocean, save at Suez, are Theopompus and
+Herodotus. Unfortunately all Theopompus's works are lost to us,
+voluminous though they were, his history alone being a matter of
+fifty-eight volumes, while before he took up history he had won for
+himself a great reputation as an orator, during the reigns of Philip and
+Alexander the Great. He is perpetually referred to, however, though not
+always praised, by other great classical writers, Cicero, Pliny, the two
+Dionysiuses and others, and was evidently regarded as a great authority;
+one particular fragment of his works that refers to Africa is preserved
+by AElian, and consists of a conversation between Silenus and Midas, King
+of Phrygia. Silenus says that Europe, Asia, and Africa are surrounded by
+the sea, but that beyond the known world there is an island of immense
+extent containing large animals and men of twice our stature. This
+island Mr. Major thinks, and doubtless rightly, is connected with the
+tradition of our old friend--you know what I mean, as Captain Marryat's
+boatswain says--the Atlantis of Plato. This affair I will no further
+mention or hint at, but hastily pass on to that other early authority,
+Herodotus, who was born 484 years before Christ, and whose works, thanks
+be, have survived. He says: "The Phoenician navigators under command
+of Pharaoh-Necho, King of Egypt, setting sail from the Red Sea, made
+their way to the Southern Sea; when autumn approached they drew their
+vessels to land, sowed a crop, waited until it was ripe for harvest,
+reaped it, and put again to sea." Having spent two years in this manner,
+in the third year they reached the Pillars of Hercules, (Jebu Zatout,
+and Gibraltar), and returned to Egypt, "reporting," says Herodotus,
+"what does not find belief in me, but may perhaps in some other persons,
+for they said in sailing round Africa they had the sun to the right (to
+the North) of them. In this way was Libya first known."[29]
+
+Much has been written regarding the accuracy of these Phoenician
+accounts; for, as frequently happens, their mention of a thing that
+seemed at first to brand their account as a lie remains to brand it as
+the truth--and although I have no doubt those Phoenician gentlemen
+heartily wished they had said nothing about having seen the sun to the
+North, yet it was best for them in the end, as it demonstrates to us
+that they had, at any rate, been South of the Equator; and we owe to
+Herodotus here, as in many other places in his works, a debt of
+gratitude for honestly putting down what he did not believe himself; he
+also has suffered from this habit of accuracy, becoming himself regarded
+by the superficial people of this world as a credulous old romancer,
+which he never was. Good man, he only liked fair play. "Here," he says
+as it were, "is a thing I am told. It's a bit too large for my belief
+hatch, but if you can get it down yours, you're free and welcome to ship
+it." Herodotus, however, accepts the fact that Africa was surrounded by
+water, save at its connection with the great land mass of the earth
+(Europe and Asia) by the Isthmus of Suez.
+
+Several other attempts to circumnavigate Africa were made prior to
+Herodotus's writings. One that we have mention of[30] was made by a
+Persian nobleman named Sataspes, whom Xerxes had, for a then capital
+offence, condemned to impalement. This man's mother persuaded Xerxes
+that if she were allowed to deal with her son she would impose on him a
+more terrible punishment even than this, namely, that he should be
+condemned to sail round Libya. There is no doubt this good lady thought
+thereby to save her son; but, as events turned out, Xerxes, by accepting
+her suggestion, did not cheat justice by granting this as an alternative
+to immediate execution. However, off Sataspes sailed with a ship and
+crew from Egypt, out through the Pillars of Hercules, and doubling the
+Cape of Libya, then named Solois, he steered south, and, says Herodotus,
+"traversed a vast extent of sea for many months, and finding he had
+still more to pass he turned round and returned to Egypt and then back
+to Xerxes, who had him then impaled, because, for one thing he had not
+sailed round Libya, and for another, Xerxes held he lied about those
+regions of it that he had visited; for Sataspes said he had seen a
+nation of little men who wore garments made of palm leaves, who,
+whenever his crew drew their ships ashore, left their cities and flew
+into the mountains, though he did them no injury, only taking some
+cattle from them; and the reason he gave for his not sailing round Libya
+was that his ships could go no further." Sataspes's end was sad, but one
+cannot feel that he was a loss to the class of romancers of travel.
+
+Another and a more determined navigator was Eudoxus of Cyzicus (B.C.
+117). The scanty record we have of his exploration is of great interest.
+While he was making a stay in Alexandria, he met an Indian who was the
+sole survivor of a crew wrecked on the Red Sea coast. He is the Indian
+who persuaded Ptolemy Euergetes to fit out an expedition to sail to
+India, and off they went and succeeded in it greatly, but on their
+return the king seized the cargo; so therefore, as a private enterprise,
+the thing was a failure. However, Eudoxus was a man of great
+determination, and on the death of Ptolemy VII. in the reign of his
+successor, he set out on another expedition to India. On his return
+voyage he was driven down the African Coast, and found there on the
+shore amongst other wreckage the prow of a vessel with the figure of a
+horse carved on it. This relic he took with him as a curiosity, and on
+his successful return to Alexandria exhibited it there in the market
+place, and during its exhibition it was recognised by some pirates from
+Cadiz (Gades) who happened to be in that city, and they testified that
+the small vessels which were employed in the fisheries along the West
+African Coast as far as the River Lixius (Wadi al Knos) always had the
+figure of a horse on their prows, and on this account were called
+"horses." The fact of this wreck of a vessel belonging to Western
+Europe being found on the East Coast of Africa joined with the knowledge
+that these vessels did not pass through the Mediterranean Sea, gave
+Eudoxus the idea that the vessel he had the figure head of must have
+come round Africa from the West Coast, and he then proceeded to Cadiz
+and equipped three vessels, one large and two of smaller size, and
+started out to do the same thing, bar wrecking. He sailed down the known
+West Coast without trouble, but when he came to passing on into the
+unknown seas, he had trouble with the crews, and was compelled to beach
+his vessels. After doing this he succeeded in persuading his crews to
+proceed, but it was then found impossible to float the largest vessel,
+so she was abandoned, and the expedition proceeded in the smaller and in
+a ship constructed from the wreck of the larger on which the cargo was
+shipped with the expedition. Eudoxus reached apparently Senegambia, and
+then another mutiny broke out, and he had to return to Barbary. But
+undaunted he then fitted out another expedition, consisting of two
+smaller vessels, and once again sailed to the South to circumnavigate
+Africa. Nothing since has been heard of Eudoxus of Cyzicus surnamed the
+Brave.[31]
+
+On his second voyage he fell in with natives who, he says, spoke the
+same language that he had previously heard on the Eastern Coast of
+Africa. If he was right in this, some authors hold he must have gone
+down the West Coast, at least as far as Cameroons, because there you
+nowadays first strike the language, which does stretch across the
+continent, namely, the Bantu, and we have no reason to suppose that the
+Bantu border line was ever further North on this Coast than it is at
+present; indeed, the indications are, I think, the other way; but as far
+as the language goes, it seems to me that Eudoxus could have heard the
+same language as on the East African Coast far higher up than Cameroons,
+namely, on the Moroccoan Coast, for in those days, prior to the great
+Arab invasion, most likely the language of the Berber races had
+possession of Northern Africa from East Coast to West. However, there is
+another statement of his which I think points to Eudoxus having gone far
+South, namely, that the reason of his turning back was an inability to
+get provisions, for this catastrophe is not likely to have overtaken so
+brave a man as he was until he reached the great mangrove swamps of the
+Niger. The litoral of the Sahara was in those days, we may presume, from
+the accounts we have far later from Leo Africanus and Arab writers, more
+luxuriant and heavily populated than it is at present.
+
+Of these voyages, however, we have such scant record that we need not
+dwell on them further, and so we will return to about 300 B.C., and
+consider the wonderful voyage made by Hanno of Carthage, of which we
+have more detailed knowledge; although there still remains a certain
+amount of doubt as to who exactly Hanno was, mainly on account of Hanno
+apparently having been to Carthage what Jones is to North Wales--the
+name of a number of individuals with a habit of doing everything and
+frequently distinguishing themselves greatly. The Carthaginians were to
+the classic world much what the English are to the modern, a great
+colonising, commercial people--warlike when wanted. They planted
+colonies in North Africa and elsewhere, and had commercial relationship
+with all the then known nations of the world, including a trans-Sahara
+trade with the people living to the South of the Great Desert. We shall
+never know to the full where those Carthaginians went, from the paucity
+of record; but we have record of the voyage of this Hanno in a
+_Periplus_ originally written in the Punic language and then translated
+into Greek.[32] Hanno, it seems, was a chief magistrate at Carthage, and
+Pliny says his voyage was undertaken when Carthage was in a most
+flourishing condition.[33] From the _Periplus_ we learn that the
+expedition to the West Coast consisted of sixty ships of fifty oars
+each, and 30,000 persons of both sexes, ample provisions and everything
+necessary for so great an undertaking. The object of this expedition was
+to explore, to found colonies, and to increase commerce. The expedition,
+after passing the Pillars of Hercules, sailed two days along the coast
+and founded their first colony, which they called Thymatirum. Just south
+of this place, on a promontory called Soloeis, they built a temple to
+Neptune. A short distance further on they found a beautiful lake, the
+edges of which were bordered with large reeds, the country abounding in
+elephants and other game; a day's sail from this place, they founded
+five small cities near the sea called respectively Cariconticos, Gytte,
+Acra, Millitea, and Arambys. The next most important part of their
+voyage was their discovery of the great River Lixius, on the banks of
+which they found a pastoral people they called the Lixitae. These seem
+to have been a mild people; but there were in the neighbourhood tribes
+of a ferocious character, and they were also told there were Trogloditae
+dwelling in the mountains, where the Lixius took its rise, who were
+fleeter than horses. Unfortunately we are not told how long the
+Carthaginians took in reaching this River Lixius; but if the
+Carthaginians had been keeping close in shore they would not have met
+with a river that looked great until they reached the mouth of the Ouro
+(23 deg.36' N. lat), which is four miles wide, but only an estuary; but as
+the Carthaginians do not seem to have gone up it, they may not have
+noticed its imperfections, and so, pursuing that dangerous method of
+judging a West African river from its mouth, regarded it as a great
+river. However this may have been, they took with them as guides and
+interpreters some of the Lixitae, and continued their voyage for three
+days, when they came to a large bay, an island in it containing a circle
+of five stadia, and proceeded to found another colony on that island,
+calling it Cerne, where they judged they were as far from the Pillars
+of Hercules as these were from Carthage. So it is held now that Cerne is
+the same as the French trading station Arguin (about 240 miles north of
+Senegal River), on to whose shoals the wreck of the French frigate _La
+Meduse_ drifted in 1816, the tragedy of which is familiar to us all from
+Gericault's great painting.
+
+Hanno next called at a place where there was a great lake, which they
+entered by sailing up a river called by them Cheretes. In this they
+found three islands, all larger than the island of Cerne. One day's sail
+then brought them to the extremity of the lake overhung by mountains,
+which were inhabited by savages clad in wild beasts' skins, who
+prevented their landing by pelting them with stones. The next point in
+their voyage was a large and broad river, infested with crocodiles and
+river horses; and from this place they made their way back to Cerne,
+where they rested and repaired and then set forth again, sailing south
+along the African shores for twelve successive days. The language of the
+natives of these regions the Lixitae did not understand, and the
+Carthaginians could not hold any communication with them for another
+reason, that they always fled from them; towards the last day they
+approached some large mountains covered with trees. They went on two
+days further, when they came to a large opening in the sea, on land on
+either side of which was a plain whereon they saw fires in every
+direction. At this place[34] they refilled their water barrels, and
+continued their voyage five days further, when they reached a large bay
+which their interpreters said was called the Western Horn. In this bay
+they found a large island, in the centre of which was a salt lake with a
+small island in it. When they went ashore in the day time they saw no
+inhabitants, but at night time they heard in every direction a confused
+noise of pipes, cymbals, drums and song, which alarmed the crew, while
+the diviners they had with them, equivalent to our naval chaplains,
+strongly advised Hanno to leave that place as speedily as possible.
+Hanno, however, being less alarmed than his companions, pushed on South,
+and they soon found themselves abreast of a country blazing with fires,
+streams of which seemed to be pouring from the mountain tops down into
+the sea. "We sailed quickly thence," says Hanno, "being much terrified."
+Proceeding four days further they found that things did not improve in
+appearance from their point of view, for the whole country seemed ablaze
+at night, a country full of fire, and at one point the fire seemed to
+fly up to the very stars. Hanno says their interpreters told them that
+this great fire was the Chariot of the Gods. Three days more sailing
+South brought them to another bay, called the Southern Horn. In this bay
+they found a large island, in which again there was a lake with another
+island in it, having inhabitants who were savage, and whose bodies were
+covered with hair. These people the interpreters called the
+Gorillae--some were captured and taken aboard, but so savage and
+unmanageable did they prove that they were killed and the skins
+preserved. As most of the inhabitants of the Islands of the Gorillae
+seemed to be females, and as these ladies had made such a gallant fight
+of it with their Carthaginian captors, Hanno kept their skins to hang
+up in the Temple of Juno on his return home, evidently intending to be
+complimentary both to the Goddess and the Gorillae; but it is to be
+feared neither of them took it as it was meant, for Hanno had no luck
+from the Gods after this, having to turn back from shortness of
+provisions, and finally ending his career by, some say, being killed,
+and others say exiled from Carthage on account of his having a lion so
+tame that it would carry baggage for him; Punic public opinion held that
+this demonstrated him to be a man dangerous to the State. The Gorillae
+seem to have worked out their vengeance on white men by making it more
+than any man's character for truth is worth to see one of them--except
+stuffed in a museum, with a label on.
+
+How far Hanno really went down South is not known with any certainty. M.
+Gosselin held he only reached the River Nun, on the Moroccoan coast.
+Major Rennell fixed his furthest point somewhere north of Sierra Leone,
+and held the Island of the Gorillae to be identical with the Island of
+Sherboro'. Bougainville believed that he at any rate went well into the
+Bight of Benin, while others think he went at any rate as far as Gaboon.
+I cannot myself see why he should not have done so, considering the
+winds and tides of the locality and the time taken; indeed, I should be
+quite willing to believe he went down to Congo, and that in the most
+terrific of the fires he witnessed an eruption of the volcanic peak of
+Cameroon, a volcano not yet extinct. Indeed the name given to this high
+fire "that almost reached the stars" by his interpreters--the Chariot of
+the Gods--is not so very unlike the name the Cameroon Peak bears to this
+day, Mungo Mah Lobeh, the Throne or Place of Thunder, and this native
+name is also capable of being translated into "the Place of the Gods" or
+spirits. The thing I do not believe in the affair is that the Lixitae
+interpreters ever called it or any other place "a chariot"; for as Hanno
+was the first white man they had seen, and they had no chariots of their
+own, it is unlikely they could have known anything of chariots; and I
+think this Chariot of the Gods must have been an error of Hanno's in
+translating his interpreter's remarks. It is perfectly excusable in him
+if it is so, because to understand what an interpreter means who does
+not know your language, and whose own language you are not an adept in,
+and who is translating from a language regarding which you are both
+alike ignorant, is a process fraught with difficulty. I have tried it,
+so speak feelingly. It is true it is not an impossibility, as those
+unversed in African may hastily conjecture, because at least one-third
+of an African language consists in gesture, and this gesture part is
+fairly common to all tribes I have met, so that by means of it you can
+get on with daily life; but it breaks down badly when you come to the
+names of places. I myself once went on a long march to a place that
+subsequent knowledge informed me was "I don't know" in my director's
+native tongue. Still, if he did not know, I did not know, and so it was
+all the same. I got there all right, therefore it did not matter to me;
+but I was haunted during my stay in it by a confused feeling that
+perhaps I was flying in the face of Science by being somewhere
+else--being in two places at the same time.
+
+I really, however, cannot help thinking Hanno must have got past the
+Niger Delta; for there is nothing to frighten any one, as far as the
+look of things go, until you go south from Calabar, and find yourself
+facing that magnificent Great Cameroon and Fernando Po; and Hanno's
+people were scared as they were never scared before. Yet, again, there
+are those fires, which were in the main doubtless what that very wise
+and not half-appreciated missionary, the late Rev. J. Leighton Wilson,
+says they were, namely, fires made by the native burning down the high
+grass at the end of a dry season to make his farms. Now Hanno could have
+seen any quantity of these along parts of the shores of the Bight of
+Benin, but is not likely to have seen them to any alarming extent on the
+Biafran Bight, because the shores thereof are deeply fringed with
+mangrove swamps, and the native does not start making farms in them.
+Hanno might have seen what looked like the smoke of innumerable fires on
+the sides of Cameroon Mountain and Fernando Po. I myself have seen the
+whole mighty forest there smoking as if beneath it smouldered the
+infernal regions themselves; but it is only columns and wafts of mist,
+and so gives no blaze at night; if you want to see a real land of flame
+with, over it, a pall of cloud reflecting back its crimson light in a
+really terrifying way, you must go south of Cameroon, south of Congo
+Francais, south, until you reach the region of the Great Congo itself;
+and there--on the grass-covered hills and plains of the Lower Congo
+lands--you will see a land of fire at the end of the dry season,
+terrific enough to awe any man. Of course, if Hanno passed the Congo and
+went down as far as the fringing sands of the Kalahari desert, he would
+certainly not have been able to get stores; but also down there he would
+not have met with an island on which there were gorillas; for even if we
+grant that there was sufficient dense forest south of the Congo in his
+days for gorillas to have inhabited, and allow that in old days gorillas
+were south of the Congo, which they are not now, still, there is no
+island near the coast. So I am afraid we cannot quite settle Hanno's
+furthest point, and must content ourselves by saying he was a brave man,
+a good sailor, and a credit therefore to his country and the human race.
+
+After Hanno's time I cannot find any record of a regular set of trading
+expeditions down the West Coast by the Carthaginians. From scattered
+observations it is certain the commerce of the Carthaginians with the
+Barbary Coast and the Bight of Benin was long carried on; but it does
+not seem to have been carried on along the coast of the Bight of Biafra;
+and the voyage in 170 B.C. may be cited in support of this, showing that
+the voyage as far south as Eudoxus went was then considered as
+marvellous and new. Still, on the other hand, it must be remembered
+that, prior to our own day, the navigator had no great inducement to
+tell the rest of the world exactly where he had been; indeed, the
+navigator whose main interest is commerce is, to this day, not keen on
+so doing. He would rather keep little geographical facts--such as short
+cuts by creeks, and places where either gold, or quicksilver, and buried
+ivory, is plentiful--to himself, than go explaining about these things
+for the sake of getting an unrepaying honour. One sees this so much in
+studying the next period of this history--the early Portuguese and early
+French discoveries; you will find that one of these nations knew about a
+place years before the other came along, and discovered it, and claimed
+it as its own--with disputes as a natural consequence.
+
+There has, however, been one very interesting point in the dealing of
+the nations of higher culture with the Africans, and that is the way
+their commerce with them has had periods of abeyance. The Egyptians
+have left us record of having been extensively in touch with the
+interior of Africa, _via_ the Nile Valley,--then came a pause. Then came
+the Carthaginian commerce,--then a pause. Then the Portuguese, French,
+English, Dutch, and Dane trading enterprise, say, roughly from 1340 to
+1700,--then a falling off of this enterprise; revived during the
+Slave-trade days, falling off again on its suppression, and reviving in
+our own days. I suppose I ought to say greatly, but--well, we will
+discuss that later. These pauses have always been caused by the nations
+of higher culture getting too busy with wars at home to trouble
+themselves about the African, all the more so because the produce of
+Africa has filtered slowly, whether it was fetched by white man or no,
+into their markets through the hands of the energetic North African
+tribes and the Arabs. Whenever the white man has settled down with his
+home affairs, and has had time to spare, he has always gone and looked
+up the African again, "discovered him," and he has always found him in
+the same state of culture that the pioneers of the previous Blueth-period
+found him in. Hanno does not find down the West Coast another
+Carthage--he finds bush fires, and hears the tom-tom and the horn and
+the shouts. He finds people slightly clad and savage. Then read Aluise
+da Ca da Mostro and the rest of Prince Henry's adventures; well, you
+might--save that the old traveller is more interesting--almost be
+reading a book published yesterday. The only radical change made for
+large quantities of Africans by means of white intercourse was made by
+exporting them to America. How this is going to turn out we do not yet
+know; and whether or no, after the present period of white exploitation
+of Africa, there may not come another pause from our becoming too
+interested in some big fight of our own to keep up our interest in the
+African, we cannot tell; so I will pass on to a very interesting point
+in a method of trade mentioned by the early authorities--the silent
+trade.
+
+Herodotus gives us the first description of it,[35] saying that the
+Carthaginians state that beyond the Pillars of Hercules there is a
+region of Libya, and men who inhabit it. When they arrive among these
+people and have unloaded their merchandise they set it in order on the
+shore, go on board their ships and make a great smoke, and the
+inhabitants seeing the smoke come down to the sea shore, deposit gold in
+exchange for the merchandise, and withdraw to some distance. The
+Carthaginians then going ashore examine the goods, and if the quantity
+seems sufficient for the merchandise they take it and sail away; but if
+it is not sufficient they go on board again and wait; the natives then
+approach and deposit more gold until they have satisfied them: neither
+party ever wrongs the other, for they do not touch the gold before it is
+made adequate to the value of the merchandise, nor do the natives touch
+the merchandise before the Carthaginians have taken the gold.
+
+The next description of this silent trade I have been able to find is
+that given by Aluise da Ca da Mostro, a Venetian gentleman who, allured
+by the accounts of the riches of West Africa given by Prince Henry the
+Navigator, abandoned trading with the Low Countries, entered the
+Prince's service, and went down the Coast in 1455. When in the district
+of Cape Blanco, at a place called by him Hoden, he was told that six
+days' journey from this place there was a place called Tagazza,
+signifying a chest of gold; there large quantities of rock salt were dug
+from the earth every year and carried on camels by the Arabs and the
+Azanaghi, who were tawny Moors,[36] in separate companies to Timbuk, and
+from thence to the Empire of Melli, which belonged to the negroes;
+having arrived there they disposed of their salt in the course of eight
+days, at the rate of two and three hundred mitigals the load (a mitigal
+= a ducat), according to the quantity thereof, after which they returned
+home with the gold they had been paid in. These merchants reckoned it
+forty days' journey on horseback from Tagazza to "Timbuk" as Mostro,
+while from Timbuk to Melli it is thirty days' journey. Ca da Mostro then
+inquired to what use the salt taken to Melli was put; and they said that
+the merchants used a certain quantity of it themselves, for on account
+of their country lying near the Line, where the days and nights are of
+equal length, at certain seasons of the year the heats were excessive,
+and putrefied the blood unless salt was taken; their method of taking it
+was to dissolve a piece in a porringer of water daily and drink it. When
+the remainder of the salt reached Melli, carried thither on camels, each
+camel load was broken up into pieces of a suitable size for one man to
+carry. A large number of what Ca da Mostro calls footmen--whom we
+nowadays call porters--were assembled at Melli to be ready to carry the
+salt from thence further away still into the heart of Africa.
+
+I have dwelt on this salt's wanderings because we have here a very
+definite description of a trade route, and the importance of
+understanding these trade routes is very great. We do not learn,
+however, exactly where the salt goes to beyond Melli; but Melli seems to
+have been, as Timbuctoo was, and to a certain extent still is, a trade
+focus; and from Melli evidently the salt went in many directions, and it
+is interesting to note Ca da Mostro's observations on the salt porters,
+who he says carry in each hand a long forked stick, which when they are
+tired they fix into the ground and rest their loads on; so to-day may
+you see the West African porters doing, save that it is only the porters
+who have to pass over woodless plateaux on their journeys that carry two
+sticks.
+
+     [Illustration: OIL RIVER NATIVES. [_To face page 245._]
+
+Speaking however further on the course of this salt trade Ca da Mostro
+says that some of the merchants of Melli go with it until they come to a
+certain water, whether fresh or salt his informant could not say; but he
+holds it most likely was fresh, or there would be no need of carrying
+salt there; and it is the opinion of the few people who have of late
+years interested themselves in the matter that this great water is the
+Niger Joliba. But be this as it may, when those merchants from Melli
+arrive on the banks of this great water they place their shares of salt
+in heaps in a row, every one setting a mark on his own. This done, the
+merchants retire half a day's journey; then "the negroes, who will not
+be seen or spoken with, and who seem to be the inhabitants of some
+islands, come in large boats," and having viewed the salt lay a sum of
+gold on every heap and then retire. When they are all gone the negro
+merchants who own the salt return, and if the quantity of gold pleases
+them they take it and leave the salt; if not, they leave both and
+withdraw themselves again. The silent people then return, and the heaps
+from which they find the gold has been removed they carry away, and
+either advance more gold to the other heaps or take their gold from them
+and leave the salt. In this manner, says Ca da Mostro, from very ancient
+times these negroes have traded without either speaking to or seeing
+each other, until a few years before, when he was at Cape Blanco among
+the Azanaghi, who supply the negroes of Melli with their salt as
+aforesaid, and who evidently get from them gossip as well as gold. They
+told him that their fellow merchants among the black Moors had told them
+that they had had serious trouble in consequence of the then Emperor of
+Melli, a man who took more general interest in affairs than was common
+in Emperors of Melli, having been fired with a desire to know why these
+customers of his traders did not like being seen; he had commanded the
+salt merchants when they next went to traffic with the silent people to
+capture some of them for him by digging pits near the salt heaps,
+concealing themselves therein and then rushing out and seizing some of
+the strange people when they came to look at the salt heaps. The
+merchants did not at all relish the royal commission, for they knew, as
+any born trader would, that it must be extremely bad for trade to rush
+out and seize customers by the scruff of their necks while they were in
+the midst of their shopping. However, much as the command added to their
+commercial anxieties, the thing had to be done, or there was no doubt
+the Emperor would relieve them both of all commercial anxieties and
+their heads at one and the same time. So they carried out the royal
+command, and captured four of their silent customers. Three they
+immediately liberated, thinking that to keep so many would only increase
+the bad blood, and one specimen would be sufficient to satisfy the
+Imperial curiosity. Unfortunately however the unfortunate captive they
+retained would neither speak nor eat, and in a few days died; and so the
+salt merchants of Melli returned home in very low spirits, feeling
+assured that their Emperor would be actively displeased with them for
+failing to satisfy his curiosity, and that the silent customers would be
+too alarmed and angered with them for their unprovoked attack to deal
+with them again. Subsequent events proved them to be correct in both
+surmises: his Majesty was highly disgusted at not having been able to
+see one of these people; and naturally, for the description given to him
+of those they had captured was at least highly interesting. The
+merchants said they were a span taller than themselves and well shaped,
+but that they made a terrible figure because their under lip was thicker
+than a man's fist and hung down on their breasts; also that it was very
+red, and something like blood dropped from it and from their gums. The
+upper lip was no larger than that of other people, and owing to this
+there were exposed to view both gums and teeth, which were of great
+size, particularly the teeth in the corners of the mouth. Their eyes
+were of great size and blackness. As for the customers, for three years
+went the merchants of Melli to the banks of the great water and arranged
+their salt heaps and looked on them for gold dust in vain: but the
+fourth year it was there; and the merchants of Melli believed that their
+customers' lips had begun to putrefy through the excessive heat and the
+want of salt, so that being unable to bear so grievous a distemper they
+were compelled to return to their trade. Things were then established on
+a fairly reasonable basis; the merchants did not again attempt to see
+their customers, and they knew from their experience with their captive
+that they were by nature dumb; for had there been speech in him, would
+he not have spoken under the treatment to which he was subjected? And as
+for the Emperor of Melli he said right out he did not care whether those
+blacks could speak or no, so long as he had but the profit of their
+gold.
+
+This gold, I may remark, that was collected at Melli was divided into
+three parts: the first was sent by the Melli caravans to Kokhia on the
+caravan route to Syria and Cairo; the other two parts went from Melli to
+Timbuctoo, where it was again divided up, some of it going to Toet,[37]
+and from thence along the coast to Tunis, in Barbary. Some of it went to
+Hoden, not far from Cape Blanco, and from there to Oran and Hona; thence
+it went to Fez, Morocco, Azila-Azasi, and Moosa, towns outside the
+Straits of Gibraltar, whence it went into Europe, through the hands of
+Italians, and other Christians, who exchanged their merchandise for the
+wares of the Barbary moors; and the remainder of the gold went down to
+the West African Coast to the Portuguese at Arguin. This description of
+the gold route is by Ca da Mostro, and is the first description of West
+African trade route I have found.
+
+But I must tear myself from the fascination of gold and its trade routes
+and return to that silent trade. The next person after Ca da Mostro to
+mention it is Captain Richard Jobson, who in 1620-1621 made a voyage
+especially to discover "the golden trade," of what he calls Tombak,
+which is our last author's Timbuk, by way of the Gambia, then held by
+many to be a mouth of the Niger.
+
+Jobson's inquiries regarding this "golden trade" informed him that the
+great demand for salt in the Gambia trade arose from the desire for it
+among the Arabiks of Barbary; that the natives themselves only consumed
+a small percentage of this import, trading away the main to those
+Arabiks in the hinterland, who in their turn traded it for gold to
+Tombak, where the demand for it was great, because that city, although
+possessing all manner of other riches and commodities, lacked salt, so
+that the Arabiks did a good trade therein. Jobson was also informed that
+the Arabiks had, as well as the market for salt at Timbuctoo, a market
+for it with a strange people who would not be seen, and who lived not
+far from Yaze; that the salt was carried to them, and in exchange they
+gave gold. Asking a native merchant, who was engaged in this trade, why
+they would not be seen, he made a sign to his lips, but would say no
+more. Jobson, however, learnt from other sources that the reason these
+negroes buy salt from the tawny Moors is because of the thickness of
+their lips, which hang down upon their breasts, and, being raw, would
+putrefy if they did not take salt, a thing their country does not
+afford, so that they must traffic for it with the Moors. The manner they
+employ, according to Jobson, is this: the Moors on a fixed day bring
+their goods to a place assigned, where there are certain houses
+appointed for them; herein they deposit their commodities, and, laying
+their salt and other goods in parcels or heaps separately, depart for a
+whole day, during which time their customers come, and to each parcel of
+goods lay down a proportion of gold as they value it, and leave both
+together. The merchants then return, and as they like the bargain take
+the gold and leave their wares, or if they think the price offered too
+little, they divide the merchandise into two parts, leaving near the
+gold as much as they are inclined to give for it, and then again depart.
+At their next return the bargain is finished, for they either find more
+gold added or the whole taken away, and the goods left on their hands.
+
+A further confirmation of the existence of this method of trading we
+find in that most interesting voyage of Claude Jannequin, Sieur de
+Rochfort, 1639. He says, "In this cursed country"--he always speaks of
+West Africa like that--"there is no provision but fish dried in the sun,
+and maize and tobacco." The natives will only trade by the French laying
+down on the ground what they would give for the provisions, and then
+going away, on which the natives came and took the commodities and left
+the fish in exchange. The regions he visited were those of Cape Blanco.
+
+To this day you will find a form of this silent trade still going on in
+Guinea. I have often seen on market roads in many districts, but always
+well away from Europeanised settlements, a little space cleared by the
+wayside, and neatly laid with plantain leaves, whereon were very tidily
+arranged various little articles for sale--a few kola nuts, leaves of
+tobacco, cakes of salt, a few heads of maize, or a pile of yams or sweet
+potatoes. Against each class of articles so many cowrie shells or beans
+are placed, and, always hanging from a branch above, or sedately sitting
+in the middle of the shop, a little fetish. The number of cowrie shells
+or beans indicate the price of the individual articles in the various
+heaps, and the little fetish is there to see that any one who does not
+place in the stead of the articles removed their proper price, or who
+meddles with the till, shall swell up and burst. There is no doubt it
+is a very easy method of carrying on commerce.
+
+In what the silent trade may have originated it is hard to say; but one
+thing is certain, that the dread and fear of the negroes did not result
+from the evil effects of the slave trade, as so many of their terrors
+are said to have done, for we have seen notice of it long before this
+slave trade arose. Nevertheless, there can be but little doubt that it
+arose from a sense of personal insecurity, and has fetish in it, the
+natives holding it safer to leave so dangerous a thing as trafficking
+with unknown beings--white things that were most likely spirits, with
+the smell of death on them--in the hands of their gods. In the cases of
+it that I have seen no doubt it was done mostly for convenience, one
+person being thereby enabled to have several shops open at but little
+working expense; but I have seen it employed as a method of trading
+between tribes at war with each other.[38] We must dismiss, I fear,
+bashfulness regarding lips as being a real cause; but I will not dismiss
+the bleeding lips as a mere traveller's tale, because I have seen quite
+enough to make me understand what those people who told of bleeding
+thick lips meant; several, not all of my African friends, are a bit
+thick about the lower lip, and when they have been passing over
+waterless sun-dried plateaux or bits of desert they are anything but
+decorative. The lips get swollen and black, and Ca da Mostro does not go
+too far in his description of what he was told regarding them.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [28] Clowes and Sons, 1897.
+
+   [29] _Melpomene_, IV. 41.
+
+   [30] _Melpomene_, IV. 43.
+
+   [31] See Ellis's _History of the Gold Coast_, also Tozer's _History of
+   Ancient Geography_, Beazley's _Dawn of Modern Geography_, and _Strabo_,
+   B.C. 25, book xvii, edited by Theodore Jansonius ab Almelooven,
+   Amsterdam, 1707.
+
+   [32] There is doubt as to whether this _Periplus_ is the entire one
+   with which the classic writers were conversant.
+
+   [33] "Et Hanno Carthaginis potentia florente circumvectus a Gabibus ad
+   finem Arabiae navigationem eam prodidit scripto"; (and Hanno, when
+   Carthage flourished, sailed round from Cadiz to the remotest parts of
+   Arabia, and left an account of his voyage in writing) Plinius, lib. ii.
+   cap. lxvii. p.m. 220. See also lib. v. cap. i. p.m. 523, and Pomponius
+   Mela, lib. iii. cap. ix. p. 63, edit. Isaici Vossii.
+
+   There is an English version of the _Periplus_, edited by Falconer,
+   London, 1797; and an Oxford edition of it, and some other works, by Dr.
+   Hudson, 1698. Also there is a work on Hanno's _Periplus_ based on MS.
+   in the Meyer Museum at Liverpool by Simonides, not the Iambic poet,
+   who wrote a ridiculous satire against women, quoted by AElian; nor
+   yet Simonides who was one of the greatest of the ancient poets, and
+   flourished in the seventy-fifth Olympia; but a modern gentleman
+   connected with America, whose work I am sufficient scholar neither to
+   use nor to criticise.
+
+   [34] Major identifies this place with Cape Verde, pointing out that the
+   inability of the Lixitae interpreters to understand the language accords
+   with the fact that at the Senegal commences the country of the blacks;
+   "the immense opening" he regards as the Gambia.
+
+   [35] _Melpomene_, IV. 96.
+
+   [36] The writers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries commonly
+   divide up the natives of Africa into--1, Moors; 2, Tawny Moors;
+   3, Black Moors, a term that lingers to this day in our word
+   Blackeymoor; 4, Negroes.
+
+   [37] Ato, according to the version given in Grynaeus.
+
+   [38] Mr. Ling Roth kindly informs me of further instances of this silent
+   trading to be found in _Lander's Journal_, Lond., 1832, iii. 161-163,
+   and Forbes's _Wanderings of a Naturalist_, Lond. 1886, where it is cited
+   for the Kubus of Sumatra. He says it also occurs among the Veddahs, and
+   that there is in no case any fetish control.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+FRENCH DISCOVERY OF WEST AFRICA
+
+     Concerning the controversy that is between the French and the
+     Portuguese as to which of them first visited West Africa, with
+     special reference to the fort at Elmina.
+
+
+We will now turn our attention to the other pioneers of our present West
+African trade, and commence with the French, for we cannot disassociate
+our own endeavours in this region from those of France, Portugal,
+Holland, and the Brandenburgers; nor are we the earliest discoverers
+here. When we English heard the West African Coast was a region worth
+trading with, those great brick-makers for the architects of England's
+majesty, the traders, went for it and traded, and have made that trading
+pay as no other nation has been able to do. However, from the first we
+got called hard names--pirates, ruffians, interlopers, and such like--in
+fact, every bad name the other nations could spare from the war of abuse
+they chronically waged against each other.
+
+The French claim to have traded with West Africa prior to the
+discoveries made there by the emissaries of Prince Henry the
+Navigator.[39] When on my last voyage out I was in French territory, I
+own the discovery of this claim of my French friends came down on me as
+a shock, because on my previous voyage out I had been in Portuguese
+possessions, and had spent many a pleasant hour listening to the recital
+of the deeds of Diego Cao and Lopez do Gonsalves, and others of that
+noble brand of man, the fifteenth-century Portugee. I heard then nothing
+of French discoverers, and also had it well knocked out of my mind that
+the English had discovered anything of importance in West Africa save
+the Niger outfalls, and I had a furious war to keep this honour for my
+fellow countrymen. Then when I got into French territory not one word
+did I hear of Diego Cao or Lopez; and so as a distraction from the
+consideration of the private characters of people still living, I
+started discoursing on what I considered a safer and more interesting
+subject, and began to recount how I had had the honour of being
+personally mixed up in the monument to Diego Cao at the mouth of the
+Congo, and what fine fellows--I got no farther than that, when, to my
+horror, I heard my heroes called microbes, followed by torrents of
+navigators' names, all French, and all unknown to me. Being out for
+information I never grumble when I get it, let it be what it may. So I
+asked my French friends to write down clearly on paper the names of
+those navigators, and promised as soon as I left the forests of the
+Equator, and reached the book forests of Europe, I would try and find
+out more about them. I have; and I own that I owe profound apologies to
+those truly great Frenchmen for not having made their acquaintance
+sooner; nevertheless I still fail to see why my honoured Portuguese,
+Diego and Lopez, should have been called microbes, and I have no regrets
+about my fights for the honour of the Niger for my own countrymen, nor
+for my constant attempts to take the conceit out of my French and
+Portuguese friends, as a set-off for "the conceit about England" they
+were always trying to take out of me, by holding forth on what those
+Carthaginians had done on the West Coast before France or Portugal were
+so much as dreamt of.
+
+The Portuguese discoveries you can easily read of in Major's great book
+on Prince Henry; and as this book is fully accepted as correct by the
+highest Portuguese authorities, it is safer to do so than to attempt to
+hunt your Portuguese hero for yourself, because of the quantity of names
+each of them possesses, and the airy indifference as to what part of
+that name their national chroniclers use in speaking of them. I have
+tried it, and have several times been in danger of going to my grave
+with the idea that I was investigating the exploits of two separate
+gentlemen, whereas I was only dealing with two parts of one gentleman's
+name; nevertheless, it is a thing worth learning Portuguese for. And, in
+addition to Major's book, we have now, thanks to the Hakluyt Society,
+that superb thing, the Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of
+Guinea, by Gomez Eanes de Zurara--a work completed in 1453. This work is
+one on which we are largely dependent for the details of the early
+Portuguese discoveries, because Gomez Eanes spent the later part of his
+life in tidying up the Torre do Tombo--namely, the national archives, of
+which he was keeper--and his idea of tidying up included the lady-like
+method of destroying old papers. It makes one cold now to think of the
+things De Zurara may have destroyed; but he evidently regarded himself,
+as does the nineteenth century spring-cleaner, as a human benefactor;
+and, strange to say, his contemporaries quite took his view; indeed,
+this job was done at the request of the Cortes, and with the Royal
+sanction. There is also an outstanding accusation of forgery against
+Zurara, but that is a minor offence, and is one we need only take into
+consideration when contemplating the question as to whether a man
+capable of destroying early manuscripts and forgery might not be also
+capable of leaving out of his Chronicle, in honour of the Navigator, any
+mention of there being Frenchmen on the Coast, when he sent out his
+emissaries to discover what might lay hidden from the eye of man down in
+the Southern Seas. I do not, however, think De Zurara left out this
+thing intentionally, but that he had no knowledge of it if it did exist,
+for no man could have written as he wrote, unless he had a heart too
+great for such a meanness. Certain it is Prince Henry never knew, for
+these are the five reasons given by Zurara, in the grave, noble
+splendour of his manner, why the Prince undertook the discoveries with
+which his name will be for ever associated. I give the passage almost in
+full because of its beauty. "And you should note well that the noble
+spirit of this Prince (Henry the Navigator) by a sort of natural
+constraint was ever urging him both to begin and carry out very great
+deeds; for which reason after the taking of Ceuta, he always kept ships
+well armed against the Infidel, both for war and because he also had a
+wish to know the land that lay beyond the Isles of Canary and that Cape
+called Bojador, for that up to his time neither by writings nor by the
+memory of man was known with any certainty the nature of the land beyond
+that Cape. Some said indeed Saint Brandan had passed that way, and
+there was another tale of two galleys rounding the Cape which never
+returned ... and because the said Lord Infant wished to know the truth
+of this--since it seemed to him if he, or some other Lord, did not
+endeavour to gain that knowledge, no mariners or merchants would ever
+dare to attempt it, (for the reason that none of them ever trouble
+themselves to sail to a place where there is not a sure and certain hope
+of profit,) and seeing also that no other prince took any pains in this
+matter, he sent out his own ships against those parts, to have manifest
+certainty of them all, and to this he was stirred up by his zeal for the
+service of God, and of King Dom Duarto, his Lord and brother, who then
+reigned; and this was the first reason of his action."
+
+"The second reason was that if there chanced to be in those lands a
+population of Christians or some havens into which it would be possible
+to sail without peril, many kinds of merchandise might be brought to
+this nation which would find a ready market, and reasonably so because
+no other people of these parts traded with them, nor yet people of any
+other that were known; and also the products of this nation might be
+taken there, which traffic would bring great profit to our countrymen."
+
+"The third reason was that as it was said that the power of the Moors in
+that land of Africa was very much greater than was commonly supposed,
+and that there were no Christians among them nor any other race of men,
+and because every wise man is obliged by natural prudence to wish for a
+knowledge of the power of his enemy; therefore the said Lord Infant
+exerted himself to cause them to be fully discovered to make it known
+determinedly how far the power of those Infidels extended."
+
+"The fourth reason was because during the one and thirty years he had
+warred against the Moors he had never found a Christian King nor a Lord
+outside this land, who for the love of Jesus Christ would aid him in the
+said war; therefore he sought to know if there were in those parts any
+Christian Princes in whom the charity and the love of Christ was so
+ingrained that they would aid him against those enemies of the Faith."
+
+"The fifth reason was the great desire to make increase of the Faith of
+our Lord Jesus Christ, and to bring to Him all the souls that should be
+saved."
+
+According to the Portuguese, Gil Eannes was the first emissary of Prince
+Henry who succeeded in passing Cape Bojador. This feat he accomplished
+in 1434; but on this his first voyage out he contented himself with
+passing the Cape: a thing which previous expeditions of Prince Henry had
+failed to do, and which, so far apparently as Prince Henry knew, had not
+been done before, for it was regarded as a tremendous achievement.
+
+The next year Prince Henry's cupbearer, Affonso Gonsalves Baladaya, set
+out accompanied by Gil Eannes in a caravel; and the coast to the South
+of Bojador was visited; their furthest expedition was to a shallow bay
+called by them Angra des Ruives.[40] They then returned to Portugal, and
+the next year again went down the coast as far as a galley-shaped rock.
+This place they called Pedro de Galli, from its appearance; its present
+name is Pedra de Galla. Their chief achievement was the discovery of the
+Rio do Oura. It is not an important river in itself, but only one of
+those deceptive estuaries common on the West coast. But it was the first
+West African place the Portuguese got gold dust at, hence its name. The
+amount of gold was apparently not considerable, and the chief cargo that
+expedition took home was sea wolves' skins; they reported quantities of
+seals or sea wolves as they called them here, and this report was the
+cause of the next Portuguese expedition; for the Portuguese in those
+days seem to have always been anxious for sea wolves' oil and skins; and
+whether this be a survival or no, it seems to me curious that the ladies
+of Lisbon are to this day very keen on sealskin jackets, which their
+climate can hardly call for imperatively. But, however this may be, it
+is certain that we have no account of the Portuguese having passed south
+of the next important cape South of Bojador, namely, Blanco, before
+1443. The terrible tragedy of Tangiers and political troubles hindered
+their explorations from 1436 to 1441,[41] and the French claim to have
+been down the West Coast trading not only before this date, but before
+Prince Henry sent a single expedition out at all, namely, as early as
+1346.
+
+The French story is that there was a deed of association of the
+merchants of Dieppe and Rouen of the date 1364. This deed was to arrange
+for the carrying on to greater proportions of their already existing
+trade with West Africa. The original of this deed was burnt, according
+to Labat, at Dieppe, in the conflagration of 1694.[42] How long before
+this Association was formed that trade had been carried on, it is a
+little difficult to make out, I find, from the usual hindrance to the
+historical study of West Africa, namely, lack of documentary evidence
+and a profusion of recriminatory lying. This association was under the
+patronage of the Dukes of Normandy, then Kings of England; and its
+ultimate decay is partly attributed to the political difficulties these
+patrons became involved in. The French authorities say the Association
+was an exceedingly flourishing affair; and it is stated that under its
+auspices factories were established at Sierra Leone, and that a fort was
+built at La Mina del Ore, or Del Mina, the place now known as Elmina, as
+early as 1382. Now it is round the subject of this fort that most
+controversy wages, for this French statement does not at all agree with
+the Portuguese account of the fort. The latter claim to have discovered
+the coast--called by them La Mina, by us the Gold--in 1470, with an
+expedition commanded by Joao de Santarim and Pedro de Escobara. The
+Portuguese, finding this part of the coast rich in gold, and knowing the
+grabbing habits of other nations where this was concerned, determined to
+secure this trade for themselves in a sound practical way, although they
+were already guarded by a Papal Bull. The expedition that discovered La
+Mina was the last one made during the reign of Affonso V.; but his son,
+who succeeded him as Joao II., rapidly set about acting on the
+information it brought home. This king indeed took an intelligent
+interest in the Guinea trade, and was well versed in it; for a part of
+his revenues before he came to the throne had been derived from it and
+its fisheries. Joao II. energetically pushed on the enterprise founded
+by his father Affonso V., who had in 1469 rented the trade of the Guinea
+Coast to Fernam Gomez for five years at 500 equizodas a year,[43] on the
+condition that 100 leagues of new coast should be discovered annually,
+starting from Sierra Leone, the then furthest known part, and reserving
+the ivory trade to the Crown. The expedition sent out by King Joao,
+commanded by the celebrated Diego de Azambuja, took with it, in ten
+caravels and two smaller craft, ready fashioned stones and bricks, and
+materials for building, with the intention of building a fort as near as
+might be to a place called Sama, where the previous expedition had
+reported gold dust to be had from the natives. This fort was to be a
+means of keeping up a constant trade with the natives, instead of
+depending only on the visits of ships to the coast. Azambuja selected
+the place we know now as Elmina as a suitable site for this fort. Having
+obtained a concession of the land from the King Casamanca, on
+representing to him what an advantage it would be to him to have such a
+strong place wherein he and his people could seek security against their
+enemies, and which would act as a constant market place for his trade,
+and a storehouse for the Portuguese goods, Azambuja lost no time in
+building the fort with his ready-fashioned materials, and not only the
+fort, but a church as well. Both were dedicated to San Gorge da Mina,
+and a daily mass was instituted to be said therein for the repose of the
+soul of the great Prince Henry the Navigator, whose body had been laid
+to rest in November, 1460. Indeed, one cannot but be struck with the
+wealth of Portuguese information that we possess, regarding the
+building of the castle at Elmina and by the good taste shown by the
+Portuguese throughout; for, besides establishing this mass--a mass that
+should be said in all Catholic churches on the West African Coast to
+this day in memory of the great man whose enterprise first opened up
+that great, though terrible region, to the civilised world--King Joao
+granted many franchises and privileges to people who would go and live
+at San Gorge da Mina, and aid in expanding the trade and civilisation of
+the surrounding region, which is as it should be; for people who go and
+live in West Africa for the benefit of their country deserve all these
+things, and money down as well. Having done these, the king evidently
+thought he deserved some honour himself, which he certainly did, so he
+called himself Lord of Guinea, and commanded that all subsequent
+discoverers should take possession of the places they discovered in a
+more substantial way than heretofore; for it had been their custom
+merely to erect wooden crosses or to carve on trees the motto of Prince
+Henry, _Talent de bien faire_. The monuments King Joao commanded should
+be erected in place of these transient emblems he designed himself; they
+were to be square pillars of stone six feet high, with his arms upon
+them, and two inscriptions on opposite sides, in Latin and Portuguese
+respectively, containing the exact date when the discovery of the place
+was made; by his order the cross that was to be on each was to be of
+iron and cramped into the pedestal. Major says the cross was to surmount
+the structure; but my Portuguese friends tell me it was to be in the
+pedestal, and also that the remains of these old monuments are still to
+be seen in their possessions; so we must presume that the outfit for an
+exploring expedition in King Joao's days included a considerable cargo
+of ready-dressed stones and materials for monuments, and that from the
+quantity of discoveries these expeditions made, the sixteenth century
+Portuguese homeward bound must have been flying as light as the Cardiff
+bound collier of to-day.
+
+Still it is remarkable that with all the wealth of detail that we have
+of these Portuguese discoveries in the fifteenth century there is no
+mention of the French being on the coast before Pedro do Cintra reaches
+Sierra Leone and calls it by this name because of the thunder on the
+mountains roaring like a lion, and so on; but he says nothing of French
+factories ashore. Azambuja gives quantities of detail regarding the
+building of San Gorge da Mina, but never says a word about there being
+already at this place a French fort; yet Sieur Villault, Escuyer, Sieur
+de Bellfond,[44] speaks of it with detail and certainty. Also M. Robbe
+says that one of the ships sent out by the association of merchants in
+1382 was called the _Virgin_, that she got as far as Kommenda, and
+thence to the place where Mina stands, and that next year they built at
+this place a strong house, in which they kept ten or twelve of their men
+to secure it; and they were so fortunate in this settlement that in 1387
+the colony was considerably enlarged, and did a good trade until 1413,
+when, owing to the wars in France, the store of these adventurers being
+exhausted, they were obliged to quit not only Mina, but their other
+settlements, as Sestro Paris, Cape Mount, Sierra Leone, and Cape Verde.
+
+Villault, who went to West Africa to stir up the French to renew the
+Guinea trade, openly laments the folly of the French in ever having
+abandoned it owing to certain prejudices they had taken against the
+climate. His account of it is that about the year 1346 some adventurers
+of Dieppe, a port in Normandy, who as descendants of the Normans, were
+well used to long voyages, sailed along the coast of the negroes,
+Guinea, and settled several colonies in those parts, particularly about
+Cape Verde, in the Bay of Rio Fesco, and along the Melequeta coast. To
+the Bay, which extends from Cape Ledo to Cape Mount they gave the name
+of the Bay of France; that of Petit Dieppe to the village of Rio Corso
+(between Rio France and Rio Sestro); that of Sestro Paris to Grand
+Sestro, not far from Cape Palmas; while they carried to France great
+quantities of Guinea pepper and elephants' tusks, whence the inhabitants
+of Dieppe set up the trade of turning ivory and making several useful
+works, as combs, for which they grew famous, and still continue so.
+Villault also speaks of "a fair church still in being" at Elmina,
+adorned with the arms of France, and also says that the chief battery to
+the sea is called by the natives La Battarie de France; and he speaks of
+the affection the natives have for France, and says they beat their
+drums in the French manner. Barbot also speaks of the affection of the
+natives for the French, and says that on his last voyage in 1682 the
+king sent him his second son as hostage, if he would come up to Great
+Kommondo, and treat about settling in his country, although he had
+refused the English and the Dutch. Barbot, however, does not agree with
+Villault about the prior rights of France to the discovery of Guinea; he
+thinks that if these facts be true it is strange that there is no
+mention of so important an enterprise in French historians, and
+concludes that it would be unjust to the Portuguese to attribute the
+first discovery of this part of the world to the French. He also thinks
+it evidence against it that the Portuguese historians are silent on the
+point, and that Azambuja, when he began to build his castle at Elmina in
+1484, never mentions there being a castle there that had been built by
+Frenchmen in 1385. This, however, I think is not real evidence against
+the prior right of France. Take, for instance, the examples you get
+constantly when reading the books of Portuguese and Dutch writers on
+Guinea. You cannot fail to be struck how they ignore each other's
+existence as much as possible when credit is to be given; indeed were it
+not for the necessity they feel themselves under of abusing each other,
+I am sure they would do so altogether, but this they cannot resist. Here
+is a sample of what the Portuguese say of the Dutch: "That the rebels
+(meaning the Dutch) gained more from the blacks by drunkenness, giving
+them wine and strong liquors, than by force of arms, and instructing
+them as ministers of the Devil in their wickedness. But that their
+dissolute lives and manners, joined to the advantage which the
+Portuguese at Mina, though inferior in numbers, had gained over them in
+some rencontres, had rendered them as contemptible among the blacks for
+their cowardice as want of virtue. That however the blacks, being a
+barbarous people, susceptible of first impressions, readily enough
+swallowed Calvin's poison (Protestantism), as well as took off the
+merchandise which the Dutch, taking advantage of the Portuguese
+indolence sold along the coast, where they were become absolute
+pirates." Then, again, the same author says, "The quantity of
+merchandises brought by the Dutch and their cheapness, has made the
+barbarians greedy of them, although persons of quality and honour
+assured them that they would willingly pay double for Portuguese goods,
+as suspecting the Dutch to be of less value, buying them only for want
+of better."[45] I could give you also some beautiful examples of what
+the Dutch say of the Portuguese and the English, and of what the French
+say of both, but I have not space; moreover, it is all very like what
+you can read to-day in things about rival nations and traders out in
+West Africa. I myself was commonly called by the Portuguese there a
+pirate because I was English, and that was the proper thing to call the
+English,--there was no personal incivility meant; and I quote the above
+passage just to impress on you that when you are reading about West
+African affairs, either ancient or modern, you must make allowance for
+this habit of speaking of rival nations--it is the climate. And although
+the Portuguese and the Dutch may choose to ignore the French early
+discoveries, yet they both showed a keen dread of the French from their
+being so popular with the natives, and did their utmost to oust them
+from the West Coast, which they succeeded in doing for a long period.
+And then again to this day, when a trader in West Africa finds a place
+where trade is good, he does not cable home to the newspapers about it.
+If it is necessary that any lying should be done about that place he
+does it himself; but what he strives most to do is to keep its existence
+totally unknown to other people; sooner or later some other trader comes
+along and discovers it, and then that place becomes unhealthy for one or
+the other of its discoverers,--and that is the climate again. Thus by
+the light of my own dispassionate observations in West Africa, I am
+quite ready to believe in that early French discovery; and I quite
+agree with Villault about the quantity of words derived from the French
+that you will find to this day among the native tongues, and even in the
+trade English of the Coast, and in districts that have not been under
+French sway in the historical memory of man. One of these words is the
+word "ju ju," always regarded by the natives as a foreign word. Their
+own word for religion, or more properly speaking for sacred beings, is
+"bosum," or "woka." They only say "ju ju" so that you white man may
+understand. The percentage, however, of Portuguese words in trade
+English is higher than that of French.
+
+After the fifteenth century it is not needful now to discuss in detail
+the subject of the French presence in West Africa; for both Dutch and
+Portuguese freely own to the presence there of the Frenchmen, and openly
+state that they were a source of worry and expense to them, owing to the
+way the natives preferred the French to either of themselves.
+
+The whole subject of the French conquests in Africa is an exceedingly
+interesting one, and one I would gladly linger over, for there is in it
+that fascination that always lies in a subject which contains an element
+of mystery. The element of mystery in this affair is, why France should
+have persisted so in the matter--why she should have spent blood and
+money on it to the extent she has, does, and I am sure will continue to
+do, without its ever having paid her in the past, or paying her now, or
+being likely to pay her in the future, as far as one can see. There are
+moments when it seems to me clear enough why she has done it all; but
+these moments only come when I am in an atmosphere reeking of La Gloire
+or La France--a thing I own I much enjoy; but when I am back in the cold
+intellectual greyness of commercial England, France's conduct in Africa
+certainly seems a little strange and curious, and far more inexplicable
+than it was when one was oneself personally risking one's life and
+ruining one's clothes, after a beetle in the African bush. I really
+think it is this sporting instinct in me that enables me to understand
+France in Africa at all; and which gives me a thrill of pleasure when I
+read in the newspapers of her iniquitous conduct in turning up, flag and
+baggage, in places where she had no legal right to be, or, worse still,
+being found in possession of bits of other nations' hinterland when a
+representative of the other arrives there with the intention of
+discovering it, and to his disgust and alarm finds the most prominent
+object in the landscape is the blue to the mast, blood to the last,
+flag of France, with a fire-and-flames Frenchman under it, possessed
+of a pretty gift of writing communications to the real owner of
+that hinterland--a respectable representative of England or
+Germany--communications threatening him with immediate extinction, and
+calling him a filibuster and an assassin, and things like that. For the
+life of me I cannot help a "Go it, Sall, and I'll hold your bonnit"
+feeling towards the Frenchman. It is not my fault entirely. Gladly would
+I hold my own countryman's bonnet, only he won't go it if I do; so I
+have to content myself with the knowledge that England has made the West
+Coast pay, and that she certainly did beat the Dutch and Portuguese off
+the Coast in a commercial war. Still she will never beat France off in
+that way, because the French interest in Africa is not a commercial one.
+France can and will injure our commerce in West Africa, in all
+probability she will ultimately extinguish it, if things go on as they
+are going, while we cannot hit back and injure her commercial prosperity
+there because she has none to injure. There is also another point of
+great interest, and that is the different effect produced by the
+governmental interference of the two nations in expansion of territory.
+That the expansion of trade, and spheres of influence are concurrent in
+this region is now recognised by our own Government;[46] although the
+Government somewhat flippantly remarks "possibly too late." It is, in my
+opinion, certainly too late as regards both Sierra Leone and the Gold
+Coast; but yet we see small evidence of our Government taking themselves
+seriously in the matter, or of their feeling a regret for having failed
+to avail themselves of the work done for England on the West Coast by
+some of the noblest men of our blood. I have often heard it said it was
+a sad thing for an Englishman to contemplate our West African
+possessions, save one, the Royal Niger; but I am sure it is a far sadder
+thing for an Englishwoman who is full of the pride of her race, and who
+well knows that that pride can only be justified by its men, to see on
+the one hand the splendid achievements of Mungo Park, the two Landers,
+the men who held the Gold Coast for England when the Government
+abandoned it after the battle of Katamansu, of Winwood Reade who, in the
+employ of Messrs. Swanzy, won the right to the Niger behind Sierra
+Leone, and many others; and on the other hand to see the map of West
+Africa to-day, which shows only too clearly that the English
+Government's last chance of saving the honour of England lies in their
+supporting the Royal Niger Company.
+
+It seems that as soon as a West Coast region falls under direct
+governmental control with us a process of petrification sets in, and a
+policy of international amiability and Reubenism, for which we have
+Scriptural authority to expect nothing but failure. It was of course
+necessary for our Government to take charge in West Africa when the
+partitioning of that continent took place; but I fail to admire those
+men who at the Council Board of Europe lost for England what had been
+won for her by better, braver men. Still it is no use, in these weird
+un-Shakespearian times, for any one to use strong language, so I'll turn
+to the consideration of the advance made in West Africa by France; for
+any one can understand how a woman must admire the deeds of brave men
+and the backing up of those deeds by a brave Government.
+
+The earlier history of the French occupation of Africa is that of a
+series of commercial companies, who all came to a bad end. Of the
+Association of the Merchants of Dieppe and Rouen in the fourteenth
+century I have already spoken; and whatever may be the difficulty of
+proving its existence in 1364, there is, I believe, no one who doubts
+that it had an existence that terminated in 1664. The French authorities
+ascribe its fall to the wars in France that succeeded the death of
+Charles VI, 1392, and to the death of some of the principal merchants
+belonging to it; but "the greatest cause of all was that many who had
+gotten vast riches began to be ashamed of the name of traders, although
+to that they owed their fortunes, and allying with the nobility set up
+as quality," and neglected business in the usual way, when this happens.
+The most flourishing settlements went into decay, and were abandoned all
+save one, on the Isle of Sanaga, or what Labat calls the Niger, the
+river we now call the Senegal.[47]
+
+This French settlement is to this day one of the main French ports in
+Africa, and it has remained in their possession, with the brief interval
+of falling into the hands of the English for a few months.
+
+The company that took over the enterprise of this Rouen and Dieppe
+Association in 1664 was called the Compagnie des Indes Occidentals; it
+paid for the stock and rights of the previous association the sum of
+150,000 livres, and it had tremendous ambitions, for not only did it buy
+up the West African enterprise, but also the rights of the lords
+proprietors in the isles of Martinique, Guadaloupe, St. Christopher,
+Santa Cruz, and Maria Galanta in the West Indies. This company came to a
+sad end when it had still thirty years of its charter to run; in 1673 it
+sold its remaining term of West African rights to a new company called
+d'Afrique for 7500 livres. Its West Indian possessions the king seized
+in 1674, and united them with the Crown.
+
+Its successor, the Compagnie d'Afrique, started with its thirty years'
+charter, and all the great ambitions of its predecessor. The king gave
+it every assistance in the way of ships and troops to carry out its
+designs; and it availed itself of these, for finding its trade
+incommoded by the Dutch, who were then settled at Anguin and Goree in
+1677, it got the king to remove the Dutch nuisance from Goree by an
+expedition under Count d'Estras, and in 1678, by an expedition of its
+own, under M. de Casse, it cleared the Dutch out of Anguin.
+
+This company also made many treaties with the native chiefs. In 1679, by
+means of treaty with the chiefs of Rio Fresco, nowadays barbarously
+spelt Rufisque, and Portadali, now Portindal, and Joal, whose name is
+still uninjured, it acquired rights over all the territory between Cape
+Verde and the Gambia;[48] an exclusion from there of all other traders,
+and an exemption from all customs; and in addition to these enterprises
+it entered into a contract with the King of France to provide him with
+2,000 negroes per annum for his West Indian Islands, and as many more as
+he might require for use in the galleys. Shortly after this the
+Compagnie d'Afrique expired in bankruptcy, compounding with its
+creditors at the rate of 5_s._ in the L, which I presume was paid mainly
+out of the 1,010,000 livres for which it sold its claim to its
+successors. The successors were a little difficult to find at first, for
+there seems to have been what one might call distaste for West African
+commercial enterprise among the French public just then. However, a
+company was got together to buy up its rights, accept its
+responsibilities and carry on business in 1681.
+
+In the matter of the company that succeeded the d'Afrique, confusion is
+added to catastrophe, owing to the then Minister of State, M. Seignelay,
+for some private end, having divided up the funds and created two
+separate companies,--one to have the trade from Cape Blanco and the
+Gambia--the Compagnie du Senegal; the other to hold the rest of the
+Guinea trade to the Cape of Good Hope, the Compagnie du Guinea. This
+arrangement, of course, left the Senegal Company with all the
+responsibility of the compagnie d'Afrique, and without sufficient funds
+to deal with them; and the Compagnie du Senegal complained, when, in
+1694, it found its affairs in much confusion, throwing the blame on the
+Government; but, says Astley, "the great are seldom without excuses for
+what they do," and the division of the concession was persisted in, on
+the grounds that when the company that succeeded d'Afrique was intact it
+failed to fulfil the Government contract of sending 2,000 negroes
+annually to the West Indies; and also that it had not imported as much
+gold from Africa as it might have done. Against this the Directors
+remonstrated loudly, saying that, during the two years and a half during
+which they had been responsible for exporting negroes to the West
+Indies, they had supplied 4,560 negroes, that the register of the Mint
+proved they had sent home in three years 400 marks of gold, and that it
+had cost them 400,000 livres to re-establish the trade of the Compagnie
+d'Afrique, for which they had already paid more than it was worth. All
+they got by these complaints was an extension of their trade rights from
+Gambia to Sierra Leone and a confirmation of their monopoly in exporting
+negroes to the French West Indies, and of their rights to Anguin and
+Goree, that is to say, a promise of Government assistance if those Dutch
+should come and attempt to reinstate themselves to the incommodation of
+French commerce.
+
+All this however did not avail to make the Compagnie du Senegal
+flourish, so in 1694 it sold its remaining seventeen years of rights for
+300,000 livres, to Sieur d'Apougny, one of the old Directors; and this
+enterprising man secured the assistance of eighteen new shareholders,
+and obtained from the Crown a new charter, and started afresh under the
+name of the "Compagnie du Senegal, Cap Nord et Cote d'Afrique." It did
+not prosper; nevertheless it may be regarded as having produced the
+founder of modern Senegal, for it sent out to attend to its affairs,
+when things were in a grievous mess, one of the greatest men who have
+ever gone from Europe to Africa--namely, Sieur Bruee.
+
+The name of this company of Sieur d'Apougny was d'Afrique; and the usual
+thing happened to it in 1709, when, for 250,000 livres, it made over its
+rights to a set of Rouen merchants, reserving, however, to itself the
+right of carrying on certain branches of the trade for which it held
+Government contracts; failing to carry these out they were taken from it
+and handed over to the company of Rouen merchants, who succumbed to
+their liabilities in 1717. Their rights were then bought up, for
+1,600,000 livres, by the already established Mississippi Company of
+Paris--a company which survived until 1758.
+
+In 1758 the English again captured St. Louis, the French main post in
+Senegal. In 1779 the French recaptured it, and it was ceded to them by
+England officially in the treaty of 1783. This was merely the usual kind
+of international amenity prevalent on the West Coast in those days.
+Dutch, French, English, Danes, Portuguese, and Courlanders would
+gallantly seize each other's property out there, while their respective
+Governments at home, if the matter were brought before their notice, and
+it was apparently worth their while, disowned all knowledge of their
+representatives' villainies and returned the booty to the prior owner on
+paper. The aggrieved Power then engaged in the difficult undertaking of
+regaining possession; the said original villain knowing little and
+caring less about the arrangements made on the point by his home
+Government. But just at this period England dealt French trade a
+frightful blow. The whole of her iniquity took the form of one John Law,
+a native of Edinburgh,[49] who raised himself to the dignity of
+comptroller-general of the finance of France by a specious scheme for a
+bank, an East India Company and a Mississippi Company, by the profits of
+which the French national debt was to be paid off, a thing then in
+urgent need of doing, and every one connected with the affair was to
+make their fortunes, an undertaking always in need of doing in any
+country. The French Government gave him every encouragement, and in 1716
+he opened the bank; in 1719 the shares of that bank were worth more than
+eighty times the current specie in France; in 1720 that bank burst,
+spreading commercial ruin. To this may be ascribed the period of
+paralysis in the Senegal trade from 1719. The Compagnie de Senegal had
+handed over their interest to the Mississippi Company involved in John
+Law's bank scheme. After this, up to 1817, France like F. M. the Duke of
+Wellington anent playing upon the harp, "had other things to do" than
+attend to West Africa. During the Napoleonic Wars England took all the
+French possessions in West Africa, but by the treaty of Paris of 1814
+she handed back those in Senegal, save the Gambia. The French vessel
+sent out to take over the territory was the ill-starred and
+ill-navigated _Meduse_. Owing to her wreck it was not until 1817 that
+France replaced officially her standard on this Coast. On the 25th of
+January of that year, and represented by Colonel Smaltz, she again
+entered into possession of Goree and St. Louis in the mouth of the
+Senegal, which was practically all she had, and that was in a very
+unsatisfactory state. Colonel Smaltz, in 1819, had to come to an
+agreement with the Oulof chief of the St Louis district to pay him a
+subsidy, but a mere catalogue of the wars between the French and the
+Oulofs is not necessary here; they were mutually unsatisfactory until
+there enters on the scene that second great founder of the French power
+in Africa, General Faidherbe, in 1854. Faidherbe is indeed the founder;
+but had it not been for Sieur Bruee and his travels far into the
+interior, and the evidence he collected regarding the riches therein,
+and of the general value of the country, it is not likely that, as
+things were in 1854, France would have troubled herself so much about
+extending her power in Senegal.
+
+Faidherbe was also one of those men who get possessed by a belief in the
+future of West Africa, regardless of any state of dilapidation they may
+find it in, and who have the power of infusing their enthusiasm into the
+minds of others; and he roused France to the importance of Senegal,
+saying prophetically, "Our possession on the West Coast of Africa is
+possibly the one of all our colonies that has before it the greatest
+future, and it deserves the whole sympathy and attention of the Empire."
+
+These were words more likely to inspire France or any other reasonable
+Power with a desire to give Senegal attention, than those used by the
+previous French visitor there, M. Sanguin, in 1785, who, speaking of
+the island of St. Louis, says it consists entirely of burning sands on
+whose barren surface you sometimes meet with scattered flints thrown out
+among their ballast by ships, and the ruins of buildings formerly
+erected by Europeans; but he remarks it is not surprising the sands are
+barren, for the air is so strongly impregnated with salt, which pervades
+everything and consumes even iron in a very short space of time. The
+heat he reports unpleasant, and rendered thus more so by the reflection
+from the sand. If the island were not all it might be, one might still
+hope for better things ashore on the mainland, but not according to M.
+Sanguin. The mainland is covered with sand and overrun with mangles, not
+the sort, you understand, that vulgar little English boys used to state
+their mothers had sold and invested the money in a barrel organ, but
+what we now call mangroves; then, mentioning that the St. Louis water
+supply was the cause of most of those maladies which carry off the
+Europeans so rapidly, that at the end of every three years the colony
+has a fresh set of inhabitants, M. Sanguin discourses on the charms of
+West African night entertainments in a most feeling and convincing way,
+stating that there was an infinity of gnats called mosquitoes, which
+exist in incredible quantities. He does not mind them himself, oh dear
+no! being a sort of savage, he says, totally indifferent to the
+impression he may create in the fair sex, so that, if you please, he
+smears himself over with butter, which preserves him from the
+mosquitoes' impertinent stings. How he came by a sufficiency of butter
+for this purpose I won't pretend to know; but he knew mosquitoes, for
+impertinent is a perfect word for them. M. Sanguin, however, was not the
+sort of man, with all his ability and enterprise, to advertise Senegal
+successfully to France. Whatever Frenchman would care to go to a land
+where he needs must be sufficiently indifferent to the fair sex to smear
+himself with butter! Dire and awful dangers and miscellaneous horrors,
+even to being carried off by maladies among mangles in an atmosphere
+stiff with mosquitoes, but not that!
+
+Now Faidherbe was different. Remember to the honour of the man he
+started with the above-described environment, but he took the grand tone
+and did not dwell on local imperfections; the burning sands of Senegal
+he mentioned, as all who know them are, by a natural constraint, forced,
+as Azurara would say, to do, but he said our intentions are pure and
+noble, our cause is just, the future cannot fail us;[50] and with such
+words, to his credit and to the credit of La France, he spoke to her
+heart; and he spoke truly, for with all its failures, with all the
+fearful loss of the lives of Frenchmen, Senegal is a grand thing, and it
+is a great thing for France, for from it has risen her masterdom over
+the Western Soudan--a work also inaugurated by Faidherbe, through his
+support of Lieutenant Maze, who reached the Niger. Practical in his
+work, Faidherbe was also--by rebuilding the fort at Medina--the
+annexation of the Oulof country (1856); the institution of a battalion
+of native Tirailleurs (1857); the telegraph line between St. Louis and
+Goree (1862); the construction of the harbour at Darkar and the erection
+of a first-class lighthouse at Cape Verd (1864); and the annexation of
+the kingdom of Cayore (1865). A grand record! and one that would be
+grander for France were it not for the mismanagement that followed
+Faidherbe's rule in commercial and financial matters.
+
+The want of financial success in her enterprise in West Africa is a
+matter that has constantly irritated France. She is continually saying:
+"English possessions on that Coast pay, why should not mine?" It is not
+my business to obtrude on her an answer, I merely dwell on the subject
+because I clearly see there are creeping nowadays into our own methods
+of managing Africa, those very same causes of financial failure that
+have afflicted her, namely, too high tariffs, too exaggerated views of
+the immediate profits to be got from those regions, and certain unfair
+methods of dealing with natives.
+
+In attempting, however, to account for the trade from the French
+possessions in West Africa being proportionately so small to the immense
+area of country, the make of the country and its native inhabitants must
+be taken into consideration. Enormous districts of the French
+possessions are, to put it mildly, not fertile, and capable of producing
+in the way of a marketable commodity only gum, which is gathered from
+the stems of the acacia horrida. It is an excellent gum, and there is
+plenty of this acacia, and other gum-yielding acacias, but pickers are
+not so plentiful, particularly now French authorities object to native
+enterprise taking the form of raiding districts for slaves to employ in
+the industry. Other enormous districts, however, are as fertile as need
+be, and densely forested with forests rich in magnificent timber and
+rubber wealth. The inhabitants, a most important factor in the
+prosperity or otherwise, of West African regions, are varied, but
+roughly speaking, we may say France possesses the whole of the tawny
+Moors, and tawny Moors have their good points and their bad. Their good
+point, from our present point of view, is their commercial enterprise.
+From the earliest historical account we have of them to the present day,
+it has been their habit to suck the trade out of the rich and fertile
+districts, carry it across the desert, and trade it with the white
+Moors, who, in their turn, carried it to the Mediterranean and Red Sea
+ports. The opening of the West Coast seaboard trade, inaugurated by the
+Portuguese, has acted as a commercial loss to the tawny Moors during the
+past 400 years, and must be held, in a measure, accountable for the
+decay of the great towns of Timbuctoo, Jenne, Mele, and so on, though
+only in a measure, for herein comes the bad point of the inhabitants of
+the Western Soudan, from our point of view, namely, their devotion to
+religious differences and politics, which prevents their attending to
+business. As this state of internecine war came on about the same period
+as the opening to the black Moors and negroes of a market direct with
+European traders in the Bight of Benin, it hurried the tawny Moors to
+commercial decay. Timbuctoo never recovered the blow dealt her by the
+Moorish conquest in 1591. At the breaking up of the Empire of Askia the
+Great, revolt and war raged through the region, Jenne revolted in the
+west, an example followed by the Touaregs Fulah and Malinkase tribes.
+Both north and south were thrown into confusion, and Timbuctoo, their
+intermediary, finding her commerce injured, rebelled in her turn. She
+was conquered and brutally repressed by the Moorish conquerors in 1594.
+A terrible dearth provoked by a lack of rain visited the town, and her
+inhabitants were reduced to eating the corpses of animals, and even of
+men. This was followed by the pestilence of 1618,[51] but through this
+arose any quantity of wars and upheavals of political authority among
+the tawny Moors in the early days of European intercourse with the West
+African Coast. They assumed a more acute, religious form in our own
+century, or to be more accurate just at the end of the eighteenth, when
+Shazkh Utham Danfodio arose among the Fulahs as a religious reformer,
+and a warrior missionary. He was a great man at both, but as a disturber
+of traffic still greater, a thing that cannot be urged to so great an
+extent against the other great Muslam missionary Umaru l'Haji. Still his
+gathering together an army of 20,000 men in 1854-55, and going about
+with them on a series of proselytizing expeditions against any tribe in
+the Upper Niger and Senegal region he found to be in an unconverted
+state, was little better than a nuisance to the French authorities at
+that time. Danfodio's affairs have fallen into the hands of England to
+arrange, and very efficiently her great representative in West Africa,
+the Royal Niger Company, has arranged them. But for our Danfodio and his
+consequences, France has had twenty, and she has dealt with them both
+gallantly and patiently. But there will always be, as far as one can
+see, trouble for France with her tawny Moors, now that the sources of
+their support are cut off from them by many of the districts they once
+drew their trade from--the sea-board districts of the Benin Bight, like
+Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast and Lagos, in the English Niger--being in
+the hands of a nation whose commercial instincts enable it to see the
+benefits of lower tariffs than France affects. Even were our tariffs to
+be raised to-morrow, the trade would again begin to drain back into the
+hands of its old owners, the tawny Moors, for the Western Soudan is
+being pacified by France. If some way is not devised of providing the
+tawny Moors with trade sufficient to keep them, things must go badly
+there, owing to the unfertility of the greater part of their country and
+the increase of the population arising from the pacification of the
+Western Soudan, which France is effecting. I will dwell no longer on
+this sketch of the history of the advance of France in Western Africa.
+We in England cannot judge it fairly. Nationally, her honour there is
+our disgrace; commercially, her presence is our ruin.
+
+Two things only stand out from these generalisations. The Royal Niger
+Company shows how great England can be when she is incarnate in a great
+man, for the Royal Niger Company is so far Sir George Taubman-Goldie.
+The other thing that stands out unstained by comatose indifference to
+the worth of West Africa to England is her Commerce as represented by
+her West Coast traders, who have held on to the Coast since the
+sixteenth century with a bulldog grip, facing death and danger, fair
+weather and foul. Fine things both these two things are, but they do not
+understand each other; they would certainly not understand me regarding
+their affairs were I to talk from June to January, so I won't attempt
+to, but speak to the general public, who so far have understood neither
+Sir George Goldie, nor the West Coast trader, nor for the matter of that
+their mutual foe France, and I beg to say that France has not been so
+destructive an enemy to England there as England's own folly has been as
+incarnate in the parliamentary resolution of 1865; that the achievements
+of France in exploration in the Western Soudan make one of the grandest
+pages of all European efforts in Africa; that the influence of France
+over the natives has been, is, and, I believe, will remain good. "Our
+intentions are pure and noble, our cause is just, the future cannot fail
+us," said Faidherbe. So far as the natives are concerned, this has been
+the policy of France in Western Africa. So far as diplomatic relations
+with ourselves, humanly speaking, it has not; but diplomacy is
+diplomacy, and the amount of probity--justice--in diplomacy is a thing
+that would not at any period cover a threepenny-bit. It is a form of war
+that shows no blood, but which has not in it those things which sanctify
+red war, honour and chivalry. Nevertheless, diplomacy is an essential
+thing in this world; it does good work, it saves life, it increases
+prosperity, it advances the cause of religion and knowledge, and
+therefore the World must not be hard on it for its being--what it is.
+Personally, I prefer contemplating other things, and so I turn to
+Commerce.
+
+     Illustration: ST. PAUL DO LOANDA. [_To face page 281._]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [39] See the first edition of _Henry the Navigator_, by R. H. Major,
+   who, with the enormous wealth of his knowledge, vigorously defends the
+   claim to Portuguese priority; although I do not quite agree with him on
+   the value of the absence of evidence in disproving the French claim I am
+   deeply indebted to him for the mention of references on the point.
+
+   [40] This is an interesting case of the alteration that has taken place
+   in Portuguese place names in West Africa. Angra des Ruives in English is
+   Gurnard Bay, and this name was given to it by the Portuguese because of
+   the quantity of this fish found there. In the _West African Pilot_ you
+   find the place called Garnet Bay, and the _Pilot_ says "fish are
+   abundant"; but as it does not say that garnets abound there, nor that it
+   was discovered by Lord Wolseley, I think there is reason to believe that
+   its name is Gurnard Bay, in translation of Angra des Ruives.
+
+   [41] _Prince Henry the Navigator_; Major.
+
+   [42] Labat, _Afrique occidentale_, vol. iv. p. 8. 1724.
+
+   [43] Equal to nearly L30 English per annum.
+
+   [44] _A Relation of the Coasts of Africa called Guinea collected by
+   Sieur Villault, Escuyer, Sieur de Bellfond, in the years 1666-1667._
+   London: John Starkey, 1670.
+
+   [45] Vas Conselo's _Life of King Joao_.
+
+   [46] Duke of Devonshire's speech at Liverpool, June, 1897.
+
+   [47] Labat. At present the Isle of St. Louis, and what is called the
+   Niger, is the river Sanaga--or Senega and Senegal, as the French corrupt
+   it.--Astley, 1745.
+
+   [48] An extent of thirty leagues and six leagues within the
+   land.--Labat, p. 19.
+
+   [49] John Law was the eldest son of an Edinburgh goldsmith, born about
+   1681. "Bred to no business, but possessed of great abilities, and a
+   fertile invention," he, when very young, recommended himself to the
+   King's ministers in Scotland to arrange fiscal matters, then in some
+   confusion from the union of the Kingdoms. His scheme, however, was not
+   adopted. Great at giving other people good advice on money matters, he
+   failed to manage his own. After a gay career in Edinburgh, and gaining
+   himself the title of "Beau Law," he got mixed up in a duel, and fled to
+   the Continent. He was banished from Venice and Genoa for draining the
+   youth of those cities of their money, and wandered about Italy, living
+   on gaming and singular bets and wagers. He proposed his scheme to the
+   Duke of Savoy, who saw by this scheme he could soon, by deceiving his
+   subjects in this manner, get the whole of the money of the kingdom into
+   his possession; but as Law could not explain what would happen then, he
+   was repulsed, and proceeded to Paris, where, under the patronage of the
+   Duc d'Orleans, they found favour with Louis XIV. When his crash came he
+   was exiled, and died in Venice in 1729.
+
+   [50] _Notice de Senegal_, Paris, 1859, p. 99.
+
+   [51] For an interesting account of Timbuctoo and its history, see
+   _Timbuctoo the Mysterious_, by M. Felix Dubois. 1897.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+COMMERCE IN WEST AFRICA
+
+     Concerning the reasons that deter this writer from entering here on
+     a general history of the English, Dutch and Portuguese in Western
+     Africa; to which is added some attempt to survey the present state
+     of affairs there.
+
+
+Lack of space, not lack of interest, prevents me from sketching the
+careers of other nations in West Africa even so poorly as I have that of
+France; but the truth is, the material for the history of the other
+nations is so enormous that in order to present it with anything
+approaching clearness or fairness, folio volumes are required. I have a
+theory of the proper way to write the history of all European West
+African enterprises--a theory I shall endeavour to put into practice if
+I am ever cast ashore on an uninhabited island, with a suitable library,
+a hogshead of ink, a few tons of writing paper, accompanied by pens, and
+at least a quarter of a century of uninterrupted calm at my disposal.
+The theory itself is short, so I can state it here. Pay no attention to
+the nasty things they say about each other--it's the climate.
+
+The history of the Portuguese occupation of West Africa is the great
+one. The material for its early geographico-historical side is in our
+hands, owing to the ability of Mr. Major and his devotion to the memory
+of Prince Henry the Navigator. But the history of Portugal in West
+Africa from the days of the Navigator onwards wants writing. Sir A. B.
+Ellis fortunately gives us, in his history of the Gold Coast, an account
+of the part that Portugal played there, but, except for this region, you
+must hunt it up second-hand in the references made to it by prejudiced
+rivals, or in scattered Portuguese books and manuscripts. While as for
+the commercial history of Portugal in West Africa, although it has been
+an unbroken one from the fifteenth century to our own time, it has so
+far not been written at all. This seems to me all the more deplorable,
+because it is full of important lessons for those nations who are now
+attempting to exploit the regions she first brought them into contact
+with.
+
+It must be noted, for one thing, that Portugal was the first European
+nation to tackle Africa in what is now by many people considered the
+legitimate way, namely, by direct governmental control. Other nations
+left West African affairs in the hands of companies of merchant
+adventurers and private individuals for centuries. Nevertheless,
+Portugal is nowadays unpopular among the other nations engaged in
+exploiting Africa. I shrink from embroiling myself in controversy, but I
+am bound to say I think she has become unpopular on account of
+prejudice, coupled with that strange moral phenomenon that makes men
+desirous of persuading themselves that a person they have treated badly
+deserves such treatment.
+
+The more powerful European nations have dealt scandalously, from a moral
+standpoint, with Portugal in Africa. This one could regard calmly, it
+being in the nature of powerful nations to do this sort of thing, were
+it not for the airs they give themselves; and to hear them talking
+nowadays about Portugal's part in African history is enough to make the
+uninitiated imagine that the sweet innocent things have no past of their
+own, and never knew the price of black ivory.
+
+"Oh, but that is all forgiven and forgotten, and Portugal is just what
+she always was at heart," you say. Well, Portugal at heart was never
+bad, as nations go. Her slaving record is, in the point of humanity to
+the cargo, the best that any European nation can show who has a slaving
+West African past at all.
+
+The thing she is taxed with nowadays mainly is that she does not
+develope her possessions. Developing African possessions is the fashion,
+so naturally Portugal, who persists on going about in crinoline and poke
+bonnet style, gets jeered at. This is right in a way, so long as we
+don't call it the high moral view and add to it libel. I own that my own
+knowledge of Portuguese possessions forces me to regard those
+possessions as in an unsatisfactory state from an imperialistic
+standpoint; a grant made by the home government for improvements, say
+roads, has a tendency to--well, not appear as a road. Some one--several
+people possibly--is all the better and happier for that grant; and after
+all if you do not pay your officials regularly, and they are not
+Englishmen, you must take the consequences. Even when an honest
+endeavour is made to tidy things up, a certain malign influence seems to
+dodge its footsteps in a Portuguese possession. For example, when I was
+out in '93, Portugal had been severely reminded by other nations that
+this was the Nineteenth Century. Bom Dios--Bother it, I suppose it
+is--says Portugal--must do something to smarten up dear Angola. She is
+over 400 now, and hasn't had any new frocks since the slave trade days;
+perhaps they are right, and it's time this dear child came out. So
+Loanda, Angola, was ordered street lamps--stylish things street
+lamps!--a telephone, and a water supply. Now, say what you please,
+Loanda is not only the finest, but the only, city in West Africa.
+"Lagos! you ejaculate--you don't know Lagos." I know I have not been
+ashore there; nevertheless I have contemplated that spot from the point
+of view of Lagos bar for more than thirty solid hours, to say nothing of
+seeing photographs of its details galore, and I repeat the above
+statement. Yet for all that, Loanda had no laid-on water supply nor
+public street lamps until she was well on in her 400th year, which was
+just before I first met her. During the past she had had her water
+brought daily in boats from the Bengo River, and for street lighting she
+relied on the private enterprise of her citizens.[52] The reports given
+me on these endeavours to develope were as follows. As for the water in
+its laid-on state, it was held by the more aristocratic citizens to be
+unduly expensive (500 reis per cubic metre), and they grumbled. The
+general public, though holding the same opinion, did not confine their
+attention to grumbling. Stand-pipes had been put up in suitable places
+and an official told off to each stand-pipe to make a charge for water
+drawn. Water in West Africa is woman's palaver, and you may say what you
+please about the down-troddenness of African ladies elsewhere, but I
+maintain that the West African lady in the matter of getting what she
+wants is no discredit to the rest of the sex, black, white, or yellow.
+In this case the ladies wanted that water, but did not go so far as
+wanting to pay for it. In the history given to me it was evident to
+an unprejudiced observer that they first tried kindness to the guardian
+officials of the stand-pipes, but these men were of the St. Anthony
+breed, and it was no good. Checked, but not foiled, in their admirable
+purpose of domestic economy, those dear ladies laid about in their minds
+for other methods, and finally arranged that one of a party visiting a
+stand-pipe every morning should devote her time to scratching the
+official while the rest filled their water pots and hers. This ingenious
+plan was in working order when I was in Loanda, but since leaving it I
+do not know what modification it may have undergone, only I am sure that
+ultimately those ladies will win, for the African lady--at any rate the
+West coast variety--is irresistible; as Livingstone truly remarked,
+"they are worse than the men." In the street lamp matter I grieve to say
+that the story as given to me does not leave my own country blameless.
+Portugal ordered for Loanda a set of street lamps from England. She sent
+out a set of old gas lamp standards. There being no gas in Loanda there
+was a pause until oil lamps to put on them came out. They ultimately
+arrived, but the P.W.D. failed to provide a ladder for the lamplighter.
+Hence that worthy had to swarm each individual lamp-post, a time-taking
+performance which normally landed him in the arms of Aurora before
+Loanda was lit for the night; but however this may be, I must own that
+Loanda's lights at night are a truly lovely sight, and its P.W.D.'s
+chimney a credit to the whole West Coast of Africa, to say nothing of
+its Observatory and the weather reports it so faithfully issues, so
+faithfully and so scientifically that it makes one deeply regret that
+Loanda has not got a climate that deserves them, but only one she might
+write down as dry and have done with it.
+
+     [Illustration: CLIFFS AT LOANDA. [_To face page 285._]
+
+The present position of the Angola trade is interesting, instructive,
+and typical. I only venture to speak on it in so far as I can appeal to
+the statements of Mr. Nightingale, who is an excellent authority, having
+been long resident in Angola, and heir to the traditions of English
+enterprise there, so ably represented by the firm of Newton, Carnegie
+and Co. The trade of Ka Kongo, the dependent province on Angola, I need
+not mention, because its trade is conditioned by that of its neighbours
+Congo Francais and the Congo Belge.
+
+     [Illustration: DONDO ANGOLA. [_To face page 287._]
+
+The interesting point--painfully interesting--is the supplanting of
+English manufactures, and the way in which the English shipping
+interest[53] at present suffers from the differential duties favouring
+the Portuguese line, the Empreza Nacional de Navigacao a Vapor. This
+line, on which I have had the honour of travelling, and consuming in
+lieu of other foods enough oil and olives for the rest of my natural
+life, is an admirable line. It shows a calm acquiescence in the
+ordinances of Fate, a general courteous gentleness, combined with strong
+smells and the strain of stringed instruments, not to be found on other
+West Coast boats. It runs two steamers a month (6th and 23rd) from
+Lisbon, and they call at Madeira, St. Vincent, Santiago, Principe and
+San Thome Islands, Kabinda, San Antonio (Kongo), Ambriz, Loanda,
+Ambrizzette, Novo Redondo, Benguella, Mossamedes and Port Alexander,
+every alternate steamer calling at Liverpool. The other steamboat
+lines that visit Loanda are the African and British-African of
+Liverpool, which run monthly, in connection with the other South-west
+African ports; and the Woermann line from Hamburg. The French
+Chargeurs-Reunis started a line of steamers from Havre _via_ Lisbon to
+Loanda, Madagascar, Delagoa Bay, touching at Capetown, when so disposed,
+but this line has discontinued calling in on Loanda. The other
+navigation for Angola is done by the Rio Quanza Company, which runs two
+steamers up that river as far as Dondo; but this industry, Dondo
+included, Mr. Nightingale states to be in a parlous state since the
+extension of the Royal Trans-African Railway Company[54] to Cazengo, "as
+all the coffee which previously came _via_ Dondo by means of carriers,
+now comes by rail, the town of Dondo is almost deserted; the house
+property which a few years ago was valued at L200,000 sterling, to-day
+would not realise L10,000." I may remark in this connection, however,
+not to raise the British railway-material makers' feelings unduly, that
+all this railway's rolling stock and material is Belgian in origin. This
+seems to be the fate of African railways. I am told it is on account,
+for one thing, of the way in which the boilers of the English
+locomotives are set in, namely, too stiffly, whereby they suffer more
+over rough roads than the more loosely hung together foreign-made
+locomotives; and, for another, that English-made rolling stock is too
+heavy for rough roads, and that roads under the conditions in Africa
+cannot be otherwise than rough, &c. It is not, however, Belgian stuff
+alone that is competing and ousting our own from the markets of Angola.
+American machinery, owing to the personal enterprise of several American
+engineering firms, is supplying steam-engines and centrifugal pumps for
+working salt at Cucuaco, and machinery for dealing with sugar-cane. Mr.
+Nightingale says the cultivation of the sugar-cane is rapidly extending,
+for the sole purpose of making rum. The ambition of every small trader,
+after he has put a few hundreds of milreis together, is to become a
+fazendeiro (planter) and make rum, for which there is ever a ready sale.
+But regarding the machinery, Mr. Nightingale says: "Up to the present
+time no British firm has sent out a representative to this province.
+There is a fair demand for cane-crushing mills, steam engines and
+turbines. A representative of an American firm is out here for the third
+time within four years, and has done good business; and there is no
+reason why the British manufacturers should not do as well. The American
+machinery is inferior to British makes, and cheaper; but it sells well,
+which is the principal thing."
+
+     [Illustration: TRADING STORES. _To face page 289._]
+
+It is the same story throughout the Angola trade. No English matches
+come into its market. The Companhia de Mossemedes, which is only
+nominally Portuguese, and is worked by German capital, has obtained from
+the Government an enormous tract of country stretching to the Zambesi,
+with rights to cure fish and explore mines. Cartridges made in Holland,
+and an iron pier made in Belgium, an extinct trade in soap and a failing
+one in Manchester goods,[55] and gunpowder, are all sad items in Mr.
+Nightingale's lament. Small matters in themselves, you may think, but
+straws show which way the wind blows, and it blows against England's
+trade in every part of Africa not under England's flag. It would not,
+however, be fair to put down to differential tariffs alone our
+failing trade in Angola, because our successful competitors in
+hardware and gunpowder are other nations who have to face the same
+disadvantages--Germany, Holland, and Belgium. Portugal herself is now
+competing with the Manchester goods. She does so with well-made stuffs,
+but she is undoubtedly aided by her tariff. The consular report (1949)
+says: "The falling off in Manchester cotton since 1891 shows a
+diminution of 1,665,710 kilos. Cotton, if coming from Manchester via
+Lisbon, 1,665,710, duties 80 per cent, or 250 reis per kilo, equal
+333,144 milreis (about L51,250); cotton coming from Portugal, 1,665,710
+kilos, duties 25 reis per kilo, equal to 41,642 dollars, 750 reis (about
+L6,400), showing a difference in the receipts for one year of L44,850."
+
+There is in this statement, I own, a certain obscurity, which has
+probably got into it from the editing of the home officials. I do not
+know if the 1,665,710 kilos, representing the difference between what
+England shipped to Angola in 1891 and what she shipped in 1896, was
+supplied in the latter years from Portugal of Portuguese manufacture;
+but assuming such to have been the case, the position from a tariff
+point of view would work out as follows: 1,665,710 kilos of cottons from
+Manchester would pay duty, at 250 reis per kilo, 416,427-1/2 milreis.
+Taking the exchange at 3_s._ sterling per milreis, this amounts to
+L62,464. If this quantity of Manchester-made cottons had gone to Lisbon,
+and there become nationalised, and sent forward to Angola in Portuguese
+steamers, the duty would have been 80 per cent. of 250 reis per kilo,
+or say 333,142 milreis, equal to L49,971; but if this quantity were
+manufactured in Portugal, and shipped by Portuguese steamers, the duty
+would be 25 reis per kilo, equal to L6,246. The premium in favour of
+Portuguese production on this quantity is therefore L56,218, a terrific
+tax on the Portuguese subjects of Angola, for one year, in one class of
+manufactures only.
+
+The deductions, however, that Mr. Nightingale draws from his figures in
+regard to Portugal and her province are quite clear. He says, "There is
+no doubt that the province of Angola is a very rich one. No advantages
+are held out for merchants to establish here, and thus bring capital
+into the place, which means more business, the opening up of roads, and
+the development of industries and agriculture. Generally the colony
+exists for the benefit of a few manufacturers in Portugal, who reap all
+the profit." Again, he says, "The merchants are much too highly taxed, a
+good fourth part of their capital is paid out in duties, with no
+certainty when it will be realised again. Angola, with plenty of
+capital, moderate taxes and low duties, might in a few years become a
+most flourishing colony."
+
+Now here we come to the general problem of the fiscal arrangements
+suitable for an African colony; and as this is a subject of great
+importance to England in the administration of her colonies, and errors
+committed in it are serious errors, as demonstrated by the late war in
+Sierra Leone,--the most serious even we have had for many years to deal
+with in West Africa,--I must beg to be allowed to become diffuse, humbly
+stating that I do not wish to dogmatise on the matter, but merely to
+attract the attention of busy practical men to the question of the
+proper system to employ in the administration of tropical possessions.
+This seems to me a most important affair to England, now that she has
+taken up great territories and the responsibilities appertaining to them
+in that great tropical continent, Africa. There are other parts of the
+world where the suitability of the system of government to the
+conditions of the governed country is not so important.
+
+     [Illustration: ST. PAUL DO LOANDA. [_To face page 291._]
+
+It seems to me that the deeper down from the surface we can go the
+greater is our chance of understanding any matter; and I humbly ask you
+to make a dive and consider what reason European nations have for
+interfering with Africa at all. There are two distinct classes of
+reasons that justify one race of human beings interfering with another
+race. These classes are pretty nearly inextricably mixed; but if, like
+Mark Twain's horse and myself, you will lean against a wall and think, I
+fancy you will see that primarily two classes of reasons exist--(_a_),
+the religious reason, the rescue of souls--a reason that is a duty to
+the religious man as keen as the rescue of a drowning man is to a brave
+one; (_b_), pressure reasons. These pressure reasons are divisible into
+two sub-classes--(1) external; (2) internal. Now of external pressure
+reasons primarily we have none in Africa. The African hive has so far
+only swarmed on its own continent; it has not sent off swarms to settle
+down in the middle of Civilisation, and terrify, inconvenience, and
+sting it in a way that would justify Civilisation not only in destroying
+the invading swarm, but in hunting up the original hive and smoking it
+out to prevent a recurrence of the nuisance, as the Roman Empire was
+bound to try and do with its Barbarians. Such being the case,[56] we
+can leave this first pressure reason--the war justification--for
+interfering with the African--on one side, and turn to the other
+reason,--the internal pressure reasons acting from within on the
+European nations. These are roughly divisible into three
+sub-classes:--(1) the necessity of supplying restless and ambitious
+spirits with a field for enterprise during such times as they are not
+wanted for the defence of their nation in Europe--France's reason for
+acquiring Africa; (2) population pressure; (3) commercial pressure. The
+two latter have been the chief reason for the Teutonic nations, England
+and Germany, overrunning the lands of other men. This Teutonic race is a
+strong one, with the habit, when in the least encouraged by Peace and
+Prosperity, of producing more men to the acre than the acre can keep.
+Being among themselves a kindly, common-sense race, it seems to them
+more reasonable to go and get more acres elsewhere than to kill
+themselves off down to a level which their own acres could support. The
+essential point about the "elsewhere" is that it should have a climate
+suited to the family. These migrations to other countries made under the
+pressure of population usually take place along the line of least
+resistance, namely, into countries where the resident population is
+least able to resist the invasion, as in America and Australia; but
+occasionally, as in the case of Canada and the Cape, they follow the
+conquest of an European rival who was the pioneer in rescuing the
+country from savagery.
+
+I am aware that this hardly bears out my statement that the Teutonic
+races are kindly, but as I have said "among themselves," we will leave
+it; and to other people, the original inhabitants of the countries they
+overflow, they are on the whole as kindly as you can expect family men
+to be. A distinguished Frenchman has stated that the father of a family
+is capable of anything; and it certainly looks as if he thought no more
+of stamping out the native than of stamping out any other kind of vermin
+that the country possessed to the detriment of his wife and children. I
+do not feel called upon to judge him and condemn, for no doubt the
+father of a family has his feelings; and as it must have been irritating
+to an ancestor of modern America to come home from an afternoon's
+fishing and find merely the remains of his homestead and bits of his
+family, it was more natural for him to go for the murderers than strive
+to start an Aborigines' Protection Society. Though why, caring for wife
+and child so much as he does, the Teuton should have gone and planted
+them, for example, in places reeking with Red Indians is a mystery to
+me. I am inclined to accept my French friend's explanation on this
+point, namely, that it arose from the Teuton being a little thick in the
+head and incapable of considering other factors beyond climate. But this
+may be merely thickness in my own head--a hopelessly Teutonic one.
+
+However, the occupation of territory from population pressure in Europe
+we need not consider here; for it is not this reason that has led Europe
+to take an active interest in tropical Africa. It is a reason that comes
+into African affairs only--if really at all--in the extreme north and
+extreme south of the continent--Algeria and the Cape. The vast regions
+of Africa from 30 deg. N. to 20 deg. S., have long been known not to possess a
+climate suitable for colonising in. "Men's blood rapidly putrifies under
+the tropic zone." "Tropical conditions favour the growth of pathogenic
+bacteria"--a rose called by another name. Anyhow, not the sort of
+country attractive to the father of a family to found a home in. Yet, as
+in spite of this, European nations are possessing themselves of this
+country with as much ardour as if it were a health resort and a gold
+mine in one, it is plain they must have another reason, and this reason
+is in the case of Germany and England primarily commercial pressure.
+
+These two Teutonic nations have the same habit in their commercial
+production that they have in their human production,--the habit of
+overdoing it for their own country; and just as Lancashire, for example,
+turns out more human beings than can comfortably exist there, so does
+she turn out more manufactured articles than can be consumed there; and
+just as the surplus population created by a strong race must find other
+lands to live in, so must the surplus manufactures of a strong race find
+other markets; both forms of surplus are to a strong race wealth.
+
+The main difference between these things is that the surplus
+manufactured article is in no need of considering climate in the matter
+of its expansion. It stands in a relation to the man who goes out into
+the world with it akin to that of the wife and family to the colonist;
+the trader will no more meekly stand having his trade damaged than the
+colonist will stand having his family damaged; but at the same time, the
+mere fact that the climate destroys trade-stuff is, well, all the better
+for trade, and trade, moreover, leads the trader to view the native
+population from a different standpoint to that of the colonist. To that
+family man the native is a nuisance, sometimes a dangerous one, at the
+best an indifferent servant, who does not do his work half so well as in
+a decent climate he can do it himself. To the trader the native is quite
+a different thing, a customer. A dense native population is what the
+trader wants; and on their wealth, prosperity, peace and industry, the
+success of his endeavours depends.
+
+Now it seems to me that there are in this world two classes of regions
+attractive to the great European manufacturing nations, England and
+Germany, wherein they can foster and expand their surplus production of
+manufactured articles. (1) Such regions as India and China. (2) Such
+regions as Africa. The necessity of making this division comes from the
+difference between the native populations. In the first case you are
+dealing with a people who are manufacturers themselves, and you are
+selling your goods mainly against gold. In the second the people are not
+manufacturers themselves except in a very small degree, and you are
+selling your goods against raw material. In a bustling age like this
+there seems to be a tendency here and in Germany to value the first form
+of market above the second. I fail to see that this is a sound
+valuation. The education our commerce gives will in a comparatively
+short time transform the people of the first class of markets into rival
+producers of manufactured articles wherewith to supply the world's
+markets. We by our pacification of India have already made India a
+greater exporter than she was before our rule there. If China is opened
+up, things will be even worse for England and Germany; for the Chinese,
+with their great power of production, will produce manufactured
+articles which will fairly swamp the world's markets; for, sad to say,
+there is little doubt but they can take out of our hands all textile
+trade, and probably several other lines of trade that England, Germany,
+and America now hold. India and China being populated, the one by a set
+of people at sixes and sevens with each other, and the other by a set of
+people who, to put it mildly, are not born warriors, cannot, except
+under the dominion and protection of a powerful European nation,
+commercially prosper. But England and Germany are not everybody. There
+is France. I could quite imagine France, for example, in possession of
+China, managing it on similar lines to those on which she is now
+managing West Africa, but with enormously different results to herself
+and the rest of the world. Her system of differential tariffs, be it
+granted, keeps her African possessions poor, and involves her in heavy
+imperial expenditure; but the Chinaman's industry would support the
+French system, and thrive under her jealous championship. This being the
+case, it is of value to England and Germany to hold as close a grip as
+possible over such regions as India and China, even though by so doing
+they are nourishing vipers in their commercial bosoms.
+
+The case of the second class of markets--the tropical African--is
+different. Such markets are of enormous value to us; they are,
+especially the West African ones, regions of great natural riches in
+rubber, oil, timber, ivory, and minerals from gold to coal. They are in
+most places densely populated with customers for England's manufactured
+goods. The advantages of such a region to a manufacturing nation like
+ourselves are enormous; for not only do we get rid there of our
+manufactured goods, but we get, what is of equal value to our
+manufacturing classes, raw material at a cheap enough rate to enable the
+English manufacturers to turn out into the markets of the civilised
+world articles sufficiently cheap themselves to compete with those of
+other manufacturing nations.
+
+     [Illustration: IN AN ANGOLA MARKET.]
+
+     [Illustration: A MAN OF SOUTH ANGOLA. [_To face page 297._]
+
+The importance to us of such markets as Africa affords us seems to me to
+give us one sufficient reason for taking over these tropical African
+regions. I do not use the word justification in the matter, it is a word
+one has no right to use until we have demonstrated that our interference
+with the native population and our endeavours for our own population
+have ended in unmixed good; but it is a sound reason, as good a reason
+as we had in overrunning Australia and America. Indeed, I venture to
+think it is a better one, for the possession of a great market enables
+thousands of men, women and children to live in comfort and safety in
+England, instead of going away from home and all that home means; and
+this commercial reason,--for all its not having a high falutin sound in
+it,--is the one and only expansion reason we have that in itself desires
+the national peace and prosperity of the native races with whom it
+deals.
+
+It seems to me no disgrace to England that her traders are the expanding
+force for her in Africa. There are three classes of men who are powers
+to a State--the soldier, the trader, and the scientist. Their efforts,
+when co-ordinated and directed by the true statesman--the religious man
+in the guise of philosopher and poet--make a great State. Being English,
+of course modesty prevents my saying that England is a great State. I
+content myself by saying that she is a truly great people, and will
+become a great State when she is led by a line of great
+statesmen--statesmen who are not only capable, as indeed most of our
+statesmen have been, of seeing the importance of India and the colonies,
+but also capable of seeing the equal importance to us of markets.
+
+England's democracy must learn the true value of the markets that our
+fellow-countrymen have so long been striving to give her, and must
+appreciate the heroism those men have displayed, only too often
+unrequited, never half appreciated by the sea-wife, who "breeds a breed
+of rovin' men and casts them over sea." Those who go to make new homes
+for the old country in Australia and America do not feel her want of
+interest keenly; but those heroes of commerce who go to fight and die in
+fever-stricken lands for the sake of the old homes at home, do feel her
+want of interest.
+
+I am not speaking hastily, nor have I only West Africa in my mind in
+this matter; there are other regions where we could have succeeded
+better, with advantage to all concerned--Malaya, British Guiana, New
+Guinea, the West Indies, as well as West Africa. If you examine the
+matter I think you will see that all these regions we have failed in are
+possessed of unhealthy climates, while the regions we have succeeded
+with are those possessed of healthy climates. The reason for this
+difference in our success seems to me to lie mainly in our deficiency of
+statesmanship at home. We really want the humid tropic zone more than
+other nations do; a climate that eats up steel and hardware as a rabbit
+eats lettuces is an excellent customer to a hardware manufacturing town,
+&c. A region densely populated by native populations willing to give raw
+trade stuffs in exchange for cotton goods, which they bury or bang out
+on stones in the course of washing or otherwise actively help their
+local climate to consume, is invaluable to a textile manufacturing town.
+Yet it would be idle to pretend that our Government has realised these
+things. Our superior ability as manufacturers, and the great enterprise
+of our men who have gone out to conquer the markets of the tropics, have
+given us all the advantages we now enjoy from those markets, but they
+could do no more; and now, when we are confronted by the expansion of
+other European nations, those men and their work are being lost to
+England. Our fellow-countrymen will go anywhere and win anywhere to-day
+just as well as yesterday, where the climate of the region allows
+England to throw enough of them in at a time to hold it independent of
+the home government; but in places where we cannot do this, in the
+unhealthy tropical regions where those men want backing up against the
+aggression on their interests of foreign governments, well, up to the
+present they have not had that backing up, and hence we have lost to
+England in England the advantages we so easily might have secured.
+
+An American magazine the other day announced in a shocked way that I
+could evidently "swear like a trooper!" I cannot think where it got the
+idea from; but really!--well, of course I don't naturally wish to, but I
+cannot help feeling that if I could it would be a comfort to me; for
+when I am up in the great manufacturing towns, England properly so
+called, their looms and forges seem to me to sing the same song to the
+great maker of Fate--we must prosper or England dies. And there is but
+one thing they can prosper on--for there is but one feeding ground for
+them and all the thousands of English men, women and children dependent
+on them--the open market of the World. To me the life blood of England
+is her trade. Her soul, her brain is made of other things, but they
+should not neglect or spurn the thing that feeds them--Commerce--any
+more than they should undervalue the thing that guards them--the
+warrior.
+
+But, you will say, we will not be tied down to this commercial reason as
+England's reason for taking over the administration of tropical Africa.
+My friend, I really think on the whole you had better--it's reasonable.
+I grant that it has not been the reason why English missionaries and
+travellers have risked their lives for the good of Africa, or of human
+knowledge, but as a ground from which to develop a policy of
+administering the country this commercial one is good, because it
+requires as aforesaid the prosperity of the African population; and your
+laudable vanities in the matter I cannot respect, when I observe right
+in the middle of the map of Africa an enormous region called the Congo
+Free State. I have reason to believe that that region was opened up by
+Englishmen--Livingstone, Stanley, Speke, Grant and Burton. If you had
+been so truly keen on suppressing Arab slavery and native cannibalism,
+there was a paradise for you! Yet, you hand it over to some one else.
+Was it because you thought some one else could do it better? or--but we
+will leave that affair and turn to the consideration of the possibility
+of administering tropical Africa, governmentally, to the benefit of all
+concerned.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [52] Loanda has now a gas company, and the installation is well under
+   way, under Belgian supervision.
+
+   [53] Referring to cotton goods, the Foreign Office report on the trade
+   of Angola for 1896 (1949) says the same cottons coming from Manchester
+   would pay 250 reis per kilo in foreign bottoms, and 80 per cent of 250
+   reis if coming in Portuguese bottoms and nationalised in Lisbon.
+
+   [54] Angola also has a small railway from Catumbella to Benguella, a
+   distance of 15 kiloms. and is contemplating constructing an important
+   line from either Benguella or Mossamedes up to Caconda.
+
+   [55] The imports in 1896 from England being 978,745 kilos, against
+   2,644,455 in 1891--a difference of 1,665,710 kilos against
+   Manchester.--_Foreign Office Annual Series, Consular Report, No. 1949_.
+
+   [56] In saying this I am aware of the conduct of Carthage and of the
+   Barbary Moors. But neither of these were primarily African. The one was
+   instigated by Greece, the other by the Vandals and the Arabs.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE CROWN COLONY SYSTEM
+
+     Wherein it is set down briefly why it is necessary to enter upon
+     this discussion at all.
+
+
+Now, you will say, Wherefore should the general public in England
+interest itself in this matter? Surely things are now governmentally
+administered in England's West African Colonies for the benefit of all
+parties concerned.
+
+Well, that is just exactly and precisely what they are not. The system
+of Crown Colonies, when it is worked by Portuguese, does, at any rate,
+benefit some of the officials; but English officials are incapable of
+availing themselves of the opportunities this system offers them; and
+therefore, as this form of opportunity is the only benefit the thing can
+give any one, the sooner the Crown Colony system is removed from the
+sphere of practical politics and put under a glass case in the South
+Kensington Museum, labelled "Extinct," the better for every one.
+
+I beg you, before we go further in this matter, to look round the world
+calmly, and then, when you have allowed the natural burst of enthusiasm
+concerning the extent and the magnificence of the British Empire to
+pass, you will observe that in the more unhealthy regions England has
+failed. I say she has failed because of the Crown Colony system--failed
+with them even during days wherein she has had to face nothing like what
+she has to face to-day from the commercial competition of other nations.
+
+In order to justify myself for holding the view that it is possible for
+any system of English administration to fail anywhere, I would draw your
+attention to the fact that the system used by us for governing unhealthy
+regions is the Crown Colony system. The two things go together, and we
+must assign one of them as the reason of our failure. You may, if it
+please you, put it down to the other thing, the unhealthiness. I cannot,
+for I know that no race of men can battle more gallantly with climate
+than the English--no other race of men has shown so great a capacity as
+we have to make the tropics pay. Still to-day we stand face to face with
+financial disaster in tropical regions.
+
+If you will look through a list of England's tropical unhealthy
+possessions, leaving out West Africa, you will see nothing but
+depression. There are the West Indies, British Guiana, and British
+Honduras. All of these are naturally rich regions and accessible to the
+markets of the world. There is not one of them hemmed in by great
+mountain chains or surrounded by arid deserts, across which their
+products must be transported at enormous cost. They are all on our
+highway--the sea; nor are they sparsely populated. Their population,
+according to the latest Government returns, is 1,653,832, and this
+estimate is acknowledged to be necessarily imperfect and insufficient.
+But with all these advantages we find no prosperity there under our
+rule. Nothing but poverty and discontent and now pauperisation in the
+shape of grants from the Imperial Exchequer. You say, "Oh! but that is
+on account of the sugar bounties and the majority of the population not
+being English;" but that argument won't do. Look at the Canary Islands.
+They were just as hard hit by aniline dyes supplanting cochineal. Their
+population is not mainly English; but down on those islands came an
+Englishman, the Spanish Government had the sense to let him have his
+way, and that Englishman, Mr. A. L. Jones, of Liverpool, has, in a space
+of only fifteen years, made those islands a source of wealth to Spain,
+instead of paupers on an Imperial bounty. "But," you say, "we have other
+regions under the Crown Colony system that are not West Indian."
+Granted, but look at them. There are the West African group; a group of
+three in the Mediterranean, Gibraltar, Malta, and Cyprus, two
+fortifications and a failure; away out East another group, which are
+prosperous from the fact that they are surrounded by countries whose
+fiscal arrangements are providentially worse than their own, and this
+seems to be the only condition which can keep a Crown Colony on its
+financial legs at all. For all our Crown Colonies adjacent to countries
+who can compete with them in trade matters are paupers, or their
+efficiency and value to the Empire is in the sphere of military and
+naval affairs, as posts and coaling stations. These possessions of the
+Gibraltar, Malta, and Hong-Kong brand should be regarded as being part
+of our navy and army, and not confused with colonies, though essential
+to them.
+
+"Still," you say, "you are forgetting Ceylon, the Fiji Islands, the
+Falklands, and the Mauritius." I am not. Ceylon is part of India and
+practically an Indian province, so is out of my arguments. I present you
+with the others wherefrom to build up a defence of the Crown Colony
+system. Say, "See the Falklands off Cape Horn, with a population of
+1,789, and heaps of sheep and a satisfactory budget." I can say nothing
+against them, and may possibly be forced to admit that for such a
+region, off Cape Horn, and with a population mainly of sheep, the Crown
+Colony system may be a Heaven-sent form of administration. But I think
+England would be wiser if she looked carefully at the West Indian group
+and recognised how like their conditions are to those of the West
+African group, for in their disastrous state of financial affairs you
+have an object lesson teaching what will be the fate of Crown Colonies
+in West Africa--Gambia, Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast and Lagos--if she
+will be not warned in time to alter the system at present employed for
+governing these possessions. It is an object lesson in miniature of what
+will otherwise be an infinitely greater drain on the resources of
+England, for West Africa is immensely larger, immensely more densely
+populated, and immensely more deadly in climate than the West Indies.
+For one Englishman killed by the West Indies West Africa will want ten;
+for every L1,000, L20,000--and all for what? Only for the sake of a
+system--a system intrinsically alien to all English ideals of
+government--a system that doddered along until Mr. Chamberlain expected
+it to work and then burst out all over in rows, and was found to be
+costing some 25 per cent. of the entire bulk of white trade with West
+Africa; a system that, let the land itself be ever so rich, can lead to
+nothing but heart-breaking failure.
+
+Now I own the Crown Colony system looks well on paper. It consists of a
+Governor, appointed by the Colonial Office, supported by an Executive
+and Legislative Council (both nominated), and on the Gold Coast with two
+unofficial members in the legislative body. These Councils, as far as
+the influence they have, are dead letters, and legislation is in the
+hands of the Governor. This is no evil in itself. You will get nothing
+done in tropical Africa except under the influence of individual men;
+but your West African Governor, though not controlled by the Councils
+within the colony, is controlled by a power outside the colony, namely
+the Colonial Office in London. Up to our own day the Colonial Office has
+been, except in the details of domestic colonial affairs, a drag-chain
+on English development in Western Africa. It has not even been
+indifferent, but distinctly, deliberately adverse. In the year 1865 a
+Select Committee of the House of Commons inquired into and reported upon
+the state of British establishments on the western coast of Africa. "It
+was a strong Committee, and the report was brief and decided.
+Recognising that it is not possible to withdraw the British Government
+wholly or immediately from any settlements or engagements on the West
+African Coast, the Committee laid down that all further extension of
+territory or assumption of government, or new treaties offering any
+protection to native tribes, would be inexpedient, and that the object
+of our policy should be to encourage in the natives the exercise of
+those qualities which may render it possible for us more and more to
+transfer to them the administration of all the governments with a view
+to the ultimate withdrawal from all, except, perhaps, Sierra Leone."[57]
+
+Remember also this. This one in 1865 was not the first of those sort of
+fits the Colonial Office had in West African affairs. It was just as bad
+after the Battle of Katamansu in 1827, and had it not been for the
+English traders our honour to the natives we had made treaties with
+would have been destroyed, and the Gold Coast lost whole and entire.
+
+This policy of 1865 has remained the policy of the English Government
+towards West Africa up to 1894. In spite of it, the English have held
+on. Governor after Governor, who, as soon as he became acquainted with
+the nature of the region, has striven to rouse official apathy, has been
+held in, and his spirit of enterprise broken by official snubs, and has
+been taught that keeping quiet was what he was required to do. It broke
+many a man's heart to do it; but doing it worked no active evil on the
+colony under his control, the affairs of which financially prospered in
+the hands of the trading community so well, that not only had no West
+African colony any public debt, except Sierra Leone, which was a
+philanthropic station, but the Gold Coast, for example, had sufficient
+surplus to lend money to colonies in other parts of the world. But at
+last the time came when the aggression on Africa by the Continental
+powers fulfilled all the gloomy prophecies which the merchants of
+Liverpool had long been uttering; and one possession of ours in West
+Africa after another felt the effects of the activity of other nations
+and the apathy of our own. They would have felt it in vain, and have
+utterly succumbed to it, had it not been for two Englishmen. Sir George
+Taubman Goldie, who, when in West Africa on a voyage of exploration,
+recognised the possibilities of the Niger regions, and secured them for
+England in the face of great difficulties; and Mr. Chamberlain.
+Concerning Sir George Goldie's efforts in securing a most important
+section of West Africa for England, I shall have occasion to speak
+later. Concerning Mr. Chamberlain, I may as well speak now; but be it
+understood, both these men, whatever their own ideas on their work may
+be, were men who came up at a critical point to reinforce Liverpool and
+Bristol and London merchants, who had fought for centuries--not to put
+too fine a point on it--from the days of Edward IV. for the richest
+feeding grounds in all the world for England's manufacturing millions.
+The dissensions, distrust and misunderstandings which have raged among
+these three representatives of England's majesty and power, are no
+affair of mine, as a mere general student of the whole affair, beyond
+the due allowance one must make for the grave mischief worked by the
+human factors. Well, as aforesaid, Mr. Chamberlain alone of all our
+statesmen saw the great possibilities and importance of Western Africa,
+and thinking to realise them, forthwith inaugurated a policy which if it
+had had sound ground to go on, would have succeeded. It had not, it had
+the Crown Colony system--and our hope for West Africa is that so
+powerful a man as he has shown himself to be in other political fields,
+may show himself to be yet more powerful, and formulate a totally new
+system suited for the conditions of West Africa, and not content himself
+with the old fallacy of ascribing failure to the individuals, white or
+black, government official or merchant or missionary, who act under the
+system which alone is to blame for England's present position in West
+Africa; but I own that if Mr. Chamberlain does this he will be greater
+than one man can ever be reasonably be expected to be, and again it is,
+I fear, not possible to undo what has been done by the resolution of
+1865.
+
+Possibly the greatest evil worked by this resolution has been the
+separation of sympathy between the Merchants and the Government. Since
+1865 these two English factors have been working really against each
+other. Possibly the greatest touch of irony in modern politics is to be
+found in a despatch dated March 30th, 1892, addressed to the British
+Ambassador at Paris, wherein it is said, "The colonial policy of Great
+Britain and France in West Africa has been widely different. France from
+her basis on the Senegal coast has pursued steadily the aim of
+establishing herself on the Upper Niger and its affluents; this object
+she has attained by a large and constant expenditure, and by a
+succession of military expeditions. Great Britain, on the other hand,
+has adopted the policy of advance by commercial enterprise; she has not
+attempted to compete with the military operations of her neighbour."[58]
+I should rather think she hadn't! Let alone the fact that France did not
+expand mainly by military operations, but through magnificent explorers
+backed up by sound sense. While, as for Great Britain "adopting the
+policy of advance by commercial enterprise"--well, I don't know what the
+writer of that despatch's ideas on "adoption" are, but suppression would
+be the truer word. Had Great Britain given even her countenance to
+"commercial enterprise," she would have given it by now representation
+in her councils for West Africa, a thing it has not yet got. True, there
+is the machinery for this representation ready in the Chambers of
+Commerce, but these Chambers have no real power whatsoever as far as
+West African affairs are concerned; they are graciously permitted to
+send deputations to the Colonial Office and write letters when they feel
+so disposed, but practically that is all.
+
+Truly it is a ridiculous situation, because West Africa matters to no
+party in England so much as it matters to the mercantile. I am aware I
+shall be told that it is impossible that one section of Englishmen can
+have a greater interest in any part of the Empire than another section,
+and, for example, that West Africa matters quite as much to the
+religious party as it does to the mercantile. But, to my mind, neither
+Religion nor Science is truly concerned in the political aspect of West
+Africa. It should not matter, for example, to the missionary whether he
+works under one European Government or another, or a purely native
+Government, so long as he is allowed by that Government to carry on his
+work of evangelisation unhindered; nor, similarly, does it matter to the
+scientific man, so long as he is allowed to carry on his work; but to
+the merchant it matters profoundly whether West Africa is under English
+or foreign rule, and whether our rule there is well ordered. For one
+thing, on the merchants of West Africa falls entirely the duty of
+supplying the revenue which supports the government of our colonies
+there; and for another, it seems to me that whether the Government he is
+under is English or no does matter very much to the English merchant.
+His duty as an Englishman is the support of the population of his own
+country, directly the support of its manufacturing classes. Everything
+that tends to alienate his influence from the service of his
+fellow-countrymen is a degradation to him. He may be individually as
+successful in trading with foreign-made goods, but as a member of the
+English State he is at a lower level when he does so; he becomes a mere
+mercenary in the service of a foreign power engaged in adding to the
+prosperity of an alien nation. Again, in this matter the difference
+between the religious man and the commercial shows up clearly. Let the
+religion of the missionary be what it may, his aim is according to it to
+secure the salvation of the human race. What does it matter to him
+whether the section of the human race he strives to save be black,
+white, or yellow? Nothing; as the noble records of missions will show
+you. Therefore I repeat that West Africa matters to no party in the
+English State so much as it matters to the mercantile. With no other
+party are true English interests so closely bound up.
+
+West Africa probably will never be a pleasant place wherein to spend the
+winter months, a holiday ground that will serve to recuperate the jaded
+energies of our poets and painters, like the Alps or Italy; probably,
+likewise, it will never be a place where we can ship our overflow
+population; and for the same reason--its unhealthiness--it will be of no
+use to us as a military academy, for troops are none the better for
+soaking in malaria and operating against ill-armed antagonists. But West
+Africa is of immense use to us as a feeding-ground for our manufacturing
+classes. It could be of equal value to England as a healthy colony, but
+in a reverse way, for it could supply the wealth which would enable them
+to remain in England in place of leaving it, if it were properly managed
+with this definite end in view. It is idle to imagine that it can be
+properly managed unless commercial experts are represented in the
+Government which controls its administration, as is not the case at
+present. It is no case of abusing the men who at present strive to do
+their best with it. They do not set themselves up as knowing much about
+trade, and they constantly demonstrate that they do not. Armed with
+absolutely no definite policy, subsisting on official and non-expert
+trade opinion, they drift along, with some nebulous sort of notion in
+their heads about "elevating the African in the plane of civilisation."
+
+Now, of course, there exists a passable reason for things being as they
+are in our administration of West Africa. England is never malign in
+intention, and never rushes headlong into a line of policy. Therefore,
+in order to comprehend how it has come about that she should have a
+system so unsuited to the regions to which it is applied, as the Crown
+Colony system is unsuited to West Africa, we must calmly investigate the
+reason that underlies this affair. This reason, which is the cause of
+all the trouble, is a misconception of the nature of West Africa, and it
+must be considered under two heads.
+
+The thing behind the resolution of 1865 is the undoubted fact that West
+Africa is no good for a Colony from its unhealthiness. There is no one
+who knows the Coast but will grant this; but surely there is no one who
+knows, not only the West Coast of Africa but also the necessities of our
+working classes in England, who can fail to recognise that this is only
+half an argument against England holding West Africa; because we want
+something besides regions whereto we can send away from England men and
+women, namely, we want regions that will enable us to keep the very
+backbone of England, our manufacturing classes, in a state of healthy
+comfort and prosperity at home in England, in other words, we want
+markets.
+
+Alas! in England the necessity for things grows up in a dumb way, though
+providentially it is irresistibly powerful; once aroused it forces our
+statesmen to find the required thing, which they with but bad grace and
+grievous groans proceed leisurely to do.
+
+This is pretty much the same as saying that the English are deficient in
+statesmanship, and this is what I mean, and I am convinced that no other
+nation but our own could have prospered with so much of this
+imperfection; but remember it is an imperfection, and is not a thing to
+be proud of any more than a stammer. External conditions have enabled
+England so far barely to feel her drawback, but now external conditions
+are in a different phase, and she must choose between acquiring
+statesmanship competent to cope with this phase, or drift on in her
+present way until the force of her necessities projects her into an
+European war. A perfectly unnecessary conclusion to the pressure of
+commercial competition she is beginning to feel, but none the less
+inevitable with her present lack of statecraft.
+
+The second part of the reason of England's trouble in West Africa is
+that other fallacious half reason which our statesmen have for years
+been using to soothe the minds of those who urged on her in good time
+the necessity for acquiring the hinterlands of West Africa, namely,
+"After all, England holds the key of them in holding the outlets of the
+rivers." And while our statesmen have been saying this, France has been
+industriously changing the lock on the door by diverting trade routes
+from the hinterland she has so gallantly acquired, down into those
+seaboard districts which she possesses.
+
+"Well, well, well," you will say, "we have woke up at last, we can be
+trusted now." I own I do not see why you should expect to be suddenly
+trusted by the men with whose interests you have played so long. I
+remember hearing about a missionary gentleman who was told a long story
+by the father of a bad son, who for years went gallivanting about West
+Africa, bringing the family into disrepute, and running up debts in all
+directions, and finally returned to the paternal roof. "Dear me! how
+interesting," said the missionary; "quite the Parable of the Prodigal
+Son! I trust, My Friend, you remembered it, and killed the fatted calf
+on his return?" "No, Sar," said the parent; "but I dam near kill that ar
+prodigal son."
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [57] See Lucas's _Historical Geography of the British Colonies_, Oxford,
+   1894.
+
+   [58] Parliamentary Paper, C 6701, 92.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+THE CROWN COLONY SYSTEM IN WEST AFRICA
+
+     Wherein is set down briefly in what manner of ways the Crown Colony
+     system works evil in Western Africa.
+
+
+I have attempted to state that the Crown Colony system is unsuited for
+governing Western Africa, and have attributed its malign influence to
+its being a system which primarily expresses the opinions of
+well-intentioned but ill-informed officials at home, instead of being,
+according to the usual English type of institution, representative of
+the interests of the people who are governed, and of those who have the
+largest stake in the countries controlled by it--the merchants and
+manufacturing classes of England. It remains to point out how it acts
+adversely to the prosperity of all concerned; for be it clearly
+understood there is no corruption in it whatsoever: there is waste of
+men's lives, moneys, and careers, but nothing more at present. By-and-by
+it will add to its other charms and functions that of being, in the
+early future, a sort of patent and successful incubator for hatching a
+fine lively brood of little Englanders, who will cry out, "What is the
+good of West Africa?" and so forth; and they will seem sweetly
+reasonable, because by then West Africa will be down on the English
+rates, a pauper.
+
+It may seem inconceivable, however, that the present governing body of
+West Africa, the home officials, and the English public as represented
+in Parliament, can be ill-informed. West Africa has not been just shot
+up out of the ocean by a submarine volcanic explosion; nor are we
+landing on it out of Noah's ark, for the thing has been in touch with
+Europe since the fifteenth century; yet, inconceivable as it may seem
+that there is not by now formulated and in working order a method of
+governing it suitable for its nature, the fact that this is so remains,
+and providentially for us it is quite easy of explanation without
+abusing any one; though no humane person, like myself for example, can
+avoid sincerely hoping that Mr. Kipling is wrong when he sings
+
+    "Deep in all dishonour have we stained our garments' hem.
+    Yet be ye not dismayed, we have stumbled and have strayed.
+    Our leaders went from righteousness, the Lord will deal with them."
+
+For although it is true that we have made a mess of this great feeding
+ground for England's manufacturing millions; yet there are no leaders on
+whom blame alone can fall, whom we can make scapegoats out of, who can
+be driven away into the wilderness carrying the sins of the people. The
+blame lies among all those classes of people who have had personally to
+deal with West Africa and the present system; and the Crown Colony
+system and the resolution of '65 are merely the necessary fungi of
+rotten stuff, for they have arisen from the information that has been,
+and has not been, placed at the disposal of our Government in England by
+the Government officials of West Africa, the Missionaries, and the
+Traders.
+
+We will take the traders' blame first--their contribution to the evil
+dates from about 1827 and consists in omission--frankly, I think that
+they, in their generation, were justified in not telling all they could
+tell about the Coast. They found they could get on with it, keep it
+quiet and manage the natives fairly well under the system of Courts of
+Equity in the Rivers, and the Committee of merchants with a Governor
+approved of by the Home Government, which was working on the Gold Coast
+up to 1843. In 1841 there arose the affair of Governor Maclean, and the
+inauguration of the line of policy which resulted in the resolution of
+1865. The governmental officials having cut themselves off from the
+traders and taken over West Africa, failed to manage West Africa, and so
+resolved that West Africa was not worth managing,--a thing they are
+bound to do again.
+
+The abuse showered on the merchants, and the terrific snubs with which
+the Government peppered them, did not make the traders blossom and
+expand, and shower information on those who criticised them--there are
+some natures that are not sweetened by Adversity. Moreover, the
+Government, when affairs had been taken over by the Offices in London,
+took the abhorrent form of Customs, and displayed a lively love of the
+missionary-made African, as he was then,--you can read about him in
+Burton[59]--and for the rest got up rows with the traders' best
+customers, the untutored African; rows, as the traders held, unnecessary
+in their beginning and feeble-handed in their termination. The whole of
+this sort of thing made the trader section keep all the valuable
+information to itself, and spend its energies in eluding the Customs,
+and talking what Burton terms "Commercial English."
+
+Then we come to the contribution made by the Government officials to the
+formation of an erroneous opinion concerning the state of affairs in
+West Africa. This arose from the conditions that surrounded them there,
+and the way in which they were unable, even if they desired, to expand
+their influence, distrusted naturally enough by the trading community
+since 1865, held in continuously by their home instructions, and
+unprovided with a sufficient supply of men or money on shore to go in
+for empire making, and also villainously badly quartered,--as you can
+see by reading Ellis's _West African Sketches_. It is small wonder and
+small blame to them that their account of West Africa has been a gloomy
+one, and such it must remain until these men are under a different
+system: for all the reasons that during the past have caused them to
+paint the Coast as a place of no value to England, remain still in full
+force,--as you can see by studying the disadvantages that service in a
+West African Crown Colony presents to-day to a civilian official.
+
+Firstly, the climate is unhealthy, so that the usual make of Englishman
+does not like to take his wife out to the Coast with him. This means
+keeping two homes, which is expensive, and it gives a man no chance of
+saving money on an income say of L600 a year, for the official's life in
+West Africa is necessarily, let him be as economical as he may, an
+expensive one; and, moreover, things are not made more cheerful for him
+by his knowing that if he dies there will be no pension for his wife.
+
+Secondly, there being no regular West African Service, there is no
+security for promotion; owing to the unhealthiness of the climate it is
+very properly ordained that each officer shall serve a year on the
+Coast, and then go home on a six months' furlough. It is a fairly common
+thing for a man to die before his twelve months' term is up, and a
+still more common one for him to have to go on sick leave. Of course,
+the moment he is off, some junior official has to take his place and do
+his work. But in the event of the man whose work he does dying, gaining
+a position in another region, or promotion, the man who has been doing
+the work has no reason to hope he will step into the full emoluments and
+honours of the appointment, although experience will thus have given him
+an insight into the work. On the contrary, it too often happens that
+some new man, either fresh from London or who has already held a
+Government appointment in some totally different region to the West
+African, is placed in the appointment. If this new man is fresh to such
+work as he has to do, the displaced man has to teach him; if he is from
+a different region, he usually won't be taught, and he does not help to
+develop a spirit of general brotherly love and affection in the local
+governmental circles by the frank statement that he considers West
+African officials "jugginses" or "muffs," although he fairly offers to
+"alter this and show them how things ought to be done."
+
+Then again the civilian official frequently complains that he has no
+such recognition given him for his services as is given to the military
+men in West Africa. I have so often heard the complaint, "Oh, if a man
+comes here and burns half a dozen villages he gets honours; while I, who
+keep the villages from wanting burning, get nothing;" and mind you, this
+is true. Like the rest of my sex I suffer from a chronic form of scarlet
+fever, and, from a knowledge of the country there, I hold it rubbish to
+talk of the brutality of mowing down savages with a Maxim gun when it
+comes to talking of West African bush fighting; for your West African is
+not an unarmed savage, he does not assemble in the manner of Dr.
+Watts's ants, but wisely ensconces himself in the pleached arbours of
+his native land, and lets fly at you with a horrid scatter gun. This is
+bound to hit, and when it hits makes wounds worse than those made by a
+Maxim; in fact he quite turns bush fighting into a legitimate sport, let
+alone the service done him by his great ally, the climate. Still, it is
+hard on the civilian, and bad for English interests in West Africa, that
+the man who by his judgment, sympathy, and care, keeps a district at
+peace, should have less recognition than one who, acting under orders,
+doing his duty gallantly, and all that, goes and breaks up all native
+prosperity and white trade.
+
+All these things acting together produce on the local Government
+official a fervid desire to get home to England, and obtain an
+appointment in some other region than the West Coast. I feel sure I am
+well within the mark when I say that two-thirds of the present
+Government officials in the West African English Crown Colonies have
+their names down on the transfer list, or are trying to get them there;
+and this sort of thing simply cannot give them an enthusiasm for their
+work sufficient to ensure its success, and of course leads to their
+painting a dismal picture of West Africa itself.
+
+I am perfectly well aware that the conditions of life of officials in
+West Africa are better than those described by Ellis. Nevertheless, they
+are not yet what they should be: a corrugated iron house may cost a heap
+of money and yet not be a Paradise. I am also aware that the houses and
+general supplies given to our officials are immensely more luxurious
+than those given to German or French officials; but this does not
+compensate for the horrors of boredom suffused with irritation to which
+the English official is subjected. More than half the quarrelling and
+discontent for which English officials are celebrated, and which are
+attributed to drink and the climate, simply arise from the domestic
+arrangements enforced on them in Coast towns, whereby they see far too
+much of each other. If you take any set of men and make them live
+together, day out and day in, without sufficient exercise, without
+interest in outside affairs, without dividing them up into regular
+grades of rank, as men are on board ship or in barracks, you are simply
+bound to have them dividing up into cliques that quarrel; the things
+they quarrel over may seem to an outsider miserably petty, but these
+quarrels are the characteristic eruption of the fever discontent. And
+may I ask you if the opinion of men in such a state is an opinion on
+which a sound policy wherewith to deal with so complex a region can be
+formed? I think not, yet these men and the next class alone are the
+makers of our present policy--the instructors of home official opinion.
+
+The next class is the philanthropic party. It is commonly confused with
+the missionary, but there is this fundamental difference between them.
+The missionary, pure and simple, is a man who loves God more than he
+loves himself, or any man. His service (I am speaking on fundamental
+lines, as far as I can see) is to place in God's charge, for the glory
+of God, souls, that according to his belief, would otherwise go
+elsewhere. The philanthropist is a person who loves man; but he or she
+is frequently no better than people who kill lapdogs by over-feeding, or
+who shut up skylarks in cages, while it is quite conceivable to me, for
+example, that a missionary could kill a man to save his soul, a
+philanthropist kill his soul to save his life, and there is in this a
+difference. I have never been able to get up any respectful enthusiasm
+for the so-called philanthropist, so that I have to speak of him with
+calm care; not as I have spoken of the missionary, feeling he was a
+person I could not really harm by criticising his methods.
+
+It is, however, nowadays hopeless to attempt to separate these two
+species, distinct as I believe them to be; and they together undoubtedly
+constitute what is called the Mission party not only in England but in
+Germany. I believe this alliance has done immense harm to the true
+missionary, for to it I trace that tendency to harp upon horrors and
+general sensationalism which so sharply differentiates the modern from
+the classic missionary reports. Take up that noble story of Dennis de
+Carli and Michael Angelo of Gattina, and read it through, and then turn
+on to wise, clear-headed Merolla da Sorrento, and read him; you find
+there no sensationalism. Now and again, when deeply tried, they will
+say, "These people live after a beastly manner, and converse freely with
+the Devil," but you soon find them saying, "Among these people there are
+some excellent customs," and they give you full details of them, with
+evident satisfaction. You see it did not fundamentally matter to these
+early missionaries whether their prospective converts "had excellent
+customs" or "lived after a beastly manner," from a religious standpoint.
+Not one atom--they were the sort of men who would have gone for Plato,
+Socrates, and all the Classics gaily, holding that they were not
+Christians as they ought to be; but this never caused them to paint a
+distorted portrait of the African. This thing, I believe, the modern
+philanthropist has induced the modern missionary only too frequently to
+do, and the other regrettable element which has induced him to do it
+has been the apathy of the English public, a public which unless it were
+stirred up by horrors would not subscribe. Again the blame is with
+England at home, but the harm done is paid for in West Africa. The
+portrait painted of the African by the majority, not all, but the
+majority of West African mission reports, has been that of a child,
+naturally innocent, led away and cheated by white traders and grievously
+oppressed by his own rulers. I grant you, the African taken as a whole
+is the gentlest kind of real human being that is made. I do not however
+class him with races who carry gentleness to a morbid extent, and for
+governmental purposes you must not with any race rely on their main
+characteristic alone; for example, Englishmen are honest, yet still we
+require the police force.
+
+The evil worked by what we must call the missionary party is almost
+incalculable; from it has arisen the estrangement of English interests,
+as represented by our reason for adding West Africa to our Empire at
+all--the trader--and the English Government as represented by the Crown
+Colony system; and it has also led to our present policy of destroying
+powerful native States and the power of the African ruling classes at
+large. Secondarily it is the cause of our wars in West Africa. That this
+has not been and is not the desire of the mission party it is needless
+to say; that the blame is directly due to the Crown Colony system it is
+as needless to remark; for any reasonable system of its age would long
+ere now have known the African at first hand, not as it knows him, and
+knows him only, at its head-quarters, London, from second-hand vitiated
+reports. It has, nowadays, at its service the common sense and humane
+opinions of the English trade lords as represented by the Chambers of
+Commerce of Liverpool and Manchester; but though just at present it
+listens to what they say--thanks to Mr. Chamberlain--yet it cannot act
+on their statements, but only querulously says, "Your information does
+not agree with our information." Allah forbid that the information of
+the party with whom I have had the honour to be classed should agree
+with that sort of information from other sources; and I would naturally
+desire the rulers of West Africa to recognise the benefit they now enjoy
+of having information of a brand that has not led to such a thing as the
+Sierre Leone outbreak for example, and to remember in this instance that
+six months before the hut tax there was put on, the Chambers had
+strongly advised the Government against it, and had received in reply
+the answer that "The Secretary of State sees no reason to suppose that
+the hut tax will be oppressive, or that it will be less easy to collect
+in Sierra Leone than in Gambia." Why, you could not get a prophetic
+almanac into a second issue if it were not based on truer knowledge than
+that which made it possible for such a thing to be said. Nevertheless,
+no doubt this remarkable sentence was written believing the same to be
+true, and confiding in the information in the hands of the Colonial
+Office from the official and philanthropic sources in which the Office
+believes.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [59] _Wanderings in West Africa_, vol. i., 1863.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+MORE OF THE CROWN COLONY SYSTEM
+
+Wherein is set down the other, or main, reason against this system.
+
+
+Having attempted to explain the internal evils or what one might call
+the domestic rows of the Crown colony system, I will pass on to the
+external evils--which although in a measure consequent on the internal
+are not entirely so, and this point cannot be too clearly borne in mind.
+Tinker it up as you may, the system will remain one pre-eminently
+unsuited for the administration of West Africa.
+
+You might arrange that officials working under it should be treated
+better than the official now is, and the West African service be brought
+into line in honour with the Indian, and afford a man a good sound
+career. You might arrange for the Chambers of Commerce, representing the
+commercial factor, to have a place in Colonial Office councils. But if
+you did these things the Crown colony system would still remain unsuited
+to West Africa, because it is a system intrinsically too expensive in
+men and money, so that the more you develop it the more expensive it
+becomes. Concerning this system as applied to the West Indies a West
+Indian authority the other day said it was putting an elephant to draw a
+goat chaise; concerning the West African application of it, I should
+say it was trying to open a tin case with a tortoise-shell paper knife.
+Of course you will say I am no authority, and you must choose between
+those who will tell you that only a little patience is required and the
+result of the present governmental system in West Africa will blossom
+into philanthropic and financial successes, and me who say it cannot do
+so but must result in making West Africa a debt-ridden curse to England.
+All I can say for myself is that I am animated by no dislike to any set
+of men and without one farthing's financial interest in West Africa. It
+would not affect my income if you were to put 100 per cent. ad valorem
+duty on every trade article in use on the Coast and flood the Coast with
+officials, paid as men should be paid who have to go there, namely, at
+least three times more than they are at present. My dislike to the
+present state of affairs is solely a dislike to seeing my country, to my
+mind, make a fool of herself, wasting men's lives in the process and
+deluding herself with the idea that the performance will repay her.
+
+Personally, I cannot avoid thinking that before you cast yourself in a
+whole-souled way into developing anything you should have a knowledge of
+the nature of the thing as it is on scientific lines. Education and
+development unless backed by this knowledge are liable to be thrown
+away, or to produce results you have no use for. I remember a
+distressing case that occurred in West Africa and supports my opinion. A
+valued friend of mine, a seaman of great knowledge and experience, yet
+lacking in that critical spirit which inquires into the nature of things
+before proceeding with them, confident alone in the rectitude of his own
+intentions, bought a canary bird at a Canary Island. He knew that the
+men who sell canaries down there are up to the sample description of
+deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. So he brought to bear
+upon the transaction a deal of subtlety, but neglected fundamental
+facts, whereby his triumph at having, on the whole, done the canary
+seller brown by getting him to take in part value for the bird a box of
+German colonial-grown cigars, was vanity. For weeks that gallant seaman
+rubbed a wet cork up and down an empty whisky bottle within the hearing
+of the bird, which is the proper thing to do providing things are all
+right in themselves, and yet nothing beyond genial twitterings rewarded
+his exertions. So he rubbed on for another week with even greater
+feeling and persuasive power, and then, to drop a veil upon this tragedy
+of lost endeavour, that canary laid an egg. Now, if that man had only
+attended to the nature of things and seen whether it were a cock or hen
+bird, he would not have been subjected to this grievous disappointment.
+Similarly, it seems to me, we are, from the governmental point of view,
+like that sea captain--swimming about in the West African affair with a
+lot of subtle details, in an atmosphere of good intentions, but not in
+touch with important facts; we are acting logically from faulty
+premises.
+
+Now, let us grant that the Crown Colony system is not fully developed in
+West Africa, for if it were, you may say, it would work all right;
+though this I consider a most dangerous idea. Let us see what it would
+be if it were fully developed.
+
+Mr. St. Loe Strachey[60] thus defines Crown Colonies:--"These are
+possessions which are for the most part peopled by non-European races of
+dark colour, and governed not by persons elected by themselves, but by a
+governor and other officials sent out from England. The reason for this
+difference is a very simple one. Those colonies which are peopled by men
+of English and European races can provide themselves with a better
+government than we can provide them with from here. Hence they are given
+responsible governments.
+
+"Those colonies in which the English or European element is very small
+can best be governed, it is found, by the Crown Colony system. The
+native, dark-skinned population are not fit to govern themselves--they
+are too ignorant and too uncivilised, and if the government is left
+entirely in the hands of the small number of whites who may happen to
+live in the colony, they are apt not to take enough care of the
+interests of the coloured inhabitants. The simplest form of the Crown
+Colony is that found in some of the smaller groups of islands in the
+West Indies. Here a governor is sent out from England, and he--helped by
+a secretary, a judge, and other officials--governs the island, reporting
+his actions to the Colonial Office, and consulting the able officials
+there before he takes important steps. In most cases, however, the
+governor has a council, either nominated from among the principal
+persons in the colony, or else elected by the inhabitants. In some
+cases--Jamaica or Barbadoes, for example--the council has very great
+power, and the type of government may be said to approach that of the
+self-governing colonies."
+
+Now, in West Africa the system is the same as that "found in some of the
+smaller groups of the West Indian islands," although these West African
+colonies have each a nominated council of some kind. I should hesitate
+to say, however, "to assist the governor." Being nominated by him they
+can usually manage to agree with him; it is only another hindrance or
+superfluous affair. Before taking any important steps the West African
+governor is supposed to consult the officials at the Colonial Office;
+but as the Colonial Office is not so well informed as the governor
+himself is, this can be no help to him if he be a really able man, and
+no check on him if he be not an able man. For, be he what he may, he is
+the representative of the Colonial Office; he cannot, it is true,
+persuade the Colonial Office to go and involve itself in rows with
+European continental powers, because the Office knows about them; but if
+he is a strong-minded man with a fad he can persuade the Colonial Office
+to let him try that fad on the natives or the traders, because the
+Colonial Office does not know the natives nor the West African trade.
+
+You see, therefore, you have in the Governor of a West African
+possession a man in a bad position. He is aided by no council worth
+having, no regular set of experts; he is held in by another council
+equally non-expert, except in the direction of continental politics. He
+may keep out of mischief; he could, if he were given either time or
+inducement to study the native languages, laws, and general ethnology of
+his colony, do much good; but how can he do these things, separated from
+the native population as he necessarily is, by his under officials, and
+with his time taken up, just as every official's time is taken up under
+the Crown Colony system, with a mass of red-tape clerkwork that is
+unnecessary and intrinsically valueless? I do not pretend to any
+personal acquaintance with English West African Governors. I only look
+on their affairs from outside, but I have seen some great men among
+them. One of them who is dead would, I believe, had the climate spared
+him, have become a man whom every one interested in West Africa would
+have respected and admired. He came from a totally different region, the
+Straits Settlements. He found his West African domain in a lethargic
+mess, and he hit out right and left, falling, like the rain, on the just
+and the unjust. I do not wish you to take his utterances or his actions
+as representing him; but from the spirit of them it is clear he would
+have become a great blessing to the Coast had he but lived long enough.
+I am aware he was unpopular from his attempts to enforce the ill-drafted
+Land Ordinance, but primarily responsible for this ill-judged thing he
+was not.
+
+In addition to Sir William Maxwell there have been, and are still, other
+Governors representative of what is best in England; but, circumstanced
+as they are under this system, continually interrupted as their work is
+by death or furloughs home, neither England nor West Africa gets
+one-tenth part of the true value of these men.
+
+In addition to the Governor, there are the other officials, medical,
+legal, secretarial, constabulary, and customs. The majority of these are
+engaged in looking after each other and clerking. Clerking is the breath
+of the Crown Colony system, and customs what it feeds on. Owing to the
+climate it is practically necessary to have a double staff in all these
+departments,--that is what the system would have if it were perfect; as
+it is, some official's work is always being done by a subordinate; it
+may be equally well done, but it is not equally well paid for, and there
+is no continuity of policy in any department, except those which are
+entirely clerk, and the expense of this is necessarily great. The main
+evil of this want of continuity is of course in the Governors--a
+Governor goes out, starts a new line of policy, goes home on furlough
+leaving in charge the Colonial Secretary, who does not by all means
+always feel enthusiastic towards that policy; so it languishes. Governor
+comes back, goes at it again like a giant refreshed, but by no means
+better acquainted with local affairs for having been away; then he goes
+home again, or dies, or gets a new appointment; a brand new Governor
+comes out, he starts a new line of policy, perhaps has a new Colonial
+Secretary into the bargain; anyhow the thing goes on wavering, not
+advancing. The only description I have heard of our policy in West
+African Colonies that seems to me to do it justice is that given by a
+medical friend of mine, who said it was a coma accompanied by fits.
+
+Of course this would not be the case if the Colonial Office had a
+definite detailed policy of its own, and merely sent out men to carry it
+out; but this the Colonial Office has not got and cannot have, because
+it has not got the scientific and commercial facts of West Africa in its
+possession. It has therefore to depend on the Governors it sends out;
+and these, as aforesaid, are men of divers minds. One Governor is truly
+great on drains; he spends lots of money on them. Another Governor
+thinks education and a cathedral more important; during his reign drains
+languish. Yet another Governor comes along and says if there are schools
+wanted they should be under non-sectarian control, but what is wanted is
+a railway; and so it goes on, and of course leads to an immense waste of
+money. And this waste of money is a far more serious thing than it
+looks; for it is from it that the policy has arisen, of increasing
+customs dues to a point that seriously hampers trade development, and
+the far more serious evil of attempting directly as well as indirectly
+to tax the native population.
+
+I am bound to say I believe any ordinary Englishman would be fairly
+staggered if he went out to West Africa and saw what there was to show
+for the expenditure of the last few years in our Crown Colonies
+there,[61] and knew that all that money had been honestly expended in
+the main, that none of it had been appropriated by the officials, that
+they had only had their pay, and that none too great.
+
+But, you will say, after all, if West Africa is as rich as it is said to
+be, surely it can stand a little wasteful expenditure, and support an
+even more expensive administration than it now has. All I can say is,
+that it can stand wasteful expenditure, but only up to a certain point,
+which is now passed; it would perhaps be more true to say it could stand
+wasteful expenditure before the factor of the competition of French and
+German colonies alongside came in; and that a wasteful expenditure that
+necessitates unjust methods of raising revenue, such as direct taxation
+on the natives, is a thing West Africa will not stand at all. Of course
+you can do it; you can impose direct taxation on the native population,
+but you cannot make it financially pay to do so; for one thing, the
+collection of that tax will require a considerable multiplication of
+officials black and white, the black section will by their oppressive
+methods engender war, and the joint body will consume more than the
+amount that can be collected. From a fiscal standpoint direct taxation
+of a non-Mohammedanised or non-Christianised community is rank
+foolishness, for reasons known to every ethnologist. As for the natural
+riches of West Africa, I am a profound believer in them, and regard West
+Africa, taken as a whole, as one of the richest regions in the world;
+but, as Sir William Maxwell said, "I am convinced that, from causes
+wholly unpreventable, West Africa is and must remain a place with
+certain peculiar dangers of its own"[62]; therefore it requires most
+careful, expert handling. It is no use your trying to get its riches out
+by a set of hasty amateur experiments; it is no use just dumping down
+capital on it and calling these goings on "Developing the resources," or
+"Raising the African in the plane of civilisation;" because these goings
+on are not these things, they are but sacrifices on the altars of folly
+and idleness.
+
+Properly managed, those parts of West Africa which our past apathy has
+left to us are capable of being made into a group of possessions before
+which the direct value to England, in England, of all the other regions
+that we hold in the world would sink into insignificance.
+
+Sir William Maxwell, when he referred to "causes wholly unpreventable,"
+was referring mainly to the unhealthiness of West Africa. There seems no
+escape from this great drawback. Every other difficulty connected with
+it one can imagine removable by human activity and ingenuity--even the
+labour difficulty--but, I fear, not so the fever. Although this is not a
+thing to discourage England from holding West Africa, it is a thing
+which calls for greater forethought in the administration of it than she
+need give to a healthy region. In a healthy region it does not matter so
+much whether there is an excess over requirements in the number of men
+employed to administer it, but in one with a death rate of at least 35
+per cent. of white men it does matter.
+
+I confess it is this excessive expenditure of men which I dislike most
+in the Crown Colony system, though I know it cannot help it; it is in
+the make of the thing. If these men were even employed in some great
+undertaking it would be less grievous; but they are many of them
+entirely taken up with clerk work, and all of them have to waste a large
+percentage of their time on it. Some of the men undoubtedly get to like
+this, but it is a morbid taste. I know one of our possessions where the
+officials even carry on their personal quarrels with each other on
+government paper in a high official style, when it would be better if
+they put aside an hour a week and went and punched each other's heads,
+and gave the rest of their time to studying native law and languages and
+pottering about the country getting up information on it at large, so
+that the natives would become familiarised with the nature of Englishmen
+first-hand, instead of being dependent for their knowledge of them on
+interpreters and the set of subordinate native officials and native
+police.
+
+I wish that it lay in my power to place before you merely a set of
+figures that would show you the present state of our West African
+affairs, but such figures do not exist. Practically speaking, there are
+no reliable figures for West African affairs. They are not cooked, but
+you know what figures are--unless they be complete and in their proper
+stations, they are valueless.
+
+The figures we have are those which appear in "The Colonial Annual
+Series" of reports. These are not annual; for example, the Gold Coast
+one was not published for three years; but no matter, when they are
+published they are misleading enough, unless you know things not
+mentioned in them but connected with them. However, we will just run
+through the figures published for one West African Crown Colony. For
+many reasons I am sorry to have to take those regarding Sierra Leone,
+but I must, as at present they are the most correct available.
+
+Now the element of error which must be allowed for in these arises from
+the proximity of the French colony of French Guinea, which is next door
+to Sierra Leone. That colony has been really developing its exports.
+Goods have, up to last year, come out through our colony of Sierra
+Leone, and have been included with the exports of Sierra Leone itself,
+though Sierra Leone has not dwelt on this interesting fact. And,
+equally, since 1890 goods going into French Guinea have gone in through
+Sierra Leone, and though traceable with care, have been put in with the
+total of the imports. So you see it is a little difficult to find out
+whether it has been French Guinea or Sierra Leone that has really been
+doing the trade mentioned in the figures.
+
+Nevertheless, it has been customary to take these joint, mixed up
+figures and get happy over "the increase of trade in Sierra Leone during
+the past ten years"; but a little calm consideration will prevent you
+from falling into this idle error.
+
+Personally I think that if you are cautious you will try and estimate
+the trade by the exports; for among the imports there are Government
+stores, railway material, &c., things that will have some day to be paid
+for, because it is the rule not to assist a colony under the system
+until it has been reduced to a West Indian condition; whereas the
+exports give you the buying power of the colony, and show the limits of
+the trade which may be expected to be done under existing conditions.
+Now, the annual total exports during the five years ending--
+
+          1875, amounted in value to, L396,709
+          1880,     "     "     "     L368,855
+          1885,     "     "     "     L386,848
+          1890,     "     "     "     L333,390
+          1895,     "     "     "     L435,175
+
+These figures show for the twenty-five years an increase of less than 10
+per cent., or about 1/2 per cent, per annum; and this is not so very
+thrilling when one comes to think that that 10 per cent., and probably
+more, is showing the increase in the trade not of Sierra Leone, but of
+French Guinea, and remembers that in 1874 the exports were L481,894, an
+amount they have not since touched.
+
+Then again even in error you are never quite sure if your Colonial
+Annual is keeping line; sometimes you will get one by a careful
+conscientious secretary who takes no end of trouble, and tells you lots
+of things which you would like to hear about next year, only next year
+you don't. For example, in Sierra Leone affairs the report for 1887 gave
+you the imports for consumption in the colony, while that of 1896
+represented the total imports, including those afterwards shipped to
+French Guinea and elsewhere; and again, in estimating the value of the
+imports Gambia adds the cost of freight and insurance to the invoice
+value of imports, and the cost of package to the declared value of
+exports. So far, only Gambia does this, but at any moment an equally
+laudable spirit might develop in one of the other colonies, and cause
+further distraction to the student of their figures.
+
+Besides these clerking errors of omission, there is a constant
+unavoidable error arising from the so-called smuggling done by the
+native traders in the hinterland. Remember that colonies which you see
+neatly enough marked on a map of West Africa with French, English,
+German, are not really each surrounded by a set of Great Walls of China.
+For example, under the present arrangement with France, if France keeps
+to that beautiful Article IX. in the Niger Convention and does not tax
+English goods more than she at present taxes French goods on the Ivory
+coast--cottons of English manufacture will be able to be sold 10 per
+cent. cheaper in the French territory than in the adjacent English Gold
+Coast.
+
+Up to the present time it has paid the native hinterland trader to come
+down into the Gold Coast and buy his cotton goods, for English cottons
+suit his West African markets better than other makes, that is to say
+they have a higher buying power; and then he went down into the French
+Ivory Coast and bought his spirits and guns, which were cheaper there
+because of lower duty. Having got his selection together he went off and
+did business with the raw material sellers, and sold the raw material he
+had purchased back to the two Coasts from which he had bought his
+selection, sending the greater part of it to the best market for the
+time being. Now you have changed that, or, rather, you have given France
+the power to change it by selling English cottons cheaper than they can
+be sold in your own possessions, and thereby rendered it unnecessary for
+the hinterland traders to buy on the Gold Coast at all. It will remain
+necessary for him to buy on the Ivory Coast, for spirits and guns he
+must have; and if he can get his cottons at the same place as he gets
+these, so much the better for him. It is doubtful, however, whether
+henceforth it will be worth his while to come down and sell his raw
+material in your possessions at all. He may browse around your interior
+towns and suck the produce out of them, but it will be to the enrichment
+of the French colony next door; and, of course, as things are even now,
+this sort of thing, which goes on throughout all the various colonies of
+France, England, Germany and Portugal, does not tend to give true value
+to the official figures concerning trade published by any one of them.
+
+I have no intention, however, of dwelling on the various methods
+employed by native smugglers with a view to aiding their suppression. It
+may be a hereditary taint contracted by my ancestors while they
+sojourned in Devon, it may be private personal villainy of my own; but
+anyhow, I never feel, as from an official standpoint I ought, towards
+smugglers. I do not ask you to regard the African native trader as a
+sweet innocent who does not realise the villainy of his doings,--he
+knows all about it; but only once did I feel harshly towards him over
+smuggling. A native trader had arranged to give me a lift, as it were,
+in his canoe, and I noticed, with a flattered vanity and a feeling of
+gratitude, how very careful he had been to make me quite comfortable in
+the stern, with a perfect little nest of mats and cloths. When we
+reached our destination and that nest was taken to pieces, I saw that
+what you might call the backbone of the affair was three kegs of
+gunpowder, a case of kerosine, and some packages of lucifer matches.
+That rascal fellow black, as Barbot would call him, had expected we
+should meet the customs patrol boat, and, basely encroaching on the
+chivalry of the white man towards the white woman judged that I and my
+nest would not be overhauled. If there had been a guardian cherub for
+the Brussels Convention or for Customs doubtless I should have been
+blown sky high and have afforded material for a moral tale called "The
+Smuggler's Awful End," but there are no cherubs who watch over Customs
+or the Brussels Convention in West Africa and I have no intention of
+volunteering for such an appointment.
+
+But to return to the Sierra Leone finances and the relationship which
+the expenditure of that colony bears to the revenue. The increase in the
+imports is apparently the thing depended on to justify the idea that as
+the trade has increased the governmental expenditure has a right to do
+so likewise. The imports increase in 1896 is given as L90,683. From this
+you must deduct for railway material, L26,000, and for the increased
+specie import, L19,591, which leaves you an increase of imports of
+L45,092 from 1887-1896, and remember a good percentage of this remainder
+of L45,092 belongs to French Guinea.
+
+Now the expenditure on the government of Sierra Leone has increased from
+L58,534 in 1887 to L116,183, being an increase at the rate of 99.1 per
+cent., whereas the exports during the same period have increased at the
+rate of 34.8 per cent, or from L333,157 to L449,033.
+
+In other words, whereas in 1887 the government expenditure amounted to
+17.5 per cent, the exports in 1896 amounted to 25.4 per cent. The sum of
+L40,579 of this increase is credited to police, gaols, transport, and
+public works;[63] and if this is to be the normal rate of increase, the
+prospects of the colony are serious; for it contains no rich mineral
+deposit as far as is at present known, nor are there in it any great
+native states. As far as we know, Sierra Leone must for an immense
+period depend on bush products collected by the natives, whose trade
+wants are only a few luxuries. For it must be remembered that in all
+these West African colonies there is not one single thing Europeans can
+sell to the natives that is of the nature of a true necessity, a thing
+the natives must have or starve. There is but one thing that even
+approaches in the West African markets to what wheat is in our own--that
+thing is tobacco. Next in importance to it, but considerably lower, is
+the group of trade articles--gunpowder, guns, and spirits, next again
+salt, and below these four staples come Manchester goods and
+miscellanies; the whole of the rest that lies in the power of
+civilisation to offer to the West African markets are things that are
+luxuries, things that will only be purchased by the native when he is in
+a state of prosperity. This subject I have, however, endeavoured to
+explain elsewhere.[64]
+
+We have for Sierra Leone, fortunately, a scientific authority to refer
+to on this matter of the natural resources of the country, and the
+amount of the natural riches we may presume we can take into account
+when arranging fiscal matters. This authority is the report of Mr.
+Scott-Elliott on the district traversed by the Anglo-French Boundary
+Commission.[65]
+
+Regarding mineral, the report states "that the only mineral of
+importance is iron, of which the country appears to contain a very large
+amount. There is a particularly rich belt of titaniferous iron ore in
+the hills behind Sierra Leone."
+
+Titaniferous iron is an excellent thing in its way, and good for steel
+making; but it exists nearer home and in cheaper worked regions than
+Sierra Leone.
+
+The soil is grouped by the report into three classes:
+
+"1. That of the plateaux and hills above 2,000, or sometimes descending
+to 1,000 feet, which is due to the disintegration of gneiss and granite
+rocks.
+
+"2. The red laterite which covers almost invariably all the lower hills
+from the sea level to 1,000 or 2,000 feet.
+
+"3. The alluvium, due either to the action of the mangroves along the
+coast, or to rivers and streams inland."
+
+These soils are capable of and do produce fine timber, rubber, oil and
+rice, and the general tropical food stuffs, but these, except the three
+first, are not very valuable export articles. Whether it is possible to
+enhance the agricultural value of the alluvium regions by growing
+tobacco, jute, coffee, cocoa, cotton and sugar, for export, is by some
+authorities regarded as doubtful on account of the labour problem; but
+at any rate, if these industries were taken in hand on a large scale, a
+scale sufficient materially to alter the resources of a West African
+colony, they would require many years of fostering, and it would be long
+before they could contribute greatly to the resources of such a colony
+as Sierra Leone, in the face of the organised production and cheaper
+labour, wherewith the supply now in the markets of Europe could be
+competed with.
+
+I have had the advantage of associating with German and Portuguese and
+French planters of coffee and cocoa. These are the planters who up to
+the present have been the most successful in West Africa. I do not say
+because they are better men, but because they have better soils and
+better labour than there is in our colonies. By these gentlemen I have
+been industriously educated in soils, &c.; and from what I have learnt
+about this matter I am bound regretfully to say that most of the soil of
+the English possessions is not really rich, taken in the main. There are
+in places patches of rich soil; and the greater part of our soil will be
+all the better this day 10,000 years hence; but at present the soil is
+mainly sour clay, slime and skin soils, skin soils over rock, skin soils
+over sour clay, skin soils over water-logged soil. We have, alas, not
+got the rich volcanic earth of Cameroon, Fernando Po, and San Thome and
+Principe. The natives who work the soil understand it fairly well, and
+negro agriculture is in a well-developed state, and their farms are most
+carefully tended and well kept. The rule along the Bight of Benin and
+Biafra is to change the soil of the farm at least every third year; this
+they do by cutting down a new bit of bush, burning the bush on the
+ground at the end of the dry season, and planting the crops. The old
+farm is then allowed to grow bush or long grass, whichever the
+particular district goes in for, until the time comes to work back on
+that piece of land again, when the bush which has grown is in its turn
+cut down and the ground replanted. This burning of the trees or grass is
+clearly regarded by the native agriculturist as manuring; it is
+practically the only method of manuring available for them in a country
+where cattle in quantities are not kept. It is a wasteful way with
+timber and rubber growing on the ground of course; but not so wildly
+wasteful as it looks, for your Negro agriculturist does not go to make
+his farm on bits of forest that require very hard clearing work. He
+clears as easily as he can by means of collecting the great fluffy seed
+bunches of a certain tree which are inflammable and adding to them all
+the other inflammable material he can get; he then places these bonfires
+in the bit of forest he wants to clear and sets fire to them on a
+favourable night, when the proper sort of breeze is blowing to fan the
+flames; when the conflagration is over, he fells a few of the trees and
+leaves the rest standing scorched but not killed. Moreover, of course an
+African gentleman cannot go and make his farm anywhere he likes: he has
+to stick to the land which belongs to his family, and work round and
+round on that. This gives a highly untidy aspect to the family estate,
+you might think; considering the extent of it, a very small percentage
+must be kept under cultivation and the rest neglected. But this is not
+really so; if you were to go and take away from him a bit of the
+neglected land, you would be taking his farm, say for the year after
+next and grievously inconvenience him, and he would know it.
+
+The native method of making farms does not, indeed, do so much harm in
+well-watered, densely-populated regions like those of Sierra Leone or
+the Niger Delta; but it does do an immense amount of harm in regions
+that are densely populated and require to make extensive farms, more
+particularly in the regions of Lagos and the Gold Coast, where the
+fertile belt is only a narrow ribbon, edged on the one side by the sand
+sea of the Sahara, and on the other by the salt sea of the South
+Atlantic. You can see the result of it in the district round Accra,
+which has always been heavily populated; for hundreds of years the
+forest has been kept down by agricultural enterprise. Consequences are,
+the rainfall is now diminished to a point that threatens to extinguish
+agriculture, at any rate, a sufficient agriculture to support the local
+population; and it is not too much to say you can read on the face of
+the Accra plain famines to come. There is little reason to doubt that
+both the African deserts, the Sahara and the Kalahari, are advancing
+towards the Equator. Round Loanda you come across a sand-logged region
+of some fifty square miles, where you get the gum shed by forests that
+have gone, humanly speaking, never to return; human agency is largely
+responsible, it is like sawing the branch of a tree partially through,
+and then the wind breaks it off. Forest destruction in lands adjacent to
+deserts is the same thing; the forest is destroyed to a certain extent,
+an extent that diminishes the rainfall and makes it unable to resist the
+desert winds, and then--finis.
+
+In the regions of the double rains in the great forest belt of Africa
+things are different, so you cannot generalise for West Africa at large
+in this matter. It is one thing for forest destruction to go on in the
+Gold Coast, quite another for it to go on in Calabar or Congo Francais,
+where men fight back the forest as Dutchmen fight the sea.
+
+But I apologise. This, you will say, is not connected with Governmental
+expenditure, &c.; but it is to me a more amusing subject, and indirectly
+has a bearing; for example, Government expenditure in the direction of
+instituting a Forestry Department would be right enough in some regions,
+but unnecessary in others.
+
+To return to this agriculture in Sierra Leone. Well, it is, like all
+West African agriculture, spade husbandry. It is concerned with the
+cultivation of vegetables for human consumption alone. In the interior
+of Sierra Leone and throughout the Western Soudan, for which Sierra
+Leone was once a principal port, there is a fair cattle country, and an
+old established one, as is shown by the exports of hides mentioned in
+the writers of the seventeenth century. Yet it would be idle for the
+most enthusiastic believer in West Africa to pretend that the Western
+Soudan is coming on to compete with Argentina or Australia in the export
+of frozen meat; the climate is against it, and therefore this cattle
+country can only be represented in trade in a hide and horn export.
+Wool--as the sheep won't wear it, preferring hair instead and that of
+poor quality--need not I think be looked forward to from West Africa at
+all.
+
+I have taken the published accounts of Sierra Leone, because, as I have
+said, they are the most complete. They are also, in the main, the most
+typical. It is true that Sierra Leone has not the gold wealth, nor the
+developing timber industry of the Gold Coast; but if you ignore French
+Guinea, and include the things belonging to it with the Sierra Leone
+totals, you will get a fairly equivalent result. Lagos has not yet shown
+a mineral export, but it and the Gold Coast have shown of late years an
+immensely increased export of rubber. Rubber, oil, and timber are the
+three great riches of our West African possessions, the things that may
+be relied on, as being now of great value and capable of immense
+expansion. But these things can only be made serviceable to the markets
+of the world and a source of riches to England by the co-operation of
+the natives of the country. In other words, you must solve the labour
+problem on the one hand, and increase the prosperity of the native
+population on the other, in order to make West Africa pay you back the
+value of the life and money already paid for her. This solution of the
+labour problem and this co-operation of the natives with you, the Crown
+Colony system will never gain for you, because it is too expensive for
+you and unjust to them, not intentionally, not vindictively nor
+wickedly, but just from ignorance. It destroys the native form of
+society, and thereby disorganises labour. It has no power of
+re-organising it. You hear that people are leaving Coomassie and Benin,
+instead of flocking in to those places, as they were expected to after
+the destruction of the local tyrannies. English influence in West
+Africa, represented as it now is by three separate classes of
+Englishmen, with no common object of interest, or aim in policy, is not
+a thing capable of re-organising so difficult a region. I have taken the
+Sierra Leone figures because, as I have said, they are the most complete
+and typical, and the state of the trade and the expenditure on the
+Government are those prior to the hut tax war. So they cannot be
+ascribed to it, nor can the plea be lodged that the expenditure was an
+enforced one. These figures merely show you the thing that led up to the
+hut tax war and the heavy enforced expenditure it has and will entail,
+and my reason for detaining you with them is the conviction that a
+similar policy pursued in our other colonies will lead to the same
+results--the destruction of trade and the imposition on the colonies of
+a debt that their natural resources cannot meet unless we are prepared
+to go in for forced labour and revert to the slave trade policy.
+
+It seems clear enough that our present policy in the Crown Colonies, of
+a rapidly increasing expenditure in the face of a steadily falling
+trade, must necessarily lead our Government to seek for new sources of
+revenue beyond customs dues. New sources under our present system can
+only be found in direct taxation of the native population; the result of
+this is now known.
+
+I will not attempt to deal fully with the figures we possess for our
+remaining Crown Colonies in Western Africa,--Gambia, the Gold Coast, and
+Lagos,--but merely refer to a few points regarding them that have so far
+been published. When the result of the policy pursued in these colonies
+leads to the inevitable row, and the figures are dealt with by competent
+men, there is, to my mind, no doubt that a state equal to that of Sierra
+Leone as a fool's paradise will be discovered; and the deplorable part
+of the thing is, that the trade palavers of the Chambers and the
+Colonial Office will give to hasty politicians the idea that West Africa
+is not worthy of Imperial attention, and large quantities of the blame
+for this failure of our colonies will be put down quite unjustly to
+French interference. That French interference has troubled our colonies
+there, no one will attempt to deny; or that if it had been acting on
+them when they were in a healthy state it would merely have had a tonic
+effect, as it has had on the Royal Niger Company's territories; but,
+acting on the Crown Colonies in their present state, French influence
+has naturally been poisonous. Even I, not given to sweet mouth as I am,
+shrink from saying what has been the true effect on the Crown Colonies
+of England of the policy pursued by us towards French advance. This only
+will I say, that the French policy is no discredit to France. Regarding
+the financial condition of Gambia it is not necessary for us to worry
+ourselves. Gambia is a nuisance to France. She loves to have high dues,
+and she cannot have them round Gambia way. She has had to encyst it, or
+it would be to her Senegal and French Guinea possessions a regular main
+to lay on smuggling. Knowing this she has encysted it; it pays better to
+smuggle from French Guinea into Gambia or Sierra Leone than from Gambia
+or Sierra Leone into the French possessions. This is a grave commercial
+position for us, but to it is largely owing the advance of the
+prosperity of these French possessions during the past three years.
+
+The Gold Coast has on the west a French possession, the Ivory Coast, on
+the east the German Togoland. Togo is a narrow strip, and to its east
+and surrounding it to the north is the French colony of Dahomey, whose
+recent expansion has told heavily on its next-door neighbours, both Togo
+and the English colony to the east, Lagos. I give below the latest
+available figures for the foreign West African possessions.[66]
+
+Unfortunately there are no figures available for the French Sudan which
+would represent the real value of the trade; the total value of trade
+is, however, considerable. You must remember that in dealing with French
+colonies you are dealing with those of a nation not gifted with
+commercial intelligence; and that, in spite of the perpetual hampering
+of trade in French colonies, the granting of concessions to French firms
+who have not the capital to work them, but are only able to prevent any
+one else doing so, the high differential tariffs, in some cases 100 per
+cent., which up to the present time have been levied on English goods,
+&c.; the English traders nevertheless work in the markets of the French
+colonies, and work mainly on French goods. Of the L117,518 representing
+the Ivory Coast trade for the first quarter of this year, over L76,000
+was English trade, and of the Dahomey L156,835 for the same period,
+L131,705. In reading the imports figures for these French colonies in
+Upper Guinea, you must remember that those imports include material for
+the well directed, unamiable intention of France to cut us off from what
+she regards as her own Western Soudan; it is a form of investment far
+more profitable than our expenditure on railways, gaols, prisons, and
+frontier police. It is one that, presuming this highly unlikely
+thing--France becoming commercially intelligent--would any year now
+enable her entirely to pocket the West African trade down to Lagos from
+Senegal. She may do it at any moment, though it is a very remote
+possibility. So we will return to the Gold Coast finances, though our
+authorities on them are at present meagre.
+
+In 1892 the Gold Coast government was financially in a flourishing
+condition. On the 1st of January, 1891, there was a sum of L75,181
+4_s._ 4_d._ standing to the credit of the colony, which was increased to
+L127,796 2_s._ 3_d._ on the 1st of January, 1892, and to L152,766 16_s._
+7_d._ on the 1st of January, 1893, and the colony had no public debt.
+There was no native direct taxation. The Customs dues were lower than
+they are now. The extremely careful official who drew up the report
+shows evidence of realising that Customs represent an indirect taxation
+on the native population, for he says: "In Sierra Leone and Lagos the
+taxation per head is very much higher (than 2_s._ 5_d._ per head), in
+the former nine times, and in the latter seven times."[67] However, in
+all three colonies, apart from the attempts at direct taxation, the
+indirect taxation on the native has considerably increased by now.
+
+The report for 1894 shows the colony still progressing rapidly, the
+trade of it amounting in value to L1,663,173 19_s._ 9_d._, of which
+L812,830 8_s._ 10_d._ represented the imports, and L850,343 10_s._
+11_d._ the exports. The expenditure showed a large increase as compared
+with previous years. It amounted to L226,931 19_s._ 4_d._, being L8,670
+13_s._ 7_d._ in excess of the revenue for the year, and L47,997 7_s._
+11_d._ more than in 1893. The principal items of increase were public
+works, upon which the sum of L54,163 0_s._ 3_d._ was spent, and the
+expedition in defence of the protected district of Attabubu against an
+Ashanti invasion, which cost L10,778 11_s._ The Gold Coast assets on
+31st of December, 1894, stood at L166,944 8_s._ 7_d._[68] Then came the
+last Ashanti war, regarding which I beg to refer you to Dr. Freeman's
+book.[69] No one can deny that he has both experience and intelligence
+enough to justify him in offering his opinion on the matter. I entirely
+accept his statements from my knowledge of native affairs elsewhere in
+West Africa. Anyhow, the last Ashanti war absorbed a good deal of the
+assets of the Gold Coast. There is no published authority to cite, but I
+do not think there is an asset now standing to the credit of the Gold
+Coast Colony, unless it be a loan.
+
+The income for the Gold Coast Colony in 1896 was L237,460 6_s._ 7_d._,
+the expenditure L282,277 15_s._ 9_d._ The exports L792,111, against
+L877,804 in 1895; but the imports were L910,000, against L981,537. Since
+1896 the Customs dues have risen; but, _per contra_, the expenditure has
+also risen, in consequence of the expenses arising from the occupation
+of Ashanti, and the Gold Coast railway. The occupation of Ashanti and
+the railway must be looked on in the light of investments--investments
+that will be profitable or unprofitable, according to their
+administration, which one must trust will be careful, for they are both
+things you cannot just dump your money down on and be done with, for the
+up-keep expenses of both are necessarily large.
+
+The subject of West African railways is one that all who are interested
+in the future of our possessions there should study most carefully, for
+two main reasons. Firstly, that there is possibly no other way in which
+money can be spent so unprofitably and extensively as on railways in
+such a region. Secondly, because railways are in several districts
+there--districts with no water carriage possibilities--simply essential
+to the expansion of trade. In other words, if you make your railway
+through the right district, in the right way, it is a thing worth
+having, a sound investment. If you do not, it is a thing you are better
+without; not an investment, but an extravagance. The cost of its
+construction must fall on the colony, alike in money and the
+distraction, from ordinary trade, of the local labour supply. In both
+countries the cost of a railway out there is necessarily great. I
+hastily beg to observe I am not aiming at a rivalry with Martin Tupper
+in saying this, but am only driven to it by so many people in their
+haste saying "Oh, for goodness gracious sake! let the Government make a
+railway anywhere; it's done little enough for us, and any railway is
+better than none."
+
+There has been considerable difficulty over the Gold Coast Railway
+already, though it is only just now entering on the phase of actual
+existence. Surveys have been made for it in all directions. Surveys are
+expensive things out there. But the general idea the Government gave the
+Chambers of Commerce was that, at any rate, this railway was to run up
+into Ashanti, and be a great general trade artery for the Colony. The
+other day Manchester found out, quite unexpected like, that the
+Government whose affections Commerce had regarded as safely and properly
+set on the hinterland trade was off, if you please, flirting round the
+corner with a group of gold mines at Tarquah, and intended, nay, was
+even then proceeding with the undertaking of running the one and only
+Gold Coast railway just up to Tarquah, and no further, until this
+section paid. Manchester, very properly shocked at this fickleness in
+the Government and its heartless abandonment of the hinterland trade,
+said things, interesting and excited things, in its _Guardian_; but,
+beyond illustrating the truth of the old adage that it's "well to be off
+with the old love before you are on with the new," things of no avail.
+
+This Tarquah railway is estimated to cost L5,000 per mile. It is to be
+financed by a loan, raised by the Crown Colony Agents, of L250,000. We
+have ample reason to believe that this L5,000 per mile will not
+represent one-third of its final cost from demonstrations by the Uganda,
+Congo Belge, and Senegal railways; more particularly are we so assured
+from the knowledge that the railway's construction will be in the hands
+of nominees of the Crown Agents, whose method of arranging for the
+construction of these railways is curious. They do not invite tenders
+for material or freight in the open market, and they do not give the
+taxed people in the country itself any opportunity for contracting for
+the supply of as much local material as possible--things it would be
+alike fair and business-like to do. Exceedingly curious, moreover, is
+the fact that the nominees of the Crown Agents' employers are not
+subject to the control of the local governmental authorities on the
+Coast, their sole connection with the affair apparently being confined
+to the passing of ordinances, as per instruction from the Colonial
+Office, authorising loans for the payment of the debt incurred by making
+the railway.
+
+There is no doubt that any Gold Coast railway which is ever to pay even
+for its coal must run through a rich bit of the local gold reefs.
+Similarly, there is no doubt that the gold mines of the Gold Coast have
+been terribly kept back by lack of transport facilities for the
+machinery necessary to work them; but there is, nevertheless, evidently
+much that is unsound in the present railway scheme. If the charge for
+it, as some suggest, were to be thrown on the gold mines, it would be as
+heavy a charge as the old bad transport was, and they would be no less
+hampered. If, as is most likely, the charge for the railway be thrown
+on the general finance of the colony, it will be a drain on other forms
+of trade, without in any way improving them; in fact, during its
+construction, it will absorb labour from the general trade--oil, rubber,
+and timber--and, if it extensively increases the gold-mining industry,
+it will keep the labour tied to it chronically, to the disadvantage of
+other trades.
+
+Lagos, our next Crown Colony, is a very rich possession, and under Sir
+Alfred Moloney, who discovered the use of the Kicksia Africana as a
+rubber tree, and Sir Gilbert Carter, who fostered the industry and
+opened the trade roads, sprang in a few years into a phenomenal
+prosperity. Then came the French aggression on its hinterland, the
+seizing of Nikki, which was one of those _foci_ of trade routes, though
+possibly, as many have said, a non-fertile bit of country in itself. To
+give you some idea of the bound up in prosperity made by Lagos, the
+exports in 1892 were L577,083; in 1895, L985,595. The main advance has
+been in rubber, which in 1896 was exported from Lagos to the value of
+L347,721. Early in this year, however, the state of the Lagos trade was
+considered so unsatisfactory that a local commission to inquire into the
+causes of this state of affairs was appointed.
+
+The publication of the Government Trade Returns for 1897 supported the
+long grumble that had been going on about the bad state of trade in
+Lagos, the imports for 1897 showing a decrease on those of 1895 by
+L67,474. The _Board of Trade Journal_, quoting from the _Lagos Weekly
+Record_ of February 28th, 1898, says, "An examination of the export
+returns affords a clue to the direction of such decrease. It is to be
+noted that notwithstanding that the export of rubber in 1897 shows an
+excess of L13,367 above that exported in 1895, yet in the aggregate of
+the total exports of the two years that of 1897 shows a decrease of
+L193,745; this is due to the great falling off which is perceptible in
+the palm oil and kernel trade, which together show a decrease in 1897 of
+L162,580 as compared with the quantities exported in 1895; while as
+compared with the exports in 1896 the decrease amounts to L114,773. The
+returns show a steady and increasing decline in the exports of these
+products, for while the decrease in 1896 as compared with 1895 was only
+L47,807, the decrease had risen in 1897 as compared with the previous
+year to L114,773, as already intimated, which implies that there has
+been a further falling off of the trade to the extent of nearly L67,000.
+This manifest excessive diminution in what must be regarded as the
+staple commodities of the trade is undoubtedly a serious indication, for
+though these commodities come under the classification of jungle
+products they are not liable to exhaustion as are the rubber or timber
+industries, and hence they form the only reliable commodities upon which
+the trade must expand. The dislocation of the labour system in the
+hinterland is no doubt responsible in a large measure for the falling
+off in the yield of these products, while in many instances they have
+been abandoned for the more remunerative rubber business. But, be the
+circumstances what they may, it is evident that there has been an actual
+decrease of trade to the extent of over L114,000."
+
+This was the state of affairs the local committee was appointed to deal
+with. Its discussions were long and careful. I will not attempt to drag
+you through its final report, which a grossly ungrateful public in Lagos
+sniffed at because it merely seemed carefully to reproduce every one's
+opinion on the causes of the falling off of trade and to agree with it
+solemnly; but, like the rest of the local world, it made no sweeping
+suggestion of means whereby things could be altered. Since the
+committee, however, was formed, there has been a greater interest taken
+in expenditure, healthy in its way, but too often ignoring the fact,
+that it is not so much the amount of money that is spent governmentally
+that constitutes waste, but the things on which it is expended. Large
+sums have been spent in Lagos, I am informed, on building a Government
+House that every valuable Governor ought to be paid to keep out of, so
+unhealthy is its situation, and again on bridging a lagoon that has no
+particular sound bottom to it worth mentioning.
+
+That such forms of expenditure are not the necessary grooves into which
+a place like Lagos is driven in order to get rid of its money is
+undoubted. The local press at any rate indicates other grooves; for
+example here is a cheerful little paragraph:
+
+"_A propos_ of what was said in your last issue about the grave-diggers,
+there is no doubt that something should be done to relieve the men from
+the strain of work to which they are continuously subjected. The demands
+of a constantly increasing death rate, which has caused the cemeteries
+to be enlarged, make it necessary that the number of grave-diggers
+should be increased. Besides, these men are poorly paid for the work
+they do. Of the twenty grave-diggers, six are paid at the rate of 1_s._
+per diem, and the rest at the rate of 10_d._ They have no holidays,
+either, like other people. While the Government labourers, of whom there
+is a host, may skulk half their time, the hard-working grave-digger is
+at it from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day, Sundays included, for the Grim
+Reaper is ever busy. The Keeper of the graveyards, also, has much to do
+for the paltry salary he receives. I would earnestly appeal to the
+authorities to do something to raise the burden of this overworked
+staff."[70] So would I, but rather in the direction of giving the "Grim
+Reaper" and the grave-diggers fewer people to bury. I must also give you
+another beautiful little bit of local colour, although it suggests
+further expenditure. "It is satisfactory to note that the Chamber of
+Commerce intends to take up the question of the swamp near the petroleum
+magazine. Since the Government made the causeway leading to the
+dead-house and cut off the tidal inflow, the upper portion of the swamp
+has been formed into a most noxious disease-breeding sink, into which
+refuse of all kinds is thrown, the stagnant waters and refuse combining,
+under the effects of the sun, to emit a most formidable pestilential
+effluvia. In the interests of humanity something should be done to abate
+this nuisance."[71]
+
+However, I leave these local questions of Lagos town. They just present
+a pretty picture of the difficulties that surround dealing with a place
+that has by nature swamps, that must have dead-houses, grave-diggers,
+and extensive cemetery accommodation, and that is peopled by natives who
+will instinctively throw refuse into any hole; with evidently a large
+death rate in the native population and a published death rate in whites
+of 153 per thousand. Let us now return to the higher finance.
+
+"The total expenditure of Lagos in 1888 amounted to L62,735 15_s._
+11_d._ The expenditure has risen in 1898 to L192,760, which gives an
+excess of L130,025. The total cost of the staff in 1888 was L15,932,
+while the present cost amounts to L41,604, which is an increase of
+L25,672. This increase, apart from the augmentation in the Governor's
+salary, is mainly in respect to the following departments:--Secretariat,
+Harbour Department, Constabulary and Police, and the Public Works
+Department. The cost of working the secretariat has been increased by
+L1,074, due to the following additional officers:--Two assistant
+colonial secretaries, a chief clerk, and a first clerk. It is well known
+that in 1888, when the department cost the colony about one-half its
+present expenses as regards the European staff, the work was performed
+with efficiency and despatch; while at present it is not only difficult
+to get business got through, but, what is more, if the business is not
+followed up with watchful care, it will become lost in the
+superabundance of assistants and clerks who crowd the department, and
+the practical expression of whose work is more discernible on the public
+revenue than anything else."[72] The _Lagos Record_ goes on to say,
+"There is room for retrenchment in the matter of expenditure on account
+of the European official staff." I do not follow it here. It is room for
+retrenchment in mere routine workers, black and white, that is wanted,
+and the liberation of the Europeans to do work worth their risking their
+lives in West Africa for. The percentage of black officials, mainly
+clerks--excellent and faithful to their duties--is increasing in all our
+colonies there too rapidly; and the existence of poorly paid but
+numerous posts under Government with a certain amount of prestige, is a
+dangerous allurement to native young men, tempting them from nobler
+careers, and forming them into a sort of wall-class between the English
+official and the main body of the native population. Take, for example,
+the number of Government servants at the Gold Coast, according to Sir
+William Maxwell, 1897;--
+
+                     European   Native            Civil
+                     officers.  clerks.  Hausas.  police.
+
+          Accra         35       206      432      105
+          Cape Coast     8        69        0       47
+          Elmina         5        36       50       19
+
+An awful percentage of clerks is 311 for such a country, more clerks
+than police, only 121 less Government native clerks than soldiers in the
+army; and you may depend upon it the white officials are clerking away,
+more or less, too. I always think how very apposite the answer of an
+official was to the criticism of excessive expenditure: "Sir, there is
+no reckless expenditure; every J pen has to be accounted for!"
+
+No, I am quite unable to agree that anything but the Crown Colony system
+is to blame, and that because it is engaged in administering a district
+with no possibilities in it for England save commercial matters, in
+which the Crown Colony system is not well informed. I have only quoted
+these figures to show you that Lagos and the Gold Coast are merely
+keeping line with Sierra Leone--increasing their expenditure in the face
+of a falling trade, with a dark trade future before them, on account of
+French activity in cutting them off from their inland markets, and of
+their own mismanagement of the native races.
+
+The trade and the prosperity of West Africa depend on jungle products.
+There is no more solid reason to fear the extinction of West Africa's
+jungle products of oil, timber, fibre, rubber, than there is to worry
+about the extinction of our own coal-fields--probably not so much--for
+they rapidly renew themselves. Yes, even rubber, though that is slower
+at it than palm oil and kernel; and at present not one-tenth part of the
+jungle products are in touch with commerce; and save gold, and that to a
+very small extent, the mineral wealth of West Africa is untouched. It is
+not in all regions only titaniferous iron; there are silver, lead,
+copper, antimony, quicksilver, and tin ores there unexploited, and which
+it would not be advisable to attempt to exploit until the so-called
+labour problem is solved. This problem is really that of the
+co-operation for mutual benefit of the African and the Englishman. In
+the solution of this problem alone lies the success of England in West
+Africa, not of England herself, for England could survive the loss of
+West Africa whole, though doing so would cost her dear alike in honour
+and in profit. The Crown Colony system which now represents England in
+West Africa will never give this solution. It necessarily destroys
+native society, that is to say, it disorganises it, and has not in it
+the power to reorganise. As I have already endeavoured to show, English
+influence in West Africa, as represented by the Crown Colony system,
+consists of three separate classes of Englishmen with no common object
+of interest, and is not a thing capable of organising so difficult a
+region. All these three classes, be it granted, each represent things
+for the organisation of a State. No State can exist without having the
+governmental, the religious, and the mercantile factors, working
+together in it; but in West Africa these representatives of the English
+State are things apart and opposed to each other, and do not constitute
+a State. You might as well expect to get the functions of a State, good
+government, out of these three disconnected classes of Englishmen in
+Africa, as expect to know the hour of day from the parts of a watch
+before they were put together.
+
+You will see I have humbly attempted to place this affair before you
+from no sensational point of view, but from the commercial one--the
+value of West Africa to England's commerce--and have attempted to show
+you how this is suffering from the adherence of England to a form of
+government that is essentially un-English. I have made no attack on the
+form of government for such regions formulated in England's more
+intellectual though earlier period of Elizabeth, the Chartered Company
+system as represented by the Royal Niger Company. I have neither shares
+in, nor reason to attack the Royal Niger Company, which has in a few
+years, and during the period of the hottest French enterprise, acquired
+a territory in West Africa immensely greater than the territory acquired
+during centuries under the Crown Colony system; it has also fought its
+necessary wars with energy and despatch, and no call upon Imperial
+resources; it has not only paid its way, but paid its shareholders their
+6 per cent., and its bitterest enemies say darkly, far more. I know from
+my knowledge of West Africa that this can only have been effected by its
+wise native policy. I know that this policy owes its wisdom and its
+success to one man, Sir George Taubman Goldie, a man who, had he been
+under the Crown Colony system, could have done no more than other men
+have done who have been Governors under it; but, not being under it, the
+territories he won for England have not been subjected to the jerky
+amateur policy of those which are under the Crown Colony system. For
+nearly twenty years the natives under the Royal Niger Company have had
+the firm, wise, sympathetic friendship of a great Englishman, who
+understood them, and knew them personally. It is the continuous
+influence of one great Englishman, unhampered by non-expert control,
+that has caused England's exceedingly strange success in the Niger;
+coupled with the identity of trade and governmental interest, and the
+encouragement of religion given by the constitution and administration
+of the Niger Company. This is a thing not given by all Chartered
+Companies; indeed, I think I am right in saying that the Niger and the
+North Borneo Companies stand alone in controlling territories that have
+been essentially trading during recent years. This association of trade
+and government is, to my mind, an _absolutely necessary restraint_ on
+the Charter Company form of government;[73] but there is another element
+you must have to justify Charters, and that is that they are in the
+hands of an Englishman of the old type.
+
+I am perfectly aware that the natives of Lagos and other Crown Colonies
+in West Africa are, and have long been, anxious for the Chartered
+Company of the Niger to be taken over by the Government, as they
+pathetically and frankly say, "so that now the trade in their own
+district is so bad, it may get a stimulus by a freer trade in the
+Niger," and the native traders not connected with the Company may rush
+in; while officials in the Crown Colonies have been equally anxious, as
+they say with frankness no less pathetic, so that they may have chances
+of higher appointments. I am equally aware that the merchants of England
+not connected with the Niger Company, which is really an association of
+African merchants, desire its downfall; yet they all perfectly well
+know, though they do not choose to advertise the fact, that three months
+Crown Colony form of government in the Niger territories will bring war,
+far greater and more destructive than any war we have yet had in West
+Africa, and will end in the formation of a debt far greater than any
+debt we now have in West Africa, because of the greater extent of
+territory and the greater power of the native States, now living
+peacefully enough under England, but not under England as misrepresented
+by the Crown Colony system. I am not saying that Chartered Companies are
+good; I am only saying they are better than the Crown Colony plan; and
+that if the Crown Colony system is substituted for the Chartered
+Company, which is directly a trading company, England will have to pay a
+very heavy bill. There would be, of course, a temporary spurt in trade,
+but it would be a flash in the pan, and in the end, an end that would
+come in a few years' time, the British taxpayer would be cursing West
+Africa at large, and the Niger territories in particular. Personally, I
+entirely fail to see why England should be tied to either of these
+plans, the Crown Colony or the Chartered Company, for governing tropical
+regions. Have we quite run out of constructive ability in Statecraft? Is
+it not possible to formulate some new plan to mark the age of Victoria?
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [60] _Industrial and Social Life of the Empire._ Macmillan and Co.
+
+   [61] For Lagos, Gold Coast, Sierra Leone and Gambia from 1892 to 1896,
+   L2,364,266.
+
+   [62] Forty-eighth annual report Liverpool Chamber of Commerce, 1898.
+
+   [63]                                            L       Increase.
+         Expenditure on police and gaols, 1896   31,504       L
+           "             "        "       1887    3,037     28,467
+
+         Expenditure on transport         1896   10,091
+           "             "        "       1887    3,298      6,793
+
+         Expenditure on public works      1896    6,736
+           "            "        "        1887    1,417      5,319
+                                                            ------
+                   Aggregate increase                       40,579
+
+
+   [64] "The Liquor Traffic in West Africa," _Fortnightly Review_, April,
+   1898.
+
+   [65] _Colonial Reports, Miscellaneous, No. 3, 1893._ G. F. Scott Elliott
+        M.A., F.L.S., and C. A. Raisin, B.Sc.
+
+   [66] French colonies--
+
+                            Imports.             Exports
+                         1896.     1897.      1896.    1897.
+                           L         L          L        L
+        Senegal        1,047,000 1,167,000   783,000  845,000
+        French Guinea    185,000   240,000*  231,000  201,000*
+        Ivory Coast      186,000   188,000   176,000  189,000
+        Dahomey          389,000   330,000   364,000  231,000
+        French Congo     192,000     **     190,000    **
+
+        * For nine months only.
+        ** No statistics.
+
+        Trade of Dahomey and the Ivory Coast for the first three months
+        of 1898--
+
+                      Imports.    Exports.      Total trade.
+                         L           L               L
+        Ivory Coast    58,658      58,560         117,518
+        Dahomey        84,064      72,771         156,835
+
+        German possessions--
+
+                        Imports.                Exports.
+                  1895.   1896.  1897.   1895.   1896.  1897.
+                    L       L      L       L       L      L
+        Togoland 117,000  94,000 99,000 152,000  83,000 39,000
+        Cameroon 283,000 268,000   *    204,000 198,000   *
+                 ---------------------------------------------
+        Total    400,000 362,000   *    356,000 281,000   *
+
+        * No figures for calendar year. _Board of Trade Journal_,
+          September, 1898.
+
+
+   [67] _Colonial Annual_, No. 88, Gold Coast for 1892, published 1893.
+
+   [68] Ditto, No. 188.
+
+   [69] _Ashanti and Jaman._ Constable, 1898.
+
+   [70] _Lagos Standard_, September 7, 1898.
+
+   [71] _Lagos Weekly Record_, September 10, 1898.
+
+   [72] _Lagos Weekly Record_, August 27, 1898.
+
+   [73] See Introduction to _Folk Lore of the Fjort_. R. E. Dennett. David
+   Nutt, 1898.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE CLASH OF CULTURES
+
+     Wherein this student, realising as usual, when too late, that the
+     environment of such opinions as are expressed above is boiling hot
+     water, calls to memory the excellent saying, "As well be hung for a
+     sheep as a lamb," and goes on.
+
+
+I have no intention, however, of starting a sort of open-air steam
+laundry for West African washing. I have only gone into the
+unsatisfactory-to-all-parties-concerned state of affairs there not with
+the hope, but with the desire, that things may be improved and further
+disgrace avoided. It would be no good my merely stating that, if England
+wishes to make her possessions there morally and commercially pay her
+for the loss of life that holding them entails, she must abolish her
+present policy of amateur experiments backed by good intentions, for you
+would naturally not pay the least attention to a bald statement made by
+merely me. So I have had to place before you the opinions of others who
+are more worthy of your attention. I must, however, for myself disclaim
+any right to be regarded as the mouthpiece of any party concerned,
+though Major Lugard has done me the honour to place me amongst the
+Liverpool merchants. I can claim no right to speak as one of them. I
+should be only too glad if I had this honour, but I have not. There was
+early this year a distressing split between Liverpool and myself--whom
+I am aware they call behind my back "Our Aunt"--and I know they regard
+me as a vexing, if even a valued, form of relative.
+
+This split, I may say (remembering Mr. Mark Twain's axiom, that people
+always like to know what a row is about), arose from my frank admiration
+of both the Royal Niger Company and France, neither of which Liverpool
+at that time regarded as worthy of even the admiration of the most
+insignificant; so its _Journal of Commerce_ went for me. The natural
+sweetness of my disposition is most clearly visible to the naked eye
+when I am quietly having my own way, so naturally I went for its
+_Journal of Commerce_. Providentially no one outside saw this deplorable
+family row, and Mr. John Holt put a stop to it by saying to me, "Say
+what you like, you cannot please all of us;" had it not been for this I
+should not have written another line on the maladministration of West
+Africa beyond saying, "Call that Crown Colony system you are working
+there a Government! England, at your age, you ought to be ashamed of
+yourself!" But you see, as things are, I am not speaking for any one,
+only off on a little lone fight of my own against a state of affairs
+which I regard as a disgrace to my country.
+
+Well but, you may say, after all what you have said points to nothing
+disgraceful. You have expressly said that there is no corruption in the
+government there, and the rest of the things--the change of policy
+arising from the necessity for white men to come home at the least every
+twelve months, the waste of money necessary to local exigencies, and the
+fact that officers and gentlemen cannot be expected to understand and
+look after what one might call domestic expenses--may be things
+unavoidable and peculiar to the climate. To this I can only say, Given
+the climate, why do you persist in ignoring the solid mass of expert
+knowledge of the region that is in the hands of the mercantile party,
+and go on working your Governors from a non-expert base? You have in
+England an unused but great mass of knowledge among men of all classes
+who have personally dealt with West Africa--yet you do not work from
+that, organise it, and place it at the service of the brand new
+Governors who go out; far from it. I know hardly any more pathetic sight
+than the new official suddenly appointed to West Africa buzzing round
+trying to find out "what the place is really like, you know." I know
+personally one of the greatest of our Governors who have been down
+there, a man with iron determination and courage, who was not content
+with the information derivable from a list of requisites for a tropical
+climate, the shorter Hausa grammar and a nice cheery-covered little work
+on diseases--the usual fillets with which England binds the brows of her
+Sacrifices to the Coast--but went and read about West Africa, all by
+himself, alone in the British Museum. He was a success, but still he
+always declares that the only book he found about this particular part
+was a work by a Belgian, with a frontispiece depicting the author, on an
+awful river, in the act, as per inscription, of shouting, "Row on, brave
+men of Kru!" which, as subsequent knowledge showed him that bravery was
+not one of the main qualities of the Kru men, shook him up about all his
+British Museum education. So in the end he, like the rest, had to learn
+for himself, out there. Of course, if the Governors were carefully
+pegged down to a West African place and lived long enough, and were not
+by nature faddists, doubtless they would learn, and in the course of a
+few years things would go well; but they are not pegged down. No sooner
+does one of them begin to know about the country he is in charge of than
+off he is whisked and deposited again, in a brand new region for which
+West Africa has not been a fitting introduction.
+
+Then, as for the domestic finance, why expect officers and lawyers,
+doctors and gentlemen from clubland to manage fiscal matters? Of course
+they naturally don't know about trade affairs, or whether the Public
+Works Department is spending money, or merely wasting it. You require
+professional men in West Africa, but not to do half the work they are
+now engaged on in connection with red tape and things they do not
+understand. Of course, errors of this kind may be merely Folly, you may
+have plenty more men as good as these to replace them with, so it may
+matter more to their relations than to England if they are wasted alike
+in life and death, and you are so rich that the gradual extinction of
+your tropical trade will not matter to your generation. But as a
+necessary consequent to this amateurism, or young gentlemen's academy
+system, the Crown Colony system, there is disgrace in the injustice to
+and disintegration of the native races it deals with.
+
+Now when I say England is behaving badly to the African, I beg you not
+to think that the philanthropic party has increased. I come of a
+generation of Danes who when the sun went down on the Wulpensand were
+the men to make light enough to fight by with their Morning Stars; and
+who, later on, were soldiers in the Low Countries and slave owners in
+the West Indies, and I am proud of my ancestors; for, whatever else they
+were, they were not humbugs; and the generation that is round me now
+seems to me in its utterances at any rate tainted with humbug. I own
+that I hate the humbug in England's policy towards weaker races for the
+sake of all the misery on white and black it brings; and I think as I
+see you wasting lives and money, sowing debt and difficulties all over
+West Africa by a hut tax war in Sierra Leone, fighting for the sake of
+getting a few shillings you have no right to whatsoever out of the
+African,--who are you that you should point your finger in scorn at my
+tribe? I as one of that tribe blush for you, from the basis that you are
+a humbug and not scientific, which, I presume you will agree is not the
+same thing as my being a philanthropist.
+
+I had the honour of meeting in West Africa an English officer who had
+previously been doing some fighting in South Africa. He said he "didn't
+like being a butterman's nigger butcher." "Oh! you're all right here
+then," I said; "you're out now for Exeter Hall, the plane of
+civilisation, the plough, and the piano." I will not report his remarks
+further; likely enough it was the mosquitoes that made him say things,
+and of course I knew with him, as I know with you, butchery of any sort
+is not to your liking, though war when it's wanted is; the distinction I
+draw between them is a hard and fast one. There is just the same
+difference to my mind between an unnecessary war on an unarmed race and
+a necessary war on the same race, as there is between killing game that
+you want to support yourself with or game that is destructive to your
+interests, and on the other hand the killing of game just to say that
+you have done it. This will seem a deplorably low view to take, but it
+is one supported by our history. We have killed down native races in
+Australasia and America, and it is no use slurring over the fact that we
+have profited by so doing. This argument, however, cannot be used in
+favour of killing down the African in tropical Africa, more particularly
+in Western Tropical Africa. If you were to-morrow to kill every native
+there, what use would the country be to you? No one else but the native
+can work its resources; you cannot live in it and colonise it. It would
+therefore be only an extremely interesting place for the zoologist,
+geologist, mineralogist, &c., but a place of no good to any one else in
+England.
+
+This view, however, of the profit derivable from and justifying war you
+will refuse to discuss; stating that such profit in your wars you do not
+seek; that they have been made for the benefit of the African himself,
+to free him from his native oppressors in the way of tyrannical chiefs
+and bloody superstitions, and to elevate him in the plane of
+civilisation. That this has been the intention of our West African wars
+up to the Sierra Leone war, which was forced on you for fiscal reasons,
+I have no doubt: but that any of them advanced you in your mission to
+elevate the African, I should hesitate to say. I beg to refer you to Dr.
+Freeman's opinions on the Ashantee wars on this point,[74] but for
+myself I should say that the blame of the failure of these wars to
+effect their desired end has been due to the want of power to
+re-organise native society after a war; for example, had the 1873
+Ashantee war been followed by the taking over of Ashantee and the strong
+handling of it, there would not have been an 1895 Ashantee war; or, to
+take it the other way, if you had followed up the battle of Katamansu in
+1827, you need not have had an 1874 war even. Dr. Freeman holds, that if
+you had let the Ashantis have a sea-port and generally behaved fairly
+reasonably, you need hardly have had Ashantee wars at all. But, however
+this may be, I think that a good many of the West African wars of the
+past ten years have been the result of the humbug of the previous sixty,
+during which we have proclaimed that we are only in Africa for peaceful
+reasons of commerce, and religion, and education, not with any desire
+for the African's land or property: that, of course, it is not possible
+for us to extend our friendship or our toleration to people who go in
+for cannibalism, slave-raiding, or human sacrifices, but apart from
+these matters we have no desire to meddle with African domestic affairs,
+or take away their land. This, I own, I believe to have honestly been
+our intention, and to be our intention still, but with our stiff Crown
+Colony system of representing ourselves to the African, this intention
+has been and will be impossible to carry out, because between the true
+spirit of England and the spirit of Africa it interposes a distorting
+medium. It is, remember, not composed of Englishmen alone, it includes
+educated natives, and yet it knows the true native only through
+interpreters.
+
+But why call this humbug? you say. Well, the present policy in Africa
+makes it look so. Frankly, I do not see how you could work your original
+policy out unless it were in the hands of extremely expert men, patient
+and powerful at that. Too many times in old days have you allowed white
+men to be bullied, to give the African the idea that you, as a nation,
+meant to have your way. Too many times have you allowed them to violate
+parts of their treaties under your nose, until they got out of the way
+of thinking you would hold them to their treaties at all, and then
+suddenly down you came on them, not only holding them to their side of
+the treaties, but not holding to your own, imposing on them
+restrictions and domestic interference which those treaties made no
+mention of at all. I have before me now copies of treaties with chiefs
+in the hinterland of our Crown Colonies, wherein there is not even the
+anti-slavery clause--treaties merely of friendship and trade, with the
+undertaking on the native chief's part to hand over no part or right in
+his territories to a foreign power without English Government consent.
+Yet, in the districts we hold from the natives under such treaties, we
+are contemplating direct taxation, which to the African means the
+confiscation of the property taxed. We have, in fact, by our previous
+policy placed ourselves to the African with whom we have made treaties,
+in the position of a friend. "Big friend," it is true, but not conqueror
+or owner. Our departure now from the "big friend" attitude into the
+position of owner, hurts his feelings very much; and coupled with the
+feeling that he cannot get at England, who used to talk so nicely to
+him, and whom he did his best to please, as far as local circumstances
+and his limited power would allow, by giving up customs she had an
+incomprehensible aversion to, it causes the African chief to say "God is
+up," by which I expect he means the Devil, and give way to war, or
+sickness, or distraction, or a wild, hopeless, helpless, combination of
+all three; and then, poor fellow, when he is only naturally suffering
+from the dazzles your West African policy would give to an iron post,
+you go about sagely referring to "a general antipathy to civilisation
+among the natives of West Africa," "anti-white-man's leagues," "horrible
+secret societies," and such like figments of your imagination; and
+likely enough throw in as a dash for top the statement that the chief is
+"a drunken slave-raider," which as the captain of the late s.s.
+_Sparrow_ would say, "It may be so, and again, it mayn't." Anyhow it
+seems to occur to you as an argument only after the war is begun, though
+you have known the man some years; and it has not been the ostensible
+reason for any West African war save those in the Niger Company's
+territories, which run far enough inland to touch the slave-raiding
+zone, and which are entirely excluded from my arguments because they
+have been in the hands of experts on West Africa in war-making and in
+war-healing.
+
+Our past wars in West Africa, I mean all our wars prior to the hut-tax
+war, have been wars in order to suppress human sacrifice, to protect one
+tribe from the aggression of another, and to prevent the stopping of
+trade by middlemen tribes. These things are things worth fighting for.
+The necessity we have been under to fight them has largely arisen from
+our ancestors shirking a little firm-handedness in their generation.
+
+There is very little doubt that, owing to a want of reconstruction after
+destruction, these wars have not been worth to the Empire the loss of
+life and money they have cost; but this is nothing against us as
+fighters nor any real disgrace to our honour, but merely a slur on our
+intellectual powers in the direction of statecraft. They are wars of a
+totally different character to those of the hut-tax kind, that arise
+from aggressions on native property: the only thing in common between
+them is the strain of poor statecraft. This imperfection, however,
+exists to a far greater extent in hut-tax war, for to it we owe that
+general feeling of dislike to the advance of civilisation you now hear
+referred to. That, to a certain extent, this dislike already exists as
+the necessary outcome of our policy of late years, and that it will
+increase yearly, I fear there is very little doubt. It is the toxin
+produced by the microbe. It is the consequence of our attempt to
+introduce direct taxation, which seems to me to be an affair identical
+with your greased cartridges for India. Doubtless, such people ought not
+to object to greased cartridges; but, doubtless, such people as we are
+ought not to give them, and commit, over again, a worthless blunder,
+with no bad intention be it granted, but with no common sense.
+
+It has been said that the Sierra Leone hut-tax war is "a little Indian
+mutiny"; those who have said it do not seem to have known how true the
+statement is, for these attacks on property in the form of direct
+taxation are, to the African, treachery on the part of England, who,
+from the first, has kept on assuring the African that she does not mean
+to take his country from him, and then, as soon as she is strong enough,
+in his eyes, deliberately starts doing it. When you once get between two
+races the feeling of treachery, the face of their relationship is
+altered for ever, altered in a way that no wholesome war, no brutality
+of individuals, can alter. Black and white men for ever after a national
+breach of faith tax each other with treachery, and never really trust
+each other again.
+
+The African, however, must not be confounded with the Indian.
+Externally, in his habits he is in a lower culture state; he has no
+fanatical religion that really resents the incursions of other religions
+on his mind; Fetish can live in and among all sorts and kinds of
+religions without quarrelling with them in the least, grievously as they
+quarrel with Fetish; he has no written literature to keep before his
+eyes a glorious and mythical past, which, getting mixed up with his
+religious ideas, is liable in the Indian to make him take at times
+lobster-like backward springs in the direction of that past, though it
+was never there, and he would not have relished it if it had been.
+Nevertheless, the true Negro is, I believe, by far the better man than
+the Asiatic; he is physically superior, and he is more like an
+Englishman than the Asiatic; he is a logical, practical man, with
+feelings that are a credit to him, and are particularly strong in the
+direction of property; he has a way of thinking he has rights, whether
+he likes to use them or no, and will fight for them when he is driven to
+it. Fight you for a religious idea the African will not. He is not the
+stuff you make martyrs out of, nor does he desire to shake off the
+shackles of the flesh and swoon into Nirvana; and although he will sit
+under a tree to any extent, provided he gets enough to eat and a
+little tobacco, he won't sit under trees on iron spikes, or hold
+a leg up all the time, or fakirise in any fashion for the benefit
+of his soul or yours. His make of mind is exceedingly like the make
+of mind of thousands of Englishmen of the stand-no-nonsense,
+Englishman's-house-is-his-castle type. Yet, withal, a law-abiding man,
+loving a live lord, holding loudly that women should be kept in their
+place, yet often grievously henpecked by his wives, and little better
+than a slave to his mother, whom he loves with a love he gives to none
+other. This love of his mother is so dominant a factor in his life that
+it must be taken into consideration in attempting to understand the true
+Negro. Concerning it I can do no better than give you the Reverend
+Leighton Wilson's words; for this great missionary knew, as probably
+none since have known, the true Negro, having laboured for many years
+amongst the most unaltered Negro tribes--the Grain coast tribes--and his
+words are as true to-day of the unaltered Negro as on the day he wrote
+them thirty-eight years ago, and Leighton Wilson, mind you, was no blind
+admirer of the African.
+
+"Whatever other estimate we may form of the African, we may not doubt
+his love for his mother. Her name, whether dead or alive, is always on
+his lips and in his heart. She is the first being he thinks of when
+awakening from his slumbers and the last he remembers when closing his
+eyes in sleep; to her he confides secrets which he would reveal to no
+other human being on the face of the earth. He cares for no one else in
+time of sickness, she alone must prepare his food, administer his
+medicine, perform his ablutions, and spread his mat for him. He flies to
+her in the hour of his distress, for he well knows if all the rest of
+the world turn against him she will be steadfast in her love, whether he
+be right or wrong.
+
+"If there be any cause which justifies a man in using violence towards
+one of his fellow men it would be to resent an insult offered to his
+mother. More fights are occasioned among boys by hearing something said
+in disparagement of their mothers than all other causes put together. It
+is a common saying among them, if a man's mother and his wife are both
+on the point of being drowned, and he can save only one of them, he must
+save his mother, for the avowed reason if the wife is lost he may marry
+another, but he will never find a second mother."[75]
+
+Among the tribes of whom Wilson is speaking above, it is the man's true
+mother. Among the Niger Delta tribes it is often the adopted mother, the
+woman who has taken him when, as a child, he has been left motherless,
+or, if he is a boughten child, the woman who has taken care of him.
+Among both, and throughout all the bushmen tribes in West Africa,
+however, this deep affection is the same; next to the mother comes the
+sister to the African, and this matter has a bearing politically.
+
+There is little doubt that there exists a distrustful feeling towards
+white culture. Up to our attempt to enforce direct taxation it was only
+a distrustful feeling that a few years careful, honest handling would
+have disposed of. Since our attempt there is no doubt there is something
+approaching a panicky terror of white civilisation in all the native
+aristocracies and property owners. It is not, I repeat, to be attributed
+to Fetish priests. Certainly, on the whole, it is not attributable to a
+dislike of European customs or costumes; it is the reasonable dislike to
+being dispossessed alike of power and property in what they regard as
+their own country. A considerable factor in this matter is undoubtedly
+the influence of the women--the mothers of Africa. Just as your African
+man is the normal man, so is your African woman the normal woman. I
+openly own that if I have a soft spot in my feelings it is towards
+African women; and the close contact I have lived in with them has given
+rise to this, and, I venture to think, made me understand them. I know
+they have their faults. For one thing they are not so religiously minded
+as the men. I have met many African men who were philosophers, thinking
+in the terms of Fetish, but never a woman so doing. Be it granted that
+on the whole they know more about the details of Fetish procedure than
+the men do. Yet though frightened of them all, a blind faith in any
+mortal Ju Ju they do not possess. Your African lady is artful with them,
+not philosophic, possibly because she has other things to do--what with
+attending to the children, the farm, and the market--than go mooning
+about as those men can. For another thing they go in for husband
+poisoning in a way I am unable to approve of.
+
+Well, it may be interesting to inquire into the reasons that make the
+West African woman a factor against white civilisation. These reasons
+are--firstly, that she does not know practically anything about it; and,
+secondly, she has the normal feminine dislike to innovations. Missionary
+and other forms of white education have not been given to the African
+women to anything like the same extent that they have been given to the
+men. I do not say that there are not any African women who are not
+thoroughly educated in white education, for there are, and they can
+compare very favourably from the standpoint of their education with our
+normal women; but these have, I think I may safely say, been the
+daughters of educated African men, or have been the women who have been
+immediately attached to some mission station. I have no hesitation in
+saying that, considering the very little attention that has been given
+to the white education of the African women, they give evidence of an
+ability in due keeping with that of the African men. But all I mean to
+say is, that our white culture has not had a grasp over the womankind of
+Africa that can compare with that it has had over the men; for one woman
+who has been brought home to England and educated in our schools, and
+who has been surrounded by English culture, &c., there are 500 men. But
+into the possibilities of the African woman in the white education
+department I do not mean to go; I am getting into a snaggy channel by
+speaking on woman at all. It is to the mass of African women, untouched
+by white culture, but with an enormous influence over their sons and
+brothers, that I am now referring as a factor in the dislike to the
+advance of white civilisation; and I have said they do not like it
+because, for one thing, they do not know it; that is to say, they do not
+know it from the inside and at its best, but only from the outside.
+Viewed from the outside in West Africa white civilisation, to a shrewd
+mind like hers, is an evil thing for her boys and girls. She sees it
+taking away from them the restraints of their native culture, and in all
+too many cases leading them into a life of dissipation, disgrace, and
+decay; or, if it does not do this, yet separating the men from their
+people.
+
+The whole of this affair requires a whole mass of elaborate explanations
+to place it fairly before you, but I will merely sketch the leading
+points now. (1) The law of muetterrecht makes the tie between the mother
+and the children far closer than that between the father and them: white
+culture reverses this, she does not like that. (2) Between husband and
+wife there is no community in goods under native law; each keeps his and
+her separate estate. White culture says the husband shall endow his wife
+with all his worldly goods; this she knows usually means, that if he has
+any he does not endow her with them, but whether he has or has not he
+endows himself with hers as far as any law permits. Similarly he does
+not like it either. These two white culture things, saddling him with
+the support of the children and endowing his wife with all his property,
+presents a repulsive situation to the logical African. Moreover, white
+culture expects him to think more of his wife and children than he does
+of his mother and sisters, which to the uncultured African is absurd.
+
+Then again both he and his mother see the fearful effects of white
+culture on the young women, who cannot be prevented in districts under
+white control from going down to the coast towns and to the Devil:
+neither he nor the respectable old ladies of his tribe approve of this.
+Then again they know that the young men of their people who have
+thoroughly allied themselves to white culture look down on their
+relations in the African culture state. They call the ancestors of their
+tribe "polygamists," as if it were a swear-word, though they are a
+thousand times worse than polygamists themselves: and they are ashamed
+of their mothers. It is a whole seething mass of stuff all through and I
+would not mention it were it not that it is a factor in the formation of
+anti-white-culture opinion among the mass of the West Africans, and that
+it causes your West African bush chief to listen to the old woman whom
+you may see crouching behind him, or you may not see at all, but who is
+with him all the same, when she says, "Do not listen to the white man,
+it is bad for you." He knows that the interpreter talking to him for the
+white man may be a boughten man, paid to advertise the advantages of
+white ways; and he knows that the old woman, his mother, cannot be
+bought where his interest is concerned: so he listens to her, and she
+distrusts white ways.
+
+I am aware that there is now in West Africa a handful of Africans who
+have mastered white culture, who know it too well to misunderstand the
+inner spirit of it, who are men too true to have let it cut them off in
+either love or sympathy from Africa,--men that, had England another
+system that would allow her to see them as they are, would be of greater
+use to her and Africa than they now are; but I will not name them: I
+fight a lone fight, and wish to mix no man, white or black, up in it, or
+my heretical opinions. That handful of African men are now fighting a
+hard enough fight to prevent the distracted, uninformed Africans from
+rising against what looks so like white treachery, though it is only
+white want of knowledge; and also against those "water flies" who are
+neither Africans nor Europeans, but who are the curse of the Coast--the
+men who mislead the white man and betray the black.
+
+Next to this there is another factor almost equally powerful, with which
+I presume you cannot sympathise, and which I should make a mess of if I
+trusted myself to explain. Therefore I call in the aid of a better
+writer, speaking on another race, but talking of the identical same
+thing. "In these days the boot of the ubiquitous white man leaves its
+mark on all the fair places of the earth, and scores thereon an even
+more gigantic track than that which affrighted Robinson Crusoe in his
+solitude. It crushes down the forest, beats out roads, strides across
+the rivers, kicks down native institutions, and generally tramples on
+the growths of natives and the works of primitive man, reducing all
+things to that dead level of conventionality which we call civilisation.
+
+"Incidentally it stamps out much of what is best in the customs and
+characteristics of the native races against which it brushes; and though
+it relieves him of many things which hurt or oppressed him ere it came,
+it injures him morally almost as much as it benefits him materially. We
+who are white men admire our work not a little--which is natural, and
+many are found willing to wear out their souls in efforts to convert the
+thirteenth century into the nineteenth in a score of years. The natives,
+who for the most part are frank Vandals, also admire efforts of which
+they are aware that they are themselves incapable, and even the
+_laudator temporis acti_ has his mouth stopped by the cheap and often
+tawdry luxury which the coming of the white man has placed within his
+reach. So effectually has the heel of the white man been ground into the
+face of Perak and Selangor, that these native states are now only
+nominally what their name implies. The white population outnumbers the
+people of the land in most of the principal districts, and it is
+possible for a European to spend weeks in either of these states without
+coming into contact with any Asiatics save those who wait at table,
+clean his shirts, or drive his cab. It is possible, I am told, for a
+European to spend years in Perak or Selangor without acquiring any
+profound knowledge of the natives of the country or of the language
+which is their special medium. This being so, most of the white men who
+live in the protected native states are somewhat apt to disregard the
+effect their actions have upon the natives and labour under the common
+European inability to view natives from a native standpoint. Moreover,
+we have become accustomed to existing conditions; and thus it is that
+few perhaps realise the precise nature of the work which the British in
+the Peninsula have set themselves to accomplish. What we are really
+attempting, however, is nothing less than to crush into twenty years the
+revolution in facts and in ideas, which, even in energetic Europe, six
+long centuries have been needed to accomplish. No one will, of course,
+be found to dispute that the strides made in our knowledge of the art of
+government since the thirteenth century are prodigious and vast, nor
+that the general condition of the people of Europe has been immensely
+improved since that day; but nevertheless one cannot but sympathise with
+the Malays who are suddenly and violently translated from the point to
+which they have attained in the natural development of their race, and
+are required to live up to the standard of a people who are six
+centuries in advance of them in national progress. If a plant is made
+to blossom or bear fruit three months before its time it is regarded as
+a triumph of the gardener's art; but what then are we to say of this
+huge moral forcing system we call 'protection'? Forced plants we know
+suffer in the process; and the Malay, whose proper place is amidst the
+conditions of the thirteenth century, is apt to become morally weak and
+seedy and lose something of his robust self respect when he is forced to
+bear Nineteenth century fruit."[76]
+
+Now, the above represents the state of affairs caused by the clash of
+different culture levels in the true Negro States, as well as it does in
+the Malay. These two sets of men, widely different in breed, have from
+the many points of agreement in their State-form, evidently both arrived
+in our thirteenth century. The African peoples in the central East, and
+East, and South, except where they are true Negroes, have not arrived in
+the Thirteenth century, or, to put it in other words, the true Negro
+stem in Africa has arrived at a political state akin to that of our own
+Thirteenth century, whereas the Bantu stem has not; this point, however,
+I need not enter into here.
+
+There are, of course, local differences between the Malay Peninsula and
+West Africa, but the main characteristics as regards the State-form
+among the natives are singularly alike. They are both what Mr. Clifford
+aptly likens to our own European State-form in the Thirteenth century;
+and the effect of the white culture on the morals of the natives is also
+alike. The main difference between them results from the Malay Peninsula
+being but a narrow strip of land and thinly peopled, compared to the
+densely populated section of a continent we call West Africa. Therefore,
+although the Malay in his native state is a superior individual warrior
+to the West African, yet there are not so many of him; and as he is less
+guarded from whites by a pestilential climate, his resistance to the
+white culture of the Nineteenth century is inferior to the resistance
+which the West African can give.
+
+The destruction of what is good in the Thirteenth century culture level,
+and the fact that when the Nineteenth century has had its way the main
+result is seedy demoralised natives, is the thing that must make all
+thinking men wonder if, after all, such work is from a high moral point
+of view worth the Nineteenth century doing. I so often think when I hear
+the progress of civilisation, our duty towards the lower races, &c.,
+talked of, as if those words were in themselves Ju Ju, of that improving
+fable of the kind-hearted she-elephant, who, while out walking one day,
+inadvertently trod upon a partridge and killed it, and observing close
+at hand the bird's nest full of callow fledglings, dropped a tear, and
+saying "I have the feelings of a mother myself," sat down upon the
+brood. This is precisely what England representing the Nineteenth
+century is doing in Thirteenth century West Africa. She destroys the
+guardian institution, drops a tear and sits upon the brood with motherly
+intentions; and pesky warm sitting she finds it, what with the nature of
+the brood and the surrounding climate, let alone the expense of it. And
+what profit she is going to get out of such proceedings there, I own I
+don't know. "Ah!" you say, "yes, it is sad, but it is inevitable." I do
+not think it is inevitable, unless you have no intellectual constructive
+Statecraft, and are merely in that line an automaton. If you will try
+Science, all the evils of the clash between the two culture periods
+could be avoided, and you could assist these West Africans in their
+Thirteenth century state to rise into their Nineteenth century state
+without their having the hard fight for it that you yourself had. This
+would be a grand humanitarian bit of work; by doing it you would raise a
+monument before God to the honour of England such as no nation has ever
+yet raised to Him on Earth.
+
+There is absolutely no perceivable sound reason why you should not do it
+if you will try Science and master the knowledge of the nature of the
+native and his country. The knowledge of native laws, religion,
+institutions, and State-form would give you the knowledge of what is
+good in these things, so that you might develop and encourage them; and
+the West African, having reached a Thirteenth century state, has
+institutions and laws which with a strengthening from the European hand
+would by their operation now stamp out the evil that exists under the
+native state. What you are doing now, however, is the direct contrary to
+this: you are destroying the good portion and thereby allowing what is
+evil, or imperfect, in it as in all things human, to flourish under your
+protection far more rankly than under the purely native Thirteenth
+century State-form, with Fetish as a state religion, it could possibly
+do.
+
+I know, however, there is one great objection to your taking up a
+different line towards native races to that which you are at present
+following. It is one of those strange things that are in men's minds
+almost without their knowing they are there, yet which, nevertheless,
+rule them. This is the idea that those Africans are, as one party would
+say, steeped in sin, or, as another party would say, a lower or degraded
+race. While you think these things, you must act as you are acting. They
+really are the same idea in different clothes. They both presuppose all
+mankind to have sprung from a single pair of human beings, and the
+condition of a race to-day therefore to be to its own credit or blame. I
+remember one day in Cameroons coming across a young African lady, of the
+age of twelve, who I knew was enjoying the advantages of white tuition
+at a school. So, in order to open up conversation, I asked her what she
+had been learning. "Ebberyting," she observed with a genial smile. I
+asked her then what she knew, so as to approach the subject from a
+different standpoint for purposes of comparison. "Ebberyting," she said.
+This hurt my vanity, for though I am a good deal more than twelve years
+of age, I am far below this state of knowledge; so I said, "Well, my
+dear, and if you do, you're the person I have long wished to meet, for
+you can tell me why you are black." "Oh yes," she said, with a perfect
+beam of satisfaction, "one of my pa's pa's saw dem Patriark Noah wivout
+his clothes." I handed over to her a crimson silk necktie that I was
+wearing, and slunk away, humbled by superior knowledge. This, of course,
+was the result of white training direct on the African mind; the story
+which you will often be told to account for the blackness and whiteness
+of men by Africans who have not been in direct touch with European, but
+who have been in touch with Muhammedan, tradition--which in the main has
+the same Semitic source--is that when Cain killed Abel, he was horrified
+at himself, and terrified of God; and so he carried the body away from
+beside the altar where it lay, and carried it about for years trying to
+hide it, but not knowing how, growing white the while with the horror
+and the fear; until one day he saw a crow scratching a hole in the
+desert sand, and it struck him that if he made a hole in the sand and
+put the body in, he could hide it from God, so he did; but all his
+children were white, and from Cain came the white races, while Abel's
+children are black, as all men were before the first murder. The present
+way of contemplating different races, though expressed in finer
+language, is practically identical with these; not only the religious
+view, but the view of the suburban agnostic. The religious European
+cannot avoid regarding the races in a different and inferior culture
+state to his own as more deeply steeped in sin than himself, and the
+suburban agnostic regards them as "degraded" or "retarded" either by
+environment, or microbes, or both.
+
+I openly and honestly own I sincerely detest touching on this race
+question. For one thing, Science has not finished with it; for another,
+it belongs to a group of subjects of enormous magnitude, upon which I
+have no opinion, but merely feelings, and those of a nature which I am
+informed by superior people would barely be a credit to a cave man of
+the palaeolithic period. My feelings classify the world's inhabitants
+into Englishmen, by which I mean Teutons at large, Foreigners, and
+Blacks. Blacks I subdivide into two classes, English Blacks and Foreign
+Blacks. English Blacks are Africans. Foreign Blacks are Indians,
+Chinese, and the rest. Of course, everything that is not Teutonic is, to
+put it mildly, not up to what is; and equally, of course, I feel more at
+home with and hold in greater esteem the English Black: a great, strong
+Kruman, for example, with his front teeth filed, nothing much on but
+oil, half a dozen wives, and half a hundred jujus, is a sort of person
+whom I hold higher than any other form of native, let the other form
+dress in silk, satin, or cashmere, and make what pretty things he
+pleases. This is, of course, a general view; but I am often cornered
+for the detail view, whether I can reconcile my admiration for Africans
+with my statement that they are a different kind of human being to white
+men. Naturally I can, to my own satisfaction, just as I can admire an
+oak tree or a palm; but it is an uncommonly difficult thing to explain.
+All I can say is, that when I come back from a spell in Africa, the
+thing that makes me proud of being one of the English is not the manners
+or customs up here, certainly not the houses or the climate; but it is
+the thing embodied in a great railway engine. I once came home on a ship
+with an Englishman who had been in South West Africa for seven unbroken
+years; he was sane, and in his right mind. But no sooner did we get
+ashore at Liverpool, than he rushed at and threw his arms round a
+postman, to that official's embarrassment and surprise. Well, that is
+just how I feel about the first magnificent bit of machinery I come
+across: it is the manifestation of the superiority of my race.
+
+In philosophic moments I call superiority difference, from a feeling
+that it is not mine to judge the grade in these things. Careful
+scientific study has enforced on me, as it has on other students, the
+recognition that the African mind naturally approaches all things from a
+spiritual point of view. Low down in culture or high up, his mind works
+along the line that things happen because of the action of spirit upon
+spirit; it is an effort for him to think in terms of matter. We think
+along the line that things happen from the action of matter upon matter.
+If it were not for the Asiatic religion we have accepted, it is, I
+think, doubtful whether we should not be far more materialistic in
+thought-form than we are. This steady sticking to the material side of
+things, I think, has given our race its dominion over matter; the want
+of it has caused the African to be notably behind us in this, and far
+behind those Asiatic races who regard matter and spirit as separate in
+essence, a thing that is not in the mind either of the Englishman or the
+African. The Englishman is constrained by circumstances to perceive the
+existence of an extra material world. The African regards spirit and
+matter as undivided in kind, matter being only the extreme low form of
+spirit. There must be in the facts of the case behind things, something
+to account for the high perception of justice you will find in the
+African, combined with an inability to think out a pulley or a lever
+except under white tuition. Similarly, taking the true Negro States,
+which are in its equivalent to our Thirteenth century, it accounts for
+the higher level of morals in them than you would find in our Thirteenth
+century; and I fancy this want of interest and inferiority in
+materialism in the true Negro constitutes a reason why they will not
+come into our Nineteenth century, but, under proper guidance could
+attain to a Nineteenth century state of their own, which would show a
+proportionate advance. The simile of the influence of the culture of
+Rome, or rather let us say the culture of Greece spread by the force of
+Rome, upon Barbarian culture is one often used to justify the hope that
+English culture will have a similar effect on the African. This I do not
+think is so. It is true the culture of Rome lifted the barbarians from
+what one might call culture 9 to culture 17, but the Romans and the
+barbarians were both white races. But you see now a similar lift in
+culture in Africa by the influence of Mohammedan culture, for example in
+the Hausa States and again in the Western Soudan, where there is no
+fundamental race difference.
+
+In both English and Mohammedan Berber influence on the African there is
+another factor, apart from race difference; namely, that the two higher
+cultures are in a healthier state than that of Rome was at the time it
+mastered the barbarian mind; in both cases the higher culture has the
+superior war force.
+
+This seems to me simply to lay upon us English for the sake of our
+honour that we keep clean hands and a cool head, and be careful of
+Justice; to do this we must know what there is we wish to wipe out of
+the African, and what there is we wish to put in, and so we must not
+content ourselves by relying materially on our superior wealth and
+power, and morally on catch phrases. All we need look to is justice.
+Love for our fellow-man, pity, charity, mercy, we need not bother our
+heads about, so long as we are just. These things are of value only when
+they are used as means whereby we can attain justice. It is no use
+saying that it matters to a Teuton whether the other race he deals with
+is black, white, yellow--I can quite conceive that we should look down
+on a pea-green form of humanity if we had the chance. Naturally, I think
+this shows a very proper spirit. I should be the last to alter any of
+our Teutonic institutions to please any race; but when it comes to
+altering the institutions of another race, not for the reason even of
+pleasing ourselves but merely on the plea that we don't understand them,
+we are on different ground. If those ideas and institutions stand in the
+way of our universal right to go anywhere we choose and live as honest
+gentlemen, we have the power-right to alter them; but if they do not we
+must judge them from as near a standard of pure Justice as we can attain
+to.
+
+There are many who hold murder the most awful crime a man can commit,
+saying that thereby he destroys the image of his Maker; I hold that one
+of the most awful crimes one nation can commit on another is destroying
+the image of Justice, which in an institution is represented more truly
+to the people by whom the institution has been developed, than in any
+alien institution of Justice; it is a thing adapted to its environment.
+This form of murder by a nation I see being done in the destruction of
+what is good in the laws and institutions of native races. In some parts
+of the world, this murder, judged from certain reasonable standpoints,
+gives you an advantage; in West Africa, judged from any standpoint you
+choose to take, it gives you no advantage. By destroying native
+institutions there, you merely lower the moral of the African race, stop
+trade, and the culture advantages it brings both to England and West
+Africa. I again refer you to the object lesson before you now, the hut
+tax war in Sierra Leone. Awful accusations have been made against the
+officers and men who had the collecting of this tax. In the matter of
+the native soldiery, there is no doubt these accusations are only too
+well founded, but the root thing was the murder of institutions. The
+worst of the whole of this miserable affair is that a precisely similar
+miserable affair may occur at any time in any of our West African Crown
+Colonies--to-morrow, any day,--until you choose to remove the Crown
+Colony system of government.
+
+It has naturally been exceedingly hard for men who know the colony and
+the natives, with the experience of years in an unsentimental commercial
+way, to keep civil tongues in their heads while their interests were
+being wrecked by the action of the government; but whether or no the
+white officers were or were not brutal in their methods we must presume
+will be shown by Sir David Chalmers's report. I am unable to believe
+they were. But there is no manner of doubt that outrages have been
+committed, disgraceful to England, by the set of riff-raff rascal
+Blacks, who had been turned out by, or who had run away from, the
+hinterland tribes down into Sierra Leone Colony, and there been turned,
+by an ill-informed government, into police, and sent back with power
+into the very districts from which they had, shortly before, fled for
+their crimes. I entirely sympathise, therefore, with the rage of
+Liverpool and Manchester, and of every clear-minded common-sense
+Englishman who knows what a thing the hut tax war has been. And I want
+common-sense Englishmen to recognise that a system capable of such
+folly, and under which such a thing could happen in an English
+possession, is a system that must go. For a system that gets short of
+money, from its own want of business-like ability, and then against all
+expert advice goes and does the most unscientific thing conceivable
+under the circumstances, to get more, is a thing that is a disgrace to
+England. Yet the Sierra Leone Colony was capable of this folly, and the
+people in London were capable of saying to Liverpool and Manchester,
+that no difficulty was expected from the collection of the tax. If this
+is so in our oldest colony, what reason have we to believe that in the
+others we are safer? Any of them, in combination with London, may
+to-morrow go and do the most unscientific thing conceivable, and
+disgrace England, in order to procure more local revenue, and fail at
+that.
+
+The desire to develop our West African possessions is a worthy one in
+its way, but better leave it totally alone than attempt it with your
+present machinery; which the moment it is called upon to deal with the
+administration of the mass of the native inhabitants gives such a
+trouble. And remember it is not the only trouble your Crown colony
+system can give; it has a few glorious opportunities left of further
+supporting everything I have said about it, and more. But I will say no
+more. You have got a grand rich region there, populated by an uncommon
+fine sort of human being. You have been trying your present set of ideas
+on it for over 400 years; they have failed in a heart-breaking drizzling
+sort of way to perform any single solitary one of the things you say you
+want done there. West Africa to-day is just a quarry of paving-stones
+for Hell, and those stones were cemented in place with men's blood mixed
+with wasted gold.
+
+Prove it! you say. Prove it to yourself by going there--I don't mean to
+Blazes--but to West Africa.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [74] _Ashantee and Jaman_, Freeman (Constable and Co., 1898).
+
+   [75] _Western Africa_, Wilson, 1856, p. 116.
+
+   [76] _East Coast Etchings._ H. Clifford, Singapore, 1896.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+AN ALTERNATIVE PLAN
+
+     Wherein the student, having said divers harsh things of those who
+     destroy but do not reconstruct, recognises that, having attempted
+     destruction, it is but seemly to set forth some other way whereby
+     the West African colonies could be managed.
+
+
+West Africa, I own, is a make of country difficult for a power with
+a different kind of culture, climate and set of institutions, and
+so on, to manage from Europe satisfactorily. But, as things go,
+I venture to think it presents no especial difficulty; that all the
+difficulties that exist in this matter are difficulties arising from
+misunderstandings,--things removable, not things of essence, barring
+only fever.
+
+Also I feel convinced that no one of our English governmental methods at
+present existing is suitable for its administration. It is no use
+saying, Look at our Indian system, why not just introduce that into West
+Africa? I have the greatest admiration for our Indian system; it is the
+right thing in the right place, thanks to its having healthily grown up,
+fostered by experts, military and civil. Nevertheless it would not do
+for West Africa to-day. What we want there is the sowing of a similar
+system, not the transplanting of the Indian in its perfect form, for
+that is to-day for West Africa infinitely too expensive. If a man
+before his fortune is made spends a fortune, he ends badly; if he
+measures his expenditure with his income and develops his opportunities,
+he ends as a millionaire; and we must never forget that great dictum
+that the State is the perfection of the individual man, and should mould
+our politics accordingly.
+
+I hold it to be a sound and healthy idea of ours that our possessions
+over-sea should pay their own way, and I therefore distrust the
+cucumber-frame form of financial politics that at present holds the
+field in West African affairs. It has been the pride and boast of the
+West African colonies that they have paid their way; let it remain so.
+It seems to me unsound that our colonies there should receive loans
+wherewith to carry on; for, for one thing, it makes them carry on more
+than is good for them, and merely means a piling up of debt; and, for
+another, it gives West Africa the notion that it is England's business
+to support her, which to my mind it distinctly is not; for if we wanted
+a lapdog set of colonies we could get healthier ones elsewhere.
+Moreover, it pauperises instead of fostering the proper pride, without
+which nothing can flourish.
+
+Apart from our Indian system, we have, for governing those regions where
+our race cannot locally produce a sufficient population of its own to
+take the reins of government out of the hands of officialdom in England,
+only two other systems, namely, the Chartered Company and the Crown
+Colony. I beg to urge that it is high time we had a third system.
+Concerning the Crown Colony system for Africa, I have spoken as
+tolerantly as I believe it is possible for any one acquainted with its
+working in West Africa to speak. If I were to say any more I might say
+something uncivil, which, of course, I do not wish to do. Concerning
+the Chartered Company system, I need only remark that there are two
+distinct breeds of Chartered Companies--the one whose attention is
+turned to the trade, the other whose attention is turned to the lands
+over which its charter gives it dominion. The first kind is represented
+in Africa by the Royal Niger Company, the second by the South African.
+
+The second form of Chartered Company, that interested in land, we have
+not in West Africa under the name of a Company; but the present Crown
+Colony system represents it, and I feel certain that whatever good the
+South African Company may have done for the empire in South Africa, it
+has done an immense amount of harm in Western Africa. For some, to me
+unknown, reason the South African Company has found favour in the sight
+of officialdom in London; and, fascinated by its success in South
+Africa, yet recognising its drawbacks, officialdom has attempted to
+introduce what they regard as best in the South African system into West
+Africa. I do not think any student can avoid coming to the conclusion
+that the policy which is now driving the Crown Colonies in West Africa
+is one and the same with that of Mr. Rhodes. I do not mean that Mr.
+Rhodes, had he had the handling of West Africa, would himself have used
+this form of policy. He formulated it for South Africa; but, with his
+careful study of such things as local needs, he would have formulated
+another form for West Africa, which is a totally different region.
+
+To take only two of the differences, and state them brutally. First, in
+West Africa the most valuable asset you have is the native: the more
+heavily the district there is populated with Africans, and the more
+prosperous those natives are, the better for you; for it means more
+trade. All the gold, ivory, oil, rubber, and timber in West Africa are
+useless to you without the African to work them; you can get no other
+race that can replace him, and work them; the thing has now been tried,
+and it has failed. Whereas in South Africa the converse is true: you can
+do without the African there, you can replace him with pretty nearly any
+other kind of man you like, or do the work yourself. The second
+difference is, that the land in South Africa is worth your having, you
+can go and domesticate on it; whereas in West Africa you cannot. A
+failure to recognise these differences is at the root of our present
+ill-judged West African policy, outside the Royal Niger Company's
+domain; by introducing South African methods we are trying to get what
+is of no use to us, the _Landes Hoheit_, and thereby devastating what is
+of use to us, the trade.
+
+However, I will not detain you over this interesting question of
+Chartered Company government. I merely wish to draw your attention to
+the two breeds, the Land Company, and the Trade Company; and to urge
+that they are things to be applied in their respective proper
+environments. I can honestly assure you, I know every blessed, single,
+mortal thing that can be said against the trade form which I admire, for
+I have lived under a hail of this sort of information since I was
+discovered by my big juju, Liverpool, to be such an admirer of what I
+called a co-ordinate system of government and trade, and Liverpool
+called divers things.
+
+I shall go to my grave believing that Liverpool had reasons for
+attacking the Company, but neglected fundamental facts in its
+controversy with the Trade Company, which, to it, was "a little more
+than kith, and less than kind." The Royal Niger Company has
+demonstrated its adaptation to its environment. Without any forced
+labour, without any direct taxation, it has paid. I venture to think,
+though I have no doubt it would severely hurt the feelings of the
+R.N.C., that we may regard the Royal Niger Company as representing the
+perfected system of native government in West Africa plus English
+courage and activity. I believe that on this foundation has been built
+its success. For say what you like, if the Royal Niger had not got on
+well with the natives in its territories--dealt cleanly, honestly,
+rationally with them--it would never have extended its influence in the
+grand way it has, represented only by a mere handful of white men, in
+what is, as far as we know, the most densely populated region with the
+highest and most organised form of native power in all tropical Africa.
+Had it not been to the natives it ruled a just, honourable, and
+desirable form of government, it would long ago have been stamped out by
+them, or would have been compelled to call in England's armed support to
+maintain it, as the Crown Colony system has been compelled to do in
+Sierra Leone and on the Gold Coast. It has not had to call in Imperial
+assistance, and it has paid its shareholders--a sound, healthy conduct;
+but, nevertheless, remember that all the great debt of gratitude you and
+every one of the English owe the Royal Niger Company for defending the
+honour of England against Continental enterprise, for maintaining the
+honour of England in the eyes of the native races with whom it had made
+treaties, you do not owe to the Chartered Company _system_, but to Sir
+George Goldie, the man who had to use it because it was the _best_
+existing system available for such a region. You have too much sense to
+give all the honour to Lord Kitchener of Khartoum's sword, though a
+sword is an excellent thing. I trust, therefore, you have too much sense
+to give all honour to the Chartered Company, even when it is a trading
+company. Trade is an excellent thing, but, in the case of the Royal
+Niger, this very factor, trade, restricts the man who uses the Chartered
+Company to a set of white men and a set of black. Therefore, never can I
+feel that either Liverpool or the Brass men have profited by the R.N.C.
+as they would have done if there had been a better system available for
+dealing with what Mr. St. Loe Strachey delicately calls "a dark-skinned
+population" with an insufficient local white population at hand.
+Briefly, I should say that the Chartered Company system keeps its "ain
+fish-guts for its ain sea-maws" too much. Therefore now, when, like many
+before me who have laboured strenuously to reform, I have given up the
+idea that reformation is possible for the individual on whom they have
+expended their powers, and have decided that there are some people whom
+you can only reform with a gun, I will start reforming myself, and say
+the Chartered Company system is not good enough, taken all round as
+things are, for West Africa for these reasons.
+
+First, a Chartered Company consists of a band of merchants, ruling
+through, and by, a great man. If that great man who expands the
+influence and power of the Company lives long enough to establish a form
+of policy, well and good. I have sufficient trust in the common sense of
+a band of English merchants, provided their interest is common, to
+believe they will adhere to the policy; but suppose he does not, or
+suppose you do not start with a good man, you will merely have a mess,
+as has been demonstrated by the perpetual failures of our French
+friends' Chartered Companies. By the way, I may remark that although
+France is no great admirer of the chartered system with us, she is
+devoted to it for herself, sprinkling all her West African possessions
+with them freely, only unfortunately, as their names are usually far
+longer than their banking accounts, they do not grow conspicuous; even
+apart from these private and subsidised Chartered Companies in French
+possessions, France follows the chartered system imperially in West
+Africa by keeping out non-French trade with differential tariffs, and so
+on. But, after all, in this matter she is no worse than English critics
+of the Royal Niger; and it is a common trait of all West African
+palavers that those who criticise are amply well provided themselves
+with the very faults they find so repulsive in others--it's the climate.
+
+Secondly, the Chartered Company represents English trade interests in
+sections, instead of completely; English honour, common sense, military
+ability, and so on, the Royal Niger under Sir George Goldie has
+represented more perfectly than these things have ever been represented
+in West--or, I may safely say, Africa at large; but the trade interests
+of England it has only represented partially, or in other words, it has
+only represented the trade interests of its shareholders and the natives
+it has made treaties with, and what we want is something that will
+represent our trade interests there completely. Therefore, I do not
+advocate it as the general system for West Africa, for under another
+sort of man it might mean merely a more rapid crash than we are in for
+with the Crown Colony system. To my dying day I shall honour that great
+Trade Company, the Royal Niger, for representing England, that is,
+England properly so-called, to the world at large, during one of the
+darkest ages we have ever had since Charles II.; and, I believe that it,
+with the Committee of Merchants who held the Gold Coast for England
+after the battle of Katamansu, when her officials would have abandoned
+alike the Gold Coast and her honour in West Africa, will stand out in
+our history as grand things, but yet I say we want another system.
+
+"Du binst der Geist der stets verneint!" you ejaculate. You do not like
+Crown Colonies. You won't grovel to Chartered Companies, however good.
+You prove, on your own showing, that there is not in West Africa a
+sufficiently large, or a sufficiently long resident, local English
+population--what with their constantly leaving for home or for the
+cemetery--to form an independent colony. What else remains?
+
+Well, I humbly beg to say that there is another system--a system that
+pays in all round peace and prosperity--a system whereby a region with a
+native population--a lively one in a Thirteenth century culture
+state--of about 30,000,000, is ruled. The total value of exports from
+the regions I refer to averages L14,000,000, out of a country of very
+much the same make as West Africa; the floating capital in its trade is
+some L25,000,000; its actual land area is 562,540 square miles; yet its
+trade with its European country amounts, nevertheless, to at least one
+half of that carried on between India and England. If you apply the
+system that has built this thing up, practically since 1830, to West
+Africa, you will not get the above figures out in forty years; but you
+will get at least two-thirds of them; and that would be a grand rise on
+your present West African figures, and in time you could surpass these
+figures, for West Africa is far larger, and far nearer European markets,
+and you have the advantage of superior shipping.
+
+The region I am citing is not so unhealthy for whites as West Africa.
+Still, it has a stiff death-rate of its own; even nowadays, when it has
+pulled that death-rate down by Science--a thing, I may remark, you never
+trouble your head about in West Africa, or think worthy of your serious
+attention.
+
+I will not insult your knowledge by telling you where this system is
+working to-day, or who works it, and all that. The same consideration
+also bars me from applying for a patent for this system; for although I
+lay it before you altered to what I think suitable for West Africa, the
+main lines of the system remain. The only thing I confess that makes me
+shaky about its being applied to West Africa is, that this system
+requires and must have experts black and white to work it, both at home
+in England and out in West Africa. Still, you have a sufficient supply
+of such experts, if only you would not leave things so largely in the
+hands of clerks and amateurs; who, with the assistance of faddists and
+renegade Africans, break up the native true Negro culture state, leaving
+you little sound stuff to work on in the regions now under the Crown
+Colony system.
+
+Before I proceed to sketch the skeleton of the other system, I must lay
+before you briefly the present political state of West Africa in the
+words of the greatest living expert on the subject, as they are given in
+a remarkable article in the _Edinburgh Review_ for October, 1898.
+
+"The weighty utterance of Sir George Goldie should never be forgotten,
+'Central African races and tribes have, broadly speaking, no sentiment
+of patriotism as understood in Europe.' There is, therefore, little
+difficulty in inducing them to accept what German jurisconsults term
+'Ober Hoheit,' which corresponds with our interpretation of our vague
+term 'Protectorate.' But when complete sovereignty or 'Landes Hoheit,'
+is conceded, they invariably stipulate that their local customs and
+systems of government shall be respected. On this point they are,
+perhaps, more tenacious than most subject races with whom the British
+Empire has had to deal; while their views and ideas of life are
+extremely difficult for an Englishman to understand. It is therefore
+certain that even an imperfect and tyrannical native African
+administration, if its extreme excesses were controlled by European
+supervision, would be in the early stages productive of far less
+discomfort to its subjects than well-intentioned but ill-directed
+efforts of European magistrates, often young and headstrong, and not
+invariably gifted with sympathy and introspective powers. If the welfare
+of the native races is to be considered, if dangerous revolts are to be
+obviated, the general policy of ruling on African principles through
+native rulers must be followed for the present. Yet it is desirable that
+considerable districts in suitable localities should be administered on
+European principles by European officials, partly to serve as types to
+which the native governments may gradually approximate, but principally
+as cities of refuge in which individuals of more advanced views may find
+a living if native government presses unduly upon them, just as in
+Europe of the Middle Ages men whose love of freedom found the iron-bound
+system of feudalism intolerable, sought eagerly the comparative liberty
+of cities."[77]
+
+There are a good many points in the above classic passage on which I
+would fain become diffuse, but I forbear; merely begging you to note
+carefully the wording of that part concerning government by natives
+ruling on African principles, because here is a pitfall for the hasty.
+You will be told that this is the present policy in Crown Colonies--but
+it is not. What they are doing is ruling on European principles through
+natives, which is a horse of another colour entirely and makes it hot
+work for the unfortunate native catspaw chief, and so all round
+unsatisfactory that no really self-respecting native chief will take it
+on.
+
+Well, to return to that other system: what it has got to do is to unite
+English interests--administrative, commercial and educational--into one
+solid whole, and combine these with native interests; briefly, to be a
+system where the Englishman and the African co-operate together for
+their mutual benefit and advancement, and therefore it must be a
+representative system, and one of those groups of representative systems
+which form the British Empire.
+
+For reasons I need not discuss here it must be a duplicate system, with
+an English and an African side, these two united and responsible to the
+English Crown, but both having as great a share of individual freedom in
+Africa as possible. By and by the necessity for the duplicate system may
+disappear, but at present it is necessary.
+
+I will take the English side first. There should be in England an
+African Council, in whose hands is the power of voting supplies and of
+appointing the Governor-General, subject to the approval of the Crown,
+and to whom firms trading in Africa should be answerable for the actions
+of their representatives. This council should be of nominated members,
+from the Chambers of Commerce of Liverpool, Manchester, London, Bristol,
+and Glasgow. Of course, they should not be paid members. This council
+would occupy a similar position in West African administration to that
+which the House of Commons occupies in English.
+
+Under this Grand Council there should be two sub-councils reporting to
+it, one a joint committee of English lawyers and medical men, the other
+a committee of the native chiefs. Neither of these councils should be
+paid, but sufficient should be granted them to pay their working
+expenses. The members of these sub-councils of the Grand Council should
+be appointed--the medical and legal committee by say, the Lord
+Chancellor and the College of Physicians respectively, and the committee
+of African chiefs by the chiefs in West Africa.
+
+I make no pretence at believing that either of these sub-councils for
+the first few years of their existence will be dove-cots--lawyers and
+doctors will always fight each other: but the lawyers will hold the
+doctors in and _vice versa_, and the common sense of the Grand Council
+will hold them both well down to practical politics. With the council of
+chiefs there will probably be less trouble, and this council will be an
+ambassador to the white government at headquarters capable of
+representing to it native opinion and native requirements.
+
+Representing the Grand Council and nominated by it, subject to the
+approval of the Crown, as represented by the Chief Secretary for the
+Colonies and the Privy Council, there must be one Governor-General for
+West Africa: he must be supreme commander of the land and sea forces,
+with the right of declaring peace and war, and concluding treaties with
+the native chiefs; he must be a proved expert in West African affairs;
+he must be paid, say, L5,000 a year; he must spend six months on the
+Coast on a tour of inspection, during which he must be accessible alike
+to the European and native. He may, if he sees fit, spend more than six
+months out there; but it is not advisable he should reside there
+permanently, for if he does so, he will assuredly get out of touch with
+the Grand Council, of which he should _ex officio_ be chairman or
+president. This grand council with its sub-councils is all that is
+required in England for the government of West Africa. It is not, as you
+see, an expensive system _per se_: with its power to raise supplies, it
+could vote itself sufficient to carry on its out-of-pocket expenses in
+the matter of clerks and goods inspectors. The connecting link between
+it and Africa is the Governor-General; between it and England, the Chief
+Secretary for the Colonies--not the Colonial, or Foreign, or any other
+existing Office: things it should be equal with, not subject to.
+
+Out in Africa, the Governor-General should be the representative of the
+English _raj_--the Ober Hoheit of England--and the head of the system of
+Landes Hoheit, represented by the African chiefs; in him the two must
+join. Under his control, on the European side, must be the few European
+officials required to administer the country locally. These must be
+carefully picked, experienced men, provided with sufficient power to
+enforce their rule with promptitude when it comes to details; but the
+policy of the Ober Hoheit should be the policy of the Governor and Grand
+Council, not of the individual official.
+
+Immediately in grade under the Governor-General should come a set of
+district commissioners or governors, one for each of the present
+colonies. These men should be the resident representatives of the
+Governor-General, and responsible to him for the affairs, trade and
+political, of their districts. These district commissioners should be
+paid L2,000 a year each, and have a term of residence on the Coast of
+twelve months, with six months' furlough at home on half pay, the other
+half of the pay going to the men who represent them during their absence
+at home--the senior sub-commissioners of their districts.[78]
+
+The next grade are the sub-commissioners. These are only required in the
+districts now termed Protectorates; the Europeanised coast towns to be
+under a different system I will sketch later. Well, these Protectorate
+districts should be divided up among sub-commissioners, who should each
+reside in his allotted district. They should be responsible directly to
+the district commissioner, and they should represent to him constantly
+the chiefs' council of the sub-district and the trade, and on the other
+hand represent trade and the Ober Hoheit things to the native chiefs.
+These men, therefore, will be the backbone of the system, and primarily
+on them will depend its success; so they must be expert men--well
+acquainted with the native culture state, and with the trade. Each of
+these sub-commissioners should have in his district, his own town, from
+which he should frequently make tours of inspection round his district
+at large; but this town should be what Sir George Goldie calls "a town
+of refuge." English law should rule in it absolutely, administered by an
+official, one of the class of men approved by the legal sub-council of
+the Grand Council. The sub-commissioner should also have in his town a
+medical staff of three men, nominated by the medical side of the
+sub-council of the Grand Council. These three (chief medical, assistant
+medical, and dispenser) should have a hospital provided, where they can
+carry on their work properly. Also in this town should be the military
+force sufficient to enforce rule in the district--either to go and
+prevent one chief bagging another chiefs belongings, or to assist a
+chief in a domestic crisis. It is impossible to say how large a military
+staff a sub-commissioner would require; some districts would require no
+more than fifty soldiers, while another might require 200. Details of
+this kind the Governor-General must decide; but whatever size this force
+may be, it should be composed of troops under efficient military
+control. I believe the West Indian troops to be the best for this
+service; but here again you will meet, if you take the trouble to
+inquire of people who ought to know, the greatest haziness of mind
+combined with an enormous difference of opinion. Some will tell you that
+the West Indians are no good, that they are cowardly and unfit for bush
+work, and require as many carriers as a white regiment. Others say the
+opposite, and hold forth on the evil of using raw savages as troops in
+such a country, and placing men who have been cast out on account of
+crime into positions of power and authority in the very districts
+wherein all the power they should have by rights would be to swing at
+the end of a rope.
+
+There is much to be said on both sides; the only thing I will say is
+that military affairs in West Africa are in much the same scrappy mess
+as civil, and require reorganisation. There is, no doubt, excellent
+fighting material in many West African tribes, and turbulent native
+spirits are all the better for military organisation and discipline; it
+is certain, however, that such men should be deported from districts
+wherein they have private scores to settle, and used elsewhere after
+they have been disciplined. If it were possible for the native regiments
+now being drilled in the hinterlands of our colonies out there to be
+used actively to guard our people from foreign aggression, there would
+be a good reason for having them, but recent events have demonstrated,
+in the Gold Coast hinterland for example, that they cannot, according to
+Government notions, be so employed. Therefore they are worse than
+useless, for they merely add to the unjustifiable aggressions on the
+native residents by aggressions of their own; such things as native
+police under the white Government side for the districts of the
+protectorate should not exist. They are a sort of wild fowl who will get
+you and themselves into more rows than they will ever get any one out
+of, and they will squeeze you and the native population into the
+bargain. The chiefs of the district should be responsible for the
+internal administration of justice among their own people. If a chief
+fails in this he should be removed, with the assistance of the military
+force at the command of the sub-commissioner. When, in fact, a chief is
+found to be going astray, the fact should be promptly brought before the
+council of chiefs; a definite short time, say a month, should be
+allowed them to bring him to his bearings, and if at the expiration of
+this time they fail to do so, without any further delay the
+sub-commissioner should step in. In a very short time the chiefs'
+council would see the advisability of keeping this from happening, and
+also see that it can only be prevented by enforcing good government
+among themselves.
+
+Well, this West Indian guard should of course be under its proper
+military officers, and at the disposal of the sub-commissioner, and well
+installed in barracks, and made generally as happy as circumstances will
+permit.
+
+Then again in each town which forms the centre of a sub-commissioner's
+district there should be representatives of any firms who may wish to
+trade there. They can each have their separate factories, or form a
+local association for working the trade of the district as it pleases
+them. I think it would be advisable that in each of these towns away in
+the interior there should be a warehouse, whereto all goods coming up
+for the separate trading firms should be delivered, and wherein all
+exports ready for transport to the coast should be lodged, and the
+figures concerning these things ascertained. This should be the business
+of the sub-commissioner's secretary, and he can be aided in it by a
+black clerk. But it would not be a custom-house, because customs, like
+native regiments, do not exist out there under this system.
+
+If any of the firms like to establish sub-factories in the district
+outside the town, they should have every facility impartially afforded
+them to do so. Any attack made on them by the natives should be promptly
+revenged, but outside the town in all trade matters the native law
+should rule under the administration of the local chief, with a power
+(in important cases--say, over L20 involved) of appeal to the chiefs'
+council, and from that, if need be to the sub-commissioner.
+
+Now in this town, acting with and directing the council of chiefs, you
+will have all that the hinterland districts in West Africa at present
+require for their administration and development, except, you will say,
+religion and education. As for the first, as represented by the
+missions, I think they will do best away from the rest, as I will
+presently attempt to explain. As for education, that will be in their
+hands too, and with them. The missionary stations about the district,
+however, will be under the direct control and protection of the
+sub-commissioner and his town. No gaol will be required there or
+elsewhere in West Africa; the sort of thing a gaol represents is better
+represented by a halter and convict labour gang. So much, as old Peter
+Heylin would say, for the sub-commission.
+
+The district commissioner for a colony and its hinterland should have a
+residence at one of the chief towns on the coast, making tours round to
+his sub-commissioners as occasion requires; and he should always be
+accessible both to his sub-commissioners and to the district chiefs. At
+his head town should be the headquarters of the military force required
+by his colony, and the headquarters of the labour service.
+
+We will now turn to the administration of the coast towns, places that
+have been long in our possession and have a sufficient white and
+Europeanised African population to justify us in regarding them as
+English possessions in the Landes Hoheit sense. These towns should be
+governed by municipality, and should be under English law, having
+accredited magistrates approved of by the Grand Council and paid, not
+by the municipalities, but by the Grand Council.
+
+Each municipality should occupy in the system an identical position to
+that occupied by the sub-commissioner in his town, and communicate with
+the district commissioner direct, receive all goods, and make returns of
+them to him. They should each have and be responsible for hospitals and
+schools within the town, and for its police, lighting, and sanitary
+affairs. Each municipality should be paid by the Government the same pay
+as a sub-commissioner, L1,000 a year. They should get their extra
+resources from a charge on the trade of the town at a fixed rate made by
+the Grand Council for all municipalities under the system.
+
+This system would do away with the division of our possessions, at
+present so misleading and vexatious and unnecessary, into Colonies and
+Protectorates, and substitute for that division the just division into
+regions under our Landes Ober Hoheit (municipalities), and those under
+our Ober Hoheit--(sub-commissioners' districts). Both alike would be
+under the Governor-General as representing the Grand Council.
+
+There still remains one important new development in our West African
+methods--the organisation of native labour. The institution of a regular
+and reliable labour supply seems to me one of the most vital things for
+the progress of West Africa. There is undoubtedly in West Africa an
+enormous supply of labour, and that the true negro can work and work
+well the Krumen have amply demonstrated. All that is required is method
+and organisation. This you could easily supply. If, for example, you
+were to direct those energies of yours which are now employed in raising
+native regiments in the hinterland to raising and regulating a native
+labour army, it would be better. A native regiment of soldiers is a
+thing you do not want in any hinterland district, whereas the native
+regiment of labourers is a thing you do want very badly.
+
+There is also in this connection another fact: while, under the present
+state of affairs, one colony will be choked with men anxious for work,
+and another colony will be starving for labour, if all the English
+colonies were united under one system, and a regular labour department
+were instituted, this would be obviated.
+
+There exist in West Africa two sources of labour supply, but I think the
+Labour Department had better deal with only one of them--the free paid
+labour--the other, the convict, would be better placed under the kind
+care of the municipalities.
+
+All persons convicted of offences other than capital, should be, at the
+discretion of the magistrates, sentenced to a fine, or so many weeks'
+labour. The whole of this labour should be devoted to the Public Works
+Department of the Municipality, not of the State, and above all, should
+not be sent away up into the hinterland, where there will be no one to
+look after it as convict labour requires. Quite apart from this, there
+should be the State Labour Department, whose jurisdiction would extend
+over both colony and hinterland, and whose white officials should be a
+distinct line in the service; one or more of these officials should be
+in every hinterland sub-commissioner's town. They would be recruiters
+and drillers of labourers, just as you now have recruiters and drillers
+of soldiers there; and a requisition should be made to all the chiefs,
+to draft into this labour army any person, under their rule, who might
+be anxious to serve as a labourer; and they should also have power to
+enrol any labour volunteer recruits that might come into the town,
+provided the chiefs could not show a satisfactory reason against their
+so doing. This labour army should be divided up into suitably sized
+gangs, with a head man elected by his gang, and be employed in the
+transport work required by the Government, or let out by the Government
+to private individuals requiring labour within the district, or drafted
+to other English colonies on the Coast, if occasion required, to do
+certain jobs--I do not say for certain spaces of time, because piecework
+is the best system for West Africa. An attempt should be made gradually
+to induce the hinterland chiefs to adopt the Kru social system, wherein
+every man serves so many years as a labourer, then, about the age of
+thirty, joins the army and becomes a compound soldier-policeman, ending
+up in honour and glory as a local magistrate. But it must be remembered
+that domestic slavery is not a great institution among the Kru tribes,
+as it is amongst the hinterland tribes in our colonies; the Kru system
+could not, therefore, be immediately introduced.
+
+We now come to the question of where the revenue is to come from to
+support this system. There is no difficulty about that in itself; the
+difficulty comes in in the method to be employed in its collection. When
+one has a chartered trading company it is, of course, a simple matter;
+when you have a Crown Colony it is done by means of the custom-house
+system. The alternative system, however, is not a chartered company;
+under it individual firms, so long as they can show sufficient capital
+and good faith, would work the details of their trade out there as
+freely and privately as in England. I think every effort should be made
+to do away in West Africa with the custom-house system as it exists in
+English Crown Colonies. In Cameroon it is better, but in our Crown
+Colonies and also in the Niger Coast Protectorate it is ruinous to the
+tempers of ship masters and shippers, and the cause of a great waste of
+time--decidedly one of the main causes of the undue length of voyages to
+and from the Coast.
+
+It seems to me that the revenue of our West African possessions must be
+a charge on the trade; and that this charge should, as much as possible,
+be collected in Europe from the shippers instead of from their
+representatives on the Coast. If I were king in Babylon, I would make
+all the trade to West Africa pass through Liverpool, and pay its customs
+there to a custom-house of the Grand Council, or through the English
+ports of the other chambers represented on the Grand Council--each
+chamber being responsible for the trade of its port. I am aware that
+this would cause difficulty with the increasing continental trade; but
+this would be obviated by affiliating Hamburg and Havre to the Council
+and giving into their hands the collections of the dues at those ports.
+The Grand Council should fix annually the amount of the trade tax, and
+it should have at its disposal for this matter the figures sent home by
+the separate district commissioners in West Africa. The sub-commissioner
+of a district should know the amount of trade his district was doing,
+and be paid a commission on it to stimulate his interest. If the goods
+used in his district were delivered at one warehouse in his town, he
+would have little difficulty in getting the figures, which he should
+pass on to the district commissioner, who should forward them to the
+Grand Council with report in duplicate to the Governor-General, so that
+that officer might keep his finger on the pulse of the prosperity of
+each district; similarly, the municipalities should report to him the
+trade done in the towns under their control.
+
+In addition, the Government, that is to say, the Grand Council, should
+take over the monopoly of the tobacco import and the timber export. By
+using tobacco in the same way as European governments use coinage, an
+immense revenue could be very cheaply obtained. The Grand Council should
+sell the tobacco to the individual traders who work the West African
+markets, allowing no other tobacco to be used in the trade; this revenue
+also could be collected in Europe.
+
+The timber industry should, I think, be under governmental control, both
+for the sake of providing the Government with revenue and for the sake
+of protecting the forests from destruction in those districts where
+forest destruction is a danger to the common weal, by weakening the
+forest barriers against the Sahara.
+
+The return that the Government should make for these monopolies to the
+independent trader should be, among other things, transport. In the
+course of a few years the Government would have in hand a sufficient
+surplus to build a pier across the Gold Coast surf. It is possible to
+build piers across the West Coast surf, for the French have done it. I
+would not advocate one great and mighty pier, that ocean-going steamers
+could go alongside, for all the Gold Coast ports, but a set of
+=T=-headed piers where surf boats or lighters could discharge, and the
+employment of stout steam tugs to tow surf boats and lighters to and fro
+between the lighters and the pier.
+
+Then again, every mile of available waterway inland should be utilised,
+and patrolled by Government cargo boats of the lawn-mower or flat-iron
+brand, as the Chargeurs-Reunis are subsidised to patrol the Ogowe. On
+the Gold Coast you have the Volta and the Ancobra available for this; in
+Sierra Leone and Lagos you have many waterways penetrating inland.
+
+Land transport should also be in the hands of the Government, and goods
+delivered free of extra charge at the towns of the sub-commissioners;
+this could be done by the Labour Department. When sufficient surplus
+revenue was in hand, light railways on the French system should be
+built, similarly delivering, free of freight, the goods belonging to the
+inland registered traders, but charging freight for passengers and local
+goods traffic. A telegraph and postal service should also be another
+source of revenue, if thrown open at a low charge to the general public.
+If there is a telegraph office in West Africa, where telegrams can be
+sent at a reasonable rate, the general public will throw away a lot of
+money on it in a fiscally fascinating way.
+
+These various sources of revenue will place in the hands of the Grand
+Council a sufficient revenue, and if that revenue is expended by them in
+developing methods of transport, I am confident that the trade of the
+district, in the hands of the private firms, will healthily expand,
+alike rapidly and continuously, and thereby supply more revenue, which,
+expended with equal wisdom, will again increase the trade and prosperity
+of the region, and make West Africa into a truly great possession.
+
+The things I depend on for the development of West Africa, are mainly
+two. First, the sub-commissioner's town, acting in fellowship with the
+chiefs' council of the district. The example of that town will stimulate
+the best of the chiefs to emulation; it will by every self-respecting
+chief, be regarded as stylish to have clean wide streets and shops, a
+telegraph and post-office, and things like that. Seeing that his elder
+brother, the sub-commissioner, has a line of telegraph connecting him
+with the district commission town, he will want a line of telegraph too.
+By all means let him have it; let him have the electric light and a
+telephone, if he feels he wants it, and will pay for it; but don't force
+these things, let them come, natural like. The great thing, however, in
+the sub-commissioner's town is that it should be so ruled and governed
+that it does not become a thing like our Coast towns now, sink-holes of
+moral iniquity, that stink in the nose of a respectable African--things
+he hates to see his sons and daughters and people go down into.
+
+Secondly, I depend on municipal Government on the lines I have laid down
+for the Coast towns. The Government of these municipalities would be in
+the hands of the representatives of the trading firms, and the more
+important native traders--people, as I hold, perfectly capable of
+dealing with affairs, and having a community of interests.
+
+The great difficulty in arranging any system for the government of West
+Africa lies not in the true difficulties this region presents, but in
+the fictitious difficulties that are the growth of years of mutual
+misunderstanding and misrepresentation. That great mass of mutual
+distrust, so that to-day down there white man distrusts white man and
+black, black man distrusts black man and white, may seem on a
+superficial review to be justified. But if you go deeper you will find
+that this distrust is the mere product of folly and ignorance, and is
+therefore removable.
+
+The great practical difficulty lies in arranging a system whereby the
+white trader can work on every legitimate line absolutely free from
+governmental hindrance. I have too great a respect for the West Coast
+traders to publish any criticism on them. I hold that the competition
+among them is too severe for them to face the present state of West
+Africa and prosper as men should who run so great a risk of early death
+as the West Coast trader runs. I should like to know who profits by
+their internecine war; I think no one but the native buyers of their
+goods. Again now, under the present Crown Colony system, the traders,
+knowing they are the people who have paid for the Government for years,
+who have given it the money it lives on, naturally ask for something
+back in the way of local improvements. The Government has now no money
+to carry out these improvements, unless it borrows it. The Government as
+at present existing must necessarily waste that borrowed money just as
+it has wasted the money the traders have paid it; therefore the
+consequences of improvements under the present system must be debt,
+which the traders must pay in the end. I would therefore urge the
+traders to abandon a policy of demanding improvements and protection in
+their trade relationships with the natives, such as ordinances against
+adulteration of produce, &c., and to realise that by gaining these
+things they are but enslaving themselves in the future. Let them rather
+adopt the policy of altering the form of government before they proceed
+to urge further governmental expenditure.
+
+If the traders require a dry-nurse system, let them formulate one in
+place of the one sketched above. I do not, however, think they want
+anything of the kind, unless they are indeed degenerate; but, if they
+do, I beg them to bear in mind that you cannot have an Alexandra
+feeding bottle and a latch key; they must choose one or the other. At
+present, the Crown Colony system gives neither. Under it the trader is
+treated like a child, a neglected child, one of those interesting but
+unfortunate children who have to support an elderly relative, who would
+be all the better for a cheap funeral.
+
+Upon the missionary and educational side of the system I have advocated
+I need not enlarge. Just as trade should go on under it free, so should
+mission effort; there should be no governmental forcing of either, but
+it should be steadily borne in mind that the regeneration of the
+considerable amount of broken up stuff which exists in the Coast town
+regions--the Africans who have lost their old culture and their old
+Fetish regulation or conduct without being completely Europeanised--is a
+work that can only be effected by the missionary, and therefore in the
+hands of the missions should be placed the whole education department,
+with the one demand on it from the Government that in their schools
+every scholar should have the opportunity of acquiring a sound education
+in the rudiments of English reading, writing and arithmetic. Give him
+this knowledge, and your brilliant young African has demonstrated that
+he can rise to any examination such as an European university offers
+him. Under the system I advocate there need be no limitation as to
+colour in the officials employed in the municipalities. In the
+sub-commissioners' towns the head officials must be Englishmen, but
+among the regions under the Landes Hoheit in the hinterland, Africans
+educated as doctors or as traders could have grand careers provided they
+did honest work.
+
+The consideration of the African side of this system of administration
+is a thing into which--after all the long recitation I have inflicted on
+you concerning African religion and law--I am not justified in plunging
+here. I will merely, therefore, lay before you a statement of African
+Common Law, so that you may see the African principle through which the
+Landes Hoheit--the government of Africa by Africans--would work. I am
+confident that the thing--the African principle--is so sound that it
+could work; there is no need for us to put our Commerce under it, any
+more than there is need that we should attempt to put the African's
+private property under our own law; but a healthy Commerce and a healthy
+Law should co-operate, and can co-operate.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [77] Preface by Sir George Goldie to Vandeleur's _Campaigning on the
+   Upper Nile and Niger_, 1898.
+
+   [78] The time which a man ought to be expected to remain in West Africa
+   is difficult to determine--representatives of trading firms are expected
+   to remain out two years, and the mortality among them is certainly no
+   higher than among the officials with their twelve months' service. It is
+   contended by the commercial party that it takes a man several months
+   after returning from furlough to get into working order again, that
+   under the twelve months' system no sooner has he done this than he is
+   off on furlough again, in short that the system is foolish and wasteful
+   in the extreme. On the other hand the advocates of the short service
+   plan contend that a man is not fit for work at all after twelve months
+   in West Africa, and that if he is not definitely ill, he has at any rate
+   lost all energy. Personally, I fancy it depends on the individual, and
+   that with a definite policy the short service plan will be quite safe.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+AFRICAN PROPERTY
+
+     Wherein some attempt is made to set down the divers kinds of
+     property that exist among the people of the true Negro race in
+     Western Africa, and the law whereby it is governed.
+
+
+In speaking on the subject of African property and the laws which guard
+it in its native state, I must, in the space at my disposal here,
+confine myself to speaking of these things as they are in one division
+of the many different races of human beings that inhabit that vast
+continent of Africa; and, in order to present the affair more clearly, I
+must take them as they exist in their most highly developed state,
+namely, among the people of the true Negro stock, for it is among these
+people that pure African culture has reached so far its fullest state of
+development.
+
+The distribution zone of this true Negro stock cannot yet be fixed with
+any approach to accuracy, but we know that the seaboard of the regions
+inhabited by the true Negro is that vast stretch of the African West
+Coast from a point south of the Gambia River to a point just north of
+Cameroon River, in the region of the Rio del Rey. We can safely say,
+within this region you will find the true Negro, but we cannot safely
+say how far inland, or how far down south of the Rio del Rey we shall
+find him. That this stock extends through up to the Nile regions;
+that it stretches far away south of the Nile in the interior of the
+Upper Congo regions, appearing in the Azenghi; that it stretches south
+on the coast line below the Rio del Rey, appearing as the so-called
+noble tribes of the Bight of Panavia, the Ajumba, Mpongwe, Igalwa, and
+also as Osheba, Befangh, will be demonstrated I believe when we have a
+sufficient supply of ethnological observers in Africa. But it must be
+remembered that you can only get the true Negro unadulterated in the
+coast regions of Western Africa between the Rivers Gambia and Cameroon.
+
+     [Illustration: A HOUSA. [_To face page 420._]
+
+In the fringe regions of the West Soudan you have an adulterated form of
+him--adulterated in idea with Mohammedanism, and the Berber races; to
+the east and to the south with that other great African race division,
+the Bantu. I venture to think that Bantu adulteration mainly takes the
+form of language. We have in our own continent many instances of races
+of greater strength and conquering power adopting the language of the
+weaker peoples whom they have conquered, when the language has been one
+more adapted to the needs of life and more widely diffused than their
+own, and therefore more suited to commercial intercourse.
+
+The Negro languages are poor, and, moreover, they differ among
+themselves so gravely that one tribe cannot understand another tribe
+that lives even next door to it. I know 147 such languages in the region
+of the Niger Delta alone. Now this sort of thing means interpreters, and
+is hindersome to commercial intercourse, and therefore you always find
+the true Negro, when he is in a district where he has opportunities of
+trading with other peoples, adopting their language, and making for use
+in public life a corrupt English, Portuguese, or Arabic lingo.
+Similarly, it seems to me, he has in the regions he has conquered in
+Southern and Central Africa, adopted Bantu, and much the same thing has
+happened, and is still happening, there, as happened in Southern and
+Central Europe. Just as the powerful barbarian stocks adopted Latin in a
+way that must keep Priscian's head still in bandages and to this day
+seriously mar his happiness in the Elysian fields, so have the true
+Negroes adopted the flexible Bantu languages. But it would be as
+unscientific to regard a Spaniard or a Frenchman as a full-blooded
+ancient Roman, as to regard many of the Negro tribes now speaking Bantu
+language as Bantu men.
+
+The Negro has, moreover, not only adopted Bantu languages in some
+regions, such as the Mpongwe, for example, but he has also adopted to a
+certain extent Bantu culture. I am sure those of you who have lived
+among the true Negroes and true Bantu, will agree with me that these
+cultures differ materially. Africa, so far as I know it, namely, from
+Sierra Leone to Benguela, smells generally rather strong, but
+particularly so in those districts inhabited by the true Negro. This
+pre-eminence the true Negroes attain to by leaving the sanitary matters
+of villages and towns in the hands of Providence. The Bantu culture
+looks after the cleaning and tidying of the village streets to a
+remarkable degree, though by no means more clean in the houses, which,
+in both cultures, are quite as clean and tidy as you will find in
+England. Again, in the Bantu culture you will find the slaves living in
+villages apart: inside the true Negro they live with their owners; and
+there are other points which mark the domestic cultures of these people
+as being different from each other, which I need not detain you with
+now. All these points in Bantu domestic culture the true Negro will
+adopt, as well as language; but there seem to be two points he does not
+readily adopt, or rather two points in his own culture to which he
+clings. One is the religious: in Bantu you find a great female god, who,
+for practical purposes, is more important than the great male god, in so
+far as she rules mundane affairs. In the true Negro the great gods are
+male. There are great female gods, but none of them occupy a position
+equal to that occupied by Nzambi, as you find the Bantu great female god
+called among the people who are undoubtedly true Bantu, the Fjort. The
+other, is the form of the State, and one important part of that form is
+the institution in the Negro tribes of a regular military organisation,
+with a regular War Lord, not one and the same with the Peace Lord.
+
+     [Illustration: HOUSE PROPERTY IN KACONGO.]
+
+     [Illustration: BUBIES OF FERNANDO PO. [_To face page 423._]
+
+This, I am aware, is not the customary or fashionable view of race
+distribution in Africa, but allow me to recall to your remembrance one
+of the most fascinating books ever written, _The Adventures of Andrew
+Battel, of Leigh in Essex_, who for eighteen years lived among the
+districts of the Lower Congo.
+
+I do this in order to show that I am not theorising in this matter.
+Andrew Battel left London on a ship sweetly named _The May Morning_, and
+having a consort named the _Dolphin_--they were pinnaces of fifty tons
+each--on the 20th of April, 1589. With very little delay they fell into
+divers disasters, and Andrew became a prisoner in the hands of the
+Portuguese at Loanda. He had a very bad time of it, the Portuguese then
+regarding all Englishmen as pirates and nothing more, except heretics
+and vermin. Andrew, with the enterprise and common sense of our race,
+escaped several times from captivity, and, with the stupidity of our
+race fell into it again, but his great escape was when he fell in with
+the Ghagas. Well, these Ghagas, Andrew Battel and the Portuguese
+historians say, were a fearful people, who came from behind Sierra
+Leone, and when the Kingdom of Congo was discovered by Diego Cao in
+1484, the Ghagas were attacking it so severely that, but for the timely
+arrival of the Portuguese and the help they gave Congo, there would in a
+very short time have been no Kingdom of Congo left to discover; and to
+this day Dr. Blyden, who went there on a Government mission, says that
+up by Fallaba, in the Sierra Leone hinterland, you will now and then see
+a Ghaga--a man feared, a man of whom the country people do not know
+where his home is, nor what he eats or how he lives, but from whom they
+shrink as from a superior terrible form of human being--a remnant, or
+remainder over, of those people whose very name struck terror throughout
+Central Equatorial Africa in the 15th century, when, for some reason we
+do not know, they made a warlike migration down among the peaceful
+feeble Bantu.
+
+If you will carefully study the account given of the organisation of the
+Ghagas and also of the organisation of the Kingdom of Congo, I think you
+will see that in the Ghagas you have a true Negro State form, while in
+the Congo Kingdom you have something different; something that is
+nowadays called Bantu. What became of the Ghagas when foiled by the
+Portuguese in destroying the Kingdom of Congo is not exactly known, but
+there is a definite ground for thinking that, modified by intermarriage
+and a different environment, they split up, and are now represented by
+the warlike South African tribes and East African tribes, such as the
+Matabele, and the Massai, and so on. The modification of this portion of
+the true Negro stem in the south and the east is akin to the
+modification the stem has undergone nearer to its true home on the West
+Coast of Africa, where to the north of Sierra Leone and behind the coast
+regions of the Ivory, Gold, and Slave Coasts it has, by admixture with
+the Berber tribes of the Western Soudan, produced the Black Moors,
+namely the Mandingo, the Hausa, and Oullaf. These Black Moors of the
+Western Soudan have attained to a high pitch of barbaric culture; it
+appears to be a further development of the true Negro culture, but it is
+so suffused with the Mohammedan idea and law that it is not in this
+state that we can best study the native culture of the pure Negro.
+Neither can we study it well in those south and east regions where it
+has adopted Bantu language and culture to a certain extent.
+
+I will not, however, attempt to enter here upon the question of the
+continental distribution of the Negro and Bantu stocks; I will merely
+beg observers of African tribes to note carefully whether their tribe is
+given to street-cleaning, to keeping slaves in separate villages, or to
+venerating a great female god. If it is, it has got a Bantu culture; if,
+in addition, it has a regular military organisation, or a keen
+commercial spirit, or a certain ability to rule over the tribes round
+it, I beg they will suspect Negro blood and do their best to give us
+that tribe's migration history; and then we may in future times be able
+to settle the question of race distribution on better lines than our
+present state of knowledge allows of. Having said that the law and
+institutions of the true Negro stock cannot best be studied in those
+regions where they are adulterated by alien cultures, it remains to say
+where they can best be studied. I think that undoubtedly this region is
+that of the Oil Rivers.
+
+The thing you must always bear in mind when observing institutions and
+so on from Sierra Leone down to Lagos, is that the fertile belt between
+the salt sea of the Bight of Benin and the sand sea of Sahara is but a
+narrow band of forest and fertile country, while, when you get below
+Lagos--Lagos itself is a tongue of the Western Soudan coming down to the
+sea--you are in the true heart of Africa, the Equatorial Forest Belt;
+and that it is in this belt that you will get your materials at their
+purest. Therefore take the regions inhabited by the true Negro. In the
+regions from Sierra Leone to the Gold Coast, you have, it is true, not
+much white influence or adulteration, mainly because of the rock-reefed
+shore being dangerous to navigators. There is in this region undoubtedly
+a great and yearly increasing so-called Arab, but really Mohammedanised
+Berber, influence working on the true Negro. The natives themselves have
+their State-form in a state of wreckage from the destruction of the old
+Empire of Meli, which fell, from reasons we do not know, some time in
+the 16th century. We have, however, miserably little information on this
+particular region of Sierra Leone, the Pepper and Ivory Coasts, owing to
+its never having been worked at by a competent ethnologist; but the
+accounts we have of it show that the secret societies have here got the
+upper hand to an abnormal extent for the Negro state. Then we come to
+the Gold Coast region which has been so excellently worked at by the
+late Sir A. B. Ellis. Here you have a heavy amount of adulteration in
+idea, and, moreover, the long-continued white influence--1435-1898--has
+decidedly tended to a disorganisation of the Negro State-form, and to an
+undue development of the individual chief; nevertheless the law-form now
+existent on the Gold Coast is, when tested against a knowledge of the
+pure Negro law-form as found in the Oil Rivers, almost unaltered, and I
+think if you will carefully study that valuable book, Sarbar's _Fanti
+Customary Law_, you will also see that the State-form is identical in
+essence with that of the Oil Rivers--the House system.
+
+The House is a collection of individuals; I should hesitate to call it a
+developed family. I cannot say it is a collection of human beings,
+because the very dogs and canoes and so on that belong to it are part of
+it in the eye of the law, and capable therefore alike of embroiling it
+and advancing its interests. These Houses are bound together into groups
+by the Long ju-ju proper to the so-called secret society, common to the
+groups of houses. The House itself is presided over by what is called,
+in white parlance, a king, and beneath him there are four classes of
+human beings in regular rank, that is to say, influence in council:
+firstly, the free relations of the king, if he be a free man himself,
+which is frequently not the case; if he be a slave, the free people of
+the family he is trustee for; secondly, the free small people who have
+placed themselves under the protection of the House, rendering it in
+return for the assistance and protection it affords them service on
+demand; the third and fourth classes are true slave classes, the higher
+one in rank being that called the Winnaboes or Trade boys, the lower the
+pull-away boys and the plantation hands.[79] The best point in it, as a
+system, is that it gives to the poorest boy who paddles an oil canoe a
+chance of becoming a king.
+
+Property itself in West Africa, and as I have reason to believe from
+reports in other parts of tropical Africa that I am acquainted with, is
+firmly governed and is divisible into three kinds. Firstly, ancestral
+property connected with the office of headmanship, the Stool, as this
+office is called in the true Negro state, the Cap, as it is called down
+in Bas Congo; secondly, family property, in which every member of the
+family has a certain share, and on which he, she, or it has a claim;
+thirdly, private property, that which is acquired or made by a man or
+woman by their personal exertions, over and above that which is earned
+by them in co-operation with other members of their family which becomes
+family property, and that which is gained by gifts or made in trade by
+the exercise of a superior trading ability.
+
+Every one of these forms of property is equally sacred in the eye of the
+African law. The property of the Stool must be worked for the Stool;
+working it well, increasing it, adds to the importance of the Stool, and
+makes the king who does so popular; but he is trustee, not owner, of the
+Stool property, and his family don't come in for that property on his
+death, for every profit made by the working of Stool property is like
+this itself the property of the Stool, and during the king's life he
+cannot legally alienate it for his own personal advantage, but can only
+administer it for the benefit of the Stool.
+
+The king's power over the property of the family and the private
+property of the people under his rule, consists in the right of Ban, but
+not arriere Ban. Family property is much the same as regards the laws
+concerning it as Stool property. The head of the family is the trustee
+of it. If he is a spendthrift, or unlucky in its management, he is
+removed from his position. Any profit he may make with the assistance of
+a member of his own family becomes family property; but of course any
+profit he may make with the assistance of his free wives or wife, a
+person who does not belong to his family, or with the assistance of an
+outsider, may become his own. Private property acquired in the ways I
+have mentioned is equally sacred in the eyes of the law. I do not
+suppose you could find a single human being, slave or free, who had not
+some private property of his or her very own. Amongst that very
+interesting and valuable tribe, the Kru, where the family organisation
+is at its strictest, you can see the anxiety of the individual Kruman to
+secure for himself a little portion of his hard-earned wages and save it
+from the hands of his family elders. The Kruman's wages are paid to him,
+or changed by him, into cloths and sundry merchandise, and he is not
+paid off until the end of his term of work. So he has to hurry up in
+order to appropriate to himself as much as he can on the boat that takes
+him back to his beloved "We" country, and industriously make for himself
+garments out of as much of his cotton goods as he can; for even a man's
+family, even in Kru country, will not take away his shirt and trousers,
+but I am afraid there is precious little else that the Kruman can save
+from their rapacity. What he can save in addition to these, he informs
+me, he gives to his mother, or failing his mother, to a favourite
+sister, who looks after it and keeps it for him, she being, woman-like,
+more fit to quarrel if need be with the family elders than he is
+himself. But all private property once secured is sacred, very sacred,
+in the African State-form. I do not know from my own investigations, nor
+have I been able to find evidence in the investigations of other
+observers, of any king, priesthood, or man, who would openly dare
+interfere with the private property of the veriest slave in his
+district, diocese, or household. I know this seems a risky thing to
+say, and I do not like to say it because I feel that if I were a betting
+man I could make a good thing over betting on it, for experience has
+taught me that every time an African's property is taken by a fellow
+African under native law, and in times of peace, it is taken after it is
+confiscated by its original owner, either in bankruptcy or crime. You
+will hear dozens of accounts of how everything an African possessed was
+seized on, etc., but if you look into them you will find in every case
+that the individual so cleaned out owed it all, and frequently far more,
+before he or she fell into the hands of the Official Receiver, the local
+chief.
+
+One of the most common causes of an individual's entire estate being
+seized upon is a conviction for witchcraft. Every form of property in
+Africa is liable to be called on to meet its owner's debts, and the
+witch's is too heavy a debt for any individual's private estate to meet
+and leave a surplus. For not only does the witch owe to the family of
+the person, of whose murder he or she is convicted, the price of that
+life, but it is felt by the Community that the witch has not been found
+out in the first offence, and so every miscellaneous affliction that has
+recently happened is put down to the convicted witch's account. Mind
+you, I do not say _all_ these claims are _satisfied_ out of the estate
+of the witch deceased, (witches are always deceased by the authorities
+with the utmost despatch after conviction) because the said property has
+during the course of the trial got into the hands of Officialdom and has
+a natural tendency to stop there. But one thing is certain, there is no
+residuary estate for the witch's own relations. Not that for the matter
+of that they would dare claim it in any case, lest they should be
+involved with the witch and accused as accomplices.
+
+Still, legally, the witch's relations have the consolation of knowing
+that, if things go smoothly and they evade being accused of a share in
+the crime, they cannot be called on to meet the debts incurred by the
+witch. From a family point of view better a dead witch than a live
+speculative trader.
+
+The reason of this delicate little point of law I confess gave me more
+trouble to discover than it ought to have done, for the explanation was
+quite simple, namely, the witch's body had been taken over by the
+creditors.
+
+Now, according to African law, if you take a man's life, or, for the
+matter of that, his body, dead or alive, in settlement of a debt, your
+claim is satisfied. You have got legal tender for it. I remember coming
+across an amusing demonstration of this law in the colony of Cameroon.
+There was, and still is, a windy-headed native trader there who for
+years has hung by the hair of loans over the abyss of bankruptcy. All
+the local native traders knew that man, but there arrived a new trader
+across from Calabar district who did not. Like the needle to the pole,
+our friend turned to him for a loan in goods and got it, with the usual
+result namely, excuses, delays, promises--in fact anything but payment;
+enraged at this, and determined to show the Cameroon traders at large
+how to carry on business on modern lines, the young Calabar trader
+called in the Government and the debtor was gently but firmly confined
+to the Government grounds. Of course he was not put in the chain-gang,
+not being a serious criminal, but provided with a palm-mat broom he
+proceeded to do as little as possible with it, and lead a contented,
+cheerful existence.
+
+It rather worried the Calabar man to see this, and also that his drastic
+measure caused no wild rush to him of remonstrating relations of the
+imprisoned debtor; indeed they did not even turn up to supply the said
+debtor with food, let alone attempt to buy him off by discharging his
+debt. In place of them, however, one by one the Cameroon traders came to
+call on the Calabar merchant, all in an exceedingly amiable state of
+mind and very civil. They said it gave them pleasure to observe his
+brisk method of dealing with that man, and it was a great relief to
+their minds to see a reliable man of wealth like himself taking charge
+of that debtor's affairs, for now they saw the chance of seeing the
+money they had years ago advanced, and of which they had not, so far,
+seen a fraction back, neither capital nor interest. The Calabar man grew
+pale and anxious as the accounts of the debts he had made himself
+responsible for came in, and he knew that if the debtor died on his
+hands, that is to say in the imprisonment he had consigned him to, he
+would be obliged to pay back all those debts of the Cameroon man, for
+the German Government have an intelligent knowledge of native law and
+carry it out in Cameroon. Still the Calabar man did not like climbing
+down and letting the man go, so he supplied him with food and worried
+about his state of health severely. This that villainous Cameroon fellow
+found out, and was therefore forthwith smitten with an obscure abdominal
+complaint, a fairly safe thing to have as my esteemed friend Dr. Plehn
+was absent from that station, and therefore not able to descend on the
+malingerer with nauseous drugs. It is needless to say that at this
+juncture the Calabar man gave in, and let the prisoner out, freeing
+himself thereby from responsibility beyond his own loss, but returning a
+poorer and a wiser man to his own markets, and more assured than ever of
+the villainy of the whole Dualla tribe.
+
+In any case legally the relatives of a debtor seized or pawned can
+redeem, if they choose, the person or the body by paying off the debt
+with the interest, 33-1/2 per cent. per annum, to the common rate. Great
+sacrifices and exertions are made by his family to redeem almost every
+debtor, and the family property is strained to its utmost on his or her
+behalf; but in the case of a witch it is different, no set of relatives
+wish to redeem a convicted witch, who, reduced by the authorities to a
+body, and that mostly in bits and badly damaged, is not a thing
+desirable. No! they say Society has got him and we are morally certain
+he must have been illegitimate, for such a thing as a witch never
+happened in our family before, and if we show the least interest in the
+remains we shall get accused ourselves. Of course if a man or woman's
+life is taken on any other kind of accusation save witchcraft, the
+affair is on a different footing. The family then forms a higher
+estimate of the deceased's value than they showed signs of to him or her
+when living, and they try to screw that value to the uttermost farthing
+out of the person who has killed their kinsman. Society at large only
+regards you for doing this as a fool man to think so highly of the
+departed, whose true value it knows to be far below that set on him. In
+the case of a living man taken for debt, he is a slave to his creditor,
+a pawn slave, but not on the same footing as a boughten slave; he has
+not the advantages of a true slave in the matter of succeeding to the
+wealth or position of the house, but against that he can be a free man
+the moment his debts are paid. This may be a theoretical possibility
+only, just as it would be theoretical for me to expect my family to bail
+me out if the bail were a question of a million sterling, but in legal
+principle the redemption is practicable.
+
+In the case of taking a dead body another factor is introduced. By
+taking charge of and interring a body, you become the executor to the
+deceased man's estate. I have known three sets of relatives arrive with
+three coffins for one body, and a consequential row, for a good deal can
+be made by an executor; but if you make yourself liable for the body's
+liabilities care is needed, and there is no reckless buying of bodies
+with whose private affairs you are not conversant, in West Africa. It is
+far too wild a speculation for such quiet commercial men as my African
+friends are. Hence it comes that a Negro merchant on a trading tour away
+from his home, overtaken by death in a town where he is not known, is
+not buried, but dried and carefully put outside the town, or on the road
+to the market, the road he came by, so that any one of his friends or
+relations, who may perchance come some time that way, can recognise the
+remains. If they do they can take the remains home and bury them if they
+like, or bury them there, free and welcome, but the local County Council
+will do nothing of the kind. A nice thing a set of respectable elders,
+or as their Fanti, name goes Paynim, would let themselves in for by
+burying the body of a gentleman who happened to have four murders, ten
+adultery cases, a crushing mass of debt, and no earthly assets save a
+few dilapidated women, bad ones at that, and a whole pack of children
+with the Kraw Kraw, or the Guinea worm, or both together and including
+the Yaws.
+
+This brings us to another way besides witchcraft whereby a gentleman in
+West Africa can throw away a fine fortune by paying his debts, namely,
+the so-called adultery. Adultery out there, I hastily beg to remark, may
+be only brushing against a woman in a crowded market place or bush path,
+or raising a hand in defence against a virago. It's the wrong word, but
+the customary one to use for touching women, and it is exceedingly
+expensive and a constant source of danger to the most respectable of
+men, the demands made on its account being exorbitant: sometimes so
+exorbitant that I have known of several men who, in order to save their
+family from ruin--for if their own private property were insufficient to
+meet it the family property would be liable for the balance--have given
+themselves up as pawn-slaves to their accusers.
+
+There is but one check on this evil of frivolous and false accusation,
+and that is that when there have been many cases of it in a district,
+the cult of the Law God of that region gets a high moral fit on and
+comes down on that district and eats the adultery. I need not say that
+this is to the private benefit of no layman in the district, for
+notoriously it is an expensive thing to have the Law God down, and a
+thing every district tries to avoid. There is undoubtedly great evil in
+this law, which presses harder on private and family property than
+anything else, harder even than accusations of witchcraft; but it
+safeguards the women, enabling them to go to and fro about the forest
+paths, and in the villages and market places at home, and far from home,
+without fear of molestation or insult, bar that which they get up
+amongst themselves.
+
+The methods employed in enforcing the payment of a debt are appeal to
+the village headman or village elders; or, after giving warning, the
+seizure of property belonging to the debtor if possible, or if not, that
+of any other person belonging to his village will do. This procedure
+usually leads to palaver, and the elders decide whether the amount
+seized is equal to the debt or whether it is excessive; if excessive the
+excess has to be returned, and there is also the appeal to the Law
+Society. In the regions of the Benin Bight we have also, as in India,
+the custom of collecting debts by Dharna. In West Africa the creditor
+who sits at the debtor's door is bound to bring with him food for one
+day, this is equivalent to giving notice; after the first day the debtor
+has to supply him with food, for were he to die he would be answerable
+for his life and the worth thereof in addition to the original debt. If
+I mention that there is no community of goods between a man and his wife
+(women owning and holding property under identical conditions to men in
+the eye of the law), I think I shall have detained you more than long
+enough on the subject of the laws of property in West Africa. You will
+see that the thing that underlies them is the conception that every
+person is the member of some family, and all the other members of the
+family are responsible for him and to him and he to them; and every
+family is a member of some house, and all the other members of the house
+are responsible for and to the families of which it is composed.
+
+The natural tendency of this is for property to become joint property,
+family property, or to be absorbed into family property. A man by his
+superior ability acquires, it may be, a considerable amount of private
+property, but at his death it passes into the hands of the family. There
+are Wills, but they are not the rule, and they more often refer to an
+appointment of a successor in position than to a disposal of effects.
+The common practice of gifts there supplies the place of Wills with us;
+a rich man gives his friend or his favourite wife, child, or slave,
+things during his life, while he can see that they get it, and does not
+leave the matter till after his death. The good point about the African
+system is that it leaves no person uncared for; there are no unemployed
+starving poor, every individual is responsible for and to his fellow
+men and women who belong to the same community, and the naturally strong
+instinct of hospitality, joined with the knowledge that the stranger
+within the gates belongs to a whole set of people who will make palaver
+if anything happens to him, looks well after the safety of wanderers in
+Negro land. The bad point is, of course that the system is cumbersome,
+and, moreover, it tends, with the operation of the general African law
+of _mutterrecht_, the tracing of descent through females, to prevent the
+building up of great families. For example, you have a great man, wise,
+learned, just, and so on; he is esteemed in his generation, but at his
+death his property does not go to the sons born to him by one of his
+wives, who is a great woman of a princely line, but to the eldest son of
+his sister by the same mother as his own. This sister's mother and his
+own mother was a slave wife of his father's; this, you see, keeps good
+blood in a continual state of dilution with slave blood. The son he has
+by his aristocratic wife may come in for the property of her brother,
+but her brother belongs to a different family, so he does not take up
+his father's greatness and carry it on with the help his father's wealth
+could give him in the father's family. I do not say the system is unjust
+or anything like that, mind; I merely say that it does not tend to the
+production of a series of great men in one family.
+
+Nevertheless, when once you have mastered the simple fundamental rules
+that underlie the native African idea of property they must strike you
+as just, elaborately just; and there is another element of simplicity in
+the thing, and that is that all forms of property are subject to the
+same law, land, women, china basons, canoes, slaves, it matters not
+what, there is the law.
+
+You will ofter hear of the vast stretches of country in Africa unowned,
+and open to all who choose to cultivate them or possess them. Well,
+those stretches of unowned land are not in West Africa. I do not pretend
+to know other parts of the continent. In West Africa there is not one
+acre of land that does not belong to some one, who is trustee of it, for
+a set of people who are themselves only life tenants, the real owner
+being the tribe in its past, present, and future state, away into
+eternity at both ends. But as West African land is a thing I should not
+feel, even if I had the money, anxious to acquire as freehold, and as
+you can get under native law a safe possession of mining and cultivation
+rights from the representatives living of the tribe they belong to, I do
+not think that any interference is urgently needed with a system
+fundamentally just.
+
+After having said so much on African native property, it may be as well
+to say what African property consists of. It is not necessary for me to
+go into the affair very fully, but you will remember, I am sure, the old
+statement of "women and slaves constitute the wealth of an African." The
+African himself would tell you nine times in ten that women and slaves
+caused him the lack of it. Still they are undoubtedly a factor in the
+true Negro's wealth, but to consider them property it is necessary to
+consider them as property in different classes. Here and now I need only
+divide them into two classes--wives properly so-called, and male and
+female slaves. The duty of the slave is to increase directly the wealth
+of his or her owner--that of the wife to increase it also, but in a
+different manner, namely, by bringing her influence to bear for his
+advantage among her own family and among the people of the district she
+lives in. A big chief will have three or more of these wives, each of
+them living in her own house, or in the culture state of Calabar, in her
+own yard in his house, having her own farm away in the country, where
+she goes at planting and harvest times. She possesses her own slaves and
+miscellaneous property, which includes her children, and the main part
+of this property is really the property of her family, just as most
+people's property is in West Africa. The husband will reside with each
+of these wives in turn, yet he has a home of his own, with his slave
+wives, and his children properly so called, similarly having his own
+farm and miscellaneous property, which similarly belongs mainly to his
+family, and this house is usually presided over by his mother, or
+failing her a favourite sister.
+
+The immediate rule of a husband over his wife may be likened to that of
+a constitutional monarch, that of a man or woman over a slave to that of
+an absolute monarch, though true absolutism is in the Negro State-form
+not to be found in any individual man. The nearest approach to it is,
+very properly, in the hands of the cult of the Law God, the tribal
+secret society, but even from that society the individual can appeal, if
+he dare, to Long Ju Ju.
+
+The other forms of wealth possessed by an African, his true wealth, are
+market rights, utensils, canoes, arms, furniture, land, and trade goods.
+It is in his capacity to command these things in large quantities that
+his wealth lies, it is his wives and slaves who enable and assist him to
+do this thing. So take the whole together and you will see how you can
+have a very rich African, rich in the only way it is worth while being
+rich in, power, yet a man who possibly could not pay you down L20, but a
+real millionaire for all that.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [79] See "Lecture on African Religion and Law," published by leave of
+   the Hibbert Trustees in the _National Review_. September, 1897.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDICES
+
+     [Illustration: JA JA, KING OF OPOBO. [_To face page 443._]
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX I
+
+     A SHORT DESCRIPTION OF THE NATIVES OF THE NIGER COAST PROTECTORATE,
+     WITH SOME ACCOUNT OF THEIR CUSTOMS, RELIGION, TRADE, &c. BY M. LE
+     COMTE C. N. DE CARDI.
+
+
+It is with some diffidence I attempt this task, because many more able
+men have written about this country, with whom occasionally I shall most
+likely be found not quite in accord; but if a long residence in and
+connection with a country entitles one to be heard, then I am fully
+qualified, for I first went to Western Africa in 1862, and my last
+voyage was in 1896.
+
+Previous to 1891, the date at which this Coast (Benin to Old Calabar)
+was formed into a British Protectorate under the name of the Oil Rivers
+Protectorate, now the Niger Coast Protectorate, each of the rivers
+frequented by Europeans for the purpose of trade was ruled over more or
+less intelligently by one, and in some cases by two, sable potentates,
+who were responsible to Her Britannic Majesty's Consul for the safety
+and well-being of the white traders; also for the fostering of trade in
+the hinterlands of their district, for which good offices they were paid
+by the white traders a duty called "comey," which amounted to about 2s.
+6d. per ton on the palm oil exported. When the palm kernel trade
+commenced it was generally arranged that two tons of palm kernels should
+be counted to equal one ton of palm oil so far as regards fiscal
+arrangements. The day this duty was paid was looked upon by the king, or
+kings if there were two of them, as a festival; in earlier years a
+certain amount of ceremony was also observed.
+
+The king would arrive on board the trader's hulk or sailing ship (some
+firms doing their trade without the assistance of a hulk) to an
+accompaniment of war horns, drums, and other savage music. With the king
+would generally come one or two of his chiefs and his Ju-Ju man, but
+before mounting the gangway ladder a bottle of spirit or palm wine would
+be produced from some hidden receptacle, one of the small boys, who
+always follow the kings or chiefs to carry their handkerchiefs and
+snuff-boxes, would then draw the cork and hand a wine-glass and the
+bottle to the Ju-Ju man, who would pour himself out a glass, saying a
+few words to the Ju-Ju of the river, at the same time spilling a little
+of the liquor into the water; he would then drink up what remained in
+the glass, hand glass and bottle to the king, who would then proceed as
+the Ju-Ju man had done, being followed on the same lines by the chiefs
+who were with him.
+
+Their devotions having thus been duly attended to, the king, Ju-Ju man
+and his attendant chiefs would mount the ladder to the deck of the
+vessel. The European trader would, as a rule, be there to receive him
+and escort him on to the poop, where the king would be asked to sit down
+to a sumptuous repast of pickled pork, salt beef, tinned salmon, pickles
+and cabin biscuits. There would be also roast fowls and goat for the
+trader and his assistants, and for vegetables yams and potatoes, the
+latter a great treat for the white men, but not thought much of by the
+natives.
+
+The king with his friends making terrific onslaughts on the pork, beef
+and tinned salmon, after having eaten all they could would ask for more,
+and pile up a plate of beef, pork and salmon, if there was any left, to
+pass out to their attendants on the main deck, at the same time begging
+some biscuits for their pull-away boys in the canoe, a request always
+acceded to.
+
+Drinkables, you will observe, so far have had no part in the feed; it is
+because these untutored natives follow Nature's laws much closer than
+Europeans, and never drink until they have finished eating. The king,
+having done justice to the victuals, now politely intimates to the
+European trader that "he be time for wash mouth." Being asked what his
+sable majesty would like to do it in, he generally elects "port win," as
+the natives call port wine. His chiefs, not being such connoisseurs as
+his majesty, are, as a rule, satisfied with a bottle or two of beer or
+gin, carefully sticking to the empty bottles.
+
+In the meantime, had you looked over the side of the ship, you would
+have wondered what his majesty's forty or fifty canoe boys were doing,
+so carefully divesting themselves of every rag of cloth and hiding it by
+folding it up as small as possible and sitting on it. This was so as to
+point out to the trader, when he came to the gangway to see the king
+away, that "he no be proper for king's boys no have cloth."
+
+The king, having duly washed his mouth, is now ready to proceed with the
+business of his visit. The payment of the comey is very soon arranged,
+it being a settled sum and the different goods having their recognised
+value in pawns, bars, coppers or crues according to the currency of the
+particular river.
+
+But the "shake hand"[80] is now to be got through, and the "dashing"[81]
+to the king; his friends who are with him want their part, and it would
+surprise a stranger the number of wants that seem to keep cropping up in
+a West African king's mind as he wobbles about your ship, until, finding
+he has begged every mortal thing that he can, he suddenly makes up his
+mind that further importunity will be useless; he decides to order his
+people into his canoe, which in most cases they obey with surprising
+alacrity, brought about, I have no doubt, by the thought that now comes
+their turn.
+
+Arrived at the gangway, his majesty, in the most natural way imaginable,
+notices for the first time (?) that his boys are all naked, and turning
+with an appealing look to the trader, he points out the bareness of the
+royal pull-away boys, and intimates that no white trader who respects
+himself could think of allowing such a state of things to continue a
+moment longer. This meant at least a further dash of four dozen
+fishermen's striped caps and about twelve pieces of Manchester cloth.
+
+One would suppose that this was the last straw, but before his majesty
+gets into his canoe several more little wants crop up, amongst others a
+tot of rum each for his canoe boys, and perchance a few fathoms of rope
+to make a new painter for his canoe, until sometimes the white trader
+almost loses his temper. I have heard of one (?) who did on one
+occasion, and being an Irishman, he thus apostrophised one of these
+sable kings, "Be jabers, king, I am thinking if I dashed you my ship you
+would be after wanting me to dash you the boats belonging to her, and
+after that to supply you with paint to paint them with for the next ten
+years." There was a glare in that Irishman's eye, and that king noticed
+it, and decided the time had come for him to scoot, and history says he
+scooted. In the early days of the palm oil trade, the custom inaugurated
+by the slave traders of receiving the king on his visit to the ship was
+by a salute of six or seven guns, and another of equal number on his
+departure, the latter being an intimation to all whom it might concern
+that his majesty had duly received his comey, and that trade was open
+with the said ship. This was continued for some years, but as the
+security of the seas became greater in those parts the trading ships
+gave up the custom of carrying guns, and the intimation that the king
+"done broke trade" with the last arrival was effected by his majesty
+sending off a canoe of oil to the ship, and the sending round of a
+verbal message by one of the king's men.
+
+Since the year 1891 the kings of the Oil Rivers have been relieved of
+the duty of collecting comey, as a regular government of these rivers
+has been inaugurated by H.B.M. Government, comey being replaced by
+import duties.
+
+
+NATIVE SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT IN BENIN, AND RELIGION
+
+Though there is a great similarity in the native form of government in
+these parts, it would be impossible to convey a true description of the
+manners and customs of the various places if I did not treat of each
+river and its people separately; I shall therefore commence by
+describing the people of Benin.
+
+The Benin kingdom, so far as this account of it will go, was said to
+extend from the boundaries of the Mahin country (a district between the
+British Colony of Lagos and the Benin River) and the river Ramos; thus
+on the coast line embracing the rivers Benin, Escravos, and Forcados,
+also the hinterland, taking in Warri up to the Yoruba States.
+
+For the purpose of the work I have set myself, I shall treat of that
+part of the kingdom that may be embraced by a line drawn from the mouth
+of the river Ramos up to the town of Warri, thence to Benin City, and
+brought down to the coast a little to the north of the Benin River. This
+tract of country is inhabited by four tribes, viz., the Jakri tribe, the
+dominant people on the coast line; the Sobo tribe, a very timid but most
+industrious people, great producers of palm oil, as well as being great
+agriculturists; an unfortunate people placed as they were between the
+extortions of the Jakris and the slave raiding of the Benin City king
+for his various sacrificial purposes; the third tribe are the Ijos,
+inhabiting the lower parts of the Escravos, Forcados, and Ramos rivers;
+this latter tribe are great canoe builders and agriculturists in a small
+way, produce a little palm oil, and by some people are accused of being
+cannibals; this latter accusation I don't think they deserve, in the
+full acceptation of the word, for thirty-three years ago I passed more
+than a week in one of their towns, when I was quite at their mercy,
+being accompanied by no armed men and carrying only a small revolver
+myself, which never came out of my pocket. Since when I have visited
+some of their towns on the Bassa Creek outside the boundary I have drawn
+for the purpose of this narrative, and never was I treated with the
+least disrespect.
+
+The fourth tribe is the Benin people proper, whose territory is supposed
+to extend as far back as the boundaries of the Yoruba nation, starting
+from the right bank of the Benin River. In this territory is the once
+far-famed city of Benin, where lived the king, to whom the Jakri, the
+Sobo, and the Ijo tribes paid tribute.
+
+These people have at all times since their first intercourse with
+Europeans, now some four hundred years, been renowned for their barbaric
+customs.
+
+The earlier travellers who visited Benin City do not mention human
+sacrifices among these customs, but I have no doubt they took place; as
+these travellers were generally traders and wanted to return to Benin
+for trade purposes, they most likely thought the less said on the
+subject the best. I find, however, that in the last century more than
+one traveller mentions the sacrifice of human beings by the king of
+Benin, but do not lead one to imagine that it was carried to the
+frightful extent it has been carried on in later years.
+
+I think myself that the custom of sacrificing human beings has been
+steadily increasing of late years, as the city of Benin became more and
+more a kind of holy city amongst the pagan tribes.
+
+Their religion, like that of all the neighbouring pagans, admits of a
+Supreme Being, maker of all things, but as he is supposed to be always
+doing good, there is no necessity to sacrifice to him.
+
+They, however, implicitly believe in a malignant spirit, to whom they
+sacrifice men and animals to satiate its thirst for blood and prevent it
+from doing them any harm.
+
+Some of the pagan customs are of a sanitary character. Take, for
+instance, the yam custom. This custom is more or less observed all along
+the West Coast of Africa, and where it is unattended by any sacrificing
+of human or animal life, except the latter be to make a feast, it should
+be encouraged as a kind of harvest festival. When I say this was a
+sanitary law, I must explain that the new yams are a most dangerous
+article of food if eaten before the yam custom has been made, which
+takes place a certain time after the yams are found to be fit for taking
+out of the ground.
+
+The new yams are often offered for sale to the Europeans at the earliest
+moment that they can be dug up, some weeks in many cases before the
+custom is made; the consequence is that many Europeans contract severe
+attacks of dysentery and fever about this time.
+
+The well-to-do native never touches them before the proper time, but the
+poorer classes find it difficult to keep from eating them, as they are
+not only very sweet, but generally very cheap when they first come on
+the market.
+
+The king of Benin was assisted in the government of his country and his
+tributaries by four principal officers; three of these were civil
+officers; these officers and the Ju-Ju men were the real governors of
+the country, the king being little more than a puppet in their hands.
+
+It was these three officers who decided who should be appointed governor
+of the lower river, generally called New Benin.
+
+Their choice as a rule fell upon the most influential chief of the
+district, their last choice being Nana, the son of the late chief
+Alumah, the most powerful and richest chief that had ever been known
+amongst the Jakri men. I shall have more to say about Nana when I am
+dealing with the Jakri tribe.
+
+Amongst the principal annual customs held by the king of Old Benin, were
+the customs to his predecessors, generally called "making father" by the
+English-speaking native of the coast.
+
+The coral custom was another great festival; besides these there were
+many occasional minor customs held to propitiate the spirit of the sun,
+the moon, the sky, and the earth. At most of these, if not all, human
+sacrifices were made.
+
+Kings of Benin did not inherit by right of birth; the reigning king
+feeling that his time to leave this earth was approaching, would select
+his successor from amongst his sons, and calling his chief civil officer
+would confide to him the name of the one he had selected to follow him.
+
+Upon the king's death this officer would take into his own charge the
+property of the late king, and receive the homage of all the expectant
+heirs; after enjoying the position of regent for some few days he would
+confide his secret to the chief war minister, and the chosen prince
+would be sent for and made to kneel, while they declared to him the will
+of his father. The prince thereupon would thank these two officers for
+their faithful services, and then he was immediately proclaimed king of
+Benin.
+
+Now commences trouble for the non-successful claimants; the king's
+throne must be secure, so they and their sons must be suppressed. As it
+was not allowed to shed royal blood, they were quietly suffocated by
+having their noses, mouths and ears stuffed with cloth. To somewhat take
+the sting out of this cruel proceeding they were given a most pompous
+funeral.
+
+Whilst on the subject of funerals I think I had better tell you
+something about the funeral customs of the Benineese.
+
+When a king dies, it is said, his domestics solicit the honour of being
+buried with him, but this is only accorded to a few of his greatest
+favourites (I quite believe this to have been true, for I have seen
+myself slaves of defunct chiefs appealing to be allowed to join their
+late master); these slaves are let down into the grave alive, after the
+corpse has been placed therein. Graves of kings and chiefs in Western
+Africa being nice roomy apartments, generally about 12 feet by 8 by 14,
+but in Benin, I am told, the graves have a floor about 16 feet by 12,
+with sides tapering to an aperture that can be closed by a single
+flag-stone. On the morning following the interment, this flag-stone was
+removed, and the people down below asked if they had found the King.
+This question was put to them every successive morning, until no answer
+being returned it was concluded that the slaves had found their master.
+Meat was then roasted on the grave-stone and distributed amongst the
+people with a plentiful supply of drink, after which frightful orgies
+took place and great licence allowed to the populace--murders taking
+place and the bodies of the murdered people being brought as offerings
+to the departed, though at any other time murder was severely punished.
+Chiefs and women of distinction are also entitled to pompous funerals,
+with the usual accompaniment of massacred slaves. If a native of Benin
+City died in a distant part of the kingdom, the corpse used to be dried
+over a gentle fire and conveyed to this city for interment. Cases have
+been known where a body having been buried with all due honours and
+ceremonies, it has been afterwards taken up and the same ceremonies as
+before gone through a second time.
+
+The usual funeral ceremonies for a person of distinction last about
+seven or eight days, and consist, besides the human sacrifices, of
+lamentations, dancing, singing and considerable drinking.
+
+The near relatives mourn during several months--some with half their
+heads shaved, others completely shaven.
+
+The law of inheritance for people of distinction differs from that of
+the kings in the fact that the eldest son inherits by right of
+primogeniture, and succeeds to all his father's property, wives and
+slaves. He generally allows his mother a separate establishment and
+maintenance and finds employment and maintenance for his father's other
+wives in the family residence. He is expected to act liberally with his
+younger brothers, but there is no law on this question. Before entering
+into full possession of his father's property he must petition the king
+to allow him to do so, accompanying the said petition with a present to
+the king of a slave, as also one to each of the three great officers of
+the king. This petition is invariably granted. A widow cannot marry
+again without the permission of her son, if she have a son; or if he be
+too young, the man who marries her must supply a female slave to wait
+upon him instead of his mother.
+
+Theft was punished by fine only, if the stolen property was restored,
+but by flogging if the thief was unable to make restitution.
+
+Murder was of rare occurrence. When detected it was punished with death
+by decapitation, and the body of the culprit was quartered and exposed
+to the beasts and birds of prey.
+
+If the murderer be a man of some considerable position he was not
+executed, but escorted out of the country and never allowed to return.
+
+In case of a murder committed in the heat of passion, the culprit could
+arrange matters by giving the dead person a suitable funeral, paying a
+heavy fine to the three chief officers of the king and supplying a slave
+to suffer in his place. In this case he was bound to kneel and keep his
+forehead touching the slave during his execution.
+
+In all cases where an accusation was not clearly proved, the accused
+would have to undergo an ordeal to prove his guilt or innocence. To
+fully describe the whole of these would fill several hundred pages, and
+as most of them could be managed by the Ju-Ju men in such a way, that
+they could prove a man guilty or innocent according to the amount of
+present they had received from the accused's friends, I will pass on to
+other subjects.
+
+Adultery was very severely punished in whatever class it took place; in
+the lower classes all the property of the guilty man passed at once to
+the injured husband, the woman being severely flogged and expelled from
+her husband's house.
+
+Amongst the middle class this crime could be atoned for by the friends
+of the guilty woman making a money present to the injured husband; and
+the lady would be restored to her outraged lord's favour.
+
+The upper classes revenged themselves by having the two culprits
+instantly put to death, except when the male culprit belonged to the
+upper classes; then the punishment was generally reduced to banishment
+from the kingdom of Benin for life.
+
+Amongst these people one finds some peculiar customs concerning
+children. Amongst others, a child is supposed to be under great danger
+from evil spirits until it has passed its seventh day. On this day a
+small feast is provided by the parents; still it is thought well to
+propitiate the evil spirits by strewing a portion of the feast round the
+house where the child is.
+
+Twin children, according to some accounts, were not looked upon with the
+same horror in Benin as they are in other parts of the Niger Delta; as a
+fact, they were looked upon with favour, except in one town of the
+kingdom, the name of which I have never been able to get, nor have I
+been able to locate the spot; but wherever it is, I am informed both
+mother and children were sacrificed to a demon, who resided in a wood in
+the neighbourhood of this town.
+
+This law of killing twin children, like most Ju-Ju laws, could be got
+over if the father was himself not too deeply steeped in Ju-Juism, and
+was sufficiently wealthy to bribe the Ju-Ju priests. The law was always
+mercilessly carried out in the case of the poorer class of natives--the
+above refers solely to the part of Benin kingdom directly under the king
+of Old Benin, and does not hold good with regard to the Sobos, Jakris,
+or Ijos.
+
+
+ORIGIN OF THE BENIN CITY PEOPLE
+
+According to Clapperton the Benin people are descendants of the Yoruba
+tribes, the Yoruba tribes being descended from six brothers, all the
+sons of one mother. Their names were Ikelu, Egba, Ijebu, Ife, Ibini
+(Benin), and Yoruba.
+
+According to the late Sultan Bello (the Foulah chief of Sokoto at the
+time of Captain Clapperton's visit to that city), the Yoruba tribes are
+descended from the children of Canaan, who were of the tribe of Nimrod.
+
+In my opinion there is room for much speculation on this statement of
+the Sultan Bello.
+
+It is a very curious fact that the people of Benin City have been, from
+the earliest accounts we have of them, great workers in brass. Might not
+the ancestors of this people have brought the art of working in brass
+with them from the far distant land of Canaan? Moses, when speaking of
+the land of Canaan, says, "out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass"
+(Deut. viii. 9). Here we must understand copper to be meant; because
+brass is not dug out of the earth, but copper is, and found in abundance
+in that part of the world.
+
+Yet another curious subject for reflection, from the first information
+that European travellers give us (_circa_ 1485) in their descriptions of
+the city of Benin, mention has invariably made of towers, from the
+summits of which monster brass serpents were suspended. Upon the entry
+of the punitive expedition into Benin City in the month of February,
+1897, Benin City still possessed one of these serpents in brass, not
+hanging from a tower, but laid upon the roof of one of the king's
+houses.
+
+Might not these brazen serpents be a remnant of some tradition handed
+down from the time of Moses? for do we not read in the Scriptures, that
+the people of Israel had sinned; and God to punish them sent fiery
+serpents, which bit the people, and many died. Then Moses cried to God,
+and God told him to make a serpent of brass, and set it on a pole.
+(Numbers xxi. 9.)
+
+While on the subject of serpents, I may mention that in the
+neighbourhood of Benin, there is a Ju-Ju ordeal pond or river, said to
+be infested with dangerous and poisonous snakes and alligators, through
+which a man accused of any crime passing unscathed proves his innocence.
+
+There are some other customs connected with the position of the king of
+Benin, as the head of the Ju-Juism of his country, which seem to have
+some trace of a Biblical origin, but which I will not discuss here, but
+leave to the ethnologists to unravel, if they can.
+
+That they were a superior people to the surrounding tribes is amply
+demonstrated by their being workers in brass and iron; displaying
+considerable art in some of their castings in brass, iron, copper and
+bronze, their carving in ivory, and their manufacture of cotton
+cloth--no other people in the Delta showing any such ability.
+
+The Jakri tribe, who inhabit that part of the country lying between the
+Sobo country and the Ijo country, were the dominant tribe in the lower
+or New Benin country. Being themselves tributary to the Benin king, they
+dare not make the Sobo or Ijo men pay a direct tribute to them for the
+right to live, but they indirectly took a much larger tribute from them
+than ever they paid the king of Benin.
+
+The Jakris were the brokers, and would not allow either of the
+above-named tribes to trade direct with the white men.
+
+The principal towns of the Jakri men were:--Brohemie[82] (destroyed by
+the English in 1894): this town was generally called Nana's town of late
+years. Nana was Governor of the whole of the country lying between a
+line drawn from the Gwato Creek to Wari and the sea-coast; his
+governorship extending a little beyond the Benin River, and running down
+the coast to the Ramos River. This appointment he held from the king of
+Benin, and was officially recognised by the British Consul as the
+head-man of the Jakri tribe, and for any official business in connection
+with the country over which he was Governor. Jeboo or Chief Peggy's
+town, situated on the waterway to Lagos; Jaquah town or Chief Ogrie's
+town. The above towns are all on the right bank of the river.
+
+On the left bank of the river are found the following towns:--Bateri, or
+Chief Numa's town, lying about half an hour's pull in a boat from Deli
+Creek. Chief Numa, was the son of the late Chief Chinome, a rival in his
+day to Allumah, the father of Nana, the late Governor; Chinome was the
+son of Queen Doto of Wari, who years ago was most anxious to see the
+white man at her town, and repeatedly advised the white men to use the
+Forcados for their principal trading station; but the old Chief Allumah
+was against any such exodus, and as he was a very big trader in
+palm-oil, he of course carried the day, and the white men stuck to their
+swamp at the mouth of the river Benin.
+
+Close to Numa's town his brother Fragoni has established a small town.
+At some little distance from Bateri is Booboo, or the late Chief
+Bregbi's town. Galey, the eldest son of the late Chinome, has a small
+town in the Deli Creek. This man, though the eldest son of the late
+Chief Chinome, is not a chief, though his younger brother Numa is. Here
+is a knotty point in Jakri law of inheritance, which differs from the
+Benin City law on the subject.
+
+Wari, the capital of Jakri, though almost if not actually as old a town
+as Benin City, has never had the bad reputation that the latter city has
+always had. I attribute this to the fact that the ladies of Warri have
+always been a power in the land.
+
+Sapele is a place that has come very much into notice since the country
+has been under the jurisdiction of the Niger Coast Protectorate, and is
+without doubt one of the best stations on the Benin territory. I am glad
+to say that the Europeans have at last deserted to a great extent their
+factories at the mouth of the Benin River, and are now principally
+located at Sapele and Wari.
+
+The Jakri tribe claim to be of the same race as the people of Benin City
+and kingdom. This I am inclined to dispute; I think they were a coast
+tribe like the Ijos. Tradition says that Wari was founded by people from
+Benin kingdom and for many years was tributary to the king of Benin, but
+in 1778 Wari was reported to be quite independent. They may have become
+almost the same race by intermarriage with the Benin people that went
+to Wari; but that they were originally the same race I say no.
+
+The religion of the Jakri tribe and the native laws and system of
+ordeals were, as far as I have been able to ascertain, identical with
+those of the Benin kingdom; with the exception of the human sacrifices
+and their law of inheritance which does not admit the right of
+primogeniture--following in this respect, the laws of the Bonny men and
+their neighbours. Twin children are usually killed by the Jakris, and
+the mother driven into the bush to die.
+
+The Jakri tribe are, without doubt, one of the finest in the Niger Coast
+Protectorate; many of their present chiefs are very honest and
+intelligent men, also excellent traders. Their women are noted as being
+the finest and best looking for miles round.
+
+The Jakri women have already made great strides towards their complete
+emancipation from the low state in which the women of neighbouring
+tribes still find themselves, many of them being very rich and great
+traders.
+
+The Sobo tribe have been kept so much in the background by the Jakris
+that little is known about them. What little is known of them is to
+their credit.
+
+We now come to the Ijo tribe, or at least, that portion of them that
+live within the Niger Coast Protectorate; these men are reported by some
+travellers to be cannibals, and a very turbulent people; this character
+has been given them by interested parties. Their looks are very much
+against them as they disfigure their faces by heavy cuts as tribal
+marks, and some pick up the flesh between their eyes making a kind of
+ridge, that gives them a savage expression. Though I have put the limit
+of these people at the river Ramos, they really extend along the coast
+as far as the western bank of the Akassa river. They have never had a
+chance and, with the exception of large timber for making canoes, their
+country does not produce much. Though I have seen considerable numbers
+of rubber-producing trees in their country, I never was able to induce
+them to work it. No doubt they asked the advice of their Ju-Ju as to
+taking my advice, and he followed the usual rule laid down by the
+priesthood of Ju-Ju-ism, no innovations.
+
+Whilst I was in the Ijo country I carefully studied their Ju-Ju, as I
+had been told they were great believers in, and practisers of Ju-Ju-ism.
+I found little in their system differing from that practised in most of
+the rivers of the Delta.
+
+In all these practices human agency plays a very large part, and this
+seems to be known even to the lower orders of the people; as an
+instance, I must here relate an experience I once had amongst the Ijos.
+I had arranged with a chief living on the Bassa Creek to lend me his
+fastest canoe and twenty-five of his people, to take me to the Brass
+river; the bargain was that his canoe should be ready at Cock-Crow Peak
+the following morning. I was ready at the water-side by the time
+appointed, but only about six of the smallest boys had put in an
+appearance; the old chief was there in a most furious rage, sending off
+messengers in all directions to find the canoe boys. After about two
+hours' work and the expenditure of much bad language on the part of the
+old chief, also some hard knocks administered to the canoe boys by the
+men who had been sent after them, as evidenced by the wales I saw on
+their backs, the canoe was at last manned, and I took my seat in it
+under a very good mat awning which nearly covered the canoe from end to
+end, and thanking my stars that now my troubles had come to an end I
+hoped at least for a time. I was, however, a very big bit too premature,
+for before the old chief would let the canoe start, he informed me he
+must make Ju-Ju for the safety of his canoe and the safe return of it
+and all his boys, to say nothing of my individual safety.
+
+One of the first requirements of that particular Ju-Ju cost me further
+delay, for a bottle of gin had to be procured, and as the daily market
+in that town had not yet opened, and no public house had yet been
+established by any enterprising Ijo, it took some time to procure.
+
+On the arrival of the article, however, my friend the old chief
+proceeded in a most impressive manner to repeat a short prayer, the
+principal portion I was able to understand and which was as follows: "I
+beg you, I beg you, don't capsize my canoe. If you do, don't drown any
+of my boys and don't do any harm to my friend the white man." This was
+addressed to the spirit of the water; having finished this little
+prayer, he next sprinkled a little gin about the bows of the canoe and
+in the river, afterwards taking a drink himself. He then produced a leaf
+with about an ounce of broken-up cooked yam mixed with a little palm
+oil, which he carefully fixed in the extreme foremost point of the
+canoe.
+
+At last this ceremony was at an end and we started off, but alas! my
+troubles were only just beginning. We had been started about half an
+hour, and I had quietly dozed off into a pleasant sleep, when I was
+awakened by feeling the canoe rolling from side to side as if we were
+in rough water; just then the boys all stopped pulling, and on my
+remonstrance they informed me Ju-Ju "no will," _id est_, that the Ju-ju
+had told them they must go back. I used gentle persuasion in the form of
+offers of extra pay at first, then I stormed and used strong language,
+or at least, what little Ijo strong language I knew, but all to no
+avail. I then began to inquire what Ju-Ju had spoken, and they pointed
+out a small bird that just then flew away into the bush; it looked to me
+something like a kingfisher. The head boy of the canoe then explained to
+me that this Ju-ju bird having spoken, _id est_, chirped on the
+right-hand side of the canoe, and the goat's skull hanging up to the
+foremost awning stanchion having fallen the same way (this ornament I
+had not previously noticed), signified that we must turn back. So turn
+back we did, though I thought at the time the boys did not want to go
+the journey, owing to the almost continual state of quarrelling that had
+been going on for years between the Ijos and the Brassmen. I was not far
+wrong, for when we eventually did arrive at Brass, I had to hide these
+Ijo people in the hold of my ship, as the very sight of a Brassman made
+them shiver.
+
+The following morning the same performance was gone through; we started,
+and at about the same point Ju-Ju spoke again; again we returned. My old
+friend the chief was very sorry he said, but he could not blame his boys
+for acting as they had done, Ju-Ju having told them to return. He would
+not listen when I told him I felt confident his boys had assisted the
+Ju-Ju by making the canoe roll about from side to side.
+
+However, I thought the matter over to myself during that second day, and
+decided I would make sure one part of that Ju-ju should not speak
+against me the next morning, and that was the goat's skull, so during
+that night after every Ijo was fast asleep, I visited that skull and
+carefully secured it to its post by a few turns of very fine fishing
+line in such a manner that no one could notice what I had done, if they
+did not specially examine it. I dare not fix it to the left, that being
+the favourable side, for fear of it being noticed, but I fixed it
+straight up and down, so that it could not demonstrate against my
+journey.
+
+I retired to my sleeping quarters and slept the sleep of the just, and
+next morning started in the best of spirits, though continually haunted
+by the fear that my little stratagem might be discovered. We had got
+about the same distance from the town that we had on the two previous
+mornings when the canoe began to oscillate as usual, caused by a
+combined movement of all the boys in the canoe, I was perfectly
+convinced, for the creek we were in was as smooth as a mill pond. Many
+anxious glances were cast at the skull, and the canoe was made to roll
+more and more until the water slopped over into her, but the skull did
+not budge, and, strange to relate, the bird of ill omen did not show
+itself or chirp this morning, so the boys gave up making the canoe
+oscillate and commenced to paddle for all they were worth, and the
+following evening we arrived at my ship in Brass. We could have arrived
+much earlier, but the Ijos did not wish to meet with any Brassmen, so we
+waited until the shades of night came on, and thus passed unobserved
+several Brass canoes, arriving safely at my ship in time for dinner.
+
+I carefully questioned the head boy of the Ijo boys all about this bird
+that had given me so much trouble. He explained to me that once having
+passed a certain point in the creek, the bird not having spoken and the
+skull not having demonstrated either, it was quite safe to continue on
+our journey, conveying to me the idea that this bird was a regular
+inhabitant of a certain portion of the bush, which was also their sacred
+bush wherein the Ju-Ju priests practised their most private devotions.
+The same species of bird showed itself several times both on the right
+of us and on the left of us as we passed through other creeks on our way
+to Brass, but the canoe boys took no notice of it.
+
+In dealing with the Benin Kingdom I have allowed myself somewhat to
+encroach upon the Royal Niger Company's territory, which commences on
+the left bank of the river Forcados and takes in all the rivers down to
+the Nun (Akassa), and the sea-shore to leeward of this river as far as a
+point midway between the latter river and the mouth of the Brass river,
+thence a straight line is drawn to a place called Idu, on the Niger
+River, forming the eastern boundary between the Royal Niger Company's
+territory and the Niger Coast Protectorate. I have not defined the
+western boundary between the Royal Niger Company's territory and the
+other portion of the Niger Coast Protectorate otherwise than stating
+that it commences on the seashore at the eastern point of the Forcados.
+
+Benin Kingdom, as a kingdom, may now be numbered with the past. For
+years the cruelties known to be enacted in the city of Benin have been
+such that it was only a question of ways and means that deterred the
+Protectorate officials from smashing up the place several years ago.
+
+It is a very curious trait in the character of these savage kinglets of
+Western Africa how little they seem to have been impressed by the
+downfall of their brethren in neighbouring districts. Though they were
+well acquainted with all that was passing around them. Thus the fall of
+Ashantee in 1873 was well known to the King of Dahomey, yet he continued
+on his way and could not believe the French could ever upset him. Nana,
+the governor of the lower Benin or Jakri, could not see in the downfall
+of Ja Ja that the British Government were not to be trifled with by any
+petty king or governor of these rivers; though Nana was a most
+intelligent native, he had the temerity to show fight against the
+Protectorate officials, and of course he quickly found out his mistake,
+but alas! too late for his peace of mind and happiness; he is now a
+prisoner at large far away from his own country, stripped of all his
+riches and position. Here was an object lesson for Abu Bini, the King of
+Benin, right at his own door, every detail of which he must have heard
+of, or at least his Ju-Ju priests must have heard of the disaster that
+had happened to Nana, his satrap.
+
+Nothing daunted Abu Bini and his Ju-Ju priests continued their evil
+practices; then came the frightful Benin massacre of Protectorate
+officials and European traders, besides a number of Jakris and Kruboys
+in the employment of the Protectorate.
+
+The first shot that was fired that January morning, 1897, by the
+emissaries of King Abu Bini, sounded the downfall of the City of Benin
+and the end of all its atrocious and disgusting sacrificial rites, for
+scarcely three months after the punitive expedition camped in the King's
+Palace at old Benin.
+
+The two expeditions that have had to be sent to Benin River within the
+last few years have been two unique specimens of what British sailors
+and soldiers have to cope with whilst protecting British subjects and
+their interests, no matter where situated.
+
+I do not suppose that there are in England to-day one hundred people who
+know, and can therefore appreciate at its true value, the risk that each
+man in those two expeditions ran. In the attack on Nana's town the
+British sailors had to walk through a dirty, disgusting, slimy mangrove
+swamp, often sinking in the mud half way up their thighs, and this in
+the face of a sharp musketry fire coming from unseen enemies carefully
+hidden away, in some cases not five yards off, in dense bush, with
+occasional discharges of grape and canister. But nothing stopped them,
+and Nana's town was soon numbered with the things that had been.
+
+It was the same to a great extent in the attack on Benin, only varied by
+the swamps not being quite so bad as at Nana's town, but the distance
+from the water side was much farther; in the former case one might say
+it was only a matter of minutes once in touch with the enemy; in the
+attack on Benin city it was a matter of several days marching through
+dense bush, where an enemy could get within five yards of you without
+being seen, and in some places nearer. Almost constantly under fire,
+besides a sun beating down on you so hot that where the soil was sandy
+you felt the heat almost unbearable through the soles of your boots, to
+say nothing of the minor troubles of being very short of drinking water,
+and at night not being able to sleep owing to the myriads of sand-flies
+and mosquitoes; getting now and again a perfume wafted under your
+nostrils, in comparison with which a London sewer would be eau de
+Cologne.
+
+I was once under fire for twelve hours against European trained troops,
+so know something about a soldier's work, and for choice I would prefer
+a week's similar work in Europe to two hours' West African bush and
+swamp fighting, with its aids, fever and dysentery.
+
+Before I quit Benin I want to mention one thing more about Ju-Ju. When
+the attack was made on Benin city, the first day's march had scarcely
+begun when two white men were killed and buried. After the column passed
+on, the natives came and dug the bodies up, cut their heads and hands
+off, and carried them up to Benin city to the Ju-Ju priests, who showed
+them to the king to prove to him that his Ju-Ju, managed by them, was
+greater than the white man's; in fact, the king, I am told, was being
+shown these heads and hands at the moment when the first rockets fell in
+Benin city. Those rockets proved to him the contrary, and he left the
+city quicker than he had ever done in his life before.
+
+To point out to my readers how all the natives of the Delta believed in
+the power of the Benin Ju-Ju, I must tell you none of them believed the
+English had really captured the King until he was taken round and shown
+to them, the belief being that, on the approach of danger, he would be
+able to change himself into a bird and thus fly away and escape.
+
+
+BRASS RIVER
+
+Brass River is then the first river we have to deal with on the Niger
+Coast Protectorate, to the eastward of the Royal Niger Company's
+boundary.
+
+The inhabitants of Brass call their country Nimbe and themselves Nimbe
+nungos, the latter word meaning people. Their principal towns were
+Obulambri and Basambri, divided only by a narrow creek dry at low water.
+In each of these towns resided a king, each having jurisdiction over
+separate districts of the Nimbe territory; thus the King of Obulambri
+was supposed to look after the district on the left hand of the River
+Brass, his jurisdiction extending as far as the River St. Barbara. The
+King of Basambri's district extended from the right bank of the Brass
+River, westward as far as the Middleton outfalls; included in this
+district was the Nun mouth of the River Niger. These two kinglets had a
+very prosperous time during the closing days of the slave trade, as most
+of the contraband was carried on through the Brass and the Nun River
+both by Bonnymen and New Calabar men after they had signed treaties with
+Her Majesty's Government to discontinue the slave trade in their
+dominions. When eventually the trade in slaves was finally put down
+their prosperity was not at an end, for they went largely into the palm
+oil trade, and did a most prosperous trade along the banks of the Niger
+as far as Onitsa.
+
+Though these two kings always objected to the white men opening up the
+Niger, and did their utmost to retard the first expeditions, they were
+not slow in demanding comey from the early traders who established
+factories in the Nun mouth of the Niger; this part of the Niger is also
+called the Akassa.
+
+These people are a very mixed race, and to describe them as any
+particular tribe would be an error. I believe the original inhabitants
+of the mouths of these rivers were the Ijos, and that the towns of
+Obulambri and Bassambri were founded by some of the more adventurous
+spirits amongst the men from the neighbourhood of Sabogrega, a town on
+the Niger; being afterwards joined by some similar adventurers from
+Bonny River. The three people are closely connected by family ties at
+this day.
+
+As a rule these people have always had the character of being a well
+behaved set of men; it is a notable fact in their favour that they were
+the only people that, once having signed the treaty with Her Majesty's
+Government to put down slavery, honestly stuck to the terms of the
+treaty; unlike their neighbours, they did so, though they were the only
+people who did not receive any indemnity.
+
+They, however, have occasionally lost their heads and gone to excesses
+unworthy of a people with such a good reputation as they have generally
+enjoyed.
+
+Their last escapade was the attack on the factory of the Royal Niger
+Company at Akassa some few years ago, and for which they were duly
+punished; their dual mud and thatch capital was blown down, and one
+small town called Fishtown destroyed.
+
+Impartial observers must have pitied these poor people driven to despair
+by being cut off from their trading markets by the fiscal arrangements
+of the Royal Niger Company. The latter I don't blame very much, they are
+traders; but the line drawn from Idu to a point midway between the Brass
+River and the Nun entrance to the Niger River, as being the boundary
+line for fiscal purposes between the Royal Niger Company and the Niger
+Coast Protectorate, was drawn by some one at Downing Street who
+evidently looked upon this part of the world as a cheesemonger would a
+cheese.
+
+In 1830 it was at Abo on the Niger where Lander the traveller met with
+the Brassmen, who took him down to Obulambri, but no ship being in Brass
+River, they took him and his people over to Akassa, at the Nun mouth of
+the Niger, to an English ship lying there. History says he was anything
+but well received by the captain of this vessel, and that the Brassmen
+did not treat him as well as they might; however, they did not eat him,
+as they no doubt would have done could they have looked into the future.
+Whatever their treatment of Lander was, it could not have been very bad,
+as they received some reward for what assistance they had given him some
+time after.
+
+It was amongst these people that I was enabled to study more closely the
+inner working of the domestic slavery of this part of Western Africa,
+and where it was carried on with less hardship to the slaves themselves
+than any place else in the Delta, until the Niger Company's boundary
+line threw most of the labouring population on the rates, at least they
+would have gone on the rates if there had been any to go on, but
+unfortunately the municipal arrangements of these African kingdomlets
+had not arrived at such a pitch of civilisation; the consequence was
+many died from starvation, others hired themselves out as labourers, but
+the demand for their services was limited, as they compared badly with
+the fine, athletic Krumen, who monopolise all the labour in these parts.
+Then came the punitive expedition for the attack on Akassa that wiped
+off a few more of the population, so that to-day the Brassmen may be
+described as a vanishing people.
+
+The various grades of the people in Brass were the kings, next came
+the chiefs and their sons who had by their own industry, and assisted
+in their first endeavours by their parents, worked themselves into
+a position of wealth, then came the Winna-boes, a grade mostly
+supplied by the favourite slave of a chief, who had been his constant
+attendant for years, commencing his career by carrying his master's
+pocket-handkerchief and snuff-box, pockets not having yet been
+introduced into the native costume; after some years of this duty he
+would be promoted to going down to the European traders to superintend
+the delivery of a canoe of oil, seeing to its being tried, gauged, &c.
+This first duty, if properly performed, would lead to his being often
+sent on the same errand. This duty required a certain amount of _savez_,
+as the natives call intelligence, for he had to so look after his
+master's interests that the pull-away boys that were with him in the
+canoe did not secrete any few gallons of oil that there might be left
+over after filling up all the casks he had been sent to deliver; nor
+must he allow the white trader to under-gauge his master's casks by
+carelessness or otherwise. If he was able to do the latter part of his
+errand in such a diplomatic manner that he did not raise the bile of the
+trader, that day marked the commencement of his upward career, if he was
+possessed of the bump of saving. All having gone off to the satisfaction
+of both parties, the trader would make this boy some small present
+according to the number of puncheons of oil he had brought down, seldom
+less than a piece of cloth worth about 2s. 6d., and, in the case of
+canoes containing ten to fifteen puncheons, the trader would often dash
+him two pieces of cloth and a bunch or two of beads. This present he
+would, on his return to his master's house, hand over to his mother (_id
+est_, the woman who had taken care of him from the time when he was
+first bought by his Brass master). She would carefully hoard this and
+all subsequent bits of miscellaneous property until he had in his
+foster-mother's hands sufficient goods to buy an angbar of oil--a
+measure containing thirty gallons. Then he would approach his master
+(always called "father" by his slaves) and beg permission to send his
+few goods to the Niger markets the next time his master had a canoe
+starting--which permission was always accorded. He had next to arrange
+terms with the head man or trader of his master's canoe as to what
+commission he had to get for trading off the goods in the far market. In
+this discussion, which may occupy many days before it is finally
+arranged, the foster-mother figures largely; and it depends a great deal
+upon her standing in the household of the chief as to the amount of
+commission the trade boy will demand for his services. If the
+foster-mother should happen to be a favourite wife of the chief, well,
+then things are settled very easily, the trade boy most likely saying he
+was quite willing to leff-em to be settled any way she liked; if, on the
+contrary, it was one of the poorer women of the chiefs house, Mr.
+Trade-boy would demand at least the quarter of the trade to commence
+with, and end up by accepting about an eighth. As the winnabo could
+easily double his property twice a year--and he was always adding to his
+store in his foster-mother's hands from presents received each time he
+went down to the white trader with his father's oil--it did not take
+many years for him to become a man of means, and own canoes and slaves
+himself. Many times have I known cases where the winnabo has repeatedly
+paid up the debts of his master to the white man.
+
+According to the law of the country, the master has the right to sell
+the very man who is paying his debts off for him; but I must say I never
+heard a case of such rank ingratitude, though cases have occurred where
+the master has got into such low water and such desperate difficulties
+that his creditors under country law have seized everything he was
+possessed of, including any wealthy winnaboes he might have.
+
+Some writers have said this class could purchase their freedom; with
+this I don't agree. The only chance a winnabo had of getting his freedom
+was, supposing his master died and left no sons behind him old enough or
+capable enough to take the place of their father, then the winnabo might
+be elected to take the place of his defunct master: he would then become
+_ipso facto_ a chief, and be reckoned a free man. If he was a man of
+strong character, he would hold until his death all the property of the
+house; but if one of the sons of his late master should grow up an
+intelligent man, and amass sufficient riches to gather round him some of
+the other chief men in the town, then the question was liable to be
+re-opened, and the winnabo might have to part out some of the property
+and the people he had received upon his appointment to the headship of
+the house, together with a certain sum in goods or oil, which the elders
+of the town would decide should represent the increment on the portion
+handed over. I have never known of a case where the whole of the
+property and people have been taken away from a winnabo in Brass; but I
+have known it occur in other rivers, but only for absolute misuse,
+misrule, and misconduct of the party.
+
+Egbo-boes are the niggers or absolute lower rank of slaves, who are
+employed as pull-away boys in the oil canoes and gigs of the chiefs, and
+do all the menial work or hard labour of the towns that is not done by
+the lower ranks of the women slaves.
+
+The lot of these egbo-boes is a very hard one at times, especially when
+their masters have no use for them in their oil canoes. At the best of
+times their masters don't provide them with more food then is about
+sufficient for one good square meal a day; but, when trade is dull and
+they have no use for them in any way, their lot is deplorable indeed.
+This class has suffered terribly during the last ten years owing to the
+complete stoppage of the Brassmen's trade in the Niger markets.
+
+This class had few chances of rising in the social scale, but it was
+from this class that sprang some of the best trade boys who took their
+masters' goods away up to Abo and occasionally as far as Onitsa, on the
+Niger.
+
+Cases have occurred of boys from this class rising to as good a position
+as the more favoured winnaboes; but for this they have had to thank some
+white trader, who has taken a fancy to here and there one of them, and
+getting his master to lend him to him as a cabin boy--a position
+generally sought after by the sons of chiefs, so as to learn "white
+man's mouth," otherwise English.
+
+The succession laws are similar to those of the other Coast tribes one
+meets with in the Delta, but to understand them it requires some little
+explanation. A tribe is composed of a king and a number of chiefs. Each
+chief has a number of petty chiefs under him. Perhaps a better
+definition for the latter would be, a number of men who own a few slaves
+and a few canoes of their own, and do an independent trade with the
+white men, but who pay to their chiefs a tribute of from 20 to 25 per
+cent, on their trade with the white man. In many cases the white man
+stops this tribute from the petty chiefs and holds it on behalf of the
+chief. This collection of petty chiefs with their chief forms what in
+Coast parlance is denominated a House.
+
+The House may own a portion of the principal town, say Obulambri, and
+also a portion in any of the small towns in the neighbouring creeks,
+and it may own here and there isolated pieces of ground where some petty
+chief has squatted and made a clearance either as a farm or to place a
+few of his family there as fishermen; in the same way the chief of the
+house may have squatted on various plots of ground in any part of the
+district admitted by the neighbouring tribes to belong to his tribe. All
+these parcels and portions of land belong in common to the House--that
+is, supposing a petty chief having a farm in any part of the district
+was to die leaving no male heirs and no one fit to take his place, the
+chief as head of the house would take possession, but would most likely
+leave the slaves of the dead man undisturbed in charge of the farm they
+had been working on, only expecting them to deliver him a portion of the
+produce equivalent to what they had been in the habit of delivering to
+their late master, who was a petty chief of the house.
+
+The head of the house would have the right of disposal of all the dead
+man's wives, generally speaking the younger ones would be taken by the
+chief, the others he would dispose of amongst his petty chiefs; if, as
+generally happens, there were a few aged ones amongst them for whom
+there was no demand he would take them into his own establishment and
+see they were provided for.
+
+As a matter of fact, all the people belonging to a defunct petty chief
+become the property of the head of the house under any circumstances;
+but if the defunct had left any man capable of succeeding him, the head
+chief would allow this man to succeed without interfering with him in
+any way, provided he never had had the misfortune to raise the chief's
+bile; in the latter case, if the chief was a very powerful chief, whose
+actions no one dare question, the chances are that he would either be
+suppressed or have to go to Long Ju-Ju to prosecute his claim, the
+expenses of which journey would most likely eat up the whole of the
+inheritance, or at least cripple him for life as far as his commercial
+transactions were concerned. It is of course to the interest of the head
+of a house to surround himself with as many petty chiefs as he possibly
+can, as their success in trade, and in amassing riches whether in slaves
+or goods, always benefits him; even in those rivers where no heavy
+"topside" is paid to the head of the house by the white traders, the
+small men or petty chiefs are called upon from time to time to help to
+uphold the dignity of the head chief, either by voluntary offerings or
+forced payments. Public opinion has a good deal to say on the subject of
+succession; and though a chief may be so powerful during his lifetime
+that he may ride roughshod over custom or public opinion, after his
+death his successor may find so many cases of malversation brought
+against the late chief by people who would not have dared to open their
+mouths during the late chief's lifetime, that by the time they are all
+settled he finds that a chief's life is not a happy one at all times.
+Claims of various kinds may be brought up during the lifetime of a
+chief, and three or four of his successors may have the same claim
+brought against them, each party may think he has settled the matter for
+ever; but unless he has taken worst, the descendants of the original
+claimants will keep attacking each successor until they strike one who
+is not strong enough to hold his own against them, and they succeed in
+getting their claim settled. This settlement does not interfere with the
+losing side turning round and becoming the claimants in their turn. Some
+of these family disputes are very curious; take for instance a case of
+a claim for five female slaves that may have been wrongfully taken
+possession of by some former chief of a house, this case perhaps is kept
+warm, waiting the right moment to put it forward, for thirty years, the
+claim then becomes not only for the original five women, but for their
+children's children and so on.
+
+
+RELIGION
+
+The Brass natives to-day are divided into two camps as far as religion
+is concerned: the missionary would no doubt say the greater number of
+them are Christians, the ordinary observer would make exactly the
+opposite observation, and judging from what we know has taken place in
+their towns within the last few years, I am afraid the latter would be
+right.
+
+The Church Missionary Society started a mission here in 1868; it is
+still working under another name, and is under the superintendence of
+the Rev. Archdeacon Crowther, a son of the late Bishop Crowther.
+
+Their success, as far as numbers of attendants at church, has been very
+considerable; and I have known cases amongst the women who were
+thoroughly imbued with the Christian religion, and acted up to its
+teaching as conscientiously as their white sisters; these however are
+few.
+
+With regard to the men converts I have not met with one of whom I could
+speak in the same terms as I have done of the women.
+
+Whilst fully recognising the efforts that the missionaries have put
+forth in this part of the world, I regret I can't bear witness to any
+great good they have done.
+
+This mission has been worked on the usual lines that English missions
+have been worked in the past, so I must attribute any want of success
+here as much to the system as anything.
+
+One of the great obstacles to the spread of Christianity in these parts
+is in my opinion the custom of polygamy, together with which are mixed
+up certain domestic customs that are much more difficult to eradicate
+than the teachings of Ju-Ju, and require a special mission for them
+alone.
+
+Almost equal to the above as an obstacle in the way of Christianity is
+what is called domestic slavery; Europeans who have visited Western
+Africa speak of this as a kind of slavery wherein there is no hardship
+for the slave; they point to cases where slaves have risen to be kings
+and chiefs, and many others who have been able to arrive at the position
+of petty chief in some big man's house. I grant all this, but all these
+people forget to mention that until these slaves are chiefs they are not
+safe; that any grade less than that of a chief that a slave may arrive
+to does not secure him from being sold if his master so wished.
+
+Further, domestic slavery gives a chief power of life and death over his
+slave; and how often have I known cases where promising young slaves
+have done something to vex their chief their heads have paid the
+penalty, though these young men had already amassed some wealth, having
+also several wives and children.
+
+People who condone domestic slavery, and I have heard many
+kindly-hearted people do so, forget that however mild the slavery of the
+domestic slave is on the coast, even under the mildest native it is
+still slavery; further, these slaves are not made out of wood, they are
+flesh and blood, they in their own country have had fathers and mothers.
+During my lengthened stay on the coast of Africa I never questioned a
+slave about his or her own country that I did not find they much
+preferred their own country far away in the interior to their new home.
+Some have told me that they had been travelling upwards of two months
+and had been handed from one slave dealer to another, in some cases
+changing their owner three or four times before reaching the coast. On
+questioning them how they became slaves, I have only been told by one
+that her father sold her because he was in debt; several times I have
+been told that their elder brothers have sold them, but these cases
+would not represent one per cent. of the slaves I have questioned; the
+almost general reply I have received has been that they had been stolen
+when they had gone to fetch water from the river or the spring, as the
+case might be, or while they have been straying a little in the bush
+paths between their village and another. Sometimes they would describe
+how the slave-catchers had enticed them into the bush by showing them
+some gaudy piece of cloth or offered them a few beads or negro bells,
+others had been captured in some raid by one town or village on another.
+
+Therefore domestic slavery in its effect on the interior tribes is doing
+very near the same amount of harm now that it did in days gone by. It
+keeps up a constant fear of strangers, and causes terrible feuds between
+the villages in the interior.
+
+What is the use of all the missionaries' teaching to the young girl
+slaves so long as they are only chattels, and are forced to do the
+bidding of their masters or mistresses, however degrading or filthy that
+bidding may be?
+
+The Ju-Juism of Brass is a sturdy plant, that takes a great deal of
+uprooting. A few years ago a casual observer would have been inclined
+to say the missionaries are making giant strides amongst these people. I
+remember, as evidence of how keenly these people seemed to take to
+Christianity up to a certain point, a little anecdote that the late
+Bishop Crowther once told me about the Brass men. I think it must have
+been a very few years before his death. I saw the worthy bishop
+staggering along my wharf with an old rice bag full of some heavy
+articles. On arriving on my verandah he threw the bag down, and after
+passing the usual compliments, he said, "You can't guess what I have got
+in that bag." I replied I was only good at guessing the contents of a
+bag when the bag was opened; but judging from the weight and the
+peculiar lumpy look of the outside of the bag, I should be inclined to
+guess yams. "Had he brought me a present of yams?" I continued. "No," he
+replied; "the contents of that bag are my new church seats in the town
+of Nimbe; the church was only finished during the week, and I decided to
+hold a service in it on Sunday last; and, do you believe me, those logs
+of wood are a sample of all we had for seats for most part of the
+congregation! I have therefore brought them down to show you white
+gentlemen our poverty, and to beg some planks to make forms for the
+church." I promised to assist him, and he left, carefully walking off
+with his bag of fire-wood, for that was all it was, cut in lengths of
+about fifteen inches, and about four inches in diameter. Here ends my
+anecdote, so far as the bishop was concerned, for he never came back to
+claim the fulfilment of my promise; but later on one of my clerks
+reported to me that there had been a great run on inch planks during the
+week, and that the purchasers were mostly women, and the poorest natives
+in the place. This fact, coupled with the fact that the bishop never
+came back for the planks he had begged of me, caused me to make some
+inquiries, and I found that the church had been plentifully supplied
+with benches by the poorer portion of the congregation.
+
+Yet how many of these earnest people could one guarantee to have
+completely cast out all their belief in Ju-Juism? If I were put upon my
+oath to answer truthfully according to my own individual belief, I am
+afraid my answer would be _not one_.
+
+What an awful injustice the missionary preaches in the estimation of the
+average native woman, when he advises the native of West Africa to put
+away all his wives but one. Supposing, for instance, it is the case of a
+big chief with a moderate number of wives, say only twenty or thirty, he
+may have had children by all of them, or he may have had children by a
+half dozen of them,--what is to become of those wives he discards? are
+they to be condemned to single blessedness for the remainder of their
+days? Native custom or etiquette would not allow these women to marry
+the other men in the chief's house; they can't marry into other houses,
+because they would find the same condition of things there as in their
+own husband's house, always supposing Christianity was becoming general.
+These difficulties in the way of the missionary are the Ju-Ju priests'
+levers, which they know well how to use against Christianity, and which
+accounts for the frequent slide back to Ju-Juism, and in some cases
+cannibalism of otherwise apparently semi-civilized Africans.
+
+The Pagan portion of the inhabitants of the Brass district have still
+their old belief in the Ju-Ju priests and animal worship.
+
+The python is the Brass natives' titular guardian angel. So great was
+the veneration of this Ju-Ju snake in former times, that the native
+kings would sign no treaties with her Britannic Majesty's Government
+that did not include a clause subjecting any European to a heavy fine
+for killing or molesting in any way this hideous reptile. When one
+appeared in any European's compound, the latter was bound to send for
+the nearest Ju-Ju priest to come and remove it, for which service the
+priest expected a dash, _id est_, a present; if he did not get it, the
+chances were the priest would take good care to see that that European
+found more pythons visited him than his neighbours; and as a rule these
+snakes were not found until they had made a good meal of one of the
+white man's goats or turkeys, it came cheaper in the long run to make
+the usual present.
+
+It is now some twenty years ago that the then agent of Messrs. Hatton
+and Cookson in Brass River found a large python in his house, and killed
+it. This coming to the ears of the natives and the Ju-Ju priests, caused
+no little excitement; the latter saw their opportunity, worked up the
+people to a state of frenzy, and eventually led them in an attack on the
+factory of Messrs. Hatton and Cookson, seized the agent and dragged him
+out of his house on to the beach, tied him up by his thumbs, each Ju-Ju
+priest present spat in his mouth, afterwards they stripped him naked and
+otherwise ill treated him, besides breaking into his store and robbing
+him of twenty pounds worth of goods. The British Consul was appealed to
+for redress, and upon his next visit to the river inquired into the
+case, but, _mirabile dictu_, decided that he was unable to afford the
+agent any redress, as he had brought the punishment on himself. I don't
+mention the name of this Consul, as it would be a pity to hand down to
+posterity the fact that England was ever represented by such an idiot.
+
+Besides the python the Brass men had several other secondary Ju-Jus;
+amongst others may be mentioned the grey and white kingfisher, also
+another small bird like a water-wagtail, besides which, in common with
+their neighbours, they believed in a spirit of the water who was
+supposed to dwell down by the Bar, and to which they occasionally made
+offerings in the shape of a young slave-girl of the lightest complexion
+they could buy.
+
+The burial customs of this people differed little from others in the
+Niger Delta, but as I was present at the burial of two of their
+kings--viz. King Keya and King Arishima, at which I saw identically the
+same ceremonial take place, I will describe what I saw as far as my
+memory will serve me, for the last of these took place about thirty
+years ago.
+
+The grave in this instance was not dug in a house, but on a piece of
+open ground close to the king's house, but was afterwards roofed over
+and joined on to the king's houses. The size of the grave was about
+fourteen by twelve feet, and about eight feet deep. At the end where the
+defunct's head would be, was a small table with a cloth laid over it,
+upon this were several bottles of different liquors, a large piece of
+cooked salt beef and sundry other cooked meats, ship's biscuits, &c. The
+ceiling of this chamber was supported by stout beams being laid across
+the opening, upon which would be placed planks after the body had been
+lowered into position, then the whole would be covered over with a part
+of the clay that had been taken out of the hole, the rest of the clay
+being afterwards used to form the walls of the house, that was
+eventually constructed over the grave; a small round hole about three
+inches in diameter being made in the ceiling of the grave, apparently
+about over the place where the head of the corpse would lay. Down this
+would be poured palm wine and spirits on the anniversaries of the king's
+death, by his successor and by the Ju-Ju priests. This part of the
+ceremony would be called "making his father," if it was a son who
+succeeded; if it was not a son, he would describe it as "making his big
+father"; though he was perhaps no blood relation at all.
+
+Previous to the burial the body of the king lay in state for two days in
+a small hut scarcely five feet high, with very open trellis work sides.
+I believe they would have kept the body unburied longer if they could
+have done so, but at the end of the second day his Highness commenced to
+be very objectionable. The king's body was dressed for this ceremony in
+his most expensive robes, having round the neck several necklaces of
+valuable coral, to which his chiefs would add a string more or less
+valuable according to their means, as they arrived for the final
+ceremony. The Europeans were expected to contribute something towards
+the funeral expenses, which contribution generally consisted of a cask
+of beef, a barrel of rum, a hundredweight of ship's biscuits, and from
+twenty to thirty pieces of cloth. Even in this there was a certain
+amount of rivalry shown by the Europeans, to their loss and the natives'
+gain. One knowing trader amongst them on this occasion had just received
+a consignment of imitation coral, an article at that time quite unknown
+in the river, either to European trader or to natives; so he decided to
+place one of these strings of imitation coral round the king's neck
+himself, and thus create a great sensation, for had it been real coral
+its value would have been one hundred pounds. He had, however, not
+counted on the king's very objectionable state, and when he proceeded to
+place his offering round the king's neck, he nearly came to grief, and
+did not seem quite himself until he had had a good stiff glass of brandy
+and water. The news spread like wildfire of this man's munificence, and
+soon the principal chiefs waited upon him to thank him for his present
+to their dead king; the other Europeans were green with jealousy, though
+each had in his turn tried to outdo his neighbour; unfortunately, there
+was a Scotchman there "takin' notes," and faith he guessed a ruse, but
+he was a good fellow and friend of the donor, and kept the secret for
+some years, and did not tell the tale until it could do his friend no
+harm.
+
+The cannons had been going off at intervals for the last two days.
+Towards ten o'clock of the second night after death the king was placed
+in a very open-work wicker casket, and carried shoulder high round the
+town, and then finally deposited in his grave. During this time the
+cannons were being continually fired off, and individuals were assisting
+in the din by firing off the ordinary trade gun. I and another European
+concealed ourselves near the grave, and carefully watched all night to
+see if they sacrificed any slaves on the king's grave, or put any poor
+creatures down into the grave to die a lingering death; but we saw
+nothing of this done, though we had been informed that no king or chief
+of Brass was ever buried without some of his slaves being sent with him
+into the next world; as our informant explained, how would they know he
+had been a big man in this life if he did not go accompanied by some of
+his niggers into the next?
+
+The firing of cannon is kept up at intervals for an indefinite number of
+days after the final interment; but there is no hard and fast rule as
+to its duration as far as I have been able to ascertain, and I think
+myself it is ruled by the greater or less liberality of the successors,
+who are the ones who have to pay for the gunpowder.
+
+Amongst other customs that are common to all these rivers and this river
+is the killing of twin children; but since the mission has been
+established here the missionaries have done their utmost to wean the
+people from this remnant of savagery.
+
+A curious custom that I have heard of in most of these rivers is the
+throwing into the bush, to be devoured by the wild beasts, any children
+that may be born with their front teeth cut. I found this custom in
+Brass, but with an exception, _id est_, I knew a pilot in Twon Town who
+had had the misfortune to be born with his upper front teeth through;
+whether it was because it was only the upper teeth that were through, or
+whether it was that the law is not so strictly carried out in the case
+of a male, I was never able to make sure of; however, he had been
+allowed to live, but it appears in his case some part of the law had to
+be carried out at his death, viz. he was not allowed to be buried, but
+was thrown into the bush, to fall a prey to the wild beasts, and any
+property he might die possessed of could not be inherited by any one,
+but must be dissipated or thrown into the bush to rot. I believe the
+Venerable Archdeacon Crowther has been instrumental in saving several of
+these kind of children in Bonny.
+
+The women of Brass are, like their sisters in Benin river, moving on
+towards women's rights; for though they have been for many generations
+the hewers of wood and drawers of water, and made to do most of the hard
+work of the country, they had commenced some years ago to enjoy more
+freedom than their sisters in the leeward rivers. They still do most of
+the fishing, and the fishing girls of Twon Town used to present a pretty
+sight as some fifteen or twenty of their tiny canoes used to sweep past
+the European factories, each canoe propelled by two or three graceful,
+laughing, chattering girls; with them would generally be seen a canoe or
+two paddled by some dames of a maturer age. Though _passee_ as far as
+their looks were concerned, they could still ply their paddle as well as
+the best amongst the younger ones, as they forced their frail canoes
+through water to some favourite quiet blind creek where the currentless
+water allowed them to use their preparation[83] for stupefying the fish,
+and in little over three hours you might see them come paddling back,
+each tiny canoe with from fifty to a hundred small grey mullet,
+sometimes with more and occasionally with a few small river soles.
+
+The Brass man, like his neighbours, had his public Ju-Ju house as well
+as his private little Ju-Ju chamber, the latter was to be found in any
+Brass man's establishment which boasted of more than one room; those who
+could not afford a separate chamber used to devote a corner of their own
+room, where might be seen sundry odds and ends bespattered with some
+yellow clay, and occasionally a white fowl hung by the leg to remain
+there and die of starvation and drop gradually to pieces as it
+decomposed.
+
+The public Ju-Ju house at Obulambri was not a very pretentious affair;
+it consisted of a native hut of wattle and daub, the walls not being
+carried more than half way up to the eaves, roofed with palm mats; in
+the centre was an iron staff about five feet high, surrounded by eight
+bent spear heads; this was called a tokoi, at the foot of it was a hole
+about three inches in diameter, down which the Ju-Ju priests would pour
+libations of tombo or palm wine, as a sacrifice to the Ju-Ju. I was
+informed that this Ju-Ju house was built over the grave of the original
+founder of Obulambri town. Behind the tokoi, on a kind of altar raised
+about eighteen inches from the ground, were displayed about a dozen
+human skulls; at the time I visited it the Ju-Ju man explained to me
+that the greater part of these had belonged to New Calabar prisoners
+taken in their last war with those people; besides the skulls were
+sundry odds and ends of native pottery, as also a few bowls and jugs of
+European manufacture. What part this pottery played in their devotions I
+could never get a Ju-Ju man to explain, some of them appeared to have
+held human blood. Stacked up in one corner were a few human bones,
+principally thigh and shin bones.
+
+The Brassmen do not often sacrifice human beings to their Ju-Jus, except
+in time of war, when all prisoners without exception were sacrificed.
+
+Their Ju-Ju snake occasionally secured a small child by crawling
+unobserved into a house when the elders were absent or asleep. I once
+was passing through a small fishing village in the St. Nicholas river,
+when most of the inhabitants were away fishing, and hearing terrible
+screams went to see what was the cause of the trouble, and found several
+women wringing their hands and running to and fro in front of a small
+hut. For several minutes I could not get them to tell me what was the
+cause of their trouble; at last one of them trembling, with the most
+abject fear and quite unable to speak, pointed to the door of the hut.
+I went and looked in, but it was so dark I could see nothing at first,
+so stepped inside; when, getting accustomed to the semi-darkness, I saw
+a large python, some ten or twelve feet long, hanging from the ridge
+pole of the hut immediately over a child about two years old that was
+calmly sleeping. To snatch up the child and walk out was the work of a
+moment. I then found that the woman who had pointed to the door of the
+hut was the mother of the child--her gratitude to me for delivering her
+child from certain death can be more easily imagined than described.
+Upon asking why she had not acted as I had done, she replied she dare
+not have interfered with the snake in the way I had done. I afterwards
+asked several of the more intelligent natives of Brass if the Ju-Ju law
+did not allow a mother to save her child in such a case. Some said she
+was a fool woman, and that she could have taken her child away the
+moment she saw it in danger; but others said had she done so, she would
+have been liable to be killed herself or pay a heavy fine to the Ju-Ju
+priests; and I am inclined to believe the latter version to be
+correct.[84]
+
+Amongst other curious customs these people make use of the feather
+ordeal, to find out robbery, witchcraft, and adultery, &c. In this
+ordeal it rests a great deal with the Ju-Ju man who performs it whether
+it proves the party guilty or not. This ordeal is performed as
+follows:--The Ju-Ju man takes a feather from the underpart of a fowl's
+wing, making choice of a stronger or weaker one, according to how he
+intends the ordeal shall demonstrate, then, drawing the tongue of the
+accused as far out of his mouth as he can, forces the quill of the
+feather through from the upper side and draws it out by grasping the
+point of the feather from the under side of the tongue; if the feather
+is unbroken the accused person is proved guilty, if on the contrary the
+feather breaks in the attempt to pass it through the tongue it proves
+the innocence of the person. It may be seen from this description how
+very easy it was to prove a person innocent, the mere fact of the
+feather breaking in the attempt to push it through the tongue being
+sufficient; thus, when suitably approached, the Ju-Ju man could not only
+prove a person's innocence, but also save him any inconvenience in
+eating his mess of foo foo and palaver sauce that evening.
+
+
+NEW CALABAR
+
+The intervening rivers between the Brass and New Calabar Rivers are the
+St. Nicholas, the St. Barbara, the St. Bartholomew, and the Sombrero;
+the influence of the king of New Calabar may be said to commence at the
+St. Bartholomew River, extending inland to about five or ten miles
+beyond the town of Bugama. The lower parts of the St. Bartholomew and
+the numerous creeks, running between that river and New Calabar are
+mostly inhabited by fishermen and their families, their towns and
+villages being without exception the most squalid and dirty of any to be
+found in the Delta. Beyond fishing, the males seem to do little else
+than sleep; occasionally the men assist their wives and children in
+making palm-leaf mats, used generally all over the Delta in place of
+thatch--not a very profitable employment, as the demand varies
+considerably according to the seasons. After a very rough and
+boisterous rainy season, the price may be two shillings and sixpence, or
+its equivalent, for four hundred of these mats, each mat being a little
+over two feet in length, but falling in bad times to two shillings and
+sixpence for five to six hundred. A roof made with these mats threefold
+thick will last for three years.
+
+These people call themselves Calabar men simply because they live within
+the influence of the Calabarese. In the upper part of these small
+rivers, about a day's journey by canoe from the mouth of St.
+Bartholomew, is the chief town of a small tribe of people called the
+Billa tribe, connected by marriage with the Bonny men, several of the
+kings of Bonny having married Billa women. These people are producers in
+a small way of palm-oil, and though they are located so close to the New
+Calabar people, prefer to sell their produce to the Bonny men, who send
+their canoes over to the Billa country to fetch the oil, the latter
+people not having canoes large enough for carrying the large puncheons
+which the Bonny men send over to collect their produce in.
+
+The New Calabar men are now split up into three towns called Bugama,
+where the king lives; Abonema, of which Bob Manuel is the principal
+chief; and Backana, where the Barboy House reside. Besides they have
+numerous small towns scattered about in the network of creeks connecting
+the Calabar River with the Sombrero River. Previous to 1880 these people
+all dwelt together in one large town on the right bank of the Calabar
+River, nearly opposite to where the creek, now called the Cawthorne
+Channel,[85] branches off from the main river.
+
+For some few years previous the chief of the Barboy House, Will Braid,
+had incurred the displeasure of the Amachree house, which was the king's
+house. For certain private reasons the king, with whom sided most of the
+other chiefs, had decided to break down the Barboy house, which had
+been a very powerful house in days anterior to the present king's
+father, and tradition says that the Barboys had some right to be the
+reigning house. Will Braid, the head of the house at this time, had by
+his industry and honourable conduct raised the position of the house to
+very near its former influence. This was one of the private reasons that
+caused the king to look on him with disfavour.
+
+When one of these West African kinglets decides that one of their chiefs
+is getting too rich, and by that means too powerful, he calls his more
+immediate supporters together, and they discuss the means that are to be
+used to compass the doomed one's fall. If he be a man of mettle, with
+many sub-chiefs and aspiring trade boys, the system resorted to is to
+trump up charges against him of breaches of agreement as to prices paid
+by him or his people in the Ibo markets for produce, and fine him
+heavily. If he pays without murmur, they leave him alone for a time; but
+very soon another case is brought against him either on the same lines
+or for some breach of native etiquette, such as sending his people into
+some market to trade where, perchance, he has been sending his people
+for years; but the king and his friendly chiefs dish up some old custom,
+long allowed to drop in abeyance, by which his house was debarred from
+trading in that particular market. The plea of long usance would avail
+him little; another fine would be imposed. This injustice would
+generally have the effect desired, the doomed one would refuse to pay,
+then down the king would come on him for disregarding the orders of
+himself and chiefs; fine would follow fine, until the man lost his head
+and did some rash act, which assisted his enemies to more certainly
+compass his ruin. Or he does what I have seen a persecuted chief do in
+these rivers on more than one occasion: that is, he gathers all his
+wives and children about him, together with his most trusted followers
+and slaves, also any of his family who are willing to follow him into
+the next world, lays a double tier of kegs of gunpowder on the floor of
+the principal room in his dwelling-house and knocks in the heads of the
+top tier of kegs. Placing all his people on this funeral pile, he seats
+himself in the middle with a fire-stick grasped in his hand, then sends
+a message to the king and chiefs to come and fetch the fines they have
+imposed on him. The king and chiefs generally shrewdly guessed what this
+message meant, and took good care not to get too near, stopping at a
+convenient distance to parley with him by means of messengers. The
+victim finding there was no chance of blowing up his enemies along with
+himself and people, would plunge the fire-stick into the nearest keg,
+and the next moment the air would be filled with the shattered remains
+of himself and his not unwilling companions.
+
+Having digressed somewhat to explain how chiefs are undone, I must
+continue my account of the New Calabar people and the cause of their
+deserting their original town. This was brought about by Will Braid, on
+whom the squeezing operation had been some time at work. He turned at
+bay and defied the king and chiefs; this led to a civil war, in which he
+was getting the worst of the game, so one dark night he quietly slipped
+away with most of his retainers and took refuge in Bonny. This led to
+complications, for Bonny espoused the cause of W. Braid and declared war
+against New Calabar; thus in place of suppressing Will Braid they came
+near to being suppressed themselves, the Bonny men very pluckily
+establishing themselves opposite New Calabar town, where they threw up
+a sand battery, in which they placed several rifled cannon, and did
+considerable damage to the New Calabar town, from whence a feeble return
+fire was kept up for several days, during which time the Calabar men
+occupied themselves in placing their valuables and people in security,
+and eventually, unknown to the Bonny men, clearing out all their war
+canoes and fighting men through creeks at the back of their town to the
+almost inaccessible positions of Bugama and Abonema. The Bonny men
+continued the bombardment, but finding there was no reply from the town,
+despatched, during the night, some scouts to find out what was the
+position of things in the New Calabar town; on their return they
+reported the town deserted. The Bonny men lost no time in following the
+New Calabar men to their new position, but found Bugama inaccessible, so
+turned their attention to Abonema, which they very pluckily assaulted,
+but were repulsed with considerable loss, losing one of their best war
+canoes, in which was a fine rifled cannon; at the same time the Bonny
+chief, Waribo, who had most energetically led the assault, barely
+escaped with his life, as he was in the war canoe that had been sunk by
+the New Calabar men. This victory was very pluckily gained by Chief Bob
+Manuel and his people, who were greatly assisted in the defence of their
+position by having been supplied at an opportune moment with a
+mitrailleuse by one of the European traders in the New Calabar river.
+This defeat somewhat cooled the courage of the Bonny men; the war
+however continued to be carried on in a desultory manner for several
+months, until both sides were tired of the game, and at last all the
+questions in dispute between the king and chiefs of New Calabar and Will
+Braid, and the matters in dispute between the New Calabar men and the
+Bonny men were by mutual agreement left to the arbitration of the king
+and chiefs of Okrika, and King Ja Ja and the chiefs of Opobo. The
+arbitrators met on board one of Her Majesty's vessels in Bonny River in
+1881, King Ja Ja being represented by Chief Cookey Gam and several other
+chiefs, the king and chiefs of Okrika being in full force. The result of
+the arbitration did not give complete satisfaction to any party, owing
+to the advice of Ja Ja on the affair not having been listened to in its
+entirety. However, W. Braid returned to New Calabar territory and
+founded a town of his own, assisted by his very faithful Chief Yellow of
+Young Town. Thus ended the last war between the old rivals Bonny and New
+Calabar. It is on record that these two countries had been scarcely ever
+at peace for any length of time since New Calabar was first founded some
+two hundred and fifty years ago, when, tradition says, one of the
+Ephraim Duke family left Old Calabar and settled at the spot from whence
+they retired in 1880.
+
+Old traders I met with in the early sixties informed me that during one
+of these wars, between the years 1820 and 1830, the king Pepple, then
+reigning in Bonny succeeded in capturing the king of Calabar of that
+time (the grandfather of the last king Amachree), and to celebrate his
+victory and royal capture, made a great feast to which he invited all
+the European slave traders then in his country. The feast was a right
+royal one, the king had a special dish prepared for himself which was
+nothing less than the heart of his royal captive, torn from his scarcely
+lifeless body.
+
+The New Calabar people, though said to be descended from the Old Calabar
+race, have not retained any of the characteristics of the latter,
+neither in their language nor dress, nor have they retained the
+elaborate form of secret society or native freemasonry peculiar to the
+Efik[86] race called Egbo.
+
+Their religion is the same animistic form of Ju-Juism and belief in the
+oracle they call Long Ju-Ju situated in the vicinity of Bende in the
+hinterland of Opobo, common to all the inhabitants of the Delta; besides
+the latter, they are believers in the power of a Ju-Ju in some mystic
+grove in the Oru country. The peculiar test at this latter place is said
+to have been established by some ancient dame having uttered some
+fearful curse or wish at the spot where the ordeal is administered. The
+descriptions of this are rather vague, as no one who has undergone it
+has ever been known to return, that is, if he has really seen the oracle
+work, for if it works it is a sign of his guilt and drowns him; if he is
+innocent it does not work, so on his return he is not in a position to
+describe it. But the proprietors of this interesting Ju-Ju have for very
+many years found that a nigger fetches a better price alive than when
+turned into butcher's meat; they have therefore been in the habit of
+selling the guilty victim into slavery in as far distant a country as
+possible; but occasionally one of these men have drifted down to the
+coast again, but dare not return to his own country as no one would
+believe he was anything else but a spirit. One of these "spirits" I had
+the pleasure to interview on one occasion, and he told me that the only
+ones who were actually drowned were the old or unsaleable men; when two
+men went to this Ju-Ju or ordeal well, to decide some vital question
+between them, the party taking best would want to see his dead or
+drowned opponent; for this purpose the Ju-Ju priests always kept a few
+of the old and decrepit votaries on hand to be drowned as required, but
+the opponent was never allowed to stand by and see the oracle work, but
+was taken up to the well and allowed to see a dead body lying at the
+bottom, and after he had glanced in and satisfied himself there was a
+drowned person there, he would be hurried away by the Ju-Ju priests and
+their assistants. That these priests had the supernatural power to make
+the water rise up in the well, this "spirit" thoroughly believed, and
+when I offered the suggestion of an underground water supply brought
+from some higher elevation, he scouted the idea and gave me his private
+opinion thus: "White man he no be fit savey all dem debly ting Ju-Ju
+priest fit to do; he fit to change man him face so him own mudder no fit
+savey him; he fit make dem tree he live for water side, bob him head
+down and drink water all same man; he fit make himself alsame bird and
+fly away; you fit to look him lib for one place and you keep you eye for
+him, he gone, you no fit see him when he go."
+
+Which little speech turned into ordinary English meant to say that white
+people could not understand the devilish tricks the Ju-Ju priests were
+able to do, they could so disguise a person that his own mother would
+not recognise him, this without the assistance of any make-up but simply
+from their devilish science; that they could cause a tree on the banks
+of a river to bend its stem and imbibe water through its topmost
+branches; that they could change themselves into birds and fly away; and
+lastly, that they could make themselves invisible before your eyes and
+so suddenly that you could not tell when they had done so.
+
+I asked him why the Ju-Ju man had not altered him, so that when he sold
+him it would be impossible for any one who had known him in his own
+country ever to recognise him if they saw him in another. His reply was:
+"Ju-Ju man savey them man what believe in Ju-Ju no will believe me dem
+time I go tell dem I be dem Os[=u]k[=u] of Young Town come back from
+Long Ju-Ju. He savey all man go run away from me in my own country."
+"Well," I said, "how about the people amongst whom you now are? they
+believe in very nearly the same Ju-Jus that your own people do, what do
+they say about you?" "Oh! they say I be silly fellow and no savey I done
+die one time, and been born again in some other country." I then asked
+him how they accounted for his knowing about the people who were still
+alive in his own country and to be able to talk about matters which had
+taken place there within the previous five or six years. Then I got the
+word the inquirer in this part of the world generally gets when he
+wishes to dive into the inner circles of native occultism, viz.,
+"Anemia," which means "I don't know."
+
+The chiefs in New Calabar in the days of the last king's father were an
+extremely fine body of men, both physically and commercially; the latter
+quality they owed to the strong hand the king kept over them, and the
+excellent law he inaugurated when he became the king with regard to
+trade, viz., that no New Calabar chief or other native was allowed to
+take any goods on credit from the Europeans. His power was absolute, and
+considering that he inherited his father's place at a time when the
+country was in the throes of war with Bonny--his father being the king
+captured by the king of Bonny mentioned previously--the success of his
+rule was wonderful, for he pulled his country together and carried on
+the war with such ability that Bonny ultimately was glad to come to
+terms; a peace was agreed upon which lasted many years, until the old
+king of Bonny died, and his son wishing to emulate his father re-opened
+hostilities, but with such ill-success and loss to his country that it
+eventually led to his being deposed and exiled from his country for some
+years.
+
+The New Calabar people are and have been always great believers in
+Ju-Juism, the head Ju-Ju priest being styled the Ju-Ju king and ranking
+higher than the king in any matters relating to purely native affairs.
+
+The shark is their principal animal deity, to which they were in the
+habit of sacrificing a light-coloured child every seven years. This used
+to be openly and ostentatiously performed by a procession of a
+half-dozen large canoes being formed up at the town of New Calabar, each
+canoe being manned by forty to fifty paddlers; in the midships of each
+canoe a deck some ten feet long would be placed on which the Ju-Ju
+priests and a number of the younger chiefs and the grown-up sons of the
+chief men would huddle together and keep up a continuous howling and
+dancing, accompanied with the waving of their hands and handkerchiefs,
+until they arrived down near the mouth of the river. When the water
+began to be so rough that the singers and dancers could not keep their
+feet, it was a sign the offering must be cast into the sea; the Ju-Ju
+men and their assistants all supplicating their friend the shark to
+intercede with the Spirit of the Water to keep open the entrance to
+their river and cause plenty of ships to come to their river to trade.
+
+Their Ju-Ju house in their original town was a much larger and more
+pretentious edifice than that of Bonny, garnished with human and goats'
+skulls in a somewhat similar manner, unlike the Bonny Ju-Ju house in the
+fact that it was roofed over, the eaves of which were brought down
+almost to the ground, thus excluding the light and prying eyes at the
+same time; at either side of the main entrance, extending some few feet
+from the eaves, was a miscellaneous collection of iron three-legged
+pots, various plates, bowls and dishes of Staffordshire make, all of
+which had some flower pattern on them, hence were Ju-Ju and not
+available for use or trade--the old-fashioned lustre jug, being also
+Ju-Ju, was only to be seen in the Ju-Ju house, though a great favourite
+in Bonny and Brass as a trade article--at this time all printed goods or
+cloth with a flower or leaf pattern on them were Ju-Ju. Any goods of
+these kinds falling into the hands of a true believer had to be
+presented to the Ju-Ju house. As traders took good care not to import
+any such goods, people often wondered where all these things came from.
+Had they arrived shortly after a vessel bound to some other port had had
+the misfortune to be wrecked off New Calabar, they would have solved the
+problem at once, for anything picked up from a wreck which is Ju-Ju has
+to be carried off at once to the Ju-Ju house. I remember on one occasion
+visiting this Ju-Ju house just after a large ship called the _Clan
+Gregor_ bound into Bonny had been wrecked off New Calabar, and found the
+Ju-Ju house decked both inside and out with yards of coloured cottons
+from roof to floor; but the Ju-Ju priests did not get all their rights,
+for some tricky natives on salving a bale of goods would carefully slit
+the bale just sufficiently to see what were the goods inside, and
+should they be Ju-Ju would not open them, but take them to their
+particular friend amongst the European traders, and get him to send them
+away to some other river for sale on joint account.
+
+Every eighth day is called Calabar Sunday, the day following being
+formerly the market day or principal receiving day for the white traders
+of the native produce, which consisted principally, and still does, of
+palm oil. The native Sunday was passed in olden days by the chief in
+receiving visits from the white men and jamming[87] with them for any
+produce he had the intention of selling the following day, or clearing
+up any little Ju-Ju matters that he had been putting off for the want of
+a slack day, not because it was his Sunday, but because that was a day
+on which by custom he could not visit the ships. I remember it was on
+paying a visit to old King Amachree, the father of the late king of the
+same name, I saw for the first time a native sacrifice. I was then
+little more than a boy as a matter of fact, I was under seventeen years
+of age, but filling a man's place in New Calabar who had been invalided
+home. The old king had taken me under his special protection and gave me
+much good advice and counsel, which was of great use to me in my novel
+position. My employers ought to have been very thankful to him, for
+though I was the youngest trader in the river by some twelve years, I
+held my own with them and got a larger share of the produce of the river
+than my predecessor had done, all owing to the old brick of a king, who
+would come and see how I was doing on the big trade days, and if he
+thought I was not doing as well as my neighbours he would send off a
+message to a small creek close to the shipping, where the natives used
+to wait with their oil until it was jammed for, _id est_, agreed for,
+and order three or four canoes of oil to be sent off to me, though I had
+not seen its owner to agree with him as to what he was to get for it. I
+held this appointment for a little over six months, when, my senior
+having returned, I had to go back to my duties in Bonny under the chief
+agent of the firm, a Captain Peter Thompson, one of the kindest-hearted
+skippers that ever entered Bonny river. In those days we all had some
+nickname that we were known by amongst the natives, and another amongst
+the white men. Amongst the former he was called Calla Thompson, because
+he was short, in contradistinction to another Thompson who was tall,
+called Opo Thompson; but his name amongst the white men was Panter
+Thompson, owing to his inability to pronounce the "th" in panther during
+a discussion as to whether we had tigers or only panthers on the West
+Coast of Africa. Poor Panter, after a most successful voyage of a little
+over two years, was preparing to return home, and had only a few more
+weeks to remain in Bonny, when in stepping into his boat his foot
+slipped and he fell into the river at a point known to be infested with
+sharks. A brother skipper jumped into the boat, and actually clutched
+him by his cap at the same moment poor Panter said "I am gone, Ned!" no
+doubt feeling himself being drawn down by some hungry shark.
+
+His son now commands one of the finest steamers of the African Steamship
+Company, and seems to have inherited in a marked degree all the good
+qualities of his father; so, travellers to West Africa, if you want a
+comfortable ship and a thorough good fellow to travel with, take your
+passage in the ship commanded by Captain Willie Thompson, R.N.R.
+
+But this is digressing. I must get back to New Calabar and tell you what
+I saw at my introduction to Ju-Juism under the auspices of dear old King
+Amachree. The occasion was the swearing Ju-Ju with some people in the
+interior, with whom they had only lately opened up commercial relations,
+and they wanted them to swear they would trade with no other people but
+them. The deputation, who represented the market people, looked as wild
+a lot as one could wish to see, and, as far as I could make out, the
+ceremony I was watching was a kind of preliminary canter to a more
+impressive, and most likely more diabolical one to be carried out at
+some future date in the stranger folks' country. On this occasion the
+officiating Ju-Ju priest did not seem to address any of his words to the
+strangers, who looked on with a certain amount of fear depicted in their
+countenance.
+
+The Ju-Ju priest was clothed (?) in a superb dark-coloured and
+greasy-looking rag about his loins, barely sufficient to satisfy the
+easiest going of European Lord Chamberlains; but from the expressive
+grunts of satisfaction which greeted his appearance in the Ju-Ju house,
+I was led to suppose his dress was quite correct and proper for the
+occasion. His head was shaved on the right side, and all down his right
+side and leg he had been dusted over with some greyish-white native
+chalk. He said a few words in an undertone to one of his assistants, who
+went out of sight for a moment or so and quickly returned with a very
+fine almost milk-white goat, the poor beast seeming to anticipate its
+fate from its fearfully loud bleating. The Ju-Ju priest seized the poor
+beast by its muzzle with his left hand, and dexterously tossing its body
+under his left arm, forced its head back towards his left shoulder until
+the neck of the beast formed an arc, his assistant handing him at this
+moment a very sharp white-handled spear-pointed knife, which he drew
+across the animal's throat, almost severing its head from its body.
+Quick as lightning he dropped on one knee and held the bleeding animal
+over a receptacle, having the appearance of a large soup plate,
+fashioned in the clay of the ground immediately in front of the altar
+arrangement. In the centre of this plate was a hole down which the
+quickly coagulating blood slowly trickled; after the interval of what
+appeared to me minutes, but was in fact most likely less than a minute,
+the Ju-Ju man laid the lifeless body of the goat down with its neck over
+the opening in the plate, leaving it there to drain. At the moment of
+the sacrifice various gongs and old ship bells were struck by young men
+stationed near them for that purpose--a wrecked ship's bell being
+generally presented to the Ju-Ju house, though not as in the case of
+Ju-Ju goods by law prescribed. New Calabar people had been fairly well
+observant of this custom, and the wrecks numerous, judging from the
+number of ships' bells in the Ju-Ju house. At every movement of the
+Ju-Ju priest the king and chief would grunt out a noise very much
+resembling that auld Scotch word "ahum."
+
+The Ju-Ju house had amongst its possessions several ill-shapen wooden
+idols, and scattered about the affair that represented an altar were
+various small idols looking very much like children's dolls; also
+several large elephant's tusks, and two or three very well carved ones,
+with the usual procession of coated and naked figures winding round
+them.
+
+The present king of New Calabar[88] is a son of my old friend King
+Amachree, and is called King Amachree also, but has shown little of the
+ability of his late father, being completely led by the nose by his
+brother George Amachree, who practically rules both king and people.
+
+The former is a small, quiet, and rather amiable man, but of a
+vacillating and unreliable character; his brother and prime minister is,
+on the contrary, a tall and very fine specimen of the negro race,
+endowed by nature with a very suave and not unmusical voice, a very able
+speaker, clear and logical reasoner, but of a very grasping nature--an
+excellent and successful trader and exceedingly nice man to deal with,
+as long as he has got things moving the way that suits him and his
+policy; but when thwarted in his designs, trading or political, he
+becomes a difficult customer to deal with, and a very unpleasant and
+objectionable type of negro "big man." Nevertheless, had he had the
+fortune to have been born in a civilised Africa, I feel confident his
+natural abilities, assisted by education, would have made him a man of
+eminence in whatever country his lot might have been cast.
+
+Most of the New Calabar chiefs bear a very favourable repute amongst the
+white traders, and compare very favourably intellectually with the
+neighbouring chiefs of the Niger Delta.
+
+Another chief of no mean capacity is Bob Manuel, of Abonema, exceedingly
+neat, almost a dandy in appearance, a very shrewd trader, clear and
+concise in his speech, honourable in all his dealings, of a very
+reserved temperament; but a charming man to talk with, once started on
+any topic that interests him or his visitor.
+
+Owing to some peculiarities in their dress, the New Calabar chiefs are
+very different to the chiefs in other parts of the Delta. They never
+appear outside of their houses unless robed in long shirts (made of real
+india madras of bold check patterns, in which no other colour but red,
+blue and white is ever allowed to be used) reaching down to their heels;
+under this they wear a singlet and a flowing loin cloth of the same
+material as their shirts. Of late years, during the rainy season, some
+of them have added elastic-side boots and white socks, but the most
+curious part of their get-up is their head-gear, for since about 1866
+they have taken to wearing wigs. These are only worn on high days and
+holidays and at special functions, but the effect sometimes is so
+utterly ridiculous as to be more than strangers can look at without
+laughing. Imagine an immensely stout and somewhat podgy negro with
+elastic-side boots, white stockings, long shirt, several strings of
+coral hung round his neck and hanging in festoons down as far as where
+his waistcoat would end, did he wear one, a Charles II. light flaxen
+wig, the latter topped up by an ordinary stove-pipe black silk hat!
+
+This fashion of wearing wigs, I am afraid, was unconsciously inaugurated
+by me, having taken with me in 1865 to New Calabar some wigs that I had
+used in some private theatricals in England. A chief named Tom Fouche
+saw them, and was enchanted with a nigger's trick wig, the top of which
+could be raised by pulling a hidden silk cord, and eventually he became
+the proud possessor of my stock, and produced a great sensation the
+first public festival he appeared at. Previous to this I never saw a wig
+in New Calabar; as a matter of fact, they have no excuse for them, a
+bald-headed native being an almost unheard-of curiosity, and grey or
+white heads are very scarce. Alas! like all pioneers, I did not reap the
+reward I should have done, as I left the New Calabar river before the
+fashion had caught on, and Messrs. Thomas Harrison and Co., of
+Liverpool, became the principal purveyors of wigs to the Court of New
+Calabar.
+
+These people are remarkable for the bold stand they have made against
+the persecution of their neighbours almost from the day their founder
+planted his foot on the New Calabar soil, or mud rather, I should say;
+besides their wars with the Bonny men, they were often attacked by the
+Brass men, allies of Bonny. With the Okrika men they were almost
+constantly at war. This latter was a kind of guerilla warfare carried on
+in the creeks, and consisted in seizing any unprotected small canoe with
+its crew of two or three men or women and cargo, the latter generally
+being yams or Indian corn, the custom being on both sides to eat these
+prisoners.
+
+The Church Missionary Society established a mission here in 1875, but
+during the war of 1879 and 1880 the missionary had to leave. Their
+success had not been brilliant up to this date, owing, no doubt, in some
+measure, to the immense power wielded by the Ju-Ju priests in New
+Calabar.
+
+It was not until 1887-8 that the missionaries were able to again
+commence their labours amongst these people, and then not in the
+principal town. Archdeacon Crowther, however, succeeded about this time
+in getting a plot of ground in Bob Manuel's town, Abonema, for the
+purpose of building a mission station. As to the success of this last
+effort I can't speak from personal observation, as I left this river
+shortly afterwards myself; in fact, it was on my last visit to Abonema
+that I conveyed in my steamer, the _Quorra_, the missionary and his wife
+to their new home from Brass. They were a young couple of very well
+educated and most intelligent Sierra Leone natives.
+
+
+BONNY AND THE PEPPLE FAMILY
+
+This river was the most important slave market in the Delta, as a matter
+of fact surpassing in numbers of slaves exported any other single
+slave-dealing station on the West or South-West Coast of Africa.
+
+According to Mr. Clarkson, the historian of the abolition of the
+slave-trade, this river and Old Calabar exported more slaves than all
+the other slave-dealing centres on the West and South-West Coasts of
+Africa combined.
+
+It is a well-known fact that for about two hundred years the average
+annual output of slaves through the Bonny River was about 16,000 (this
+included the shipments from New Calabar), totalling up to the immense
+number of 3,200,000 souls taken out of this part of Africa during two
+centuries.
+
+The above figures do not represent the total depletion this part of
+Africa suffered during this time. To the above immense number of slaves
+exported must be added the number of lives lost in the raids made on the
+Ibo villages for the purpose of capturing the people to sell as slaves;
+we must also add the number that died on their way down from the
+interior to the coast, and to these again must be added the slaves
+refused by the European trader by reason of any defect, malformation,
+or incipient signs of disease. The fate of these poor souls was sad; but
+perhaps many of their brethren envied them their quick release from the
+cares of this world. The native slave-dealer was too practical a man to
+burden himself with mouths to fill that he could not immediately turn
+into cloth, rum, gunpowder or coral, so oftener than otherwise he would
+simply tell his own niggers to drop their canoe astern of the slave
+ship, cut the rejected slaves heads off, and cast their bodies into the
+river to feed the sharks, this often taking place within sight of the
+European slaver.
+
+A very moderate allowance for loss of life between the interior and the
+slave-ship from the above-mentioned causes would be at the least 40 per
+cent.; thus totalling the immense number of 4,480,000 souls sent out of
+this one district in about two centuries. The greater number of these
+were Ibos, a slave much sought after in the olden days by planters in
+the West Indies and the Southern States of America.
+
+I have mentioned these latter facts here to point out to my readers that
+the so-called benevolent domestic slavery as practised on the coast of
+Western Africa and tolerated in Her Britannic Majesty's West African
+Colonies, must, as a natural consequence, lead to a deplorable loss of
+life, though not in so wholesale a manner as the export of slaves led to
+in former days.
+
+The Bonny people claim to be descended from the Ibo tribe, but I should
+be inclined to think that their proper description to-day would be a
+mixture of Ibos, Kwos, Billa, and sundry infusions of blood from
+inter-marriage with the female slaves brought down by the slave-dealers
+from places lying beyond and at the back of the Ibo people.
+
+Whatever their origin may have been, a commercial spirit is, and has
+been since their first intercourse with Europeans, a very highly
+developed trait in their character. As I have already shown, they were
+the greatest slave traders in Western Africa, and when that, for them,
+lucrative trade was finally put a stop to by the treaty signed on the
+21st of November, 1848, between Her Britannic Majesty's Consul and King
+Pepple, whereby King Pepple was to receive an annual present of $2,000
+for six years--[previous to this, one, if not two treaties had been
+signed by King Pepple, with Her Britannic Majesty's representatives,
+with the same object; but the greed of gain had been too much for his
+dusky Majesty, combined with the continued presence on the coast of the
+Spanish slave-dealers; one of the latter being established at Brass as
+late as 1844]--they then turned their whole attention to the legitimate
+trade of palm oil, and soon became the largest exporters of that article
+on the West Coast of Africa. Their trade in this article had not been
+inconsiderable since 1825, at which date the Liverpool merchants had
+seriously turned their attention to legitimate trade.
+
+In 1837-38, the export of palm oil was already about 14,200 tons, all
+carried in sailing vessels principally owned in Liverpool, and mostly by
+firms that had been in the slave trade.
+
+Like the natives of Brass, many of these people have embraced the
+Christian faith, the Church Missionary Society having placed one of
+their stations here in 1866, some two years earlier than the Brass
+Mission was commenced.
+
+Their endeavours have certainly met with considerable success in
+prevailing upon a large number of the natives to give up many of their
+Ju-Ju practices; amongst others, the worship of the iguana, an immense
+lizard, which from time immemorial had been the Bonny man's titular
+guardian angel. They not only got them to give up worshipping this
+saurian, but also, to mark a new departure in their religious ideas, the
+missionaries prevailed upon the people to organise a general iguana
+hunt; so, following the old saying of "the better the day, the better
+the deed," one Easter Sunday, about the year 1883 or 1884, or about
+twenty-two years after the establishment of the mission, the bells of
+the mission church rang out the signal for the wholesale slaughter of
+these reptiles. To such an extent and with such good will did the people
+work that day, that by evening time not one was left alive in the town.
+That day it was everybody's job to kill these reptiles, but it was
+nobody's job to clear away the dead bodies, there being no County
+Council in Bonny to see to the scavenger work after this animal St.
+Bartholomew; the consequence was the stench was so great from the
+decaying bodies that every European predicted a general sickness would
+be the natural outcome of it all; but no such unlucky event happened,
+and the natives did not seem to notice the extra strong perfume very
+much--one of them observing, to a growl about it by a white man, that
+"it be all same them trade beef you sell we people for chop."
+
+The Bonny men until late years were steeped in all the most vile
+practices of Ju-Juism--sacrificing human beings to their various Ju-Jus,
+and eating all their prisoners captured in war, certain of their Ju-Ju
+practices demanding an annual human sacrifice. If at this time they
+happened to be at peace with their neighbours, and consequently without
+any prisoner to be sacrificed, the Ju-Ju men would disguise themselves
+in some fantastic dress (some Europeans have said they disguise
+themselves as leopards; I have never seen this disguise used, and doubt
+it very much), and prowl about the town and its byeways, seizing for
+their purpose in preference some stray stranger that might be staying in
+the town; failing a stranger, some noted bad character belonging to the
+town in whose fate no one would be greatly interested would be seized
+upon. To say these practices are completely stamped out would be,
+perhaps, not quite the truth; but that they are being stamped out I feel
+convinced, and considering what believers in Ju-Ju these people have
+been, I think I may say fairly quick.
+
+The common sense of the people is assisting very much, and the women are
+showing themselves capable of something better than what their former
+state condemned them to. The final decision to slaughter the iguana some
+years ago was brought about by them in a great measure on solid common
+sense grounds, for had not the iguana been their mortal enemy for years
+by eating their fowls and chickens before their eyes, thus destroying
+about the only means a woman of the lower class, or one who had ceased
+to please her lord and master, had of making a little pin money.
+
+The Ju-Ju house of Bonny, once the great show place of the town, has now
+completely disappeared and its hideous contents are scattered; strange
+to say, I saw, only a few weeks ago, in the house of a lady in London,
+one of the sacrificial pots of native earthenware that had done duty for
+many generations in the Bonny Ju-Ju House.
+
+A description of this Ju-Ju house may be interesting to some of my
+readers. It was an oblong building of about forty feet long by thirty
+broad, surrounded by mud walls about eight or ten feet high; one portion
+over where the altar stood had had sticks arranged, as if the intention
+had been at some time to roof it over; at the end behind the altar the
+wall had been built in a semicircle; the altar looked very much like an
+ordinary kitchen plate rack with the edges of the plate shelves picked
+out with goat skulls. There were three rows of these, and on the three
+plate shelves a row of grinning human skulls; under the bottom shelf,
+and between it and the top of what would be in a kitchen the dresser,
+were eight uprights garnished with rows of goats' skulls, the two middle
+uprights being supplied with a double row; below the top of the dresser,
+which was garnished with a board painted blue and white, was arranged a
+kind of drapery of filaments of palm fronds, drawn asunder from the
+centre, exposing a round hole with a raised rim of clay surrounding it,
+ostensibly to receive the blood of the victims and libations of palm
+wine.
+
+To one side, and near the altar, was a kind of roughly made table fixed
+on four straight legs; upon this was displayed a number of human bones
+and several skulls; leaning against this table was a frame looking very
+like a chicken walk on to the table; this also was garnished with
+horizontal rows of human skulls--here and there were to be seen human
+skulls lying about; outside the Ju-Ju house, upon a kind of trellis
+work, were a number of shrivelled portions of human flesh.
+
+Whilst writing about the wholesale slaughter of iguanas I forgot to
+mention that this was not the first time an animal that was Ju-Ju and
+held in high veneration had had a general battue arranged for it. The
+monkey used to hold a place in Bonny equal with the iguana, but for some
+reason or another it fell from its high estate, and was as ruthlessly
+slaughtered by its quondam worshippers.
+
+Other Ju-Jus were the shark and the Spirit of the Water, or supposed
+guardian angel of the Bar. The bull was at one time worshipped, but not
+of late years; but still fresh beef was Ju-Ju, and twenty years ago no
+Bonny gentleman would touch it.
+
+Like fresh beef, milk of cows or goats was never used by natives,
+neither were eggs eaten by Bonny men or any of the neighbouring coast
+tribes.
+
+Native houses in Bonny are very little different to the general run of
+native houses along this coast, as far as the external appearance goes;
+but inside they are perfect Hampton Court mazes to the uninitiated. A
+noticeable peculiarity is that the entrance door and all the other
+doorways in a native house have a fixed barrier about eighteen inches
+high between each room from whence start the doorways proper. This forms
+a very favourite seat of the master of the house or his wife, but one
+must never step over them while any one is sitting on them; a man
+stepping over one while a man is sitting there means "poison for eye,"
+as the natives express it, which means to say your action will cause
+them sickness. A man doing the same when a female is sitting in this
+position has a much more significant meaning, and for a slave would
+entail a good flogging.
+
+No community of natives demonstrates the peculiar workings of domestic
+slavery so well as these people, for in no other place on the coast can
+any one find so many instances of the rapid rise of a bought slave from
+the lowest rung of the slave ladder to the topmost.
+
+The bought slave was quite a different class to the son of a slave born
+in Bonny of slave parents; for outside the direct descendants of the
+Pepple family, the freemen of Bonny could be counted on one hand;
+therefore, a slave born in Bonny was looked upon as being almost equal
+with a freeman. These were called Bonny free; and the Bonny free, though
+they boast of their birth, can't boast of the most brains, for the most
+intelligent men of these people--especially during the last fifty
+years--have been bought slaves, with few exceptions.
+
+In 1837, the then reigning King Pepple had to get Captain Craigie of
+H.M. Navy to assist him in asserting his rights, a slave of his having
+usurped his place. A few years after, in 1854, this same King Pepple was
+deposed by his chiefs for making continuous war on New Calabar, and thus
+draining the wealth of the country, as well as for his cruelties to his
+own people; they, at the same time, found out another charge against him
+that he was an usurper, as there was a young man named Dapho Pepple, a
+son of his elder brother, who was entitled to the throne, and, with the
+assistance of the late Consul Beecroft, the change was made and the
+fighting King Pepple was taken away to Fernando Po, and eventually found
+his way to England in 1857; there he resided four years, was carefully
+looked after by the temperance party, and eventually became a convert to
+Christianity. Several sets of verses were strung together for and about
+him by the goody goody papers of the time. He made strong appeals to the
+British public for L20,000 to establish a mission in his country; but in
+this matter I am afraid he was not successful, as the mission was never
+started by him, and on his arrival home in Bonny River, in August, 1861,
+there was a dearth of current coin in the royal pockets.
+
+The following is King Pepple's address in verse, which, he asserted, he
+spoke when seeking funds to establish a mission in his country. He only
+asked for a modest L20,000. I never heard what he got, but one thing I
+do know, whatever he did get, he never expended a shilling of it for the
+purpose it was given him:--
+
+          Beloved bretheren,
+                      Young and old,
+            I come to day to ask for gold
+            To help the missionary Coons
+            Who brave Bonny's hot simoons.
+              Tooralooral! Rich and poor,
+              A pewter plate is at the door!
+
+            Now why must each of you decide
+            Your heart and purse to open wide?
+            It is because the imbued sin
+            That e'en now lurks each heart within
+              Tooralooral! with all its might
+              Is prompting you to close them tight.
+
+            And then it must not be forgot
+            That Hell is wide and awful hot,
+            And gibbering fiends around us grin
+            With joy to see us tumble in.
+              Tooralooral! don't forget
+              The Devil he may have you yet.
+
+            But would you from destruction turn,
+            Nor 'mid sulphurous vapours burn,
+            But each become a blessed spirit,
+            And kingdom come with joy inherit.
+              Tooralooral! tip us a bob,
+              To help us on our holy job.
+
+            Remember, friends, we are but dust,
+            And die in course of time we must.
+            To show the seeds have taken root
+            By yielding up the proper fruit,
+              Tooralooral! are you willing
+              To subscribe another shilling?
+
+            If you will help to save the nigger
+            Your crown of glory shall be bigger,
+            More white your robes, your sandals smarter,
+            When we shall meet above herear'ter
+              Tooralooral! Psalms and Hymns,
+              Cherubs sweet and Seraphims.
+
+            Fields of glory, floods of light,
+            Sweet effulgence, Angels bright,
+            Sounds symphoneous, jewels rare,
+            Sheets of gold and perfumed air.
+              Tooralooral! fellow men,
+              Hallelujah! and Amen.
+
+By what specious reasoning he succeeded in prevailing upon the
+authorities at the Foreign Office to countenance his return to Bonny, or
+what he described as his dominions, I know not. The fact, however, is on
+record that he did get this permission, and that he found some good
+friends in London to assist him with sufficient cash to pay L900 down on
+account of the charter of the _Bewley_, a small vessel of only about 180
+tons register, which was to carry him and his consort, the Queen
+Eleanor, better known in Bonny as Allaputa, and their royal suite, which
+consisted of nine English men and two English women; amongst the former
+he had nominated the following officials, viz., premier, secretary, an
+assistant secretary, three clerks, and one doctor, a farmer, and a valet
+for himself. Mrs. Wood, the gardener's wife, was to be schoolmistress,
+and the other English woman was to act as a maid of honour to the Queen
+Eleanor. All these people had agreements for salaries varying from L60
+to L600 per annum, some of them with an allowance of L15 for uniform;
+several of the agreements contained a clause that stipulated that the
+king was to supply them with suitable apartments in the royal palace.
+On arriving in the Bonny river, these poor people had a rude awakening,
+for they found that the king was not wanted by his people, had no royal
+palace, and no revenues. However, they did not immediately quit the
+service of the dusky monarch, but held on in the hope of getting
+sufficient arrears of pay out of him to pay their passages home; they
+had some reason for their action, for the old king still had a strong
+party friendly to him in the town. The king funked landing amongst his
+late subjects, and he remained on board the _Bewley_, until the 15th of
+October, landing at last with many misgivings. Strange to relate, the
+same day the walls of the Bonny Ju-Ju house crumbled to bits, caused, no
+doubt, by the heavy rains, but the king looked upon it as an omen boding
+no good to him.
+
+When the king landed, the captain of the _Bewley_ gave the European
+suite notice that he could not supply them with food any longer, as the
+king was not able to pay him what he owed the ship.
+
+These poor people now found themselves in a sad plight, but the
+Liverpool supercargoes in the river gave them quarters in their
+different sailing vessels and hulks. Those who wished to try their luck
+in some other place on the coast had their passages paid by the
+supercargoes of the river; Miss Mary, the queen's maid of honour, was
+about the first to be sent home, the gardener and his wife left in
+November, and by the end of December the last of the king's white suite
+left the river. None were ever paid their arrears of wages, the king
+being with difficulty made to find L10 towards the passage money of the
+doctor. Strange to relate, though these eleven white people could not be
+said to have passed their time in Bonny river under the best conditions
+for health, being cooped up on board a vessel of only 180 tons
+register, yet only one of them died, that one being the king's valet.
+All had remained more than two months in the river, some four months, at
+a time, when, according to some authorities, the coast climate is most
+to be dreaded.
+
+King Pepple never regained his ancient sway over the Bonny people, and
+after lingering in very indifferent health a few years, during which
+time he was every now and again springing some new intrigue on his
+people, he passed away at Ju-Ju Town, where he had been living almost
+ever since his return to his native land, for his health's sake, he
+asserted, but rumour had it that he felt himself safer away from the
+vicinity of his more powerful chiefs.
+
+After his death, the affairs of Bonny went back into the hands of the
+four regents, as they had been since the death of King Dapho up to the
+time of King Pepple's return in 1861, and in a great measure remained
+during the few years Pepple lived.
+
+These regents had originally been appointed by the late Acting Consul
+Lynslager on the 1st of September, 1855, and were the heads of the
+following houses:--
+
+  _Name of House._    _Native Name of Chief in_  _Name of Chief in_
+                      _Possession in 1855._      _Possession in 1869._
+
+   Annie Pepple        Elolly Pepple              Ja Ja.
+
+   Captain Hart        Apho Dappa                 Still alive.
+
+   Adda Allison        Generally called Addah.      "     "
+
+   Manilla Pepple      Erinashaboo                Warrabo.
+
+   Oko Jumbo  }        Advisers to the regents,   Still alive.
+   Jim Banago }        both wealthy men.          Squeeze Banago.
+
+The above lists show in a very marked manner the favourable side of
+domestic slavery; every one of the above chiefs were bought slaves or
+the sons of bought slaves, and in that case would be Bonny free. Ja Ja
+was bought by Adda Allison, and by him presented to Elolly Pepple, the
+name Ja Ja signifying a present in some native language in the
+hinterland of Bonny. Oko Jumbo was a slave bought by Manilla Pepple.
+Captain Hart was a slave bought from the Okrika people, and had been
+head slave of the late King Dapho. The others I am not sure about, but
+Squeeze Banago and Warrabo may have been Bonny free, though I have my
+doubts, but in no case from 1855 up to this date, 1869, had a son
+inherited from his father. I don't wish to be understood never did;
+because cases have occurred, and did occur during this time, where the
+son followed the father, but in these six principal Houses the chief was
+not the son of the former head of the House. A House, in native
+parlance, meant a number of petty chiefs congregated together for mutual
+protection, owning allegiance generally to the richest and most
+intelligent one amongst them, whom they called their father, and the
+Europeans called a chief. A House could be formed as Oko Jumbo formed
+his. He, as I have said above, was a bought slave, yet, by his superior
+intelligence and industry, he amassed, in early life, great wealth, was
+able to buy numerous slaves, some of whom showed similar aptitude to
+himself, to whom he showed the same encouragement that his master had
+shown him, and allowed them to trade on their own account. These men in
+their turn bought slaves, and allowed them similar privileges. This kind
+of evolution went on with uninterrupted success until Oko Jumbo, after
+twenty years' trading, found himself at the head of five or six hundred
+slaves; for, according to country law, all the slaves bought by his
+favoured slaves (now become petty chiefs or head boys) belonged to him
+as he belonged to Manilla Pepple; but owing to his accumulated riches
+and numerous followers he was beginning to take rank as a chief and head
+of a House. One must not think that the assistance given by an owner of
+slaves to here and there one, as described above, is all pure
+philanthropy; it is nothing of the kind, for for every hundred pounds
+worth of trade the slave does on his own account nowadays means L25 into
+the coffers of his master. In the early sixties this profit was not so
+great, but it represented in those days a ten to fifteen per cent.
+commission to the head of the House.
+
+There were five kinds of commission paid by the European traders to the
+heads of Houses. There were Ex Bar, Custom Bar, Work Bar, Gentlemen's
+Dash and Boys' Dash, and as a slave who had been allowed to trade by his
+master rose in the social scale he marked the different stages he passed
+through by being allowed gradually to claim these various commissions on
+his own oil from the Europeans; thus at first he would get only the
+boys' dash, = 1 pes of small Manchester cloth, value about 2s., and a
+fisherman's red cap, worth about 3d. The latter was supposed to go to
+his pull-away boys to buy palm wine. The second stage in his progress
+would be marked by his being allowed to take the gentlemen's dash,
+consisting of two pes of cloth, value 2s. 6d. each. The third he would
+be allowed to receive a portion of the work bar on his oil, sometimes
+only a third, gradually increasing until he would be allowed to claim
+the whole work bar. On arriving at this latter stage he would be
+expected to provide a war canoe and men and arms for the same, ready at
+any moment to turn out and fight for the general good of the country or
+to take part in any quarrel between his master and any other chief in
+Bonny, or to attend his master with it when he wished to visit any small
+country and make a little naval demonstration if these people had been a
+little slack in paying their debts. In course of time, this man, having
+supplied a war canoe, would aspire to being recognised as a chief, and
+thus be entitled to wear an eagle's feather in his hat. To arrive at
+this stage he would have to make some payments to the principal Ju-Ju
+men of the town, and if he never had been at war, and thus missed the
+opportunity of cutting an enemy's head off, he must purchase a slave for
+this purpose and cut the poor creature's head off in cold blood in the
+Ju-Ju house. This function was rigorously insisted upon by the Ju-Ju
+men, and under no circumstances would they allow a man to become a chief
+who had not cut a man's head off, either in war or in cold blood. After
+this ceremony, the new-made chief would be duly introduced, at a public
+meeting, to all the other chiefs, and the next day several brother
+chiefs would accompany him round to the various trading ships in the
+port, to intimate to the Europeans that he was a full chief, and
+entitled to receive all the work bar, ex bar, gentlemen's dash and boys'
+dash that a chief was entitled to. I have previously mentioned custom
+bar; this originally was paid only to the king, and consisted of one
+iron bar upon every puncheon of oil bought by the European trader; in
+early days the king used to put a boy on board each ship to collect this
+toll, but in course of time found that he was more sure to be honestly
+dealt with if he left the white man to pay him occasionally what was due
+to him, than to receive it daily through his bar-boy. On the deposition
+of King Pepple, the custom bar was collected by the four regents, whose
+descendants demanded it as a right, even after the return of the king,
+and continued to get it, until a few years ago, when all these bars were
+abolished in Bonny by mutual consent, and in their place was paid
+"topping," varying from time to time, according to the saneness of the
+white traders, from twenty to thirty per cent. on the price of the oil,
+gentlemen's and boys' dash still being continued.
+
+Referring back to the head-cutting ceremony, I must here mention a
+curious fact, when one remembers the savage state of these people, that
+I have known many Bonny men who were in a position to be made chiefs,
+and had conformed to all the preliminary forms, but who shirked the head
+cutting in cold blood, preferring thus to continue head boys only, until
+forced by the chiefs (generally instigated by the Ju-Ju men) to complete
+the ceremony. One in particular, named Jungo, I remember, who at the
+time of the civil war in Bonny in 1869 had been for some time eligible
+to become a chief, yet shirked the head cutting; he was amongst those
+who followed Ja Ja in his retreat to the Ekomtoro, afterwards called the
+Opobo; it was not until some years after arriving in the Opobo that some
+Ju-Ju priest remembered that Jungo had not distinguished himself during
+the war, and that he had yet to perform his head cutting. Poor Jungo was
+one of the mildest natured black men I have ever known, and tried all
+kinds of schemes to get out of the ordeal, even offering to give up some
+of his acquired rights, but public opinion and the Ju-Ju priests were
+too much for him, and the slave to be sacrificed was bought, and the
+ceremony carried out by Jungo; but he was such a poor performer that he
+unintentionally caused considerably more pain to his victim than
+necessary, for Jungo tried to do the terrible deed by striking with his
+face turned the other way, the victim absolutely cursing him for his
+bungling. This latter episode may, perhaps, be put down as a traveller's
+yarn, but it is not at all to be wondered at, when it is known that
+these poor wretches are made drunk previous to being decapitated.
+
+Having described how a slave might become a chief, I will now describe
+how one became the head of a House or chief, and afterwards made himself
+a king, and one of the most powerful in this part of Africa.
+
+When Elolly Pepple died (some say he was poisoned), shortly after the
+return of King Pepple in 1861, the Annie Pepple House was for some time
+left without a head. The various chiefs held repeated meetings, and the
+generally coveted honour did not seem to tempt any of them; by right of
+seniority a chief named Uranta (about the freest man in the House, some
+asserted he was absolutely free), was offered the place, but he, for
+private reasons of his own, refused. After Uranta there were Annie
+Stuart, Black Foobra and Warrasoo, all men of some considerable riches
+and consideration, but they also shirked the responsibility, for Elolly
+had been a very big trader, and owed the white men, it was said, at the
+time of his death, a thousand or fifteen hundred puncheons of oil,
+equivalent to between ten and fifteen thousand pounds sterling, and none
+of the foremost men of the house dare tackle the settlement of such a
+large debit account, fearing that the late chief had not left sufficient
+behind him to settle up with, without supplementing it with their own
+savings, which might end in bankruptcy for them, and their final
+downfall from the headship. At this time there was in the House a young
+man who had not very long been made a chief, though he had, for a
+considerable number of years, been a very good trader, and was much
+respected by the white traders for his honesty and the dependence they
+could place in him to strictly adhere to any promise he made in trade
+matters. This young chief was Ja Ja, and though he was one of the
+youngest chiefs in the house, he was unanimously elected to fill the
+office. He, however, did not immediately accept, though his being
+unanimously elected amounted almost to his being forced to accept.
+
+He first visited _seriatim_ each white trader, counted book (as they
+call going through the accounts of a House), and found that though there
+was a very large debit against the late chief, there was also a large
+credit, as a set off, in the way of sub-chief's work bars and the late
+Elolly's own work bars. At the same time, he arranged with each
+supercargo the order in which he would pay them off, commencing with
+those who were nearing the end of their voyage, and getting a promise
+from each that if he settled according to promise they would get their
+successor to give him an equal amount of credit that they themselves had
+given the late Elolly. A few days after, at a public meeting of the
+chiefs of the Annie Pepple House, he intimated his readiness to accept
+the headship of the House, distinctly informing them that, as they had
+elected him themselves, they must assist him in upholding his authority
+over them as a body, which would be no easy task for him when there were
+so many older and richer chiefs in the House who were more entitled than
+he was to the post. The older chiefs, only too delighted to have found
+in Ja Ja some one to take the responsibility of the late chief's debts
+and the troubles of chieftainship off their shoulders, were prepared,
+and did solemnly swear, to assist him with their moral support, taking
+care not to pledge themselves to assist him in any of the financial
+affairs of the House.
+
+Ja Ja had not been many months head of the Annie Pepple House before he
+began to show the old chiefs what kind of metal he was made of; for
+during the first twelve months he had selected from amongst the late
+Elolly's slaves no less than eighteen or twenty young men, who had
+already amassed a little wealth, and whom he thought capable of being
+trusted to trade on their own account, bought canoes for them, took them
+to the European traders, got them to advance each of these young men
+from five to ten puncheons worth of goods, he himself standing guarantee
+for them. This operation had the effect of making Ja Ja immediately
+popular amongst all classes of the slaves of the late chief. At the same
+time, the slaves of the old chief of the House began to see that there
+was a man at the head of the House who would set a good example to their
+immediate masters. Some of these young men are now wealthy chiefs in
+Opobo, and as evidence that they had been well chosen, Ja Ja was never
+called upon to fulfil his guarantee.
+
+Two years after Ja Ja was placed at the head of the House the late
+Elolly's debts were all cleared off, no white trader having been
+detained beyond the date Ja Ja had promised the late chief's debts
+should be paid by. In consideration for the prompt manner in which Ja Ja
+had paid up, he received from each supercargo whom the late chief had
+dealt with a present varying from five to ten per cent. on the amount
+paid.
+
+From this date Ja Ja never looked back, becoming the most popular chief
+in Bonny amongst the white men, and the idol of his own people, but
+looked upon with jealousy by the Manilla Pepple House, to which belonged
+the successful slave, Oko Jumbo, who was now, both in riches and power,
+the equal of Ja Ja, though never his equal in popularity amongst the
+Europeans. Though there was a king in Bonny, and Warribo was the head of
+the Manilla House, _id est_, the king's House, Oko Jumbo and Ja Ja were
+looked upon by every one as being the rulers of Bonny. The demon of
+jealousy was at work, and in the private councils of the Manilla House
+it was decided that Ja Ja must be pulled down, but the only means of
+doing it was a civil war. The risks of this Oko Jumbo, Warribo and the
+king did not care to face, as though the Oko Jumbo party was most
+numerous, each side was equally supplied with big guns and rifles up to
+a short time before the end of 1868, when two European traders, on their
+way home, picked up a number of old 32 lb. carronades at Sierra Leone,
+and shipped the same down to Oko Jumbo. This sudden accession of war
+material, of course, put him in a position to provoke Ja Ja, and he cast
+about for a _causus belli_, but Ja Ja was an astute diplomatist, and
+managed to steer clear of all his opponent's pitfalls. A very small
+matter is often seized upon by natives as a means to provoke a war, and
+in this case the cause of quarrel was found in "that a woman of the
+Annie Pepple House had drawn water from some pond belonging to the
+Manilla Pepple House." This was thought quite sufficient. A most
+insulting message was sent to Ja Ja, intimating that the time had come
+when nothing but a fight could settle their differences. His reply was
+characteristic of the man; he reminded them that he had no wish to
+fight, was not prepared, and, furthermore, that neither he, nor they,
+had paid their debts to the Europeans. The latter part of the message
+was too much for an irascible, one-eyed old fighting chief named Jack
+Wilson Pepple, so off he marched to his own house, and fired the first
+round shot into the Annie Pepple part of the town, and civil war was
+commenced. It was a bit overdue, the last having taken place in 1855. As
+a rule, they come round about every ten years, like the epidemics of
+malignant bilious fever of the coast.
+
+The Annie Pepple House was not slow to reply, but Ja Ja knew he was
+over-matched, both in guns and numbers of fighting men, so he only kept
+up a semblance of a fight sufficiently long to allow him to make a
+retreat to a small town called Tombo, in the next creek to the Bonny
+creek, only about three miles from Bonny by water, less by land.
+
+From here he was in a better position to parley with his opponents, and
+make terms if possible, but he soon saw that no arrangement less than
+the complete humiliation of himself and people was going to satisfy his
+enemies, for besides the jealousy of Oko Jumbo, the young King George
+Pepple, son of the gentleman who had been to England and brought out the
+European suite, had not forgotten that the Annie Pepple house,
+represented by the late Elolly, had been the chief opponents of his late
+father when he returned to Bonny in 1861 after his exile.
+
+This young man had been educated in England, and I must say did credit
+to whoever had had charge of his education. He both spoke and wrote
+English correctly, and had his father been able to hand over to him the
+kingship as he had received it in 1837, he might have blossomed into a
+model king in West Africa; but, alas! the only thing he inherited from
+his father beyond the kingship was debt--king only in name, receiving
+only so much of his dues as the principal chiefs liked to allow him, not
+having the means of being a large trader, looked upon with scant favour
+by the Europeans, and owing to his English education lacking the rude
+ability of such men as Oko Jumbo and Ja Ja to make a position for
+himself, he became but a puppet in the hands of his principal chiefs; a
+fate, I am afraid, which has generally befallen the native of these
+parts who has attempted to retain any of the teachings of Christianity
+on his return amongst his pagan brethren.
+
+Few people can understand the reason of this. It is simply another proof
+of the wonderful power of Ju-Ju amongst these people, for it is to that
+occult influence that I trace the general ill-success of the educated
+native of the Delta in his own country,--unless he returns to all the
+pagan gods of his forefathers, and until he does so many channels of
+prosperity are completely closed to him.
+
+I am afraid I have wandered a little from my subject, but in doing so I
+hope I have made some things clear that otherwise might have appeared a
+little mixed from an European point of view, so will now return to Ja
+Ja.
+
+From Tombo Town Ja Ja communicated with the Bonny Court of Equity, and a
+truce was arranged, native meetings followed, and after several weeks of
+palavering, no better terms were offered Ja Ja than had before been
+offered to him. The white men interested themselves in the matter, and
+held meetings innumerable, until at last they were as divided as the
+natives. With the exception of one or two at the outside, they
+understood so little of the occult workings of native squabbles that
+they could do little to smooth matters over. In the meantime, Ja Ja had
+been studying a masterly plan of retreat from Tombo Town to a river
+called the Ekomtoro, also called the Rio Conde in ancient maps.
+
+Once in this river, by fortifying two or three points he would be able
+to completely turn the tables on his enemies by barring their way to the
+Eboe markets, but to get there he would have to pass one, if not two,
+fortified points held by the Manilla Pepple people. Besides this, what
+would his position be when there, if he could not get any white men
+there to trade with? Luckily for him, there dropped from the clouds the
+very man he wanted. This was a trader named Charley, who had been in the
+Bonny River some years before, and was now established at Brass on his
+own account. At an interview with Ja Ja, that did not last half an hour,
+the whole plan of campaign was arranged. Charley returned to Brass and
+confided the scheme to his friend, Archie McEachan, who decided to join
+him. Thus Ja Ja had the certainty of support in his new home if he could
+only get there, and get there he did.
+
+Being shortly after joined by these two white traders trade was opened
+in the Ekomtoro, and on Christmas Day, 1870, Ekomtoro was named the
+[)O]p[)o]b[=o] River, after [)O]p[)o]b[=o], the founder of the town of
+"Grand Bonny," as Bonny men delight to call their mud and thatch
+capital.
+
+The name of [)O]p[)o]b[=o] was chosen by Ja Ja himself. To students of
+the peculiar relationship existing between a bought slave and his
+master, the latter looked up to and called father by his slave, this
+choice of the name of a man who had been a great man in his father's
+house, _id est_, his master's, demonstrates in a striking manner the
+veneration a bought slave, under the system of domestic slavery in these
+parts, in many cases displays, equalling in every respect that of the
+free-born direct descendant.
+
+The tables were now turned with a vengeance, and Ja Ja remained the
+master of the position, and for several years kept the Bonny men out of
+the Eboe and Qua markets; eventually agreeing to have the differences
+between himself and the Manilla Pepple people settled by the arbitration
+of the New Calabar and the Okrika chiefs with Commodore Commerell and
+Mr. Charles Livingstone, Her Britannic Majesty's Consul for the Bights
+of Benin and Biafra, as referees.
+
+Evidently the arbitrators considered that Ja Ja was in no way to blame
+for the civil war that had taken place in Bonny, for in the division of
+the markets that had been common property when Ja Ja and his people had
+formed an integral part of the Bonny nation, the greater part was given
+to Ja Ja and his right to remain where he had established himself fully
+recognised.
+
+Immediately on this settlement being come to, Her Britannic Majesty's
+Consul entered into a commercial treaty with Ja Ja recognising him as
+King of Opobo. This treaty was signed January 4th, 1873, the deed of
+arbitration having been signed the day previous.
+
+In giving my readers the history of this man up to this point, I have
+always had in my mind the question of domestic slavery, being anxious to
+give its most favourable side as fair an exposition as its unfavourable.
+
+I have in previous pages mentioned some of the latter, but those remarks
+only dealt with the early stages of the slave's condition after capture
+in the interior and his risks of arriving alive at his destination. I
+have now to deal with him as a chattel of one of the petty chiefs,
+chiefs or kings of Western Africa, admitting that his chances of
+improving his condition are manifold, his life until he gets his foot on
+the first rung of the ladder of advancement is terrible; he never knows
+from one moment to another when he may be re-sold, he is badly fed, in
+fact, some masters never feed their slaves at all when they are not
+actually employed pulling a canoe or doing other labour such as making
+farm, cutting sticks for house-building, &c. Failing these employments,
+the slave has all his time to himself. His chances of putting this time
+to any profit are very few in the Oil Rivers; and should he by chance
+get some employment from a white man, his owner takes good care to
+receive his pay, the only thing the slave getting out of it being three
+full meals a day for a few days, making the starvation fare he is
+accustomed to the harder to bear afterwards. Were it not for their
+adopted mother, _id est_, the woman they are given to on being bought,
+their state would be absolutely unbearable in times of forced idleness;
+but these women almost invariably have considerable affection for their
+numerous adopted children, and though their means may be very limited,
+they generally manage to supply them with at least one meal a day in
+return for the many little services they perform for them, such as
+fetching water, carrying firewood in from the bush, selling their few
+fowls and eggs to the white men, and doing any other little matter of
+trade for them.
+
+Even those slaves who have been lucky enough to fall into the hands of a
+master who sees that they at least do not starve, have along with their
+less lucky brethren to put up with the ungovernable fits of temper which
+some of these black slave owners display at times, in many cases
+inflicting the most terrible punishment for trivial offences, as often
+as not only on suspicion that the slave was guilty. Amongst the numerous
+punishments I have known inflicted are the following.
+
+Ear cutting in its various stages, from clipping to total dismemberment;
+crucifixion round a large cask; extraction of teeth; suspension by the
+thumbs; Chilli peppers pounded and stuffed up the nostrils, and forced
+into the eyes and ears; fastening the victim to a post driven into the
+beach at low water and leaving him there to be drowned with the rising
+tide, or to be eaten by the sharks or crocodiles piecemeal; heavily
+ironed and chained to a post in their master's compound, without any
+covering over their heads, kept in this state for weeks, with so little
+food allowed them that cases have been known where the irons have
+dropped off them, but they, poor wretches, were too weak to escape, as
+they had been reduced to living skeletons; impaling on stakes; forcing a
+long steel ram rod through the body until it appeared through the top of
+the skull. The above are a few of the punishments that even to this day
+are practised, not only in the Niger Delta, but in the outlying
+districts of the West African colonies. It is very rare that the
+Government officials get to know anything about them; and when they do,
+it is difficult to procure a conviction owing to the fear natives have
+to come forward and act as witnesses.
+
+Besides the punishments enumerated above, there are many others, some of
+which are too horrible to be described here.
+
+One often hears people who know a little about West Africa talk about
+native law, but they forget to mention, if they happen to know it, that
+in a powerful chief's house there is only one exponent of the law, and
+that is the chief; for him native law only begins to have effect when it
+is a matter between himself and some other chief, or a combination of
+chiefs, whose power is equal or superior to his own.
+
+As an instance of the form which native justice (?) sometimes takes, I
+will relate what took place some years ago in one of the oil rivers. An
+old and very powerful chief had a young wife of whom he was immoderately
+jealous. Amongst his favourite attendants was a young male slave, a mere
+boy, to whom he had given many tokens of his favour; but the demon of
+jealousy whispered to him that his young slave boy was looked upon with
+too much favour by his young wife--herself little more than a child.
+That a slave of his should dare to cast his eyes on his wife was more
+than this terrible old chief could stand, so he decided to put an end at
+once to the love dreams of his slave, and at the same time point out to
+any other enterprising slave of his how dangerous it was to aspire to
+the forbidden favours of a chief's wife. So he ordered his young wife to
+cook him a specially good palm oil chop, a native dish of great repute,
+for his breakfast the following morning. The next morning when he sat
+down to his breakfast his favourite slave was behind his chair in
+attendance; his young wife was present to see her lord and master was
+properly served--the wives do not sit at table with their husbands--when
+suddenly the chief turned in his chair and ordered his young slave to
+sit at table with him. Naturally the slave hesitated to accept such an
+unheard-of honour as to sit at table with his master; quickly scenting
+something terrible was going to befall him, he attempted to leave the
+apartment, but other slaves quickly barred his way, and he was brought
+back trembling with fright, the beads of perspiration rolling down his
+face and body in little rivulets, and placed in a chair opposite his
+master, who, all this time had not displayed any signs of anger;
+gradually the boy began to regain somewhat his scattered senses. Finding
+his master displayed no signs of anger, he began to do as he was
+ordered, the chief at the same time plied him with repeated doses of
+spirits, till at last the boy began to chatter, and attacked the food
+with a will. At length, having eaten and drunk till he could scarcely
+stand, his master asked him had he enjoyed his young mistress's cooking.
+On his replying yes, the chief called for a revolver, and telling him it
+was the last thing he ever would enjoy of his young mistress, he emptied
+the six chambers of the revolver into the poor lad's head; then having
+ordered his body to be thrown into the river, went on with the usual
+occupations of the day, never having once mentioned the reason of his
+act to his people nor explaining his meaning to his young wife.
+
+To the native mind the chief's actions spoke as plainly as possible; but
+not having spoken, his wife's family could not, had they wished, have
+made a palaver about his wife's good fame; for though the chief was
+originally a bought slave or nigger himself, his young wife was country
+free, her family being sufficiently powerful to have made things
+uncomfortable for him if he had accused her without proof of guilt. Had
+she been a slave, the chances are she would have been slaughtered.
+
+I do not wish to convey to my readers the idea that all chiefs in the
+Niger Delta are cruel monsters, but they all have power of life and
+death over their slaves; the mildest of them occasionally may find
+themselves so placed that they are compelled in conformity with some
+Ju-Ju right to sacrifice a slave or two. The ordinary punishments for
+theft and insubordination practised amongst these people are often
+terribly cruel and unnecessarily severe.
+
+Of course the Government of the Niger Coast Protectorate is steadily
+breaking down these savage customs, wherever and whenever they hear of
+them being practised within their jurisdiction; but the formation of the
+country, the dense forests, and the superstition of the people, all
+assist in keeping most cases from coming to their knowledge.
+
+Before taking leave of the Bonny people, I must not omit to mention that
+the custom of destroying twin children and children who had the
+misfortune to be born with teeth was, and is, a custom still observed
+amongst them. Another custom prevalent amongst these people, and common
+more or less to all other natives in the Delta, was the destroying of
+any woman if she became the mother of more than four children.
+
+
+ANDONI RIVER AND ITS INHABITANTS.
+
+This river lies a few miles to the east of Bonny River. The inhabitants
+of the lower part of the river are called Andoni men, and during the
+slave-dealing days these people were as well known to Europeans as the
+Bonny men, but, owing in a great measure to the much deeper water at the
+entrance to Bonny River than was to be found on the Andoni bar, the
+former river offering thus more facilities for deep-draughted ships,
+the traders gradually deserted the Andoni altogether, though these
+people were, I believe, the original owners of the land now claimed by
+the Bonny people as forming the Bonny kingdom. The Andoni men, being
+deserted by the European traders, gradually became a race of fishermen
+and small farmers. The Bonny men, having become the dominant race, and
+not allowing the Andonis any intercourse with the white traders in their
+river, the Andoni men protested against this treatment, and waged war
+against the Bonny men on many occasions in the early part of this
+century. The last war between these two peoples continued for some
+years; the Bonny men not always getting the best of these encounters,
+were very glad to come to terms with them in 1846, a treaty being then
+signed between the two tribes, wherein the Andoni men were secured equal
+rights with the Bonny men, but the commercial enterprise of these people
+seems to have died out. Yet the King of Doni Town, as their principal
+town is called in old maps, was reported by traders, who visited him in
+1699, as being a man of some intelligence, speaking the Portuguese
+language fluently, and having some knowledge of the Roman Catholic
+faith, yet still adhering to all the customs of Ju-Juism, furthermore
+describing the people as being such implicit believers in their Ju-Ju
+that they would kill any one who touched any of the idols in their Ju-Ju
+house.
+
+This may have been true at the time, but about five and twenty years ago
+I visited the town of Doni, as also their Ju-Ju house, and handled some
+of their idols, and they showed no irritation at my so doing. I had, of
+course, asked permission to do so of the Ju-Ju man who was showing me
+round. I have no doubt they would resent any one interfering with them
+without their permission. When I visited these people they gave me the
+idea that they had never seen a white man, or had any communication with
+him, for I vainly searched for any evidence that the white man had ever
+been established in their river. From all I was able to gather of their
+manners and customs I found that they differed little from any of their
+neighbours, though they are always described by interested parties as
+being inveterate cannibals and dangerous people for strangers to visit.
+
+
+OPOBO RIVER.
+
+After leaving Andoni, and continuing down the coast some ten or fifteen
+miles, the Opobo discharges itself into the sea. This river, marked in
+ancient maps as the Rio Conde and Ekomtoro, is the most direct way to
+the Ibo palm-oil-producing country.
+
+This river was well known to the Portuguese and Spanish slave traders,
+but as Bonny became the great centre for the slave trade, this river was
+completely deserted and forgotten to such an extent that, though an
+opening in the coast line was shown on the English charts where this
+river was supposed to be, it was never thought worth the trouble of
+naming, and remained quite unknown to the English traders until it came
+suddenly into repute, owing to Ja Ja establishing himself here in 1870.
+
+The people here are the Bonny men and their descendants who followed Ja
+Ja's fortunes, therefore their manners and customs are identical with
+those of Bonny.
+
+The physical appearance of these people is somewhat better than that of
+the Bonny men, owing, I think, to the position of their town, which is
+built on a better soil, and raised a few feet higher than that of Bonny
+from the level of the river, also their uninterrupted successful trade
+since their arrival in this country has doubtless not a little
+contributed to their improved condition, while, on the other hand, the
+Bonny men suffered severely during the years from 1869 to 1873, owing to
+Ja Ja barring their way to the markets, and they seem never to have
+recovered themselves.
+
+Trading stations of the white men are at the mouth of the river and at
+Eguanga, the latter a station a few miles above Opobo town.
+
+Opobo became, under King Ja Ja's firm rule, one of the largest exporting
+centres of palm oil in the Delta, and for years King Ja Ja enjoyed a not
+undeserved popularity amongst the white traders who visited his river,
+but a time came when the price of palm oil fell to such a low figure in
+England that the European firms established in Opobo could not make both
+ends meet, so they intimated to King Ja Ja that they were going to
+reduce the price paid in the river, to which he replied by shipping
+large quantities of his oil to England, allowing his people only to sell
+a portion of their produce to the white men. The latter now formulated a
+scheme amongst themselves to divide equally whatever produce came into
+the river, and thus do away with competition amongst themselves. Ja Ja
+found that sending his oil to England was not quite so lucrative as he
+could wish, owing to the length of time it took to get his returns back,
+namely, about three months at the earliest, whilst by selling in the
+river he could turn over his money three or four times during that
+period. He therefore tried several means to break the white men's
+combination, at last hitting upon the bright idea of offering the whole
+of the river's trade to one English house. The mere fact of his being
+able to make this offer shows the absolute power to which he had arrived
+amongst his own people. His bait took with one of the European traders;
+the latter could not resist the golden vision of the yellow grease thus
+displayed before him by the astute Ja Ja, who metaphorically dangled
+before his eyes hundreds of canoes laden with the coveted palm oil. A
+bargain was struck, and one fine morning the other white traders in the
+river woke up to the fact that their combination was at an end, for on
+taking their morning spy round the river through their binoculars (no
+palm oil trader that respects himself being without a pair of these and
+a tripod telescope, for more minute observation of his opponents'
+doings) they saw a fleet of over a hundred canoes round the renegade's
+wharf, and for nearly two years this trader scooped all the trade. The
+fat was fairly in the fire now, and the other white traders sent a
+notice to Ja Ja that they intended to go to his markets. Ja Ja replied
+that he held a treaty, signed in 1873, by Mr. Consul Charles
+Livingstone, Her Britannic Majesty's Consul, that empowered him to stop
+any white traders from establishing factories anywhere above
+Hippopotamus Creek, and under which he was empowered to stop and hold
+any vessel for a fine of one hundred puncheons of oil. In June, 1885,
+the traders applied to Mr. Consul White, who informed King Ja Ja that
+the Protectorate treaty meant freedom of navigation and trade.
+
+So the traders finding their occupation gone, decided amongst themselves
+to take a trip to Ja Ja's markets, the only sensible thing they had done
+since the trouble commenced. This was a step in the right direction,
+namely, by attempting to break down the curse of Western Africa _id
+est_, the power of the middle-man.
+
+The names of the four traders who first attempted to trade in the Ibo
+markets of King Ja Ja deserve to be recorded, for their action was not
+without great risk to themselves. They were:
+
+          Mr. S. B. Hall         }
+          Mr. Thomas Wright      } English
+          Mr. Richard Foster     }
+          Mr. A. E. Brunschweiler--Swiss.
+
+To these must be added the name of Mr. F. D. Mitchell, who, though not
+in the first trip to the markets, joined in the subsequent attempt to
+establish business amongst the interior tribes. Their reception at the
+markets was not altogether a success, owing to the reception committee,
+or whatever represented it in those parts, being packed with either Ja
+Ja's own people or Ibos favourable to him.
+
+This good beginning was continued under great difficulties by these
+first traders with little profit or success for about two years, owing
+to the great power of Ja Ja amongst the interior tribes and the pressure
+he was able to bring to bear on the Ibo and Kwo natives.
+
+In the meantime, clouds had been gathering round the head of King Ja Ja.
+His wonderful success since 1870 had gradually obscured his former keen
+perception of how far his rights as a petty African king would be
+recognised by the English Government under the new order of things just
+being inaugurated in the Oil Rivers; honestly believing that in signing
+the Protectorate treaty of December 19th, 1884, with the _sixth_ clause
+crossed out, he had retained the right given him by the commercial
+treaty of 1873 to keep white men from proceeding to his markets, he got
+himself entangled in a number of disputes which culminated in his being
+taken out of the Opobo River in September, 1887, by Her Britannic
+Majesty's Consul, Mr. H. H. Johnston, C.B., now Sir Harry Johnston, and
+conveyed to Accra, where he was tried before Admiral Sir Hunt Grubbe,
+who condemned him to five years' deportation to the West Indies, making
+him an allowance of about L800 per annum and returning a fine of thirty
+puncheons of palm oil, value about L450 in those days, which the late
+Consul Hewett had imposed upon him, a fine that the Admiral did not
+think the Consul was warranted in having imposed.
+
+Poor Ja Ja did not live to return to his country and his people whom he
+loved so well, and whose condition he had done so much to improve,
+though at times his rule often became despotic. One trait of his
+character may interest the public just now, as the Liquor Question in
+West Africa is so much _en evidence_, and that is, that he was a strict
+teetotaler himself and inculcated the same principles in all his chiefs.
+In his eighteen years' rule as a king in Opobo he reduced two of his
+chiefs for drunkenness--one he sent to live in exile in a small fishing
+village for the rest of his life, the other, who had aggravated his
+offence by assaulting a white trader, he had deprived of all outward
+signs of a chief and put in a canoe to paddle as a pull-away boy within
+an hour of his committing the offence.
+
+During the Ashantee campaign of 1873 Sir Garnet Wolseley sent Captain
+Nicol to the Oil Rivers to raise a contingent of friendly natives; on
+his arrival in Bonny he was not immediately successful, so continued on
+to Opobo, where he was the guest of the writer. Upon Captain Nicol
+explaining his errand, Ja Ja furnished him with over sixty of his
+war-boys, most of whom had seen considerable fighting in the late war
+between Bonny and Opobo. The news reaching Bonny of what Ja Ja had done,
+put the Bonny men upon their mettle, and when Captain Nicol reached
+Bonny on his way back to Ashantee, he found a further contingent waiting
+for him from the Bonny chiefs.
+
+This combined contingent did good work against the Ashantees, being
+favourably mentioned in despatches. Poor Captain Nicol, who raised them,
+and commanded them in most of their engagements with the enemy, was, I
+regret to say, killed whilst gallantly leading them on in one of the
+final rushes just before Coomassie was taken.
+
+In recognition of the above services of his men, Her Most Gracious
+Majesty Queen Victoria presented King Ja Ja with a sword of honour, the
+King of Bonny receiving one at the same time.
+
+Shipwrecked people were always sure of kindly treatment if they fell
+into the hands of Ja Ja's subjects, for he had given strict orders to
+his people dwelling on the sea-shore to assist vessels in distress and
+convey any one cast on shore to the European factories, warning them at
+the same time on no account to touch any of their property. He was also
+the first king in the Delta to restrain his people from plundering a
+wrecked ship, though the custom had been from time immemorial that a
+vessel wrecked upon their shores belonged to them by rights as being a
+gift from their Ju-Ju--an idea held by savage people in many other parts
+of the world.
+
+It seems a pity that a man who had so many good qualities should have
+ended as he did. He was a man who, properly handled, could have been
+made of much use in the opening up of his country. Unfortunately, the
+late Consul Hewett was prejudiced against Ja Ja from his first interview
+with him, finding in this nigger king a man of superior natural
+abilities to his own.
+
+Had the late Mr. Consul Hewett had the fiftieth part of the ability in
+dealing with the natives his sub and successor, Mr. H. H. Johnston,
+showed, there would never have been any necessity to deport Ja Ja.
+Unfortunately, between Ja Ja's stubbornness and the late Consul Hewett's
+bungling, matters had come to such a pass that some decisive measures
+were actually necessary to uphold the dignity of the Consular Office.
+
+When Mr. H. H. Johnston succeeded the late Mr. Consul Hewett, the Opobo
+palaver was in about as muddled a state as it was possible for it to
+have got into. Matters had been in an unsatisfactory state for some
+years between King Ja Ja and the late Consul. Ja Ja had over-stepped the
+bounds of propriety in more ways than one. He tried the same tactics
+with Mr. Johnston, who to look at, is the mildest-looking little man you
+can imagine, and therefore did not fill the native's eye as a ruler of
+men; but Mr. Johnston very soon let Ja Ja and the natives generally see
+he was made of different stuff to his predecessor, and the first
+attempts on Ja Ja's part not to act up to the lines he laid down for him
+settled his fate. Mr. Johnston offered him the choice of delivering
+himself up quietly as a prisoner or being treated as an enemy of the
+Queen, his town destroyed and himself eventually captured and exiled for
+ever. He elected to give himself up, was taken to Accra and there tried
+and condemned after a fair hearing. I was present myself at the trial,
+and old friend as I was to him, I don't think the verdict would have
+been otherwise had I been in the judge's place, though there were many
+extenuating circumstances in his case, all of which were fully
+considered by Admiral Hunt Grubbe in his final sentence.
+
+I feel confident that had Mr. Consul Johnston had the management of
+affairs in the Opobo a few years earlier, Ja Ja would never have been
+deported, and instead of having to censure him, he would have handled
+him in such a manner as to make use of his influence in furthering
+British interests. I do not think I can describe the late King Ja Ja
+better than Mr. Consul Johnston did in a letter he addressed to Lord
+Salisbury under date of September 24th, 1887, wherein he writes as
+follows:--"Ja Ja's chief friends and supporters for years past have been
+the naval officers on the coast. His generous hospitality, his frank,
+engaging manner, his naif discourse, and amusing crudities of diction
+have gained the ready sympathy of these gentlemen; no doubt Ja Ja is no
+common man, though he is in origin a runaway slave,[89] he was cut out
+by nature for a king, and he has the instinct of rule, though it not
+unfrequently degenerates into cruel tyranny.
+
+"His demeanour is marked by quiet dignity, and his appearance and
+conversation are impressive.
+
+"Nevertheless, I know Ja Ja to be a deliberate liar,[90] who exhibits
+little shame or confusion when his falsehoods are exposed. He is a
+bitter and unscrupulous enemy[91] of all who attempt to dispute his
+trade monopolies, and the five British firms whose trade he has almost
+ruined during the past two years."
+
+A complaint often made against the Government by merchants established
+on the West Coast of Africa is want of official protection and
+assistance; in many cases in the past this has been the case; but they
+certainly could not make this complaint during the few months that Mr.
+Consul Johnston was at the head of the Consular service in the Oil
+Rivers. I will here give a summary of what exertions were made by the
+Government to assist the merchants in their praiseworthy attempts to get
+behind the middlemen in this one river, where Ja Ja was always given the
+credit of being the head and front of the obstruction, nothing ever
+being said about the king and chiefs of Bonny, who were equally
+interested with Ja Ja in keeping the white men out of the markets, their
+principal markets being on the River Opobo.
+
+Owing to the energetic representations of Mr. Consul H. H. Johnston, the
+British Government placed at his disposal for the settlement of the
+market question and the Ja Ja palaver the following Government vessels,
+viz., the _Watchful_, the _Goshawk_, the _Alecto_, the _Acorn_, the
+_Royalist_, and the _Raleigh_, the latter bringing Admiral Sir Hunt
+Grubbe up from the Cape of Good Hope for the trial of King Ja Ja.
+
+Result: Within a very short time after the deportation of Ja Ja, all the
+firms who had been so anxious to establish in the interior markets and
+thus get behind the middlemen (without doubt the curse of the Oil Rivers
+and every part of Africa where they are tolerated) gave up trading at
+the interior markets that had caused the Government so much trouble to
+open for them, and made an agreement with the middlemen, represented in
+this case by the Bonny men and Opobo men, that they would not attempt to
+trade any more in the interior markets if the middlemen would promise to
+trade with no European firm that attempted to trade in the interior
+markets. On the writer's last visit to the Opobo in 1896 there was only
+one firm trading in the interior markets, and that firm was not one of
+those that were in the river at the time of the clamour for the removal
+of Ja Ja and the opening of the interior in 1887.
+
+
+KWO IBO.
+
+This river was first visited in modern days in 1871 by the late Mr.
+Archie McEachan, who found the people very troublesome to deal with, and
+did not long remain there. No doubt the people were not so easy to deal
+with as those natives that have been for some hundreds of years dealing
+with Europeans; but as he was at the same time posing as a friend and
+supporter of Ja Ja, and the oil he got in Kwo Ibo was being diverted
+from Ja Ja's markets, the latter no doubt exerted a certain amount of
+pressure on his friend, and aided, if he did not actually cause him to
+decide to withdraw from Kwo Ibo.
+
+Kwo Ibo lay fallow for some time, then one or two Sierra Leone men
+attempted to trade there, but with little success, owing to the
+influence King Ja Ja had in the country. It was not until 1880-1 that
+any sustained effort was made to trade in this river; but about this
+time a Mr. Watts established a small trading station there, and
+succeeded in creating a trade, though he had a very difficult task to
+combat the opposition of King Ja Ja, who considered he was being
+defrauded of some of his supposed just rights. Had Mr. Watts pushed his
+way into the interior markets and dealt direct with the producers, he
+would deserve the united thanks of every merchant connected with the
+trade in the Niger Delta; but he did not, and contented himself with
+buying his produce on a little better terms than he could have done in
+Opobo or Old Calabar, and created another set of middlemen, who to-day
+consider they, like their neighbours, are justified in doing their
+utmost in keeping the European out of the interior. Mr. Watts eventually
+sold out his interest in the trade of this river to the combination of
+river firms now known under the name of the African Association of
+Liverpool.
+
+A mission has been established here for some years and I had the
+pleasure of meeting the missionary in charge, some two years ago, on his
+way home after a long sojourn in the Kwo Ibo; his description of the
+people and of the success of his mission work was most interesting. If
+he has returned to the seat of his labours and is still alive, I can
+only wish him every success in the work in which evidently his whole
+heart was centred.
+
+The name Kwo Ibo, which has been given to this river, gives one the idea
+that the inhabitants are a mixture of Kwos and Ibos. This to a certain
+extent may be a very good description as regards the inhabitants of the
+upper reaches of the river, which takes its rise, so it is supposed, in
+a lake in the Ibo country, afterwards passing through the Kwo, and
+discharges itself into the sea about half-way between the east point of
+the Opobo River and the Tom Shotts Point.
+
+The lower part of the river is inhabited principally by Andoni men by
+origin, but calling themselves Ibenos or Ibrons.
+
+These people deserve a great deal of credit for the plucky manner in
+which they withstood the numerous attacks the late King Ja Ja made upon
+them, and their stubborn refusal to discontinue trading with the white
+men established in their river, though they were but ill-provided with
+arms to defend themselves. During several years they must have suffered
+severely from the repeated raids the late King Ja Ja made upon them, not
+only from losses in battle, but also in having their towns destroyed and
+many of their people carried off as prisoners. Some of the earlier raids
+made by Ja Ja, I must in fairness to him say, were to a great extent
+brought on by the actions of the Ibrons themselves, who were not slow to
+attack and slay any Opobo men they caught wandering about, if the latter
+were not in sufficient numbers to defend themselves.
+
+In language, these people are closely allied to the old Calabar people,
+and many of their customs show them to have had more communication with
+those people than they have had with the Andoni people, at any rate for
+many years. I find no mention amongst the writings of the early
+travellers to Western Africa of their having visited this river, nor is
+it even named on any old chart that I have consulted, though on some I
+have seen a river indicated at the spot where the Kwo Ibo enters the
+sea.
+
+Needless to mention, they were, and the majority are to-day, steeped in
+Ju-Juism, witchcraft, and their attendant horrors.
+
+The Kwo people, whose country lies on both sides of the Kwo Ibo, and
+behind the Ibenos, are the tribe from whom were drawn the supplies of
+Kwo or Kwa slaves known under the name of the Mocoes in the West Indies.
+
+
+OLD CALABAR.
+
+
+I now come to the last river in the Niger Coast Protectorate, both banks
+of which belong to England, the next river being the Rio del Rey, of
+which England now only claims the right bank, Germany claiming the left
+and all the territory south to the river Campo, a territory almost as
+large as, if not equal to, the whole of the Niger Coast Protectorate,
+which ought to have been English, for was it not English by right of
+commercial conquest, if by no other, and for years had been looked upon
+by the commanders of foreign naval vessels as under English influence?
+
+Owing to some one blundering, this nice slice of African territory was
+allowed to slip into the hands of the Germans, hence my account of the
+Oil Rivers ought to be called an account of the Oil Rivers reduced by
+Germany.
+
+In speaking of the inhabitants of this river, I must also include the
+people who inhabit the lower part of the Cross River. This explanation
+would not have been necessary some few years ago, but I notice the more
+recent hydrographers make the Cross River the main river and the Old
+Calabar only a tributary of that river, which is, without doubt, the
+most correct.
+
+The principal towns are Duke Town (where are to be found nowadays the
+headquarters of the Niger Coast Protectorate, the Presbyterian Mission,
+and the principal trading factories of the Europeans), Henshaw Town,
+Creek and Town; besides these, the various kings and chiefs have
+numberless small towns and villages in the environs. In the lower part
+of the Cross river are many fishing villages, the inhabitants of which
+are looked upon as Old Calabar people, and owing to the latter being the
+dominant race they have to-day lost, or very nearly so, any trace of
+their forefathers, who I believe to have been Kwos with a strong strain
+of Andoni blood.
+
+These villages did, in days anterior to the advent of the European
+traders, an immense business with the interior in dried shrimps, the
+latter being used by the natives, not only as a flavouring to their
+stews and ragouts, but as a substitute for the all necessary salt.
+
+The original inhabitants of the district now occupied by the Old Calabar
+people were the Akpas, whom the Calabarese drove out, and to a great
+extent afterwards absorbed. This immigration of the Calabarese is said
+to have taken place very little over one hundred and fifty years ago.
+Originally coming from the upper Ibibio district of the Cross River,
+they belong to the Efik race, and speak that language, though nowadays,
+owing to numerous intermarriages with Cameroon natives and the great
+number of slaves bought from the Cameroons district, they are of very
+mixed blood. Most of the kings and chiefs of Old Calabar owe their rank
+and position to direct descent, some of them being of ancient lineage, a
+fact of which they are very proud. In this respect they differ in a
+great measure from their neighbours in Bonny and Opobo, where, oftener
+than otherwise, the succession falls to the most influential man in the
+House, slave or free-born.
+
+The principal town of these people boasted, some few years ago, of many
+very nice villa residences, belonging to the chiefs, built of wood, and
+roofed with corrugated iron, mostly erected by a Scotch carpenter, who
+had established himself in Old Calabar, and who was in great request
+amongst the chiefs as an architect and builder. Unfortunately, these
+houses being erected haphazard amongst the surrounding native-built
+houses did not lend that air of improvement to the town they might
+otherwise have done if the chiefs had studied more uniformity in the
+building of the town, and arranged for wide streets in place of alley
+ways, many of which are not wide enough to let two Calabar ladies of the
+higher rank pass one another without the risk of their finery being
+daubed with streaks of yellow mud from the adjacent walls.
+
+The native houses of the better classes are certainly an improvement
+upon any others in the Protectorate, showing as they do some artistic
+taste in their embellishments. They are generally built in the form of a
+square or several squares, more or less exact, according to the extent
+of ground the builder has to deal with and the number of apartments the
+owner has need for. In some cases, I have seen a native commence his
+building operations by marking out two or three squares or oblongs,
+about twenty feet by fifteen, round which he would build his various
+apartments or rooms. In the centre of the inner squares, which are
+always left open to the sky, you almost invariably find a tree growing,
+either left there purposely when clearing the ground, or planted by the
+owner; occasionally you will find a fine crop of charms and Ju-Jus
+hanging from the branches of these trees.
+
+The inner walls, especially of the courtyards, are in most cases
+tastefully decorated with paintings, somewhat resembling the arabesque
+designs one sees amongst the Moors. No doubt this art and that of
+designing fantastic figures on brass dishes, which they buy from the
+Europeans and afterwards embellish with the aid of a big-headed nail and
+a hammer, comes to them from the Mohammedans of the Niger, of whom they
+used to see a good deal in former days.
+
+With regard to the dress of these people, I have not anything so
+interesting to relate about them as I had of the New Calabar gentlemen.
+Except on high days and holidays, there is little to distinguish the
+upper classes here from the same classes in any of the other rivers of
+the Protectorate, except that it might be in the peculiar way they knot
+the loin cloth on, leaving it to trail a little on the ground on one
+side, and their great liking for scarlet and other bright coloured
+stove-pipe hats. On their high festivals the kings appear in crowns and
+silk garments; the chiefs, who do not stick to the native gala garments
+of many-hued silks, generally appear in European clothes, not always of
+irreproachable fit, their queen, as every chief calls his head wife,
+appearing in a gorgeous silk costume that may have been worn several
+seasons before at Ascot or Goodwood by a London belle. Sometimes you may
+be treated to the sight of a dusky queen gaily displaying her ample
+charms in a low-cut secondhand dinner or ball dress that may have
+created a sensation when first worn at some swagger function in London
+or Paris. As the native ladies do not wear stays, and one of the
+greatest attributes of female beauty in Calabar is plumpness, and plenty
+of it, you may imagine that the local _modiste_ has her wits greatly
+exercised in devising means to fill up the gaping space between the
+hooks and eyes. I once heard a captain of one of the mail steamers
+describe this job as "letting in a graving piece down the back."
+
+One of the customs peculiar to the Old Calabar people, practised
+generally amongst all classes, but most strictly observed by the
+wealthier people, is for a girl about to become a bride to go into
+retirement for several weeks just previous to her marriage, during which
+time she undergoes a fattening treatment, similar to that practised in
+Tunis. The fatter the bride the more she is admired. It is said that
+during this seclusion the future bride is initiated into the mysteries
+of some female secret society. Many of the chiefs are very stout, and
+given to _embonpoint_, a fact of which they are very proud.
+
+The lower-class women are not troubled with too much clothing, but still
+ample enough for the country and decency's sake. As one strolls through
+the town to see the market or pay a visit to some chief, one often
+encounters young girls, and sometimes women, in long, loose, flowing
+robes, fitting tight round the neck, and on inquiring who these are, the
+reply generally comes, "Dem young gal be mission gal, dem tother one he
+be Saleone woman."
+
+The mission here is the United Presbyterian Mission of Scotland,[92] and
+a great deal of good has been done by it for these people, and is being
+done now, and great hopes are expected from their industrial mission,
+started only a few years ago, therefore, it would be unfair to make
+further comment on the latter; it is a step in the right direction.
+
+Some of the missionaries to Old Calabar have put in about forty years of
+active service, most of it passed on the coast. Amongst others who have
+lived to a great age in this mission should be mentioned the Rev. Mr.
+Anderson, who lived to the advanced age of between eighty and ninety
+years, greatly respected by both the European and native population.
+Amongst the lady missionaries the name of Miss Slessor stands out very
+prominently, and, considering the task she has set herself, viz., the
+saving of twin children and protection of their mothers, her success has
+been marvellous, for the Calabarese is, like his neighbours, still a
+great believer in the custom that says twin children are not to be
+allowed to live. This lady has passed about twenty years in Old Calabar,
+a greater part of the last ten years all alone at Okyon, a district
+which the people of Duke Town and the surrounding towns preferred not to
+visit, if they could manage any business they had with the people of
+Okyon without going amongst them. Many of these old customs will now be
+much more quickly stamped out than in the past, owing to the fact that
+it is in the power of the Consul-General to punish the natives severely
+who practise them. The preaching and exhortation of the missionaries to
+the people in the past was met by the very powerful argument, in a
+native's mind, that "it was a custom his father had kept from time
+immemorial, and he did not see why he should not continue it," the Ju-Ju
+priests being clever enough to point out to the natives that, though the
+missionaries preached against Ju-Juism, they could not punish its
+votaries. But that is all changed now, and even the Ju-Ju priests begin
+to feel that the power of the Consul-General is much greater than that
+of their grinning idols and trickery.
+
+Though these people have been in communication with Europeans for at
+least two centuries, and under British influence for upwards of sixty
+years, and a mission has been established in their principal town for
+the best part of fifty years, it was a common thing to see human flesh
+offered for sale in the market within a very few years of the
+establishment of the British Protectorate.
+
+In judging the result of missionary effort in this river, or, in fact,
+any other part of Western Africa, one is apt to exclaim, "What poor
+results for so much expenditure in lives and money!" The cause is not
+far to seek if one knows the native, and has sufficiently studied his
+ways and customs as to be able to understand or read what is working in
+his brain.
+
+The upper or dominant classes, consisting of the kings, the chiefs, the
+petty chiefs and the trade boys (the latter being the traders sent into
+the far distant markets to buy the produce for their masters, and it is
+from this class that many of the chiefs in most of these rivers spring)
+are all, to a man, working either openly or secretly against the
+missionaries. Even when they have become converts and communicants, in
+very many cases they are as much an opponent as ever of the missionary.
+I can fancy I see some enthusiastic missionary jumping up with
+indignation depicted in every feature to tell me I am not telling the
+truth about his particular converts. Well, as I expect to be called a
+liar, I have taken care to admit that a very few converts are not
+opposed to the missionary, in order that I may say to any missionary
+that particularly wishes to wipe the floor with me that perchance his
+special converts are included in the minority that is represented by the
+very few cases where the convert is wholly and solely for the mission.
+
+What are the causes that lead these people to work against the missions?
+First and foremost is Ju-Ju and its multifarious ramifications,
+consisting of Ju-Ju priests of the district, the Ju-Ju priests of the
+surrounding country, and the travelling Ju-Ju men, described by the
+natives as witch doctors, who keep up a communication of ideas and
+thought from end to end of the pagan countries of West and South-West
+Africa.
+
+Secondly, not only is the teaching of Christianity opposed to Ju-Juism,
+but it is also opposed to the whole fabric of native customs other than
+Ju-Juism. Polygamy, for example, is an actual necessity, according to
+native custom, thus a wife after the birth of an infant retires from the
+companionship of her husband and devotes herself for the following two
+years to the cares of nursing. Then, again, at certain times, according
+to native custom, a woman is not allowed to prepare food that has to be
+eaten by others than herself. This would place the man with only one
+wife in a peculiar position, as it is a general custom in all these
+rivers, from the kings downwards, to have their food cooked by one of
+their wives. This custom arises from the fact that poisoning is known to
+be very much practised amongst all the Pagan tribes, and experience has
+taught the men that their greatest safety lies in the faithfulness of
+their wives, for the wives are aware that they have all to lose and
+nothing to gain by the death of their husbands.
+
+Many people who have visited Western Africa will say that the reports of
+secret poisoning on the coast are travellers' yarns; but to refute that
+I will here describe a custom met with still in many places on the
+coast, and invariably practised amongst all natives in the purely native
+towns in the immediate vicinity of the coast towns. Even the coast towns
+people practise it still in every case amongst themselves and in some
+cases with the Europeans. Of course, I don't say that the educated negro
+or coloured missionary will do it with Europeans, but many of the
+educated natives will do it with the uneducated native, and this custom
+is that your native host will never offer you food or drink without
+first tasting it to show you it is not poisoned. While I am on this
+topic, let me give any would-be travellers amongst the Pagans a bit of
+advice. Once they strike in amongst the purely native, always follow
+this custom; it will do no harm and may save them from unpleasant
+experiences.
+
+Thirdly, the native instinct of self-preservation is as much the first
+law of nature to the negro as it is to the rest of mankind. At first
+sight it might be said, "Where is the link between self-preservation and
+missionary effort, and how comes it to work against the missions?" I
+will try to explain this point as clearly as possible.
+
+Naturally the first people the missionary came in contact with were the
+coast tribes. These people, in almost if not every case, are
+non-producers, being simply the brokers between the white man and the
+interior; in not a few cases behind the coast tribes are other tribes
+who are again non-producers and are the brokers of the coast brokers, or
+make the coast brokers pay a tribute to them for passing through their
+country. No place so well illustrated this system as the trade on the
+lower Niger as it used to be conducted by the Brass, New Calabar and
+Bonny men. Previous to the advent of the Royal Niger Company in that
+river, these people paid a small tribute to perhaps a dozen different
+towns on their way up to Abo on the Niger--some of the Brass men used
+even to get as far as Onicha or Onitsha. Now that the Royal Niger
+Company is trading on the Niger, none of these people can go to the
+Niger to trade. Well, there you have one of the great objections to
+mission effort. Each of these small tribes who were non-producers have
+lost the tribute they used to exact from the Brass, Bonny and New
+Calabar native brokers, therefore all the non-producers are averse to
+the white man passing beyond them, be he missionary or trader. Of
+course, the greatest objectors to the white man penetrating into the
+interior are the coast middlemen, for it strikes at once at the source
+of all their riches, all the grandeur of their chieftainship, and for
+the rising generation all hope of their ever arriving to be a chief like
+their father or their masters, and have a large retinue of slaves, for
+the favourite slaves are in no way anxious to see slavery abolished,
+because with its abolition they only foresee ruin to their ambitious
+views.
+
+Thus you will understand me when I point out to you the weak spot in
+nine-tenths of the mission effort. They have been trying to look after
+the negro's soul and teaching him Christianity, which in the native mind
+is cutting at the root, not only of all their ancient customs, but
+actually aims at taking away their living without attempting to teach
+them any industrial pursuit which may help them in the struggle for
+life, which is daily getting harder for our African brethren as it is
+here in England.
+
+When I am speaking of mission effort I ought to include Government
+effort in the older colonies. No attempt has been made, as far as I am
+aware of, to open technical schools or to assist the natives to learn
+how to earn their living other than by being clerks or petty traders.
+
+
+SECRET SOCIETIES AND FESTIVALS IN OLD CALABAR--AND THE COUNTRIES UP THE
+CROSS RIVER
+
+To describe all the customs of the Old Calabar people would take up more
+space than I am allowed to monopolise in this work.
+
+They have numerous plays or festivals, in which they delight to disguise
+themselves in masks of the most grotesque ugliness. These masks are, in
+most cases, of native manufacture, and seem always to aim at being as
+ugly as possible. I never have seen any attempt on the part of a native
+manufacturer of masks to produce anything passably good looking.
+
+Egbo, the great secret society of these people, is a sort of
+freemasonry, having, I believe, seven or nine grades. To attempt to
+describe the inner working of this society would be impossible for me,
+as I do not belong to it. Though several Europeans have been admitted to
+some of the grades, none have ever, to my knowledge, succeeded in being
+initiated to the higher grades. The uses of this society are manifold,
+but the abuses more than outweigh any use it may have been to the
+people. As an example, I may mention the use which a European would make
+of his having Egbo, viz., if any native owed him money or its
+equivalent, and was in no hurry to pay, the European would blow[93] Egbo
+on the debtor, and that man could not leave his house until he had paid
+up. Egbo could be, and was, used for matters of a much more serious
+nature than the above, such as the ruin of a man if a working majority
+could be got together against him. This society could work much more
+swiftly than the course adopted in other rivers to compass a man's
+downfall; _vide_ Will Braid's trouble with his brother chiefs in New
+Calabar.
+
+The country up the Cross River, which is the main stream into the
+interior, improves a very few miles after leaving Old Calabar; in fact,
+the mangrove disappears altogether within twenty miles of Duke Town,
+being replaced by splendid forest trees and many clearings, the latter
+being, in some instances, the farms of Old Calabar chiefs. On arriving
+at Ikorofiong, which is on the right bank of the river, you find
+yourself on the edge of the Ikpa plain, which extends away towards Opobo
+as far as the eye can see. I visited this place thirty-five years ago,
+and stayed for a couple of days in the mission house, the gentleman then
+in charge being a Dr. Bailey. At that time this was the farthest station
+of the Old Calabar mission; since then they have established themselves
+in Umon, and have done great service amongst these people, who were
+previously to the advent of the mission terribly in the toils of their
+Ju-ju priests. The people of Umon speak a language quite different from
+the Calabarese. Umon is about one hundred miles by water from Old
+Calabar.
+
+Twenty or thirty miles further up the Cross River you come to the
+Akuna-Kuna country, inhabited by a very industrious race of people,
+great producers and agriculturists, and having abundance of cattle,
+sheep, goats and poultry. These people received one of Her Majesty's
+consuls with such joy and good feeling, and so loaded him with presents
+of farm produce, that his Kroo boatmen suffered severely from
+indigestion while they remained in the Akuna-Kuna country. A little
+farther up the river is the town of Ungwana, a mile or so beyond which
+is now to be found a mission station. This district is called Iku-Morut,
+and a few years ago the inhabitants were never happy unless they were at
+war with the Akuna-Kuna people. This state of things has been much
+modified by the presence in the country of protectorate officials.
+
+About sixty miles by river beyond Iku-Morut is the town Ofurekpe, in the
+Apiapam district. This place, its chief and people are everything to be
+desired, the town is clean, the houses are commodious, the inhabitants
+are friendly, and their country is delightful. They are a little given
+to cannibalism, but, I am very credibly informed, only practise this
+custom on their prisoners of war.
+
+Beyond this point the river passes through the Atam district, a country
+inhabited, so I was informed, by the most inveterate of cannibals. Not
+having visited these people, I am not able to speak from personal
+experience; but as I have generally found in Western Africa that a
+country bearing a very bad character does not always deserve all that is
+said against it, I shall give this country the benefit of the doubt, and
+say that once the natives get accustomed to having white people visit
+them, and have got over the fearful tales told them by the interested
+middlemen about the ability of the white men to witch them by only
+looking at them, then they will be as easy to deal with, if not easier,
+than the knowing non-producers.
+
+I know of one interior town, not in Old Calabar, where the principal
+chief had given a warm welcome to a white man and allotted him a piece
+of ground to build a factory on, which he was to return and build the
+following dry season. Before the time had elapsed the chief died,
+without doubt poisoned by some interested middleman. When the white man
+went up to the country according to his agreement, the new chief would
+not allow him to land, and accused him of having bewitched the late
+chief. The white trader was an old bird and not easily put off any
+object he had in view, so stuck to his right of starting trade in the
+country, and by liberal presents to the new chief at last succeeded in
+commencing operations, with the result that the new chief died in a very
+short time and the white man, who was put in charge of the factory, was
+shot dead whilst passing through a narrow creek on his way to see his
+senior agent, this being done in the interior country so as to throw the
+blame upon the people he was trading with. No one saw who fired the
+fatal shot, and the body was never recovered, as the boys who were with
+him were natives belonging to the coast people and in their fright
+capsized the small canoe he was travelling in, so they reported; but
+some months after the white man's ring mysteriously turned up, the tale
+being it was found in the stomach of a fish.
+
+I will here describe one other very practical custom that used to be
+observed all over the Old Calabar and Cross River district, but which
+has disappeared in the lower parts of the river, owing no doubt to the
+efforts of the missionaries having been successful in instilling into
+the native mind a greater respect for their aged relatives than formerly
+existed. If it ever occurs nowadays in the Calabar district it can only
+take place in some out of the way village far away in the bush, from
+whence news of a little matter of this kind might take months to reach
+the ears of the Government or the missionary; but this custom is still
+carried on in the Upper Cross River, and consists in helping the old and
+useless members of the village or community out of this world by a tap
+on the head, their bodies are then carefully smoke-dried, afterwards
+pulverised, then formed into small balls by the addition of water in
+which Indian corn has been boiled for hours--this mixture is allowed to
+dry in the sun or over fires, then put away for future use as an
+addition to the family stew.
+
+With all the cannibalistic tastes that these people have been credited
+with, I have only heard of them once ever going in for eating white men,
+and this occurred previous to the arrival in the Old Calabar river of
+the Efik race, if we are to trust to what tradition tells us. It appears
+that in 1668-9 four English sailors were captured by the then
+inhabitants of the Old Calabar River; three of them were immediately
+killed and eaten, the fourth being kept for a future occasion. Whether
+it was that being sailors, and thus being strongly impregnated with salt
+horse, tobacco and rum, their flesh did not suit the palate of these
+natives I know not, but it is on record that the fourth man was not
+eaten, but kindly treated, and some years after, when another English
+ship visited the river, he was allowed to return to England in her.
+Since that date, as far as I know, no white men have ever been molested
+by the Old Calabar people.
+
+There has been occasionally a little friction between traders and
+natives, but nothing very serious, though it is said some queer
+transactions were carried on by the white men during the slave-dealing
+days.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [80] "Shake-hand" was a present given by a trader each voyage on his
+   arrival on the coast to the king and the chiefs who traded with him; the
+   Europeans themselves gradually increased this to such an extent that
+   some of the kings began to look upon it as a right, which led to endless
+   palavers; if it is not completely abolished by now, it ought to be.
+
+   [81] "Dashing"--native word for making presents. This word is a
+   corruption of a Portuguese word.
+
+   [82] Brohemie, founded by the late chief Alluma between fifty and sixty
+   years ago. Chinome, a powerful chief, fought with Allumah in 1864-5 for
+   supremacy; the former was conquered, and died some few years after.
+   Chief Dudu, not mentioned in the text, founded in 1890 Dudu town, and is
+   to-day a most loyal and respected chief. Chief Peggy died in 1889. Chief
+   Ogrie died in 1892, Chief Bregbi also died some years ago.
+
+   [83] This preparation is made from the pericarp of the Raphia Vinifera
+   pounded up into a pulplike mass, which they mix in the water in their
+   canoes and then bale out into the water in the creek.
+
+   [84] One good thing the missionaries have done since they have been in
+   Brass, and that is, that, of persuading the natives, or at least the
+   greater part of them, to give up the worship of this snake; and this
+   part must have included the most influential portion of Brass society,
+   for since about the year 1884 the Ju-Ju snake is killed wherever seen
+   without any disastrous consequences to the killer.
+
+   [85] As an evidence of how secret the natives of these parts have always
+   tried to keep, and have to a great extent kept, the knowledge of the
+   various various creeks from the white men since the abolition of the
+   slave trade, I may point to this creek, which is clearly marked and the
+   soundings given in the old charts, _circa_ 1698, but was quite unknown
+   to the present generation of traders, until Capt. Cawthorne, of the
+   African Steamship Company rediscovered it about 1882-4. I well remember
+   this creek being carefully described to me by Bonny men in 1862 as the
+   haunt of lawless outcasts from Bonny and the surrounding countries,
+   cannibals and pirates. About this time I was stationed in New Calabar,
+   and in roaming about the creeks looking for something to shoot, I came
+   across this beautiful wide creek and followed it until I sighted Breaker
+   Island; but being only in a small shooting canoe I was forced to turn
+   back the way I had come. The next morning I was favoured by the visit of
+   King Amachree, the father of the present king, who said he had heard
+   from his people that I had been down this creek, and he had come to warn
+   me of the danger I ran in visiting that creek, giving me the same
+   description that the Bonny men had done some months earlier. I laughed
+   and told him I had heard the same yarn from the Bonny men. Later in the
+   same year I mentioned my visit to an old freeman in Bonny, named Bess
+   Pepple. He being a little inebriated at the time, let his tongue wag
+   freely, and informed me that it was a creek often used by the slavers
+   during the time the preventive squadron was on the coast, to take in
+   their cargo. In one instance that he remembered he said there were five
+   slavers up that creek when two of Her Majesty's gunboats were in Bonny,
+   about the year 1837. About this time (1862) a mate of a ship who was in
+   charge of a small schooner running between New Calabar and Bonny was
+   forced by stress of weather to anchor inside the seaward mouth of this
+   creek, and was attacked during the night by some natives, carried on
+   shore, tied to a tree and flogged, the cargo of the schooner plundered,
+   and the Kroomen also flogged. Complaint being made to the kings of New
+   Calabar and Bonny, they both replied with the same tale: "We no done
+   tell you we no fit be responsible for dem men who live for dem creek; he
+   be dam pirate." This was true they had, but the mate swore he recognised
+   some Bonny men amongst his assailants.
+
+   [86] Efik race--the inhabitants of Old Calabar, said to have come from
+   the Ibibio country, a district lying between Kwo country and the Cross
+   River.
+
+   [87] Jamming, a trade term, meaning making an agreement to buy or sell
+   anything at an agreed price.
+
+   [88] This king is now dead, he was the last of the kings of New Calabar,
+   the country being now ruled over by a native council under the direction
+   of the Niger Coast Protectorate officials.
+
+   [89] This is an error into which the late Consul Hewett no doubt led Mr.
+   Johnston, as Ja Ja had been since 1861-2 a chief in Bonny and recognised
+   as one of the regents of that place; originally a slave, I will admit,
+   but not a runaway one.
+
+   [90] This failing is called diplomacy in civilised nations.
+
+   [91] Monopolies have led Europeans on the West Coast of Africa to be
+   equally as unscrupulous and bitter enemies of any one, white or black,
+   who have attempted to dispute their trade monopolies.
+
+   [92] Established in Old Calabar in 1846.
+
+   [93] It is called blowing Egbo because notice is given of the Egbo law
+   being set in motion against any one by one of the myrmidons of Egbo
+   blowing the Egbo horn before the party's house.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX II
+
+PART I
+
+A VOYAGE TO THE AFRICAN OIL RIVERS TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO. BY JOHN
+HARFORD
+
+
+It was in the month of December, 1872, when I with seventeen others left
+our good old port of Bristol bound for one of the West African oil
+rivers on a trading voyage. It was a splendid morning for the time of
+year: bright, fine, and clear, when we were towed through our old lock
+gates, with the hearty cheers, good-byes, and God-speed-yous from our
+friends ringing in the air; and although there were some of us made sad
+by the parting kiss, which to many was the last on this earth, there was
+one whose heart felt so glad that he has often described the day as
+being one of the happiest in his life, and that one was your humble
+servant, the writer. Our first start was soon delayed, as we had to
+anchor in King Road and wait a fair wind. And now a word to any hearers
+who may be about to start on a new venture. Always wait for a fair
+wind--when that comes make the best use you can of it. Our fair wind
+came after some two weeks, and lasted long enough for us to get clear of
+the English land; but before we were clear of the Irish, we encountered
+head winds again. Being too far out to return, we had to beat our ship
+about under close reefed topsails for another week. This was a rough
+time for all on board. At last the wind changed, and we this time
+succeeded in clearing the Bay of Biscay and then had a fairly fine run
+until we reached St. Antonia, one of the Cape de Verde Islands. This we
+sighted early one morning, and in the brilliant tropical sunshine it
+appeared to me almost a heavenly sight. We soon passed on, the little
+island disappeared, and once more our bark seemed to be alone on the
+mighty ocean. After a week or so we sighted the mainland of that great
+and wonderful continent Africa--wonderful, I say, because it has been
+left as if it were unknown for centuries, while countries not nearly its
+equal in any way have had millions spent upon them. Our first land fall
+was a port of Liberia. Liberia, I must tell you, is part of the western
+continent with a seaboard of some miles. It was taken over by the
+American Republic and made a free country for all those slaves that were
+liberated in the time of the great emancipation brought about by that
+good man William E. Channing. Here, on their own land, these people, who
+years before had been kidnapped from their homes, were once more free.
+
+After a week's buffeting about with cross currents and very little wind
+we at last reached the noted headland of Cape Palmas, a port of Liberia;
+we anchored here for one night and next morning were under way again.
+This time, having a fair wind and the currents with us, we soon made our
+next stopping place, which was a little village on the coast-line called
+Beraby. Here we had our first glimpse of African life. Directly we
+dropped anchor a sight almost indescribable met the eye of what appeared
+to be hundreds of large blackbirds in the water. We had not long to wait
+before we knew it was something more than blackbirds, for soon the ship
+was crowded from stem to stern with natives from the shore jabbering
+away in such a manner very alarming to a new-comer. I am not ashamed to
+confess that I was anything but sorry when the ship was cleared and we
+were off once more; this was soon done as we had only to take on board
+our Kroo men, or boys, as they are always called, although some of them
+are as finely built as ever a man could wish to be. We took about twenty
+of these boys, who engage for the voyage and become, like ourselves,
+part of the ship's crew. After each one had received one month's pay
+from our captain, and duly handed it over to their friends, and said
+their good-byes, general good-wishes were given, and we again up anchor,
+and set sail for the well-known port of Half Jack, which ought to be
+called the Bristol port of Half Jack, for here we met some half-dozen
+Bristol ships, who gave our captain a regular good old Bristol welcome.
+
+A few words about this important port may be of interest, although I am
+sorry to say we have managed to let it, valuable as it is, get into the
+hands of the French, like many more in that part. Half Jack is a very
+low-lying country with a large lagoon, as it is called running, between
+it and the mainland. Along the sides of this lagoon the country villages
+are situated, which produce that great product palm oil; this is sold to
+the Half Jack men, who in turn sell to our Bristol men and they ship it
+to all parts of Europe. We now leave Half Jack to its traders and
+natives, and after our captain has paid his complimentary visits, we set
+sail for the Gold Coast town of Accra; but before reaching that, we have
+to pass many fine ports and splendid headlands. Axim, in particular, I
+must mention, as it has recently come very much to the fore, owing to
+the great quantity of mahogany that is now being exported from there, a
+wood that has revolutionised the furniture industries of this
+country--it has also enabled the thrifty men and women of England to
+make their homes more bright and cheerful by giving them the very cheap
+and beautiful furniture they could not have dreamed of years ago, when
+the only mahogany procurable was the black Spanish, which was far too
+expensive for ordinary persons to think about. Axim, in addition to this
+great export of wood, is the port of departure for the West African gold
+mines, and they will I have no doubt, in time prove of great value. The
+Ancobra River empties itself here. Axim being at its mouth, this river
+would be very useful in helping to develop the interior of this part,
+were it not that the mouth was so shallow and dangerous, two obstacles
+that the science of the future will, I expect, remove. We are now
+passing some of the finest specimens of coast scenery it is possible to
+see. I can better describe it by comparing it somewhat to our North
+Devon and Cornwall coasts, such splendid rocks and headlands and land
+that I venture to say will eventually prove very valuable.
+
+We next come to the important town of Elmina, one of the departure ports
+of the Ashantee country, and also where all noted prisoners are kept.
+King Prempeh, late of Ashantee, is now awaiting her Majesty's pleasure
+there; many others have found Elmina their home of detention after
+attempting to disobey our gracious Queen's commands.
+
+Cape Coast Castle is our next noted place. This is the chief departure
+port for the Ashantee country, and was at one time the Government seat
+for the Gold Coast Colony. It is a very fine rock-bound port, and from
+the sea its square-topped, white-washed houses, and its Castle on the
+higher promontory, form an imposing-looking picture. It is second to
+Accra for importance in this part; much gold comes from here. It is also
+a celebrated place for the African-made gold jewellery, some of which is
+very beautiful in design and workmanship. The grey parrots form a great
+article of barter here. Hundreds of these birds are brought to Liverpool
+every week, I may almost say all from this place. The people are chiefly
+of the Fantee tribe, and a fine and intelligent race they are. They have
+good schools, and many of the younger men ship off to other parts of the
+coast as clerks, &c. Good cooks may be engaged from here, which is a
+fact I think well worth mentioning.
+
+And now we sail on to the present seat of Government for the Gold Coast
+Colony, Accra. This is a fine country, a flat, table-like land along the
+front, with the hills of the hinterland rising in the background. The
+landing here is somewhat dangerous in the rough season, and great care
+has to be taken by the men handling the surf-boats to avoid them
+capsizing. Many lives have been lost here in days gone by.
+
+I told you before why we called at the Kroo village Beraby, and the port
+of Half Jack. We now anchored at Accra to engage our black mechanics,
+for which the place is noted. Here you may procure any kind of mechanic
+you may mention--coopers, carpenters, gold-and silver-smiths,
+blacksmiths, &c. In those early days the coopers and carpenters were
+engaged to assist our Bristol men, but to-day the whole of the work is
+done by the natives themselves. I do not think you would find a white
+cooper or carpenter in any of the lower ports, some of the natives
+being very clever with their tools. We also engaged our cooks, steward,
+and laundry men, which any establishment of any size in these parts must
+keep. For all these trades the natives have to thank chiefly the Basel
+Mission, which is, I believe, of Swiss origin. This mission started
+years ago to not only teach the boys the word of God, but to teach them
+at the same time to use their hands and brains in such a way that they
+were bound to become of some use to their fellow men, and command ready
+employment. This mission, I cannot help feeling, has been one of the
+greatest blessings they have ever had on that great continent. It has
+sent out hundreds of men to all parts, and to-day the whole of the West
+Coast is dependent upon Accra for its skilled labour. This way of
+instructing the natives is now, I am pleased to say, being followed by
+nearly all our missionary societies, and it is certainly one of the best
+means of civilising a great people like the Africans are.
+
+Not to take powder and shot and shoot them down because they don't
+understand our Christian law, but teach them how to make and construct,
+that they in time may become useful citizens, and that they may be
+better able to learn the value of the many valuable products growing in
+their midst, they will be ever thankful to us and bless our advent among
+them. These Accra people are a very fine race, clean, and distinctly
+above the ordinary type of negro, clearer cut features, well-built men
+and women. The women, especially, are superior to any of the West
+Africans I have met with up to the present. They, like their husbands,
+are fond of dress, and, like their husbands too, are hard-working and
+industrious; this was shown by the readiness of these people to
+undertake the porterage in the prompt manner they did for the late
+Ashantee Expedition, and which must have done a great deal towards
+bringing about the success of the same. You will be better able to
+understand this if you will suppose, we will say, six thousand men were
+landed at Land's End, their destination being Bristol, and with no train
+or horse to carry the food supply and ammunition, let alone the heavy
+guns. For this work some thousands of porters are required, each one of
+which must carry from 60 to 100 pounds in weight. This is carried on the
+head, and when I tell you these people think nothing of doing twenty
+miles a day, day after day, you will realise how physically strong they
+must be. The manner in which they rallied round the Government--men,
+women, and children--as soon as it was decided an expedition should be
+sent, must have been very encouraging to those in command.
+
+One thing, however, about these Accra people, while they have very much
+improved themselves in their dress they have not improved their villages
+as much as we would wish to see, but this will all come in time. Our old
+towns used to abound in narrow courts and lanes, while we to-day like to
+see open spaces, broad streets, &c., with plenty of fresh air, knowing
+it is an absolute necessity to us, and it should be the first care of
+our councillors to do away as far as possible with all dens and alleys,
+so that if the cottage is small, the cottager can breathe pure, fresh
+air; for, as you all know, the working man's stock-in-trade is his
+health--when that goes, the cupboard is often bare.
+
+Now, I think it is about time we hove anchor and said good-bye to Accra.
+Our coopers and carpenters are engaged, and our crew being completed we
+set sail for our destination.
+
+After being some four or five days crossing the Bight of Biafra, we
+sighted the island of Fernando Po. Here our captain having to do a
+little business, we anchor for the night in the harbour of Santa Isabel.
+The little island of Fernando Po once belonged to us, but we exchanged
+it some years ago with the Spanish Government for another island in the
+West Indies, which our Government thought of more value. This, as far as
+the West Coast was concerned, was a pity, because at the time I am
+speaking of the island was a flourishing place, with about half-a-dozen
+or so English merchants, and a fairly good hotel; but not so now, for
+while there is still business going on, the place is not advancing, and
+a place that does not advance must go back. The chief merchants there
+to-day are English. This the Spanish would not have if they could help
+it, but being under certain obligations to them they suffer them to
+remain.
+
+The first view of Fernando Po when you arrive in the bay is a perfect
+picture; it makes one almost feel they would never like to leave there;
+its white houses all round the front on the higher level, its wharves
+and warehouses at the bottom, and its beautiful mountain rising
+magnificently in the background. Its whole appearance is very similar to
+the island of Teneriffe. It seems strange that here, almost in the
+middle of the tropics, if you have any desire to feel an English winter,
+you have only to go to the top of the Fernando Po mountain, which can
+easily be done in two days, or even less, for while at the foot the
+thermometer is registering 85 deg. or 90 deg. in the shade, on the top there is
+always winter cold and snow.
+
+Now, I think we had better continue our journey. We took a few
+passengers on board, and then set sail for the Cameroon River. This
+being only fifty or sixty miles distant, we were not long before we came
+to anchor off what is called the Dogs' Heads. Here we had to wait the
+flood, and almost three-quarter tide, to enable our ship to pass safely
+over a shallow part of the river called the flats. Now we come in sight
+of the then noted King Bell's Town, called after a king of that name.
+Here our ship is moored with two anchors, and here she has to remain
+until the whole of her cargo has been purchased. This was done, and is
+even to-day, by barter, that is exchanging the goods our ship has
+brought out for the products of the country, which at that time
+consisted only of palm oil, ivory, and cocoa-nuts; but before we
+commence to trade the ship has to be dismantled--top spars and yards
+taken down, and carefully put away with the rigging and running gear;
+spars are then run from mast to mast, and bow to stern, forming a ridge
+pole; then rafters are fastened to these coming down each side,
+supported by a plate running along the side, supported by upright posts
+or stanchions; the rafters are then covered with split-bamboos, over
+these are placed mats made from the bamboo and palm trees. It takes, of
+course, some thousands of mats to cover the ship all over, but this is
+done in about a month, and all by natives who are engaged for that
+particular work and belonging to that place. Our ship now being housed
+in, all hands who have not been sent to assist in taking another ship to
+England are given their different duties to assist the captain in
+carrying on the trade.
+
+
+TRADING IN THE CAMEROONS
+
+Each ship in those days had what was then called a cask house, that was
+a piece of land as nearly opposite as possible to where the ship lay
+moored. This land was always kept fenced round with young mangrove props
+or sticks, forming a compound; inside this compound would be two,
+perhaps three, fairly good sized stores or warehouses, and also an open
+shed for empty casks which had to be filled with palm oil and stowed in
+the ship for the homeward voyage. Now the first work to be done after
+the ship was made ready for trading, was to land as much of her cargo as
+was not immediately required for trading purposes, such as salt,
+caskage, earthenware, and all heavy goods. Salt in those days, as in the
+present, formed one of the staple articles of trade, therefore a ship
+would generally have from 200 to 300 tons of this on board, all of which
+would have to be landed into one of these store houses. At that time
+that meant a lot of labour, as every pound had to be carried by the
+natives from the boats to the store in baskets upon the head, over a
+long flat beach. To-day all this is altered, the salt is sent out in
+bags, and each store has a good iron wharf running out into the river
+with trolly lines laid upon it, which runs the goods right into the
+store, and so saves an immense amount of labour. After the salt came the
+casks, packed in what are called shooks; that is, the cask when emptied
+at home here, is knocked down and made into a small close package and in
+that condition only taking up an eighth part of the room it would take
+when filled with the palm oil, thus enabling the ship to carry, in
+addition to her cargo, enough casks to fill her up again completely
+when filled with oil. To carry on this work the crew of the ship was
+divided into two parts, one to work on board, the other on shore. The
+shore work was generally allotted to the Kroo boys we engaged up the
+coast, with one of the white men in charge, while the white crew with
+three or four natives would work the ship. In addition to all this work,
+trade would be going on every day, which meant 100 or so natives coming
+and going constantly from half-past five in the morning until three or
+four in the afternoon, when trade would cease for the day. This release,
+I need scarcely tell you, was most welcome to us all, for during the
+whole of this time the ship was nothing but a continual babel, which not
+unfrequently ended in a free fight all round, when, of course, a little
+force had to be used to restore quiet.
+
+The trading would be carried on in this way. The after end of the ship
+was partitioned off and made to resemble a shop as nearly as possible,
+in this were displayed goods of all kinds and descriptions too numerous
+to mention here. In front of this shop, at a small table, the captain
+sat, while an assistant would be in the shop ready to pass any goods
+that were required out to the purchasers, who first had to take their
+produce, whatever it might be, to the mate, who would be on the main
+deck to examine the oil and see that it was clean and free from dirt of
+any kind; he would also measure whatever was brought by the natives,
+then give them a receipt, or what was commonly called a book. This book
+was taken to the captain, who would ask what they required. All that
+could be paid for from the shop was handed over, while for the heavy
+goods another receipt or book was given which had to be handed to the
+man in charge of the store on the beach, who gave the native his
+requirements there. So the work would go on from day to day, and month
+to month, until the whole of the ship's cargo had been bought, then the
+mat roof was taken off, masts and spars rigged up, sails bent and the
+ship made ready to sail for Old England. This, I must tell you, was a
+happy time for all on board, after lying, as we often did, some fourteen
+or fifteen months in the manner I have described. During these long
+months many changes took place; some of our crew fell ill with fever,
+and worst of all dysentery, one of the most terrible diseases that had
+to be contended with at that time. Three of our number, one after the
+other, we had to follow to the grave, while others were brought down to
+a shadow.
+
+Here I experienced my first attack of African fever, which laid me low
+for some two weeks. I remember quite well getting out of my bed for the
+first time; I had no idea I had been so ill; I could not stand, so had
+to return to my berth again. This was a rough time for us--we had no
+doctor, and very little waiting upon, I can tell you. If the
+constitution of the sufferer was not strong enough to withstand the
+attack he generally had to go under, as it was impossible for the
+captain to look after the sick and do his trade as well, and as he was
+the only one supposed to know anything about medicine, it was a poor
+look out. (I have known, after a ship had been out a few months, not a
+white man able to do duty out of the whole of the crew.) These were our
+hard times, as, in addition to working all day, the white crew had to
+keep the watch on board through the night, while the Kroo boys did the
+same on shore. So that when any of our men were ill, the watch had to be
+kept by the two or three that were able. Many a night after a hard day's
+work I have fallen fast asleep as soon as I had received my
+instructions from the man I relieved. I fear my old captain got to know
+this, for he used to come on deck almost always in my watch, and
+sometimes ask me the time, which I very rarely could tell him. One night
+he caught me nicely. I was fast asleep, when suddenly I felt something
+very peculiar on my face. I put my hands up to rub my eyes as one does
+when just awakening, and, to my horror, my face was covered with palm
+oil, our captain standing at the cabin door laughing away. "What is the
+matter?" he said; "has anything happened?" "Yes," I replied; "you have
+given me the contents of the oil-can." I need scarcely tell you I did
+not sleep much on watch after that. The wonder to me now is that we did
+not lose more lives during that trying time.
+
+Rumours of wars, as they were called, amongst the natives occasionally
+reached us, but we were left pretty much unmolested. One day the captain
+and I had a free fight with fifty or sixty natives, some of whom had
+stolen a cask from our store, which I happened to discover. We got our
+cask back and a few of them had more than they bargained for. Another
+time while I was on board a ship fitting out for home, the captain of
+her saw a native chief coming alongside who was heavily in his debt, so
+he made up his mind, without saying a word to any one, to make him a
+prisoner, so he invited him downstairs to have a glass of wine, leaving
+the forty or so people who had accompanied their chief in his canoe on
+deck. The captain then quietly locked him up, the chief shouted for
+assistance, his people rushed down and the tables were soon turned, for
+they took the captain prisoner and nearly killed him into the bargain,
+one man striking him with a sword nearly severed his hand from his arm,
+the two or three whites on board were powerless. The natives having
+taken complete charge of the ship, we managed to hoist our flag for
+assistance, which was soon at hand, but too late to be of any use, for
+as soon as they had liberated their chief from his imprisonment, they
+all made off as quickly as they could to their own village. The captain
+was of course greatly to blame for not saying a word to any of us of his
+intention and for so underrating the strength of the chief's people. The
+chief was eventually brought to justice, however, by our own Consul.
+
+One other little break occurred to me to vary the monotony of those long
+months. Attached to our ship was a small cutter which used to run down
+to small villages outside the Cameroon River. To one called Victoria I
+journeyed once with the mate and our little craft on a small trading
+venture. Victoria is situated at the foot of the splendid Cameroon
+mountain, which, like its neighbour at Fernando Po, always has snow at
+the peak; it is over 13,000 feet high and at that time only one or two
+men had ventured to the summit--one was, I believe, the late Sir Richard
+Burton. Since then several others have succeeded, amongst them the
+present Sir Harry Johnston, who did a lot of travelling when he was
+Vice-Consul, in those parts. Victoria is a snug little place. It was
+founded some years ago by a very old missionary, a Mr. Seagar, a man who
+did a great work in his time and whose name will never be forgotten in
+the Cameroon River. It lies in what is called Ambas Bay, which is
+sheltered somewhat from the south-west winds by two small islands. On
+one of these a British Consulate was erected a few years ago. The whole
+of this part as well as the Cameroon River is now a portion of the
+German Colony. We soon completed our business here and returned once
+more to our duties in the river. Between Victoria and Cameroon is the
+village of Bimbia, said to be one of the most noted slave depots in the
+district. Hundreds of slaves used to be shipped from here in the days
+when the trade was allowed, and it is said that some time after the
+trade was prohibited one of these slave ships was just about to embark
+her human freight, when a British man-o'-war hove in sight. The captain,
+thinking his ship would be taken--and it was, I believe--and wanting to
+secure the golden dollars he had, took them to the shore and buried
+them. This is said to be thousands and thousands of pounds and is still
+unfound, so goes the tale. I tell it to you as it was told to me.
+
+Our daily routine in the river was so similar that we will now consider
+the whole of the ship's cargo had been bought, and she is getting ready
+to make a start for home, which we were all very glad of; but our joy
+did not last long, for the mail arriving just at that time with letters
+from England, the captain received communication from our owners that
+they were sending out another ship, which he was instructed was for our
+chief mate to take charge of. That meant that the mate would have to
+remain to lay the cargo of her, while our old ship went home; but the
+poor man had been very ill for some time previous to this news, and was
+totally unfit to take charge; so under the circumstances there was only
+one thing to be done, and that was for the captain to remain and send
+the mate home. As soon as this was decided upon, two of us were asked to
+stay behind and help to work the newly-arrived vessel. I was one, the
+cook was the other (our skipper liked to be looked after in the eating
+department). Well, we soon settled down in our new quarters, and in a
+week or so said good-bye to our old ship and shipmates, who were jolly
+glad to get out of the river, and did not envy us poor fellows who had
+to go through all the old duties over again without a bit of change.
+However, we entered upon our work with cheerful hearts. We had a good
+captain, and had no intention of leaving him as long as he remained out.
+Perhaps a word or two about the natives' trade tricks might interest
+you, then you will see a mate's life on an African trading ship was not
+altogether a "bed of roses"; and he had to be pretty sharp to catch
+them, otherwise our wily friends would be sure to have him. For
+instance, they had a happy knack of half-filling their casks with thick
+wood, secured in such a way to the inside of the heads that, instead of
+there being fifty gallons of oil in the cask which it would measure by
+the gauging rod, it would possibly not contain more than twenty-five;
+water, too, was very often introduced to make up a deficiency, and if
+you happened to tell our friend his oil contained water, you were told
+not water, it is rain. Another dodge was to mix a certain kind of herb
+with the oil, which caused it to ferment, so that half casks could very
+easily be made to look full ones. Dirt as well was freely used by the
+natives when they thought they could get it passed, so one had to keep
+one's eyes open.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX II
+
+PART II
+
+PIONEERING IN WEST AFRICA; OR, "THE OPENING UP OF THE QUA IBOE RIVER"
+
+
+In the year 1880, I was asked by a Liverpool firm to undertake certain
+work in connection with one of the trading establishments on the Old
+Calabar River. The offer came at a very opportune time. Being anxious to
+improve my position, like most young fellows, I accepted, and was soon
+on the way to my new undertaking. My first business was to take an old
+ship, that had seen the best of her days, and had been lying there in
+the stream for many years as a trading hulk, now being considered unsafe
+to remain longer afloat. I had to place her on the beach in such a way
+that she could still be used as a trading establishment. This was not a
+small matter, as the beach upon which she had to be placed was not a
+good one for the purpose. However, I found that if I could get her to
+lie on a certain spot I had carefully marked out, there was every
+possibility of a success; but I fear I was the only one that thought so,
+as it was fully twelve months before my senior would let me undertake
+the venture; at last I got his consent, and in a very short time the
+vessel was landed safely, and, I am pleased to say, did duty for over
+ten years. It was while waiting for this consent that the beginning of
+the events I am going to narrate took place.
+
+Business was somewhat quiet in the Old Calabar, so our senior thought he
+would go for a bit of an excursion to a place called Qua Iboe, which was
+supposed to be a small tributary of the great river of Old Calabar, but
+which he found to his astonishment was some twenty-five miles westward
+of the mouth of the Old Calabar, and ninety miles from our main station
+at Calabar; however, he did not like to return without seeing the place,
+so he and his crew went, and after two or three days' journey, they
+suddenly found themselves in the midst of breakers, and it was only by
+luck they got washed into the mouth of the river Qua Iboe, half-dead
+with fright, so much so that our senior would not venture back in the
+boat, but preferred walking overland.
+
+After being absent seven or eight days, he returned to headquarters with
+a very lively recollection of what he had gone through. Not being
+accustomed to the sea, the knocking about of the small boat very much
+upset him, then the long overland journey back took all the pleasure out
+of what he had intended to be a little holiday. Consequently, on his
+return he had but little to say about the river he had gone to see; and
+not being of a talkative disposition, had I not pressed him on the
+subject, I think, as far as our establishment was concerned, the Qua
+Iboe would have been a blank space on the map to-day, as many more fine
+places are in that great continent.
+
+So while we were at dinner, an evening or so after his return, feeling
+very anxious to hear something about his excursion, I remarked that we
+had not heard him say much about the new river. "No," said he; "for the
+simple reason is that I know but very little about it, except that I
+nearly got capsized in the breakers." "Well," I said, "is it a river of
+any size? Would it not be a good place to open up a new business?" "Oh,
+yes!" he said; "the river is a fair size, and it may or may not be a
+good place for business. We can't go there, we have not the means; we
+could not go without a vessel of some sort." "Well," said I, "would you
+go if you could? Or, in other words, will you give me all the support I
+need if I undertake to go?" "Yes, certainly," he said; "I shall be only
+too pleased to give you anything we have here."
+
+That night I got to work and laid out all my plans. First I had to find
+a vessel. We had attached to our hulk a good large boat that would carry
+about ten tons. This boat I soon got rigged up with mast and sails. This
+done, I had a house constructed about sixty or seventy feet long by
+twenty wide, made ready to be put up on whatever spot I should pitch
+upon when I reached my new destination. This work, of course, took some
+little time. However, the eighth day after I had my senior's consent to
+go, I was sailing away from the Old Calabar, with my little craft and
+sixteen people besides myself.
+
+It took some four or five days to get to the long-looked-for Qua Iboe.
+At last we were rewarded with a glimpse of the bar and its breakers,
+which we had to pass before we could get into the river. We, however,
+reached it safely, and with thankful hearts I can tell you, as our
+journey had been anything but a pleasant one--so many of us in such a
+small craft. I felt bound to take this number, as in addition to wanting
+these people for the building of the establishment, I wished to make as
+big a show as I could to the, at that time, unknown natives, who had
+the reputation of being as bad a lot as were to be met with anywhere on
+the West Coast. Anyhow, I thought they would have to be pretty bad if I
+could not make something of them, so I sailed my boat flying up the
+river to the first village, which was supposed to be the senior one in
+the river, and was always called Big Town. It was just dusk when we
+arrived. We dropped anchor, and decided to rest for the night; but I
+found the villagers very excited, and not liking at all my advent among
+them, as they had just had news from the up-country informing them that
+if they allowed a white man to remain in their river, King Ja Ja, who
+was the very terror not only of this place, but of some fifty or sixty
+miles all round, had threatened to burn their towns down; he laying
+claim to all this country, allowed no one to trade there but himself.
+
+The advice I had from these people was that I had better go back and
+leave them and their river to themselves. But I said, No, I am not going
+back. I have come to open a trading station and to remain with you, and
+that King Ja Ja, or any one else but our British Consul, would never
+drive me from that river alive. I saw, though, it was useless taking any
+notice of these frightened people, so I up anchor the next morning, and
+sailed up the river; near the next village I saw a suitable spot for our
+establishment. I at once anchored our boat, landed our people with house
+and everything we had brought, put up a bit of a shanty to sleep under
+for the time, and set to work to build our house; this, I may tell you,
+did not take long, for by the end of the week we had a fine-looking
+place up, such a one had never been seen in that part before. The house
+complete, my next work was to get goods for the natives to buy from us.
+This meant a journey for me.
+
+Ten days after our first arrival, our house and store were up and built,
+and I was away to the Old Calabar in our boat with some of my people to
+get goods to start our trade with; the remainder stayed to put the
+finishing touches to our building and to clear the land near.
+
+I was soon back at my post again and trade started. After this I had to
+make several journeys to keep our supply good, and all went well for
+about three months, with the exception of continuous rumours as to what
+King Ja Ja intended to do; these I took no notice of, as I did not
+anticipate he would molest me or my people. However, my peaceful
+occupation was not to last for long; for while I was away at Old Calabar
+replenishing our stock, a day or two previous to my return King Ja Ja,
+with about a thousand of his men, pounced down unexpectedly on these Qua
+Iboe people, burnt down seven villages, took one hundred prisoners, and
+drove the remainder of the population into the woods, cutting down every
+plantain tree, and destroying everything in the way of food stuff that
+was growing in the place. I arrived off the bar the day after this
+terrible business had taken place. When I left the river I left twelve
+of my people there. The head man had instructions that as soon as they
+saw me off the bar, when the tide was right for me to come in, to hoist
+a white flag.
+
+The day I arrived, after waiting until I knew high water must have
+passed, I took my glasses, but there was not a soul visible. Not caring
+to risk our little vessel without the signal, I took a small boat we had
+with us and started over the bar into the river. What my surprise was
+you will readily understand when, arriving at the store, I found only
+one man, half-dead with fright, and crying like a child; all I could get
+out of him was that Ja Ja had been there and killed every one in the
+place. The first thing I did was to at once return to the vessel, and
+bring her in with the remainder of my people. We landed all our stores,
+then I immediately hoisted our English ensign on the flag-staff. I
+prayed to the Almighty to defend us and the country from the tyranny of
+these dreadful men who had caused so much misery for these poor people.
+Their wretchedness I was soon brought face to face with.
+
+The morning after my arrival, if ever a man's heart was softened mine
+was, and the tears came to my eyes when I saw crawling into the house
+from the woods a poor, half-starved cripple child, covered with sores,
+and in a dreadful state. We took it in at once and cared for it. Then I
+sent my people into the woods to see if they chanced to come across any
+one, and to tell them to come in under our flag, and I would see that no
+harm again befell them. In this we were very successful, for one after
+the other they arrived, more dead than alive, until some 700 of them
+were in and around our house. The next thing to be thought about was
+food for them. My last cargo fortunately was all rice and biscuits. This
+relieved me somewhat, and I felt we could at least manage for a short
+time.
+
+To find food for such a great number gave me, as you may suppose,
+serious thought, for there was not a scrap left in the district; the
+land in this particular part being of a poor nature, the food grown at
+the best of times was very small, and this little had all been
+destroyed. But we had not to wait long before witnessing one of the
+greatest blessings that could have happened. As soon as the men had
+somewhat recovered from their fright, they began to go out into the
+river to fish, when such quantities were caught that never in the
+remembrance of any person in that country had such an amount of fish
+been seen. Load after load was brought to the shore, in fact, some had
+to spoil before it could be cured.
+
+What did all this wonderful catch bring about? While a short time before
+these people had been in the greatest poverty and distress, now they are
+rejoicing and thankful for this abundance of food and wealth. I say
+wealth because fish in this part of Africa is more precious than gold
+with us. With fish anything can be bought in the market, from the
+smallest article to the largest slave. So you see here was our relief
+brought about by the ever bountiful Providence, whose all-seeing eye is
+ever near those who are in want and need and ask His aid, whether it be
+the poorest slave in Africa or the orphan child in England.
+
+From this time we began to gather strength day by day. New arrivals came
+in who had managed to get away to some place of safety until they felt
+they could return to their native place with security.
+
+As soon as Ja Ja and his men had destroyed the villages they returned to
+their town of Opobo, with the hundred prisoners, the whole of whom they
+massacred in cold blood, and exhibited to their townspeople, and, I am
+sorry to say, to some Europeans, for days. While this fearful murdering
+was going on twenty-five miles away from us I, with a few of the most
+courageous Ibunos, or Qua Iboe people, made a tour of the principal
+villages in the Ibuno country to let the inhabitants know of the deadly
+onslaught that had been committed on the people at the mouth of the
+river. They all swore to stand by us to a man, and to keep themselves
+free from Ja Ja's tyrannical rule. After making this round we returned
+to the mouth of the river and turned our attention to the defence of the
+new villages that were about to be built.
+
+A little accident occurred to us while leaving the last village, called
+Ikoropata, that may be worth mentioning as a warning to others who might
+be placed in a similar situation. We had just started after having a
+long palaver with the chiefs, our men, about twenty, marching in single
+file, I near the leading man. All at once I noticed he was carrying his
+gun in a very alarming and unsuitable way. Had it gone off by accident,
+which is not an unusual occurrence, the man behind him was bound to
+receive the contents, with perhaps fatal results. Having stopped them
+and explained the danger of carrying guns in this position, we started
+off again, every man with his weapon to his shoulder. Strange to say, a
+few minutes after the very man's gun I had noticed at first blew off
+into the air with a tremendous report. Had this happened before, I fear
+we might have had to take one of our comrades back more dead than alive.
+The escape was a marvellous one, and not easily forgotten by any of us.
+
+Now being back amongst our own people, we set about to get all the guns
+we could together, and all able bodied men I told off for gun practice
+and defence drill. This I carried on day after day, until we had quite a
+little band of well-trained men. All this time we were continually
+receiving rumours from the Opobo side as to what Ja Ja's next intentions
+were, and to keep up the excitement he sent about 200 men as near the
+mouth of the river as he dared. They settled themselves in a creek two
+or three miles away from us, and here they used to amuse themselves by
+letting off now and again a regular fusilade of guns. This generally
+occurred in the middle of the night when every one but the watchmen had
+gone to sleep, and had such an effect on the frightened Ibunos that
+often two-thirds of them would rush off to the woods under the
+impression that the Opobos were again making a raid upon them. This went
+on for weeks, so much so that I was almost losing heart, and sometimes
+thought I should never get confidence in the people. At last, to my
+great surprise one evening in walked to my house the whole of the
+chiefs, who had just held a meeting in the village and passed a law that
+no person should again leave the town. They said they had come to tell
+me they felt ashamed of themselves for running away so many times and
+leaving me alone and unprotected in their country, and had decided to
+leave me no more, but that every man should stand and die if needs be
+for the defence of their towns. Whether Ja Ja's people heard of this
+resolution I don't know, but they soon dropped their gun firing at
+night, and eventually left their camping ground. Their next move was to
+get into the Ibunos' markets, and worry them there. This I was
+determined should not be done if I could help it. It was a long time
+before there was any real disturbance, although I could see that the
+Ibunos were daily getting more frightened that the Opobo people would
+monopolise their markets, and in that case they knew there would be very
+little chance for them.
+
+At last news came down the river that the Opobos had that afternoon sent
+a canoe to a market or town called Okot for the purpose of starting a
+trade with the natives. Now Okot was at that time one of the best
+markets the Ibunos had, and for them to be suddenly deprived of this
+trading station would be a terrible calamity to us all. I did not know
+what was to be done. The Ibunos would not go to the market to face the
+Opobos, neither would they go further up the river for fear of being
+molested by them. The only thing to do was to go myself and start a
+station at the same place, and which would enable me to keep an eye on
+their movements, so I at once made ready to start the same evening, and
+by five o'clock next morning I landed at Okot, and found the Opobo canoe
+there also, but like all Africans, time not being an object to them,
+they had not gone to the king or the owner of the land at the landing
+place. We did not wake the Opobos up on our arrival, but I immediately
+started for the village, and at daylight walked into the presence of the
+king of that part, who was so surprised to see a white man in his
+village that it took him some time to believe his eyes. Poor old chap! I
+fear he must have wished several times afterwards that he had never seen
+a white man, for he was taken prisoner by the Government in 1896 or 1897
+for insisting, I believe, in carrying out some human sacrifice at one of
+the feast times, and died in prison. But to return to my mission. I soon
+made him understand that I had come to start a trading station at his
+beach, but before doing this I had to secure the land at the landing
+place for the purpose. This he readily consented to, telling me at the
+same time that although the land at that particular spot did not belong
+to him he would instruct the owner of it to sell me all I wanted. So
+after paying the usual compliments to the old king, I started back for
+the landing place with the owner, who had already sold his right to me,
+and was now only coming to show us the extent, which was the whole of
+the land of any use on this spot. Just as we got back we found our
+Opobo friends preparing to go to the village to see the king and also
+get permission to build on this land, but their surprise on being told
+by him that he had no land on the spot to give them I will leave you to
+imagine. But the Opobos at that time took a lot of beating, and they
+decided to build a house without getting the permission of any one, and
+an iron roofed house too, which was considered by the natives then a
+great thing. After the house had stood for some time, our consul being
+in the river, we had the disputed land brought before him and thoroughly
+discussed. After hearing evidence on both sides for two days, it was
+decided that it belonged to us, and the Opobos were ordered to remove
+their house. But before this settlement occurred we had a lot to contend
+with from them. They did all in their power to debar us from keeping our
+establishments open there, and for two or three years we had continual
+trouble with them, occasionally firing at our people; luckily they
+seldom hit any one. Then they tried competing with us in trading. This I
+did not mind, as I considered it a fair means of testing who was who. Ja
+Ja, I knew, was a very rich man, and if we attempted to follow them in
+their extravagant prices we should soon be ruined. My policy was to let
+them go ahead, which they did, paying almost twice as much for their
+produce as we could possibly afford to pay. This lasted a great deal
+longer than I anticipated, and I feel sure Ja Ja must have lost a deal
+of money. After about twelve months of this reckless trading we were
+left pretty much to ourselves at Okot, and being fairly well settled
+down I began to look about for a good beach to start my next
+establishment. I had not to look far. On the left bank of the river,
+about two and a half miles down from Okot, was the landing beach of
+Eket. Here there is a rising cliff about fifty feet high, and I had
+often remarked when passing this spot, "If I were going to build a house
+to live in here I should like to build it on this hill." The situation
+was so good, as it was right in an elbow of the river, and from the top
+of the hill you had a view of the river branching off both up and down
+at right angles. An opportunity occurring for me to start a house at
+Eket, I went and saw the people, who were very pleased for me to come
+among them. So a little house was built, and a young coloured assistant
+named William Sawyer placed in charge, who proved to be one of the best
+men I ever had in the country. He needed to be, too, for the Ekets were
+the most trying of any of the peoples we had to deal with. I never left
+my stations for any length of time. Once or twice a week I visited them,
+but no matter how short a time I was away there was always a grievance
+to be settled at Eket. Poor Sawyer had a terrible time; the people had
+an idea they could do as they liked with the factory keeper, and would
+often walk off with the goods without paying for them, which Mr. Sawyer
+naturally objected to, usually ending in a free fight, sometimes my
+people coming off second best. The trade at that time at Eket was not
+large, although it was a good one, and I did not want to give it up if
+it could be helped. But my patience came to an end when I arrived upon
+the scene one day and found Mr. Sawyer had been terribly handled the day
+before. There had been a big row, and I could see by his face he had had
+very much the worst of the fight. I felt I could not allow this any
+longer, so summoned a meeting of all the chiefs and people. We had a
+very large meeting, one of the largest I ever remember, and after
+explaining to them my reason for calling them together, told them it was
+my intention to close the little house and go to some people higher up
+the river, who would be pleased for us to come among them, and would not
+ill-use my people as the Ekets were doing, and showing them how badly
+they had treated Mr. Sawyer, who had done nothing more than his duty in
+trying to protect the property that was under his care, and which they
+seemed to think they had a better right to than he. When they had heard
+my complaint and warning to close the house, the old and ever respected
+chief of all the Ekets rose to his feet. The people seeing this, there
+was silence in a moment (which every one knows who has happened to have
+been present at an African palaver is indeed a rarity), he being much
+loved and reverenced in his own town. As soon as he started I felt we
+were going to hear something worth hearing, and we did, for if ever
+there was a born statesman this was one. He said, "We have heard with
+sorrow of the way in which your people have been so ill-used by our
+people, and it is a shame to us a stranger should be so treated who is
+trying to do his best to bring business among us. Not only have you
+brought a business to us, where we can come and exchange our produce for
+our requirements, but you have opened our eyes to the light, as it were,
+and we have no intention that you should leave us. You have been sent to
+us by Abassy (which means God), and he will never let you leave us. Your
+trade will grow in such a way that you will see here on this beach far
+more trade than you will be able to cope with, so cast away from your
+mind the thought of leaving us. The disturbances that have been going on
+we will stop. It is not our wish that it has been so; it is the young
+boys of the village who know no better. We will put a stop to it in
+such a way that you will find your people from this time will have but
+little to complain about." After such a speech you may be sure I gave up
+all thought of leaving the Eket people, and I need scarcely tell you
+that this same spot has become the centre of the whole of the trade of
+this river. The words spoken by the venerable and, I believe, good old
+chief came as true as the day. We did see often and often more trade
+than we could cope with, and the establishment grew in such a way that
+the natives themselves often used to wonder. I never had anything to do
+with a more prosperous undertaking in Africa, and to-day there are few
+establishments on the West Coast that can surpass it, either in its
+quiet, steady trade or healthy climate. I used to say one could live as
+long as they liked. On the hill there is a very fine house, with acres
+and acres of good land at the back of it, while at the foot of the hill
+are all the stores and the shop where the daily work and trade goes on
+year in year out.
+
+Several very remarkable incidents happened here. One evening, just as we
+were going to dinner, a woman came and stood a little way from the
+house. I could see that she was crying bitterly and evidently in great
+distress. "What is the matter?" I said. "Affya (that is her brother) is
+dying, and I want you to come and see him before it is too late." Now
+Affya was one of the finest young fellows at Eket, and one whom I felt
+would be a sad loss to a people who wanted so much leading and
+governing, as it were. So I lost no time, but went off at once with the
+woman to see if I could do anything. On our arrival at the house things
+looked bad enough, and I feared the worst when I saw him laid out, as
+every one there thought, for dead--the finest young fellow at Eket. I
+fell on my knees by his side and prayed as earnestly as man could to
+our Heavenly Father, and begged for this life to be spared to us. All at
+once he moved as though suddenly aroused from sleep, and in a moment I
+had him up and on the back of one of my boys, and away to Eket House as
+fast as possible, and laid him on the verandah to sleep and rest free
+from the close and stuffy hut he had been in before. After a little
+nourishment he slept all night. I kept watch near him, and next morning
+what was my surprise when he told me he was feeling quite strong and
+able to walk back to the village. This I allowed him to do after the sun
+had got well high, as I could plainly see the lad was out of all danger.
+Should these lines ever get into the hands of that lad, for lad he will
+always be to me, I feel very sure he will say, "Yes, this wonderful
+returning to life did indeed happen to me, Affya, son of Uso, at Eket,
+at the village of Usoniyong, in the month of July, 1892." This is one of
+the many incidents that occurred whilst I was in charge at Eket and the
+Qua Iboe River. Another evening, just after dinner, my steward came to
+me saying there was a rat under the house (our house stood on iron
+columns). "A rat," I said; "what do you mean?" "Well, a small woman."
+
+"Go and bring her up; do not be afraid." He looked at me as much as to
+say you will be afraid when I do bring her up. Presently he appeared
+with a child in his arms, such a sight I never shall forget--almost
+starved to death, and covered with marks where she had been burnt with
+fire-sticks. This poor little thing, after wandering many days in the
+wood, at last found her way to our house. She was too ill to have
+anything done to her that evening, so I had a bed made for her in the
+sitting-room, close to my door, so that I could hear should she get
+frightened in the night. The little thing woke up many times, but was
+soon off to sleep again when I had patted and spoken to it. The next day
+we had her seen to, the steward boy set about and made her some dresses,
+and after a warm bath and plenty of food, in a few days the little girl
+was the life of our house. The poor little thing had been left without
+father or mother, and had become dependent upon an uncle, or some other
+relative, who had ill-used her in such a terrible manner that he had
+left her for dead. How she ever found strength to get to our house was
+almost a mystery.
+
+After being with us for twelve months, some other relatives laid claim
+to her, and as I was just leaving for England, I allowed them to take
+her, but not without making four or five of the principal chiefs
+responsible for her welfare. She will now be a grown woman, but will
+look back upon those happy months with pleasure, I feel sure.
+
+Another incident may be of interest--quite a change of scene--showing
+you how you may be as kind and as good to a people as it is possible to
+be, yet you must always be ready to defend yourself at a moment's
+notice, which will be seen from the following circumstances. We had been
+troubled for some time past with night robberies, not very serious at
+first, but they became more frequent than I cared about. I gave the
+matter serious attention, but we could not trace the thieves, do what we
+would; the strange thing was, that as soon as a robbery had been
+committed, a native, a sort of half slave, was sure to be seen about the
+beach putting on what seemed to me a sort of bravado manner; but, of
+course, he never knew anything about the people who had been tampering
+with the premises, and he always appeared to be surprised to think that
+any one should do such a thing, but at last matters came to a climax;
+our plantain trees had been cut down, and a whole lot of fine plantains
+stolen, as well as a lot of wire fencing. I was vexed to the extreme
+when this dastardly work was brought to my notice. But what was my
+surprise, no sooner had my lad reported the matter to me, when along
+walked the very man I have just described, looking as bold as brass.
+Said I to myself, "If you have not done this stealing you know something
+about it, and you will have to give an account of your movements before
+you leave these premises." So I sent orders to have him immediately put
+under arrest, which was done, and he was given to understand that until
+the thieves, whoever they were, had been brought to justice, he would
+have to remain under arrest.
+
+This was an unexpected blow for my friend, but he proved one too many
+for my people. He managed to get the best side of his keeper, and
+slipped; next morning we had no prisoner, the bird had flown. I knew he
+would work no good for us in the villages, neither did he; he went from
+village to village, right through the Eket country, telling the people
+the most dreadful things, and the most abominable lies, of what had been
+done to him the short time he was our prisoner; so much so, that he got
+the people quite furious against me and my people. Just as an agitator
+will work up strife in England if he is not checked, so it was with this
+man; he got every village to declare war against me. This went on for
+three or four days, until he got them all to concentrate themselves.
+They were all brought one night to within a quarter of a mile of our
+establishment; here they had their war dances all night, yet I did not
+think there was any likelihood of their attacking us. Still, for a
+couple of days things did not appear right, the people seemed strange in
+their manner; so I thought it not wise to be caught napping, and I made
+some preparations for an attack if we were to have one, and had the
+Gatling gun placed in position at the rear of the house. This I felt was
+quite enough to defend the house, if I could but get a fair chance to
+use it, although I was in hope I should not be called upon to do so.
+
+We had not long to wait, for at 5.30 in the morning after a continuous
+beating of drums all night, I got up and walked out on the verandah,
+which was my usual custom, not thinking we were going to be attacked,
+but when I looked round, the wood and bush seemed to be alive with
+people, and some of them were already advancing towards the house, while
+one chief, more daring than the others, came on near enough for me to
+speak to him. Seeing this unexpected development of affairs, and the
+suspicious look of my friend near at hand, I called to my boy, who was
+near, to bring my revolver, and no sooner had the chief got within
+twenty paces or so of the house, when I called upon him to stop and tell
+me what was their mission so early in the morning. He said they had come
+to talk over the matter of the man I had imprisoned. But I said this is
+not the time of day we usually talk over matters we may have in
+dispute--the afternoon being always the recognised time. "Yes," said my
+friend, "but we want to settle matters now." "All right," I said, and
+with that I held my revolver at his head, and ordered him to stand, and
+not move an inch, or I would shoot him dead on the spot. The people at
+the back, seeing what was taking place, began to move towards the
+house. I said to my boy, "run to the beach and tell Mr. Sawyer to come
+up." This was my coloured assistant, whom I knew I could trust. The lad
+was away, and Mr. Sawyer at my side before the people had got too near.
+"What am I to do, sir?" "Take this revolver and hold it to that man's
+head, whilst I jump to the Gatling; if he moves, shoot him down." There
+was not half a move in him, and in a moment I was at the Gatling. By
+this time there was a general move forward from all parts of the bush,
+but no sooner did this black mass see I was at the gun, and determined
+to fight or die, quicker than I can write these words, I saw the whole
+body fall back in dismay. There was my opportunity. I jumped from the
+Gatling, went straight to the people, and demanded of them what they
+wanted to do. Their answer was--"We don't know; we are a lot of fools,
+and we have lost our heads; send us back, we have no business to come to
+fight against you, and we don't want to."
+
+By seven o'clock that morning the trade was going on in our
+establishment as though nothing had happened. This little incident I
+have always described as a bloodless battle, won in a few moments; yes,
+in almost less time than it has taken me to write its description. This
+matter we finally settled, after holding a large meeting with all the
+chiefs and people. The laws of these people are very definite; you must
+have absolute proof of a person's guilt, before you can even accuse him.
+I had to sit as judge over my own case, which was rather an unfair
+position for one to be placed in. But as the laws are definite it was
+simple enough to decide. The question was--"Had I any proof that this
+man was one of the thieves, or in any way connected with the affair?" I
+had not; my evidence was purely suppositional. This ended the matter. I
+was in the wrong, therefore I had no alternative but to put a fine upon
+myself, which I did, and was very pleased to end what had nearly cost me
+my life, and probably also a number of my people. After this affairs
+went on merrily at Eket.
+
+There was a place called Okon some few miles up the river from Eket, and
+here I proposed to start another establishment, so had made all
+preparations at Ibuno for that purpose, and left the latter place with
+my boat, people, provisions and materials. We arrived at Okot overnight,
+intending to sleep there, as it was the nearest beach to Okon. All went
+well until the next morning, when we were preparing to start. My factory
+keeper at Okot came to me in the most serious manner possible, wanting
+to know if I really meant going to Okon. I said "Certainly, we have come
+up for the purpose." "Well," he said, "I think you had better not go;
+there are very nasty rumours about here that it is intended to do you
+some harm if you should attempt to open up at Okon; in other words, men
+have been appointed to take your life." "All right," I said; "we must
+take our chance; we shall not turn back until we have tried." So away we
+went, I in a small boat with a few boys, the others in another boat with
+the etceteras. We arrived at Okon and landed our goods, but we found a
+number of Ja Ja's people had arrived before us. I took no notice of them
+any more than passing the time of day. However, I must confess I did not
+like their demeanour. Nothing was said and our provisions were safely
+housed in a native shanty. Here I intended to remain while building our
+own house. The timber, iron and other goods were placed on the spot we
+intended to occupy. This done, I started off with a couple of boys to
+acquaint the king and the people of the village of our arrival, and to
+get the king or some of his chiefs to come down and allot me the land I
+required. We had been in the village some little time, and matters were
+well-nigh settled, when all at once there was a general stampede from
+the meeting house, and just at that moment I heard a regular fusilade of
+guns, and in came running one of my people from the beach, nearly
+frightened to death. "Massa, massa, come quick to the beach; Ja Ja's men
+have burnt down the house and want to shoot us all, and all our goods
+are in their hands." By this time a lot of Ja Ja's men were in the
+village, and I was left absolutely alone with the exception of my own
+boys and the one that had run up from the beach. Every native had rushed
+to his compound as soon as the firing had commenced. I turned to my
+boys, told them not to fire, but to keep cool, do as I told them, and be
+ready to protect themselves if any one attacked them, not else. So down
+we slowly walked to the beach. Here was a sight for me! All my goods
+thrown to the four winds, my house burnt to the ground, and about a
+hundred or more of Ja Ja's or Opobo men arranged up in line, every man
+with his rifle and cutlass, ready to fight, which they evidently
+anticipated I should do as soon as I appeared on the scene; but this I
+had no intention of doing. To attempt to show fight against such odds
+would have been simply suicidal, so I made up my mind to show the best
+front possible under the circumstances, called my boys, placed them in
+equal numbers on either side of me, with our backs to the bush and
+facing our would-be enemies. I then inquired what they wished to do.
+Drawing my revolver, which was a six chambered one, I held it up. "If
+you want my life you may have it, but, FIRST, _let me tell you, inside
+this small gun I hold six men's lives; those six men I_ WILL _have_,
+then you may have me." Not a word was uttered. Then I said, "If you do
+not want that, I and my people will leave you here in possession of
+these goods and the house that you have already partly destroyed." With
+this I ordered my boys to the boats, to which we went quietly and in
+order, leaving our Opobo friends dumbfounded and baulked of the main
+object of their mission.
+
+When we had got well clear of the beach I was thankful indeed, for never
+was a man nearer death than I was at that time, I think. We went down to
+Ibuno as fast as our boats could go, our boys singing as Kroo boys can
+sing when they feel themselves free from danger. I only stayed a few
+hours at Ibuno. As soon as the tide served I made right away to Old
+Calabar to lay the whole affair before H.M. Consul. After this I felt I
+had done my duty in the matter of the Opobo business. The affair was, of
+course, settled against the Opobos, and they had to leave the Okon beach
+to us absolutely.
+
+I must not deal with the rough side only of pioneer life in West Africa,
+so I think I will just touch upon one of the many kindnesses shown to me
+by the Ibunos during these troublous times. The Qua Iboe bar, like many
+others along the coast, more so in this particular part, is very
+treacherous, being composed of quicksand. It is always on the move, so
+the channel changes from place to place. Sometimes you go in and out at
+one side, sometimes at the other, and sometimes straight through the
+centre. These moving sands require a great deal of careful watching and
+constant surveying, which I used to invariably see to and do myself
+about once a fortnight. While out on this work one day, with four boys
+and Mr. Williams, who at that time had a small establishment at Ibuno,
+and was as anxious as I was to know the true position of the channel, we
+were both working small sailing craft--we had not risen to a steamer
+then--(now there is, and has been for a considerable time, one working
+the same river), and started off, the weather being fairly fine, and to
+all appearances the sea very quiet. All went well with us going out. I
+got soundings right through the channel, and after passing safely we
+turned our boat about to come back into the river again. Along we came
+until we got right into the centre of the bar, then suddenly a sea took
+us, and before any one could speak the boat was over. We were under
+water and the boat on top of us. Being a good swimmer, I was not afraid,
+but immediately dived down and came up alongside the boat. My boys were
+round me like a swarm of fish, not knowing whether I could swim or not.
+I soon put their minds at rest and told them not to trouble about me,
+but to get everything together belonging to the boat and get her
+righted. This done, "Now," I said, "if you will all keep your heads and
+do as you are told, we shall get the boat and ourselves through all
+right." So we divided, three on one side, three on the other, and swam
+with the boat until we reached the beach, which was about a mile and a
+half distant, and I can tell you took us some considerable time. Before
+we landed we had been something like three hours in the water, which is
+no small matter anywhere, much less in West Africa, where one is not
+always in the best of condition. Mr. Williams got very frightened and, I
+think, was in doubt once or twice as to whether we should reach the
+shore; but we did, and were truly thankful, and although we did not
+openly show it, we gave none the less hearty thanks from our inmost
+hearts. After landing we righted our boat and paddled off up river to
+our factory. Here we arrived before any of the natives knew what had
+happened. Our boys soon put the news about, as they felt they had had a
+marvellous escape. Mr. Williams and I drank as much brandy as we could
+manage, then I jumped into bed and remained until the next morning. I
+believe he did the same too. At daylight I awoke and felt, to my
+surprise, as well as I ever felt in my life. Being so long in the water,
+I fully anticipated a severe attack of fever next day, but it wasn't so,
+and I was about my business as though nothing had happened. I don't
+think I should have thought any more about it had not the Ibunos so
+forcibly reminded me of the danger we really had passed through. After
+having so many narrow escapes this one appeared to pass as a matter of
+ordinary occurrence. Not so to them; the afternoon of the day after the
+accident, while I was out about the work, I saw an unusual number of
+natives going to the house, each little contingent carrying baskets of
+yams and fish. I had not long to wait before one of my boys came to tell
+me the Ibuno people wished to speak with me at the house. I went to them
+at once. Here was my dining room full of natives, and in the centre a
+pile of yams two or three feet high, and fish, the very finest that had
+been caught that day, as well as some very beautiful dried fish, enough
+to last me and my people, I should think, a month or more. This sight
+took me rather by surprise, not quite knowing what was about to take
+place. I took the chair which was placed for me and waited. All being
+quiet, one of the chiefs rose up and said, "We know you are somewhat
+surprised to see all us villagers here to-day, and also the food we
+have brought with us which is now in front of you, but we have come to
+tell you how sorry we all were, men, women and children throughout our
+villages, when we heard you had been thrown into the sea, and all had
+such a narrow escape of losing your lives. We are all the more sorry to
+think that not one of our people were able to render you the slightest
+assistance. Had we seen you or known what was taking place every canoe
+would have come to your aid, but we did not, and while we were sitting
+comfortably in our houses you were struggling in the water. To us this
+has been a grief, and to show you how thankful we are to think you have
+been preserved to us through this danger and many others, we have
+brought for your acceptance the best we can offer you. We are but poor,
+as you know, but these gifts come from our hearts as a present to you
+and a thank-offering to our Father in Heaven who has been pleased to
+restore you to us unhurt. We are, we must tell you, thankful in more
+ways than one for your deliverance, because had you been lost our great
+enemy Ja Ja would at once have said his Ju Ju had worked that it should
+be so." With this he sat down.
+
+For me to attempt to express what I felt at that moment would be
+impossible; I must say I felt a very unpleasant feeling in my throat,
+and I don't know but that some of the water I had had too much of the
+day before was having a good try to assert itself. If it had, it was not
+to be wondered at; for any one would have to have been hard indeed if
+such kindness did not touch them; even the strongest of us are bound
+sometimes to give way for a moment. I did not attempt to hide from them
+the fulness of my heart, and the gratitude I felt for such kindness,
+where I least expected it. I told them I had not thought much of the
+accident, but I was thankful to think my life and my people had been
+spared, and I only hoped I should live to show them how their great
+kindness would ever be remembered by me, and would not be forgotten as
+long as life lasted. After general thanks our meeting broke up and
+ended, but has never been forgotten.
+
+After we had got fairly well established and our trade began to develop
+itself, our firm at Liverpool chartered a small brig, with a general
+cargo of goods for us, which in due time I was notified of. Now this was
+a great event, not only for us, but for the river, as this would be the
+first sailing ship that had ever entered the Qua Iboe to bring in and
+take out a cargo direct. Everything that had been done before this was
+by small craft, and transhipped at one of the main rivers; so I was very
+anxious that the arrival of this ship should be made as complete a
+success as possible. I knew it would be next to impossible to bring her
+in right over the bar, as deeply laden as she would be from England, as
+our depth of water was not more than 8 ft. 6 in. to 9 ft. at spring
+tides, and this vessel would draw from 10 to 11 ft. at the very least.
+
+In due time the little ship was sighted off the bar. As soon as the tide
+made, I put off to her to receive her letters, and to give the captain
+instructions as to what I wished him to do. On arriving alongside, the
+first thing I found was that her draft of water was 11 ft., so I told
+the captain he could not possibly go into the river with that draft, so
+we decided to lighten her all we could; I left again for the shore to
+make all the necessary arrangements to this end. The next morning our
+boats were started off out; the day being fine they all got alongside
+without much trouble, and brought away as much as they could carry,
+which was not more than about twenty tons; this from 200 did not make
+much impression on the ship's draught. Next day all the boats were again
+despatched; this time the weather was anything but favourable, and, to
+my dismay, while all the boats crossed the bar in safety, not one could
+get to the ship; the wind and current being so strong down from the
+westward against them, they all fell away to leeward. When night came on
+they anchored, as they could neither get to the ship nor back to the
+river; here they were without food or fire. All remained until the next
+day, when the weather, if anything, was worse; so when evening came and
+they all found it was useless trying to get back into the river or to
+the ship, and being without food, they all ran before the wind for the
+Old Calabar River, which was some twenty-five miles to the mouth, then
+about thirty-five miles more of river, until they got to our
+establishment there; here they eventually arrived nearly starved; while
+I, with only one boy, was left at the Ibuno factory in a dreadful state
+of mind, as you may imagine, wondering what had happened to our people,
+and also what was to be done with the ship and cargo. The spring tides
+were upon us, and the vessel either had to come in at once, or remain
+out another fortnight, and be under demurrage, which meant a very
+serious matter for us. Being our first ship, it was most unfortunate.
+The only thing to do was to bring her in as she stood. This had to be
+done at all costs; so I at once got Mr. Williams, who, by-the-bye, was
+generally to the fore in time of need, to lend me his boat, with three
+of his boys; these, with my one, made up some sort of a crew. Away we
+went, and got safely out. On the way I had a good survey of the bar, so
+as to get every inch of the water it was possible. This carefully done,
+we arrived alongside the ship, and no one was more surprised than the
+captain, when I told him I had come out to take his ship into the river,
+if he was ready. "Yes," he said; "if you will undertake to do it." "I
+will," I said. "You work your ship as I tell you, and we shall get in
+all right, I feel confident."
+
+The order was given to loose all sails and heave anchor, which was done
+in a very short time. As the tide was near to being high, there was no
+time to be lost. We were soon under way, and our little craft, with all
+sails set, bounding for the bar. I had my channel to a nicety; over we
+went, to my astonishment, without a touch. The relief I felt when this
+was passed, I am unable to describe. In a short time the first ship that
+had ever entered Qua Iboe River from England direct was anchored off our
+factory. The natives crowded down to see this, to them, wonderful sight,
+and when I landed I was immediately carried on the shoulders of some of
+the crowd up to my house. The delight in the river that evening was
+great indeed; so much so, that I shall not easily forget that event.
+
+Still, my troubles were not quite at an end, for while we had the ship
+in, we had no one to discharge her cargo; but "necessity being the
+mother of invention," I called the chiefs of the village together, and
+told them of my position. One boy was all I had, and the cargo must come
+out of the ship. "All right," they said, "show our people what has to be
+done; we will discharge the ship." Next morning our beach was alive with
+people, and by the evening of the next day she was completely
+discharged and ready for homeward cargo. We could now afford to take
+more time. The next thing was to commence loading; this we had got well
+on with, when our people returned. After this we were not long in
+getting our ship ready for going out over the bar again, which was done
+as successfully as she was brought in. After getting her clear we ran
+her to Old Calabar to complete her loading for England. This ended our
+first ship, others followed after, one of which got left on the bar a
+wreck, and another turned back and was condemned in the river. We soon
+gave up the idea of working sailing ships. A small steamer was bought,
+and after this things went fairly well.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX III
+
+TRADE GOODS USED IN THE EARLY TRADE WITH AFRICA AS GIVEN BY BARBOT AND
+OTHER WRITERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. BY M. H. KINGSLEY
+
+
+"Those used in trade by the Senga Company of Senegal at St. Lewis and
+Goree and their dependent factories of Rufisco, Camina, Juala, Gamboa
+(Gambia), _circa_ 1677.
+
+"For the convenience of trade between the French at the Senega and the
+natives, all European goods are reduced to a certain standard, viz.,
+hides, bars, and slaves, for the better understanding whereof I give
+some instances. One bar of iron is reckoned as worth 8 hides, 1 cutlace
+the same, 1 cluster of bugles weighing 4-1/4 lbs. as 3 hides, 1 bunch of
+false pearls 20 hides, 1 bunch of Gallet 4 hides, 1 hogshead of brandy
+from 150 to 160 hides. Bugles are very small glass beads, and mostly
+made at Venice, and sold in strings and clusters. At Goree the same
+goods bear not quite so good a rate, as, for example, a hogshead of
+brandy brings but 140 hides, 1 lb. of gunpowder 2 hides, 1 piece of
+eight 5 hides, 1 oz. of coral 7 or 8 hides, 1 oz. of crystal 1 hide, an
+ounce of yellow amber 2 hides.
+
+"A slave costs from 12 to 14 bars of iron, and sometimes 16, at Porto
+d'Ali 18 to 20, and much more at Gamboa, according to the number of
+ships, French, English, Portuguese, and Dutch, which happen to be there
+at the same time. The bar of iron is rated at 6 hides.
+
+"Besides these, which are the most staple commodities, the French import
+common red, blue, and scarlet cloth, silver and brass rings or
+bracelets, chains, little bells, false crystal, ordinary and coarse
+hats, _Dutch_ pointed knives, pewter dishes, silk sashes with false gold
+and silver fringes, blue serges, _French_ paper, steels to strike fire,
+_English_ sayes, _Roan_ linen, salamporis, platillies, blue callicoes,
+taffeties, chintzs, cawris or shells, by the French called _bouges_,
+coarse north, red cords called _Bure_, lines, shoes, fustian, red
+worsted caps, worsted fringe of all colours, worsted of all kinds in
+skeins, basons of several sizes, brass kettles, yellow amber, maccatons,
+that is, beads of two sorts, pieces of eight of the old stamp, some
+pieces of 28 sols value, either plain or gilt, Dutch cutlaces, straight
+and bow'd, and clouts, galet, martosdes, two other sorts of beads of
+which the blacks make necklaces for women, white sugar, musket balls,
+iron nails, shot, white and red frize, looking-glasses in plain and gilt
+frames, cloves, cinnamon, scissors, needles, coarse thread of sundry
+colours, but chiefly red, yellow, and white, copper bars of a pound
+weight, ferrit, men's shirts, coarse and fine, some of them with bone
+lace about the neck, breast, and sleeves, _Haerlem_ cloths, _Coasveld_
+linen, _Dutch_ mugs, white and blue, _Leyden_ rugs or blankets,
+_Spanish_ leather shoes, brass trumpets, round padlocks, glass bottles
+with a tin rim at the mouth, empty trunks or chests, and a sort of bugle
+called Pezant, but above all, as was said above, great quantities of
+brandy, and iron in bars; particularly at Goree the company imports
+10,000 or more every year of those which are made in their province of
+_Brittany_, all short and thin, which is called in London narrow flat
+iron, or half flat iron in Sweden, but each bar shortened or cut off at
+one end to about 16 to 18 inches, so that about 80 of these bars weigh a
+ton English. It is to be observed that such voyage-iron, as it is called
+in London, is the only sort and size used throughout all Nigritia,
+Guinea, and West Ethiopia in the way of trade. Lastly, a good quantity
+of Cognac brandy, both in hogsheads and rundlets, single and double, the
+double being 8, the single 4 gallons.
+
+"The principal goods the French have in return for these commodities
+from the _Moors_ and _Blacks_ are slaves, gold dust, elephants' teeth,
+beeswax, dry and green hides, gum-arabic, ostrich feathers, and several
+other odd things, as ambergris, cods of musk, tygers' and goats' skins,
+provisions, bullocks, sheep, and teeth of sea-horses (hippopotamus)."
+
+The main trade of the Senga or Senegal Company seems to have been gum
+and slaves in these regions. Gold dust they got but little of in
+Senegal, the Portuguese seeming to have been the best people to work
+that trade. The ivory was, according to Barbot, here mainly that picked
+up in woods, and scurfy and hollow, or, as we should call it, kraw kraw
+ivory, the better ivory coming from the Qua Qua Ivory Coast. Hides,
+however, were in the seventeenth century, as they are now, a regular
+line in the trade of Senegambia, and the best hides came from the
+Senegal River, the inferior from Rufisco and Porto d'Ali. Barbot says:
+"They soak or dye these hides as soon as they are flayed from the beast,
+and presently expose them to the air to dry; which, in my opinion, is
+the reason why, wanting the true first seasoning, they are apt to
+corrupt and breed worms if not looked after and often beaten with a
+stick or wand, and then laid up in very dry store houses." I have no
+doubt Barbot is right, and that there is not enough looking after done
+to them now a days, so that the worms have their own way too much.
+
+The African hides were held in old days inferior to those shipped from
+South America, both in thickness and size, and were used in France
+chiefly to cover boxes with; but in later times, I am informed, they
+were sought after and split carefully into two slices, serving to make
+kid for French boots.
+
+"The French reckoned the trade of the Senga Company to yield 700 or 800
+per cent, advance upon invoice of their goods, and yet their Senga
+Company, instead of thriving, has often brought a noble to ninepence.
+Nay, it has broken twice in less than thirty years, which must be
+occasioned by the vast expense they are at in Europe, Africa, and
+America, besides ill-management of their business; but this is no more
+than the common fate of Dutch and English African Companies, as well as
+that to make rather loss than profit, because their charges are greater
+than the trade can bear, in maintaining so many ports and other forts
+and factories in Africa, which devour all the profits." I quote this of
+Barbot as an interesting thing, considering the present state of West
+Coast Colonial finance.
+
+
+GAMBIA TRADE, 1678.
+
+"The factors of the English Company at James Fort, and those of the
+French at Albreda and other places, drive a very great trade in that
+country all along the river in brigantines, sloops, and canoes,
+purchasing--
+
+Elephants' teeth, beeswax, slaves, pagnos (country-made clothes),
+hides, gold and silver, and goods also found in the Sengal trade.
+
+In exchange they give the _Blacks_--
+
+Bars of iron, drapery of several sorts, woollen stuffs and cloth, linen
+of several sorts, coral and pearl, brandy or rum in anchors, firelocks,
+powder, ball and shot, Sleysiger linen, painted callicoes of gay
+colours, shirts, gilded swords, ordinary looking-glasses, salt, hats,
+_Roan_ caps, all sorts and sizes of bugles, yellow amber, rock crystal,
+brass pans and kettles, paper, brass and pewter rings, some of them
+gilt, box and other combs, _Dutch_ earthen cans, false ear-rings,
+satalaes, and sabres or cutlaces, small iron and copper kettles, _Dutch_
+knives called _Bosmans_, hooks, brass trumpets, bills, needles, thread
+and worsted of several colours." This selection practically covered the
+trade up to Sierra Leone.
+
+
+SIERRA LEONE, 1678.
+
+"Exports.--Elephants' teeth, slaves, santalum wood, a little gold, much
+beeswax with some pearls, crystal, long peppers, ambergris, &c. The
+ivory here was considered the best on the West Coast, being, says
+Barbot, very white and large, have had some weighing 80 to 100 lbs., at
+a very modest rate 80 lbs. of ivory for the value of five livres
+_French_ money, in coarse knives and other such toys. The gold purchased
+in Sierra Leone, the same authority states, comes from Mandinga and
+other remote countries towards the Niger or from South Guinea by the
+River Mitomba. The trade selection was: French brandy or rum, iron bars,
+white callicoes, Sleysiger linen, brass kettles, earthen cans, all sorts
+of glass buttons, brass rings or bracelets, bugles and glass beads of
+sundry colours, brass medals, earrings, _Dutch_ knives, _Bosmans_, first
+and second size, hedging bills and axes, coarse laces, crystal beads,
+painted callicoes (red) called chintz, oil of olive, small duffels,
+ordinary guns, muskets and fuzils, gunpowder, musket balls and shot, old
+sheets, paper, red caps, men's shirts, all sorts of counterfeit pearls,
+red cotton, narrow bands of silk stuffs or worsted, about half a yard
+broad for women, used about their waists.
+
+The proper goods to purchase, the cam wood and elephants' teeth in
+Sherboro' River, are chiefly these:--
+
+Brass basons and kettles, pewter basons, and tankards, iron bars,
+bugles, painted callicoes, _Guinea_ stuffs or cloths, _Holland_ linen or
+cloth, muskets, powder, and ball. A ship may in two months time out and
+home purchase here fifty-six tons of cam wood and four tons of
+elephants' teeth or more."
+
+The trade selection for the Pepper Coast was practically the same as for
+Sierra Leone, only less extensive and cheaper in make, and had a special
+line in white and blue large beads. The main export was Manequette
+pepper and rice, the latter of which was to be had in great quantity but
+poor quality at about a halfpenny a pound; and there was also ivory to
+be had, but not to so profitable an extent as on the next coast, the
+Ivory. The same selection of goods was used for the Ivory Coast trade as
+those above-named, with the addition of Contaccarbe or Contabrode,
+namely, iron rings, about the thickness of a finger which the blacks
+wear about their legs with brass bells, as they do the brass rings or
+bracelets about their arms in the same manner. The natives here also
+sold country-made cloths, which were bought by the factors to use in
+trade in other districts, mainly the Gold Coast; the Ivory Coast cloths
+come from inland districts, those sold at Cape La Hou are of six
+stripes, three French ells and a half long, and very fine; those from
+Corby La Hou of five stripes, about three ells long, and coarser. They
+also made "clouts" of a sort of hemp, or plant like it, which they dye
+handsomely, and weave very artificially.
+
+
+THE GOLD COAST.
+
+This coast has, from its discovery in the 15th century to our own day,
+been the chief trade region in the Bight of Benin; and Barbot states
+that the amount of gold sent from it to Europe in his day was L240,000
+value per annum.
+
+The trade selection for the Gold Coast trade in the 17th and 18th
+centuries is therefore very interesting, as it gives us an insight into
+the manufactures exported by European traders at that time, and of a
+good many different kinds; for English, French, Portuguese, Dutch, Danes
+and Brandenburghers were all engaged in the Gold Coast trade, and each
+took out for barter those things he could get cheapest in his own
+country.
+
+"The _French_ commonly," says Barbot, "carry more brandy, wine, iron,
+paper, firelocks, &c., than the _English_ or _Dutch_ can do, those
+commodities being cheaper in _France_, as, on the other hand, they (the
+_English_ and _Dutch_) supply the Guinea trade with greater quantities
+of linen, cloth, bugles, copper basons and kettles, wrought pewter,
+gunpowder, sayes, perpetuanas, chintzs, cawris, old sheets, &c., because
+they can get these wares from _England_ or _Holland_.
+
+"The _French_ commonly compose their cargo for the Gold Coast trade to
+purchase slaves and gold dust; of brandy, white and red wine, ros solis,
+firelocks, muskets, flints, iron in bars, white and red contecarbe, red
+frize, looking glasses, fine coral, sarsaparilla, bugles of sundry sorts
+and colours and glass beads, powder, sheets, tobacco, taffeties, and
+many other sorts of silks wrought as brocardels, velvets, shirts, black
+hats, linen, paper, laces of many sorts, shot, lead, musket balls,
+callicoes, serges, stuffs, &c., besides the other goods for a true
+assortment, which they have commonly from _Holland_.
+
+"The _Dutch_ have _Coesveld_ linen, Slezsiger lywat, old sheets,
+_Leyden_ serges, dyed indigo-blue, perpetuanas, green, blue and purple,
+_Konings-Kleederen_, annabas, large and narrow, made at _Haerlem_;
+_Cyprus_ and _Turkey_ stuffs, _Turkey_ carpets, red, blue and yellow
+cloths, green, red and white _Leyden_ rugs, silk stuffs blue and white,
+brass kettles of all sizes, copper basons, _Scotch_ pans, barbers'
+basons, some wrought, others hammered, copper pots, brass locks, brass
+trumpets, pewter, brass and iron rings, hair trunks, pewter dishes and
+plates (of a narrow brim), deep porringers, all sorts and sizes of
+fishing hooks and lines, lead in sheets and in pipes, 3 sorts of _Dutch_
+knives, _Venice_ bugles and glass beads of sundry colours and sizes,
+sheep skins, iron bars, brass pins long and short, brass bells, iron
+hammers, powder, muskets, cutlaces, cawris, chintz, lead balls and shot,
+brass cups with handles, cloths of _Cabo Verdo_, _Qua Qua_, _Ardra_ and
+_Rio Forcada_, blue coral, _alias_ akory from Benin, strong waters and
+abundance of other wares, being near 160 sorts, as a _Dutchman_ told
+me."
+
+I am sorry Barbot broke down just when he seemed going strong with this
+list, and I was out of breath checking the indent, and said "other
+wares," but I cannot help it, and beg to say that this is the true
+assortment for the Gold Coast trade in 1678. The English selection
+"besides many of the same goods above mentioned have tapseils, broad and
+narrow, nicanees fine and coarse, many sorts of chintz or _Indian_
+callicoes printed, tallow, red painting colours, _Canary_ wine, sayes,
+perpetuanas inferior to the _Dutch_ and sacked up in painted tillets
+with the _English_ arms, many sorts of white callicoes, blue and white
+linen, _China_ satins, _Barbadoes_ rum, other strong waters and spirits,
+beads of all sorts, buckshaws, _Welsh_ plain, boy-sades, romberges,
+clouts, gingarus, taffeties, amber, brandy, flower, _Hamburgh_ brawls,
+and white, blue and red chequered linen, narrow _Guinea_ stuffs
+chequered, ditto broad, old hats, purple beads. The _Danes_,
+_Brandenburghers_ and _Portuguese_ provide their cargoes in _Holland_
+commonly consisting of very near the same sort of wares as I have
+observed the _Dutch_ make up theirs, the two former having hardly
+anything of their own proper to the trade of the Gold Coast besides
+copper and silver, either wrought or in bullion or in pieces of eight,
+which are a commodity also there.
+
+"The _Portuguese_ have most of their cargoes from _Holland_ under the
+name of _Jews_ residing there, and they add some things of the product
+of _Brazil_, as tobacco, rum, tame cattle, _St. Tome_ cloth, others from
+_Rio Forcado_ and other circumjacent places in the Gulf of Guinea."
+
+
+USE MADE OF EUROPEAN GOODS BY THE NATIVES OF THE GOLD COAST. BARBOT.
+
+"The broad linen serves to adorn themselves and their dead men's
+sepulchers within, they also make clouts thereof. The narrow cloth to
+press palm oil; in old sheets they wrap themselves at night from head
+to foot. The copper basons to wash and shave. The _Scotch_ pans serve in
+lieu of butchers' tubs when they kill hogs or sheep, from the iron bars
+the smiths forge out all their weapons, country and household tools and
+utensils; of frize and perpetuanas, they make girts 4 fingers broad to
+wear about their waists and hang their sword, dagger, knife and purse of
+money or gold, which purse they commonly thrust between the girdle and
+their body. They break _Venice_ coral into 4 or 5 parts, which
+afterwards they mould into any form on whetstones and make strings or
+necklaces which yield a considerable profit; of 4 or 5 ells of _English_
+or _Leyden_ serges, they make a kind of cloak to wrap about their
+shoulders and stomachs. Of chintz, perpetuanas, printed callicoes,
+tapsiels and nicanees, are made clouts to wear round their middles. The
+wrought pewter, as dishes, basons, porringers, &c., serve to eat their
+victuals out of, muskets, firelocks and cutlaces they use in war; brandy
+is more commonly spent at their feasts, knives to the same purposes as
+we use them. With tallow they anoint their bodies from head to toe and
+even use it to shave their beards instead of soap. Fishing hooks for the
+same purpose as with us. _Venice_ bugles, glass beads and contacarbe,
+serve all ages and sexes to adorn their heads, necks, arms and legs very
+extravagantly, being made into strings; and sarsaparilla."--Well, I
+think I have followed Barbot enough for the present on this point, and
+turn to his description of the dues the natives have to pay to native
+authorities on goods bought of Europeans, which amounted to 3 per cent.
+paid to the proper officers; the kings of the land have at each port
+town, and even fishes, if it exceeds a certain quantity pays 1 in 5;
+these duties are paid either in coin or value. Up the inland they pay no
+duty on river fish, but are liable to pay a capitation fee of one
+shilling per head for the liberty of passing down to the sea-shore
+either to traffic or attend the markets with their provisions or other
+sorts of the product of the land, and pay nothing at their return home,
+goods or no goods, unless they by chance leave their arms in the
+village, then the person so doing is to pay one shilling.
+
+The collectors account quarterly with their kings, and deliver up what
+each has received in gold at his respective post, but the fifth part of
+the fish they collect is sent to the king as they have it, and serves to
+feed his family.
+
+No fisherman is allowed to dispose of the first fish he has caught till
+the duty is paid, but are free to do it aboard ships, which perhaps may
+be one reason why so many of them daily sell such quantities of their
+fish to the seafaring men.
+
+Barbot, remarking on this Gold Coast trade, says: "The Blacks of the
+Gold Coast, having traded with Europeans ever since the 14th century,
+are very well skilled in the nature and proper qualities of all European
+wares and merchandize vended there; but in a more particular manner
+since they have so often been imposed on by the Europeans, who in former
+ages made no scruple to cheat them in the quality, weight and measures
+of their goods which at first they received upon content, because they
+say it would never enter into their thoughts that white men, as they
+call the Europeans, were so base as to abuse their credulity and good
+opinion of us. But now they are perpetually on their guard in that
+particular, examine and search very narrowly all our merchandize, piece
+by piece, to see each the quality and measure contracted for by samples;
+for instance, if the cloth is well made and strong, whether dyed at
+_Haerlem_ or _Leyden_--if the knives be not rusty--if the basons,
+kettles, and other utensils of brass and pewter are not cracked or
+otherwise faulty, or strong enough at the bottom. They measure iron bars
+with the sole of the foot--they tell over the strings of contacarbel,
+taste and prove brandy, rum or other liquors, and will presently
+discover whether it is not adulterated with fresh or salt water or any
+other mixture, and in point of French brandy will prefer the brown
+colour in it. In short they examine everything with as much prudence and
+ability as any European can do."
+
+"The goods sold by _English_ and _Dutch_, _Danes_, _Brandenburghers_,
+&c., ashore, out of these settlements are generally about 25 per cent.
+dearer to the Blacks than they get aboard ships in the Roads; the
+supercargoes of the ships commonly falling low to get the more customers
+and make a quicker voyage, for which reason the forts have very little
+trade with the Blacks during the summer season, which fills the coast
+with goods by the great concourse of ships at that time from several
+ports of Europe; and as the winter season approaches most of them
+withdraw from the coast, and so leave elbow room for the fort factors to
+trade in their turn during that bad season.
+
+"In the year 1682 the gold trade yielded hardly 45 per cent. to our
+French ships, clear of any charges; but that might be imputed to the
+great number of trading ships of several European nations which happened
+to be at that time on the coast, whereof I counted 42 in less than a
+month's time: had the number been half as great that trade would have
+appeared 60 per cent. or more, and if a cargo were properly composed it
+might well clear 70 per cent. in a small ship sailing with little
+charge, and the voyage directly home from this coast not to exceed 7 or
+8 months out and home, if well managed."
+
+These observations of Barbot's are alike interesting and instructive,
+and in principle applicable to the trade to-day. Do not imagine that
+Barbot was an early member of the Aborigines' Protection Society when he
+holds forth on the way in which Europeans "in former ages" basely dealt
+with the angelic confidence of the Blacks. One of his great charms is
+the different opinions on general principles, &c., he can hold without
+noticing it himself: of course this necessitates your reading Barbot
+right through, and that means 668 pages folio in double column, or
+something like 2,772 pages of a modern book; but that's no matter, for
+he is uniformly charming and reeks with information.
+
+Well, there are other places in Barbot where he speaks, evidently with
+convictions, of "this rascal fellow Black," &c. and gives long accounts
+of the way in which the black man cheats with false weights and
+measures, and adulterates; and if you absorb the whole of his
+information and test it against your own knowledge, and combine it with
+that of others, I think you will come to the conclusion that it is not
+necessary for the philanthropist to fidget about the way the European
+does his side to the trade; the moralist may drop a large and heavy tear
+on both white and black, but that is all that is required from him.
+Unfortunately this is not all that is done nowadays: the black has got
+hold of Governmental opinion, and just when he is more than keeping his
+end up in commercial transactions, he has got the Government to handicap
+his white fellow-trader with a mass of heavy dues and irritating
+restrictions, which will end most certainly in stifling trade. My firm
+conviction is that black and white traders should be left to settle
+their own affairs among themselves.
+
+
+SELECTION OF GOODS FOR FIDA OR ONIDAH, CALLED BY THE FRENCH JUIDA, NOW
+KNOWN AS DAHOMEY, WITH MAIN SEAPORT WHYDAH.
+
+The French opened trade in this district in 1669, when the Dutch were
+already there.
+
+"The main export of this coast was 'slaves, cotton cloth, and blue
+stones, called agoy or accory, very valuable on the Gold Coast.'
+
+"The best commodity the Europeans can carry thither to purchase is
+Boejies or cawries, so much valued by the natives, being the current
+coin there and at Popo, Fida, Benin and other countries further east,
+without which it is scarcely possible to traffic there. Near to Boejies
+the flat iron bars for the round or square will not do, and again next
+to iron, fine long coral, _China_ sarcenets, gilt leather, white damask
+and red, red cloth with large lists, copper bowls or cups, brass rings,
+_Venice_ beads or bugles of several colours, agalis, gilded looking
+glasses, _Leyden_ serges, platilles, linen morees, salampores, red
+chints, broad and narrow tapsiels, blue canequins, broad gunez and
+narrow (a sort of linen), double canequins, French brandy in ankers or
+half-ankers (the anker being a 16 gallon rundlet), canary and malmsey,
+black caudebec hats, Italian taffeties, white or red cloth of gold or
+silver, _Dutch_ knives, _Bosmans_, striped armoizins, with white or
+flowered, gold and silver brocadel, firelocks, muskets, gunpowder, large
+beads from _Rouen_, white flowered sarcenets, _Indian_ armorzins and
+damask napkins, large coral earrings, cutlaces gilded and broad, silk
+scarfs large umbrellors, pieces of eight, long pyramidal bells."
+
+All the above-mentioned goods are also proper for the trade in _Benin_,
+_Rio Lagos_ and all along the coast to _Rio Gabon_.
+
+
+BENIN TRADE GOODS.
+
+"Exports, 1678: cotton cloths like those of _Rio Lagos_, women slaves,
+for men slaves (though they be all foreigners, for none of the natives
+can be sold as such) are not allowed to be exported, but must stay
+there; jasper stones, a few tigers' or leopards' skins, acory or blue
+coral, elephants' teeth, some pieminto, or pepper. The blue coral grows
+in branching bushes like the red coral at the bottom of the rivers and
+lakes in Benin, which the natives have a peculiar art to grind or work
+into beads like olives, and is a very profitable merchandise at the Gold
+Coast, as has been observed.
+
+"The Benin cloths are of 4 bands striped blue and white, an ell and a
+half long, only proper for the trade at _Sabou river_ and at _Angola_,
+and called by the blacks _monponoqua_ and the blue narrow cloths
+_ambasis_; the latter are much inferior to the former every way, and
+both sorts made in the inland country.
+
+"The European goods are these: cloths of gold and silver, scarlet and
+red cloth, all sorts of calicoes and fine linen, _Haerlem_ stuffs with
+large flowers and well starched, iron bars, strong spirits, rum and
+brandy, beads or bugles of several colours, red velvet, and a good
+quantity of Boejies, cawries as much as for the Ardra (Fida) trade being
+the money of the natives, as well as them; false pearls, Dutch cans
+with red streaks at one end, bright brass large rings from 5 to 5-1/2
+ounces weight each, earrings of red glass or crystal, gilt looking
+glasses, crystal, &c."
+
+
+OUWERE (NOW CALLED WARRI) TRADE, AND THE NEW CALABAR TRADE, 1678.
+
+"Exports mainly slaves and fine cloths from New Calabar district and
+Ouwere. 'The principal thing that passes in Calabar as current money
+among the natives is brass rings for the arms or legs, which they call
+_bochie_, and they are so nice in the choice of them, that they will
+often turn over a whole cask before they find 2 to please their fancy.'
+
+"The _English_ and _Dutch_ import there a great deal of copper in small
+bars, round and equal, about 3 feet long, weighing about 1-1/4 lbs.,
+which the blacks of Calabary work with much art, splitting the bar into
+3 parts from one end to the other, which they polish as fine as gold,
+and twist the 3 pieces together very ingeniously into cords to make what
+form of arm rings they please."
+
+
+OLD CALABAR TRADE, 1678.
+
+"The most current goods of Europe for the trade of Old Calabar to
+purchase slaves and elephants' teeth are iron bars, in quality and
+chiefly, copper bars, blue rags, cloth and striped _Guinea_ clouts of
+many colours, horse bells, hawks' bells, rangoes, pewter basons of 1, 2,
+3 and 4 lbs. weight, tankards of ditto of 1, 2, and 3 lbs. weight, beads
+very small and glazed yellow, green, purple and blue, purple copper
+armlets or arm rings of _Angola_ make, but this last sort of goods is
+peculiar to the _Portuguese_."
+
+The blacks there reckon by copper bars, reducing all sorts of goods to
+such bars; for example, 1 bar of iron, 4 copper bars; a man slave for 38
+and a woman slave for 37 or 36 copper bars.
+
+
+TRADE OF RIO DEL REY, AMBOZES COUNTRY, CAMARONES RIVER, AND DOWN TO RIO
+GABON.
+
+"The _Dutch_ have the greatest share in the trade here in yachts sent
+from Mina on the Gold Coast, whose cargo consists mostly of small copper
+bars of the same sort as mentioned at Old Calabar, iron bars, coral,
+brass basons, of the refuse goods of the Gold Coast, bloom coloured
+beads or bugles and purple copper armlets or rings made at _Loanda_ in
+_Angola_, and presses for lemons and oranges. In exchange for which they
+yearly export from thence 400 or 500 slaves, and about 10 or 12 tons
+weight of fine large teeth, 2 or 3 of which commonly weigh above a
+hundredweight, besides accory, javelins and some sorts of knives which
+the blacks there make to perfection, and are proper for the trade of the
+Gold Coast."
+
+"_Ambozes_ country, situated between the _Rio del Rey_ and _Rio
+Camarones_, is very remarkable for the immense height of the mountains
+it has near the sea-shore, which the Spaniards call _Alta Tierra de
+Ambozi_, and reckon some of them as high as the _Pike of Teneriffe_
+(this refers to the great Camaroon, 13,760 feet). Trade in teeth, accory
+and slaves, for iron and copper bars, brass pots and kettles, hammered
+bugles or beads, bloom colour purple, orange and lemon colour, ox horns,
+steel files, &c."
+
+The trade in the Rio Gabon at this time was inferior to that at Cape
+Lopez. Indeed, the ascendency the Gaboon trade attained to in the middle
+parts of this 19th century was an artificial one, the natural outlet for
+the trade being the districts round the mouth of the Ogowe river, which
+penetrates through a far greater extent of country than the rivers
+Rembwe and Ncomo, which form the Gaboon estuary or _Rio Gabon_ of
+Barbot.
+
+"Great numbers of ships ran to _Cape Lopez Gonzalves_ in the seventeenth
+century, and did a pretty brisk trade in cam wood, beeswax, honey and
+elephants' teeth, of which last a ship may sometimes purchase three or
+four thousand-weight of good large ones and sometimes more, and there is
+always an abundance of wax; all which the Europeans purchase for knives
+called _Bosmans_, iron bars, beads, old sheets, brandy, malt, spirits or
+rum, axes, the shells called cauris, annabas, copper bars, brass basons,
+from eighteen-pence to two shillings apiece, firelocks, muskets, powder,
+ball, small shot, &c."
+
+
+SELECTION OF GOODS FOR THE ISLANDS FERNANDO PO, ST. THOMAS'S, PRINCE'S,
+AND ANNOBON.
+
+There were about 150 ships per annum calling and trading at San Tome in
+the seventeenth century. The goods in "_French_ ships particularly
+consist in _Holland_ cloth or linen as well as of _Rouen_ and
+_Brittany_, thread of all colours, serges, silk stockings, fustians,
+_Dutch_ knives, iron, salt, olive oil, copper in sheets or plates, brass
+kettles, pitch, tar, cordage, sugar forms (from 20 to 30 lbs. apiece),
+brandy, all kinds of strong liquors and spirits, _Canary_ wines, olives,
+carpets, fine flour, butter, cheese, thin shoes, hats, shirts, and all
+sorts of silks out of fashion in _Europe_, hooks, &c., of each sort a
+little in proportion."
+
+In connection with this now but little considered island of San Tome, so
+called from having been discovered in the year 1472, under the direction
+of Henry the Navigator, on the feast day of the Apostle Thomas, there is
+an interesting bit of history, which has had considerable bearing on the
+culture of the Lower Congo regions.
+
+The Portuguese, observing the fertility of the soil of this island,
+decided to establish a colony there for the convenience of trading in
+the Guinea regions; but the climate was so unwholesome that an abundance
+of men died before it was well settled and cultivated. "Violent fevers
+and cholicks that drove them away soon after they were set a-shore."
+
+"The first design of settling there was in the year 1486 but perceiving
+how many perished in the attempt, and that they could better agree with
+that of the continent on the coast of Guinea, it was resolved by King
+Jao II. of Portugal that all the Jews within his dominions, which were
+vastly numerous, should be obliged to receive baptism, or upon refusal
+be transported to the coast of Guinea, where the Portuguese had already
+several considerable settlements and a good trade, considering the time
+since its first discovery.
+
+"A few years after such of those Jews as had escaped the malignant air,
+were forced away to this Isle of San Tome; these married to black women,
+fetched from Angola in great numbers, with near 3,000 men of the same
+country.
+
+"From these Jews married to black women in process of time proceeded
+mostly that brood of mulattos at this day inhabiting the island. Most of
+them boast of being descended from the Portuguese; and their
+constitution is by nature much fitter to bear with the malignity of the
+air." (For a full account of this matter see the _History of Portugal_
+by Faria y Sousa, p. 304.)
+
+San Tome is now very flourishing, on account of its soil being suited to
+cocoa and coffee, and there are to-day there plenty of full-blooded
+Portuguese; but the old strain of Jewish mulattos still exists and is
+represented by individuals throughout all the coast regions of West
+Africa. Moreover, these mulattos secured in the seventeenth century a
+monopoly for Portugal of the slave trade in the Lower Congo, and I
+largely ascribe the prevalence of customs identical with those mentioned
+in the Old Testament that you find among the Fjort tribes to their
+influence, although you always find such customs represented in all the
+native cultures in West Africa (presumably because the West African
+culture is what the Germans would call the _urstuff_), but I fancy in no
+culture are they so developed as among the Fjorts.[94]
+
+
+TRADE GOODS FOR CONGO AND CABENDA, 1700.
+
+"Blue bafts, a piece containing 6 yards and of a deep almost black
+colour, and is measured either with a stick of 27 inches, of which 8
+sticks make a piece, or by a lesser stick, 18 inches long, 12 of which
+are accounted a piece, _Guinea_ stuffs, 2 pieces to make a piece,
+tapseils have the same measure as blue bafts.
+
+Nicanees, the same measure.
+
+Black bays, 2-1/2 yards for a piece, measured by 5 sticks of 18 inches
+each.
+
+Annabasses, 10 to the piece.
+
+Painted callicoes, 6 yards to the piece.
+
+Blue paper Slesia, 1 piece for a piece. Scarlet, 1 stick of 18 inches or
+1/2 a yard is accounted a piece.
+
+Muskets, 1 for a piece.
+
+Powder, the barrel or rundlet of 7 lbs. goes for a piece.
+
+Brass basons, 10 for a piece. We carry thither the largest.
+
+Pewter basons of 4, 3, 2 and 1 lb. The No. 4 goes 4 to the piece, and
+those of 1 lb. 8 to a piece.
+
+Blue perpetuanas have become but of late in great demand, they are
+measured as blue bafts, 6 yards making the piece.
+
+Dutch cutlaces are the most valued because they have 2 edges, 2 such go
+for a piece.
+
+Coral, the biggest and largest is much more acceptable here than small
+coral, which the Blacks value so little that they will hardly look on
+it, usually 1-1/2 oz. is computed a piece.
+
+_Memorandum._ A whole piece of blue bafts contains commonly 18-1/2
+yards, however some are shorter and others exceed.
+
+_Pentadoes._ Commonly contain 9 or 9-1/2 to the piece.
+
+_Tapseils._ The piece usually holds 15 yards.
+
+_Nicanees._ The piece is 9 or 9-1/2 yards long."
+
+The main export of Congo was slaves and elephants' teeth and grass
+clothes called Tibonges, were used by the Portuguese as at Loando in
+Angola. Some of them single marked with the arms of Portugal, and others
+double marked, and some unmarked.
+
+The single marked cloth was equal in value to 4 unmarked, equal to about
+8 pence.
+
+
+TRADE GOODS FOR SAN PAUL DO LOANDA.
+
+"Cloths with red lists, great ticking with long stripes and fine wrought
+red kerseys, _Silesia_ and other fine linen, fine velvet, small and
+great gold and silver laces, broad black bays, _Turkish_ tapestry or
+carpets, white and all sorts of coloured yarns, blue and black beads,
+stitching and sewing silk, _Canary_ wines, brandy, linseed oil, seamen's
+knives, all sorts of spices, white sugar and many other commodities and
+trifles as great fish-hooks, pins a finger long, ordinary pins, needles
+and great and small hawks' bells.
+
+"The _English_ compose their cargoes generally of brass, basons,
+annabasses, blue bafts, paper, brawls, _Guinea_ stuffs, muskets, powder,
+nicanees, tapseils, scarlet, _Slesia's_, coral, bags, wrought pewter,
+beads, pentedoes, knives, spirits, &c., all sorts of haberdashery,
+silks, linens, shirts, hats, shoes, &c., wrought pewter plates, dishes,
+porringers, spoons of each a little assortment are also very probably
+vended among the _Portuguese_, and also all manner of native made cloths
+from other parts of _Guinea_ fetch good prices in _Angola_."
+
+     [Illustration: _Miss Kingsley's "Studies in West Africa"_ TROPICAL
+                     WEST AFRICA.]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [94] For the reasons for the unhealthiness of this island see _Travels
+   in West Africa_ (Macmillan), p. 46.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+   A
+
+   ABIABOK, 163, 180-184
+
+   Abiadiong, 180
+
+   Abonema (_see_ New Calabar)
+
+   Abrah, oracle at, 172
+
+   Administration (_see_ Crown Colony)
+
+   Adultery laws, 434, 454, 536
+
+   African--
+     acclimatisation of, West Indians, 53-54
+     agriculture, 341
+     nature of, 63, 124, 168, 177-178, 373
+
+   Alemba rapid fetish, 177
+
+   Alumah, King, 458
+
+   Amachree, King, 500, 503, 505
+
+   _Amomum_, 56
+
+   Anamaquoa, 82
+
+   Ancestor Worship, 131-135
+
+   Andoni, 538-540, 553
+
+   Angola, 196, 283
+
+   Animal deities, 513, 515 (_see_ Snake and Shark)
+
+   Ants--
+     Driver, 25-33
+     _Myriaica molesta_, 33, 34
+
+   Apothecary, 180-184
+
+   Ashantee, 115, 144, 368
+
+   Assini, 73, 83
+
+   Atlantis, 227
+
+   Ayzingo, 108
+
+   Azambuja, 258
+
+
+   B
+
+   BAFANGH, 152
+
+   Bakele, 186
+
+   Bantu, 231 (_see_ Negro)
+
+   Bar, custom, 523
+
+   Barbot, 46, 69, and Appendix III.
+
+   Basel mission, 110
+
+   Bastian, 137, 154
+
+   Baths, medical, 182, 183
+
+   Bence Island, 36
+
+   Benga, 90, 153
+
+   Benguella, 210, 286-287
+
+   Benin, Bight of, 4
+     fetish of, 141-144 (_see_ Appendix I)
+     natives of kingdom, 448-468
+
+   Binger, 83
+
+   Bob Manuel, King, 507, 509
+
+   Bonny, 142, 495-509, 510, "free," 516, 540
+
+   Brahmanism, 119
+
+   Brass River, 140, 468-491
+
+   Bristol, 83
+
+   Brohemie, 458
+
+   Bruee Sieur, 271-273
+
+   Burial Customs, 144-150, 452-455
+
+   Bush fighting, 319
+     soul, 208, 209
+
+
+   C
+
+   CABINDA, 11, 186
+
+   Calabar, 54, 140-142
+     fetish, 144
+     history, 552-561
+     New, 491
+
+   Cameroons, 81, 231, 236, 238
+
+   Canoes, 99-101
+
+   Catfish, 96, 97
+
+   Centipedes, 81
+
+   Chamberlain, Rt. Honble. J., 307
+
+   Chambers of Commerce, 323
+
+   Charms, 163-169
+
+   Chiloango, 108-112
+   Clerks, 329, 357
+
+   Coinage, native, 82
+
+   Colonial Office, 305, 324-330
+
+   Comey, 444, 447, 523
+
+   Competition, 417
+
+   Comte, 115
+
+   Congo--
+     Belge, 54
+     River, 102, 238
+
+   Cookey Gam, King, 497
+
+   Corisco, 89-90
+
+   Crabs, 105
+
+   Crocodiles, 2
+     worship of, 140
+
+   Crown Colony, 317, 319, 326, 361, 366, 390, 417-418
+     statistics, 348, 357
+
+   Crowther--
+     Bishop, 481
+     Archdeacon, 487, 509
+
+   "Customs," native, 451 (_see_ Fetish)
+     fiscal, 408, 410, 413, 444, 447
+
+
+   D
+
+   DAHOMEY--
+     fetish, 144
+     fiscal, 347-348
+
+   Danfodio, 278
+
+   Dash, 446
+
+   De Brosses, 114
+
+   Debtors, 431, 433
+
+   Dennett, R. E., 154, 183, 186, 192
+
+   De Zurara, 252, 253
+
+   Dieppe, 256, 261-263
+
+   Diplomacy, 280
+
+   Direct taxation, 331
+
+   Disease (_see_ Doctor)
+     ague, 184
+     boisi, 184
+     fvuma, 184
+     hysteria, 188
+     leprosy, 184
+     malignant melancholy, 188
+     pneumonia, 188
+     small-pox, 184-188
+     soul, diseases of, 199, 209, 213
+     worms, 184
+     yaws, 187
+
+   Doctor (_see_ Apothecary)
+     clinical, 199-219
+     witch, 163, 169, 180, 182, 213
+
+   Dream-soul, 205, 207
+
+   Drum fish, 108
+
+   Duppy, 68
+
+   Dutch, 262, 268
+
+   Dye wood, 78
+
+
+   E
+
+   EBOES, 138 (_see_ Ibo)
+
+   Ebony, 78
+
+   Ebumtup, 214
+
+   _Edinburgh Review_, 157
+
+   Egbo (_see_ Law God)
+
+   Electrical fish, 107
+
+   Ellis, Sir A. B., 115-116, 132, 134-139
+
+   Elmina, 257
+
+   Emanequetta, 57
+
+   Expenditure (_see_ Crown Colony)
+
+   Exports, 334
+
+
+   F
+
+   FACE, throwing the, 165-167
+
+   Familiar spirits, 161
+
+   Fangaree charms, 164
+
+   Father, making, 146-148, 451
+
+   Fetish, 112-179
+     "customs," 173, 176, 450
+     days, 171, 174
+     definitions of, 113, 116, 119, 171
+     derivation of the word, 114
+     gods and goddesses--
+       Abassi-boom, 155
+       Mbuiri, 118
+       Nkala, 118
+       Nyankupong, 155
+       Nzambi 118, 137, 154
+       Nzambi Mpungu, 155
+       Sasabonsum, 117
+       Srahmantin, 137
+     House, description of, 170, 514
+     Man, 168, 171
+     Schools of, 137
+       Calabar, 144, 151, 160
+       Mpongwe, 151, 154, 160
+       Nkissism, 154-163
+       Tshi and Ewe and Yoruba, 139
+
+   Fiscal arrangements, 290 (_see_ Crown Colony)
+
+   Fish, quality of, 95, 106-109
+   Fishing, appliances, 101-106
+       canoes, 99
+     Native methods of, 99-109, 488
+
+   Floating Islands, 103
+
+   French, early exploration by the, 250, 264
+     Statistics, Colonial, 347
+
+   Frogs, 66
+
+   Funerals, 145, 452-484
+
+
+   G
+
+   GA, 138
+
+   Gesture, 237
+
+   Ghagas, 424
+
+   Glamour, 219
+
+   Gods (_see_ Fetish), 141
+
+   Goethe, 121-123
+
+   Gorillae, 235, 236
+
+   Governor, 305, 328, 365
+     native, 450
+
+   Grain Coast, 56-61
+     of Paradise, 56-61
+
+   Guineamen, 83
+
+   Guenther, Dr., 108
+
+
+   H
+
+   HANNO, 231-240
+
+   Head cutting, 525
+
+   Hero worship, 131-134
+
+   Hoheit, Landes and Ober, 400-405, 410
+
+   House system, 427, 475-478
+
+   Human sacrifices, 142-148
+
+
+   I
+
+   IBBIBIOS, 138
+
+   Igalwa, 153
+
+   Ijos, 448, 460
+
+   Immortal soul, 200, 207
+
+   Imports, 334
+
+   Inheritance, 453-475
+
+   Insects, 10-11
+
+   Islam and Fetish, 127
+
+   Ivory Coast, 68-73
+     trade of, 81-83, 347
+
+
+   J
+
+   JA JA, KING, 497, 522, 527, 540-552
+
+   Jakris, 448-457, 459-460
+
+   Jam, 503
+
+   Jannequin, 248
+
+   Jews, 630
+
+   Jobson, 246-247
+
+   Ju Ju, 114 (_see_ Fetish)
+     Long, 439, 444, 461, 480, 498
+     trade, 503
+
+
+   K
+
+   KITTY-KATTY, 64
+
+   Kla, 200
+
+   Koromantin slaves, 140
+
+   Krumen, 52, 54, 56, 412, 429
+
+   Kufong, 163, 165
+
+   Kwo Ibo, 549, 552, and Appendix II
+
+
+   L
+
+   LABAT, 131
+
+   Lagos, colony, 353
+
+   Land, 438
+
+   Landana, 194
+
+   Law, John, 271
+
+   Law, native--
+     adultery, 434, 536
+     god society, 160
+     property, 371, 427, 439, 475-478.
+
+   Leo Africanus, 231
+
+   Leopard worship, 140, 165
+
+   Liberia, 46, 52-54 (_see_ Grain Coast)
+
+   Loanda, 108, 284
+
+   Loango, 212
+
+   Lucan, Dr., 194
+
+   Lyall, Sir Alfred, on witchcraft, 156, 158
+
+
+   M
+
+   MACHINERY, 288
+
+   Maine, Sir Henry, 153
+
+   Malagens, 69
+
+   Malignant melancholy, 188-189
+
+   Manchester, 288, 351
+
+   Manilla, 82
+
+   Manioc, 190
+
+   Markets, 310
+
+   Maxwell, Sir Wm., 329
+
+   Meleguetta Coast, 51-61
+
+   Melli, 244-245, 426
+
+   Mendi, 164
+
+   Merolla, 197, 321
+
+   Minstrels, 149
+
+   Missionary, 320, 478, 509, 512, 556
+
+   Mohammedanism and Fetish, 126-127, 141
+
+   Monrovia, 46
+
+   Monteiro, 196
+
+   Mpongwe, 151
+
+   Mungo Mah Lobeh, 236
+
+   Murder, 454
+
+   Music, 64-66
+
+   _Mutterrecht_, 437
+
+
+   N
+
+   NASSAU, Dr., 89, 130, 152-153, 159
+
+   Nana, 451, 458
+
+   Negro, 420-423
+
+   Nganga bilongo (_see_ Apothecary)
+
+   Niger Company, 279, 306, 360, 394
+
+   Nkala, 118
+
+   Nkissism, 154-155, 163
+
+   Nyankupong, 155
+
+   Nzambi, 118, 137, 154-155, 159
+
+   Nzambi Mpungu, 118, 155
+
+
+   O
+
+   OBEAH, 139, 140, 219
+
+   Ogi, 138
+
+   Ogowe, 45, 79, 102
+
+   Oko Jumbo, King, 522, 529-532
+
+   Ombuiri, 116
+
+   Opobo, 142, 532, 540-549
+
+   Ordeal, 160, 161, 490
+
+   Oru, 160
+
+   Oulof, 273
+
+   Ouwere, 143, 630
+
+
+   P
+
+   PALM oil, 15 (_see_ Appendix I)
+
+   Panavia, 152
+
+   Paradise grains, 56-57
+
+   Parliamentary resolution (1865), 305, 307, 311
+
+   Pepple, King, 497, 510, 512, 517-521, 526
+
+   Pepper coast (_see_ Grain)
+
+   Phoenicians, 227 (_see_ Hanno)
+
+   Police, 333, 407
+
+   Poorah, 139
+
+   Portuguese, 114, 252-256, 281, 290
+     stone monuments, 259
+
+   Post-mortem, 211
+
+   Priests, 140-141, 160, 169-170, 499, 505 (_see_ Fetish Man)
+
+   Property--
+     ancestral, 428
+     family, 428
+     private, 428-429
+     Stool, 428
+
+
+   R
+
+   RAILWAYS, 287, 350
+
+   Religion, native (_see_ Fetish)
+
+   Revenue, 309, 413 (_see_ Crown Colony)
+     native, 444-447, 523
+
+
+   S
+
+   SAILS, 100-101
+
+   Sataspes, 228
+
+   San Andrew, Rio, 58, 70, 73
+
+   Sanguin, 274
+
+   Sasabonsum, 116-117
+
+   Scorpion, 80, 81, 185
+
+   Senegal, 273, 275
+
+   Shadow-soul, 200, 207-208
+
+   Shake hand, 446
+
+   Shark, 501
+
+   Sierra Leone, 36, 139, 149, 344
+     resources of, 339
+
+   Sisa, 202-205
+
+   Sleep disease, 189-193
+     stages of, 192-193
+
+   Small-pox, 186-188
+
+   Smaltz, 273
+
+   Snake worship, 140, 483-490, 456
+
+   Sobo, 457
+
+   Societies, Secret, 139, 170, 556-566
+     (_see_ Law God)
+
+   Song-net, 149-150
+
+   Soul, 199-200
+     Fetish view of the, 129-131
+     Division of the Human, 200-204
+   South Africa, 394
+
+   Spiders, 140
+
+   Spinoza 112-113, 120
+
+   Spirit and Matter, Native view of, 129-130
+
+   Spirits, Classes of, 130
+     Familiar, 161
+     Touch of, 133
+
+   Srahmandazi, 146, 151, 202
+
+   Srahmantin, 137
+
+   Statesmanship, 311
+
+   Statistics, 348-357
+
+
+   T
+
+   TCHANGA (Voudou), 139
+
+   "Them," 132
+
+   Theopompus, 226
+
+   Timber, 73-80
+
+   Timbuctoo, 277
+
+   Tom-toms, 64
+
+   Topping, 525
+
+   Tornadoes, 18-19, 47-48
+
+   Trade (_see_ Crown Colony)
+     gold, 241-246, 257
+     palm oil, 354-359
+     rubber, 353
+     salt, 242-248, 339
+     timber, 78
+     tobacco, 248, 339
+
+   Tshi, 115, 137
+
+   Twins, treatment of, 148
+
+   Tylor, Professor, 115
+
+
+   U
+
+   UKUKIWE, 160
+
+   Umaru l'Haji, 278
+
+
+   V
+
+   VEGETATION, 32-33
+
+   Virtue, Native idea of, 178
+
+   Volta, 96
+
+   Voudou, 139-140
+
+
+   W
+
+   WANGA (Obeah), 139-140, 219
+
+   War, 371
+
+   Warri, 143, 459, 630
+
+   Wealth, 438
+
+   "Well-disposed ones," 132
+
+   West Africa, Political aspect of, 310
+
+   West Indies, 302, 324
+
+   Will Braid, 493-497
+
+   Wills, 436
+
+   Winnebah, 175
+
+   Winnaboes, 471-474
+
+   Witchcraft, 157-168
+     law, 430 (_see_ Fetish)
+
+
+   X
+
+   XYLOPHONIC instruments, 65
+
+
+   Y
+
+   YAM custom, 174-175, 450
+
+   Yaws, 187
+
+
+   Z
+
+   ZAIRE, 102
+
+
+
+                                THE END
+
+
+             RICHARD CLAY AND SONS, LIMITED: LONDON AND BUNGAY.
+
+        [Illustration: _Miss Kingsley's "Studies in West Africa"_
+
+                       MAP OF THE NIGER DELTA.]
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Notes:
+
+
+The following typographical errors/spelling errors have been corrected.
+The pages refer to the original printed text.
+
+   p.  38  The town be took by locusts!["] : added closing quote
+
+   p.  42  You remember D----?["] : added closing quote.
+
+   p.  75  regarding this affair[.] : repaired
+
+   p.  86  ar[r]ives : corrected.
+
+   p. 246  Timbucto[o],  added, to match other instances.
+
+   p. 255  Bodajor --> Bojador : corrected
+
+   p. 287  The footnote is unnumbered, and [54] has been provided.
+
+   p. 289  about L6,400[)]: added missing right parenthesis]
+
+   p. 416  sink--holes --> sink-holes : corrected
+
+   p. 485  an[n]iversaries : corrected
+
+   p. 495  on the floor [fo] --> of : corrected
+
+   p. 510  number of 3,200,00[0] souls : added
+
+   p. 548n Monopolies[,] have led : removed
+
+   p. 602  I did not like their demeanour[.] : added
+
+   p. 603  our goods are in their hands.["] : added
+
+   p. 615  own way too much[.] : repaired
+
+   p. 622  perpetually on[,] their guard : removed
+
+   p. 623  to the great [m/n]umber : typo corrected
+
+   p. 625  being a 16 gallon rundlet[)] : closing parenthesis added
+
+   p. 636  Clerks, 329, 357[,] : removed
+
+The following words appear as variants and have been left as printed:
+
+   Ogowe (3) / Ogowe (11)
+   Filiaria perstans (1) / Filaria perstans (1)
+   muetterrecht (1) / mutterrecht (1)
+   Bassambri (1) / Basambri (1)
+
+The following words appear with and without hyphens. The various
+spellings are left as printed. Where the printed text introduces
+a hyphen at end-of-line, the hyphen is retained only if that variant
+is otherwise predominant.
+
+   Scott-Elliott/Scott Elliot--(In the literature the name is
+                                uniformly hyphenated.)
+   Sea-shore/seashore
+   headquarters/headquarters
+   ashore / a-shore            (hyphenated only in a quoted passage)
+   craw-fish / crawfish
+   ear-rings / earrings
+   firewood / fire-wood
+   headman / head-man
+   inter-marriage / intermarriage
+   ju-ju / juju
+   re-captured / recaptured
+   re-organized / reorganized
+   sand-flies / sandflies
+   middleman / middle-man
+   sandbanks / sand-banks
+   Winna-boes / Winnaboes
+   small-pox / smallpox
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's West African studies, by Mary Henrietta Kingsley
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WEST AFRICAN STUDIES ***
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