 Chapter 2. Fernando Poe and the Boobies. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Travels in West Africa by Mary H. Kingsley. Chapter 2. Fernando Poe and the Boobies. Giving some account of the occupation of this island by the whites in the manners and customs of the blacks peculiar to it. Our outward voyage really terminated at Calabar, and it terminated gorgeously in fireworks and whatnot in honor of the coming of Lady MacDonald, the whole settlement, white and black, turning out to do her honor to the best of its ability. And its ability in this direction was far greater than, for my previous knowledge of coast conditions, I could have imagined possible. Before Sir Claude MacDonald settled down again to local work, he and Lady MacDonald crossed a Fernando Poe, still in the Patanga, and I accompanied them, thus getting an opportunity of seeing something of Spanish official circles. I had heard sundry noble legends of Fernando Poe and seen the coast in a good deal of the island before, but although I had heard much of the governor, I had never met him until I went up to his residence with Lady MacDonald and the Consul General. He was a delightful person who as a Spanish naval officer, some time resident in Cuba, had picked up a lot of English with a strong American accent clinging to it. He gave a most moving account of how, as soon as his appointment as governor was announced, all his friends and acquaintances carefully explained to him that this appointment was equivalent to execution, only more uncomfortable in the way it worked out. During the outward voyage, this was daily confirmed by the stories told by the sailors and merchants, personally acquainted with the place who were able to support their information with dates and details of the disease of the victims to the climate. Still he kept up a good heart, but when he arrived at the island, he found his predecessor had died of fever, and he himself, the day after landing, went down with a bad attack and he was placed in a bed, the same bed he was mournfully informed in which the last governor had expired. Then he did believe all in one awful lump, all the stories he had been told and added to their horrors a few original conceptions of death and purgatory and a lot of transparent semi-formed images of his own delirium. Fortunately, both prophecy and personal conviction alike miscarried and the governor returned from the jaws of death. But without a moment's delay he withdrew from the port of Clarence and went up the mountain to Basil, which is in the neighborhood of the highest native village, where he built himself a house and rounded a little village of homes for the most unfortunate set of human beings I have ever laid eye on. They are the remnant of a set of Spanish colonists who had been located at some point in the Spanish possessions in Morocco and finding that place unfit to support human life petitioned the government to remove them and let them try colonizing elsewhere. The Spanish government just then had one of its occasional fits of interest in Fernando Poe and so shipped them here and the governor, a most kindly and generous man who would have been a credit to any country, established them and their families around him at Basil to share with him the advantages of the superior elevation, advantages he profoundly believed in and which he has always placed at the disposal of any sick white man on the island of whatsoever nationality or religion. Undoubtedly the fever is not so severe at Basil as in the lowlands but there are here the usual drawbacks to West African highland namely an oversupply of rain and equally saturating mists to say nothing of sudden and extreme alterations of temperature and so the colonists still fall off and their children die continuously from the various Entozua which abound upon the land. When the governor first settled upon the mountain he was very difficult to get at for business purposes and a telephone was therefore run up to him from Clarence through the forest and Spain at large felt proud at the stashing bit of enterprise in modern appliance. Alas the primeval forests of Fernando Poe were also charmed with the new toy and they talked to each other on it with their leaves and branches to such an extent that a human being could not get a word in edgeways. So the governor had to order the construction of a road along the course of the wire to keep the trees off it but unfortunately the telephone is still an uncertain means of communication because another interruption in its usefulness still afflicts it namely the indigenous natives habit of stealing bits out of its wire for they are fully persuaded that they cannot be found out in their depredations provided they take sufficient care that they are not caught in the act. The governor is thus liable to be cut off at any moment in the middle of a conversation with Clarence and the amount of hello's, are you theirs and speak louder please. In Spanish that must at such times be poured out and wasted in the lonely forests before the break is realized and an unfortunate demand set off as a messenger is terrible to think of. But nothing would persuade the governor to come a mile down towards Clarence until the day he should go there to join the vessel that was to take him home and I am bound to say he looked as if the method was a sound one for he was an exceedingly healthy, cheery looking man. Fernando Poe is said to be a comparatively modern island and not so very long ago have been connected with the mainland. The straight between them being only 19 miles across and not having any deep soundings. I fail to see what grounds there are for these ideas for though Fernando Poe's volcanoes are not yet extinct but merely have their fires banked. Yet on the other hand the island has been in existence sufficiently long to get itself several peculiar species of animals and plants and that is a thing which takes time. I myself do not believe that this island was ever connected with the continent but arose from the ocean as the result of a terrific upheaval in the chain of volcanic activity which runs across the Atlantic from the Cameroon Mountains in the SSW direction to Annobom Island and possibly even to the Tristan de Kunha group midway between the Cape and South America. These volcanic islands are all of extreme beauty and fertility. They consist of Fernando Poe, 10,190 feet, Príncipe, 3,000 feet, Santom, 6,913 feet and Annobom, 1,350 feet. Santom and Príncipe are Portuguese obsessions. Fernando Poe and Annobom Spanish and they are all exceedingly unhealthy. Santom is still called the Dutchman's churchyard on account of the devastation its climate wrought among the Hollanders when they once occupied it as they seem at one time or another to have occupied all Portuguese possessions out here. During the long war these two powers raged with each other for supremacy in the bites, a supremacy that neither of them attained to. Príncipe is said to be the most unhealthy and the reason of the difference in this particular between Príncipe and Annobom is said to arise from the fact that the former is on the guinea current, a hot current and Annobom on the equatorial which averages 10 degrees cooler than its neighbor. The shores of Santom are washed by both currents and the currents around Fernando Poe are in a mixed and uncertain state. It is difficult unless you have haunted these seas to realize the interest would take down there in currents, particularly when you are navigating small sailing boats. A pursuit I indulge in necessarily for my fishing practices. Their effect on the climate too is very marked. If we could only arrange for some terrific affair to take place in the bed of the Atlantic that would send that precious guinea current to the place it evidently comes from and get the cool equatorial alongside the mainland shore West Africa would be quite another place. Fernando Poe is the most important island as regards size on the West African coast and at the same time one of the most beautiful in the world. It is a great volcanic mass with many craters and culminates in the magnificent cone Clarence Peak culled by the Spaniards Pico de Sant'Isabel by the natives of the island Owasa. Seeing it from the sea or from the continent it looks like an immense single mountain that has floated out to sea. It is visible during clear weather and particularly sharply visible in the strange clearness you get after a tornado. From a hundred miles to seawards and anything more perfect than Fernando Poe when you sight it as you occasionally do from far away Bonnie Bar in the sunset floating like a fairy island made of gold or of amethyst I cannot conceive. It is almost equally lovely at close quarters namely from the mainland at Victoria 19 miles distant. Its moods of beauty are infinite for the most part gentle and gorgeous but I have seen it silly wetted hard against tornado clouds and grandly grim from the upper regions of its great brother Poe. And as for Fernando Poe in full moonlight well there you had to better go and see it yourself. The whole island is or rather I should say was heavily forested almost to its peak with a grand and varied type of forest very rich in oil palms and tree ferns and having an undergrowth containing an immense variety and quantity of ferns and mosses. Sugarcane also grows wild here an uncommon thing in West Africa. The last botanical collection of any importance made from these forests was that of Hermann and its examination showed that Abyssinian genera and species predominated and that many species similar to those found in the mountains of Mauritius the Isle de Bourbon and Madagascar were present. The number of European plants 43 genera 27 species is strikingly large most of the British forms being represented chiefly at the higher elevations. What was more striking was that it showed that South African forms were extremely rare and not one of the characteristic types of St Helena occurred. Cocoa, coffee and Chinchona alas flourish in Fernando Poe as the coffee suffers but little from the disease that harasses it on the mainland at Victoria and this is the cause of the great destruction of the forest that is at present taking place. Santhom a few years ago was discovered by its surprised neighbors to be amassing great wealth by growing coffee and so Fernando Poe and the principle immediately started to amass great wealth too and are now hard at work with gangs of miscellaneous natives got from all parts of the coast save the crew. Four to the crew-boy, Panera, as he calls a Spaniard is a name of horror worse than the Portuguese although he holds God made white man and God made black man but them devil make Portuguese and he also remembers an unfortunate affair that occurred some years ago now in connection with coffee growing. A number of crew men engaged themselves for a two year term of labor on the island of Santhom and when they arrived there were set to work on coffee plantations by the Portuguese. Now agricultural work is women's paliver but nevertheless though crew men made shift to get through with it vowing the while no doubt as they hopefully notched away the moons on their talistics that they would never let the girls at home know that they had been hoeing but when their moons were all complete instead of being sent home with their pay to we country they were put off from time to time and month after month went by and they were still on Santhom and still hoeing. At last the homesick men in despair of ever getting free started off secretly in ones and twos to try and get to we country across hundreds of miles of the storm haunted Atlantic and small canoes and with necks to no provisions. The result was a tragedy but it might easily have been worse for a few. A very few were picked up alive by English vessels and taken back to their beloved we country to tell the tale. But many a canoe was found with a dead crew boy or so in it and many a one which floating bottom upwards graphically spoke of madness caused by hunger, thirst and despair having driven its occupants overboard to the sharks. My Portuguese friends assure me that there was never thought of permanently detaining the boys and that they were only just keeping them until other laborers arrived to take their place on the plantations. I quite believe them for I have seen too much of the Portuguese in Africa to believe that they would in a wholesale way be cruel to natives but I am not in the least surprised that the poor crew men took the Portuguese logo and Aman for eternity itself for I have frequently done so. The greatest length of the island lies northeast and southwest and amounts to 33 miles. The mean breath is 17 miles. The port Clarence Cove now called Santa Isabel by the Spaniards who have been giving Spanish names to all the English named places without anyone taking much notice of them is a very remarkable place and except perhaps Gaboon the finest harbor on the west coast. The point that brings Gaboon anchorage up in line with Clarence Cove is its superior healthiness for Clarence is a section of a circle and its shores are steep rocky cliffs from 100 to 200 feet high and the place to put it very mildly exceedingly hot and stuffy. The Cove is evidently a partly submerged crater the submerged rim of the crater is almost a perfect semi circle seawards having on it four five seven eight and ten fathoms of water save almost in the center of the arc where there is a passage with 12 to 14 fathoms inside in the crater there is deeper water running in places from 30 to 45 fathoms and outside the submerged rim there is deeper water again but rocky shawls abound on the top of the shore cliffs stand the dilapidated little town of Clarence on a plateau that falls away slightly towards the mountain for about a mile when the ground commences to rise into the slopes of the Cordillera on the narrow beach tucked close against the cliffs are a few stores belonging to the merchants where goods are placed on landing and there is a little pier too but as it is usually having something done to its head or else is closed by the authorities because they intend doing something by and by the chances are against it's being available for use hence it usually comes about that you have to land on the beach and when you have done this you make your way up a very steep path cut in the cliffside to the town when you get there you find yourself in the very dullest town I know on the coast I remember when I first landed in Clarence I found its society in a flutter of expectation and alarm not untinged with horror Clarence, nay the whole of Fernando Poe was about to become so rackety and dissipated as to put Paris and Monte Carlo to the blush Clarence was going to have a calf and what was going to go on in that cafe I shrink from reciting I have little hesitation now in saying this alarm was a false one when I next arrived in Clarence it was just a sound sleep and its streets as weird grown as ever although the cafe was open my idea is that the sleepiness of the place infected the cafe and took all the go out of it but again it may have been that the inhabitants were too well guarded against its evil influence for there was on the island 52 white laymen and 54 priests to take charge of them the extra two being I presume to look after the governor's conduct although this worthy man made a most spirited protest against this view when I suggested it to him and in addition to the priests there are several missionaries of the Methodist mission and also a white gentleman who has invented a new religion anyhow the cafe smoulders like a damp squib when you spend the day on shore and when having exhausted the charms of the town the thing that usually takes from between 10 minutes to a quarter of an hour you apply to an inhabitant for advice as to the disposal of the rest of your shore leave you are told to go and see the coals you say you have not come to tropical islands to say coal heave and applying elsewhere for advice you probably get the same so as you were told to go and see the coals when you left your ship you do as your bid these coals the remnant of the store that was kept here for the English men of war were left here when the naval station was removed the Spaniards at first thought of using them and ran a tramway from Clarence to them but when the tramway was finished their activity had run out too and to this day there the coals remain now and again someone has the idea that they are quite good and can be used for a steamer and some people who have tried them say they are all right and others say they are all wrong and so the end of it will be that some few thousand years hence there will be a serious quarrel among geologists on the strange pocket of coal on Fernando Po and they will run up continents and raise and lower oceans and they will doubtless get more excitement and pleasure out of them than you can nowadays the history of the English occupation of Fernando Po seems often misunderstood and now and then one hears our governor reviled for handing it over to the Spaniards but this was unavoidable for we had it as a loan from Spain in 1827 as a naval station for our ships at that time energetically commencing to suppress the slave trade in the Bites the idea being that this island would afford a more healthy and convenient spot for a naval depot than any port on the coast itself more convenient Fernando Po certainly was but not more healthy and ever since 1827 it has been accumulating for itself an evil reputation for unhealthiness which is only languishing just at present because there is an interval between its epidemics fever and Fernando Po even more than on the mainland having periodic outbursts of a more serious type than the normal intermittent and remittant of the coast moreover Fernando Po shares with Senegal the undoubted yet doubtful honor of having had regular yellow fever in 1862 and 1866 this disease was imported by a ship that came from Havana since then it has not appeared in the definite South American form and therefore does not seem to have obtained a foothold it has in Senegal where a few years ago all the money voted for the keeping of the FTA National was in one district devoted by public consent to the purchase of coffins required by an overwhelming outbreak of Yellow Jack in 1858 the Spanish government thinking presumably that the slave trade was suppressed enough or at any rate to a sufficiently inconvenient extent reclaimed Fernando Po to the horror of the Baptist missionaries who had settled in Clarins apparently under the erroneous idea that the island had been definitely taken over by the English this mission had received from the West African Company a large grant of land a gathering of Sierra Leonians and other artisan and trading Africans who were attracted to Clarins by the work made by the naval station and these people with the English traders who also settled here for a like reason were the founders of Clarins town the declaration of the Spanish government stating that only Roman Catholic missions would be countenanced caused the Baptists to abandon their possessions and withdraw to the mainland in Ambas Bay where they have since remained and nowadays protestantism is represented by a Methodist mission which has a sub-branch on the mainland on the Aguayate river and one on the Quaibo the Spaniards on resuming possession of the island had one of their attacks of activity regarding it and sent out with Don Carlos Chacon four Jesuit priests a secretary a commissariat officer a costume house clerk and a transport the Santa Maria with a number of emigrant families this attempt to colonize Fernando Poe should have at least done the good of preventing such experiments ever being tried again with women and children for of these unfortunate creatures for whom in spite of it being the wet season no houses had been provided and no sand died in the space of five months Mr. Hutchinson who was English consul at the time tells us that in a very short time the gaunt figures of men women and children might be seen crawling through the streets with scarcely in evidence of life in their faces save the expression of a sort of torpedo carelessness as to how soon it might be their turn to drop off and die the Portino carried back 50 of them to Cadiz who looked when they embarked more like living skeletons of skin and bone than animated human beings I quote this not to cast reproach on the Spanish government but merely to give a fact a case in point of the deadly failure of endeavors to colonize on the west coast a thing which is even now occasionally attempted always with the same sad results though in most cases these attempts are now made by religious but misinformed people under Bishop Taylor's mission the Spaniards did not entirely confine their attention to planting colonists in a ready-made state on the island as soon as they had settled themselves and built their barracks and government house they such a work and cleared away the bush for an area of from four to six miles around the town the ground soon became overgrown again but this clearing is still perceptible in the different type of forest on it and has enabled the gardens and little plantations around Clarence to be made more easily my Spanish friends assure me that the Portuguese who discovered the island in 1471 and who exchanged it and an Obama in 1778 to the Spaniards for the little island of Catalina and the colony of Sacramento in south America did not do anything to develop it when they the Spaniards first entered into possession they at once set to work to colonize and clear then the colonization scheme went to the bed the natives poisoned the wells that is set and the attention of the Spaniards was in those days turned for some inscrutable reason to the eastern shores of the island a district now quite abandoned by whites on account of its unhealthiness and they lost in addition to the colonists a terrible quantity of their sailors in conception bay a law then followed and the Spaniards willingly lent the place to the English as a foreset they say we did nothing except establish Clarence as a headquarters which they consider to have been a most excellent enterprise and import the Baptist mission which they hold as a less estimable undertaking but there that's nothing to what the Baptist mission hold regarding the Spaniards for my own part I wish the Spaniards better luck this time in their activity for in directing it to plantations they are on a truer and safer road to wealth then they have been with their previous importations of Cuban political prisoners and ready made families of colonists and I hope they will send home those unfortunate wretches they have there now and commence in their expected two years to reap the profits of the coffee and cocoa certainly the chances are that they may for the soil of Fernando Poe's of exceeding fertility Mr. Hutchinson says he has known Indian corn planted here on a Monday evening make its appearance four inches above ground on the following Wednesday morning within a period he carefully says of 36 hours I have seen this sort of thing over in Victoria but I like to get a grown strong man and a consul of her Britannic majesty to say it for me having discourse to large on the various incomers to Fernando Poe we may next turn to the natives properly so called the boobies these people although presenting a series of interesting problems to the ethnologist both from their insular position and their differentiation from any of the mainland peoples are still but little known to a great extent this has arisen from their exclusiveness and their total lack of enthusiasm in trade matters a thing that differentiates them more than any other characteristic from the mainlanders who young and old men and women regard trade as the great affair of life take to it as soon as they can tattle and don't even leave it off at death according to their own accounts of the way the spirits of distinguished traders still dabble and interfere in market matters but it is otherwise with the booby a little rum a few beads and finish then he will turn the rest of his attention to catching porcupines or the beautiful little gazelles gray on the back and white underneath with which the island abounds and what time he may have on hand after this he spends in building houses and making himself hats it is only his utterly spare moments that he employs in making just sufficient palm oil from the rich supply of nuts at his command to get that rum and those beads of his cloth he does not want he utterly fails to see what good the stuff is for he abhors clothes the Spanish authorities insist that the natives who come into the town should have something on and so they array themselves in a bit of cotton cloth which before they are out of sight of the town on their homeward way they strip off and stuff into their baskets showing in this as well as in all other particulars how uninfluencable by white culture they are for the Spaniards like the Portuguese are great sticklers for clothes and insist on their natives wearing them usually with only too much success I shall never forget the yards and yards of cotton the ladies of Bluanda wore and not content with making cocoons of their bodies they wore over their heads as a mantilla some dozen yards or so black cloth into the bargain moreover this insistence on drapery for the figures not merely for towns a German officer told me the other day that when a week or so before his ship had called at anubom they were simply besieged for cloth cloth cloth the anubomians explaining that they were all anxious to go across to principi and get employment on coffee plantations but that the Portuguese planters would not engage them in an unclothed state you must not however imagine that the booby is neglectful of his personal appearance in his way he is quite a dandy but his idea of decoration goes in the direction of a plaster of tolla pomatum over his body and above all a hat this hat may be an antique European one or a bound round handkerchief but it is more frequently a infection of native manufacture and great taste and variety are displayed in its make they are of plated palm leaf that's all you can safely generalize regarding them for sometimes they have broad brims sometimes narrow sometimes no brims at all so too with the crown sometimes it is thick and domed sometimes nonexistent the wearer's hair are glow with red-tailed parrots feather sticking around should be as a general rule these hats are much adorned with oddments of birds, plumes and one chief I knew had quite a regent street dolly-vard in creation which he used to fix to his wool in a most intelligent way with bonnet pins made of wood these hats are also a peculiarity of the booby for none of the mainlanders care a row of pins for hats except for dandy to wear occasionally whereas the booby wears his perpetually although he has by no means the same amount of sun to guard against owing to the glorious forests of his island for earrings the booby wears pieces of wood stuck through the lobe of the ear and although this is not a decorative habit still it is less undecorative than that of certain mainland friends of mine in this region necessarily dripping lumps of fat in their ears and in their hair his neck is hung round with jujus on strings bits of the backbones of pythons teeth, feathers and antelope horns and occasionally a bit of fat in a bag round his upper arm are bracelets preferably made of ivory got from the mainland for celluloid bracelets carefully imported for its benefit he refuses to look at often this bracelets are made of beads or a circlet of leaves and when on the warpath an armlet of twisted grass is always worn by the men men and women alike wear armlets and in the case of the women they seem to be put on when young for you see puffs of flesh growing out from between them they are not entirely for decoration serving also as pockets for under them men stick a knife and women a tobacco pipe colored clay leglets of similar construction are worn just under the knee on the right leg while around the body you see belts of shibu small pieces cut from acetitopnia shells which form the native currency of the island these shells are also made into veils worn by the women at their wedding this native coinage equivalent is very interesting such things are exceedingly rare in West Africa the only other instance I personally know of a tribe in this part of the world using a native made coin is that of the fence who use little bundles of imitation ax heads Dr. Oscar Bauman who knows more than anyone else about these boobies thinks I believe that these bits of acetitopnia shells may have been introduced by the runaway Angola slaves who used to fly from their Portuguese owners on Santhom to the Spaniards on Fernando Po the villages of the boobies are in the forest in the interior of the island and they are fairly wide apart they are not a sea beach folk although each village has its beach which merely means the place to which it brings its trade these beaches being usually the dwelling places of the so called portos Negroes who act as middlemen between the boobies and the whites you will often be told that the boobies are singularly bad house builders indeed that they make no definite houses at all but only rough shelters of branches this is however a mistake shelters of the sky that you come across are merely the rough huts put up by hunters not true houses the village is usually fairly well built surrounded with a living hedge of stakes the houses inside this are four cornered the walls made of logs of wood stuck in edge ways and surmounted by a roof of thatch pitched at an extremely stiff angle and the hole is usually surrounded with a dug out drain to carry off surface water these houses as usual on the west coast are divisible into two classes houses of assembly and private housing houses the first are much the larger the latter are very low and sometimes ridiculously small but still they are houses and better than those awful lowango grass affairs you get on the Congo Herr Baumann says that the houses high up on the mountain have double walls between which there is a free space an arrangement which may serve to minimize the extreme droughtiness of the house a very necessary thing in these relatively chilly upper regions I may remark on my own account that the booby villages do not often lie right on the path but like those you have to deal with up the Kalabar some little way off it this is no doubt for the purpose of concealing their whereabouts from strangers and it does it successfully too for many a merry hour have I spent trying to make out at what particular point it was advisable to dive into the forest think it to reach a village but this cultivates habits of observation and a short course of this work makes you recognize which tree is which along miles of a bush path as easily as you would shops in your own street at home the main interest of the booby life lies in hunting for is more of a sportsman than the majority of mainlanders he has not any big game to deal with unless we accept pythons which attain a great size on the island and crocodiles elephants though plentiful on the adjacent mainland are quite absent from Fernando Po as are also hippos in the great anthropoid apes but of the little gazelles small monkeys porcupines and squirrels he has a large supply he has a very pretty otter lustra poensis with yellow brown fur often quite golden underneath a creature which is I believe identical with the angola otter the boobies using their hunting flintlock guns but chiefly traps and nets and I am told slings the advantage of these latter methods are I expect the same as on the mainland where a distinguished sportsman once told me to go shooting with Gon better well but you know get him thing for sure better well you friend hear them knees and come look him and you have to go share what you don't kill or bad man hear them knees and you come look him and you know fit to get share you fit to get kill yourself chai chai traps be best I urged that the traps might also be robbed charm he look up to them traps he fit to make man who go to swell up and bust the boobies also fish mostly by basket traps but they are not experts either in this or in canoe management their chief seashore sport is hunting for the eggs of the turtles who lay in the sand from August to October these eggs about 200 in each nest are about the size of a billiard ball with a leathery envelope and are much valued for food as are also the grubs of certain beetles got from the stems of the palm trees and the honey of the wild bees which abound here their domestic animals are the usual African list cats, dogs, sheep, goats and poultry pigs there are too very domestic in clearance and in a wild state in the forest these pigs are the descendants of those imported by the Spaniards not long ago became such an awful nuisance in clearance that the government issued instructions that all pigs without rings in their noses i.e. all in a condition to grub up back gardens should be forthwith shot if found abroad this proclamation was issued by the governmental bellman thus I say I say I say I say suppose pig walk are no live for him nose gone shoot kill him one time hear it hear it however a good many pigs with no iron living in their noses got adrift and escaped into the interior and have flourished like the green bay tree destroying the booby's plantation and eating his yams while the booby retaliating kills and eats them so it's a drawn battle for the booby enjoys the pig and the pig enjoys the yams which are of singular excellence that's what the government issued throughout the bite now I am told the government are firmly discouraging the export of these yams which used to be quite a little branch of Fernando Po trade in the hope that this will induce the native to turn his attention to working in the coffee and cocoa plantations hope springs eternal in the human breast for the booby has shown continually since the 16th century that he takes no interest in these things whatsoever a man or woman will come voluntarily and take service in clearance submit to clothes and rapidly pick up the ways of a house or store and just when their owner thinks he owns a treasure and begins to boast that he has got an exception to all boobydom or else that he knows how to manage them better than other men than a hole in that man's domestic arrangement suddenly appears the booby has gone without giving a moment's warning without stealing his master's property but just softly and silently vanished away and if hunted up the treasure will be found in his or her particular village clothes less comfortable, utterly unconcerned and unaware that he or she has lost anything by leaving clearance and civilization it is this conduct that gains for the booby the reputation of being a bigger idiot than he really is for West Africans their agriculture is of a fairly high description the noteworthy point about it however is the absence of Menioc Menioc is grown on Fernando Po but only by the portos the booby cultivated plants are yams Dios Correa Alata Cocoa Coloscasia Escolenta the Tower of the South Seas and Plantains their farms are well kept by San Carlos Bay the yams of the Cordillera districts are the best flavored but those of the east coast the largest palm oil is used for domestic purposes in the usual ways and palm wine both fresh and fermented is the ordinary native drink rum is held in high esteem but used in a general way in moderation as a cordial and a treat for the booby is like the rest of the West African natives by no means and habitual drunkard gin he dislikes and I may remark you will find the same opinion in regard to the Duala in Cameroon's river on the undeniable authority of Dr. Buckner and my own extensive experience of the West Coast bears it out physically the boobies are a fairly well formed race of medium height they are decidedly inferior to the Bengar the cruise but quite on a level with the ethics the women indeed are very calmly their color is bronze and their skin the skin of the Bantu beards are not uncommon among the men and these give their faces possibly more than anything else a different look to the faces of the ethics or the Dualas indeed the people physically most like the boobies that I have ever seen are undoubtedly the bakwiti of Cameroon's mountain who are also liable to be bearded possibly I should say more liable to wear beards for a good deal of the African hairlessness you hear commented on in the West African at any rate arises from his deliberately pulling his hair out his beard moustache whiskers and occasionally as among the fans his eyebrows Dr. Baumann the great authority on the boobie language says it is a Bantu stock I know nothing of it myself save that is harsh and sound their method of counting is usually by fives but they are notably weak in arithmetical ability differing in this particular from the mainlanders and especially from their negro neighbors who are very good at figures surpassing the Bantu in this as indeed they do in most branches of intellectual activity with the most remarkable instance of inferiority the boobies display is their ignorance regarding methods of working iron I do not know that iron in a native state is found in Fernando Poe but scrap iron they have been in touch with for some hundreds of years the mainlanders are all cognizant of native methods of working iron although many tribes of them now depend entirely on European trade for their supply of knives etc and this difference between them and the boobies would seem to indicate that the migration of the latter island must have taken place at a fairly remote period a period before the iron working tribes came down to the coast of course if you take the boobies usual explanation of his origin namely that he came out of the crater on the top of Clarence's peak this argument falls through but he has also another legend one more over which is likewise to be found upon the mainland which says he was driven from the district north of the Gabun obituary by the coming of the Minpogue to the coast and as this legend is the more likely of the two I think we may accept it as true or nearly so but what adds another difficulty to the matter is that the boobies not only unlearned in iron lore but he was learned in stone and up to the time of the youth of many porto-negros on Fernando Poe he was making and using stone implements and none of the tribes within the memory of men have done this on the mainland it is true that up the Niger and about Benin and Axim you get polished stone cells but these are regarded as weird affairs thunderbolts and suitable only for grinding up and making into medicine there is no trace in the traditions of these places as far as I have been able to find of any time at which stone implements were in common use and certainly the Impogue have not been a very long time on the coast for their coming is still remembered in their traditions the boobies stone implements I have seen twice but on neither occasion could I secure one and although I have been long promised specimens from Fernando Poe I have not yet received them they are difficult to procure because none of the present towns are on really old sites the boobie like most Bantu's moving pretty frequently whether because the ground is witch demonstrated by outbreaks of sickness or because another village full of his fellow creatures or a horrid white man plantation making has come too close to him a Roman Catholic priest in Kakongo once told me a legend he laughed much over of how a fellow priest had enterpricingly settled himself one night in the middle of a boobie village with intent to devote the remainder of his life to quietly but thoroughly converting it next morning when he rose up he found himself alone the people having taken all their portable possessions and vanished to build another village elsewhere the worthy father spent some time chivying his flock about the forest but in vain and he returned home disgusted deciding that the creator for some wise purpose had dedicated the boobies to the devil the spears used by this interesting people are even to this day made entirely of wood and have such a Polynesian look about them that I intend some time or other to bring some home and experiment on that learned Polynesian culture expert Baron von Hegel with them intellectually experiment not physically pre-understand the pottery has a very early man look about it but in this it does not differ much from that of the mainland which is quite as poor and similarly made without a wheel and sun baked those pots of the boobies I have seen have however not had the pattern any sort of pattern does and it need not be carefully done that runs round mainland pots to keep their souls in I eat prevent their breaking up on their own account the basket work of the boobies is of a superior order the baskets they make to hold are excellent and will hold water like a basin but I am in doubt whether this art is original or imported by the Portuguese runaway slaves for they put me very much in mind of those made by my old friends the cabanders from whom a good many of those slaves were recruited I think there is little doubt that several of the musical instruments own this origin particularly their best beloved one the Elibo this may be described as a wooden bell having inside it for clappers several usually five pieces of stick threaded on a bit of wood jammed into the dome of the bell and striking the rim beyond which the clappers just protrude these bells are very like those you meet with in Angola but I have not seen on the island nor does Dr. Baumann sight having seen the peculiar double bells of Angola the Ngongui the booby bell is made out of one piece of wood and worked or played with both hands Dr. Baumann says his customary on bright moonlight nights for two lines of men to sit facing each other and to clap one can hardly call it ring these bells vigorously but in good time accompanying this performance with a monotonous song while the delighted women and children dance round the learned doctor evidently sees the chresqueness of this practice but notes that the words of the songs are not Zefinji, profound as he has heard men for hours singing the shark bites the boobies hand only that over and over again and nothing more this agrees with my own observations of all Bantu native songs I have always found that the words of these songs were either their repetition of some such phrase as this or a set of words referring to the presence or experience of the singer or the present company's little peculiarities with a very frequent chorus old and conventional the native tunes used with these songs are far superior and I expect many of them are very old they are often full of variety and beauty particularly those of them Pongue and Igalwa of which I will speak later the dances I have no personal knowledge of but there is nothing in Baumann's description to make one think they are distinct in themselves from the mainland dances I once saw a dance at Fernanda Poe but that was among Portos and it was my old friend the Bantu Coe in all its beauty but there is a distinct peculiarity about the places the dances are held on every village having a capped piece of ground outside it which is the dancing place for the village the ballroom as it were an exceedingly picturesque these dances must be they are mostly held during the nights of full moon these capped grounds remind one very much of the similar looking patches of capped grass one sees in villages in Cacongo but there is no similarity in their use for the Cacongo lawns are a fetish not frivolous import the boobies have an instrument I have never seen in an identical form on the mainland it is made like a bow with a tense string of fiber one end of the bow is placed against the mouth and the string is then struck by the right hand with a small round stick while with the left it is scraped with a piece of shell or a knife blade this excruciating instrument I warn anyone who may think of living among the boobies is very popular the drums used are both the dualla form all wood and the ordinary skin cover drum and I think if I catalog fives made of wood I shall have really finished the booby orchestra I have doubts on this point because I rather question whether I may be allowed to refer to a very old bollock hide unmounted as a musical instrument without bringing down the wrath of musicians on my head these stiff tripels are much thought of and played by the artists by being shaken as accompaniments to other instruments they make a noise and that is after all the soul of most instrumental music these instruments are all that is left of certain bollocks which many years ago the Spaniards introduced hoping to improve the food supply they seemed as if they would have flourished well on the island on the stretches of grassland in the Cordillera and the east but the boobies being great sportsmen killed them all off the festivities of the boobies dances, weddings feasts, etc. this miscellaneous collection of instruments are used in concert usually takes place in November the dry season but the boobie is liable to pour forth his soul in the bosom of his family at any time of the day or night from June to January and when he pours it forth on that bow affair it makes a lonely European long for home divisions of time the boobie can hardly be said to have but this is a point upon which all West Africans are rather weak particularly the Bantu he has however a definite name for November, December and January the dry season months calling them lobos the fetish of these people although agreeing on broad lines with the Bantu fetish has many interesting points as even my small knowledge of it showed me and it is a subject that would repay further investigation and as by fetish I always mean the governing but underlying ideas of a man's life we will commence with a child nothing as far as I have been able to make out happens to him for fetish reasons when he first appears on the scene he receives at birth as his usual a name which has changed for another on his initiation into the secret society the secret society having also as usual a secret language about the age of three or five years the boy is decorated with the auspices of the witch doctor with certain scars on the face these scars run from the root of the nose across the cheeks and are sometimes carried up in a curve on to the forehead tattooing in the true sense of the word they do not use much but they paint themselves as the mainlanders do with a red paint made by burning some herb and mixing the ash with clay or oil and they occasionally whether for juju reasons or for mere decoration I do not know paint a band of yellow clay around the chest but of the booby secret society I know little nor have I been able to find anyone who knows much more Hutchinson in his exceedingly amusing description of a wedding he was once present at among these people would lead one to think the period of seclusion of the women's society was 12 months the chief god or spirit or was a resides in the crater of the highest peak the name the peak is known to the native another very important spirit to whom goats and sheep are offered is lobby resident in a crater lake on the northern slope of the cordilleras and the grass you sometimes see a booby wearing is said to come from this lake and be a juju of lobis Dr. Baumann says that the lake at Reaba from which the spirit wapa rises is more holy and that he is small and resides in a chasm in a rock whose declivity can only be passed by means of bush ropes and in the west season he is not gettable at all he will if given suitable offerings reveal the future to boobies but boobies only his priest is the king of all the boobies upon whom it is never permitted to a white man or a porto to gaze Baumann also gives the residence of another important spirit as being the grotto at bunny this is a sea cave only accessible at low water in calm weather I have heard many legends of this cave but have never had an opportunity of seeing it or anyone who has seen it first hand the charms used by these people are similar in form to those of the mainland Bantu but the methods of treating paths and gateways are somewhat peculiar the gateways to the towns are sometimes covered by freshly cut banana leaves and during the religious feast in November the paths to the villages are barred across with a hedge of grass which no stranger must pass through the government is a peculiar one for West Africa every village has its chief but the whole tribe obey one great chief or king who lives in the crater ravine at Riava this individual is called Moka but whether he is now the same man referred to by Rokosinski Mr. Holland and the Reverend Hugh Brown attempted to interview him in the 70s I do not feel sure for the boobies are just a sort of people to keep a big king going with a variety of individuals even the indefatigable Dr. Baumann failed to see Moka though he evidently found out a great deal about the methods of his administration and formed a very high opinion of his ability for he says that to this one chief the people owe their present unity and orderliness at this time the whole island was in a state of internecine war murder was frequent and property unsafe now their social condition according to the doctor's account is a model to Europe let alone Africa civil wars have been abolished disputes between villages being referred to arbitration and murder is swiftly and surely punished if the criminal has bolted into the forest and cannot be found his village is made responsible for the violence sheep and tobacco to the value of 16 pounds theft is extremely rare and offenses against the moral code also the boobies having an extremely high standard in this matter even the little children having each a separate sleeping hut in old days adultery was punished by cutting off the offender's hand I have myself seen women in Fernanda Poe who have had a hand cut off the wrist but I believe those were slave women who suffered for theft slaves the boobies do have but their condition is the mild poor relation or retainer form of slavery you find in Calabar and differs from the Duala form for the slaves live in the same villages as their masters while among the Dualas as among most bountiful slave holding tribes the slaves are excluded from the master's village and have separate villages of their own for marriage ceremonies and for you to Mr. Hutchinson burial customs are exceedingly quaint in the southern and eastern districts where the bodies are buried in the forest with their heads just sticking out of the ground in other districts the bodies also buried in the forest but is completely covered and an erection of stones put up to mark her place little is known of all West African fetish still less of that of these strange people Dr. Oscar Baumann brought to bear on them his careful unemotional German methods of observation thereby giving us more valuable information about them and their island and we otherwise should possess Mr. Hutchinson resided many years on Fernanda Poe in the capacity of HBM's consul with his hands full of the affairs of the oil rivers and in touch with the portos of Clarence but he nevertheless made a very interesting observations on the natives customs the Polish exile and his courageous wife who ascended Clarence peak Mr. Rogozinski and another Polish exile Mr. Janikowski about complete our series of authorities on the island Dr. Baumann thinks they got their information from porto sources sources the learned doctor evidently regards as more full of imagination than solid fact but as you know all African travelers are occasionally in the habit of poo-pooing each other and I own that I myself have been chiefly in touch with portos and that my knowledge of the booby language runs to the conventional greeting from Ipori, Porto, Kessoko, Hatsisoko who are you Porto what's the news no news although these portos are less interesting to the ethnologist and the philanthropist they being byproducts of his efforts I must not leave Fernanda Poe without mentioning them for on them the trade of the island depends they are the middlemen between the booby and the white trader the former regards them with little if any more trust than he regards the white men and his view of the position of the Spanish governor is that he is chief over the portos that he has any headship over boobies or over the booby land it's Chula as he calls Fernanda Poe he does not imagine possible Baumann says he was once told by a booby white men are fish not men they are able to stay a little while on land but at last they mount their ships again and vanish over the horizon into the ocean how can a fish possess land if the coffee and cacao thrive on Fernanda Poe to the same extent that they have already thriven on Santhom there is but little doubt that the boobies will become extinct for work on plantations either for other people or themselves they will not and then the portos will become the most important class for they will go in for plantations their little factories are studded all round the shores of the coast in suitable coves and bays and here in fairly neat houses they live collecting palm oil from the boobies and making themselves little cacao plantations and bringing these products into clearance every now and then to the white traders factory then after spending some time and most of their money in the giddy world of that capital they return to their homes and recover there is a class of them permanently resident in clearance the city men of Fernanda Poe and these are very like the sara leonians of free town but preferable their origin is practically the same as that of the free towners they are the descendants of liberated slaves set free during the time of our occupation of the island as a naval depot for suppressing the slave trade and of sara leonians and acras who have arrived and settled since then they have some of the same black genelem sara style about them but not develop to the same ridiculous extent as in the sara leonians for they have not been under our institutions the nanny poe ladies are celebrated for their beauty all along the west coast and very justly they are not however as they themselves think the most beautiful women in this part of the world that leads to my way of thinking I prefer an elmina or an igalwa or a mimpongue or but I had better stop and own that my affections have got very scattered among the black ladies on the west coast and I now sooner remember one lovely creature whose soft eyes, perfect form and winning pretty ways have captivated me than I think of another the nanny poe ladies have often a certain amount of Spanish blood in them which gives a decidedly greater delicacy to their features, delicate little nostrils, mouths not too heavily lipped, a certain gloss on the hair and a light in the eye but it does not improve their color and I am sure that it has an awful effect on their tempers so I think I will remain for the present the faithful admirer of my sable ingramina, the igalwa with the little red blossoms stuck in her night black hair and a sweet soft look and word for everyone but particularly for her ugly husband Isaac the jackwash end of chapter 2 CHAPTER 3 Voyage down coast of travels in west Africa this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org travels in west Africa CHAPTER 3 Voyage down coast wherein the voyager before leaving the rivers discourses on dangers to which is added some account of mangrove swamps and the creatures that abide therein I left Calabar in May and joined the Mengele of Lagos Bar my voyage down coast in her was a very pleasant one and full of instruction for Mr. Father Gill who was her purser had in former years resided in Congo, Française as a merchant and to Congo Française I was bound with an empty hold as regards local knowledge of the district he was one of that class of men of which you most frequently find representatives among the merchants who do not possess the power so many men along here do possess a power that always amazes me for a considerable time in a district without taking any interest in it keeping their whole attention concentrated on the point of how long it will be before their time comes to get out of it Mr. Father Gill evidently had much knowledge and experience of the Vernanvas district and its natives he had I should say overdone his experiences with the natives as far as personal comfort and pleasure at the time went having been nearly killed and considerably chivided by them now I do not wish a man however much I may deplore his total lack of local knowledge to go so far as this Mr. Father Gill gave his accounts of these incidents calmly and in an undecorated way that gave them a power and convincingness verging on being unpleasant although useful to a person he was going into the district where they had occurred for one felt there was no mortal reason why one should not personally get involved in similar affairs and I must here acknowledge the great subsequent service Mr. Father Gill's wonderfully accurate descriptions of the peculiar characteristics of the Ogo forests were to me when I subsequently came to deal with these forests on my own account the district of forest has peculiar characteristics of its own which you require to know I should like here to speak of west coast dangers because I fear you may think that I am careless of or do not believe in them neither of which is the case the more you know of the west coast of Africa the more you realize its dangers for example on your first voyage out you hardly believe the stories of fever old coasters that is because you do not then understand the type of man who is telling them a man who goes to his death with a joke in his teeth but a short experience of your own particularly if you happen on a place having one of its periodic epidemics soon demonstrates that the underlying horror of the thing is there a rotting corpse which the old coaster has dusted over with jokes to cover it hardly shows at a distance but which when you come yourself to live alongside you soon become cognizant of many men when they have got assure and subtle to realize this and let the horror get a grip on them a state briefly and locally described as funk and a state that usually ends fatally you can hardly blame them why I know of a case myself a young man who had never been outside the English country town before in his life from family reverses had to take a situation as bookkeeper down in the bytes the factory he was going to was in an isolated out of the way place and not in a settlement and when the ship called off it he was put ashore in one of the ships boats with his belongings and a case or so of goods there were only the firms Beach Boys down at the and as the steamer was in a hurry the officer from the ship did not go up to the factory with him but said goodbye and left him alone with a set of naked savages as he thought but really of good kindly crew boys on the beach he could not understand what they said nor they what he said and so he walked up to the house and onto the veranda and tried to find the agent he had come out to serve under he looked into the open ended dining room and shyly around the veranda and then sat down and waited for someone to turn up sundry natives turned up and said a good deal but no one white or comprehensible so in desperation he made another and a bolder tour completely round the veranda and noticed a most peculiar noise in one of the rooms and an infinity of flies going into the Venetian shuttered window plucking up courage he went in and found what was left of the white agent a considerable quantity of rats and most of the flies in west africa he then presumably had fever and he was taken off a fortnight afterwards by a french boat to whom the native signaled and he is not coming down the coast again some men would have died right out from a shock like this but most of the newcomers do not feel the shock of this order they either die themselves or get more gradually accustomed to this sort of thing when they come to regard death and fever as soldiers who on a battlefield sit down and laugh and talk round a campfire after a day's hard battle in which they have seen their friends and companions falling round them all the time knowing that tomorrow the battle comes again and that tomorrow night they themselves may never see but it is not hard-hearted callousness it is only their way Michael Scott put this well in Tom Kringle's log in his account of the yellow fever during the war in the west indies fever that the chief danger particularly to people who go out to settlements is not the only one but as the other dangers except perhaps domestic poisoning are incidental to pottering about in the forests or on the rivers among the unsophisticated tribes that will not dwell on them they can all be avoided by anyone with common sense by keeping well out of the districts in which they occur and so I warn the general reader that if he goes out to west Africa it is not because I said the place was safe or it's dangers overrated the cemeteries of the west coast are full of the victims of those people who have said that coast fever is cork fever and a man's own fault which it is not that natives will never attack you unless you attack them which they will on occasions my main aim in going to Congo Francez was to get up above the tide line of the Auge River and there collect fishes for my object on this void was to collect fish from a river north of the Congo I had hoped this river would have been the Niger for Sir George Goldie had placed at my disposal great facilities for carrying on work there in comfort but for certain private reasons I was disinclined to go from the Royal Niger Protectorate into the Royal Niger Company's Territory and the Calabar where Sir Claude McDonnell did everything he possibly could to assist me I did not find a good river for me to collect fishes in these two rivers failing me from no fault of either their own presiding geni my only hope of doing anything now lay on the south west coast river the Ogo and everything there depended on Mr Hudson's attitude towards scientific research in the domain of ick theology fortunately for me that gentleman elected to take a favorable view of this affair and in every way in his power assisted me during my entire stay in Congo Francez but before I enter into a detailed description of this wonderful bit of West Africa I must give you a brief notice of the manners habits and customs of west coast rivers in general to make think more intelligible there is an uniformity in the habits of west coast rivers from the Volta to the Kwanzaa which is when you get used to it very taking accepting the Congo the really great river comes out to sea with as much mystery as possible lounging lazily along among its mangrove swamps in a manner when one comes out and wears the hurry style through quantities of channels inter-communicating with each other each channel at first sight as like the other as peas in a pod is bordered on either side by green black walls of mangroves which captain Lugard graphically described as seeming as if they had lost all count of the vegetable proprities and were standing on stilts with their branches tucked up out of the wet leaving their gaunt roots exposed in mid-air high tide or low tide there is little difference in the water the river be it broad or narrow deep or shallow looks like a pathway of polished metal for it is as heavy weighted with stinking mud as water air can be ebb or flow year out and year in but the differences in the banks though an unending alternation between two appearances is weird you do not see the mangroves displaying their ankles in the way that shocked captain Lugard they look most respectable their foliage rising densely in a wall irregularly striped here and there by the white line of an aerial route coming straight down into the water from some other branch as straight as a plummet in the strange knowing way an aerial route of a mangrove does keeping the hard straight line until it gets some feet above water level and then spreading out into blunt fingers with which to dip into the water grasp the mud banks indeed at high water can hardly be said to exist the water stretching away into the mangrove swaps for miles and miles and you can then go in a suitable small canoe away among the swamps as far as you please this is a fascinating pursuit but it is a pleasure to be indulged in with caution for one thing you are certain to come across crocodiles now a crocodile drifting down in deep water or lying asleep with its jaws open on a sand bank in the sun is a picturesque adornment to the landscape when you are on the dock of a steamer and you can ride home about it and frighten your relatives on your behalf but when you are away among the swamps in a small dugout canoe and that crocodile and his relations are awake a thing he makes a point of being at flood tide because of fish coming along and when he has got his foot upon his native heath that is to say his tail within holding reach of his native mud he is highly interesting and you may not be able to ride home about him and you get frightened on your own behalf for crocodiles can and often do in such places grab at people in small canoes I have known of several natives losing their lives in this way some native villages are approachable from the main river by a short cut as it were through the mangrove swamps and the inhabitants of such villages will now and then go across this way with small canoes instead of by the constant channel to the village which is almost always winding in addition to this unpleasantness you are liable until you realize a danger from experience or have native advice on the point to get tide trapped away in the swamps the water falling around you when you are away in some deep pool or lagoon and you find you cannot get back to the main river of course if you really want a truly safe investment in fame and really care about posterity and posterity's science you will jump over into the black batter like stinking slime cheered by the thought of the terrific sensation you will produce 20,000 years hence and the care you will be taken of then by your fellow creatures in a museum but if you are a mere ordinary person of a retiring nature like me you stop in your lagoon until the tide rises again most of your attention is directed to dealing with at home to crocodiles and mangrove flies and with a fearful stench of the slime around you what little time you have over you wondering why you came to West Africa and why after having reached this point of folly you need have gone and painted the lily and adorned the rose by being such a colossal ass as to come fooling about in mangrove swamps still even if your own peculiar tastes and avocations do not take you in small dugout canoes into the heart of the swamps you can observe the difference in the local scenery made by the flowing of the tide on a vessel stuck on a sand bank in the Rio del Rey for example moreover as you will have little else to attend to save mosquitoes and mangrove flies one in such a situation you may as well pursue the study at the ab gradually the folly edge of the lower branches of the mangroves grows wet and muddy until there is a great black band about three feet deep above the surface of the water in all directions gradually a network of gray white roots rises up and below this again gradually a slope of smooth and lead gray slime the effect is not in the least as if the water had fallen but as if the mangroves had with one accord risen up out of it and into it again they seem silently to sink when the flood comes but by this more safe if still unpleasant method of observing mangrove swamps you miss seeing in full the make of them for away in their fastnesses mangroves raised their branches for above the reach of tide line and the great gray roots of the older trees are always sticking up in midair but fringing the rivers there is always a hedge of younger mangroves whose lower branches get immersed at corners here and there from the river face you can see the land being made from the waters a mud bank forms of it a mangrove seed lights on it and the things done well not done perhaps but begun for if the bank is high enough to get exposed at low water this pioneer mangrove grows he has a wretched existence though you have only got to look at his dwarfed attenuated form to see this he gets joined by a few more bold spirits and they struggle on together their network of roots stopping abundance of mud and by good chance now and then a consignment of miscellaneous debris of palm leaves or a floating tree trunk but they always die before they attain any considerable height still even in death they collect their bare white stems remaining like a net gripped in the mud so that these pioneer mangrove heroes may be said to have laid down their lives to make that mud bank fit for colonization for the time gradually comes when other mangroves can and do colonize on it and flourish extending their territory steadily and the mud bank joins up with and becomes a part of Africa right away on the inland fringe of the swamp you may go some hundreds of miles before you get there you can see the rest of the process the mangroves there have risen up and dried the mud to an extent that is more than good for themselves have over-civilized that mud in fact and so the brackish waters of the tide which although their enemy went too deep too strong in salt is essential to their existence cannot get to their roots they have done this gradually as a mangrove does all things but they have done it and down onto that mud come a whole set of palms from the old mainland who in their early colonization days go through similarly trying experiences first the screwpines come and live among them then the wine palms and various creepers the debris of these plants being greater and making better soil than dead mangroves they work quicker and the mangrove is doomed soon the salt waters are shut right out the mangrove dies and that bit of Africa is made it is very interesting to get into these regions you see along the river bank a rich thick lovely wall of soft wooded plants and behind this you find great stretches of death miles and miles sometimes of white mangrove skeletons standing on grey stuff that is not yet earth and is no longer slime and through the crust of which you can sink into rotting futurefaction yet long after you are dead buried and forgotten this will become a forest of soft wooded plants and palms and finally of hard wooded trees districts of this description you will find in great sweeps of Kama country for example and in the rich low regions of the base of the Sierra del Cristal and the Rumbi range you often hear the utter lifelessness of mangrove swamps commented on why I do not know for they are fairly heavily stocked with fauna though the species are comparatively few there are the crocodiles more of them than anyone wants there are quantities of flies particularly the big silent mangrove fly which lays an egg in you under the skin the egg becomes a maggot and stays there until it feels fit to enter into external life then there are slimy things that crawl with legs upon a slimy sea and any quantity of hopping mudfish and crabs and a certain mollusk and in the water various kinds of catfish birdless they are save for the flocks of grey parrots that pass over them at evening hoarsely squawking and save for this squawking of the parrots are silent all the day at least during the dry season in the wet season there is no silence night or day in West Africa but that roar of the descending deluge of rain that is more monotonous and more gloomy than any silence can be in the morning you do not hear the long low mellow whistle of the plantain eaters calling of the dawn nor in the evening the clock bird nor the handle festival sized choruses of frogs or the crickets carry on their vesper controversy of she did she didn't so fiercely on hard land but the mangrove swamp follows the general rule for West Africa and night in it is noisier than the day after dark it is full of noises grunts from I know not what splashes from jumping fish the peculiar whir of rushing crabs and quaint creaking and groaning sounds from the trees and above all in eariness the strange wine and sighing cuff of crocodiles great regions of mangrove swamps are a characteristic feature of the West African coast the first of these lies north of Sierra Leone then they occur but of smaller dimensions just fringes of river outfalls until you get to Lagos when you strike the greatest of them all the swamps of the Niger outfalls about 23 rivers in all and of the sombrero New Calabar, Bonnie, San Antonio Obopo, Falsand True Guobo, Old Calabar with the cross Aquaefe Quar rivers and Rio del Rey rivers the whole of this great stretch of coast is a mangrove swamp each river silently rolling down it's great mass of mud laden waters and constituting each in itself a very pretty problem to the navigator by it's network of intercommunicating creeks and mud bar which it forms off it's entrance by dropping it's heaviest mud it's lighter mud is carried out beyond it's bar and makes a nasty smelling ground soup of a south Atlantic ocean with froth floating in lines and patches on it for miles to seaword in this great region of swamps every mile appears like every other mile until you get well used to it and are able to distinguish the little local peculiarities of the rivers and in the winding of the creeks a thing difficult even for the most experienced navigator to do during those thick wool like mists called smokes which hang about the whole bite from November till May the dry season sometimes lasting all day sometimes clearing off 3 hours after sunrise the upper or north westerly part of the swamp is round the mouths of the Niger and it's successfully concealed from geographers down to 1830 when the series of heroic journeys made by Mungo Park Clapperton and the two landers finally solved the problem a problem that was as great and which cost more men's lives than even the discovery of the sources of the Nile that this should have been so may seem very strange to us who now have been told the answer to the riddle for the upper waters of this great river were known of before Christ and spoken of by Herodotus Pliny and Ptolemy and its mouths navigated continuously along by the seaboard by trading vessels since the 15th century but they were not recognized as belonging to the Niger some geographers held that the Senegal or the Gambia with its outfall others that it was a Zaire Congo others that it did not come out in the west coast at all but got mixed up with the Nile in the middle of the continent and so on yet when you come to know the swamps this is not so strange you find on going up what looks like a big river say Falkados two and a half miles wide at the entrance and a real bit of the Niger before you were a bit far great broad business like looking river entrances open on either side showing wide rivers mangroves walled but two thirds of them are utter frauds of an hour of your entering them some few of them do communicate with other main channels to the great upper river and others are main channels themselves but most of them intercommunicate with each other and lead nowhere in particular and you can't even get there because of their shallowness it is small wonder that the earlier navigators did not get far up them in sailing ships and that the problem had to be solved by men descending the mainstream of the Niger before it commences to what we in Devonshire should call squander itself about in all these channels and in addition it must be remembered that the natives with whom these trading vessels dealt first for slaves afterwards for palm oil were not and are not now members of the low family of savages far from it they do not go in for gentle smiles but for murdering any unprotected boats crew they happen to come across not only for a love sport but to keep white traders from penetrating to the trade producing interior and spoiling prices and the region is practically foodless. The rivers of the great mangrove swamp from the Sombrero to the Rio del Rey are now known pretty surely not to be branches of the Niger but the upper regions of this part of the Bide are much neglected by English explorers I believe the great swamp region of the Bide of Biafra is the greatest in the world and that in its immensity and gloom it has a grandeur equal to that of the Himalayas. Take any man educated or not and place him on Bonnie or Forcadeau's river in the wet season on a Sunday Bonnie for choice. Forcadeau's is good. You will keep Forcadeau's scenery indelibly lined on the tablets of your mind when a yesterday has faded from its page. After you have spent even a week waiting for the Lagos boat on its inky waters. But Bonnie, well come inside the bar and anchor off the factory seaword. There is the foam of the bar gleaming and wicked white against a lidden sky and what there is left of Breaker Island. In every other direction you will see the apparently endless walls of mangrove unvarying in color unvarying in form unvarying in height say from perspective. Beneath and between you and them lie the rotting mud waters of Bonnie River and a way up and down river miles of rotting mud waters fringed with walls of rotting mud mangrove swamp. The only break in them one can hardly call a day relief to this scenery are the gaunt black ribs of the old hulks once used as trading stations which lie exposed at low water near the shore protruding like the skeletons of great unclean beasts who have died because Bonnie water was too strong even for them. Raised on piles from the mud shore you will see the white painted factories and their great storehouses for oil each factory likely enough with its flag at half mast which does not enliven the scenery either for you know it is because somebody is dead again. Throughout and over all is the torrential downpour of the wet season rain coming down night and day with its dull roar. I have known it rained six mortal weeks in Bonnie River just for all the world as if it were done by machinery and the interval that came then was only a few wet days where after it settled itself down to work again in the good west coast waterspout poor for more weeks. While your eyes are drinking in the characteristics of Bonnie scenery you notice a peculiar smell an intensification of that smell you noticed when nearing Bonnie in the evening out at sea. That's the breath of the malarial mud laden with fever and the chances are you will be down tomorrow. If it is near evening time now you can watch it becoming incarnate creeping and crawling and gliding out from the side creeks and between the mangrove roots laying itself upon the river stretching and rolling in a kind of grim play and finally crawling up the side of the ship to come on board and leave its cloak of moisture that grows grim mildew in a few hours over all. The noise you will not be much troubled with there is only that rain a sound I have known make men who are sick with fever well nigh mad and now and again the depressing cry of the curlews which abound here. This combination is such that after six or eight hours of it you will be thankful to hear your shipmates start to work the winch. I take it you are hard of when you relish a winch and you will say let your previous experience of the world make good heavens what a place. Five times have I been now in Bonny River and I like it you always do get to like it if you live long enough to allow the strange fascination of the place to get a hold on you but when I first entered it on a ship commanded by Captain Murray in 93 in the wet season in August in spite of the confidence I had by this time acquired in his skill and knowledge of the west coast a sense of horror seized on me as I gazed upon the scene and I said to the old coaster who then had charge of my education good heavens what an awful accident we've gone and picked up the sticks he was evidently heard and said Bonny was a nice place when you got used to it and went on to discourse on the last epidemic here when nine men out of the resident 11 died in about ten days from yellow fever next to the scenery of a river commend me for cheerfulness to the local conversation of its mangrove swamp region and every truly important west African river has its mangrove swamp belt which extends inland as far as the tide waters make it brackish and which has a depth and extent from the banks depending on the configuration of the country above this belt comes uniformly a region of high forest having towards the river frontage clay cliffs sometimes high as in the case of the old Calabarad a diabo more frequently dwarf cliffs as in the forcados up at Wadi and in the Ogo for a long stretch through Kamma country after the clay cliffs region you come to a region of rapids caused by the river cutting its way through a mountain range such ranges are the Balabala causing the living stone rapids of the Congo the Sierra del Cristal those of the Ogo and many lesser rivers the Rumbaya and Oman ranges those of the old Calabar and cross rivers naturally in different parts these separate regions vary in sight the mangrove swamp may be only a fringe at the mouth of the river or it may cover hundreds of square miles the clay cliffs may extend for only a mile or so along the bank or they may as on the Ogo extend for 130 and so it is also with the rapids in some rivers for instance the Cameroons there are only a few miles of them in others there are many miles in the Ogo there are as many as 500 and these rapids may be close to the river mouth as in most of the gold coast rivers save the Ancobra and the Volta or they may be far in the interior as in the cross river where they commenced at about 200 miles and the Ogo where they commenced at about 208 miles from the sea coast this depends on the nearness or remoteness from the coastline of the mountain ranges from the west side of the continent ranges apparently of very different geological formations which have no end of different names but about which little is known in detail and now we will leave generalizations on West African rivers and go into particulars regarding one little known in England and called by its owners the French the greatest strictly equatorial river in the world the Ogo end of chapter 3