West African studies - Mary Henrietta Kingsley

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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.

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