LITMIR.BIZ

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or no he takes to the Coast. Strange as it is to me, who love West Africa, there are people who have really been there who have not even liked it in the least. These people, I fancy, have not been properly brought up in a suitable academy as I was.

      Doubtless a P. & O. is a good preparatory school for India, or a Union, or Castle liner for the Cape, or an Empereza Nacioñal simply superb for a Portuguese West Coast Possession, but for the Bights, especially for the terrible Bight of Benin, “where for one that comes out there are forty stay in,” I have no hesitation in recommending the West Coast cargo boat. Not one of the best ships in the fleet, mind you; they are well enough to come home in, and so on, but you must go on a steamer that has her saloon aft on your first trip out or you will never understand West Africa.

      It was on such a steamer that I made my first voyage out in ’93, when, acting under the advice of most eminent men, before whose names European Science trembles, I resolved that the best place to study early religion and law, and collect fishes, was the West Coast of Africa.

      On reaching Liverpool, where I knew no one and of which I knew nothing in ’93, I found the boat I was to go by was a veteran of the fleet. She had her saloon aft, and I am bound to say her appearance was anything but reassuring to the uninitiated and alarmed young Coaster, depressed by the direful prophecies of deserted friends concerning all things West African. Dirt and greed were that vessel’s most obvious attributes. The dirt rapidly disappeared, and by the time she reached the end of her trip out, at Loanda, she was as neat as a new pin, for during the voyage every inch of paint work was scraped and re-painted, from the red below her Plimsoll mark to the uttermost top of her black funnel. But on the day when first we met these things were yet to be. As for her greed, her owners had evidently then done all they could to satisfy her. She was heavily laden, her holds more full than many a better ship’s; but no, she was not content, she did not even pretend to be, and shamelessly whistled and squarked for more. So, evidently just to gratify her, they sent her a lighter laden with kegs of gunpowder, and she grunted contentedly as she saw it come alongside. But she was not really entirely content even then, or satisfied. I don’t suppose, between ourselves, any South West Coast boat ever is, and during the whole time I was on her, devoted to her as I rapidly became, I saw only too clearly that the one thing she really cared for was cargo. It was the criterion by which she measured the importance, nay the very excuse for existence, of a port. If she is ever sold to other owners and sent up the Mediterranean, she will anathematise Malta and scorn Naples. “What! no palm oil!” she’ll say; “no rubber? Call yourself a port!” and tie her whistle string to a stanchion until the authorities bring off her papers and let her clear away. Every one on board her she infected with a commercial spirit. I am not by nature a commercial man myself, yet under her influence I found myself selling paraffin oil in cases in the Bights: and even to missionaries and Government officials travelling on her in between ports, she suggested the advisability of having out churches, houses, &c., in sections carefully marked with her name.

      As we ran down the Irish Channel and into the Bay of Biscay, the weather was what the mariners termed “a bit fresh.” Our craft was evidently a wet ship, either because she was nervous and femininely flurried when she saw a large wave coming, or, as I am myself inclined to believe, because of her insatiable mania for shipping cargo. Anyhow, she habitually sat down in the rise of those waves, whereby, from whatever motive, she managed to ship a good deal of the Atlantic Ocean in various sized sections.

      Her saloon, as aforesaid, was aft, and I observed it was the duty, in order to keep it dry, of any one near the main door who might notice a ton or so of the fourth element coming aboard, to seize up three cocoa-fibre mats, shut three cabin doors and yell “Bill!” After doing this they were seemingly at full liberty to retire into the saloon and dam the Atlantic Ocean, and remark, “It’s a dog’s life at sea.” I never noticed “Bill” come in answer to this performance, so I was getting to regard “Bill” as an invocation to a weather Ju Ju; but this was hasty, for one night in the Bay I was roused by a new noise, and on going into the saloon to see what it was, found the stewardess similarly engaged; mutually we discovered, in the dim light—she wasn’t the boat to go and throw away money on electric—that it was the piano adrift off its daïs, and we steered for it. Very cleverly we fielded en route a palm in pot complete, but shipped some beer and Worcester sauce bottles that came at us from the rack over the table, whereby we got a bit messy and sticky about the hair and a trifle cut; nevertheless, undaunted we held our course and seized the instrument, instinctively shouting “Bill,” and “Bill” came, in the form of a sandy-haired steward, amiable in nature and striking in costume.

      After the first three or four days, a calm despair regarding the fate of my various lost belongings and myself having come on me, and the weather having moderated, I began to make observations on what manner of men my fellow-passengers were. I found only two species of the genus Coaster, the Government official and the trading Agent, were represented; so far we had no Missionaries. I decided to observe those species we had quietly, having heard awful accounts of them before leaving England, but to reserve final judgment on them until they had quite recovered from sea-sickness and had had a night ashore. Some of the Agents soon revived sufficiently to give copious information on the dangers and mortality of West Africa to those on board who were going down Coast for the first time, and the captain and doctor chipped in ever and anon with a particularly convincing tale of horror in support of their statements. This used to be the sort of thing. One of the Agents would look at the Captain during a meal-time, and say, “You remember J., Captain?” “Knew him well,” says the Captain; “why I brought him out his last time, poor chap!” then follows full details of the pegging-out of J., and his funeral, &c. Then a Government official who had been out before, would kindly turn to a colleague out for the first time, and say, “Brought any dress clothes with you?” The unfortunate new comer, scenting an allusion to a more cheerful phase of Coast life, gladly answers in the affirmative.

      “That’s right,” says the interlocutor; “you want them to wear at funerals. Do you know,” he remarks, turning to another old Coaster, “my dress trousers did not get mouldy once last wet season.”

      “Get along,” says his friend, “you can’t hang a thing up twenty-four hours without its being fit to graze a cow on.”

      “Do you get anything else but fever down there?” asks a new comer, nervously.

      “Haven’t time as a general rule, but I have known some fellows get kraw kraw.”

      “And the Portuguese itch, abscesses, ulcers, the Guinea worm and the smallpox,” observe the chorus calmly.

      “Well,” says the first answerer, kindly but regretfully, as if it pained him to admit this wealth of disease was denied his particular locality; “they are mostly on the South-west Coast.” And then a gentleman says parasites are, as far as he knows, everywhere on the Coast, and some of them several yards long. “Do you remember poor C.?” says he to the Captain, who gives his usual answer, “Knew him well. Ah! poor chap, there was quite a quantity of him eaten away, inside and out, with parasites, and a quieter, better living man than C. there never was.” “Never,” says the chorus, sweeping away the hope that by taking care you may keep clear of such things—the new Coaster’s great hope. “Where do you call—?” says a young victim consigned to that port. Some say it is on the South-west, but opinions differ, still the victim is left assured that it is just about the best place on the seaboard of the continent for a man to go to who wants to make himself into a sort of complete hospital course for a set of medical students.

      This instruction of the young in the charms of Coast life is the faithfully discharged mission of the old Coasters on steamboats, especially, as aforesaid, at meal times. Desperate victims sometimes determine to keep the conversation off fever, but to no avail. It is in the air you breath, mentally and physically; one will mention a lively and amusing work, some one cuts in and observes “Poor D. was found dead in bed at C. with that book alongside him.” With all subjects it is the same. Keep clear of it in conversation, for even a half hour, you cannot. Far better is it for the young Coaster not to try, but just to collect all the anecdotes and information you can referring to it, and then lie low for a new Coaster of your own to tell them to, and when your own turn

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