Alone in West Africa - Mary Gaunt

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it, but at last it was done to some purpose; the book I had written with great effort caught on, and I had the money for the trip I had planned many years before when I was a small girl reading about those distant lands. I hesitated not a moment. The day I had sufficient money to make such a thing possible I went up to the City to see about a passage to West Africa.

      And now a wonderful thing happened. Such a piece of good luck as I had not in my wildest dreams contemplated. Elder Dempster, instigated by the kind offices of Sir Charles Lucas, the permanent head of the Colonial Office, who knew how keen was my desire, offered me a ticket along the Coast, so that I actually had all the money I had earned to put into land travel, and Mr. Laurie, my publisher, fired by my enthusiasm, commissioned a book about the wonderful old forts that I knew lay neglected and crumbling to decay all along the shores of the Gold Coast.

      As I look back it seems as if surely the fairy godmother who had omitted to take my youth in charge was now showering me with good gifts, or maybe, most probably, the good gifts had been offered all along and I had never recognised them. We, some of us, drive in a gorgeous coach and never see anything but the pumpkin.

      At least I was not making that mistake now. I was wild with delight and excitement when, on a cold November day, when London was wrapped in fog, I started from Euston for Liverpool. One of the brothers who I had envied in my youth, a post captain in the Navy now (how the years fly), happened to be in London and came down to the station to see me and my heaped impedimenta off.

      He understood my delight in the realisation of my dream.

      “Have you any directions for the disposal of your remains?” he asked chaffingly, as we groped our way through the London fog.

      “Oh, that will all be settled,” said I, “long before you hear anything about it”; and we both laughed. We did not think, either of us, my adventure was going to end disastrously. It would have been against all the traditions of the family to think any such thing.

      He told me how once he had gone into action with interest because he wanted to see what it would be like to be under fire, and whether he would be frightened. He didn't have much time to contemplate the situation, for presently he was so badly wounded that it took him six months to crawl off his bed, but it brought him a cross of honour from Italy. “And now,” says he, with a certain satisfaction, “I know.” So he sympathised. He felt that whatever happened I would have the satisfaction of knowing.

      It is hardly necessary to describe to an English reader Liverpool on a cold, grey morning in November. There is the grey sky and the grey streets and the grey houses, and the well-to-do shivering in their wraps, and the poor shivering in their rags, all the colourless English world, that is not really colourless for those who know how to look at it, but which had driven me to sunnier lands; and there was the ship with her wet decks, her busy officers in comforters and sea-boots, her bare-footed sailors, and her gangways crowded with cargo, baggage, and numbers of bewildered passengers themselves.

      And I think as we crowded into the smoking-room for warmth I was the only enthusiastic person among them. The majority of the passengers on board s.s. Gando actually didn't want to go to West Africa.

      It seems strange, but so it was; the greater part of them, if they could have afforded to stay at home, would actually have stayed. I was inclined to be impatient with them. Now I forgive them. They know not what they do. It is a pity, but it can be remedied.

      The Gando was not a mail boat. I had chosen her because she called at Dakar, and I thought I would like to go if possible to the first settlement on the Coast, and I wanted to see how the French did things. I may say here I never got to Dakar—still it is something to be looked forward to in the future, to be done when next I write a book that pays—for on board the Gando was Sir George Denton, the Governor of the Gambia, surely the nicest governor ever lucky colony had, and for such an important person the ship went a little out of her way and called first at Bathurst, port and capital of the Gambia colony.

      Now, I had a letter of introduction to Sir George and I presented it, and he promptly asked me to come ashore with him. I had never thought of staying in the Gambia beyond the day or two the ship would take to discharge her cargo—“a potty little colony,” as I had heard it called, and it hardly seemed worth while to waste my time in a miniature Thames. How the Governor laughed when he found out my appalling ignorance, and how ashamed I was when I found it out!

      “The Thames,” said he; “well, we only hold the mouth of the river about four hundred miles up, but the Gambia is at least a thousand miles in extent, and may be longer for all I know.”

      I apologised to the Gambia.

      “But could I see the river?”

      “Why, of course; we'll send you up in the Mansikillah, the Government steamer”; and I accepted his invitation with alacrity and with gratitude.

      Truly, my fairy godmother was more than waving her wand. I hadn't left English shores a week, and here was an invitation to go four hundred miles into the interior of the continent of my dreams.

      We went first to the Canary Islands, the islands of the blest of the ancients, but the Canaries were as nothing to me; they have been civilised too long. They were only a stepping-stone to that other land, the land of romance, that I was nearing at last.

      And now I have an apology to make, an apology which very few people will understand, but those few will, and to them it is a matter of such importance that I must make it. I went to see a savage land. I went to seek material for the only sort of story I can write, and to tell of the prowess of the men who had gone before and left their traces in great stone forts all along three hundred miles of coast. I found a savage land, in some parts a very wild land indeed, but I found what I had never expected, a land of immense possibilities, a land overflowing with wealth, a land of corn and wine and oil. I expected swamp and miasma, heat, fever, and mosquitoes. I found these truly, but I found, too, a lovely land, an entrancingly lovely land in places; I found gorgeous nights and divine mornings, and I found that the great interest of West Africa lay not in the opportunity it gave for vivid descriptions of heroes who fought and suffered and conquered, or fought and suffered and died, but in showing its immense value to the English crown in describing a land where every tropical product may be grown, a land with a teeming population and a generous soil, a land in fact that, properly managed, should supply raw material for half the workshops in England, a land that may be made to give some of its sunlight to keep alight the fires on English hearths in December, a land that as yet only the wiser heads amongst us realise the value of.

      “A man comes to West Africa,” said a Swiss to me once, “because he can make in ten years as much as he could make in thirty in England.”

      That is the land I found, and I apologise if I have ever written or thought of it in any other way.

      “The White Man's Grave,” say many still. But even the all-powerful white man must have a grave in the end. Live wisely and discreetly and it is, I think with wise old Zachary Macauley who ruled Sierra Leone at the end of the eighteenth century, no more likely to be in West Africa than in any other place.

      And the ship sailed on, and one morning early, before daylight, we heard the bell buoy that marks the mouth of the Gambia before lazy eyes can see there is a river, and knew that we had arrived at our destination. At last, at last I was on the very threshold of the land I had dreamed of years before.

       Table of Contents

      Rejoicing-, half-eastern and wholly tropical, on arrival of the Governor—Colonies governed and held as the Romans held their colonies of Britain—Great g-ulf between the black and the white—The barrier of sex—Received as a brother but declined as a brother-in-law—Lonely Fort St. James—The strenuous lives led by the men of the past—Crinted walls—The pilot's wife—Up the river in the Mungo

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