# West African Studies/Chapter 1

WEST AFRICAN STUDIES
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
There are some people who will tell you that the labour problem is the most difficult affair that Africa presents to the student; others give the first place to the influence of civilisation on native races, or to the interaction of the interests of the various white Powers on that continent, or to the successful sanitation of the said continent, or some other high-sounding thing; but I, who have an acquaintance with all these matters, and think them well enough, as intellectual exercises, yet look upon them as slight compared to the problem of the West Coast Boat.
Now life on board a West Coast steamer is an important factor in West African affairs, and its influence is far reaching. It is, indeed, akin to what the Press is in England, in that ​it forms an immense amount of public opinion. It is on board the steamer that men from one part of West Africa meet men from another part of West Africa—parts of West Africa are different. These men talk things over together without explaining them, and the consequence is confusion in idea and the darkening of counsel from the ideas so formed being handed over to people at home who practically know no part of the West Coast whatsoever.
I had an example of this the other day, when a lady said to me in an aggrieved tone, after I had been saying a few words on swamps, "Oh, Miss Kingsley, but I thought it was wrong to talk about swamps nowadays, and that Africa was really quite dry. I have a cousin who has been to Accra and he says," &c. That's the way the formation of an erroneous opinion on West Africa gets started. Many a time have I with a scientific interest watched those erroneous opinions coming out of the egg on a West Coast boat. Say, forexample, a Gold Coaster meets on the boat a River-man. River-man in course of conversation, states how, "hearing a fillaloo in the yard one night I got up and found the watchman going to sleep on the top of the ladder had just lost a leg by means of one crocodile, while another crocodile was kicking up a deuce of a row climbing up the crane." Gold Coaster says, "Tell that to the Marines." River-man says, "Perfect fact, Sir, my place swarms with crocodiles. Why, once, when I was," &c., &c. Anyhow it ends in a row. The Gold Coaster says, "Sir, I have been 7 years" (or 13 or some impressive number of years) "on the West Coast of Africa, Sir, and I have never seen a crocodile." River-man makes remarks on the existence of a toxic state wherein a man can't see the holes in a ladder, for he knows he's seen hundreds of crocodiles.
​I know Gold Coasters say in a trying way when any terrific account of anything comes before them, "Oh, that was down in the Rivers," and one knows what they mean. But don't you go away with the idea that a Gold Coaster cannot turn out a very decent tale; indeed, considering the paucity of their material, they often display the artistic Spirit to a most noteworthy degree, but the net result of the conversation on a West African steamboat is error. Parts of it, like the curate's egg, are quite excellent, but unless you have an acquaintance with the various regions of the Coast to which your various informants refer, you cannot know which is which. Take the above case and analyse it, and you will find it is almost all, on both sides, quite true. I won't go bail for the crocodile up the crane, but for the watchman's leg and the watchman being asleep on the top of the ladder I will, for watchmen will sleep anywhere; and once when I was, &c., I myself saw certainly not less than 70 crocodiles at one time, let alone smelling them, for they do swarm in places and stink always. But on the other hand the Gold Coaster might have remained 7, 13, or any other number of centuries instead of years, in a teetotal state, and yet have never seen a crocodile.
It may seem a reckless thing to say, but I believe that the great percentage of steamboat talk is true; only you must remember that it is not stuff that you can in any way use or rely on unless you know yourself the district from which the information comes, and it must, like all information—like all specimens of any kind—be very carefully ticketed, then and there, as to its giver and its district. In this it is again like the English Press, wherein you may see a statement one day that everything is quite satisfactory, say in Uganda, and in the next issue that there has been a ​massacre or some unpleasantness. The two statements have in them the connecting thread of truth, that truth that, according to Fichte, is in all things. The first shows that it is the desire in the official mind that everything should be quite satisfactory to every one; the second, that practically this blessed state has not yet arrived—that is all.
I need not, however, further dwell on this complex phase, and will turn to the high educational value of the West African steamboat to the young Coaster, holding that on the conditions under which the Coaster makes his first voyage out to West Africa largely depends whether or no he takes to the Coast. Strange as it is to me, who love West Africa, there are people who have really been there who have not even liked it in the least. These people, I fancy, have not been properly brought up in a suitable academy as I was.
Doubtless a P. & O. is a good preparatory school for India, or a Union, or Castle liner for the Cape, or an Empereza 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 ​mercial spirit. I am not by nature a commercial man myself, yet under her influence I found myself selling paraffin oil in cases in the Bights: and even to missionaries and Government officials travelling on her in between ports, she suggested the advisability of having out churches, houses, &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 of its dais, and we steered for it. Very cleverly we fielded en route a palm in pot complete, but shipped some beer and Worcester sauce bottles that came at us from the ​rack over the table, whereby we got a bit messy and sticky about the hair and a trifle cut; nevertheless, undaunted we held our course and seized the instrument, instinctively shouting "Bill," and "Bill" came, in the form of a sandy-haired steward, amiable in nature and striking in costume.
After the first three or four days, a calm despair regarding the fate of my various lost belongings and myself having come on me, and the weather having moderated, I began to make observations on what manner of men my fellow-passengers were. I found only two species of the genus Coaster, the Government official and the trading Agent, were represented; so far we had no Missionaries. I decided to observe those species we had quietly, having heard awful accounts of them before leaving England, but to reserve final judgment on them until they had quite recovered from sea-sickness and had had a night ashore. Some of the Agents soon revived sufficiently to give copious information on the dangers and mortality of West Africa to those on board who were going down Coast for the first time, and the captain and doctor chipped in ever and anon with a particularly convincing tale of horror in support of their statements. This used to be the sort of thing. One of the Agents would look at the Captain during a meal-time, and say, "You remember J., Captain?" "Knew him well," says the Captain; "why I brought him out his last time, poor chap!" then follows full details of the pegging-out of J., and his funeral, &c. Then a Government official who had been out before, would kindly turn to a colleague out for the first time, and say, "Brought any dress clothes with you?" The unfortunate new comer, scenting an allusion to a more cheerful phase of Coast life, gladly answers in the affirmative.
​"That's right," says the interlocutor; "you want them to wear at funerals. Do you know," he remarks, turning to another old Coaster, "my dress trousers did not get mouldy once last wet season."
"Get along," says his friend, "you can't hang a thing up twenty-four hours without its being fit to graze a cow on."
"Do you get anything else but fever down there?" asks a new comer, nervously.
"Haven't time as a general rule, but I have known some fellows get kraw kraw."
"And the Portuguese itch, abscesses, ulcers, the Guinea worm and the smallpox," observe the chorus calmly.
"Well," says the first answerer, kindly but regretfully, as if it pained him to admit this wealth of disease was denied his particular locality; "they are mostly on the South-west Coast." And then a gentleman says parasites are, as far as he knows, everywhere on the Coast, and some of them several yards long. "Do you remember poor C.?" says he to the Captain, who gives his usual answer, "Knew him well. Ah! poor chap, there was quite a quantity of him eaten away, inside and out, with parasites, and a quieter, better living man than C. there never was." "Never," says the chorus, sweeping away the hope that by taking care you may keep clear of such things—the new Coaster's great hope. "Where do you call—?" says a young victim consigned to that port. Some say it is on the South-west, but opinions differ, still the victim is left assured that it is just about the best place on the seaboard of the continent for a man to go to who wants to make himself into a sort of complete hospital course for a set of medical students.
This instruction of the young in the charms of Coast life is the faithfully discharged mission of the old Coasters ​on steamboats, especially, as aforesaid, at meal times. Desperate victims sometimes determine to keep the conversation off fever, but to no avail. It is in the air you breath, mentally and physically; one will mention a lively and amusing work, some one cuts in and observes "Poor D. was found dead in bed at C. with that book alongside him." With all subjects it is the same. Keep clear of it in conversation, for even a half hour, you cannot. Far better is it for the young Coaster not to try, but just to collect all the anecdotes and information you can referring to it, and then lie low for a new Coaster of your own to tell them to, and when your own turn comes, as come it will if you haunt the West Coast long enough, to peg out and be poor so and so yourself. For goodness sake die somewhere where they haven't got the cemetery on a hill, because going up a hill in shirt collars, &c., will cause your mourners to peg out too, at least this is the lesson I was taught in that excellent West Coast school.
When, however, there is no new Coaster to instruct on hand, or he is tired for ten minutes of doing it, the old Coaster discourses with his fellow old Coasters on trade products and insects. Every attention should be given to him on these points. On trade products I will discourse elsewhere; but insects it is well that the new comer should know about before he sets foot on Africa. On some West Coast boats excellent training is afforded by the supply of cockroaches on board, and there is nothing like getting used to cockroaches early when your life is going to be spent on the Coast—but I need not detain you with them now, merely remarking that they have none of the modest reticence of the European variety. They are very companionable, seeking ​rather than shunning human society, nestling in the bunk with you if the weather is the least chilly, and I fancy not averse to light; it is true they come out most at night, but then they distinctly like a bright light, and you can watch them in a tight packed circle round the lamp with their heads towards it, twirling their antennæ at it with evident satisfaction; in fact it's the lively nights those cockroaches have that keep them abed during the day. They are sometimes of great magnitude; I have been assured by observers of them in factories ashore and on moored hulks that they can stand on their hind legs and drink out of a quart jug, but the most common steamer kind is smaller, as far as my own observations go. But what I do object to in them is, that they fly and feed on your hair and nails and disturb your sleep by so doing; and you mayn't smash them—they make an awful mess if you do. As for insect powder, well, I'd like to see the insect powder that would disturb the digestion of a West African insect.
But it's against the insects ashore that you have to be specially warned. During my first few weeks of Africa I took a general natural historical interest in them with enthusiasm as of natural history; it soon became a mere sporting one, though equally enthusiastic at first. Afterwards a nearly complete indifference set in, unless some wretch aroused a vengeful spirit in me by stinging or biting. I should say, looking back calmly upon the matter, that 75 per cent. of West African insects sting, 5 per cent. bite, and the rest are either permanently or temporarily parasitic on the human race. And undoubtedly one of the many worst things you can do in West Africa is to take any notice of an insect. If you see a thing that looks like a cross between a flying lobster and the figure of Abraxas on ​a Gnostic gem, do not pay it the least attention, never mind where it is; just keep quiet and hope it will go away—for that's your best chance; you have none in a stand-up fight with a good thorough-going African insect. Well do I remember, at Cabinda, the way insects used to come in round the hanging lamp at dinner time. Mosquitoes were pretty bad there, not so bad as in some other places, but sufficient, and after them hawking came a cloud of dragon-flies, swishing in front of every one's face, which was worrying till you got used to it. Ever and anon a big beetle, with a terrific boom on, would sweep in, go two or three times round the room and then flop into the soup plate, out of that, shake himself like a retriever and bang into some one's face, then flop on the floor. Orders were then calmly but firmly given to the steward boys to "catch 'em;" down on the floor went the boys, and an exciting hunt took place which sometimes ended in a capture of the offender, but always seemed to irritate a previously quiet insect population who forthwith declared war on the human species, and fastened on to the nearest leg. It is best, as I have said, to leave insects alone. Of course you cannot ignore driver ants, they won't go away, but the same principle reversed is best for them, namely, your going away yourself.
One way and another we talked a good deal of insects as well as fever on the ———, but she herself was fairly free from these until she got a chance of shipping; then, of course, she did her best—with the flea line at Canary, mixed assortment at Sierra Leone, scorpions and centipedes in the Timber ports, heavy cargo of the beetle andmangrove-fly line, with mosquitoes for dunnage, in the Oil Rivers; it was not till she reached Congo—but of that anon.
We duly reached Canary. This port I had been to the pre​vious year on a Castle liner, having, in those remote and dark ages, been taught to believe that Liverpool boats were to be avoided; I was, so far, in a state of mere transition of opinion from this view to the one I at present hold, namely, that Liverpool West African boats are quite the most perfect things in their way, and, at any rate, good enough for me.
I need not discourse on the Grand Canary; there are many better descriptions of that lovely island, and likewise of its sister, Teneriffe, than I could give you. I could, indeed give you an account of these islands, particularly "when a West Coast boat is in from South," that would show another side of the island life; but I forbear, because it would, perhaps, cause you to think ill of the West Coaster unjustly; for the West Coaster, when he lands on the island of the Grand Canary, homeward bound, and realises he has a good reasonable chance to see his home and England again, is not in a normal state, and prone to fall under the influence of excitement, and display emotions that he would not dream of either on the West Coast itself or in England. Indeed, it is not too much to say that on the Canary Islands a good deal of the erroneous prejudice against West Africa is formed; but this is not the place to go into details on the subject.
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Santa Cruz, Teneriffe.
​the Bay of Biscay, to rescue it from the dire confusion into which it had been thrown by an esteemed and able officer and a dutiful but inexperienced Purser caused them to regard me as only a very early visitor to Canary. Now they required explanation. I said I was interested in Natural History. "Botany," they said, "They had known some men who had come out from Kew, but they were all dead now."
I denied a connection with Kew, and in order to give an air of definiteness to my intentions, remembering I had been instructed that "one of the worst things you can do in West Africa is to be indefinite," I said I was interested in the South Antarctic Drift—I was in those days.
They promptly fell into the pit of error that this was a gold mine speculation, and said they had "never heard of such a mine." I attempted to extricate them from this idea, and succeeded, except with a deaf gentleman who kept on sweeping into the conversation with yarns and opinions on gold mines in West Africa and the awful mortality among people who attended to such things, which naturally led to a prolonged discussion ending in a general resolution that people who had anything to do with gold mines generally died rather quicker even than men from Kew. Indeed, it took me days to get myself explained, and when it was accomplished I found I had nearly got myself regarded as a lunatic to go to West Africa for such reasons. But fortunately for me, and for many others who have ventured into this kingdom, the West African merchants are good-hearted, hospitable English gentlemen, who seem to feel it their duty that no harm they can prevent should happen to any one; and my first friends, among them my fellow passengers on the ———, failing in inducing ​me to return from Sierra Leone, which they strongly advised, did their best to save me by means of education. The things they thought I "really ought to know" would make wild reading if published in extenso. Led by the kindest and most helpful of captains, they poured in information, and I acquired a taste for "facts"—any sort of facts about anything—a taste when applied to West African facts, that I fancy ranks with that for collecting venomous serpents; but to my listening to everything that was told me by my first instructors, and believing in it, undoubtedly I have often owed my life, and countless times have been enabled to steer neatly through shoaly circumstances ashore.
Our captain was not a man who would deliberately alarm a new comer, or shock any one, particularly a lady; indeed, he deliberately attempted to avoid so doing. He held it wrong to dwell on the dark side of Coast life, he said, "because youngsters going out were frequently so frightened on board the boats that they died as soon as they got on shore of the first cold they got in the head, thinking it was Yellow Jack"; so he always started conversation at meal times with anecdotes of his early years on an ancestral ranch in America. One great charm about "facts" is that you never know but what they may come in useful; so I eagerly got up a quantity of very strange information on the conduct of the American cow. He would then wander away among the China Seas or the Indian Ocean, and I could pass an examination on the social habits of captains of sailing vessels that ran to Bombay in old days. Sometimes the discourse visited the South American ports, and I took on information that will come in very handy should I ever find myself wander​ing about the streets of Callao after dark, searching for a tavern. But the turn that serious conversation always drifted into was the one that interested me most, that relating to the Coast. Particularly interesting were those tales of the old times and the men who first established the palm oil trade. They were, many of them, men who had been engaged in the slave trade, and on the suppression thereof they turned their attention to palm oil, to which end their knowledge of the locality and of the native chiefs and their commercial methods was of the greatest help. Their ideas were possibly not those at present in fashion, but the courage and enterprise those men displayed under the most depressing and deadly conditions made me proud of being a woman of the nation that turned out the "Palm oil ruffians"—Drake, Hawkins, the two Roberts, Frobisher, and Hudson—it is as good as being born a foreign gentleman.
There was one of these old coasters of the palm oil ruffian type who especially interested me. He is dead now. For the matter of that he died at a mature age the year I was born, and I am in hopes of collecting facts sufficient to enable me to publish his complete biography. He lived up a creek, threw boots at leopards, and "had really swell spittoons, you know, shaped like puncheons, and bound with brass." I am sure it is unnecessary for me to mention his name.
Two of the old Coasters never spoke unless they had something useful and improving to say. They were Scotch; indeed, most of us were that trip, and I often used to wonder if the South Atlantic Ocean were broad enough for the accent of the "a," or whether strange sounds would ever worry and alarm Central America and the Brazils. ​For general social purposes these silent ones used coughs, and the one whose seat was always next to mine at table kept me in a state of much anxiety, for I used to turn round, after having been riveted to the captain's conversation for minutes, and find him holding some dish for me to help myself from; he never took the least notice of my apologies, and I felt he had made up his mind that, if I did it again, he should take me by the scruff of my neck some night and drop me overboard. He was an alarmingly powerfully built man, and I quite understood the local African tribe wishing to have him for a specimen. Some short time before he had left for home last trip, they had attempted to acquire his head for their local ju ju house, from mixed æsthetic and religious reasons. In a way, it was creditable of them, I suppose, for it would have caused them grave domestic inconvenience to have removed thereby at one fell swoop, their complete set of tradesmen; and as a fellow collector of specimens I am bound to admit the soundness of their methods of collecting! Wishing for this gentleman's head they shot him in the legs. I have never gone in for collecting specimens of hominidae but still a recital of the incident did not fire me with a desire to repeat their performance; indeed, so discouraged was I by their failure that I hesitated about asking him for his skeleton when he had quite done with it, though it was gall and wormwood to think of a really fine thing like that falling into the hands of another collector.
The run from Canary to Sierra Leone takes about a week. That part of it which lies in the track of the N.E. Trade Winds, i.e., from Canary to Cape Verde, makes you
was displaying, gracefully, a sensible choice of things; but you only feel this outward bound to the West Coast. When you come up from the Coast, fever stricken, homeward bound, you think otherwise. I do not mean to say that owing to a disintegrating moral effect of West Africa you wish to pursue the other ways mentioned in the stanza, but you do wish the Powers above would send that wind to the Powers below and get it warmed. Alas! it is in this Trade Wind zone that most men die, coming up from the Coast sick with fever, and it is to the blame of the Trade Wind that you see obituary notices—"of fever after leaving Sierra Leone." Nevertheless, outward bound the thing is delightful, and dreadfully you feel its loss when you have run through it as you close in to the African land by Cape Verde. At any rate I did; and I began to believe every bad thing I had ever heard of West Africa, and straightway said to myself, what every man has said to himself who has gone there since Hanno of Carthage, "Why was I such a fool as to come to such an awful place?" It is the first meeting with the hot breath of the Bights that tries one; it is the breath of Death himself to many. You feel when first you meet it you have done with all else; not alone is it hot, but it smells—smells like nothing else. It does not smell all it can then; by and by, down in the Rivers, you get its perfection, but off Cape Verde you have to ask yourself, "Can I live in this or no?" and ​you have to leave it, like all other such questions, to Allah, and go on.
We passed close in to Cape Verde, which consists of rounded hills having steep bases to the sea. From these bases runs out a low, long strip of sandy soil, which is the true cape. Beyond, under water, runs out the dangerous Almadia reef, on which were still, in '93, to be seen the remains of the Port Douglas, who was wrecked there on her way to Australia in '92. Her passengers were got ashore and most kindly treated by the French officers of Senegal; and finally, to the great joy and relief of their rescuers the said passengers were fetched away by an English vessel, and taken to what England said was their destination and home, Australia, but what France regarded as merely a stage on their journey to hell, to which port they had plainly been consigned.
It was just south of Cape Verde that I met my first tornado. The weather had been wet in violent showers all the morning and afternoon. Our old Coasters took but little notice of it, resigning themselves to saturation without a struggle, previous experience having taught them it was the best thing to do, dryness being an unattainable state during the wet season, and "worrying one's self about anything one of the worst things you can do in West Africa." So they sat on deck calmly smoking, their new flannel suits, which were donned after leaving the trade winds, shrinking, and their colours running on to the other deck, uncriticised even by the First officer. He was charging about shouting directions and generally making that afternoon such a wild, hurrying fuss about "getting in awnings," " tricing up all loose gear," such as deck chairs, and so on, to permanent parts of the ———, that, as nothing beyond ​showers had happened, and there was no wind, I began to feel most anxious about his mental state. But I soon saw that this activity was the working of a practical prophetic spirit in the man, and these alarms and excursions of his arose from a knowledge of what that low arch of black cloud coming off the land meant.
We were surrounded by a wild, strange sky. Indeed, there seemed to be two skies, one upper, and one lower; for parts of it were showing evidences of terrific activity, others of a sublime, utterly indifferent calm. At one part of our horizon were great columns of black cloud, expanding and coalescing at their capitals. These were mounted on a background of most exquisite pale green. Away to leeward was a gigantic black cloud-mountain, across whose vast face were bands and wreaths of delicate white and silver clouds, and from whose grim depths every few seconds flashed palpitating, fitful, livid lightnings. Striding towards us came across the sea the tornado, lashing it into spray mist with the tremendous artillery of its rain, and shaking the air with its own thunder-growls. Away to windward leisurely boomed and grumbled a third thunderstorm, apparently not addressing the tornado but the cloud-mountain, while in between these phenomena wandered strange, wild winds, made out of lost souls frightened and wailing to be let back into Hell, or taken care of somehow by some one. This sort of thing naturally excited the sea, and all together excited the ———, who, not being built so much for the open and deep sea as for the shoal bars of West African rivers, made the most of it.
In a few seconds the wind of the tornado struck us, screaming through the rigging, eager for awnings or any loose gear, but foiled of its prey by the First officer, who ​stood triumphantly on a heap of them, like a defiant hen guarding her chickens.
Some one really ought to write a monograph on the natural history of mariners. They are valuable beings, and their habits are exceedingly interesting. I myself, being already engaged in the study of other organisms, cannot undertake the work; however, I place my observations at the disposal of any fellow naturalist who may have more time, and certainly will have more ability.
The sailor officer (Nauta pelagius vel officinalis) is metamorphic. The stage at which the specimen you may be observing has arrived is easily determined by the band of galoon round his coat cuff; in the English form the number of gold stripes increasing in direct ratio with rank. The galoon markings of the foreign species are frequently merely decorative, and in many foreign varieties only conditioned by the extent of surface available to display them and the ability of the individual to acquire the galoon wherewith to decorate himself.
The English third officer, you will find, has one stripe, the second two, the first three, and the imago, or captain, four, the upper one having a triumphant twist at the top.
You may observe, perhaps, about the ship sub-varieties, having a red velvet, or a white or blue velvet band on the coat cuff; these are respectively the Doctor, Purser, and Chief engineer; but with these sub-varieties I will not deal now, they are not essentially marine organisms, but akin to the amphibia.
The metamorphosis is as clearly marked in the individual as in the physical characteristics. A third officer is a hard-working individual who has to do any ​thing that the other officers do not feel inclined to, and therefore rarely has time to wash. He in course of time becomes second officer, and the slave of the hatch. During this period of his metamorphosis he feels no compunction whatever in hauling out and dumping on the deck burst bacon barrels or leaking lime casks, actions which, when he reaches the next stage of development, he will regard as undistinguishable in a moral point of view from a compound commission of the seven deadly sins. For the deck, be it known, is to the First officer the most important thing in the cosmogony,and there is probably nothing he would not sacrifice to its complexion. One that I had the pleasure of knowing once lamented to me that he was not allowed by his then owners to spread a layer of ripe pineapples upon his precious idol, and let them be well trampled in and then lie a few hours, for this he assured me gave a most satisfactory bloom to a deck's complexion. Yet when this same man becomes a captain and grows another stripe round his cuffs, he no longer takes an active part in the ship's household affairs, that is his First officer's business, the ship's husband's affair; and should he have an inefficient First the captain expects Men and Nations to sympathise with him, just as a lady expects to be sympathised with over a bad housemaid.
There are, however, two habits which are constant to all the species through each stage of transformation from roust-about to captain. One is a love of painting. I have never known an officer or captain who could pass a paint-pot, with the brush sticking temptingly out, without emotion. While, as for Jack, the happiest hours he knows seemingly are those he spends sitting on a slung plank over the side of his ocean home, with his bare feet dangling a few feet above ​the water as tempting bait for sharks, and the tropical sun blazing down on him and reflected back at him from the iron ship's side and from the oily ocean beneath. Then he carols forth his amorous lay, and shouts, "Bill, pass that paint-pot" in his jolliest tones. It is very rarely that a black seaman is treated to a paint-pot; all they are allowed to do is to knock off the old stuff, which they do in the nerveless way the African does most handicraft. The greatest dissipation of the black hands department consists in being allowed to knock the old stuff off the steam-pipe covers, donkey, and funnel. This is a delicious occupation, because, firstly, you can usually sit while doing it, and secondly, you can make a deafening din and sing to it.
The other habit and the more widely known is the animistic view your seaman takes of Nature. Every article that is to a landsman an article and nothing more, is to him an individual with a will and mind of his own. I myself believe there is something in it. I feel sure that a certain hawser on board the ——— had a weird influence on the minds of all men who associated with it. It was used at Liverpool coming out of dock, but owing to the absence of harbours on the Coast it was not required again until it tied our ocean liner up to a tree stump at Boma, on the Congo. Nevertheless it didn't suit that hawser's views to be down below in the run and see nothing of life. It insisted on remaining on deck, and the officers gave in to it and said "Well, perhaps it was better so, it would rot if it went down below," so some days it abode on the quarter-deck, some days on the main, and now and again it would condescend to lie on the fo'castle, head in the sun. It had too its varying moods of tidiness, now neat and ​dandy coiled, now dishevelled and slummocky after association with the Kru boys.
It is almost unnecessary to remark that the relationship between the First officer and the Chief engineer is rarely amicable. I certainly did once hear a First officer pray especially for a Chief engineer all to himself under his breath at a Sunday service; but I do not feel certain that this was a display of true affection. I am bound to admit that "the engineer is messy," which is magnanimous of me, because I had almost always a row of some kind on with the First officer, owing to other people upsetting my ink on his deck, whereas I have never fallen out with an engineer—on the contrary, two Chief engineers are amongst the most valued friends I possess.
The worst of it is that no amount of experience will drive it into the head of the First officer that the engineer will want coal particularly and exactly when the ship has just been thoroughly scrubbed and painted to go into port. I have not been at sea so long as many officers, yet I know that you might as well try and get a confirmed dipsomaniac past a grog shop as the engineer past, say the Canary Coaling Company; indeed he seems to smell the Dakar coal, and hankers after it when passing it miles out to sea. Then, again, if the engineer is allowed to have a coal deposit in the forehold it is a fresh blow and grief to the First officer to find he likes to take them as Mrs. Gamp did her stimulant, when she "feels dispoged," whether the deck has just been washed down or no.
The cook, although he always has a blood feud on with the engineer concerning coals for the galley fire, which should endear him to the First officer, is morally a greater trial to the First than he is to his other victims. You ​see the cook has a grease tub, and what that means to the deck in a high sea is too painful to describe. So I leave the First officer with his pathetic and powerful appeals to the immortal gods to be told why it is his fate to be condemned to this "dog's life on a floating Hanwell lunatic asylum," commending him to the sympathetic consideration of all good housewives, for only they can understand what that dear good man goes through.
After we passed Cape Verde we ran into the West African wet season rain sheet. There ought to be some other word than rain for that sort of thing. We have to stiffen this poor substantive up with adjectives, even for use with our own thunderstorms, and as is the morning dew to our heaviest thunder "torrential downpour of rain," so is that to the rain of the wet season in West Africa. For weeks it came down on us that voyage in one swishing, rushing cataract of water. The interspaces between the pipes of water—for it did not go into details with drops—were filled with gray mist, and as this rain struck the sea it kicked up such a water dust that you saw not the surface of the sea round you, but only a mist sea gliding by. It seemed as though we had left the clear cut world and entered into a mist universe. Sky, air, and sea were all the same, as our vessel swept on in one plane, just because she capriciously preferred it. Many days we could not see twenty yards from the ship. Once or twice another vessel would come out of the mist ahead, slogging past us into the mist behind, visible in our little water world for a few minutes only as a misty thing, and then we leisurely tramped on alone "o'er the viewless, hueless deep," with our horizon alongside.
If you cleared your mind of all prejudice the thing was ​really not uncomfortable, and it seemed restful to the mind. As I used to be sitting on deck every one who came across me would say, "Wet, isn't it? Well, you see this is the wet season on the Coast"—or, "Damp, isn't it? Well, you see this is the wet season on the Coast"—and then they went away, and, I believe slept for hours exhausted by their educational efforts. After this they would come on deck and sit in their respective chairs, smoking, save that irrepressible deaf gentleman, who spent his time squirrel like between vivid activity and complete quiescence. You might pass the smoking room door and observe the soles of his shoes sticking out off the end of the settee with an air of perfect restful calm hovering over them, as if the owner were hibernating for the next six months. Within two minutes after this an uproar on the poop would inform the experienced ear that he was up and about again, and had found some one asleep on a chair and attacked him. It was during one of these days, furnishing reminiscences of Noah's flood, that conversation turned suddenly on Driver ants. One of the silent men, who had been sitting for an hour or so, with a countenance indicative of a contemplative acceptance of the penitential psalms, roused by one of the deaf man's rows, observed, "Paraffin is good for Driver ants." "Oh," said the deaf gentleman as he sat suddenly down on my ink-pot, which, for my convenience, was on a chair, "you wait till you get them up your legs, or sit down among them, as I saw Smith, when he was tired clearing bush. They took the tire out of him, he live for scratch one time. Smith was a pocket circus. You should have seen him get clear of his divided skirt. Oh lor! what price paraffin?"
The conversation on the Driver ant now became general. ​As far as I remember, Mr. Burnand, who in Happy Thoughts and My Health, gave much information, curious and interesting, on earwigs and wasps, omitted this interesting insect. So, perhaps, a précis of the information I obtained may be interesting. I learnt that the only thing to do when you have got them on you is to adopt the course of action pursued by Brer Fox on that occasion when he was left to himself enough to go and buy ointment from Brer Rabbit, namely, make "a burst for the creek," water being the quickest thing to make them leave go. Unfortunately, the first time I had occasion to apply this short and easy method with the ant was when I was strolling about by Bell-Town with a white gentleman and his wife, and we strolled into Drivers. There were only two water-barrels in the vicinity, and my companions, being more active than myself, occupied them.
While in West Africa you should always keep an eye lifting for Drivers. You can start doing it as soon as you land, which will postpone the catastrophe, not avoid it; for the song of the West Coaster to his enemy is truly, "Some day, some day, some day I shall meet you ; Love, I know not when nor how." Perhaps, therefore, this being so, and watchfulness a strain when done deliberately, and worrying one of the worst things you can do in West Africa, it may be just as well for you to let things slide down the time-stream until Fate sends a column of the wretches up your legs. This experience will remain "indelibly limned on the tablets of your mind when a yesterday has faded from its page," or, as the modern school of psychologists would have it, "The affair will be brought to the notice of your sublimated consciousness, and that part of your mind will watch for Drivers without ​worrying you, and an automatic habit will be induced that will cause you never to let more than one eye roam spellbound over the beauties of the African landscape; the other will keep fixed, turned to the soil at your feet."
The Driver is of the species Ponera, and is generally referred to the species anomma arcens. The females and workers of these ants are provided with stings as well as well-developed jaws. They work both for all they are worth, driving the latter into your flesh, enthusiastically up to the hilt; they then remain therein, keeping up irritation when you have hastily torn their owner off in response to a sensation that is like that of red hot pinchers. The full-grown worker is about half an inch long, and without ocelli even. Yet one of the most remarkable among his many crimes is that he will always first attack the eyes of any victim. These creatures seem to have no settled home; no man has seen the beginning or end, as far as I know, of one of their long trains. As you are watching the ground you see a ribbon of glistening black, one portion of it lost in one clump of vegetation, the other in another, and on looking closer you see that it is an acies instituta of Driver ants. If you stir the column up with a stick they make a peculiar fizzing noise, and open out in all directions in search of the enemy, which you take care they don't find.
These ants are sometimes also called "visiting ants," from their habit of calling in quantities at inconvenient hours on humanity. They are fond of marching at night, and drop in on your house usually after you have gone to bed. I fancy, however, they are about in the daytime as well, even in the brightest weather; but it is certain that it is in dull, wet weather, and after dusk, that you come ​across them most on paths and open spaces. At other times and hours they make their way among the tangled ground vegetation.
Their migrations are infinite, and they create some of the most brilliant sensations that occur in West Africa, replacing to the English exile there his lost burst water pipes of winter, and such like things, while they enforce healthy and brisk exercise upon the African.
I will not enter into particulars about the customary white man's method of receiving a visit of Drivers, those methods being alike ineffective and accompanied by dreadful language. Barricading the house with a rim of red hot ashes, or a river of burning paraffin, merely adds to the inconvenience and endangers the establishment.
The native method with the Driver ant is different: one minute there will be peace in the simple African home, the heavy-scented hot night air broken only by the rhythmic snores and automatic side slaps of the family, accompanied outside by a chorus of cicadas and bull frogs. Enter the Driver—the next moment that night is thick with hurrying black forms, little and big, for the family, accompanied by rats, cockroaches, snakes, scorpions, centipedes, and huge spiders animated by the one desire to get out of the visitors' way, fall helter skelter into the street, where they are joined by the rest of the inhabitants of the village, for the ants when they once start on a village usually make regular house-to-house visitation. I mixed myself up once in a delightful knockabout farce near Kabinda, and possibly made the biggest fool of myself I ever did. I was in a little village, and out of a hut came the owner and his family and all the household parasites pell mell, leaving the Drivers in possession; but the mother and father of the ​family, when they recovered from this unwonted burst of activity, showed such a lively concern, and such unmistakable signs of anguish at having left something behind them in the hut, that I thought it must be the baby. Although not a family man myself, the idea of that innocent infant perishing in such an appalling manner roused me to action, and I joined the frenzied group, crying, "Where him live?" "In him far corner for floor!" shrieked the distracted parents, and into that hut I charged. Too true! There in the corner lay the poor little thing, a mere inert black mass, with hundreds of cruel Drivers already swarming upon it. To seize it and give it to the distracted mother was, as the reporter would say, "the work of an instant." She gave a cry of joy and dropped it instantly into a water barrel, where her husband held it down with a hoe, chuckling contentedly. Shiver not, my friend, at the callousness of the Ethiopian; that there thing wasn't an infant—it was a ham!
These ants clear a house completely of all its owner's afflictions in the way of vermin, killing and eating all they can get hold of. They will also make short work of any meat they come across, but don't care about flour or biscuits. Like their patron Mephistopheles, however, they do not care for carrion, nor do they destroy furniture or stuffs. Indeed they are typically West African, namely, good and bad mixed. In a few hours they leave the house again on their march through the Ewigkeit, which they enliven with criminal proceedings. Yet in spite of the advantage they confer on humanity, I believe if the matter were put to the human vote, Africa would decide to do without the Driver ant. Mankind has never been sufficiently grateful to its charwomen, like these insect equivalents, who ​do their tidying up at supremely inconvenient times. I remember an incident at one place in the Lower Congo where I had been informed that "cork fever" was epidemic in a severe form among the white population. I was returning to quarters from a beetle hunt, in pouring rain; it was as it often is, "the wet season," &c., when I saw a European gentleman about twenty yards from his comfortable-looking house seated on a chair, clad in a white cotton suit, umbrellaless, and with the water running off him as if he was in a douche bath. I had never seen a case of cork fever, but I had heard such marvellous and quaint tales of its symptoms that I thought—well, perhaps, anyhow, I would not open up conversation. To my remorse he said, as I passed him, "Drivers." Inwardly apologising, I outwardly commiserated him, and we discoursed. It was on this occasion that I saw a mantis, who is by way of being a very pretty pirate on his own account, surrounded by a mob of the blind hurrying Drivers who, I may remark, always attack like Red Indians in open order. That mantis perfectly well knew his danger, but was as cool as a cucumber, keeping quite quiet and lifting his legs out of the way of the blind enemies around him. But the chances of keeping six legs going clear, for long, among such brutes without any of them happening on one, were small, even though he only kept three on the ground at one time. So, being a devotee of personal courage, I rescued him—whereupon he bit me for my pains. Why didn't he fly? How can you fly, I should like to know, unless you have a jumping off place?
Drivers are indeed dreadful. I was at one place where there had been a white gentleman and a birthday party in the evening; he stumbled on his way home and went ​to sleep by the path side, and in the morning there was only a white gentleman's skeleton and clothes.
However, I will dwell no more on them now. Wretches that they are, they have even in spirit pursued me to England, causing a critic to observe that brevi spatio interjecto is my only Latin, whereas the matter is this. I was once in distinguished society in West Africa that included other ladies. We had a distinguished native gentleman, who had had an European education, come to tea with us. The conversation turned on Drivers, for one of the ladies had the previous evening had her house invaded by them at midnight. She snatched up a blanket, wrapped herself round with it, unfortunately allowed one corner thereof to trail, whereby it swept up Drivers, and awful scenes followed. Then our visitor gave us many reminiscences of his own, winding up with one wherein he observed "brevi spatio interjecto, ladies; off came my breeches." After this we ladies all naturally used this phrase to describe rapid action.
There is another ant, which is commonly called the red Driver, but it is quite distinct from the above-mentioned black species. It is an unwholesome-looking, watery-red thing with long legs, and it abides among trees and bushes. An easy way of obtaining specimens of this ant is to go under a mango or other fruit tree and throw your cap at the fruit. You promptly get as many of these insects as the most ardent naturalist could desire, its bite being every bit as bad as that of the black Driver.
These red ones build nests with the leaves of the tree they reside on. The leaves are stuck together with what looks like spiders' webs. I have seen these nests the size of an apple, and sent a large one to the British Museum, ​but I have been told of many larger nests than I have seen. These ants, unfortunately for me who share the taste, are particularly devoted to the fruit of the rubber vine, and also to that of a poisonous small-leaved creeping plant that bears the most disproportionately-sized spiny, viscid, yellow fruit. It is very difficult to come across specimens of either of these fruits that have not been eaten away by the red Driver.
It is a very fascinating thing to see the strange devices employed by many kinds of young seedlings and saplings to keep off these evidently unpopular tenants. They chiefly consist in having a sheath of exceedingly slippery surface round the lower part of the stem, which the ants slide off when they attempt to climb. I used to spend hours watching these affairs. You would see an ant dash for one of these protected stems as if he were a City man and his morning train on the point of starting from the top of the plant stem. He would get up half an inch or so because of the dust round the bottom helping him a bit, then, getting no holding-ground, off he would slip, and falling on his back, desperately kick himself right side up, and go at it again as if he had heard the bell go, only to meet with a similar rebuff. The plants are most forbearing teachers, and their behaviour in every way a credit to them. I hope that they may in time have a moral and educational effect on this overrated insect, enabling him to realise how wrong it is for him to force himself where he is not welcome; but a few more thousand years, I fear, will elapse before the ant is anything but a chuckleheaded, obstinate wretch. Nothing nowadays but his happening to fall off with his head in the direction of some other vegetable frees the slippery plant from his attempts. To ​this other something off he rushes, and if it happens to be a plant that does not mind him up he goes, and I have no doubt congratulates himself on having carried out his original intentions, understanding the world, not being the man to put up with nonsense and all that sort of thing, whereas it is the plant that manages him. Some plants don't mind ants knocking about among the grown-up leaves, but will not have them with the infants, and so cover their young stuff with a fur or down wherewith the ant can do nothing. Others, again, keep him and feed him with sweetstuff so that he should keep off other enemies from its fruit, &c. But I have not space to sing in full the high intelligence of West African vegetation, and I am no botanist; yet one cannot avoid being struck by it, it is so manifold and masterly.
Before closing these observations I must just mention that tiny, sandy-coloured abomination Myriaica molesta. In South West Africa it swarms, giving a quaint touch to domestic arrangements. No reckless putting down of basin, tin, or jam-pot there, least of all of the sugar-basin, unless the said sugar-basin is one of those commonly used in those parts, of rough, violet-coloured glass, with a similar lid. Since I left South West Africa I have read some interesting observations of Sir John Lubbock's on the dislike of ants to violet colour. I wonder if the Portuguese of Angola observed it long ago and adopted violet glass for basins, or was it merely accidental and empirical. I suspect the latter, or they would use violet glass for other articles. As it is, everything eatable in a house there is completely insulated in water—moats of water with a dash of vinegar in it—to guard it from the ants from below; to guard from the ants from above, the same ​breed and not a bit better. Eatables are kept in swinging safes at the end of coir rope recently tarred. But when, in spite of these precautions, or from the neglect of them, you find, say your sugar, a brown, busy mass, just stand it in the full glare of the sun. Sun is a thing no ant likes, I believe, and it is particularly distasteful to ants with pale complexions; and so you can see them tear themselves away from their beloved sugar and clear off into a Hyde Park meeting smitten by a thunderstorm.
This kind of ant, or a nearly allied species, is found in houses in England, where it is supposed they have been imported from the Brazils or West Indies in 1828. Possibly the Brazils got it from South West Africa, with which they have had a trade since the sixteenth century, most of the Brazil slaves coming out of Congo. It is unlikely that the importation was the other way about; for exotic things, whether plants or animals, do not catch on in Western Africa as they do in Australia. In the former land everything of the kind requires constant care to keep it going at all, and protect it from the terrific local circumstances. It is no use saying to animal or vegetable, "there is room for all in Africa"—for Africa, that is Africa properly so called—Equatorial West Africa, is full up with its own stuff now, crowded and fighting an internecine battle with the most marvellous adaptations to its environment.
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