# Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons/Chapter 16

CHAPTER XVI
CONGO FRANÇAIS
Before leaving the Ogowé region I must attempt to give you a general résumé of its geography; for my own journals kept, while in it, contain this information in so scattered a state, that no one save an expert in this bit of Africa would understand the full bearing of them; and it would have to be an enthusiastic expert who would take the trouble of piecing the information together.
My reason for going into these geographical details at all, is that I think I may say no region in Africa, certainly no region of equal importance, is so little known in England. The history of the exploration of the upper regions of the Ogowé may be written in the life of one man, that of the greatest of all West African explorers, M. de Brazza; and it is impossible for any one to fail to regard him with the greatest veneration, when one knows from personal acquaintance the make of country and the dangerousness of the native population with which he has had to deal and with which he still deals, restlessly but wisely pushing always onwards to expand the territories of the country of his ​adoption, France. It requires indeed some one who has personally sampled Africa to form a just estimate of the value of certain bits of work from what I may call an artistic standpoint. The "arm-chair explorer" may be impressed by the greatness of length of the red line route of an explorer; but the person locally acquainted with the region may know that some of those long red lines are very easily made in Africa—thanks to the exertions of travellers who have gone before, or to what one of my German friends once poetically called the lamblike-calfheadedness of the natives, or to the country itself being of a reasonably traversable nature. In other regions a small red line means 400 times the work and danger, and requires 4,000 times the pluck, perseverance and tact. These regions we may call choice spots.
I do not mean to depreciate the value of extensive travel in Africa, far from it. It has an enormous value and so obvious a one that I need not dwell on it; but the man who combines the two—who makes his long red line pass through great regions of choice spots—deserves especial admiration; and when in addition to traversing them, he attains power over their natives, and retains it, welding the districts into a whole, making the flag of his country respected and feared therein, he is a very great man indeed and such a man is de Brazza. Such a man Mr. Stanley might have been had it not been for matters I will not enter into here, for it would involve us in a discussion on the Congo Free State.
M. de Brazza's first journey into the interior of Congo Français was made in 1875-78 when, accompanied by MM. Ballay and Marche he reached the upper waters of the Ogowé and then pushed east and northwards, discovering two new rivers, the Alima and the Licona, both of which he surmised were tributaries of the Congo. He at once saw the importance of these rivers to the French possessions; for, by them, access would be obtained to the Congo, above the great barrier of navigation on that river, the Livingstone rapids. He convinced the authorities at home of this and was commanded by the African Association (French Committee) and ​by the Government to make a second journey in order to trace the Alima to the Congo; to establish civilising stations, one on the Ogowé and one on the Congo; and to cultivate the friendship of the native tribes throughout the region.
The Chambers voted a grant towards the expenses, and he left France for Africa on the 27th of December, 1879—M. Ballay, his companion on the first journey, remaining behind to complete the preparations for the exploration, more especially the fitting out of a steamer that was to be used in the navigation of the Ogowé and the Alima. When the said steamer should be ready in sections, M. Ballay was to bring it out and join M. de Brazza. There is always a steamer in sections in every story of a good expedition, and that steamer is invariably a curse that costs men's lives, and M. de Brazza's steamer was no exception to the rule; but of that hereafter.
Two Europeans went out with de Brazza, M. Noguez and and M. Michaud. On landing on the Coast he organised his expedition at Gaboon, and ascended the Ogowé, the worst part of the journey being from Lembarene to Boué, on account of the Fans all along this region, and the rapids along a great part of it, these having to be navigated through the Sierra de Cristal, owing to the wildness of the banks preventing portage. When these mountains are passed, however, there is an open park-like country where carriers can be employed, and you are no longer at the entire mercy of the flying furious river that makes this bit of the voyage from Njole to Boué a peculiarly choice spot. Beyond the Sierra del Cristal, moreover, de Brazza got in touch with the Okanda and Adooma tribes people less ferocious and more helpful than the Fans; and over these two tribes he attained a great influence, arranging with them the regular system of communication with Njole that at present goes on, the Adoomas conveying supplies up and down through the region of the rapids.
​He fixed on a point for his first station at the confluence of the Passa with the Ogowé, and founded there the station now know as Franceville in June, 1880. In the middle of the same month he sent down to the coast M. Michaud with 770 men and forty-four canoes to meet M. Ballay, whom he expected would by this time have arrived at Gaboon with the sections of the steamer; and leaving M. Noguez at Franceville to get on with making it, de Brazza started off in a way characteristic of him, alone, with a small party of AN UPPER OGOWÉ VILLAGE. natives for the Congo; although he fully expected to meet with opposition from the Apfuru tribe, who had on his previous journey barred the way to him down the Alima. He says he "relied on his growing reputation for friendliness, throughout the region, for softening the hostility of the natives." He may have done so; but if he had not had time to acquire it, de Brazza would have gone on, relying on something else, his luck, most likely—that luck which, as the story on the Ogowé goes, once saved him from immolation at the hands of the Fans by ​arranging for a pyrotechnic display to take place without human aid, with a quantity of fireworks he had with him.
Two or three days' journey from Franceville going east, the nature of the country changes. To the clayey soil of the Ogowé basin and its richly wooded moist valleys succeeds a sandy, arid, hilly country, with here and there in the neighbourhood of a village a group of palm trees.
BATEKE PORTERS, OGOWÉ.
This is the aspect of the country which forms the watershed between the Ogowé and the tributaries of the Upper Congo. On the northern bank of the Congo, and on the southern bank of the Congo, I found this same make of country, more seaward, in the Pallaballa mountains above Matadi.
De Brazza remarks it is a singular fact that narrow sandy tracts of country are everywhere inhabited by one and the same tribe, the Bateke, reputed, probably erroneously he says, to be cannibals.
​When he had passed the Leketi, a southern branch of the Alima, his route lay across the plateau of Achicuya, an elevated district lying about 2,600 feet above sea level, and separated from another similar plateau (the Aboma) by the river Mpama. (Mpama-Ox.)
The chief of Achicuya received the traveller in a friendly manner, and a similar reception awaited him on reaching the Abooma tribe. These latter people he describes as being the handsomest and bravest he had met; and it was from them he received information regarding the Congo and the powerful chief Makoko, whose sovereignty the Abooma acknowledge.
Leaving the Abooma district he travelled along the Lefini (the Lawson of Mr. Stanley), and just as he was finishing the construction of a raft to descend the Lefini, he received messengers from King Makoko with friendly greetings and offers of assistance. This much facilitated his further proceedings. He descended the Lefini with the envoy as far as Ngampo on his raft, and then landed and went overland for two days across an uninhabited tableland. He states his march over the sun-scorched plateau was most wearisome; and that two days' march must have been a choice spot, if, as I conjecture, this tableland was of the same formation as those truly horrible Pallaballa mountains, that have in their composition an immense percentage of mica, which glistens in the sun like diamond dust, and dazzles you, and which, bare of vegetation, reflect back the burning heat in a scorching way, forming a layer of hot air, and making the whole desolate, hideous scene vibrate before your eyes as you can see things vibrating through the hot air over a line of gas jets. Never shall I forget my short experience in the Pallaballa range. Never have I in all West Africa come across a thing that came up to one's ideals of the infernal region so completely. And the nights, when you had the whole earth round you exhaling a heavy, hot breath with the heat it
[To face p. 358.
CARAVAN FOR STANLEY POOL, PALLABALLA MOUNTAINS, CONGO
​sheet of water, the silver sheen of which contrasted with the sombre hue of the lofty mountains around. Towards the N.W. the waterline extended to the horizon, and the river swept in a noiseless slow current past the foot of the hills beneath."
His first object on reaching the banks of the Great River was to establish peaceful relations with the Apfuru and other tribes of the 'Ubanji nation. The principal tribe of this family are the Alhialumo "sailors of the Congo," who are born, live, and die with their families on board the fine canoes, in which they carry on their trade in ivory and other goods between the Alima and Stanley Pool. This was so on de Brazza's first visit. Now I am informed that trade route is to a considerable extent diverted.
De Brazza addressed himself to Ngampey their chief, who seemed inclined to be friendly. "Choose," said he, "between the cartridge and the flag I send you. One will be the sign of a war without mercy, the other a symbol of a peace as profitable to you as to us." He left the tribes on this side time to think over the answer and went on to King Makoko.
De Brazza here says he felt his rights of priority and those of France now clearly established over the whole region between the Ogowé, the Equator, and the Congo; and he next wished to extend this over the left bank of the Congo, the N., as far as the confluence of the river Djué to the south of Stanley Pool. In this part of the country the plateaus are more fertile and better cultivated than those in the interior and the population denser and equally pacific. "The Mussulman element," says de Brazza, "being unknown in this region, European civilisation need not expect to encounter the hostility, hatred, and fanaticism which oblige the French, for instance, not to advance except with armed forces from the Senegal to the Niger. There is nothing to be feared there except the natural opposition of the natives to whatever is new."
Makoko received him with all available magnificence, and he remained twenty-five days with the chief and for a longer period in his provinces, and "could not have been better treated."
​In the end a treaty was concluded by which the king placed his states under the protection of France, and ceded a tract of country, to be selected by M. de Brazza, on the shores of the Congo. The treaty was ratified on a day appointed, in the presence of all the vassal chiefs of Makoko. On its completion the grand fetish master put a little earth in a box and presented it to M. de Brazza, saying, "Take this earth and carry it to the great chief of the whites. It will remind him that we belong to him." De Brazza then planted the French flag before Makoko's house, saying, "This is the symbol of friendship and protection which I will leave with you. Wherever waves this emblem of peace there is France, and she will cause to be respected the rights of all those whom it covers."
I have no hesitation in saying that as far as Congo Français goes (I have no experience of other French possessions), this high-flown statement is true; and although de Brazza did a good thing for France that day, Makoko also did well, for he saved himself from the Congo Free State.
Soon after the signing of this treaty with Makoko, de Brazza left him and attended a meeting of the 'Ubanji chiefs at Nganchuno on the Congo. The chiefs came in an unsettled state of mind, and showed at first much opposition to the conclusion of a treaty, expressing their mistrust on account of a previous white traveller who had shot a member of the tribe and escaped down river too swiftly to be followed. However, after a second grand meeting, a treaty of peace was arranged and war was buried. This ceremony consisted in each chief and each man of de Brazza's small party burying some implement of war in a hole, over which a quickly growing tree was afterwards planted. French colours were distributed among the chiefs and the treaty definitely agreed to.
De Brazza then set off to choose the site for the station on the Congo, making five days' journey down the river to the west into Stanley Pool, and finally selecting Ntamo, now known as Brazzaville. He took possession of this site duly under his agreement with Makoko, and hoisted the French flag here on the 1st of October 1880. Its ​selection has been subjected to a good deal of criticism, but it is clear that it is a commanding strategical position, for save with the goodwill of Brazzaville no one can pass from the Upper to the Lower Congo via the river. The Livingstone rapids of the Congo, that commence to the west-ward of it, are indeed permanent bars to steam vessels navigating the Congo, for about 200 miles; yet they are not bars to canoe transport because the banks of the Congo, unlike those of the Ogowé, permit of portage.
It must be confessed that these rapids of the Congo are a difficulty. The waters collected by the great river in its catchment basin of 1,600,000 square miles come through a narrow channel 170 miles in length, cut by them in the rocks of the Pallaballa range, and take the descent of 1,000 feet in fierce stretches of rushing water, broken by thirty-two distinct cataracts. But to overcome these a railway is in course of construction from Matadi to Stanley Pool; for the courage and good seamanship of Captain Murray demonstrated the fact that it was possible to take an ocean-going steamer up through the whirlpools of Hell's Cauldron, to Matadi, close to the foot of the last of the thirty-two cataracts, the Yellala, and 120 miles from the sea. But it is certain that the Congo Free State must soon be split up among the Powers in Africa; and then the long stretch of country from Brazzaville to the 'Ubanji confluence already in the possession of France, thanks to M. de Brazza, will give France command over the whole district of the Middle Congo, i.e. that district draining its trade into the Congo for the 1,000 miles that separate the Livingstone Falls from the Stanley Falls.
Access to the right bank of the Congo at Stanley Pool is undoubtedly easier; but those southern regions, not now in the possession of the Congo Free State, belong to Portugal, and Portugal would have little chance of obtaining a tract of country when her rival for it is France. Portugal has already been almost completely ousted from the Congo, which her great explorer Diogo Cão discovered in 1482, but she still holds the southern bank of the Congo, from the sea to a point (Nkoi) just below Matadi; and a very considerable quantity of the Congo trade filters into her country owing ​to her imposts being more reasonable than those of the Free State.
I will not here attempt to go further into the political side of de Brazza's journey and its attendant conquests for France, but will pass on to his return journey to the Coast.
ADOOMAS, UPPER OGOWÉ.
He left a Senegal sergeant and a few men at Brazzaville and proceeded to explore a new route from the Stanley Pool to the sea. This was by the valley of the N'Duo, which empties itself into the Niari and leads from Ntamo to the Atlantic in a nearly due westerly direction. He thought this would ​be the easiest way to the sea; but it was so entirely unexplored that the very name under which the Niari enters the sea was unknown. Moreover the route proved so hazardous that he was compelled to continue his journey down the Congo, on his way meeting with Mr. Stanley, who gave him a cordial reception.
From the mouth of the Congo he sailed to Gaboon, reaching Libreville on the 15th of December, 1880. Here a cruel disappointment awaited him, needless to say connected with that steamer. Neither de Ballay nor the steamer had arrived, and a very bitter nuisance this must have been, and one that would have caused many a man to throw up the whole undertaking; for he had sent down those 770 men and 44 canoes, promising them divers wonderful manifestations of white man's power and plenty of work, and there was neither; and de Brazza owned it was with painful feelings that he found himself so ill supported, and obliged, instead of returning to Europe to rest from his fatigues, having performed himself all he had undertaken to do, to hasten again into the interior in order to carry reinforcements to the men left in charge of the two stations he had founded, distant, the one 500, the other 800 miles.
He started back into the interior with a party strengthened by two French sailors, Guiral and Amiel, and a number of native carpenters, gardeners, &c. In ascending the Ogowé for the third time his canoe was upset at the Boué Falls and he suffered much from illness brought on by having to work long in the water to save his baggage. Arriving at Franceville in February, 1881, he found there 100 natives satisfactorily established and engaged in various industries. The gardens had been well cared for and the settlement was self-supporting. De Brazza however had not lost faith in that steamer even yet, and he set about preparing means of transport for the thing when it should arrive. There were seventy-five miles of portage intervening between the station Franceville and the confluence of the Obia and Lekiba with the Alima, the point chosen for the commencement of the navigation of the Alima. The clearing of a path for the transport of the sections of the steamer was accomplished by the aid of 400 labourers super-intended by Michaud, Guiral, and Amiel.
​The organisation of a service of transport was then proceeded with, a business of some difficulty owing to the jealousies of the tribes with regard to the profits of conveyance over different sections of the route. M. de Brazza then thought to surmount this difficulty by establishing a body of carriers of his own, but various obstacles intervened to prevent his accomplishing this forthwith, and in the meantime he had to send supplies to Brazzaville on the Congo. While thus engaged he was fortunately joined on the 27th of September by M. Mizon of the French navy, who had been sent from France in company with de Ballay. He brought de Brazza news that the latter was detained at Gaboon and that the steamer had been discovered to have defects in construction that would prevent her joining the expedition for a long time.
M. de Brazza then resolved to leave Franceville in charge of M. Mizon and go off on an entirely new bit of exploration. He was by now, after those three voyages up and down them, aware that the rapids of the Ogowé are not what you might call a safe and pleasant route to Franceville, particularly for heavy goods; and he reverted to his old idea, that he had had to abandon testing when leaving Brazzaville in 1880, namely that a safer route to the sea-coast than the Ogowé affords, existed down the Niari valley. He first went to Nhango on the route between the Ogowé and the Congo, near the M'paka country of the latter river. There he learnt that Mr. Stanley had been attempting to persuade the chiefs of the Bateke to withdraw from their engagements with France and endeavouring to win over Malamine, the chief of Ntamo (Brazzaville). But de Brazza did not surmise there was any danger of Mr. Stanley succeeding in either of these diplomatic ventures, so proceeded on his exploration.
He started at the end of January, 1882, passing over mountains by the sources of the Leketi and M'paka, and on the 8th of February he discovered one of the sources of the Ogowé at a point where it formed a mere rivulet of water. A month later he arrived on the banks of his desired Niari, which proved to be a beautiful river 270 feet broad and to enter the ocean under the name of Quilliou (Kouilou or ​Killiou) just north of Loango. Not far from its left bank were found mines of copper and lead.
A KONGAS, THE CHIEF GONIONE, AND HIS TWO WIVES.
Along this left bank he continued his march, finding to his great satisfaction that the river, as far as its confluence with the Lalli, flowed without rapids or falls along a broad, fertile, and densely peopled valley, lying athwart the great parallel terraces over which, ladderlike, the neighbouring Congo has cut its bed on its way to the ocean. About sixty miles further the Niari tends a little towards the north and he quitted its banks after having crossed its little affluent the ​Nkenge. From here he began the ascent of the plateau, where the villagers no longer received him and his party with the friendliness he had encountered along the valley of the Niari. The mistrust with which he had to contend led at last to an hostile encounter at the village of Kimbendge, in which six of his men were wounded, and the expedition was obliged to beat a retreat. They marched without taking food, in a pouring rain all night long, going south, finding themselves in the morning at the summit of a mountain range at the foot of which extended a verdant plain through which flowed the Lundima (Loema). In the plain they passed a group of villages named Mboko, where copper ore is found on the surface; and then journeying westwards arrived at Kimbunda, a Basundi village situated between Lundima and the Loango. This place is within five days' march of Boma (Emboma) on the Congo on one side and Landana on the Atlantic. The party arrived, exhausted with the fatigues of their long and difficult march, at Landana on the 17th of April, 1882.
M. de Brazza claimed by this expedition a tract of country one-third the area of France as an addition to his previous discoveries, and he insisted on the importance of the position at Ntamo (Brazzaville) which he said was the key to the whole western interior of Equatorial Africa. It was in the hands of France and the route viâ the Niari was the best road to it and the best line for a railway, which ought to be undertaken by the French as the most effectual means of opening up the country.
The construction of this railroad has been undertaken, and that it has not been already completed I think, no doubt, arises from the idea that the Congo Free State will shortly fall into the hands of France, and then the route up the Congo, with a railway round the Livingstone rapids, will be the best and shortest way to Brazzaville, and things in general on the Middle Congo. However until that day dawns France has done much to utilise the Niari valley route and regular convoys now use it to the interior. De Brazza has of late years been ceaselessly working at the development and expansion of Congo Français to the north and east, particularly to the establishment of a safe and easy line of transport to the ​southern shores of Lake Chad. With the insight into African geographical problems so characteristic of him, de Brazza saw the Sanga river was more likely to afford a route to the central Soudan from the Congo than the apparently more important M'ubungi. Camfurel was the first man sent to trace the course of the Sanga, and he and his expedition were annihilated. Furneaux was then sent and succeeded in getting several days' journey above the rapids of the Sanga when he fell in with war, and got one white and seventeen black men of his party killed. Then he returned to de Brazza, who went up the river himself as far as the rapids and established a station there that black traders now frequent. He sent a lieutenant and fifty-five men on, and this good man got right through to Yola on the Niger and then returned to de Brazza safely. On his way I may remark, as proof that he had struck an interior trade-route, he met traders who had passports from Algeria on the Mediterranean, and these he countersigned. Some of these people accompanied him, and when he returned to Brazzaville, horses from the Soudan were photographed alongside a steamer on the Congo.
He reported that as soon as you got out of the Ogowé forests to the north, the country became extremely healthy and none of the expedition suffered from sickness, and that this country abounds with cattle and horses. The lieutenant must have been traversing high land, for a part of the time while between the Ogowé and the Niger; but that the country is healthy for white men I expect is only because there are no white men there for it to kill and make a death-rate. I do not believe that any part of Africa between the Zambesi and the Sahara is healthy for white men.
There is in course of construction a railroad which is to open up the route from Congo Français to Lake Chad, following the course of the Sanga; and this when completed will form a line of markets that must be of great importance from the richness of the country they will drain. It should be the trade-route for the whole north central African ivory and other trades; and there is no doubt de Brazza is manifesting his usual far-sightedness in turning his attention to the expansion of Congo Français to the north-cast, and ​unless Providence in the shape of death, or Sir George Goldie—de Brazza's only rival in administrative ability in West Africa—intervenes, he will succeed in uniting Congo Français with the French Soudan. De Brazza has done so much and done it so well that I, as a woman, may be excused a sentimental hope that he may live to see his edifice of power completed.
After sketching the work of de Brazza the completer, we must turn to the work of Du Chaillu, the inaugurator of geographical knowledge in this region; but I will only briefly sketch Du Chaillu's work, because his books are accessible to English readers and not given in scattered journals of geographical societies, as are the notices of de Brazza.
Du Chaillu's works should be read carefully by every one interested in the forest region of Africa, for you find in them a series of wonderfully vivid pictures of life, both of man and beast, and of the country itself with its dense, gloriously beautiful, gloomy forests and its wild rivers, as true in all these things as on the day on which Du Chaillu wrote. On his return to England great doubt was cast upon his accounts; but I have no hesitation in saying that I never came across anything while in his region that discredited Du Chaillu's narrative on the whole. His deductions from the things he
[To face p. 369.
THE FALLS OF THE NGUNIE AT SAMBA.
​have great compensations for this. We have no awful rows with each other in inconvenient places in Africa, or on our return home, and we can say to our critics: "Have you been there? No! Then go there or to whatever place you may happen to believe in! and till then—shut up." Mr. Winwood Reade accepted this sort of answer from Du Chaillu and went down to the regions of the Panavia Bight and Gaboon with a pre-determination to prove Du Chaillu was wrong; and I am bound to say I think he utterly failed. He did not follow Du Chaillu's course throughout by any means, doing little more than going in behind Corisco Bay and up the Gaboon estuary and the 'Como, a very good bit of work, and charmingly described in his Savage Africa, but he was not in the country rich in gorillas in either place.
Du Chaillu's journeys may be divided into two main groups, one of which is described in his first book, Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa, 1861. During this journey he ascended the Muni River as far as the Osheba country, the 'Como and Boqué as far as the Sierra del Cristal, marched overland from the Gaboon estuary to the rivers of the Delta of the Ogowé, and did a great deal of work in the whole of this great dangerous network; going up and down the N'Poulounay and the O'Rembo and striking the upper waters of the Ngunie, going to and fro among the tribes of the Sierra del Cristal and Achangoland mountains. On his second journey, made in 1864-65, he was entirely in regions south of the Ogowé. He went into Fernan Vaz, followed the O'Rembo for some little distance, and then struck away east by south, crossing the Ngunie at a point south of the spot he had reached on it when he discovered this river in 1858. Thence he went on into the mountains of Achangoland, where he was attacked and had to beat a very hurried retreat to the ocean.
Nearly the whole of Du Chaillu's two journeys were ​through successions of choice spots. Many of his districts have not been revisited. In a few I was his immediate successor.
By ill-luck M. Du Chaillu on both journeys just missed striking the main stream of the Ogowé, but he knew that it was there, and the information he brought back of the existence of a great river whose delta he recognised he had been exploring, was received in France with a more proper spirit MOUNT LOPE, OGOWÉ. than in England or Germany; and in 1862 MM. Serval, Bellay, and Griffon were commanded by the French government to trace the Nazareth, which Du Chaillu regarded as the chief mouth of his great river. This they did almost to the bend of it by Elivã z'onlange (called by Du Chaillu Anengué); but they failed to reach the junction of the Ogowé (called by Du Chaillu the Okanda) with the great river discovered by Du Chaillu, the Ngunie, which junction he ​had surmised occurred. The confluence of these two rivers, as I have already described, is just above Lembarene, some twenty miles from the point this expedition reached. M. Serval, however, after the return of the expedition to Gaboon, made another attempt, and crossed by land from the Gaboon to the Ogowé, reaching Orongo a little above Osoamokita, definitely proving that the Gaboon estuary was not a mouth of the Ogowé and quite disconnected from it. In 1864 another expedition sent by the French Government succeeded in reaching the confluence of the Ngunie with the Ogowé (the Ngouyai with the Okanda of Du Chaillu). From those days, up to the time of de Brazza, the most important worker on the Ogowé has been Mr. R. B. N. Walker, of whose journey I regret to say no full account has been published, for it was a most remarkable one, undertaken before the Fans on the river bank had been overawed by M. de Brazza. Mr. Walker reached Lope, the furthest point attained until de Brazza's 1889 journey, and in addition to this, made many exploring expeditions in the region. Then come the missionary journeys of Dr. Nassau, who was well-established up at Talagouga with his house and church built when de Brazza came by in 1879. Since the latter opened up the district, the only travellers I know of, passing through the region up the Ogowé rapids, are MM. Alegret and Tesseris, who made a journey right up the Ogowé and out on to the Congo with a view to selecting a site for mission stations, and to these gentlemen I am indebted for many photographs of native types on the Upper Ogowé. Financial reasons have, I believe, militated against the establishment of further stations above Talagouga by the Mission Évangélique, to which these gentlemen belong; and this station, and a Roman Catholic Mission ​at a place called Lestourville, close to Franceville, established in memory of a Governor who died, are now the outposts of Christianity in these West African regions. The main results of these travels on the Ogowé may be summarised as having shown that the Ogowé is one of the great rivers of Africa, the largest river between the Niger and the Congo, the largest strictly Equatorial river in the world, its course lying fairly neatly along the line for over 700 miles. It has a catchment basin roughly computed—for its basin is not yet thoroughly explored—of 130,000 square miles, and its discharge of water into the Atlantic is, according to the season, between 360,000 and 1,750,000 cubic feet per second.
Its main affluents are, in order of merit, the Ngunie entering on its south bank, and the Ivindo, and the Okanda, both of which enter on its north bank.
The Ogowé is, on the whole, more of the nature of the Congo than of the Niger, save that unlike the Congo, it has an immense delta. This delta commences at Lembarene, just below the point where it receives the waters of the Ngunie river. The delta region is tremendously interesting both in flora, fauna, and fetish; but it is tradeless, and its main population is made up of malaria microbes and mosquitoes, and it is supremely damp. Indeed the whole of it and the country from the Gaboon to Cette Kama, save the strange bubble-shaped mountains like Mount Sangato, Mount Mandji and Mount Okoneto, is under water when the Ogowé and its neighbouring rivers come down in the "long wet"; and the lakes in the Lembarene district, Elivã Ayzingo and the still larger Elivă z'onlange, and all the string of lakes along the O'Rembo, Ungo, and Vinue overflow into the forest. The Sierra del Cristal cuts the course of the Ogowé just above Njole, forming the region of the rapids. There are 500 miles of these rapids, rendering navigation impossible in any other craft ​but a canoe, and highly perilous work in that, I assure you, from personal experience; and when you get above them the river is not much use except for canoes, until you get to Franceville; beyond Franceville it is only available for canoes in the wet season, but you do not want the Ogowé, being in touch with the great rivers flowing transversely to it into the Congo.
Below the rapids, however, the Ogowé is a grand waterway, as waterways go on the West Coast. You can go up its main stream to Njole for over 200 miles, and up its affluent the Ngunie as far as Samba, where there are lovely falls. Above these falls and a set of rapids the Ngunie would be again available for small steamboats, but there are none there at present.
In addition to the main stream of the Ogowé, you can with the exercise of great care, and with the assistance of good fortune, navigate a small steamboat into Lake Ayzingo and Lake Z'onlange in the wet season, and also enter this main stream of the Ogowé from the ocean by two side creeks running down to Fernan Vaz. The current of the Ogowé is extremely swift, particularly above Lembarene, and the rise of the river in the Talagouga narrows, during the wet season, is from eighteen to twenty feet. This rise commences a month before the wet season gets established here, probably on account of the latter being earlier on the upper waters of the affluents that come in above Njole—the Okanda, and the Ivindo.
The region of the delta to the south is more water-eaten than to the north. The stretch of country to the north, between the delta of the Ogowé and the Gaboon, is rimmed along the seashore, and the estuary shore, by a sort of sand rampart which keeps in the overflow waters of the wet season, and forms the most impossible morass to get about in during this period. The human population of this region is sparse, and what there is resides in villages on the abruptly shaped bubble-like hills that rise isolated here and there. This region is very little explored; the main stream of the Ogowé, entered either from Nazareth Bay or from Fernan Vaz, being the highway to and from the interior, and the unhealthiness and absence of trade in this great swampy forest belt offer ​but little inducement to travelling about in it. Along the banks of the main waterways passing through it, the villages are all situated in similar sites, namely perched on the top of a clay bank, or dwarf cliff, behind which the land slopes steeply into what, in the wet season, is a swamp. On all sides rises the colossal, white-trunked, liane-hung forest; on all sides one may say, making no exception even for the broad river the villages face; for across it there is the tree-cliff again and in its deep dark waters are mirrored back the forest and the sky—all that the world is made of to the inhabitants of these villages; they are born, live, and die with no interval save sleep from the sight of that universe of forest, river and sky—and only a little sky—that which they can see over the river. All the change they get the seasons bring; the gloomy dry season when the wind steals softly up the river in the morning time, and down the river in the evening; the tornado seasons with their burst of earth-shaking thunder, and their lightnings coming down into the forest in great forked splashes, and their howling, squealing, moaning winds, that rush devastating through it, claiming as many victims among its giants as even the lightnings do.
The course of a grand tornado through a high forest is a thing to see, but anything but pleasant to experience. The heavy brooding suffocating heat when the great storm seems pressing its hot breast down on the very ground—the sensation of depression and wretchedness that creeps over you—and the evident apprehension of all living things of what they know is coming; an apprehension which changes into terror when the storm bursts and comes sweeping seawards with all the frenzy of its demoniac power and the roar of its rain. Behind it lie the bodies of many of the noblest trees, either lightning-seared, still standing, but turned in a moment from luxuriant living things into gaunt skeletons; or thrown down, with all their bravery of foliage and bush-rope, by the winged force which has wrung them round, and pulled them sheer out by the roots—things 100 to 200 feet high, just as you would pull out a root of groundsel—flinging them crashing among their fellows, wrecks to rot.
​Then comes the wet season, not here like the wet season in the Rivers, one grim, torrential waterfall; but daily heavy sheets of rain diversified with intervals of bright sunshine and accompanied by heavy steamy heat; with the Ogowé coming down daily muddier and muddier, floating along on its swift current bits of bank with the trees still growing on them, and surrounded by tangled masses of grass and drift-wood, forming the well-known floating islands which mariners often meet with miles out to sea off this coast.
Every day the river rises up the banks, flowing over their lowest parts into the low reaches of the forest, and threatening with destruction the clay or mud-cliffs with the villages perched on them; and often carrying this threat out, and tearing down parts of the clay bank, swamping and sweeping away the frail houses and ruining the plantations of plantains close by.
Between the Kama country and the Ouroungou country the channel of the Ogowé is, fortunately, broad, and there are opportunities for the swollen waters to flow easily away into the low-lying uninhabited parts of the forest. Were it not so those clay cliffs would have worse times of it than they now do, and villages would be more precarious residential sites than is now the case. In the Talagouga gorge, where the current is more fierce—the waters being hemmed in to a narrower channel, and the banks made of the hard rocks of the Sierra del Cristal—the rise of the waters twenty and thirty feet above the dry-season level does not work the destruction that occurs in the clay bank region.
The long wet season commences in September and lasts till the end of January, its greatest intensity being in November and December. In February comes the short dry, then the short wet till May. From May till September is the long dry. The seasons, however, are not to be depended on with that calm reliance you may place in their wetness or dryness on the Gold Coast or in the Rivers. The long dry is fairly worthy of its name, the long wet also.
The peculiarity of the dry season being the coolest season, ​and its sky overhung with gray threatening-looking cloud, is one that extends from just below Cameroons to Angola, i.e., to the edge of the Kalahari desert, where wet seasons are not; it strikes the person coming south from the Bights, where the dry season is the hot season and the wet the cooler, as most strange and peculiar. One of the many difficulties of travelling down the West African coast is that you are certain to get your season wrong somewhere. It is not so bad for me as it is for some people, because I rather prefer the wet and am reconciled to the climate. Now a person with a predilection for dry seasons has an awful life of it, and I must in justice remark that this predilection is the sane one to possess. I know an American gentleman, who "'lowed he'd do West Africa," but ultimately "'lowed West Africa had done him," who got so bothered by the different times different seasons were going on in different parts of the Coast that he characterised the entire West African climate as "a fried eel." Why fried I do not know. We do not fry in the Coast climate, we stew,—and I consider the statement harsh. Of course we have got the worst climate in the world and we are proud of it. Some day I will write a work in ten volumes that will be an ABC of the whole affair, and be what my German friends would call the essential pocket-book for West African travellers, and it will let them know what to expect, when, where, and how; but meantime I may note that both wet and dry seasons have their points. If you want to go far up a river, without having ample opportunities of studying the various ways in which your craft can get wrecked on sandbanks, you must go in the full wet. Of course this ends in your returning, or attempting to return in the dry, and as when you have penetrated the interior any distance you usually start on your return journey full tilt, pursued by rapacious and ferocious cannibals, the fact that you stick on sandbanks on an average three times in a mile, gives you considerable worry. If you wish to penetrate the interior on foot, you must choose the dry season because of those swamps—a good bottomless swamp is impassable in the wet. In the dry it bears a crust over it, which, with suitable precautions, can be crossed, while the shallow swamps can be waded. And all the rivers are ​navigable in canoes in the dry, if too shallow for steamers, and canoes are the most comfortable things to travel in in the whole world. The predilection in favour of small steam launches is to me a mystery. What joy any sane person can have in one, who is not in a hurry, I do not know. A GIANTESS OF THE UPPER OGOWÉ. I have had some experience in them, and some of those experiences have been the worst I have gone through. I remember one occasion when I tried to get a little launch through a creek which was, although deep, full of water grass. Well! I will be careful, but it was enough to make my distinguished Liverpool friends use bad language. You see you could not get the screw to work because of the grass. Attempts at using the screw merely made the poor thing into a chaff cutter, and it was not made for that, so choked. You could not get up a sail, because there was no wind sufficiently strong to get through the grass, which towered in a dense mass some ten feet above your funnel. You could not row or paddle, because of the said grass, and you could not get out and walk or tow because the water was too deep. I should like to have the situation put as a problem at a nautical examination. The only solution I found to it was to get two brawny blacks with matchets in the bows to cut a way for her, and the rest of the crew to pull her forward by catching hold of the grass ahead. ​If any one can suggest a better I shall be only too delighted, for it was laborious work, and these choice spots are anything but uncommon in West African rivers. Then I remember another steam lanch—the Dragon Fly. She had been built for coal, but there was no coal, so she had to burn wood. Wood, as my nautical friends would say, blows a ship out, and to store enough wood to go twenty miles you had to have wood billets everywhere; all over the deck, and on top of the sun-deck, &c., to such an extent that there was no room for you, and the gunwale was nearly awash. Then you always got on a sandbank, several sandbanks, so the wood got burnt right up before you got anywhere you wanted to, and you had to return by the current and the help of poles. If I had been bound to go on in her, we must have spent the greater part of our lives wood-chopping in wet forests; but I am of too nervous a disposition to penetrate the interior on the Dragon Fly with her dilapidated boiler.
Then there was a patent launch that progressed theoretically by the explosion of small quantities of gunpowder; but the trade powder we had did not suit her somehow, so she pursued a policy of masterly inactivity, making awesome noises in her works, and the quickest trip she ever did was to the bottom. And she certainly did make that on trade powder. I own I am prejudiced against launches. The heat of the West Coast climate is quite enough for me without having a large hot water bottle, in the shape of a boiler, to sit by. And a canoe is a craft you can take almost anywhere, and is therefore better for general work, unless you have a good deep channel large enough for you to have a steamer of a respectable size.
In addition to grass creeks and sandbanks, the obstacles to the navigation of side streams, on the Ogowé and its neighbouring rivers are swamps of papyrus, exceedingly lovely, but difficult to get through, and great floating masses of river lettuce (Pistia stratiotes). It is very like a nicely grown cabbage lettuce, and it is very charming when you look down a creek full of it, for the beautiful tender green makes a perfect picture against the dark forest that rises from the banks of the creek. If you are in a canoe, it gives you little ​apprehension to know you have got to go through it, but if you are in a small steam launch, every atom of pleasure in its beauty goes, the moment you lay eye on the thing. You dash into it as hard as you can go, with a sort of geyser of lettuces flying up from the screw; but not for long, for this interesting vegetable grows after the manner of couch-grass.
UPPER OGOWÉ NATIVES.
I used to watch its method of getting on in life. Take a typical instance: a bed of river-lettuces growing in a creek become bold, and grow out into the current, which tears the outsider pioneer lettuce off from the mat. Down river that young thing goes, looking as innocent as a turtle-dove. If you pick it up as it comes by your canoe and look underneath, you see it has just got a stump. Roots? Oh dear no! What does a sweet green rose like that want roots for? It only wants to float about on the river and be happy; so you put the precious humbug back, and it drifts away with a smile and gets up some suitable quiet inlet and then sends out roots galore longitudinally, and at every joint on them buds ​up another lettuce; and if you go up its creek eighteen months or so after, with a little launch, it goes and winds those roots round your propeller. The fierce current of the wet season, when the main river scours into the creeks, and the creeks start fierce currents of their own with their increased waters, play great havoc with these lettuce beds, and plots of them get cut off from the main bodies. These plots float off down river, and as soon as they get into a bit of slack water or hitch on a rising sandbank, they collect all other floating things that come their way and start as islands. The grass soon chokes off its companion the lettuce, and makes the island habitable for other plants; and so you have a floating island. These floating islands have a weird fascination, and I never saw so many of them in any river as in the Ogowé. To see a bit of seeming solid land, solemnly going past you down the river, as if it were out on business; or if it is in tidal ways and you on a fixed point, to see it coming up to you, hanging about, and then retiring, is unsettling to one's general ideas of the propriety of nature. One of the largest of these floating islands I saw, was in the Karkola River. It had got caught in an eddy made by another stream entering this river, and it kept swimming round and round slowly and quietly.
I have not here given an account of half the difficulties of navigating a tropical river in the forest-region, because they are so numerous, and so many of them not to be guarded against. Those logs which from their specific gravity float down just under water and strike you unexpectedly; and even those logs that float on the surface, are nasty things to meet on an ink-black night. I well remember the miscellaneous joys we happened on once when dropping down the Ogowé in the dark in a small canoe. Half the way it was a steeplechase for the canoe over floating logs. Sometimes she refused her fences point-blank and butted them; sometimes she would climb up them and fall over on the other side; and even my experienced native companion owned that it was difficult to tell, during the subsequent aquatic sports which her crew indulged in, which was the bottom of the canoe and which was the unsophisticated log. Sometimes she would clear her log-fence at a bound in a showy way, but then when she came down the other side, she went too deep and filled herself and ​foundered, and so the only thing was to pole the logs off. Some of those logs, by the by, had queer ways with them. One, on being poked on the end as it floated towards, us opened its front section and bit the pole with such a grip that the man using it let go all one time. Yes, I dare say it was a crocodile—still African vegetation is a queer thing.
You would naturally think that, in spite of sandbanks with cliff-edges down stream, of sections of the continent floating round, and of logs liable to bite and not liable to bite, you had at least one thing left to rely on—the bank. But that bank may be all right, and again, as the captain of the late ss. Sparrow would say, it mayn't. A friend of mine, for example, who got stuck in a launch up a river-creek on a sandbank, got a hawser out, and winding it round some mangroves on the bank, proceeded "to have her off in no time" with the steam winch. She did not budge an inch, but the African continent did: the whole bit of bank came away, and down on the boat came the trees with a swish, burying everything and everybody in branches and foliage. As he said, we were "like the babes in the wood after robins had been along, on a big scale"; and he also stated, as we climbed up on top of our arboreal superstructure, that "Africa was a rotten continent."
* ↑ I have used the names of places as they have been published by the various travellers referred to; but, owing to the kindness of Mr. R. B. N. Walker, I have since my return had from him a list of these names spelt in conformation with the native pronunciation, and, thinking that they may be valuable to subsequent travellers, I will occasionally append them in footnotes.
* ↑ See Proceedings of Geographical Society of Paris for June 23rd, 1882, quoted in Proceedings of Royal Geographical Society, August, 1882.
* ↑ Lembarene is now an official district under the charge of a Chef de Poste, whose residence is on Lembarene Island, and to the island the name of Lembarene is colloquially limited. The native name for the island is Ezange'-nenge'. In 1866 the name Lembarene was borne by one of the three Inlenga villages just below the confluence with the lake or lagoon Zele'.
* ↑ In M'pongwe, Nyari=Buffalo.
* ↑ The Osheba are now recognised as Fans.
* ↑ Mr. R. B. N. Walker says Du Chaillu's N'Poulounay should read Mplunie, and that it is merely an inferior stream connecting the lower main Ogowé (Ngony-Oulange) and the Bandu, with the Fernan Vaz, partly by means of the Ogâlote.
* ↑ Since my return to England, feeling much interested in the travels of Mr. Walker, I have hunted up several papers by him scattered among the transactions of various societies circa 1876, and from them fully recognise the great loss to our knowledge of the actual geography and ethnology of this region, that we suffer from Mr. Walker never having collected and published in book form the results of his travels and residence in Congo Français.
* ↑ The natives sometimes call it Otalamaguga. Aguga means want, privation, hardship.
* ↑ Sětě Kama—the natives call it Masetyi. One or two Europeans profess to believe that it was named by the Spaniards Siete Camas (the seven beds or graves) from the fact of seven men from some ship being buried there. It was first opened up as a trading station by Henry Walker in 1849, who traded from a ship. His brother, R. B. N. Walker established a factory on shore there in 1857. The natives have to this day a bad name.
* ↑ Sometimes spelt Camma country. The native name is Akama. The tribes living in it are known as the Nkâmi, frequently Ncomi.
* ↑ Long dry season, Enomo; long wet, Nlyanja.
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