# West African Studies/Chapter 2

CHAPTER II
SIERRA LEONE AND ITS SURROUNDINGS
It was late evening-time when the ——— reached that part of the South Atlantic Ocean where previous experience and dead reckoning led our captain to believe that Sierra Leone existed. The weather was too thick to see ten yards from the ship, so he, remembering certain captains who, under similar circumstances, failing to pick up the light on Cape Sierra Leone, had picked up the Carpenter Rock with their keels instead, let go his anchor, and kept us rolling about outside until the morning came. Slipperty slop, crash! slipperty slop, crash! went all loose gear on board all the night long; and those of the passengers who went in for that sort of thing were ill from the change of motion. The mist, our world, went gently into grey, and then black, growing into a dense darkness filled with palpable, woolly, wet air, thicker far than it had been before. This, my instructors informed me, was caused by the admixture of the "solid malaria coming off the land."
However, morning came at last, and even I was on deck as it dawned, and was rewarded for my unwonted activity by a vision of beautiful, definite earth-form dramatically un​veiled. No longer was the ——— our only material world. The mist lifted itself gently off, as it seemed, out of the ocean, and then separated before the morning breeze; one great mass rolling away before us upwards, over the land, where portions of it caught amongst the forests of the mountains and stayed there all day, while another mass went leisurely away to the low Bullam shore, from whence it came again after sunset to join the mountain and the ocean mists as they drew down and in from the sea, helping them to wrap up Freetown, Sierra Leone and its lovely harbour for the night.
It was with a thrill of joy that I looked on Freetown harbour for the first time in my life. I knew the place so well. Yes; there were all the bays, Kru, English and Pirate; and the mountains, whose thunder rumbling caused Pedro do Centra to call the place Sierra Leona when he discovered it in 1462. And had not my old friend, Charles Johnson, writing in 1724, given me all manner of information about it during those delicious hours rescued from school books and dedicated to a most contentious study of A General History of Robberies and Murders of the most Notorious Pyrates? That those bays away now on my right hand "were safe and convenient for cleaning and watering;" and so on and there rose up before my eyes a vision of the society ashore here in 1724 that lived "very friendly with the natives—being thirty Englishmen in all; men who in some part of their lives had been either privateering, buccaneering, or pirating, and still retain and have the riots and humours common to that sort of life." Hard by, too, was Bence Island, where, according to Johnson, "there lives an old fellow named Crackers (his true name he thinks fit to conceal), and who was formerly a noted buccaneer; he ​keeps the best house in the place, has two or three guns before his door with which he salutes his friends the pyrates when they put in, and lives a jovial life with them all the while they are there." Alas! no use to me was the careful list old Johnson had given me of the residents. They were all dead now, and I could not go ashore and hunt up "Peter Brown" or "John Jones," who had "one long boat and an Irish young man." Social things were changed in Freetown, Sierra Leone; but only socially, for the old description of it is, as far as scenery goes, correct to-day, barring the town. Whether or no everything has changed for the better is not my business to discuss here, nor will I detain you with any description of the town, as I have already published one after several visits, with a better knowledge than I had on my first call there.
On one of my subsequent visits I fell in with Sierra Leone receiving a shock. We were sitting, after a warm and interesting morning spent going about the town talking trade, in the low long pleasant room belonging to the Coaling Company whose windows looked out over an eventful warehouse yard; for therein abode a large dog-faced baboon, who shied stones and sticks at boys and any one who displeased him, pretty nearly as well as a Flintshire man. Also in the yard were a large consignment of kola nuts packed as usual in native-made baskets, called bilys, lined inside with the large leaves of a Ficus and our host was explaining to my mariner companions their crimes towards this cargo while they defended themselves with spirit. It seemed that this precious product if not kept on deck made a point of heating and then going mildewed; while, if you did keep it on deck, either the First officer's minions went fooling about it with the hose, which ​made it swell up and burst and ruined it, or left it in unmitigated sun, which shrivelled it—and so on. This led, naturally, to a general conversation on cargo between the mariners and the merchants, during which some dreadful things were said about the way matches arrived, in West Africa and other things, shipped at shipper's own risk, let alone the way trade suffered by stowing hams next the boilers. Of course the other side was a complete denial of these accusations, but the affair was too vital for any of us to attend to a notorious member of the party who kept bothering us "to get up and look at something queer over King Tom."
Now it was market day in Freetown; and market day there has got more noise to the square inch in it than most things. You feel when you first meet it that if it were increased a little more it would pass beyond the grasp of human ear, like the screech of that whistle they show off at the Royal Society's Conversazione. However, on this occasion the market place sent up an entire compound yell, still audible, and we rose as one man as the portly housekeeper, followed by the small, but able steward, burst into the room, announcing in excited tones, "Oh! the town be took by locusts! The town be took by locusts! (D.C. fortissimo). And we attended to the incident; ousting the reporter of "the queer thing over King Tom" from the window, and ignoring his "I told you so," because he hadn't.
This was the first cloud of locusts that had come right into the town in the memory of the oldest inhabitant, though they occasionally raid the country away to the North. I am informed that when the chiefs of the Western Soudan do not give sufficient gifts to the man who is locust king and has charge of them—keeping them in holes in the ​desert of Sahara—he lets them out in revenge. Certainly that year he let them out with a vengeance, for when I was next time down Coast in the Oil Rivers I was presented with specimens that had been caught in Old Calabar and kept as big curios.
This Freetown swarm came up over the wooded hills to the South-West in a brown cloud of singular structure, denser in some parts than others, continually changing its points of greatest density, like one of Thompson's diagrams of the ultimate structure of gases, for you could see the component atoms as they swept by. They were swirling round and round upwards-downwards like the eddying snowflakes in a winter's storm, and the whole air rustled with the beat of the locusts' wings. They hailed against the steep iron roofs of the store-houses, slid down it, many falling feet through the air before they recovered the use of their wings—the gutters were soon full of them—the ducks in the yard below were gobbling and squabbling over the layer now covering the ground, and the baboon chattered as he seized handfuls and pulled them to pieces.
Everybody took them with excitement, save the jack crows, who on their arrival were sitting sleeping on the roof ridge. They were horribly bored and bothered by the affair. Twice they flopped down and tried them. There they were lying about in gutters with a tempting garbagey look, but evidently the jack crows found them absolutely mawkish; so they went back to the roof ridge in a fuming rage, because the locusts battered against them and prevented them from sleeping.
We left Sierra Leone on the ——— late in the afternoon, and ran out again into the same misty wet weather. The ​next morning the balance of our passengers were neither up early, nor lively when they were up; but to my surprise. after what I had heard, no one had the much-prognosticated attack of fever. All day long we steamed onwards, passing the Banana Isles and Sherboro Island and the sound usually called Sherboro River. We being a South-West Coast boat, did not call at the trading settlements here, but kept on past Cape St. Ann for the Kru coast.
All day long the rain came down as if thousands of energetic—well, let us say—angels were hurriedly baling the waters above the firmament out into the ocean. Everything on board was reeking wet.
You could sweep the moisture off the cabin panelling with your hand, and our clothes were clammy and musty, and the towels too damp on their own account to dry you. Why none of us started specialising branchiae I do not know, but feel that would have been the proper sort of breathing apparatus for such an atmosphere.
The passengers were all at the tail end of their spirits, for Sierra Leone is the definite beginning of the Coast to the outgoer. You are down there when you leave it outward bound; it is indeed, the complement of Canary. Those going up out of West Africa begin to get excited at Sierra Leone; those going down into West Africa, particularly when it is the wet season, begin to get depressed. It did not, however, operate in this manner on me. I had survived Sierra Leone, I had enjoyed it; why, therefore, not survive other places, and enjoy them? Moreover, my scientific training, combined with close study of the proper method of carrying on the local conversation, had by now enabled me to ​understand its true spirit,—never contradict, and, if you can, help it onward. When going on deck about 6 o'clock that evening, I was alarmed to see our gallant captain in red velvet slippers. A few minutes later the chief officer burst on my affrighted gaze in red velvet slippers too. On my way hurriedly to the saloon I encountered the third officer similarly shod. When I recovered from these successive shocks, I carried out my mission of alarming the rest of the passengers, who were in the saloon enjoying themselves peacefully, and reported what I had seen. The old coasters, even including the silent ones, agreed with me that we were as good as lost so far as this world went; and the deaf gentleman went hurriedly on deck, we think "to take the sun,"—it was a way he had at any time of day, because "he had been studying about how to fix points for the Government—and wished to keep himself in practice."
My fellow new-comers were perplexed; and one of them, a man who always made a point of resisting education, and who thought nothing of calling some of our instructor's best information "Tommy Rot!" said, "I don't see what can happen; we're right out at sea, and it's as calm as a millpond."
"Don't you, my young friend? don't you?" sadly said an old Coaster. "Well, I'll just tell you there's precious little that can't happen, for we're among the shoals of St. Ann."
The new-comers went on deck "just to look round;" and as there was nothing to be seen but a superb specimen of damp darkness, they returned to the saloon, one of them bearing an old chart sheet which he had borrowed from the authorities. Now that chart was not reassuring; the thing ​looked like an exhibition pattern of a prize shot gun, with the quantity of rocks marked down on it.
"Look here," said an anxious inquirer; "why are some of these rocks named after the Company's ships?"
"Think," said the calm old Coaster.
"Oh, I say! hang it all, you don't mean to say they've been wrecked here? Anyhow, if they have they got off all right. How is it the 'Yoruba Rock' and the ‘Gambia Rock?' The 'Yoruba' and the 'Gambia' are running now."
"Those," explains the old Coaster kindly, "were the old 'Yoruba' and ‘Gambia.' The 'Bonny' that runs now isn't the old 'Bonny.' It's the way with most of them, isn't it?" he says, turning to a fellow old Coaster. "Naturally," says his friend. "But this is the old original, you know, and it's just about time she wrote up her name on one of these tombstones." "You don't save ships," he continues, for the instruction of the new-comers, attentive enough now; "that go on the Kru coast, and if you get ashore you don't save the things you stand up in—the natives strip you."
"Cannibals!" I suggest.
"Oh, of course they are cannibals; they are all cannibals, are natives down here when they get the chance. But, that does not matter; you see what I object to is being brought on board the next steamer that happens to call crowded with all sorts of people you know, and with a lady missionary or so among them, just with nothing on one but a flyaway native cloth. You remember D———?
"Well," says his friend. Strengthened by this support, he takes his turn at instructing the young critic, saying soothingly, "there, don't you worry; have a good dinner." (It was just being laid.) "For if you do get ashore the food is ​something beastly. But, after all, what with the sharks and the surf and the cannibals, you know the chances are a thousand to one that the worst will come to the worst and you live to miss your trousers."
After dinner we new-comers went on deck to keep an eye on Providence, and I was called on to explain how the alarm had been given me by the footgear of the officers. I said, like all great discoveries, "it was founded on observation made in a scientific spirit." I had noticed that whenever a particularly difficult bit of navigation had to be done on our boat, red velvet slippers were always worn, as for instance, when running through the heavy weather we had met south of the Bay, on going in at Puerto de la Luz, and on rounding the Almadia reefs, and on entering Freetown harbour in fog. But never before had I seen more than one officer wearing them at a time, while to-night they were blazing like danger signals at the shore ends of all three.
My opinion as to the importance of these articles to navigation became further strengthened by subsequent observations in the Bights of Biafra and Benin. We picked up rivers in them, always wore them when crossing bars, and did these things on the whole successfully. But once I was on a vessel that was rash enough to go into a difficult river—Rio del Rey—without their aid. That vessel got stuck fast on a bank, and, as likely as not, would be sticking there now with her crew and passengers mere mosquito-eaten skeletons, had not our First officer rushed to his cabin, put on red velvet slippers and gone out in a boat, energetically sounding around with a hand lead. Whereupon we got off, for clearly it was not by his sounding; it never amounted to more than two fathoms, while we required a good three-and-a-half. Yet that First officer, a truthful man, always, ​said nobody did a stroke of work on board that vessel bar himself; so I must leave the reader to escape if he can from believing it was the red velvet slippers that saved us, merely remarking that these invaluable nautical instruments were to be purchased at Hamburg, and were possibly only met with on boats that run to Hamburg and used by veterans of that fleet.
If you will look on the map, not mine, but one visible to the naked eye, you will see that the Coast from Sierra Leone to Cape Palmas is the lower bend of the hump of Africa and the turning point into the Bights of Benin, Biafra and Panavia.
Its appearance gives the voyager his first sample of those stupendous sweeps of monotonous landscapes so characteristic of Africa. From Sherboro River to Cape Mount, viewed from the sea, every mile looks as like the next as peas in a pod, and should a cruel fate condemn you to live ashore here in a factory you get so used to the eternal sameness that you automatically believe that nothing else but this sort of world, past, present, or future, can ever have existed and that cities and mountains are but the memories of dreams. A more horrible life than a life in such a region for a man who never takes to it, it is impossible to conceive; for a man who does take to it, it is a kind of dream life. I am judging from the few men I have met who have been stationed here in the few isolated little factories that are established. Some of them look like haunted men, who, when they are among white men again, cling to their society: others are lazy, dreamy men, rather bored by it.
The kind of country that produces this effect must be exceedingly simple in make: it is not the mere isolation from fellow white men that does it—for example, the ​handful of men who are on the Ogowé do not get like this though many of them are equally lone men, yet they are bright and lively enough. Anyhow, exceedingly simple in make as is this region of Africa from Sherboro to Cape Mount, it consists of four different things in four long lines—lines that go away into eternity for as far as eye can see. There is the band of yellow sand on which your little factory is built. This band is walled to landwards by a wall of dark forest, mounted against the sky to seaward by a wall of white surf; beyond that there is the horizon-bounded ocean. Neither the forest wall nor surf wall changes enough to give any lively variety; they just run up and down a gamut of the same set of variations. In the light of brightest noon the forest wall stands dark against the dull blue sky, in the depth of the darkest night you can see it stand darker still, against the stars; on moonlight nights and on tornado nights, when you see the forest wall by the lightning light, it looks as if it had been done over with a coat of tar. The surf wall is equally consistent, it may be bad, or good as surf, but it's generally the former, which merely means it is a higher, broader wall, and more noisy, but it's the same sort of wall making the same sort of noise all the time. It is always white; in the sunlight, snowy white, suffused with a white mist wherein are little broken, quivering bits of rainbows. In the moonlight, it gleams with a whiteness there is in nothing else on earth. If you can imagine a non-transparent diamond wall, I think you will get some near idea to it, and even on the darkest of dark nights you can still see the surf wall clearly enough, for it shows like the ghost of its daylight self, seeming to have in it a light of its own, and you love or hate it. Night and day and season changes pass ​over these things, like reflections in a mirror, without altering the mirror frame; but nothing comes that ever stills for one-half second the thunder of the surf-wall or makes it darker, or makes the forest-wall brighter than the rest of your world. Mind you, it is intensely beautiful, intensely soothing, in- tensely interesting if you can read it and you like it, but life for a man who cannot and does not is a living death.
But if you are seafaring there is no chance for a brooding melancholy to seize on you hereabouts, for you soon run along this bit of coast and see the sudden, beautiful headland of Cape Mount, which springs aloft in several rounded hills a thousand and odd feet above the sea and looking like an island. After passing it, the land rapidly sinks again to the old level, for a stretch of another 46 miles or so when Cape Mesurado, rising about 200 feet, seems from seaward to be another island.
The capital of the Liberian Republic, Monrovia, is situated on the southern side of the river Mesurado, and right under the high land of the Cape, but it is not visible from the roadstead, and then again comes the low coast, unrolling its ribbon of sandy beach, walled as before with forest wall and surf, but with the difference that between the sand beach and the forest are long stretches of lagooned waters. Evil looking, mud-fringed things, when I once saw them at the end of a hard, dry season, but when the wet season's rains come they are transformed into beautiful lakes; communicating with each other and overflowing by shallow ​channels which they cut here and there through the sandbeach ramparts into the sea.
The identification of places from aboard ship along such a coast as this is very difficult. Even good sized rivers doubling on themselves sneak out between sand banks, and make no obvious break in surf or forest wall. The old sailing direction that gave as a landmark the "Tree with two crows on it" is as helpful as any one could get of many places here, and when either the smoke season or the wet season is on of course you cannot get as good as that. But don't imagine that unless the navigator wants to call on business, he can "just put up his heels and blissfully think o' nowt," for this bit of the West Coast of Africa is one of the most trying in the world to work. Monotonous as it is ashore, it is exciting enough out to sea in the way of the rocks and shoals, and an added danger exists at the beginning and end of the wet, and the beginning of the dry, in the shape of tornadoes. These are sudden storms coming up usually with terrific violence; customarily from the S.E. and E., but sometimes towards the end of the season straight from S. More slave ships than enough have been lost along this bit of coast in their time, let alone decent Bristol Guineamen into the bargain, owing to "a delusion that occasionally seized inexperienced commanders that it was well to heave-to for a tornado, whereas a sailing ship's best chance lay in her heels." It was a good chance too, for owing to the short duration of this breed of hurricane and their terrific rain, there accompanies them no heavy sea, ​the tornado-rain ironing the ocean down; so if, according to one of my eighteenth century friends, you see that well-known tornado-cloud arch coming, and you are on a Guineaman, for your sins, "a dray of a vessel with an Epping Forest of sea growth on her keel, and two-thirds of the crew down with fever or dead of it, as likely they will be after a spell on this coast," the sooner you get her ready to run the better, and with as little on her as you can do with. If, however, there be a white cloud inside the cloud-arch you must strip her quick and clean, for that tornado is going to be the worst tornado you were ever in.
Nevertheless, tornadoes are nothing to the rocks round here. At the worst, there are but two tornadoes a day, always at tide turn, only at certain seasons of the year, and you can always see them coming; but it is not that way with the rocks. There is at least one to each quarter hour in the entire twenty-four. They are there all the year round, and more than one time in forty you can't see them coming. In case you think I am overstating the case, I beg to lay before you the statement concerning rocks given me by an old captain, who was used to these seas and never lost a ship. I had said something flippant about rocks, and he said, "I'll write them down for you, missy." This is just his statement for the chief rocks between Junk River and Baffu; not a day's steamer run. "Two and three quarters miles and six cables N.W. by W. from Junk River there is 'Hooper's Patch,' irregular in shape, about a mile long and carrying in some places only 2 1/2 fathoms of water. There is another bad patch about a mile and a-half from Hooper's, so if you have to go dodging your way into Marshall, a Liberian settlement, great caution and good luck is useful. In Waterhouse Bay there's a cluster of pinnacle ​rocks all under water, with a will-o'-the wisp kind of buoy, that may be there or not to advertise them. One rock at Tobokanni has the civility to show its head above water, and a chum of his, that lies about a mile W. by S. from Tobokanni Point, has the seas constantly breaking on it. The coast there is practically reefed for the next eight miles, with a boat channel near the shore. But there is a gap in this reef at Young Sesters, through which, if you handle her neatly, you can run a ship in. In some places this reef of rock is three-quarters of a mile out to sea. Trade Town is the next place where you may now call for cargo. Its particular rock lies a mile out and shows well with the sea breaking on it. After Trade Town the rocks are more scattered, and the bit of coast by Kurrau River rises in cliffs 40 to 60 feet high. The sand at their base is strewn with fallen blocks on which the surf breaks with great force, sending the spray up in columns; and until you come to Sestos River the rocks are innumerable, but not far out to sea, so you can keep outside them unless you want to run in to the little factory at Tembo. Just beyond Sestos River, three-quarters of a mile S.S.W. of Fen River, there are those Fen rocks on which the sea breaks, but between these and the Manna rocks, which are a little more than a mile from shore N.W. by N. from Sestos River, there are any quantity of rocks marked and not marked on the chart. These Manna rocks are a jolly bad lot, black, and only a few breaking, and there is a shoal bank to the S.E. of these for half a mile, then for the next four miles, there are not more than 70 hull openers to the acre. Most of them are not down on the chart, so there's plenty of opportunity now about for you to do a little African discovery until you come to Sestos reef, off a point of the same name, projecting half a mile to westwards ​with a lot of foul ground round it. Spence rock which breaks, is W. two-thirds S., distant 1 1/4 miles from Sestos Point; within 5 miles of it is the rock which The Corisco discovered in 1885. It is not down on the chart yet, all these set of rocks round Sestos are sharp too, so the lead gives you no warning, and you are safer right-away from them. Then there's a very nasty one called Diabolitos, I expect those old Portuguese found it out, it's got a lot of little ones which extend 2 miles and more to seaward. There is another devil rock off Bruni, called by the natives Ba Ya. It stands 60 feet above sea-level, and has a towering crown of trees on it. It is a bad one is this, for in thick weather, as it is a mile off shore and isolated, it is easily mistaken, and so acts as a sort of decoy for the lot of sunken devil rocks which are round it. Further along towards Baffu there are four more rocks a mile out, and forest ground on the way."
I just give you this bit of information as an example, because I happen to have this rough rock list of it; but a little to the east the rocks and dangers of the Kru Coast are quite as bad, both in quantity and quality, indeed, more so, for there is more need for vessels to call. I often think of this bit of coast when I see people unacquainted with the little local peculiarities of dear West Africa looking at a map thereof and wondering why such and such a Bay is not utilised as a harbour, or such and such a river not navigated, or this, that and the other bit of Coast so little known of and traded with. Such undeveloped regions have generally excellent local reasons, reasons that cast no blame on white man's enterprise or black man's savagery. They are rock-reefed coast or barred rivers, and therefore not worth the expense to the trader of ​working them, and you must always remember that unless the trader opens up bits of West Africa no one else will. It may seem strange to the landsman that the navigator should hug such a coast as the shoals (the Bainos as the old Portuguese have it) of St. Ann—but they do. If you ask a modern steamboat captain he will usually tell you it is to save time, a statement that the majority of the passengers on a West Coast boat will receive with open derision and contempt, holding him to be a spendthrift thereof; but I myself fancy that hugging this coast is a vestigial idea. In the old sailing-ship days, if you ran out to sea far from these shoals you lost your wind, and maybe it would take you five mortal weeks to go from Sierra Leone to Cape Mount or Wash Congo, as the natives called it in the 17th century.
Off the Kru Coast, both West Coast and South-West Coast steamers and men-o'-war on this station, call to ship or unship Krumen. The character of the rocks, of which I have spoken,—their being submerged for the most part, and pinnacles—increases the danger considerably, for a ship may tear a wound in herself that will make short work of her, yet unless she remains impaled on the rock, making, as it were, a buoy of herself, that rock might not be found again for years.
This sort of thing has happened many times, and the surveying vessels, who have been instructed to localise the danger and get it down on the chart, have failed to do so in spite of their most elaborate efforts; whereby the more uncharitable of the surveying officers are led in their wrath to hold that the mercantile marine officers who reported that rock and gave its bearings did so under the influence of drink, while the more charitable and scientifically inclined have suggested that elevation and sub​sidence are energetically and continually at work along the Bight of Benin, hoisting up shoals to within a few feet of the surface in some places and withdrawing them in others to a greater depth.
The people ashore here are commonly spoken of as Liberians and Kruboys. The Liberians are colonists in the country, having acquired settlements on this coast by purchase from the chiefs of the native tribes. The idea of restoring the Africans carried off by the slave trade to Africa occurred to America before it did to England, for it was warmly advocated by the Rev. Samuel Hoskins, of Newport, Rhode Island, in 1770, but it was 1816 before America commenced to act on it, and the first emigrants embarked from New York for Liberia in 1820. On the other hand, though England did not get the idea until 1787, she took action at once, buying from King Tom, through the St George's Bay Company, the land at Sierra Leone between the Rochelle and Kitu River. This was done on the recommendation of Mr. Smeatham. The same year was shipped off to this new colony the first consignment of 460 free negro servants and 60 whites; out of those 400 arrived and survived their first fortnight, and set themselves to build a town called Granville, after Mr. Granville Sharpe, whose exertions had resulted in Lord Mansfield's epoch-making decision in the case of Somerset v. Mr. J. G. Stewart, his master, i.e., that no slave could be held on English soil.
The Liberians were differently situated from their neighbours at Sierra Leone in many ways; in some of these they have been given a better chance than the Africans sent to Sierra Leone—in other ways not so good a chance. Neither of the colonies has been completely successful.
​I hold the opinion that if those American and English philanthropists could not have managed the affair better than they did, they had better have confined their attention to talking, a thing they were naturally great on, and left the so-called restoration of the African to his native soil alone. For they made a direful mess of the affair from a practical standpoint, and thereby inflicted an enormous amount of suffering and a terrible mortality on the Africans they shipped from England, Canada, and America; the tradition whereof still clings to the colonies of Liberia and Sierra Leone, and gravely hinders their development by the emigration of educated, or at any rate civilised, Africans now living in the West Indies and the Southern States of America.
I am aware that there are many who advocate the return to Africa of the Africans who were exported from the West Coast during the slavery days. But I cannot regard this as a good or even necessary policy, for two reasons. One is that those Africans were not wanted in West Africa. The local supply of African is sufficient to develop the country in every way. There are in West Africa now, Africans thoroughly well educated, as far as European education goes, and who are quite conversant with the nature of their own country and with the language of their fellow-countrymen. There are also any quantity of Africans there who, though not well educated, are yet past-masters in the particular culture which West Africa has produced on its inhabitants.
The second reason is that the descendants of the exported Africans have seemingly lost their power of resistance to the malarial West Coast climate. This a most interesting subject, which some scientific gentleman ​ought to attend to, for there is a sufficient quantity of evidence ready for his investigation. The mortality among the Africans sent to Sierra Leone and Liberia has been excessive, and so also has been that amongst the West Indians who went to Congo Belge, while the original intention of the United Presbyterian Mission to Calabar had to be abandoned from the same cause. In fact it looks as if the second and third generation of deported Africans had no greater power of resistance to West Africa than the pure white races; and, such being the case, it seems to me a pity they should go there. They would do better to bring their energies to bear on developing the tropical regions of America and leave the undisturbed stock of Africa to develop its own.
However, we will not go into that now. I beg to refer you to Bishop Ingram's Sierra Leone after a Hundred Years, for the history of England's philanthropic efforts. I may some day, perhaps, in the remote future, write myself a book on America's effort, but I cannot write it now, because I have in my possession only printed matter—a wilderness of opinion and a mass of abuse on Liberia as it is. No sane student of West Africa would proceed to form an opinion on any part of it with such stuff and without a careful personal study of the thing as it is.
The natives of this part of the West coast, the aboriginal ones, as Mrs. Gault would call them, are a different matter. You can go and live in West Africa without seeing a crocodile or a hippopotamus or a mountain, but no white man can go there without seeing and experiencing a Kruboy, and Kruboys are one of the main tribes here. Kruboys are, indeed, the backbone of white effort in West Africa, and ​I think I may say there is but one man of all of us who have visited West Africa who has not paid a tribute to the Kruboy's sterling qualities. Alas! that one was one of England's greatest men. Why he painted that untrue picture of them I do not know. I know that on this account the magnificent work he did is discredited by all West Coasters. "If he said that of Kruboys," say the old coasters, "how can he have known or understood anything?" It is a painful subject, and my opinion on Kruboys is entirely with the old coasters, who know them with an experience of years, not with the experience of any man, however eminent, who only had the chance of seeing them for a few weeks, and whose information was so clearly drawn from vitiated sources. All I can say in defence of my great fellow countryman is that he came to West Africa from the very worst school a man can for understanding the Kruboy, or any true Negro, namely, from the Bantu African tribes, and that he only fell into the error many other great countrymen of mine have since fallen into, whereby there is war and misunderstanding and disaffection between our Government and the true Negro to-day, and nothing, as far as one can see, but a grievous waste of life and gold ahead.
The Kruboy is indeed a sore question to all old coasters. They have devoted themselves to us English, and they have suffered, laboured, fought, been massacred, and so on with us for generation after generation. Many a time Krumen have come to me when we have been together in foreign possessions and said, "Help us, we are Englishmen." They have never asked in vain of me or any Englishman in West Africa, but recognition of their services by our Government at home is—well, about as much recognition as most men get from it who do good work in ​West Africa. For such men are a mere handful whom Imperialism can neglect with impunity, and, even if it has for the moment to excuse itself for so doing, it need only call us "traders." I say us, because I am vain of having been, since my return, classed among the Liverpool traders by a distinguished officer.
This part of Western Africa from Sierra Leone to Cape Palmas was known to the geographers amongst the classics as Leuce Æthiopia: to their successors as the Grain or Pepper or Meleguetta Coast. I will discourse later of the inhabitants, the Kru, from an ethnological standpoint, because they are too interesting and important to be got in here. The true limits of the Grain coast are from the River Sestros to Growy, two leagues east of Cape Palmas according to Barbot, and its name came from the fact that it was hereabouts that the Portuguese, on their early expeditions in the 15th century, first came across grains of paradise, a circumstance that much excited those navigators at the time and encouraged them to pursue their expeditions to this region, for grains of paradise were in those days much valued and had been long known in European markets.
These euphoniously-named spices are the seeds of divers amomums, or in lay language, cardamum—Amomum Meleguetta (Roscoe) or as Pereira has it, Amomum granum Paradisi. Their more decorative appellation "grains of Paradise" is of Italian origin, the Italians having known and valued this spice, bought it, and sold it to the rest of Europe at awful prices long before the Portuguese, under Henry the Navigator, visited the West African Coast. The Italians had bought the spice from the tawny Moors, who brought it, with other products of West Africa across ​the desert to the Mediterranean port Monte Barca byTripoli.
The reason why this African cardamum received either the name of grains of Paradise or of Meleguetta pepper is, like most African things, wrapt in mystery to a certain extent. Some authorities hold they got the first name on their own merits. Others that the Italian merchants gave it them to improve prices. Others that the Italians gave it them honestly enough on account of their being nice, and no one knowing where on earth exactly they came from, said, therefore, why not say Paradise? It is certain, however, that before the Portuguese went down into the unknown seas and found the Pepper coast that the Italians knew those peppers came from the country of Melli, but as they did not know where that was, beyond that it was somewhere in Africa, this did not take away the sense of romance from the spice.
As for their name Meleguetta, an equal divergence of opinion reigns. I myself think the proper word is meneguetta. The old French name was maneguilia, and the name they are still called by at Cape Palmas in the native tongue is Emanequetta. The French claim to have brought peppers and ivory from the River Sestros as early as 1364, and the River Sestros was on the seaboard of the kingdom of Mene, but the termination quetta is most probably a corruption of the Portuguese name for pepper. But, on the other hand, the native name for them among the Sestros people is Waizanzag. And therefore, the whole name may well be European, and just as well called meleguetta as meneguetta, because the kingdom of Mene was a fief of the Empire of Melli when the Portuguese first called at Sestros. The other possible derivation is that which says mele is a corrup​tion of the Italian name for Turkey millet, Melanga, a thing the grains rather resemble. Another very plausible derivation is that the whole word is Portuguese in origin, but a corruption of mala gens, the Portuguese having found the people they first bought them of a bad lot, and so named the pepper in memory thereof. This however is interestingly erroneous and an early example of the danger of armchairism when dealing with West Africa. For the coast of the malegens was not the coast the Portuguese first got the pepper from, but it was that coast just to the east of the Meleguetta, where all they got was killing and general unpleasantness round by the Rio San Andrew, Drewin way, which coast is now included in the Ivory.
The grains themselves are by no means confined to the Grain Coast, but are the fruit of a plant common in all West African districts, particularly so on Cameroon Mountain, where just above the 3,000 feet level on the east and south-east face you come into a belt of them, and horrid walking ground they make. I have met with them also in great profusion in the Sierra del Crystal; but there is considerable difference in the kinds. The grain of Paradise of commerce is, like that of the East Indian cardamom, enclosed in a fibrous capsule, and the numerous grains in it are surrounded by a pulp having a most pleasant, astringent, aromatic taste. This is pleasant eating, particularly if you do not manage to chew up with it any of the grains, for they are amazingly hot in the mouth, and cause one to wonder why Paradise instead of Hades was reported as their "country of origin."
The natives are very fond of chewing the capsule and the inner bark of the stem of the plant. They are, for the ​matter of that, fond of chewing anything, but the practice in this case seems to me more repaying than when carried on with kola or ordinary twigs.
Two kinds of meleguetta pepper come up from Guinea. That from Accra is the larger, plumper, and tougher skinned, and commands the higher price. The capsule, which is about 2 inches long by 1 inch in breadth, is more oval than that of the other kind, and the grains in it are round and bluntly angular, bright brown outside, but when broken open showing a white inside. The other kind, the ordinary Guinea grain of commerce, comes from Sierra Leone and Liberia. They are devoid of the projecting tuft on the umbilicus. The capsule is like that of the Accra grain. When dry, it is wrinkled, and if soaked does not display the longitudinal frill of the Javan Amomum maximum, which it is sometimes used to adulterate. This common capsule is only about 1 inches long and an inch in diameter, but the grain when broken open is also white like the Accra one. There are, however, any quantity on Cameroons of the winged Javan variety, but these have so far not been exported.
The plants that produce the grains are zingiberaceous, cane-like in appearance, only having broader, blunter leaves than the bamboo. The flower is very pretty, in some kinds a violet pink, but in the most common a violet purple, and they are worn as marks of submission by people in the Oil Rivers suing for peace. These flowers, which grow close to the ground, seeming to belong more to the root of the plant than the stem, or, more properly speaking, looking as if they had nothing to do with the graceful great soft canes round them, but were a crop of lovely crocus-like flowers on their own account, are followed by crimson​skinned pods enclosing the black and brown seeds wrapped in juicy pulp, quite unlike the appearance they present when dried or withered.
There is only a small trade done in Guinea grains now, George III. (Cap. 58) having declared that no brewer or dealer in wine shall be found in possession of grains of Paradise without paying a fine of £200, and that if any druggist shall sell them to a brewer that druggist shall pay a fine of £500 for each such offence.
The reason of this enactment was the idea that the grains were poisonous, and that the brewers in using them to give fire to their liquors were destroying their consumers, His Majesty's lieges. As far as poison goes this idea was wrong, for Meleguetta pepper or grains of Paradise are quite harmless though hot. Perhaps, however, some consignment may have reached Europe with poisonous seeds in it. I once saw four entirely different sorts of seeds in a single sample. That is the worst of our Ethiopian friends, they adulterate every mortal thing that passes through their hands. I will do them the justice to say they usually do so with the intellectually comprehensible end in view of gaining an equivalent pecuniary advantage by it. Still it is commercially unsound of them; for example for years they sent up the seeds of the Kickia Africana as an adulteration for Strophantus, whereas they would have made more by finding out that the Kickia was a great rubber-producing tree. They will often take as much trouble to put in foreign matter as to get more legitimate raw material. I really fancy if any one were to open up a trade in Kru Coast rocks, adulteration would be found in the third shipment. It is their way, and legislation is useless. All that is necessary is that the traders who buy of them should know their business ​and not make infants of themselves by regarding the African as one or expecting the government to dry nurse them.
In private life the native uses and values these Guinea grains highly, using them sometimes internally sometimes externally, pounding them up into a paste with which they beplaster their bodies for various aches and pains. For headache, not the sequelæ of trade gin, but of malaria, the forehead and temples are plastered with a stiff paste made of Guinea grain, hard oil, chalk, or some such suitable medium, and it is a most efficacious treatment for this fearfully common complaint in West Africa. But the careful ethnologist must not mix this medicinal plaster up with the sort of prayerful plaster worn by the West Africans at time for Ju Ju, and go and mistake a person who is merely attending to his body for one who is attending to his soul.
* ↑ This word is probably a corruption of the old name for this district, Cerberos.
* ↑ The derivation of this name given by Barbot is from misericordia. "As some pretend on occasion of a Portuguese ship cast away near the little river Druro, the men of that ship were assaulted by the negroes, which made the Portuguese cry for quarter, using the word misericordia, from which by corruption mesurado."
* ↑ Tornado is possibly a corruption from the Portuguese trovado, a thunderstorm; or from tornado, signifying returned; but most likely it comes from the Spanish torneado, signifying thunder.
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