Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo, Volume 2

CONTENTS

Allí o mui grande reino está de Congo, Por nós ja convertido à fé de Christo, Por onde o Zaire passa claro e longo, Rio pelos antiguos nunca visto. Here lies the Congo kingdom, great and strong, Already led by us to Christian ways; Where flows Zaïre, the river clear and long, A stream unseen by men of olden days. The Lusiada, V. 13.


During the hot season of 1863, Nanny Po, as the civilized African calls this lofty and beautiful island, had become a charnel-house, a dark and dismal tomb of Europeans. The yellow fever of the last year, which wiped out in two months one-third of the white colony—more exactly, 78 out of 250—had not reappeared, but the conditions for its re-appearance were highly favourable. The earth was all water, the vegetation all slime, the air half steam, and the difference between wet and dry bulbs almost nil. Thoroughly dispirited for the first time, I was meditating how to escape, when H. M. Steamship Torch steamed into Clarence Cove, and Commander Smith hospitably offered me a passage down south. To hear was to accept. Two days afterwards (July 29, 1863) I bade a temporary adios to the enemy.
The bitterness of death remained behind as we passed out of the baneful Bights. Wind and wave were dead against us, yet I greatly enjoyed the gradual emerging of the sun through his shroud of smokes; the increasing consciousness that a moon and stars really exist; the soft blue haze of the sky, and the coolness of 73° F. at 6 A.M. in the captain's cabin. I had also time to enjoy these charms. The Torch was not provided with despatch- boilers: she was profoundly worm-eaten, and a yard of copper, occasionally clapped on, did not prevent her making some four feet of water a day. So we rolled leisurely along the well-known Gaboon shore, and faintly sighted from afar Capes Lopez and St. Catherine, and the fringing ranges of Mayumba-land, a blue line of heights based upon gently rising banks, ruddy and white, probably of shaly clay. The seventh day (August 5) placed us off the well-known red hills of Loango-land.