The few acres on which Bonny-town is built, a sandy strip at Rough Corner at the eastern entrance of the river, and about two acres on Peterside, opposite Bonny-town, is all the dry land to be found within miles; all else is interminable mangrove swamp, intersected with creeks, to which the sharks from the river-bar come to breed. Should a man fall overboard in Bonny river he is never seen again after the first plunge, and it is supposed that there is a powerful under-current which tows the body under, though others ascribe its disappearance to the ubiquitous sharks.
A visitor to Bonny cannot fail to notice the number of old cannon and carronades lying about uncared-for in the town. These are simply neglected because they are out of date, for the natives of the Niger delta, though so behindhand in civilisation, keep up their armament to the style of the day. There is a battery of four Armstrong guns at Peterside, where the river is one mile and a-half wide, and there are several of these guns in Bonny-town. When making war upon another tribe, the natives dismount these guns and lash them upon a sort of deck built in the bows of one of their large canoes, which can carry from thirty to forty persons. The gun then is of course immovable, so in action the canoe is manœuvred till the piece points in the right direction, when it is discharged. As they aim point-blank whether the object aimed at be distant a mile or only a few yards, they do not do much execution, except by accident. Besides these Armstrongs there are thousands of breech-loading rifles, Sniders, Martini-Henrys, and Winchester repeaters, in the hands of the natives, almost every man possessing one. These are all imported by British merchants, and are manufactured so cheaply in Birmingham that a trader in the oil rivers can afford to sell a Snider rifle for 2l. and then make a slight profit. Directly these natives obtain such rifles they want to go and try their effect on something, and as they are useless for purposes of sport, except against large game, which is not found in the delta, they go and rake up some old quarrel with an insignificant tribe, and try the efficacy of their weapons upon its members. To this cause may be attributed most of their wars.
Oko Jumbo and Ja-Ja are the rival chiefs of the eastern outfalls of the Niger; they are both natives of Bonny. Some years back a Government of four regents, of which Oko Jumbo and Ja-Ja were members, was established in Bonny. The two rival chiefs each wished to monopolise the power, quarrels ensued, and finally Ja-Ja seceded and set up a kingdom for himself. Since then each has been endeavouring to outvie the other in the completeness of his war material. No sooner did Ja-Ja hear that his rival at Bonny had Armstrong guns, than he also sent to England for some. Recently a Gatling gun arrived for him, and the Bonny natives are now devoured with rage and envy because they have not one. Oko Jumbo has under his command some 7,000 or 8,000 men, all armed with breech-loading rifles and well supplied with ammunition; and Ja-Ja can put about the same number, similarly armed, into the field. The wars between these chieftains are notorious; one has but lately come to an end, in which several of Ja-Ja’s wives were captured and eaten by the enemy, and judging from the past we may expect another war soon. The bodies of the slain, and some of the prisoners taken, are always eaten by the combatants, and the remainder of the prisoners are sold into slavery. I asked Oko Jumbo why they did not eat all the captives, since they seemed to like that kind of food, and he replied that a good dinner was all very well in its way, but that it only satisfied one for a day at the most, whereas the rum, tobacco, and cloth purchased with the money obtained for the slaves would be a source of gratification for some weeks. The traders always endeavour to settle disputes between the natives, as during a war the river is closed, no produce is brought down, and their trade is almost at a standstill; they do not, however, seem inclined effectually to put an end to all these petty wars by combining together to refuse to supply the natives with arms and gunpowder.
Bonny-town rejoices in a bishop and an archdeacon of the Church of England, both pure negroes. Notwithstanding the presence of these high dignitaries of the Church, however, Christianity does not flourish in Bonny. The only members of the Mission are the semi-Christianised and semi-civilised negroes from Sierra Leone and Lagos, who by themselves form a small colony. The men of this community are carpenters, coopers, &c., who are employed by the traders; and the women—well, the less that is said about them the better. Among the natives of Bonny itself the missionaries make no converts; some will attend the services for a few weeks, from curiosity or from the hope of obtaining something, and then return to their old habits. The zeal of the missionary is wasted, for the fetish priests, who possess enormous influence, exercise all their power to prevent any of their followers joining the Mission. This is probably the only reason of the failure, because Christianity amongst negroes only consists in the outward observance of the Sunday ceremonies, and proselytes would have to give up none of their present pleasing practices. Morality is a word which conveys no meaning whatever to the ordinary negro mind. Fetishism is everywhere rampant; before almost every house may be seen a wooden or clay idol, to which offerings of food and drink are daily made, and human sacrifices are not by any means rare. A very common sacrifice to Ju-ju is that of a young girl, who is at low water fastened to a stake firmly imbedded in the river mud, and then left to perish in the rising tide, or to be devoured by sharks or crocodiles.
All English Missions on the West Coast of Africa, of whatever denomination, are an utter failure. Their custom is to get children to attend their schools, and then administer doses of religion to them, with the rudiments of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Now, in the first place, the advantage of these acquirements does not very much strike the average negro parent, and, in the second place, the schools turn out annually scores of youths who are only fitted, educationally, to become shopmen and subordinate clerks and bookkeepers. There being only a limited demand for such persons, it follows that the majority of the Mission ex-pupils can obtain no employment of that kind; they consider themselves, on account of what they call their superior education, above work, and so, having nothing else to do, they devote their minds and acquirements to the swindling of their more ignorant fellow-countrymen; and some of them, establishing themselves as clerks and advisers to the bush chiefs, do incalculable mischief.
The German Missions follow a much better plan. To each Mission is attached a European carpenter, blacksmith, cooper, tailor, or shoemaker, as a sort of lay-brother, and the pupils are taught these trades. The immense advantage of having his children taught a trade gratuitously is patent to the most careless negro parent, and he sends his children to the school accordingly; while in after-life they have the means of earning an honest livelihood, and becoming useful members of the community. Accra now supplies almost the whole of the Gold Coast and the Niger delta with artisans, because a German Mission has been established at Christiansborg for years, where the system of inculcating the great fact that honest and useful labour is much more praiseworthy than idle psalm-singing has been steadfastly pursued. I should advise those quasi-philanthrophists, who prefer squandering their money on the utopian negro to relieving the necessities of the poor of their own country, to withdraw their support from the English societies and transfer it to the Basle and Bremen Missions.
The only recreation which Bonny affords is curlew-shooting, which I enjoyed several times with my host of the “Adriatic.” Towards sun-set, when the curlew began to fly down towards their feeding-ground at Breaker Island at the mouth of the river, we used to take a boat up one of the numerous creeks, run her on to the mud at one side, and proceed to make a screen of mangrove branches. From behind this leafy cover we bagged many a bird on its flight down the creek. The number of guanas found in these channels is enormous; when keeping perfectly quiet under our cover we could see dozens upon dozens of them, some four or five feet in length, crawling about on the opposite bank, or leaping out of the water in pursuit of fish. This reptile is sacred, or fetish, at Bonny, as is the python in Dahomey and the crocodile at Accra.
It is advisable on such shooting excursions to be accompanied by somebody who knows the river. On my return to Bonny later on, after visiting Old Calabar, the doctor of the steamer and I nearly came to grief through going by ourselves. We left the ship shortly before sunset, and steered towards a long and narrow mud-bank down the river, where we had noticed that thousands of birds went to feed at nightfall. We reached the bank just as the light was beginning to fail; the cries of innumerable waterfowl rose from the mud, and we congratulated ourselves on being about to make a good bag. To our great annoyance we found, after following the sinuosities of the bank for some time, that we could not get within range from the boat; but, as we did not intend to be disappointed in that way, we got out and waded through the slime, dragging the boat a short way with us, till we reached what we considered a safe spot to leave it on. It was now nearly dark, but we could see the white plumage of hundreds of pelicans and other waterfowl a short distance off, so we both fired. An indescribable clamour of screams and cries followed the reports, as myriads of birds rose from the mud and wheeled and circled overhead. We reloaded, picked up our birds, and waited. Gradually the cries became fewer and fewer, and at last the whole flock settled down upon the furthest end of the bank. We were not satisfied with what we had got (what sportsman ever is?), so we gained the crest of the bank, where the footing was firmer, and proceeded to walk towards our prey, about three-quarters of a mile distant. We there repeated the former process with equal success, and turned to retrace our steps to our boat.
When we had accomplished about half the distance a horrible shiver, or tremor, seemed to stir the whole surface of the mud, and we both sank to our knees in slime. I never felt such fear before: I did not need any one to tell me what that ghastly tremor prognosticated; I knew we were on a quick-sand, or rather quick-mud, and that the tide must be coming in, and the prospect of being sucked down and smothered in reeking ooze was not a pleasant one. We drew our legs from the quivering mass, and tried to run in the direction in which we had left our boat. Worse and worse: we sank deeper and deeper at every step, the darkness, too, grew ever denser; we feared that our boat had been carried away by the rising tide, and we knew not which way to turn to extricate ourselves—assistance, we well knew, there was none. As the mud appeared a little firmer to our left we moved on to it, and waited in silence, panting and breathless from our late exertions. The birds, who had been the cause of our getting into this fix, came wheeling round overhead, and their cries echoed weirdly in the deathly stillness of the night. I said to the doctor—