The white woman in this part of the world is an early riser. A cup of tea is always served her when she is awakened, and as soon as she is dressed comes chota hazri, or the little breakfast, consisting of tea, toast, eggs, and fruit. The most is made of the cool hours of the morning, for in the hot weather it is customary to “shut up the bungalow” at about seven A. M., when the temperature is moderately low compared with what it will rise to a few hours later. Every door and window is closed and thereafter the greatest care is taken to make entrances and exits as quickly as possible, for a door left open for any length of time quickly raises the temperature. If kept carefully closed, however, it is remarkable how cool the room keeps as compared with the stifling heat without.
Though a Seychellian bungalow is generally barn-like without and barren within, its European mistress usually contrives to make its rooms pretty and inviting, it being astonishing what marvels of transformation can be accomplished by means of native mattings, Indian printed curtains, and furniture of Chinese wicker, all effective and ridiculously cheap. The kitchen is a detached building, erected as far away from the bungalow as possible, and the white woman who knows when she is well off seldom enters it. Once a month, however, she inspects her cooking pots and pans, because, being made of copper, they have to be periodically tinned or they become poisonous, almost as many lives being lost in the tropics by the neglect of this simple precaution as by failure to have every drop of drinking water boiled. As there is no ice-making plant in the Seychelles, water is cooled for drinking by being placed in a porous earthenware vessel and swung to and fro in the heated atmosphere until, though still far from cool, it is a little less tepid and nauseous.
But the European residents are not the only exiles in the Seychelles, nor, to my way of thinking, the ones most to be pitied, for of recent years these islands, presumably because of their very remoteness, have been turned into a political prison for those deposed cannibal kings whose kingdoms have, on one excuse and another, been added to the dominions of the British Crown. At present there are three political prisoners of note on the island of Mahé—King Kabanga of Uganda, King Assibi of the Gold Coast, and King Prempeh of Ashantee. Though all of these ebony royalties were enthusiastic patrons of the cooking-pot, King Prempeh is by far the most notorious and the most interesting personality of the three, for it was his palace at Kumasi that was built of the skulls and surrounded by a neat picket fence made from the leg and arm bones of the people he and his tribesmen had eaten. Hard by the palace was the ghastly “crucifixion grove” where the victims were slaughtered and their bodies hung until sufficiently gamy to suit the royal palate. Owing to an error of judgment in selecting a British commissioner as the pièce de résistance for one of his feasts, an expedition was sent to Ashantee, the country annexed to the British empire, and its ruler forced to exchange his skull-walled palace in Kumasi for a four-roomed, tin-roofed cottage in the outskirts of Victoria, the capital of the Seychelles, where, surrounded by the huts of the chieftains who accompanied him into exile, he lives on the meagre pension granted him by the British Government.
Clad in the flaming cotton robe of red and yellow which is the West African equivalent of royal ermine, worn over a pair of very soiled pajamas, his Majesty received me on the veranda of his little dwelling in the presence of the constable who guards him and who acts as interpreter when the King's scanty store of English gives out. Now I am not an entire stranger to the ways of the Lord's Anointed, but this audience with Prempeh of Ashantee was one of the most memorable experiences that I can recall. In the first place, the mercury had crept up and up and up until it hovered in the neighbourhood of one hundred and thirty degrees in the shade of the house; in the second place, the sons of the King (he told me that he had forty-two in all) had crowded into the tiny room until the place fairly reeked with the smell of perspiration; in the third place, I was at a loss what to talk to his Majesty about. The questions which one would like to ask a cannibal king are obvious—whether he takes his meat rare or well done, whether he prefers the tenderloin or the sirloin, whether he likes white meat better than black—but Prempeh of Ashantee is not at all the sort of person with whom one would feel inclined to take liberties, and I was very far from being sure whether he would consider such questions as liberties or not. After an awkward pause, during which the King shuffled his feet uneasily and I wiped away rivulets of perspiration, he said something in Ashantee—at least I suppose it was Ashantee—to one of his attendants, who shortly returned with a tin tray holding a bottle of whiskey, a siphon of lukewarm seltzer, and a couple of very dirty glasses. After another long and uncomfortable pause, the King asked me if I wouldn't have something to drink. Taking it for granted that Prempeh's capacity for drink would be as outré as his choice of food, I poured his beer glass full to the brim with whiskey, giving to myself the drink sanctioned by civilised custom.
“In my country,” said the King, leaning forward and speaking in the broken English which he had acquired from the government chaplain, “bad men sometimes try to poison king, so king turn drinks other way round,” and, suiting the action to the words, he turned the tray so as to place before me the beer-glassful of whiskey. I have never been quite certain whether there was a twinkle in the eye of that simple-hearted cannibal when he literally turned the table on me or not.
At the time of my visit to Prempeh he was in the throes of marital unhappiness, the details of which he confided to me. It seems that for several years past he had been endeavouring to gain admission to the Church-of-England fold, arguing, plausibly enough, that such a proof of his complete regeneration might result in inducing the British Government to send him back to his home in Ashantee. Working on that assumption, he had, not long before, asked the government chaplain to confirm him, to which request that gratified but still somewhat sceptical clergyman had replied: “I am sorry to say that what your Majesty asks is at present impossible, as your Majesty's marital affairs are not pleasing to the church.”
So Prempeh, who had brought only twelve of his wives with him into exile, thinking that the church held such a number to be incompatible with his dignity,—for the workings of the West African mind are peculiar, remember,—sent a message to the governor of the Seychelles asking permission to take a maiden of Mahé for his thirteenth spouse, and it was not until the indignant chaplain remonstrated with him for his fall from grace that he grasped the fact that Christianity demands of its converts the minimum instead of the maximum number of wives.
“So me ship three wives back Africa,” Prempeh explained to me in his quaint West Coast English. “Now me have only nine. Nine wives not many for great king. But if chappy [chaplain] not let me in church with nine wives, then me ship them back Africa too, for me very much homesick to see Ashantee.”
Poor, deposed, exiled, homesick king, he will never again see that African home for which he longs, I fear, for he cost England far too much in lives and money. He came out on the veranda of his little house to say good-by, and as I looked back, as my 'rickshaw boy drew me swiftly down the road, he was still standing there waving to me—a real, dyed-in-the-wool cannibal king, who has killed and eaten more human beings, I suppose, than almost any man that ever lived.