Angola and the River Congo, vol. 1

by Joachim John Monteiro

It was on my first arrival in Ambriz in February 1858, that this substance struck me as being fit for making good paper: a few simple experiments enabled me to make specimens of bleached fibre and pulp from it, proving to me conclusively its suitableness for that purpose.

Having been engaged in mining in Angola, it was not till the year 1865 that I finally determined to proceed to Ambriz, with the view of developing my discovery, and I have ever since been actively engaged in establishing houses on the part of the coast I am now describing, for bartering the Adansonia fibre,—pressing and shipping the same to England. In my long and arduous task I have met with more than the ordinary amount of losses and disappointments, from commercial failures and other causes that seem to fall to the lot of discoverers or inventors in general; but I have triumphed over all obstacles and prejudices, and have established its success as a paper-making material beyond any doubt.

The Baobab, or “monkey fruit tree,” is well known from descriptions as one of the giants of the vegetable kingdom. It rears its vast trunk thirty or forty feet high, with a diameter of three or four feet in the baby plants, to usually twenty to thirty feet in the older trees. Adansonias of more than thirty feet in diameter are rare, but they have been measured of as great a size as over 100 feet in circumference; the thickest trunk I have ever seen was sixty-four feet in circumference, and was clean and unbroken, without a crack on its smooth bark.

The leaves and flowers are produced during the rainy season, and are succeeded by the long pendant gourd-like fruit, like hanging notes of admiration, giving the gigantic, nearly leafless tree a most singular appearance. Millions of these trees cover the whole of Angola, as they do in fact the whole of tropical Africa, sufficient to supply an incalculable amount of paper material for years, but for the indolence of the negro race. I have no doubt, however, that they will in time follow the example of the Ambriz blacks, and a very large trade be developed as in the case of the palm-oil and the india-rubber trade.

The leaves of the Baobab when young are good to eat, boiled as a vegetable, and in appearance are somewhat like a new horse-chestnut leaf about half grown, and of a bright green; the flowers are very handsome, being a large ball of pure white, about four or five inches across, exactly like a powder puff, with a crown of large thick white petals turned back on top of it. After a few days the flowers become tipped with yellow, before dropping from the tree. The trunks, even of the largest trees, have properly speaking no wood, that is to say, a plank could not be sawn out of it, or any work made from it;—a section of a trunk shows first a thin outer skin or covering of a very peculiar pinkish ashen white, somewhat like that of a silver birch, some appearing quite silvery against the colour of other trees and foliage; then there follows about an inch of substance like hard mangold wurzel with fibres, then the thick coat of fibrous inner bark, which readily separates; next, the young wood, very much like the inner bark, and lastly, layers of more woody texture, divided or separated by irregular layers of pith, the most woody parts having no more firmness than perfectly rotten mildewed pine wood, and breaking quite readily with a ragged and very fibrous fracture.

The centre of these vast trunks easily rots, and becomes hollow from the top, where the stem generally branches off laterally into two or three huge arms. This is taken advantage of by the Quissama blacks, who inhabit the south bank of the River Quanza, to use them as tanks to store rain water in against the dry season, as it is a country very destitute of water.

The hollow Baobabs are very seldom open from the sides; I only remember one large tree of this kind in which an aperture like a door gave admittance into the empty centre; this was in Cambambe, and the hollow was large enough for two of us to sit inside, with a small box between us for a table, and have our breakfast, and room to spare for our cook to attend on us. Whilst we were comfortably enjoying our meal in its grateful shade, our cook suddenly gave a shout and rushed out, crying “Nhoca, Nhoca,” “Snake, Snake,” and sure enough there was a fine fellow about four feet long over-head, quietly surveying our operations; a charge of shot settled this very quickly, and down he fell, a victim to his curiosity.

The inner bark of the Adansonia is obtained by first chopping off the softer outer bark of the tree with a matchet, and then stripping the inner bark in large sheets. The smaller trees produce the finest and softest fibre, and it is taken off all round the tree, which does not appear to suffer much injury. A fresh layer of bark grows, and is thick enough to take off in about six to eight years. The bark is only taken off the large trunks in places where the outer bark is smooth and free from knobs, &c. In the course of time, the trunk growing, shows the scar, high above the ground, of the place where the bark has been taken off years before. The layers of inner bark when cut are saturated with sap; the pieces are beaten with a stick to soften them, and shaken to get rid of some of the pithy matter attached to them. The bark is then dried in the sun, when it is ready for pressing into bales, and shipping.

This inner bark is put to a variety of uses by the natives. It is twisted into string and rope for all sorts of purposes, or used in strips to secure loads, and to tie the sticks, &c., in making their huts. Finer pieces are pulled out so as to resemble a coarse network, and the edges being sewn together, make handy bags for cotton, or gum, grain, &c.; and very strong bags are woven from thin strips, in which coffee and ground-nuts are brought down from Cazengo to the coast.

Several amusing incidents occurred on my introducing the trade in Baobab fibre among the natives. I had great difficulty at first in inducing them to take to it, but they soon saw the advantage of doing on a large scale what they had been accustomed to do for their own small necessities; their principal reason for suspicion about it was that it had never before been an article purchased by the white men; they would not believe it was for making paper, but thought it must be for making cloth, and one old fellow very sagely affirmed that it was to be used for making mosquito curtains, from the open texture of the finer samples. It was debated at the towns whether it should be allowed to be cut and sold, and finally agreed to, and the trade was fully established at Ambriz for several months, when a report spread amongst the natives that the object of my buying it was to make it into ropes to tie them up some fine day when they least expected it, and ship them on board the steamers as slaves. Such was the belief in this absurd idea that all the natives employed at the factories disappeared, and not a man, woman, or child appeared in Ambriz for several days, and the place was nearly starved out.