Photo by: the Author
Our Boat and its Crew
This boat—the gift of a friend at Derby—was used in itinerating up and down our large parish with its two hundred miles of river frontage.
The following is probably a great factor in causing their mental growth to stop practically at the above age: For generations boys on arriving at the age of fourteen or fifteen had learned all their fathers had to teach them respecting fishing, hunting, wood-craft, building, paddling, etc. If they showed a special aptitude for fishing, hunting, etc., they followed their “bent” in that particular, and became proficient simply by practice, and their successes were generally put to the credit of their charms. They never initiated new ways of building (until after the arrival of the white man), or new ways of hunting or fishing, etc., but only carried on those modes they had gained from their fathers, and which were mastered by the time they were fifteen years old. Thus their intelligence has attained, for generations, its fullest development by the above age, and now we have to help them over that crucial stage. In some cases it is very difficult, but in other cases we can do so; and in such there is no limit to the intellectual progress they may make. In many instances they have mastered a good working knowledge of French, Portuguese, or English, both spoken and written, and as larger opportunities are given, a large number of youths will make such mental progress as will encourage their friends and teachers.
Photo by: the Author
A Room in the Monsembe House
The author’s study and his wife’s drawing and reception-room. The walls are made of bamboos, scraped and varnished, and all the furniture, except the chairs, was made on the spot.
The native in his raw state gained such an acquaintance with the languages of neighbouring tribes as to be able to communicate freely with them; and in many of their folk-lore stories there are sentences taken from other languages and scattered through the tales like French phrases in a fashionable novel. We have found, as a rule, that lads who came to us at fourteen or fifteen made very slow progress in our schools, and seldom reached the higher classes. They lost heart at their difficulties, and left school—there were exceptions, but such as only go to prove the rule. I think it would not be difficult to prove that English lads at the age of fourteen or fifteen need constant spurring by teacher, father, or guardian, or a much larger proportion of them would lose the knowledge they had acquired in their schools.
When I had almost finished building the three-room bungalow in which I hoped to spend many years with my devoted wife, I began to build a kitchen, and the natives, seeing a smaller house being built in proximity to the larger one, said: “That is where the white man is going to put his wife, while he will, of course, live in the large house.”
“No,” we answered; “that is the cook-house. My wife will live here in this house when she arrives.”
“You would not be so foolish, white man,” they inquired, “as to put a woman in this fine house? You will send her to live in that small one, will you not?” And there was a certain amount of anxiety in their tones rather indicative of their fear that I was going to upset the proper order of domestic life by allowing a woman to live on equality with myself.
They would scarcely believe me until they saw the stove fixed in the cook-house, and my wife installed with me on equal terms in what they called my “fine house,” which was only a three-roomed cottage with a verandah on two sides.