Under Many Flags

by Katharine Scherer Cronk; Elsie Singmaster

"Disgrace has been put upon us," said another. "We must have vengeance."

The warriors shook their heads impatiently. They would listen, but they would not obey. The little figure came nearer and nearer and stood at last regarding them.

Calabar was not only one of the most beautiful places in the world, it was one of the most terrible. Just as into the pends and closes of Dundee had crowded all the poor and wretched beings who could not afford to live elsewhere, so into Calabar had drifted the most ignorant, the most degraded, the most persecuted of the black men on the West Coast. On one side the water prevented them from going farther; not far away from the other side was the desert. From the sea came a terrible enemy, the slave-trader, who seized thousands of victims and carried them away to die in misery in his ships or to serve hard masters in distant lands. The country was under the control of England, but no white men penetrated it to face death from starvation, fever, or the bullet or poisoned arrow or spear-tip of a warrior.

Missionaries try to speak as kindly as possible about the people among whom they work, but for these poor Africans they had only dreadful words, "bloody," "savage," "cruel," "crafty," "devilish," "cannibals," "murderers." They did their best for them along the coast, but their efforts to penetrate inland were in vain. It was no wonder they were "bloody," "savage," and "cruel," since the white man whom the Africans knew was a demon who stole men, who taught them new ways of murdering one another, and who brought them rum which made beasts of them.

Most fierce and terrible of all the tribes and most dangerous to the white man were the Okoyong whose watchword seemed to be "war." They fought among themselves in their own villages and in various tribes; but most of all they fought the surrounding nations. The life of a warrior from Calabar was not worth an instant's purchase if he appeared on their borders.

But into this country Mary Slessor had gone, and here she was at dawn, alone, facing a tribe of angry men—not only facing them, but giving them orders.

She had left Scotland and had lived for a while in the mission school at Duke Town near the coast where all was orderly, and there had learned the language. Now she lived in a mud hut and ate the food of the natives, partly so that she might have a large share of her salary to send home to her mother, and partly because she wanted to learn the hearts of the native men and women and the secret of their dreadful customs. If she knew why they believed it necessary to kill the wives of a chief when he died and put their bodies with his into the grave, if she knew why they threw poor little twin babies into the bushes to die, if she knew why they offered human sacrifices,—then she might be able to persuade them to understand their own wickedness.

She asked at last to be sent to Okoyong, and here she was alone, so far as white companionship was concerned, but with many black companions. She had even adopted a family, all of them black. One was a little girl, brought to her by a white trader.

"I found this tiny baby thing in the bush," he said. "It is a twin, and the other is dead."

Mary called the baby Janie for her sister in Scotland. Finally she had seven, who would otherwise have died and whom she nursed and taught and trained.