I knew then it was all right.
[2] My mother was one of the best and cleverest of women—a queenly woman in manners and appearance (people who have been much at Courts have told me that they always felt as if they were in Royal presence when with her). She had a noble heart and disposition, was generous to a fault, and was exceedingly clever. She was, at the time I write of, still a worldly woman of strong brain, of hasty temper, bigoted, and a Spartan with the elder half of her brood. We trembled before her, but we adored her, and we never got over her death in 1872.
[CHAPTER XVI.]
WEST COAST OF AFRICA—RICHARD'S FIRST CONSULATE.
In his "Wanderings in West Africa" (2 vols., 1863), Richard describes the whole of his jurisdiction, which was several hundred miles of coast. The ship, after leaving Madeira and Teneriffe, goes to Bathurst on the West Coast, to Sierra Leone, Monrovia, Grand Bassa, Cape Palmas, Half Jack, Grand Baltam, Axim, Elmina, Cape Coast Castle, Salt Pond, Winnebah, Accra, Addah, Quitta, Bagadah, Agwey, Whydah, Lagos, Bonny, Fernando Po, and Old Calabar, one station beyond. He ends up with—"Arriving in these outer places is the very abomination of desolation. I drop, for a time, my pen, in the distinct memory of having felt uncommonly suicidal through that first night at Fernando Po."
It would not suit this book to have large copyings from his works, but I think I should give two which are especially useful—one a description of the Sierra Leone negro, and another on the richness of the Guinea Coast, about which I shall have something to say later on in 1881.
"We parted with our consumptives at Madeira; we leave our Africans at Sierra Leone. For this race there is a descending scale of terminology: 1, European; 2, civilized man; 3, African; 4, man—the Anglo-Americans say, 'pussum'—of colour; 5, negro; 6, darkie; 7, nigger, which last, is actionable. Many a £5 has been paid for the indulgence of lèse majesté against the 'man and a brother;' and not a few £50 where the case has been brought into the civil courts. Captain Philip Beaver was justified in declaring that he would 'rather carry a rattlesnake than a negro—who has been in London.' Not so Mr. Hazelface, into whose soul or countenance soggezzione, or shame, never entered—for was he not of the Almighty Negroes? And shall not the most dishonest of Negroes in these days stand before Kings? The second, our Gorilla, or Missing Link, was the son of an emancipated slave, who afterwards distinguished himself as a Missionary and a Minister. His—the sire's—name has appeared in many books, and he wrote one himself, pitying his own 'poor lost father,' because, forsooth, he died in the religion of his ancestors, an honest Fetishist. Our excellent warm-hearted, ignorant souls at home were so delighted with the report of this Lion of the Pulpit, that it was much debated whether the boy Ajáí had not been providentially preserved for the Episcopate of Western Africa.
"These individuals are out of their assiettes. At home they will devour, perforce, Kankey and bad fish, washing them down with Mimbo and Pitta—native and palm wine, and hop-less beer—here they abuse the best of beef, long openly for 'palaver sauce' and 'palm-oil chop,' and find fault with their champagne. At home they will wear breech-clouts and Nature's stockings, only. Here their coats are superfine Saxony, with broadest of silk velvet collars. The elongated cocoa-nut head bears jauntily a black pork-pie felt, with bright azure ribbons, and a rainbow necktie vies in splendour with the loudest of waistcoats from the land of Moses and Son; the pants are tightly strapped down to show the grand formation of the knee, the delicate slimness of the calf, the manly purchase of the heel, and the waving line of beauty that distinguishes the shin-bone.[1] There are portentous studs upon a glorious breadth of shirt, a small investment of cheap, gaudy, tawdry rings sets off the chimpanzee-like fingers, and when in the open air, lemon-coloured gloves invest the hands, whose horny reticulated skin reminds me of the scaly feet of those cranes which pace at ease over the burning sand, for which strong slippers are not strong enough for us; whilst feet of the same order, but slightly superior in point of proportional size, are tightly packed into patent-leather boats, the latter looking as if they had been stuffed with some inanimate substance, say the halves of a calf's head.
"It is hardly fair to deride a man's hideousness, but it is where personal deformity is accompanied by conceit. Once upon a time we all pitied an individual who by acclamation was proclaimed the ugliest man in the B—— army, which is not saying a little. 'Poor E——!' his friends would exclaim; 'it's no matter if a chap's plain, but he is revolting,' and they commiserated him accordingly. Once, however, he was detected by his chums looking into a shaving-glass, and thus soliloquizing: 'Well, E——, I declare you'd be a deuced handsome fellow if you had but a better nose.' The discreet chum, of course, spread the story, and from that moment our compassion departed.
"No one, also, is more hopeless about the civilization of Africa than the semi-civilized African returning to the 'home of his fathers.' One feels how hard has been his own struggle to emerge from barbarism. He acknowledges in his own case a selection of species, and he sees no end to the centuries before there can be a nation equal even to himself. Yet in England, and in books, he will cry up the Majesty of African kings; he will give the people whom he thoroughly despises a thousand grand gifts of morals and industry, and extenuate, or rather ignore, all their faults and shortcomings. I have heard a negro assert, with the unblushing effrontery which animates the negro speechifying in Exeter Hall, or before some learned society, that—for instance, at Lagos, a den of thieves—theft is unknown, and that men leave their money with impunity in the store-house, or on the highway. After which, he goes home, 'tongue in cheek,' despising the facility with which an Englishman and his money are parted.
"Our Africans left the ship without, on our part, or probably on theirs, a single regret. Not so with the Mandengas. The honest and manly bearing of these Moslems—so wonderful a contrast with those caricatures in pork-pie and peg-topped broadcloth—had prepossessed me strongly in their favour. We shook hands, and in broken Arabic bade each other a kindly Allah-speed.
The Black Man is raised above the White Man.
"The white man's position is rendered far more precarious on the coast than it might be, if the black man were always kept in his proper place. A European without stockings or waistcoat, and with ragged slops hanging about his limbs, would not be admitted into the cuddy; an African will. Many of the fellows come on board to make money by picking a quarrel. And what does one think of a dusky belle, after dropping her napkin at Government House, saying to her neighbour, 'Please, Mr. Officer-man, pick up my towel'? Or of such a dialogue as this? The steward has neglected to supply soup to some negro, who at every meal has edged himself higher up towards the top of the table, and whose conversation consists of whispering into the ears of an adjacent negro, and of hyæna-like guffaws.
"'I say, daddee, I want my soop; all de passengers, he drink 'im soop; me no drink my soop: what he mean, dis palaver?'
"The words are uttered in a kind of scream; the steward cannot help smiling, and the nigger resumes—
"'Ah, you laff! And for why you laff? I no laff; no drinkee soop!'
"Here the dialogue ends, and the ladies look their acknowledgments that travelling does throw us into strange society.
"From the moment of our arrival, 'negro palaver' began. A cause célèbre, which will be referred home, had just been brought to a close. Mr. M——, a civilian official in the colony, after thrice warning out of his compound a troublesome negro and a suspected thief, had applied a certain vis à tergo, and had ejected the trespasser, not, however, with unnecessary violence. In England the case would have been settled by a police magistrate, and the fine, if any, would have been half a crown. At Freetown the negro, assisted by his friends or 'company,' betakes himself to a lawyer. The latter may be a mulatto, possibly a pettifogger, certainly a moneyless man who lives in a wretched climate for the pure purposes of lucre; his interest is of course to promote litigation, and he fills his pockets by what is called 'sharp practice.' After receiving the preliminary fee of £5, he demands exemplary damages. The consequence was that Mr. M—— was lightened of £50.
THE MAN WHO WINS.
"These vindictive cases are endless; half an hour's chat will bring out a dozen, and, as at Aden, the Sons of the White Cliff have nothing to do but to quarrel and to recount their grievances. A purser of the African S.S. Company, finding a West Indian negro substituting dead for live turkeys, called him a 'tief.' The 'tief' laid an action for £1000, and the officer was only too happy to escape with the retainer, three guineas. The same, when a black came on board for a package, sent him off to the quarter-deck; the fellow became insolent, when a military man present exclaimed, 'If you gave me that cheek, I'd have you overboard!' The negro put off, took two of his friends as witnesses, procured an affidavit that the white man had threatened him, and laid an action for defamation of character, etc.; damages £50—a favourite sum. Despite a counter oath, signed by two or three English officers, one of them a colonel, to the effect that no bad language had been used except by the plaintiff, whose insolence had been unbearable, the defendant was compelled to make an apology, and to pay £15 costs. Another told me that for raising a stick to an insolent servant, he was 'actioned' for £50, and escaped by compromise for £12. When the defendant is likely to leave the station, the modus operanda is as follows:—A writ of summons is issued. The lawyer strongly recommends an apology for the alleged offence and a promise to pay costs, warning the offender at the same time that judgment will go against him if absent by default. Should the defendant prudently 'stump up,' the thing ends; if not, a capias is taken out, and the law runs its course. A jury is chosen. The British Constitution determines that a man must be tried by his peers. His peers at Sierra Leone are perhaps a dozen full-blooded blacks, liberated slaves, half-reformed fetishmen, sometimes with a sneaking fondness for the worship of Shángo, and if not criminals in their own country, at least pauper-clad in dish-clouts and palm oil. To see such peers certainly 'takes pride down a peg,' as the phrase is; no use to think of that ancestor who 'came over' with the Conqueror, or that Barony lost in the days of the Rebellion.
"No one raises the constitutional question, 'Are these half-reclaimed barbarians my peers?' And if he did, justice would sternly answer 'Yes!' The witnesses will forswear themselves—not like our porters, for half a crown, but gratis, because the plaintiff is a fellow-tribesman. The judge may be 'touched with the tar-brush,' but be he white as milk, he must pass judgment according to verdict, and when damages are under £200, there is no appeal.
"Sierra Leone contains many sable families—Lumpkins, Lewis, Pratt, Ezidio, Nicols, Macarthy, are a few of their patronymics,—against whom it is useless for a stranger to contend and come off scot and lot free. Besides these, there are seventeen chief and two hundred minor tribes, whilst a hundred languages, according to M. Koelle,—one hundred and fifty, says Bishop Vidal—are spoken in the streets of Freetown. All are hostile to one another; all combine against the white man. After the fashion of the Gold Coast, they have formed themselves into independent republics, called 'companies.' These set aside certain funds for their own advancement, and for the ruin of their rivals. The most powerful and influential races are the Aku and the Ibo.
"If the reader believes that I have exaggerated the state of things at Sierra Leone, he is mistaken; the sketch is under rather than overdrawn. And he will presently see a confirmation of these statements in the bad name which these liberated Africans bear upon the whole of the western coast.
"At breakfast we had been duly primed with good advice, viz. not to notice impudence, and to turn our shoulders—the severest punishment—upon all who tried their hands at annoyance. We rowed to the Government landing, a rickety, slippery flight of wooden stairs, which is positively dangerous at night, or when the waves dash against the jetty. We were careful to carry no luggage; porters fight for the job, and often let the object of emulation drop into the water. One of our mail-bags received this baptism de Sierra Leone last night. On such occasion a push or poke is a forbidden luxury; the man might fall down—you have certainly injured him internally—you must pay exemplary damages."