CHAPTER XVII
THE SETTLEMENT
When Warden found that the expedition consisted of a hundred sailors and over three hundred Hausas, he was anxious that an advance should be made on Oku at once. The town lay in a bush clearing on high land overlooking the Benuë, not many miles distant from the mission station. He argued that he and Beni Kalli could guide the troops by the bush paths, and that an attack carried out at dawn would demoralize an enemy already shaken by an unforeseen repulse at Kadana.
Every one admitted that he was right from the military point of view; but Hudson, the political officer accompanying the column, shirked the responsibility of taking a step that implied the existence of a tribal war. He argued that while they were fully justified in driving off the assailants of the mission and in demanding the punishment of those engaged in it, together with the fullest compensation for loss of life and property, yet they had no proof that the King of Oku sanctioned the raid.
“When he refuses our terms,” he said, “we shall destroy his town and depose him if he escapes with his life. Under the circumstances, I cannot sanction a forward movement until negotiations have failed.”
Bellairs, of course, had to take his orders from the administration, and Warden had no power to over–ride the man whom the Government had deputed to visit Oku. He knew that Loanda, second only in importance to M’Wanga, was among the slain. He had seen M’Wanga himself exercising his savage warriors day after day and taking care that they were taught how to handle the modern weapons to which they were unaccustomed. He was aware of the exact date named for the rising, and was prevented only by several weeks’ delirium of fever from stealing off down stream in good time to warn the authorities. But he was not in his own territory, for the Benuë runs through Northern Nigeria while he was attached to the Southern Protectorate, and, above all, he was a soldier, to whom obedience was the first duty. So he refrained from weakening Hudson’s position by demonstrating how mistaken was the decision arrived at. He even hoped that, in some mysterious way, matters might be adjusted without further slaughter.
The proper course to adopt was to strike hard and promptly. Failing that, he trusted to the strange workings of the native mind to bring about a peaceful settlement. Though strong in spirit he was broken in body. He had done in five months that which a few men had taken years to accomplish, while the majority of those who essayed the task had failed, and paid the penalty of failure by dying.
When the officers of the expedition gathered in the mission that night and listened to his story, their minds went back to the days of Mungo Park, and Clapperton, and Lander, and Barth, and the rest of the famous band of explorers who had traversed the wilds of the West African hinterland during the close of the eighteenth and the early years of the nineteenth centuries.