Now, I had a letter of introduction to Sir George and I presented it, and he promptly asked me to come ashore with him. I had never thought of staying in the Gambia beyond the day or two the ship would take to discharge her cargo—“a potty little colony,” as I had heard it called, and it hardly seemed worth while to waste my time in a miniature Thames. How the Governor laughed when he found out my appalling ignorance, and how ashamed I was when I found it out!
“The Thames,” said he; “well, we only hold the mouth of the river about four hundred miles up, but the Gambia is at least a thousand miles in extent, and may be longer for all I know.”
I apologised to the Gambia.
“But could I see the river?”
“Why, of course; we'll send you up in the Mansikillah, the Government steamer”; and I accepted his invitation with alacrity and with gratitude.
Truly, my fairy godmother was more than waving her wand. I hadn't left English shores a week, and here was an invitation to go four hundred miles into the interior of the continent of my dreams.
We went first to the Canary Islands, the islands of the blest of the ancients, but the Canaries were as nothing to me; they have been civilised too long. They were only a stepping-stone to that other land, the land of romance, that I was nearing at last.
And now I have an apology to make, an apology which very few people will understand, but those few will, and to them it is a matter of such importance that I must make it. I went to see a savage land. I went to seek material for the only sort of story I can write, and to tell of the prowess of the men who had gone before and left their traces in great stone forts all along three hundred miles of coast. I found a savage land, in some parts a very wild land indeed, but I found what I had never expected, a land of immense possibilities, a land overflowing with wealth, a land of corn and wine and oil. I expected swamp and miasma, heat, fever, and mosquitoes. I found these truly, but I found, too, a lovely land, an entrancingly lovely land in places; I found gorgeous nights and divine mornings, and I found that the great interest of West Africa lay not in the opportunity it gave for vivid descriptions of heroes who fought and suffered and conquered, or fought and suffered and died, but in showing its immense value to the English crown in describing a land where every tropical product may be grown, a land with a teeming population and a generous soil, a land in fact that, properly managed, should supply raw material for half the workshops in England, a land that may be made to give some of its sunlight to keep alight the fires on English hearths in December, a land that as yet only the wiser heads amongst us realise the value of.
“A man comes to West Africa,” said a Swiss to me once, “because he can make in ten years as much as he could make in thirty in England.”
That is the land I found, and I apologise if I have ever written or thought of it in any other way.