June 8th. - In the morning, up at five. Great activity on beach. Mové synchronously taking on wood fuel and discharging cargo. A very active young French pastor from the Kangwe mission station is round after the mission’s cargo. Mr. Hudson kindly makes inquiries as to whether I may go round to Kangwe and stay with Mme. Jacot. He says: “Oh, yes,” but as I find he is not M. Jacot, I do not feel justified in accepting this statement without its having personal confirmation from Mme. Jacot, and so, leaving my luggage with the Mové, I get them to allow me to go round with him and his cargo to Kangwe, about three-quarters of an hour’s paddle round the upper part of Lembarene Island, and down the broad channel on the other side of it. Kangwe is beautifully situated on a hill, as its name denotes, on the mainland and north bank of the river. Mme. Jacot most kindly says I may come, though I know I shall be a fearful nuisance, for there is no room for me save M. Jacot’s beautifully neat, clean, tidy study. I go back in the canoe and fetch my luggage from the Mové; and say good-bye to Mr. Hudson, who gave me an immense amount of valuable advice about things, which was subsequently of great use to me, and a lot of equally good warnings which, if I had attended to, would have enabled me to avoid many, if not all, my misadventures in Congo Français.
I camped out that night in M. Jacot’s study, wondering how he would like it when he came home and found me there; for he was now away on one of his usual evangelising tours. Providentially Mme. Jacot let me have the room that the girls belonging to the mission school usually slept in, to my great relief, before M. Jacot came home.
I will not weary you with my diary during my first stay at Kangwe. It is a catalogue of the collection of fish, etc., that I made, and a record of the continuous, never-failing kindness and help that I received from M. and Mme. Jacot, and of my attempts to learn from them the peculiarities of the region, the natives, and their language and customs, which they both know so well and manage so admirably. I daily saw there what it is possible to do, even in the wildest and most remote regions of West Africa, and recognised that there is still one heroic form of human being whose praise has never adequately been sung, namely, the missionary’s wife.
Wishing to get higher up the Ogowé, I took the opportunity of the river boat of the Chargeurs Réunis going up to the Njole on one of her trips, and joined her.
June 22nd. - Éclaireur, charming little stern wheel steamer, exquisitely kept. She has an upper and a lower deck. The lower deck for business, the upper deck for white passengers only. On the upper deck there is a fine long deck-house, running almost her whole length. In this are the officers’ cabins, the saloon and the passengers’ cabins (two), both large and beautifully fitted up. Captain Verdier exceedingly pleasant and constantly saying “N’est-ce pas?” A quiet and singularly clean engineer completes the white staff.
The passengers consist of Mr. Cockshut, going up river to see after the sub-factories; a French official bound for Franceville, which it will take him thirty-six days, go as quick as he can, in a canoe after Njole; a tremendously lively person who has had black water fever four times, while away in the bush with nothing to live on but manioc, a diet it would be far easier to die on under the circumstances. He is excellent company; though I do not know a word he says, he is perpetually giving lively and dramatic descriptions of things which I cannot but recognise. M. S---, with his pince-nez, the Doctor, and, above all, the rapids of the Ogowé, rolling his hands round and round each other and clashing them forward with a descriptive ejaculation of “Whish, flash, bum, bum, bump,” and then comes what evidently represents a terrific fight for life against terrific odds. Wish to goodness I knew French, for wishing to see these rapids, I cannot help feeling anxious and worried at not fully understanding this dramatic entertainment regarding them. There is another passenger, said to be the engineer’s brother, a quiet, gentlemanly man. Captain argues violently with every one; with Mr. Cockshut on the subject of the wicked waste of money in keeping the Mové and not shipping all goods by the Éclaireur, “N’est-ce pas?” and with the French official on goodness knows what, but I fancy it will be pistols for two and coffee for one in the morning time. When the captain feels himself being worsted in argument, he shouts for support to the engineer and his brother. “N’est-ce pas?” he says, turning furiously to them. “Oui, oui, certainement,” they say dutifully and calmly, and then he, refreshed by their support, dashes back to his controversial fray. He even tries to get up a row with me on the subject of the English merchants at Calabar, whom he asserts have sworn a kind of blood oath to ship by none but British and African Company’s steamers. I cannot stand this, for I know my esteemed and honoured friends the Calabar traders would ship by the Flying Dutchman or the Devil himself if either of them would take the stuff at 15 shillings the ton. We have, however, to leave off this row for want of language, to our mutual regret, for it would have been a love of a fight.
Soon after leaving Lembarene Island, we pass the mouth of the chief southern affluent of the Ogowé, the Ngunie; it flows in unostentatiously from the E.S.E., a broad, quiet river here with low banks and two islands (Walker’s Islands) showing just off its entrance. Higher up, it flows through a mountainous country, and at Samba, its furthest navigable point, there is a wonderfully beautiful waterfall, the whole river coming down over a low cliff, surrounded by an amphitheatre of mountains. It takes the Éclaireur two days steaming from the mouth of the Ngunie to Samba, when she can get up; but now, in the height of the long dry season neither she nor the Mové can go because of the sandbanks; so Samba is cut off until next October. Hatton and Cookson have factories up at Samba, for it is an outlet for the trade of Achango land in rubber and ivory, a trade worked by the Akele tribe, a powerful, savage and difficult lot to deal with, and just in the same condition, as far as I can learn, as they were when Du Chaillu made his wonderful journeys among them. While I was at Lembarene, waiting for the Éclaireur, a notorious chief descended on a Ngunie sub-factory, and looted it. The wife of the black trading agent made a gallant resistance, her husband was away on a trading expedition, but the chief had her seized and beaten, and thrown into the river. An appeal was made to the Doctor then Administrator of the Ogowé, a powerful and helpful official, and he soon came up with the little canoniere, taking Mr. Cockshut with him and fully vindicated the honour of the French flag, under which all factories here are.
The banks of the Ogowé just above Lembarene Island are low; with the forest only broken by village clearings and seeming to press in on those, ready to absorb them should the inhabitants cease their war against it. The blue Ntyankâlâ mountains of Achango land show away to the E.S.E. in a range. Behind us, gradually sinking in the distance, is the high land on Lembarene Island.
Soon we run up alongside a big street of a village with four high houses rising a story above the rest, which are strictly ground floor; it has also five or six little low open thatched huts along the street in front. [{96}] These may be fetish huts, or, as the captain of the Sparrow would say, “again they mayn’t.” For I have seen similar huts in the villages round Libreville, which were store places for roof mats, of which the natives carefully keep a store dry and ready for emergencies in the way of tornadoes, or to sell. We stop abreast of this village. Inhabitants in scores rush out and form an excited row along the vertical bank edge, several of the more excited individuals falling over it into the water.
Yells from our passengers on the lower deck. Yells from inhabitants on shore. Yells of vite, vite from the Captain. Dogs bark, horns bray, some exhilarated individual thumps the village drum, canoes fly out from the bank towards us. Fearful scrimmage heard going on all the time on the deck below. As soon as the canoes are alongside, our passengers from the lower deck, with their bundles and their dogs, pour over the side into them. Canoes rock wildly and wobble off rapidly towards the bank, frightening the passengers because they have got their best clothes on, and fear that the Éclaireur will start and upset them altogether with her wash.