I really, however, cannot help thinking Hanno must have got past the Niger Delta; for there is nothing to frighten any one, as far as the look of things go, until you go south from Calabar, and find yourself facing that magnificent Great Cameroon and Fernando Po; and Hanno’s people were scared as they were never scared before. Yet, again, there are those fires, which were in the main doubtless what that very wise and not half-appreciated missionary, the late Rev. J. Leighton Wilson, says they were, namely, fires made by the native burning down the high grass at the end of a dry season to make his farms. Now Hanno could have seen any quantity of these along parts of the shores of the Bight of Benin, but is not likely to have seen them to any alarming extent on the Biafran Bight, because the shores thereof are deeply fringed with mangrove swamps, and the native does not start making farms in them. Hanno might have seen what looked like the smoke of innumerable fires on the sides of Cameroon Mountain and Fernando Po. I myself have seen the whole mighty forest there smoking as if beneath it smouldered the infernal regions themselves; but it is only columns and wafts of mist, and so gives no blaze at night; if you want to see a real land of flame with, over it, a pall of cloud reflecting back its crimson light in a really terrifying way, you must go south of Cameroon, south of Congo Français, south, until you reach the region of the Great Congo itself; and there—on the grass-covered hills and plains of the Lower Congo lands—you will see a land of fire at the end of the dry season, terrific enough to awe any man. Of course, if Hanno passed the Congo and went down as far as the fringing sands of the Kalahari desert, he would certainly not have been able to get stores; but also down there he would not have met with an island on which there were gorillas; for even if we grant that there was sufficient dense forest south of the Congo in his days for gorillas to have inhabited, and allow that in old days gorillas were south of the Congo, which they are not now, still, there is no island near the coast. So I am afraid we cannot quite settle Hanno’s furthest point, and must content ourselves by saying he was a brave man, a good sailor, and a credit therefore to his country and the human race.
After Hanno’s time I cannot find any record of a regular set of trading expeditions down the West Coast by the Carthaginians. From scattered observations it is certain the commerce of the Carthaginians with the Barbary Coast and the Bight of Benin was long carried on; but it does not seem to have been carried on along the coast of the Bight of Biafra; and the voyage in 170 B.C. may be cited in support of this, showing that the voyage as far south as Eudoxus went was then considered as marvellous and new. Still, on the other hand, it must be remembered that, prior to our own day, the navigator had no great inducement to tell the rest of the world exactly where he had been; indeed, the navigator whose main interest is commerce is, to this day, not keen on so doing. He would rather keep little geographical facts—such as short cuts by creeks, and places where either gold, or quicksilver, and buried ivory, is plentiful—to himself, than go explaining about these things for the sake of getting an unrepaying honour. One sees this so much in studying the next period of this history—the early Portuguese and early French discoveries; you will find that one of these nations knew about a place years before the other came along, and discovered it, and claimed it as its own—with disputes as a natural consequence.
There has, however, been one very interesting point in the dealing of the nations of higher culture with the Africans, and that is the way their commerce with them has had periods of abeyance. The Egyptians have left us record of having been extensively in touch with the interior of Africa, via the Nile Valley,—then came a pause. Then came the Carthaginian commerce,—then a pause. Then the Portuguese, French, English, Dutch, and Dane trading enterprise, say, roughly from 1340 to 1700,—then a falling off of this enterprise; revived during the Slave-trade days, falling off again on its suppression, and reviving in our own days. I suppose I ought to say greatly, but—well, we will discuss that later. These pauses have always been caused by the nations of higher culture getting too busy with wars at home to trouble themselves about the African, all the more so because the produce of Africa has filtered slowly, whether it was fetched by white man or no, into their markets through the hands of the energetic North African tribes and the Arabs. Whenever the white man has settled down with his home affairs, and has had time to spare, he has always gone and looked up the African again, “discovered him,” and he has always found him in the same state of culture that the pioneers of the previous Blüth-period found him in. Hanno does not find down the West Coast another Carthage—he finds bush fires, and hears the tom-tom and the horn and the shouts. He finds people slightly clad and savage. Then read Aluise da Ca da Mostro and the rest of Prince Henry’s adventures; well, you might—save that the old traveller is more interesting—almost be reading a book published yesterday. The only radical change made for large quantities of Africans by means of white intercourse was made by exporting them to America. How this is going to turn out we do not yet know; and whether or no, after the present period of white exploitation of Africa, there may not come another pause from our becoming too interested in some big fight of our own to keep up our interest in the African, we cannot tell; so I will pass on to a very interesting point in a method of trade mentioned by the early authorities—the silent trade.
Herodotus gives us the first description of it,[35] saying that the Carthaginians state that beyond the Pillars of Hercules there is a region of Libya, and men who inhabit it. When they arrive among these people and have unloaded their merchandise they set it in order on the shore, go on board their ships and make a great smoke, and the inhabitants seeing the smoke come down to the sea shore, deposit gold in exchange for the merchandise, and withdraw to some distance. The Carthaginians then going ashore examine the goods, and if the quantity seems sufficient for the merchandise they take it and sail away; but if it is not sufficient they go on board again and wait; the natives then approach and deposit more gold until they have satisfied them: neither party ever wrongs the other, for they do not touch the gold before it is made adequate to the value of the merchandise, nor do the natives touch the merchandise before the Carthaginians have taken the gold.
The next description of this silent trade I have been able to find is that given by Aluise da Ca da Mostro, a Venetian gentleman who, allured by the accounts of the riches of West Africa given by Prince Henry the Navigator, abandoned trading with the Low Countries, entered the Prince’s service, and went down the Coast in 1455. When in the district of Cape Blanco, at a place called by him Hoden, he was told that six days’ journey from this place there was a place called Tagazza, signifying a chest of gold; there large quantities of rock salt were dug from the earth every year and carried on camels by the Arabs and the Azanaghi, who were tawny Moors,[36] in separate companies to Timbuk, and from thence to the Empire of Melli, which belonged to the negroes; having arrived there they disposed of their salt in the course of eight days, at the rate of two and three hundred mitigals the load (a mitigal = a ducat), according to the quantity thereof, after which they returned home with the gold they had been paid in. These merchants reckoned it forty days’ journey on horseback from Tagazza to “Timbuk” as Mostro, while from Timbuk to Melli it is thirty days’ journey. Ca da Mostro then inquired to what use the salt taken to Melli was put; and they said that the merchants used a certain quantity of it themselves, for on account of their country lying near the Line, where the days and nights are of equal length, at certain seasons of the year the heats were excessive, and putrefied the blood unless salt was taken; their method of taking it was to dissolve a piece in a porringer of water daily and drink it. When the remainder of the salt reached Melli, carried thither on camels, each camel load was broken up into pieces of a suitable size for one man to carry. A large number of what Ca da Mostro calls footmen—whom we nowadays call porters—were assembled at Melli to be ready to carry the salt from thence further away still into the heart of Africa.
I have dwelt on this salt’s wanderings because we have here a very definite description of a trade route, and the importance of understanding these trade routes is very great. We do not learn, however, exactly where the salt goes to beyond Melli; but Melli seems to have been, as Timbuctoo was, and to a certain extent still is, a trade focus; and from Melli evidently the salt went in many directions, and it is interesting to note Ca da Mostro’s observations on the salt porters, who he says carry in each hand a long forked stick, which when they are tired they fix into the ground and rest their loads on; so to-day may you see the West African porters doing, save that it is only the porters who have to pass over woodless plateaux on their journeys that carry two sticks.
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Speaking however further on the course of this salt trade Ca da Mostro says that some of the merchants of Melli go with it until they come to a certain water, whether fresh or salt his informant could not say; but he holds it most likely was fresh, or there would be no need of carrying salt there; and it is the opinion of the few people who have of late years interested themselves in the matter that this great water is the Niger Joliba. But be this as it may, when those merchants from Melli arrive on the banks of this great water they place their shares of salt in heaps in a row, every one setting a mark on his own. This done, the merchants retire half a day’s journey; then “the negroes, who will not be seen or spoken with, and who seem to be the inhabitants of some islands, come in large boats,” and having viewed the salt lay a sum of gold on every heap and then retire. When they are all gone the negro merchants who own the salt return, and if the quantity of gold pleases them they take it and leave the salt; if not, they leave both and withdraw themselves again. The silent people then return, and the heaps from which they find the gold has been removed they carry away, and either advance more gold to the other heaps or take their gold from them and leave the salt. In this manner, says Ca da Mostro, from very ancient times these negroes have traded without either speaking to or seeing each other, until a few years before, when he was at Cape Blanco among the Azanaghi, who supply the negroes of Melli with their salt as aforesaid, and who evidently get from them gossip as well as gold. They told him that their fellow merchants among the black Moors had told them that they had had serious trouble in consequence of the then Emperor of Melli, a man who took more general interest in affairs than was common in Emperors of Melli, having been fired with a desire to know why these customers of his traders did not like being seen; he had commanded the salt merchants when they next went to traffic with the silent people to capture some of them for him by digging pits near the salt heaps, concealing themselves therein and then rushing out and seizing some of the strange people when they came to look at the salt heaps. The merchants did not at all relish the royal commission, for they knew, as any born trader would, that it must be extremely bad for trade to rush out and seize customers by the scruff of their necks while they were in the midst of their shopping. However, much as the command added to their commercial anxieties, the thing had to be done, or there was no doubt the Emperor would relieve them both of all commercial anxieties and their heads at one and the same time. So they carried out the royal command, and captured four of their silent customers. Three they immediately liberated, thinking that to keep so many would only increase the bad blood, and one specimen would be sufficient to satisfy the Imperial curiosity. Unfortunately however the unfortunate captive they retained would neither speak nor eat, and in a few days died; and so the salt merchants of Melli returned home in very low spirits, feeling assured that their Emperor would be actively displeased with them for failing to satisfy his curiosity, and that the silent customers would be too alarmed and angered with them for their unprovoked attack to deal with them again. Subsequent events proved them to be correct in both surmises: his Majesty was highly disgusted at not having been able to see one of these people; and naturally, for the description given to him of those they had captured was at least highly interesting. The merchants said they were a span taller than themselves and well shaped, but that they made a terrible figure because their under lip was thicker than a man’s fist and hung down on their breasts; also that it was very red, and something like blood dropped from it and from their gums. The upper lip was no larger than that of other people, and owing to this there were exposed to view both gums and teeth, which were of great size, particularly the teeth in the corners of the mouth. Their eyes were of great size and blackness. As for the customers, for three years went the merchants of Melli to the banks of the great water and arranged their salt heaps and looked on them for gold dust in vain: but the fourth year it was there; and the merchants of Melli believed that their customers’ lips had begun to putrefy through the excessive heat and the want of salt, so that being unable to bear so grievous a distemper they were compelled to return to their trade. Things were then established on a fairly reasonable basis; the merchants did not again attempt to see their customers, and they knew from their experience with their captive that they were by nature dumb; for had there been speech in him, would he not have spoken under the treatment to which he was subjected? And as for the Emperor of Melli he said right out he did not care whether those blacks could speak or no, so long as he had but the profit of their gold.