"You see I make it my business, sir, when a man-o'-war comes into port, to come and offer my services."
"Well, sir, I'm much obliged to you, I won't give you any special order; I'll leave the business completely to itself."
I never heard why he was so anxious to make sure of a monopoly in his line of business. Apart from this little incident, our stay in this port, during which we were treated in the most friendly manner by the kindliest of governors and his lady, was in no way different from any other.
Yet Sierra Leone was interesting as being the headquarters of the British naval station, established to suppress the slave trade, and as being the place where the slave cargoes found on board the captured slavers were landed. Freetown and its neighbourhood was full of these poor wretches, who were denominated, somewhat hypocritically, liberated Africans; but the government took good care not to liberate them, and there indeed it was right. To have turned out these human cattle, swept up in distant raids, now far from home and country, would have been to cast them infallibly into the clutches of cruel and pitiless native masters, who would keep back what they could not sell for human sacrifices or cannibal banquets. It was mere common humanity therefore, to keep them safe, once they had been caught. But to avoid feeding useless mouths, the finest men were enrolled as soldiers—the British government, ever in advance of others, applying a law of compulsory service, unlimited in period, to their case. The recruiting service once satisfied, the rest of the poor devils were turned, willy-nilly, into "free labourers," and the greater part of them were sent as such to the British Antilles. The ship that bore them thither was no longer called a slaver, and her cargo were not slaves. But if the names were changed, the things themselves were terribly alike. Yet philanthropy and sentimentality were satisfied. And so were the captains and crews of the British cruisers, for hunting slavers is a lucrative business, and the prize money earned made them forget the unhealthiness of the climate and the monotony of the blockade.
The passion for lucre excited on both sides gave rise to actions which bordered on sheer piracy, concerning which many a tale fell on my ear all along the Guinea coast. Thus one Frenchman I met had been in command of a Spanish slaver, which was lying becalmed. He victoriously repulsed the attacking boats of a British cruiser, and killed the lieutenant in command of her, who was the first to board the slave-ship, with his own hand. A slight breeze and the fall of night enabled him to make good his escape. But no more of this. The negro trade and the suppression of it, the abuses on both sides, are all of them bygone things, bereft of interest. Slavery is the one thing that remains. It always has existed in Africa, and the steady progress made in that part of the globe by the Mohammedan religion, which admits slavery, as the basis of the social system, will no doubt still further help to perpetuate it. Should all the black tribes merge into one huge Mussulman body, stirred at once by religious fanaticism and by a passion for slavery, a formidable difficulty will be added to those which already confront European action in the continent inhabited by the sons of Ham.
From the liberated Africans of Sierra Leone we came to another category. A negro republic, with all the necessary impedimenta—elections, assemblies, newspapers, and the most exaggerated form of Protestant Puritanism to boot. This Liberian Republic, founded by an American religious body, is a sort of El Dorado for the exclusive benefit of freed negroes from the United States, and is absolutely forbidden ground to the white race. After great difficulties to begin with, after being abandoned and repopulated more than once, after times of scarcity during which the miserable freed men bitterly regretted their lost servitude, the republic has ended by taking root. There were about ten thousand inhabitants, doing nothing at all, for the free negro thinks and says, like his slave brother, "Work no good!" What did they live on then? First of all, on the sunshine, and then by doing a kind of broker's work between passing ships and the natives. They vegetated in fact, and if they did not actually rot in idleness, they owed it to a tall Virginian mulatto, a very intelligent fellow, extraordinarily like Alphonse Karr in appearance, "Governor Roberts," with whom I had several long and interesting talks. He had been sharp enough to get hold of the key of the cashbox, and by that act had become the sole representative of the sovereign people. In spite of the constitution, in spite of laws and regulations, all power was concentrated in his hands, and, save for the name, his republic was transformed into a tidy little dictatorship.
Leaving Liberia, we slipped away down the Ivory Coast and the Gold Coast, driven gently along by a scorching wind called the Harmattan. Our charts were primitive and incomplete, the information they gave quite inadequate. We had to steer by soundings, very cautiously. The coast was uniformly low and green, with no distinctive signs upon it. If we wanted to know where we were, we had to go after some canoe full of fishermen, and ask our way, hat in hand, as one does in the street. It was a funny sight to see the great black hull of the Belle-Poule, with her white sails scarcely filled by the light breeze, hugging the land, amongst a crowd of canoes full of noisy stark naked savages, hung with necklaces, and with arrows stuck in their heads of fuzzy hair, looking like handfuls of horse-hair pulled out of a mattress and clipped into any number of different shapes. A regular market went on alongside. Our sailors would pass down a biscuit or some other thing in their caps, and haul them up again with pineapples, or bananas, or fish, or perhaps a gray parrot. Thus we sailed along till we came to some great forts, whose white walls bristled with cannon—Axim, Elmina, Cape Coast Cattle—the two first flying the Dutch, the last one, the British flag. All along the Gold Coast and the Slave Coast we were to come upon these forts, originally constructed to ensure the humane management of the slave trade, nowadays become very burdensome stations, of no value but as marts for the barter of palm oil, oleaginous nuts, and ivory on the one part, against gunpowder, brandy, glass beads, matches, and the blue cotton cloth known as "guinea cloth" on the other. I went from Elmina, where the Dutch officers were most friendly, to Cape Coast, by land, in a palanquin. My companions travelled in baskets shaped like Egyptian mummies, which tall negroes carried on their heads, without putting their hands to them. It was not safe to stir! At Cape Coast, I found yet another mode of locomotion. Governor Maclean took me for a long expedition along the road towards Coomassie, the Ashanti King's capital. We travelled in a small victoria, to which was harnessed a four-in-hand of splendid negroes, whose backs bore the marks of terrible floggings. In spite of the sandy road, the team went gaily along full trot, urged forward by the Governor's incessant cry of "Get on faster, boys!" Then I went back on board and steered for Accra, another group of forts. Thence to Crevecoeur, a Dutch fort, and Christianborg, a Danish one, the governor of which, a charming young fellow, came off to see me. Living as he did alone amongst the blacks, he was delighted to find himself amongst people of his own kind again, for a few minutes.
The following day we landed in canoes, for the bar was rough, and I had been charitably warned not to put my arm or hand into the water. Only a few days previously an unlucky French sailor, who had wanted to get back his hat, which had fallen into the water, had had an arm seized and taken off by a shark. I did as I was bid; we plunged into the surf, and got through without any drawbacks. Just as I reached the shore a tremendous fusillade began. It was a reception after the local fashion, which had been prepared for me: over three thousand dancing natives doing a sort of Arab fantasia on foot. They wore shell necklaces and bracelets on their arms and legs. Some had caps made of wild beasts' skins, or circlets of turkey's feathers on their heads; others again had gold horns on their foreheads. Everybody was shouting and writhing about and firing off guns; the elders of the tribe pressed round me with dancing attendants behind them, who held huge coloured parasols over their heads. The women exerted themselves as much as the men, performing the most extravagant and peculiar dances to the sound of twenty or thirty tomtoms, or great drums, six feet long. The whole thing made the most extraordinary clatter and uproar. When we got near the fort, the crowd executed a sham assault on it, the big gun in the citadel was fired, and I made my triumphal entry between two rows of soldiers in red Danish uniforms. Nothing could have been more picturesque.
The governor gave us a splendid lunch, in the European style, in a big room in the fort. The only thing that was African about it was the waiting, which certainly did not lack local colour; for it was done by a score of young negresses, selected for the irreproachable beauty of their forms, which no veil, not even the very tiniest, concealed. There they stood, plate in hand, and napkin under arm, without the smallest shyness, seeing indeed they wore the dress(!) of the country. Imagine the bronze caryatidae round the new Paris Opera House come down off their pedestals, and handing round the dishes at a big Parisian dinner-party! All these young ladies' coquetry had gone to the dressing of their woolly hair, which was clipped, like garden shrubs, into the most fanciful shapes, and to the fineness of their skins, which were as soft and shiny as satin. This resulted from the daily baths they were in the habit of taking, rubbing themselves also with fine sand. But, unluckily, the rubbing could not get rid of the negro scent. I have never been able myself to endure the odour of negroes of either sex; but I have known people whom it quite intoxicated, and who were always trying to get reappointed to Senegal, so as to get back to it, in spite of having had their health shattered by African fevers. It is said, too, to attract sharks, and that if a white man bathes with a negro where they swarm, the negro is always seized first. I have no personal experience of this fact.
A hundred miles west of the forts of Accra we found ourselves opposite Widah, the chief mart of the kingdom of Dahomey. From the sea we looked on a sort of sandy dyke, on which the waves broke furiously. Behind the dyke lay a wide lagoon, some of it a mere marsh, and beyond the lagoon the flags of France, Spain, and Brazil floated over some forts and large white European houses. It was the first time we had seen our flag waving on any spot on the coast since leaving Senegal, and we were very eager to go and see the station it sheltered. Landing was no easy matter, and I waited a long time in a big canoe, manned by twenty paddlers kneeling forward, before the old negro in the stern decided the attempt to be possible. He never stopped invoking every fetish under the sun, and sprinkling the sea out of a brandy bottle, keeping his eye the while on the waves as they came rolling in. Then all at once he gave a great shout, loudly responded to by the twenty paddlers, who yelled in cadence, while the canoe flew before the united and frenzied strokes of their paddles. Two enormous waves passed, leaving us undamaged; but a third approached, huge and threatening. Should we get to the shore before it? Would it rise upright and capsize us, or would it break on us and swamp us? Neither. It did reach us, indeed, but the old steersman had calculated well; it lifted us up unharmed and carried us on to the beach, where a hundred negroes laid hold of the canoe and dragged it high and dry. I was seized myself before I had time to collect my ideas, and put into a hammock hung upon a long pole, which five or six tall negroes held horizontally, with arms outstretched above their heads, during the time it took to cross the lagoon, where the water was waist high. They set me down at last, at the gate of the French fort, in the middle of an immense crowd, much excited at the arrival of a French squadron—there were three ships.