I speak of the FRENCH Gaboon. It was not French at the time of my visit, but it was soon to become so. We had important commercial interests there, and the idea of forming a colonial station was already entertained.
Commander Bouet, who had preceded me on the coast, had taken his gunboat up the river, and had earnestly pressed me to do the same thing with the Belle-Poule, so as to prove its navigability for the largest ships, which, once acknowledged, would stamp it as a first-class naval station. I resolved to make the attempt, though I had no charts, no levels nor surveys, and the low shores offered no landmarks nor distinctive signs, not even a tree to guide one. Bouet had merely warned me that there were dangerous sandbanks to be avoided. "Pooh! you'll find your way amongst them all right." And so we did indeed, but it was a regular voyage of discovery.
While we were creeping along with all due caution, a fleet of canoes joined us from the right bank of the river, where Libreville now stands, with Qua-Ben, king of the right bank, and his suite, on board. The chief boarded us, came and greeted me, and then with a self-important air, established himself, accompanied by the whole of his suite, on the poop of my frigate. He was a small deformed man, with a countenance betraying all the spitefulness usual among dwarfs and humpbacked people. He was huddled into a British naval officer's uniform. Taken up as I was with the management of my ship, I paid no attention at all to him. Presently a top man just come down out of the mizzentop approached me and whispered, "Captain, that king is an awful rascal. I was here last year with a ship from Nantes, and he stripped us of everything."
"Are you quite sure?"
"Perfectly, sir, it's Qua-Ben. I know him quite well"
"Very good, call the master-at-arms…Master-at-arms, take that king over there, and put him in irons!"
Four pairs of sinewy arms lifted up his sable majesty, under the orders of the master-at-arms, the police officer of the ship, and thus carried, and followed by his dismayed attendants, the king disappeared below. He yelled like a dog who has had his paw trodden on, and I fancied I heard the words "Bouet! Bouet!" here and there. That was indeed the name he was invoking. When he had once been laid out on his plank couch, we extracted a complete confession of his misdeeds through the medium of several interpreters, and we learnt also the fact, which a summary investigation confirmed, that Commander Bouet had already chastised him and made him disgorge his plunder once. So I had him set at liberty, and advised him to meditate on his second warning, and behave accordingly for the future.
He lost no time in taking himself off, while the Belle-Poule cast anchor near the left bank of the river, before a town belonging to another native king known as Denis. This Denis was by no means an ordinary individual. Some of his predecessors, too, had been illustrious in their way. His father, who had been kidnapped when very young and taken to Europe, had played the Chinese bells in a military band under the first Napoleon's empire, had returned to his own country, and had finally been called to the highest place in the State. His son had inherited his father's honours. He was a fine-looking negro, with grizzled woolly pate, who spoke French fairly well, and seemed much inclined to come to an understanding with us and open up his country to trade and civilisation. He came to call on me in great state, dressed in the handsome uniform of a general of the French Republic, the cast-off garments of some performer at the Cirque Olympique. He had a tricolour plume in his hat, a gold laced coat with lapels turned back on the chest, white breeches, and top boots. He wore the decoration of the Legion of Honour, which he had been given for some service or other he had done our fleet in those waters; and a large gold medal of Queen Victoria, given him by the English, hung down on a thick chain between his knees. His son—who lived close to the landing-stage in a big hut with a hoarding round it, like what you see in Paris round pulled-down houses, on which was written, instead of the usual warning, "Petit Denis, Fils du Roi" (Little Denis, the King's Son) in letters a foot high—was anxious to come too. He had a Hussar uniform, but not knowing how to put it on, he sent at the last moment to ask for somebody to go and help him to get into it. I lost no time in detailing the midshipmen of the frigate for this duty, which they performed with the greatest gusto, dressing up "Petit Denis" just as the tailor's assistants dress up M. Jourdain in the Bourgeois Gentil-homme. But the scamps tightened him up to such an extent in his jacket and belts that he was more dead than alive, and on the brink of an apopletic attack, by the time he got on board. We gave the royal family the best welcome at our command. My bandmaster, M. Paulus, entertained them with his noisiest tunes; but whenever the band stopped the king cried "Encore! encore!" When the bandsmen got tired out I shut his majesty up in a little cabin with the three ship's drummers, and told them to keep rolling till he had enough of it. But the drummers gave out in their turn, and I had to send the insatiable melomaniac and his family on shore at last, whether he would or no.
In return for my handsome behaviour to him he invited me to join him in an elephant hunt. These animals were very numerous in the vicinity, and were devastating the plantations. But the season was particularly unhealthy, everybody was ill; we should have had to spend the night in pestilential marshes, where we were certain to get fever, and as I had hardly got clear of that we had caught in the Cazamanze River, I had to refuse the tempting offer. We spent several days in the Gaboon, amongst a race of negroes who struck me as being more intelligent and more easy to civilise than any others on the coast. The women, too, had better features than most negresses. Aquiline noses were to be seen among them and lips of moderate size, and some had an almost European look. Their necks and arms and waists were loaded with necklaces and bracelets of shells or metal, which rattled every time they moved, a somewhat idle precaution, inspired, so it was said, by the excessive jealousy of their lords and masters. On the whole I carried away a very good impression of the future possibilities of the Gaboon, both naval and colonial.
When the Belle-Poule had finished her cruise along the Guinea Coast she had orders to go to Brazil; so we set sail for Rio de Janeiro. On our way thither we touched at He du Prince, a Portuguese possession entirely covered with coffee plantations, the produce of which connoisseurs reckon to be the best in the world. Almost the whole of the island belonged to one lady, who did all in her power to induce our purser to give up his profession and come and manage her immense property for her. Failing in this endeavour she sent him a keepsake, in the shape of a pair of braces embroidered by her own fair hands, just as we were departing. We took in water at Ile du Prince, and as we had used up all our stores during our long cruise, I shipped a boat-load of yams to take the place of potatoes, and completed my victualling, during a stay of a few hours at Ascension, by taking a large number of turtle on board. They weighed about six hundred pounds each, and did us quite well instead of fresh meat.