The Congo and Coasts of Africa

by Richard Harding Davis

Lorenço Marquez is not a spot which one would select for a home. When I was first there, the deaths from fever were averaging fifteen a day, and men who dined at the club one evening were buried hurriedly before midnight, and when I returned in the winter months, the fever had abated, but on the night we arrived twenty men were robbed. The fact that we complained to the police about one of the twenty robberies struck the commandant as an act of surprising and unusual interest. We gathered from his manner that the citizens of Lorenço Marquez look upon being robbed as a matter too personal and selfish with which to trouble the police. It was perhaps credulous of us, as our hotel was liberally labelled with notices warning its patrons that "Owing to numerous robberies in this hotel, our guests will please lock their doors." This was one of three hotels owned by the same man. One of the others had been described to us as the "tough" hotel, and at the other, a few weeks previous, a friend had found a puff-adder barring his bedroom door. The choice was somewhat difficult.

On her way from Lorenço Marquez to Beira our ship, the Kanzlar, kept close to the shore, and showed us low-lying banks of yellow sand and coarse green bushes. There was none of the majesty of outline which reaches from Table Bay to Durban, none of the blue mountains of the Colony, nor the deeply wooded table-lands and great inlets of Kaffraria. The rocks which stretch along the southern coast and against which the waves break with a report like the bursting of a lyddite shell, had disappeared, and along Gazaland and the Portuguese territory only swamps and barren sand-hills accompanied us in a monotonous yellow line. From the bay we saw Beira as a long crescent of red-roofed houses, many of them of four stories with verandas running around each story, like those of the summer hotels along the Jersey coast. It is a town built upon the sands, with a low stone breakwater, but without a pier or jetty, the lack of which gives it a temporary, casual air as though it were more a summer resort than the one port of entry for all Rhodesia. It suggested Coney Island to one, and to others Asbury Park and the board-walk at Atlantic City. When we found that in spite of her Portuguese flags and naked blacks, Beira reminded us of nothing except an American summer-resort, we set to discovering why this should be, and decided it was because, after the red dust of the Colony and the Transvaal, we saw again stretches of white sand, and instead of corrugated zinc, flimsy houses of wood, which you felt were only opened for the summer season and which for the rest of the year remained boarded up against driven sands and equinoctial gales. Beira need only to have added to her "Sea-View" and "Beach" hotels, a few bathing-suits drying on a clothes-line, a tin-type artist, and a merry-go-round, to make us feel perfectly at home. Beira being the port on the Indian Ocean which feeds Mashonaland and Matabeleland and the English settlers in and around Buluwayo and Salisbury, English influence has proclaimed itself there in many ways. When we touched, which was when the British soldiers were moving up to Rhodesia, the place, in comparison with Lorenço Marquez, was brisk, busy, and clean. Although both are ostensibly Portuguese, Beira is to Lorenço Marquez what the cleanest street of Greenwich Village, of New York City, is to "Hell's Kitchen" and the Chinese Quarter. The houses were well swept and cool, the shops were alluring, the streets were of clean shifting white sand, and the sidewalks, of gray cement, were as well kept as a Philadelphia doorstep. The most curious feature of Beira is her private tram-car system. These cars run on tiny tracks which rise out of the sand and extend from one end of the town to the other, with branch lines running into the yards of shops and private houses. The motive power for these cars is supplied by black boys who run behind and push them. Their trucks are about half as large as those on the hand-cars we see flying along our railroad tracks at home, worked by gangs of Italian laborers. On some of the trucks there is only a bench, others are shaded by awnings, and a few have carriage-lamps and cushioned seats and carpets. Each of them is a private conveyance; there is not one which can be hired by the public. When a merchant wishes to go down town to the port, his black boys carry his private tram-car from his garden and settle it on the rails, the merchant seats himself, and the boys push him and his baby-carriage to whatever part of the city he wishes to go. When his wife is out shopping and stops at a store the boys lift her car into the sand in order to make a clear track for any other car which may be coming behind them. One would naturally suppose that with the tracks and switch-boards and sidings already laid, the next step would be to place cars upon them for the convenience of the public, but this is not the case, and the tracks through the city are jealously reserved for the individuals who tax themselves five pounds a year to extend them and to keep them in repair. After the sleds on the island of Madeira these private street-cars of Beira struck me as being the most curious form of conveyance I had ever seen.

Going Visiting in Her Private Tram-car at Beira.

Beira was occupied by the Companhia de Mozambique with the idea of feeding Salisbury and Buluwayo from the north, and drawing away some of the trade which at that time was monopolized by the merchants of Cape Town and Durban. But the tse-tse fly belt lay between Beira on the coast and the boundary of the Chartered Company's possessions, and as neither oxen nor mules could live to cross this, it was necessary, in order to compete with the Cape-Buluwayo line, to build a railroad through the swamp and jungle. This road is now in operation. It is two hundred and twenty miles in length, and in the brief period of two months, during the long course of its progress through the marshes, two hundred of the men working on it died of fever. Some years ago, during a boundary dispute between the Portuguese and the Chartered Company, there was a clash between the Portuguese soldiers and the British South African police. How this was settled and the honor of the Portuguese officials satisfied, Kipling has told us in the delightful tale of "Judson and the Empire." It was off Beira that Judson fished up a buoy and anchored it over a sand-bar upon which he enticed the Portuguese gunboat. A week before we touched at Beira, the Portuguese had rearranged all the harbor buoys, but, after the casual habits of their race, had made no mention of the fact. The result was that the Kanzlar was hung up for twenty-four hours. We tried to comfort ourselves by thinking that we were undoubtedly occupying the same mud-bank which had been used by the strategic Judson to further the course of empire.

The Kanzlar could not cross the bar to go to Chinde, so the Adjutant, which belongs to the same line and which was created for these shallow waters, came to the Kanzlar, bringing Chinde with her. She brought every white man in the port, and those who could not come on board our ship remained contentedly on the Adjutant, clinging to her rail as she alternately sank below, or was tossed high above us. For three hours they smiled with satisfaction as though they felt that to have escaped from Chinde, for even that brief time, was sufficient recompense for a thorough ducking and the pains of sea-sickness. On the bridge of the Adjutant, in white duck and pith helmets, were the only respectable members of Chinde society. We knew that they were the only respectable members of Chinde society, because they told us so themselves. On her lower deck she brought two French explorers, fully dressed for the part as Tartarin of Tarascon might have dressed it in white havelocks and gaiters buckled up to the thighs, and clasping express rifles in new leather cases. From her engine-room came stokers from Egypt, and from her forward deck Malays in fresh white linen, Mohammedans in fez and turban, Portuguese officials, chiefly in decorations, Indian coolies and Zanzibari boys, very black and very beautiful, who wound and unwound long blue strips of cotton about their shoulders, or ears, or thighs as the heat, or the nature of the work of unloading required. Among these strange peoples were goats, as delicately colored as a meerschaum pipe, and with the horns of our red deer, strange white oxen with humps behind the shoulders, those that are exhibited in cages at home as "sacred buffalo," but which here are only patient beasts of burden, and gray monkeys, wildcats, snakes and crocodiles in cages addressed to "Hagenbeck, Hamburg." The freight was no less curious; assegais in bundles, horns stretching for three feet from point to point, or rising straight, like poignards; skins, ground-nuts, rubber, and heavy blocks of bees-wax wrapped in coarse brown sacking, and which in time will burn before the altars of Roman Catholic churches in Italy, Spain, and France.

People of the "Bromide" class who run across a friend from their own city in Paris will say, "Well, to think of meeting you here. How small the world is after all!" If they wish a better proof of how really small it is, how closely it is knit together, how the existence of one canning-house in Chicago supports twenty stores in Durban, they must follow, not the missionary or the explorers, not the punitive expeditions, but the man who wishes to buy, and the man who brings something to sell. Trade is what has brought the latitudes together and made the world the small department store it is, and forced one part of it to know and to depend upon the other.

The explorer tells you, "I was the first man to climb Kilamajaro." "I was the first to cut a path from the shores of Lake Nyassa into the Congo Basin." He even lectures about it, in front of a wet sheet in the light of a stereopticon, and because he has added some miles of territory to the known world, people buy his books and learned societies place initials after his distinguished name. But before his grandfather was born and long before he ever disturbed the waters of Nyassa the Phœnicians and Arabs and Portuguese and men of his own time and race had been there before him to buy ivory, both white and black, to exchange beads and brass bars and shaving-mirrors for the tusks of elephants, raw gold, copra, rubber, and the feathers of the ostrich. Statesmen will modestly say that a study of the map showed them how the course of empire must take its way into this or that undiscovered wilderness, and that in consequence, at their direction, armies marched to open these tracts which but for their prescience would have remained a desert. But that was not the real reason. A woman wanted three feathers to wear at Buckingham Palace, and to oblige her a few unimaginative traders, backed by a man who owned a tramp steamer, opened up the East Coast of Africa; another wanted a sealskin sacque, and fleets of ships faced floating ice under the Northern Lights. The bees of the Shire Riverway help to illuminate the cathedrals of St. Peters and Notre Dame, and back of Mozambique thousands of rubber-trees are being planted to-day, because, at the other end of the globe, people want tires for their automobiles; and because the fashionable ornament of the natives of Swaziland is, for no reason, no longer blue-glass beads, manufacturers of beads in Switzerland and Italy find themselves out of pocket by some thousands and thousands of pounds.

The traders who were making the world smaller by bringing cotton prints to Chinde to cover her black nakedness, her British Majesty's consul at that port, and the boy lieutenant of the paddle-wheeled gunboat which patrols the Zambesi River, were the gentlemen who informed me that they were the only respectable members of Chinde society. They came over the side with the gratitude of sailors whom the Kanzlar might have picked up from a desert island, where they had been marooned and left to rot. They observed the gilded glory of the Kanzlar smoking-room, its mirrors and marble-topped tables, with the satisfaction and awe of the California miner, who found all the elegance of civilization in the red plush of a Broadway omnibus. The boy-commander of the gunboat gazed at white women in the saloon with fascinated admiration.