The mosquito theory—that the Anopheles mosquito is the carrying agent of the malaria parasite—is of course generally accepted. The late Dr. Koch advised that a liberal dose of quinine every eighth or ninth day ought to be an effective preventive with most persons. Major Ronald Ross, head of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, advised the destruction of the mosquito, chiefly by drainage, and the segregation of white people from the natives. The natives have become at least partially immune; but there are numerous malaria parasites in their blood constituting the source from which it is carried by the mosquito, which after biting a native bites a white person; and when the white man’s blood is malarious a little exposure to the tropical sun, a slight chill, even a mental shock or undue strain, anything that lowers the vitality, is likely to precipitate the fever.
I myself, after several years of frequent fever, at last gained practical immunity by taking five grains of quinine every night, which I did without omission for three years, until I left the coast. If my vitality had not been already reduced to the minimum I would not have required so much quinine. Many persons, instead of taking quinine regularly, wait until the fever actually comes and then take very large, nerve-shattering doses for successive days, from thirty to sixty or even ninety grains a day. One may recover from the fever, but one does not entirely recover from the quinine until he leaves the coast.
Sometimes the newcomer is fairly frightened into a fever by those who have lived in Africa long enough to have become obsessed with the thought of the climate and whose conversation it completely absorbs.
Near the end of my voyage to Africa I spent a night ashore at a certain mission, where a good lady who was in a very sociable mood, having shown me to my room, stood in the doorway telling me of the various persons—not a few—who had died in that particular room, and giving some graphic detail of each death. It was gradually borne in upon me that there must be some horrible fatality attached to that room. Finally she advised me not to lock my door. “For,” said she, “Mr. P——, who always locked his bedroom door, was found dead in bed one morning in this very room, although he went to bed looking as well as you do now. About noon next day they broke the door open, and sure enough there he was—lying right there!”
I replied: “My dear lady, won’t you please knock on my door very early in the morning, and if I do not answer, open the door and walk in; for I fully expect to be dead.”
A certain American lady, who was a missionary for some years in Liberia, tells how that when she landed, expecting to proceed to a station some distance inland, where she would join several other missionaries, she was met with the news that the missionaries of that station (four, I believe) had all died of fever a few days before she landed, one immediately after another. Nevertheless, the person who had the authority for her appointment escorted her to that desolate station and left her there alone. A partition of boards in the house was nearly all gone; it was only a few feet from the floor. She asked the explanation of this appearance and was told that the boards had been used to make coffins. Having received this interesting, though somewhat curious information, she was left alone to find what comfort she could in the reflection that there was enough of the partition left for one more coffin.
She told me about it herself—many years afterwards.
II
THE WISE ONES
At Gaboon, in the French Congo, one sees all the successive stages in the process of civilization. First, there is the savage, whose whole apparel is a little palm-oil and a bit of calico half the size of a pocket-handkerchief; then there is the man who wears “two fathoms” of cloth wound about him gracefully and falling below his knees; next, there is the man who wears this same robe with a shirt; then the man who discards the native robe and wears a shirt and trousers, but with the shirt always outside the trousers; and, last of all, the gentleman who wears his shirt inside his trousers. These several classes are somewhat distinct. One does not classify the man with a taste for simplicity who wears a rice-sack with holes for his head and arms; nor the untutored dude who wears a pink Mother Hubbard or a lady’s undergarment. These freakish modes represent attempts to hasten the process of civilization and to pass prematurely from one of the above classes to another.
In general, the distinction of culotte and sansculotte indicates the difference between the Mpongwe—the old coast tribe—and the Fang—the interior tribe, who have only reached the coast in recent years. The Mpongwe is the most civilized of all the tribes south of the Calabar River. Many of them, besides wearing trousers, live in deck-houses, that is, houses with wooden floors. The first floor ever seen by the natives was the deck of an English ship; hence the name deck-house. It was also from contact with English sailors that the native learned to speak of a “fathom” of cloth.