The jungle folk of Africa

by Robert H. Milligan

Mr. Ramseyer closed his story of this latest war by declaring triumphantly that the Christian natives had not taken part in the rebellion; though their loyalty had cost many of them their lives.

I have digressed at length from my subject and am several days ahead of my story; but I am glad to have this opportunity of recording the heroism of this grand old man, great alike in counsel and in action; whose advice successive governors of Ashantee for many years have sought; and the equal heroism of his noble wife, and the devotion of the other missionaries of the party, who might have escaped safely at the outbreak of this war, but that they chose rather to suffer with their people.

I said that from the time we came on board at Santa Cruz Ndong was disposed to wander over the ship, and I had to watch him closely. Several times he escaped from me. On one occasion I had been up with him until about three o’clock in the morning. He was then asleep and I also lay down and slept soundly for a little while. But during this time he had wakened and was gone. The door was fastened at the first hook and I did not suppose that he could pass through. He went on a tour of inspection around the ship; but in a few minutes he was tired and wished to return. He became confused and wandered into the saloon, at the other end of the deck, and from the saloon into the cabin which he had occupied with me when we went north. One of the army officers, a captain, an entire stranger to me at the time, occupied the cabin. Imagine his surprise when he was awakened in the dark by a strange hand upon his face. Supposing it to be the hand of a robber, he seized it; but finding how very, very small it was, he concluded that his life was not in immediate danger. He remembered the little boy whom he had seen with me, and calling a steward he sent him to me. I apologized to the gentleman next morning as best I could. His generosity relieved my humiliation.

All the way to Teneriffe Ndong had been getting weaker each day. One morning I took him on deck as usual, but in a little while he asked to be carried back to bed. All that day and the next he lay quietly repeating stories from the Gospel, one after another. He was again patient and loving as before, and his mind was clearer. On Thursday morning, July 19th, about three o’clock he wakened, and I rose and sat beside him. He was very weak and spoke with effort. But after a while he talked more, and without difficulty. I had partly raised him in the bed and he lay on the pillows with his arm around my neck. At last, with eyes dilated and aglow with the beauty of another world, he said: “I see Mr. Marling; he comes towards the door; and beyond him I see the City of God; and Jesus is there. Do you not see, Mr. Milligan?”

“No, Ndong,” I said.

After a while he fell asleep; and some hours later he passed into the deeper sleep in which there is “no more pain”; for he had gone to be with Jesus, “which is far better.”

That same day at noon we buried him at sea, two hundred miles west of Sierra Leone. Only those who have witnessed a burial at sea know how it affects the mind with a nameless depression and spreads a gloom over all on board. It is perhaps the awful vastness of the ocean grave that imparts this sense of desolation. The sailors have many superstitions regarding death on shipboard. For instance, they say that sharks invariably follow the ship for twenty-four hours before a death takes place.

I have several times conducted burial services at sea;—once, on a French steamer, the burial of a deputy-governor of Senegal. The body wrapped in canvas, and with heavy weights at the feet, is placed upon a plank at the open gangway, with the feet towards the sea, ropes being attached to the inner end of the gangplank. After the service, at the signal of the captain, the engines are stopped, whose ceaseless beating, night and day, the ear had not seemed to hear until it stopped. The ensuing stillness is like the sudden suspension of nature. At this moment the sailors standing by lift the ropes and draw the gangplank over the ship’s side until it tilts and the body slides into the sea. A momentary circling of the water, and nothing more remains to mark the place. Another signal, the engines again commence the ceaseless beating, and the effect is even more depressing; it is like the sudden knocking at the gate after the murder in Macbeth. Death is only realized in contrast to the world’s activity. On these African steamers which so often have the sick on board, especially on the homeward voyage, deaths are often kept secret and the burials performed at night, for the sake of the passengers; and it is a kindly custom.

The bodies of natives dying on board are often flung overboard without even being wrapped, and there is never any formal service. But the captain of the Volta to all the rest of his kindness added this also, that he gave little Ndong a white man’s burial. The boatswain wrapped the body in its canvas shroud and laid it upon the gangplank with the British flag thrown over it. As I took my place at the side, the captain stepped forward and stood beside me. A missionary brother read some verses of Scripture; another missionary, of Ndong’s own colour, offered a prayer. The captain gave the signal and the body, wrapped in its “heavy-shotted hammock-shroud, dropped in its vast and wandering grave.”