The jungle folk of Africa

by Robert H. Milligan

In general the coast of West Africa is not beautiful; although it has a weird fascination for those who have once lived on it. It is low-lying, straight and monotonous: a gleaming line of white surf, a golden strip of sandy beach, a dark green line of forest—and that is all, for days and days and days, and for some two thousand miles, only broken at long intervals by the great estuary that is a peculiar characteristic of African rivers, and by low hills far away on the horizon. Many of the traders are living, not in the white settlements, but in single trading-houses and far apart along this lonely shore. They like it or they hate it. To some it is an idle dream-life that they enjoy, and to others it is a nightmare that they abhor. Some of those who came aboard looked like haunted men. Each day is exactly like all the others, and the natural surroundings never vary however far they may wander along the beach—three endless lines of colour stretching away to eternity, the dull green forest front, the yellow strip of sand, the white surge of the foaming surf, and beyond it the boundless sea. Even in the darkest night the forest still shows as a blacker rim against the darkness, and the surf-line is white with a whiteness that no night can obscure. The unceasing sound of it is like low thunder, and unless one loves it he must often think what a relief it would be if it would stop but for one brief moment, and how the silence would “sink like music on his heart.”

In such places, and in the bush, the traders sometimes wear only pajamas, by day as well as night. There are natives enough around, and there is always noise enough; but it is the noise that only emphasizes solitude. And one were better to live entirely alone than to be subjected to the influence of African degradation without the moral restraints of home and the society of equals, unless his religious belief be something more than a mere acceptance of tradition, and his principles something more than conventional morality. There is a better class of natives whose society might relieve loneliness, but the trader, as a rule, does not gather this class around him.

Some are pleased to say very hard things about the traders. But he who would judge justly must have a mind well attempered to the claims of morality on the one hand, and on the other, to the allowance due to the frailty of human nature when placed in circumstances of unparalleled temptation. No man ever realizes the moral restraints of good society until they are all withdrawn; nor how insidious the influence even of the most repulsive vices when they have become so common to our eyes that they cease to shock: the moral safety of most men is in being shocked. Of course there are bad men among the traders, and some very bad; and the rumshop which, wherever the white man has penetrated, rises like a death-spectre in the landscape, is an abomination to which it would be difficult to do injustice. But it is not chiefly the trader who is responsible for the rum traffic. Many of them would be thankful if the various governments would entirely prohibit its importation. Moreover, they sell a thousand things besides rum,—as many useful things, and necessary to civilization, as the native is willing to buy. The traders are all men of courage—we can at least admire them for that—and many are honest and many are kind; and it were far better to refrain from condemning the dissolute than that in so doing one should soil the reputation of an honest man.

We called at Cape Coast Castle, Accra, Lagos, Monrovia and several other places where there are no harbours, and where the surf is so violent that passengers rarely go ashore unless these places are their destination. The longest stop on the voyage was at Old Calabar, sixty miles up the Calabar River, where we stayed five days. Old Calabar when I was there first was the English capital of the Oil Rivers Protectorate, which afterwards became a part of Nigeria. The heat was insufferable; for, while it is possible to keep cool on the hills where the white men live, it is not possible in the low channel of the river, and especially in the cabin of a steamer. The name Old Calabar has a fine far-away sound, like Cairo or Bagdad, and suggests a place of romantic and legendary interest. And indeed the tales of the Arabian Nights scarcely surpass the real history of the native despots that have ruled at Old Calabar even down to the death of King Duke in our own times, when, despite the presence of the English, it is said that five hundred natives were stealthily put to death to furnish the king a seemly retinue in the other world.

The run up the Calabar River is a pleasant variety after the long weeks on the sea. Here we first saw the crocodile, which abounds in all the largest rivers of Africa. It is the ugliest beast in the world. Lying on a bank of mud, its head always towards the water, and among old logs and roots, it looks itself like some gnarled and slimy log, and is difficult to discern. But at the sound of a gun or the near approach of the steamer it slides down into the water quick as a flash. Most of the passengers get their guns and take a few shots at them. In every case the passenger declares that he has shot the crocodile without a doubt; and as the creature disappears into the water there is of course no way of disproving the statement. But when we were coming down the river there seemed to be as many as ever.

The Spanish Island of Fernando Po is the most beautiful place in West Africa. Seen from the harbour in the early morning light or in the soft glow of the evening it is a fairy-land of tropical beauty. The bottom of the semicircular harbour is the crater of an extinct volcano and is very deep. The bank is covered down to the water with a lavish growth of ferns, and trailing vines, and flowers of many colours; while above the palm tree is abundant—the most graceful of all trees, and the billowy bamboo tosses in the breeze. In the middle and extending backwards is the white town of Saint Isabel, and behind the town stands a great solitary mountain of green, which rises to a height of ten thousand feet. Like other fairy-lands it requires the illusion of distance. It appears best from the harbour, and that is true of most tropical beauty. The soil is the most fertile in West Africa. I have seen plantains there full twice as large as any that I have seen elsewhere. For some years it has been producing large quantities of cocoa, most of which is shipped to Spain and thence over the world in the form of chocolate.

Africa is a land of extremes. From Fernando Po crossing again to the mainland we went fifteen miles up the Rio del Rey to the ugliest place in the world. I have also been in the Rio del Rey several times on the homeward voyage, when the steamers usually spend a day there taking on palm-oil and rubber,—a coast steamer would go to Hades for palm-oil and take all the passengers along with it. There is no native village here. The three trading houses receive the produce which the natives bring down the river. All around is one vast mangrove swamp, an ideal mosquito-incubator. The trading-houses are erected upon a foundation made with the ashes of passing steamers, which were saved and deposited here.

The foliage of the mangrove is thin, and at a distance resembles our poplar. But the greater part of the mangrove is a solid mass of roots, almost wholly above ground and more nearly vertical than horizontal. The trees seem to be standing on stilts, six or eight feet long, as if they were trying to keep out of the water. There are also aerial roots, long, leafless and straight, depending from all the branches, even the highest, which as they reach the water spread into several fingers. At the high tide the roots are submerged and the ugliness of the swamp concealed for a while. But as the tide ebbs the roots appear dripping and slimy until they are completely exposed: and as the water still recedes long stretches of fœtid mud-bank appear. The smell has been accumulating for ages. A low-lying mist rises from the oozing banks, and now and then stretches a stealthy arm out over the river, or creeps from root to root. Some one standing near exclaimed: “O heavens, what a place!” I could only wonder at the geographical direction of his thoughts; for my thoughts were of Gehenna and the river Styx. The mangrove swamp is surely the worst that nature has ever been known to do. My feeling of disgust was intensified by many experiences of after years. Sometimes approaching a town at the ebbing tide, a strong native has carried me on his back from the boat to the solid bank, across a waste of sludge, and sometimes he has fallen in the act. Other times, when one could not wade, they have thrown me a line and have dragged me across in a canoe; and I felt that if the canoe should capsize I would sink almost forever; or, perhaps be dug up twenty thousand years hence and exhibited as a pre-historic specimen. “Every prospect pleases,” reads the hymn, “and only man is vile.” But the worst débris of humanity is not half so vile as the prospect of a mangrove swamp at low tide.

The death record of the Rio del Rey is appalling. Every time that I have been there—seven times—the traders that came on board looked like dying men; and often their limbs were bandaged for ulcers or kraw-kraw. I was once on board when an English missionary and his wife debarked at this place, expecting to go on up the river, beyond the swamps, to the mission station in the hills of the interior. The lady was becoming more and more fearful during the voyage, and the effect upon her of this lower river was such that she was almost hysterical. She remained on board all day until we were about to weigh the anchor. The first impression counts for much in the matter of health and resistance to the fever; and the sight of that shrinking woman going ashore in such a place was pitiable; for we all felt that she was doomed. After a few months, however, she escaped with her life; but she was never able to return to Africa. The mangrove swamp stretches along the greater part of the coast of West Africa, and along the rivers where the water is salt or brackish because of the flow of the tide from the sea.

The next experience after the Rio del Rey was a greater contrast than ever. We proceeded forty miles southward and called at Victoria, in the German colony of Cameroon. The harbour at Victoria is divided from the sea by a semicircle of islands, some small and some larger. One of these islands, a large barren rock, when seen from a certain part of the beach, bears a singular though grotesque resemblance to Queen Victoria as she appeared when seated upon the throne. It is presumably from this that the place was given the name Victoria; for the English traders were there before Germany occupied the territory.