REV. A. C. GOOD, Ph.D.
Dr. Good died at Efulen at the age of thirty-seven. He was a man of the Livingstone type.
III
BUSH TRAVEL
Upon our arrival at Batanga we at once commenced the preparations for a journey into the bush, than which nothing could have been a greater contrast to the long, idle voyage on the sea; for our physical strength and powers of endurance were to be taxed more than ever before.
There were two others besides myself, Mr. Kerr, a new arrival, and the Rev. A. C. Good, an intrepid and consecrated missionary whose name was already known throughout the United States. Dr. Good had been twelve years in Africa, working most of the time among the Fang of the Ogowé River, but had lately come to Batanga for the purpose of opening the Bulu interior. The language of the Fang was so much like the Bulu that Dr. Good could converse with the latter from the first. Before the arrival of Mr. Kerr and myself Dr. Good had already made one journey into the Bulu country to a distance of seventy-five miles, where he chose the site of the first station, afterwards named Efulen.
In those days nearly all the distance between Efulen and the beach was covered with dense unbroken forest. None of the Bulu as far as we knew had ever been to the coast; and no white man had ever entered that part of the interior. The Mabeya tribe, living immediately behind the coast tribe, were already in trade relations with the Bulu; so that there were roads, that is, foot-paths, through the forest. But they were seldom used, and were only a little better than none at all. The present good bush-road from Batanga to Efulen did not exist in those days. We made it ourselves after we had been there nearly a year, and it has been greatly improved from time to time. The first road which we followed made a great detour to the south, and we walked, according to Dr. Good’s calculation, seventy-five miles from Batanga to Efulen, although the distance by the present straight road is less than sixty miles.
And, by the way, before we enter the forest, bidding a temporary farewell to civilization, we do well to take leave of this highly civilized term, “mile.” It is more than superfluous in such a forest: it is positively misleading. Such roads are not measured in terms of linear distance, but only in measures of time. To say that a place is distant half a day’s journey, or five hours, is to speak intelligibly; but to say that a place is five miles distant is to give not the slightest information as to the time it will take to reach it. On the few good roads which in recent years have been improved by the government one might perhaps walk thirty miles a day: on the worst roads that I have attempted I could not walk five miles a day with equal labour.
Men can now walk to Efulen in three days over the present road, and I with others have done it in that time, although in greatly reduced health; yet I was not nearly so tired as when I used to walk it in five days over the road that we first followed. The greater distance was by no means the only difference; the chief difference was in the quality of the road. The first road was so obscure that in many places we could scarcely follow it; and in some places it was so completely overgrown that we had to cut our way through, making the road as we went, for which reason we always kept men with cutlasses ahead of the caravan. Much also depends upon the season. A road might be very good and easy to travel in the dry season, but almost, or quite, impassable in the wet season, when the forest is flooded, when the streams have become rivers and the rivers have far overspread their banks, so that the traveller is wading in water much of the time. In opening a new station we could not choose our time for travel, and it so happened that in my year and a half at Efulen I only made two round trips in the dry season.
The African forest is the greatest in the world, both in the area covered and in the density of growth. The tribes with whom I am familiar conceive of the whole world as a vast bush intersected with rivers. The tribes are moving ever from the interior towards the sea; and some of those who have long been coast tribes still retain in the idiom of their language the record of their former ignorance. The word for “river” is used to designate the sea, and “the whole world” is “the whole bush.” A man will speak of his country as his “bush,” and the white man’s country he calls “the white man’s bush.” God, they say, loves “the whole bush.” Heaven, or the other world, is “the other bush,” and in singing “I have a Father in the promised land,” they say: “I have a Father in the bush beyond.”