“O ye! who have your eyeballs vexed and tired,
Feast them upon the wideness of the sea.”
—Keats.
When I was about to sail for Africa a friend read to me a thrilling incident which was supposed to be prophetic of my own fate. A cannibal maiden proposes marriage to a newly-arrived missionary. The missionary modestly declines her offer; whereupon, looking down at him with utmost complacency, she tells him that she will have him anyhow—either married, or fried. I have gone to Africa twice, and have lived there nearly seven years, yet I have escaped both of these dreadful contingencies. There is no longer any glamour of romance about the missionary life. It is not a life of hair-raising adventures and narrow escapes. In those seven years I was never frightened and seldom killed. Dull monotony is the normal experience and loneliness the besetting trial.
Neither are the sacrifices and privations of missionary life so great as many of us have supposed. The sacrifices of the missionary are more tangible, but not therefore greater, than those of the faithful minister at home; whose sacrifices are often more real because less obvious. A few days before I sailed the second time for Africa, when I knew from former experience that the missionary life was no martyrdom, I was one day seated at a dinner-table where Africa and my going was the subject of conversation. The company had the most exaggerated ideas of the privations incident to missionary life. There was no use in a denial on my part; and to have disclaimed any of the fictitious virtues with which they loaded me would only have caused them to add the virtue of modesty to the rest.
A maiden lady across the table, who for some time had sat with abstracted countenance, at last, with upturned eyes and clasped hands, remarked: “Well, I think it is an appalling sacrifice.”
To have lived up to my part, my face at that moment should have worn a saintly expression of all the virtues rolled into one; but it happened that my mouth was quite full of pork and cabbage, with which my carnal mind was occupied, and I am sure I looked more like an epicure than an ascetic. Nothing but the pork and cabbage kept me from laughing outright.
Really, life in Africa is much the same as life anywhere else; and the “privations” only teach us how many things we can do without which we once thought were indispensable. This lesson is impressed the more deeply in such a land as Africa, where a human being may live for threescore years—comfortable, apparently happy, and at least healthy—with little else than a pot, a pipe and a tom-tom; the first ministers to his necessity, the second to comfort and the third to pleasure. If we will persist in regarding the missionary as a martyr, let us consider that the martyr does not differ essentially from other Christians. Martyrdom is potentially contained in the initial decision of each Christian. The consecration of a life to Christ implies the willingness to lay it down for Him. In an uncivilized land there is a likelihood of unwonted hardships, and among savages some possibility of a violent death; but the latter is vastly improbable.
One can procure an outfit more conveniently and at less cost in Liverpool than in New York. A week at Liverpool is sufficient for this purpose. The outfit will depend somewhat upon whether one expects to live on the coast or in the bush where he will be cut off from the facilities of transportation by water. All transportation to the interior is by native porters, who carry sixty or seventy pounds on their backs, in loads as compact as possible. This excludes most furniture; and such furniture as can be transported is usually “knocked down.” An ordinary outfit will include several helmets of cork or pith, several white umbrellas lined with green, a dozen white drill suits, denim trousers, canvas shoes, leather shoes, rubber boots, cheese-cloth for mosquito-bars, rubber blankets, pneumatic pillows, hot-water bags, a supply of medicines (unless these are already on the field) especially quinine and castor-oil, a six-mouths’ supply of food—canned meats, vegetables and fruits—besides bedding and kitchenware, tableware, napery, etc., according to need, and guns and ammunition.
There is a romantic interest about this last week spent in the purchase of strange articles for an untried life, and in taking leave of civilization,—of such things as cities, society, music, fresh beef and fine clothes. The last evening in Liverpool I went to hear Tannhauser. Music had always been my pastime, and it was not an easy sacrifice to make. I therefore looked forward to that evening with peculiar interest, knowing that not again until my return, however long I might remain in Africa, would I hear any music worthy of the name. But Tannhauser proved to be not a sweet parting from civilization but an awful experience, by reason of some one in my neighbourhood beating the time with his foot, as they so often do in England. I had one of the best seats in the house, but I exchanged it for another, only to find myself in a worse neighbourhood; for, in addition to a man on each side of me beating the time, a woman immediately behind “hummed the tune.” At the close of the performance I was in a condition of “mortal mind” that would have scandalized those who are disposed to canonize missionaries. But the sorrow of parting was thus mitigated as I reflected that civilization has its pains and savagery some compensations.