At Lagos several native men came out in a boat to meet a deck passenger and land his baggage. The natives are not allowed to use the gangway, and if the rope ladder is in use they pass up and down a single rope suspended over the ship’s side. On this occasion I observed one of the men from the boat alongside sliding down a rope and carrying a heavy box, by no means an easy thing to do. He expected that the others of his party would be waiting to receive him in the boat below. But they had drifted several yards away and were engaged in eating some potato peelings which a steward had thrown to them. He called to them but they paid no attention:—they were eating. He yelled at them and cursed them, at the same time making with his legs impressive gestures of appeal and threat. But they sat indifferent until they had finished, while he with his load remained suspended in the air. Moreover, the sea at Lagos abounds with sharks. At last, having finished their repast, they came to his rescue. I was watching eagerly to see how many would be killed in the ensuing fight. But not a blow was struck, and the palaver did not last a minute. So forgetful are they of injuries. And though they are capable of great cruelty towards their enemies, their cruelty is callous rather than vindictive; not the cruelty that delights in another’s pain, but rather that of a dull imagination which does not realize it.
A few days after leaving Sierra Leone we anchored off Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, where we shipped eighty native men, Krumen, who were engaged by the ship as workmen for the discharging and loading of cargo. They are engaged for the round trip down the coast, three or four months, and are unshipped again on the homeward voyage. Of these Krumen I shall speak at some length in another chapter. They are the original native tribe of this part of the coast and are not to be confounded with the proper Liberians whose ancestors emigrated from America.
Liberia represents the philanthropic effort of America to restore to their native land the Africans carried to America by the slave trade. A large area of country was purchased from the native chiefs, and in 1820 the first settlement of colonists was established. Liberia is a country of possibilities. There is no richer soil on the entire west coast. It is especially suitable for coffee and cocoa; but it has remained undeveloped. The poor and ignorant colonists were not fit for self-government. America should have done more or else less. The Liberians might far better have remained in America. During the several generations of their absence from Africa they seemed to have lost the power of resisting the malaria. The mortality among them was very great and they were pitiably helpless. The government of Liberia some one has said is a fit subject for comic opera. At one time becoming possessed of a little cash, by some wonderful accident, they provided themselves with a small gunboat by which they hoped to convince calling ships that theirs is a real government competent to collect dues, impose fines, and enforce the rules of quarantine and release that obtain at other ports, for which purpose it has proved as ineffective as a pop-gun. But they have used it successfully against the canoes of the Krumen in levying a heavy and unjustifiable duty upon these men when they return from the south voyage with their pay.
After two weeks on shipboard the immobility of life becomes agreeable and we are all content to be lazy. And in the evening when the social instinct is lively and men sit together at leisure in the balmy breeze, under the canvas roof, on a well-lighted deck, the sea so calm as to allay all apprehension, a wall of darkness around us, and the immensity of the sea beyond, as separate from the rest of the world as would be some tiny planet that has separated from the solid earth and rotates upon its own axis, then the charm of travel on the tropical sea is all that the imagination had preconceived,—a lazy, luxurious dream. When Boswell remarked to Johnson, “We grow weary when idle,” Johnson replied: “That is, sir, because others being busy, we want company; but if all were idle there would be no growing weary; we should entertain one another.” We were all equally idle and lazy, and wished we could be lazier. There were whole days when the conversation—until evening—contained nothing more epigrammatic than “Please pass the butter,” or “Have a pickle?”
The company consists of traders, government officials and missionaries; and the captain is usually present. As our number diminishes at each successive port, we become better acquainted and more friendly. Men of antipodal differences are thus frequently brought into friendly and sympathetic relations, men who in ordinary life would seldom have been brought into contact with each other, and who never would have known that they had anything in common; and the experience is wholesome. I have learned to think more kindly of the African trader and to refrain from criticism because of some whom I have known intimately on these long voyages.
As we sit on deck in the evening the captain tells us that at Lagos, where we are due in a few days, he has seen the natives fight the sharks in the sea and kill them. The shark is the monster of the tropical seas, the incarnation of ferocity and hunger. The native takes a stout stick, six inches long and sharpened at both ends. With his hand closed tight around this he dives into the sea, and as the shark comes at him with its terrible mouth open, he thrusts the stick upright into its mouth as far as he can. There it remains planted in the upper and lower jaws of the shark, which, not being able to close its mouth, soon drowns and comes to the surface. It is a good story, and not incredible as a fact; for the native is brave enough and fool enough to do this very thing. But this is the same captain who tells of fearful storms which he has successfully encountered, when the ship rolled until she took in water through the funnels. He remarked to me one day, speaking of one of his officers who was not the brightest: “I always have to verify his reckoning; for he always mistakes east for west and invariably puts latitude where longitude ought to be.” He also tells of an invitation he once received from a cannibal chief near Old Calabar, to come ashore and help him pick a missionary. He has seen the sea-serpent many a time and knows all about it. It is not dark green with brown stripes, as is generally supposed, but is bright yellow with blue spots, and is quite three hundred feet long. On one occasion it followed the captain’s ship for several days, at times raising one hundred and fifty feet of its length out of the water, and being prevented from helping itself to a sailor now and then only by great quantities of food which they threw over to it. This caused a famine on board, and they reached the nearest port in a half-starved condition. An affidavit goes with each of the captain’s stories. Most captains indulge in this entertaining hyperbole. Some are decidedly gifted with what has been called a “creative memory.” I have never yet known a captain who could not turn out as handsome a yarn as Gulliver.
As the company become better acquainted conversation is more intimate and varied. Now we are discussing some subject of continental magnitude, and again, with equal interest, some infinitesimal triviality. Detached from the rest of the world, and with no daily budget of news, our interest becomes torpid, and things great and small appear without perspective on a flat surface of equality. We avowed our disbelief in the infallibility of the pope, and pronounced against his claim to temporal authority. We anticipated all the conclusions of the Hague Conference, and discussed the imminence of the “yellow peril.” We resolved that the Crown Colony system was a failure and had never been a success, and we devised an elaborate substitute but could not agree upon the details. We agreed that the English aristocracy had long been effete, and that the Duke of X, related to the queen, was a “hog.” We reached the amicable conclusion that the thirteen colonies should never have rebelled, and that the blame was all on the side of England. We left posterity nothing to say on the relative merits of the republican and the monarchic forms of government, and decided that the enfranchisement of the negro was a mistake.
In juxtaposition to these discussions, one man occupied the company a part of an evening recounting the entire history of his corns; but I regret that I have forgotten their number and disposition. Another disclosed the fact that he always wore safety-pins instead of garters, and descanted upon his preference with such enthusiasm that he made at least one convert that I know of. I was carefully told how to mix a gin cocktail (though I may never have any practical use for this valuable knowledge) and how to toss a champagne cocktail from one glass to another in a beautiful parabolic curve; also how many cocktails a man might drink in a day without being chargeable with intemperance: in short, if there is anything about “booze” that I do not know it must be because I have forgotten.
One night (but this was another voyage and a different kind of captain) we put in practice the principle of arbitration of which we were all adherents; and the result was my discomfiture. An argument had arisen among us as to which was the more simple of the two currency systems, dollars and cents, and pounds, shillings and pence—as if there were logical room for difference of opinion! At last, the captain arriving, we decided to refer the matter to him and to surrender our judgment to his arbitrament. The captain (an Englishman of the very stolid sort), after a period of reflection replied very slowly, and with all the gravity of a judge: “Pounds, shillings and pence is the simpler system; for, don’t you know, that when you are told the price of a thing in dollars and cents you always, in your mind, convert it into pounds, shillings and pence.”
“Of course, Captain,” said I; “I had not thought of that until you mentioned it; neither had I recalled the well-known fact that a Frenchman, while speaking French in the streets of Paris, is really thinking in English. Your decision is as shrewd as it is impartial.”