We English hug to ourselves the idea that the French are bad colonists: if so, France, like China and India, is improving at a pace which promises trouble. Algeria, Senegambia, and Siam should considerably modify the old judgment. Our neighbours have, and honestly own to, two grand faults—an excessive bureaucracy and a military, or rather a martinet, discipline, which interferes with civil life and which governs too much. On the other side England rules too little. She is at present between the two proverbial stools. She has lost the norm of honour, Aristocracy; and she has lost it for ever. But she has not yet acquired the full strength of democracy. This is part secret of that disorganisation which is causing such wonder upon the continent of Europe. Moreover, Colonial England has caught the disease of non-interference and the infection of economy, the spawn of Liberalism; while her savings, made by starving her establishments, are of the category popularly described as penny-wise and pound-foolish. France has adopted the contrary policy. She spends her money freely in making ports and roads and in opening communication through adjacent countries. She lately sent a cruiser to Madeira, proposing to connect Dakar by telegraph with the Cape Verde islands. She is assiduous in forming friendly, or rather peaceable, relations with the people. She begins on the right principle by officering her colonies with her best men, naval and military. In England anyone is good enough for West Africa. She impresses the natives, before beginning to treat, by an overwhelming display of force; and, if necessary, by hard knocks. She educates the children of the chiefs, and compels all her lieges, under a penalty, to learn, and if possible to speak, French. So far from practising non-interference, she allows no one to fight but herself. This imperious, warlike, imperial attitude is what Africa wants. It reverses our Quaker-like 'fad' for peace. We allow native wars to rage ad libitum even at Porto Loko, almost within cannon-shot of Sierra Leone. On the Gambia River the natives have sneeringly declared that they will submit to the French, who are men, but not to us, who are ———. Later still, the chiefs of Futa-Jalon went, not to London, but to Paris.
In 1854 France commenced a new and systematic course of colonial policy. She first beat the Pulos (Fulahs), once so bold, and then she organised and gave flags to them. She checked, with a strong hand, the attacks of the Moors upon the gum-gatherers of the Sahará. And now, after drawing away from us the Gambia trade, she has begun a railway intended to connect the Senegal with the Niger and completely to outflank us. This line will annex the native regions behind our settlements, and make Bathurst and Sierra Leone insignificant dependencies upon the continent of Gallic rule. The total distance is at least 820 miles, and the whole will be guarded by a line of forts. It begins with a section of 260 kilometres, which will transport valuable goods now injured by ass and camel-carriage. The natives, wearied with incessant petty wars, are ready to welcome the new comers. The western Súdán, or Niger-basin, has a population estimated at forty millions, ready, if a market be opened, to flock to it with agricultural and industrial products, including iron, copper, and gold. Meanwhile the Joliba (Black Water), with the Benuwe and other tributaries, offers a ready-made waterway for thousands of miles. Sierra Leone lies only 400 miles, less than half, from the Niger; but what would the Colonial Office say if a similar military line were proposed? Nor can we console ourselves by the feeble excuse that Senegal has a climate superior to that of our 'pest-houses.' On the contrary, she suffers severely from yellow fever, which has never yet visited the British Gold Coast. Her mortality is excessive, but she simply replaces her slain. She has none of that mawkish, hysterical humanitarianism which of late years has become a salient feature in our campaigning. During the Ashanti affair the main object seems to have been, not the destruction of the enemy, but to save as many privates as possible from ague and fever, sunstroke and dysentery.
Ninety miles beyond Cape Verde placed us in the Gambia waters, off the lands of the Guinea region. I will not again attempt a history of the disputed word which Barbot derives from Ginahoa, the first negro region visited by the Portuguese; others from Ghana, the modern Kano; from the Jenneh or Jinne of Mungo Park; from Jenna, a coast-town once of note, governed by an officer under the 'King' of Gambia-land, and, in fine, from the Italian Genoa.
The s.s. Senegal spent the night of the 14th on the soft and slippery mud, awaiting the dawn. What can the Hydrographic Department of the Admiralty be doing? What is the use of the three cruisers that still represent the old 'Coffin Squadron'? This coast has not had a survey since 1830, yet it changes more or less every year, and half a century makes every map and plan obsolete. But perhaps it would be wrong to risk seamen's lives by exposure in open boats to 'insolation,' showers, and surf.
From sunrise the sea had changed its Harmatan-grey for a dull, muddy, dirty green; and the leadsman, who is now too civilised to 'sing out' in the good old style, calmly announced that the channel was shallowing. 'Gambia,' or 'Gambi,' the Gamboa and Gambic of Barbot (Chapter VII.), is said to mean clear water, here a perfect misnomer; it is miry as the Mersey. The 'molten gold of the Gambia River' is only the fine phrase of some poetic traveller. Low land loomed on both sides, with rooty and tufted mangroves, apparently based upon the waves, showing that we approached an estuary, which soon narrowed from thirty miles to seven and to two. Three buoys, the outermost red, then the 'fairway' with chequers and cage, and lastly white without cage, all at a considerable distance off the land, marked the river-bar, and presently a black pilot came on board from his cutter. We made some easting running along shore, and gave a wide berth to the Horseshoe Bank and St. Mary's shoal portwards, to African Knoll and Middle Ground starboardwards, and to a crowd of other pleasant patches, where the water was dancing a breakdown in the liveliest way.
As we drew in shore the now burning sun shone with a sickly African heat through the scirocco-clouds and the thick yellow swamp-reek. 'It will be worse when we land,' said the normal Job's comforter. Six knots to starboard, (west), on high and healthy Cape St. Mary, rose a whitewashed building from a dwarf red cliff. To port on the river's proper right bank (east) lay Fort Bullen, an outpost upon a land-tongue, dead-green as paint, embosomed in tall bentangs, or bombax-trees (Pullom Ceiba). This 'silk-cotton-tree' differs greatly in shape from its congener in Eastern Africa. The bole bears sharp, broad-based thorns; the wings or flying buttresses are larger; several trunks rarely anastomose; the branches seldom stand out horizontally, nor are the leaves disposed in distinct festoons. It is, however, a noble growth, useful for shade and supplying a soft wood for canoes and stuffing for pillows. Fort Bullen, about one hour's row from Bathurst, formerly lodged a garrison of seventeen men under the 'Commandant and Governor of the Queen's Possessions in the Barra Country.' Now the unwholesome site has been abandoned.
The island and station of St. Mary, Bathurst, of old a graveyard, now start up to starboard. The site was chosen apparently for its superior development of mud and mangrove, miasma and malaria. It is an island within an island. St. Mary the Greater is the northernmost of that mass of riverine holms and continental islands which, formed by the Cachéo and other great drains, extends south to the Rio Grande. Measuring some twenty miles from north to south, by six from east to west, it is embraced by the two arms of the Gambia delta, and is marked in old maps as the Combo, Forni, and Felúp country. St. Mary the Less, upon which stands the settlement facing east, is bounded eastward by the main mouth and westward by Oyster Creek, a lagoon-like branch: it is a mere sand-patch of twenty-one square miles, clothed by potent heats and flooding rains with a vivid and violent vegetation. Water is found everywhere three feet below the surface, but it is bad and brackish. There is hardly any versant or shed; in places the land sinks below the water-level; and, despite the excellent brick sewers, the showers prefer to sop and sod the soil. And, lest the island should be bodily carried away by man, there is a penalty for removing even a pailful of sand from the beach.
Bathurst was unknown in the days of Mungo Park, when traders ran up stream to Jilifri, nearly opposite Fort James, and to Pisania, the end of river-navigation. St. Mary's Island, together with British Combo, Albreda, and the land called the 'Ceded,' or 'English Mile,' were bought from the Mandenga chief of the Combo province. First christened St. Leopold, and then Bathurst, after the minister of that name, the actual town owes its existence to an order issued by Sir Charles Macarthy. That ill-starred Governor of Sierra Leone (1814-24) is still remembered in Ashanti and on the Gold Coast: he is immortalised by a pestiferous island in the Upper Gambia well described by Winwood Reade. The settlement, designed for the use of liberated Africans, was built in 1816 by Lieutenant-Colonel Brereton and by Captain Alexander Grant. In 1821 it was made, like the Gold Coast, a dependency of Sierra Leone, whose jurisdiction, after the African Company was abolished in 1820,
[Footnote: The first African Company was established by Queen Elizabeth, and in 1688 was allowed to trade with Guinea. The Royal African Company, or Guinea Company of Royal Adventurers of England trading to Africa, was incorporated under Charles II. on January 20, 1663. A third was patented on September 27, 1672. The 'African Company' (1722-24) was not allowed to interfere with 'interlopers.' On May 7,1820, it was abolished, after bankruptcy, and its possessions passed over to the Crown.]
extended from N. lat. 20° to S. lat. 20°. I found it an independent government, one of four, in 1860 to 1865. In 1866 it again passed under the rule of Sierra Leone; in 1874 this ill-advised measure was withdrawn, and the Gambia was placed under an Administrator and a Legislative Council, the former subject to the Governor-in-Chief of Sierra Leone. A score of years ago it was garrisoned by some 300 men of the West African Corps. Now it is reduced to 100 armed policemen: the Gambia militia, composed of the Combo and Macarthy's Island forces, is never called out. The population of the twenty-one square miles is given by Whittaker for 1881 as 14,150, including 105 whites. The Wesleyans here, as everywhere, preponderating on the Coast, number 1,405 souls; the Catholics 500, and the Episcopalians 200.