Another half-hour placed before us Bathurst in full view. The first salient point is the graveyard, where the station began and where the stationed end. Wags declare that the first question is, 'Have you seen our burial-ground?' A few tomb-stones, mostly without inscriptions, are scattered so near the shore that corpses and coffins have been washed away by the waves. If New Orleans be a normal 'wet grave,' this everywhere save near the sea is dry with a witness, the depth and looseness of the sand making the excavation a crumbling hole. Four governors, a list greatly to be prolonged, 'lie here interred.' But matters of climate are becoming too serious for over-attention to such places or subjects.
The first aspect of this pest-house from afar is not unpleasant. A long line of scattered houses leads to the mass of the settlement, faced by its Marine Parade, and the tall trees give it a home-look; some have compared the site with 'parts of the park at Cheltenham.' At a nearer view the town of some 5,000 head suggests the idea of a small European watering-place. The execrable position has none of those undulations which make heaps of men's homes picturesque; everything is low, flat, and straight-lined as a yard of pump-water. The houses might be those of Byculla, Bombay; in fact, they date from the same epoch. They are excellent of their kind, large uncompact piles of masonry, glistening-white or dull-yellow, with blistered paint, and slates, tiles, or shingles, which last curl up in the sun like feathers. A nearer glance shows the house-walls stained and gangrened with rot and mildew, the river-floods often shaking hands with the rains in the ground-floors. The European ends in beehive native huts, rising from the swamp and sand; and these gradually fine off and end up-stream, becoming small by degrees and hideously less.
Bathurst has one compensating feature, the uncommon merit of an esplanade; the noble line of silk-cotton trees separating houses from river is apparently the only flourishing item. We remark that while some of these giants are clad in their old leaves others are bright green with new foliage, while others are bare and broomy as English woods in midwinter. They are backed by a truly portentous vegetation of red and white mangroves, palms, plantains, and baobabs, rank guinea-grass filling up every gap with stalks and blades ten feet tall.
Nor was the scene in the river-harbour at all more lively. The old Albert, of Nigerian fame, has returned to mother Earth; but we still note H.M.S. Dover, a venerable caricature, with funnel long and thin, which steams up stream when not impotent—her chronic condition. There are two large Frenchmen loading ground-nuts, but ne'er an Englishman. The foreshore is defaced by seven miserable wharves, shaky mangrove-piles, black with age and white with oystershells, driven into the sand and loosely planked over. There is an eighth, the gunpowder pier, on the north face of the island; and we know by its dilapidation that it is Government property. These stages are intended not for landing—oh, no!—but only for loading ships; stairs are wanting, and passengers must be carried ashore 'pick-a-back.' The labourers are mainly, if not wholly, 'Golah' women of British Combo, whose mates live upon the proceeds of their labours. To-day being Sunday, the juvenile piscators of Bathurst muster strong upon the piers, and no policeman bids them move on.
When the mail-bags were ready, we received a visit from the black health-officer, and we reflected severely on the exceeding 'cheek' of inspecting, as a rule, new comers from old England at this yellow Home of Pestilence. But in the healthy time of the year we rarely see the listless, emaciated whites with skins stained by unoxygenised carbon, of whom travellers tell. Despite the sun, all the Bathurstians save the Government officials—now few, too few—flocked on board. Mail-days are here, as in other places down-coast, high days and holidays. But times are changed, and the ruined river-port can no longer afford the old traditional hospitality.
Cameron and I landed under Brown's Wharf, the southernmost pier opposite the red roof and the congeries of buildings belonging to the late proprietor. We then walked up the High Street, or esplanade, which is open to the river except where the shore is cumbered with boats, hides, lumber, and beach-negroes. This is a kind of open-air market where men and women sit in the shade, spinning, weaving, and selling fruits and vegetables with one incessant flux of tongue. Here, too, amongst the heaps, and intimately mixed with the naked infantry, stray small goats, pretty and deer-shaped, and gaunt pigs, sharp-snouted and long-legged as the worst Irisher.
Several thoroughfares, upper and lower, run parallel with the river; all are connected, like a chess-board, by cross-lanes at right angles, and their grass-grown centres are lined by open drains of masonry, now bone-dry. The pavement is composed of stone and dust, which during the rains becomes mud; the trottoirs are in some places of brick, in others of asphalte, in others of cracked slabs. Mostly, however, we walk on sand and gravel, which fills our boots with something harder than unboiled peas. The multiplicity of useless walls, the tree-clumps, and the green sward faintly suggested memories of a semi-deserted single-company station in Western India; and the decayed, tumble-down look of all around was a deadly-lively illustration of the Hebrew Ichabod.
I passed, with a sense of profound sadness, the old Commissariat quarters, now degraded to a custom-house. The roomy, substantial edifice of stone and lime, with large, open verandahs, here called piazzas, lofty apartments, galleries, terraced roofs, and, in fact, everything an African house should have, still stood there; but all shut up, as if the antique domus were in mourning for the past. What Homeric feeds, what noctes coenoeque deorum, we have had there in joyous past times! But now that most hospitable of West-Coasters, Commissary Blanc, has been laid in the sandy cemetery; and where, oh! where are the rest of the jovial crew, Martin and Sherwood? I found only one relic of the bygone—and a well-favoured relic he is—Mr. W. N. Corrie, with whom to exchange condolences and to wail over the ruins.
Passing the post-office and the French, Spanish, Portuguese, and American consulates, poor copies of the dear old Commissariat, we halted outside at Mr. Goddard's, and obtained from Mr. R. E. Cole a copy of his lecture, 'The River Gambia,' read at York, September 1881. It gave me pleasure to find in it, 'The man that is wanted throughout the West Coast of Africa is not the negro, but the Chinaman; and should he ever turn his steps in its direction he will find an extensive and remunerating field for the exercise of his industry and intelligence.'
We then turned our attention from the town to the townspeople. They have not improved in demeanour during the last twenty years. Even then the 'liberateds' and 'recaptives,' chiefly Akus and Ibos, had begun the 'high jinks,' which we shall find at their highest in Sierra Leone. They had organised 'Companies,' the worst of trade-unions, elected headmen, indulged in strikes, and more than once had come into serious collision with the military. The Mandengas, whom Mungo Park calls Mandingoes and characterises as a 'wild, sociable, and obliging people,' soon waxed turbulent and unruly. This is to be expected; a race of warriors must be governed by the sword. They would prefer for themselves military law to all the blessings of a constitution or a plébiscite. But philanthropy wills otherwise, and in these days the English authorities do not keep up that state whose show secures the respect of barbarians. Where the Governor walks about escortless, like a private individual, he must expect to be 'treated as such.'