Immediately beyond this grim and grisly reminiscence are the neat dwelling-house and the store of the Honourable Mr. Sybille Boyle, so named from a ship and from her captain, R.N., who served in the preventive squadron about 1824. He is an unofficial member of Council and a marked exception to the rule of the 'Liberateds.' Everybody has a good word to say of him. The establishment is the regular colonial, where you can buy anything between a needle and a sheet-anchor. Bottled ale is not wanting, and thus steamer-passengers learn to congregate in the back parlour.
We then walked to the top of Gloucester Street, expecting to see the Duke of Edinburgh's memorial. I left it an arch of sticks and timber spanning this main cross-line, which leads to Government House. The temporary was to be supplanted by a permanent marble arc de triomphe, commemorating the auspicious occasion when the black colony first looked upon a live white Royal Highness. At once 700l. was subscribed, and only 800l. was wanting; but all those interested in the matter died, and the 350l. which remained in the chest was, I believe, transferred to the 'Willyfoss.' The august day is still kept as a public holiday, for the people are, after their fashion, loyal-mouthed in the extreme. But the memorial is clean forgotten, and men stare if you ask about it. Half-way up the street is the post-office, whose white chief is not a whit more civil than the negro head in 1862.
Upon this highly interesting spot we stood awhile to note the peculiarities of the place and its position. The soil is a loose clay, deep-red or brown, impregnated with iron and, where unclothed with humus, cold and infertile, as the spontaneous aloe shows. The subsoil is laterite, also highly ferruginous. Soft and working well with the axe while it retains the quarry-water, it soon hardens by exposure; and, thus weathered, it forms the best and ugliest of the local building materials. Embedded in the earth's surface are blocks and boulders apparently erratic, dislodged or washed down from the upper heights, where similar masses are seen. Many are scattered, as if by an eruption; others lie in slab or dome shape upon the shore. The shape is usually spheroidal, and the material hypersthene (a hard and close-grained bluish granite) or diorite, greenstone-trap blackened by sun and rain. In the few cuttings of the higher levels I afterwards remarked that detached 'hardheads' are puddinged into the friable laterite; but I nowhere found the granitic floor-rock protruding above ground. The boulders are treated by ditching and surrounding with a hot fire for forty-eight hours; cold water, not vinegar, is then poured upon them, and causes the heated material suddenly to contract and fracture, when it can easily be removed. Magnetic iron also occurs, and specimens have been sent to England; but veins have not yet been discovered.
Our walk had furnished us with a tolerable idea of 'the city's' plan, without referring to the printed affair. Fronting north with westing, it is divided into squares, blocks, and insulae, after the fashion of a chessboard. This is one of the oldest as well as the newest mode of distributions. The temples of the classical gods, being centrally situated, required for general view broad, straight approaches. From Washington to Buenos Ayres the modern cities of the New World have reverted to this ancient system without other reason but a love of regularity and simplicity. Here the longer streets flank the sea and the shorter run at right angles up the inner slopes. Both are bright red lines worn in the vegetation between the houses. The ribbons of green are the American or Bahama grass; fine, silky, and creeping along the ground, it is used to stuff mattresses, and it forms a good substitute for turf. When first imported it was neglected, cut away, and nearly killed out; now it is encouraged, because its velvety plots relieve the glaring red surface, it keeps off the 'bush,' and it clears the surface of all other vegetation. Looking upon the city below, we were surprised to see the dilapidation of the tenements. Some have tumbled down; others were tumbling down; many of those standing were lumber or board shanties called 'quarter-frames' and 'ground-floors;' sundry large piles rose grisly and fire-charred, and the few good houses looked quite modern. But what can be expected in a place where Europeans never expect to outstay the second year, and where Africans, who never yet worked without compulsion, cannot legally be compelled to work?
We then walked up to Government House, the Fort Thornton of old charts, whose roof, seen from the sea, barely tops the dense curtain of tree and shrubbery that girds and hangs around it. Passing under a cool and shady avenue of mangoes and figs, and the archway, guarded by a porter's lodge and a detachment of the three hundred local police, we came in sight of the large, rambling residence, built piecemeal, like many an English country-house. There is little to recommend it save the fine view of the sea and the surrounding shrubbery-ground. I can well understand how, with the immense variety of flower and fruit suddenly presented to his eyes, the gentleman fresh from England required six months to recover the free and full use of all his senses and faculties.
A policeman—no longer a Zouave of the West Indian corps—took in our cards, and we introduced ourselves to Captain A. E. Havelock, 'Governor-in-Chief of Sierra Leone and the Gambia.' He is No. 47 since Captain Day, R.N., first ruled in A.D. 1803. I had much to say to him about sundry of his predecessors. Captain Havelock, who dates only from 1881, has the reputation of being slightly 'black.' The Neri and the Bianchi factions here represent the Buffs and Blues of a land further north. He is yet in the heyday of popularity, when, in the consecrated phrase, the ruler 'gains golden opinions.' But colonial judgments are fickle, and mostly in extremes. After this smiling season the weather lowers, the storm breaks, and all is elemental rage, when from being a manner of demigod the unhappy ruler gradually becomes one of the 'meanest and basest of men.' Absit omen!
We returned at sunset to Government House and spent a pleasant evening. The 'smokes' had vanished, and with them the frowse and homeliness of morning. The sun, with rays of lilac red, set over a panorama of townlet, land, and sea, to which distance added many a charm. Mingling afar with the misty horizon, the nearer waters threw out, by their golden and silvery sheen, the headlands, capes, and tongues stretching in long perspective below, while the Sugarloaf, father of mountains, rose in solitary grandeur high above his subject hills. On the nearer slope of Signal Hill we saw the first of the destructive bush-burnings. They are like prairie-fires in these lands, and sometimes they gird Freetown with a wall of flame. Complexion is all in all to Sá Leone, and she showed for a few moments a truly beautiful prospect.
The Governor has had the courage to bring out Mrs. Havelock, and she has had the courage to stand firm against a rainy season. The climate is simply the worst on the West Coast, despite the active measures of sanitation lately taken, the Department of Public Health, the ordinances of the Colonial Government in 1879, and the excellent water with which the station is now provided. On a clear sunny day the charnel-house, I repeat, is lovely, mais c'est la mort; it is the terrible beauty of death. Mrs. Melville says, with full truth, 'I felt amidst all the glory of tropic sunlight and everlasting verdure a sort of ineffable dread connected with the climate.' Even when leaving the 'pestilent shore' she was 'haunted by the shadowy presence.' This is womanly, but a little reflection must suggest it to man.
Even half a century ago opinions differed concerning the climate of the colony. Dr. Madden could obtain only contradictory accounts. [Footnote: See Wanderings in West Africa, for details, vol. i. p. 275.] There is a tradition of a Chief Justice applying to the Colonial Office for information touching his pension, the clerks could not answer him, and he presently found that none of his predecessors had lived to claim it. Mr. Judge Rankin was of opinion that its ill-fame was maintained by 'policy on the one hand and by ignorance of truth on the other.' But Mr. Judge died a few days after. So with Dr. Macpherson, of the African Colonial Corps. It appears ill-omened to praise the place; and, after repeated visits to it, I no longer wonder that the 'Medical Gazette' of April 14, 1838, affirmed, 'No statistical writer has yet tried to give the minutest fraction representing the chance of a surgeon's return from Sierra Leone.'
On the other hand, Mrs. Falconbridge, whose husband was sent out from England on colonial business in 1791, and who wrote the first 'lady's book' upon the Coast, pointed out at the beginning that sickness was due quite as much to want of care as to the climate. In 1830 Mr. John Cormack, merchant and resident since 1800, stated to a Committee of the House of Commons that out of twenty-six Europeans in his service seven had died, seven had remained in Africa, and of twelve who returned to England all save two or three were in good health. We meet with a medical opinion as early as 1836 that 'not one-fourth of the deaths results merely from climate.' Cases of old residents are quoted—for instance, Governor Kenneth Macaulay, a younger brother of Zachary Macaulay, who resisted it for twenty years; Mr. Reffall for fifteen years, and sundry other exceptions.