"Domus non ullo robore fulta
Sed sterili junco cannâque intecta palustri."
It was too early for the daily debauch of palm wine, and the interiors reeked with the odours of nocturnal palm oil. The older travellers were certainly not blasés; they seemed to find pleasure and beauty wherever they looked: Ca da Mosto (1455), visiting the Senegal, detected in this graveolent substance, fit only for wheel-axles, a threefold property, that of smelling like violets, of tasting like oil of olives, and tinging victuals like saffron, with a colour still finer. Even Mungo Park preferred the rancid tallow-like shea butter to the best product of the cow. We chatted with the Shark Point wreckers, and found that they thought like Arthegal,
"For equal right in equal things doth stand."
Moreover, here, as in the Shetlands of the early nineteenth century, when the keel touches bottom the seaman loses his rights, and she belongs to the shore.
Tom Peter offered to show us other relics of the past if we would give him two days. A little party was soon made up, Mr. J. C. Bigley, the master, and Mr. Richards, the excellent gunner of the "Griffon," were my companions. We set out in a south-by-easterly direction to the bottom of Sonho, or Diogo's Bay, which Barbot calls "Bay of Pampus Rock." Thence we entered Alligator River, a broad lagoon, the Raphael Creek of Maxwell's map, not named in the hydrographic chart of 1859. Leading south with many a bend, it is black water and thick, fetid mud, garnished with scrubby mangrove, where Kru-boys come to cut fuel and catch fever; here the dew seemed to fall in cold drops. After nine miles we reached a shallow fork, one tine of which, according to our informants, comes from the Congo Grande, or São Salvador, distant a week's march. Leaving the whaler in charge of a Kru-man, we landed, and walked about half a mile over loose sand bound by pine-apple root, to the Banza Sonho, or, as we call it, King Antonio's Town- -not to be mistaken for that placed in the charts behind Point Padron. Our object being unknown, there was fearful excitement in the thatched huts scattered under the palm grove, till Tom Peter introduced us, and cleared for us a decent hut. The buildings, if they can be so called, are poor and ragged, copies of those which we shall see upon the uplands. Presently we were visited by the king named after that saint "of whom the Evil One was parlous afraid." This descendant of the "Counts of Sonho," in his dirty night-cap and long coat of stained red cloth, was a curious contrast to the former splendour of the "count's habit," with cap of stitched silk which could be worn only by him and his nobles, fine linen shirt, flowered silk cloak, and yellow stockings of the same material. When King Affonso III. gave audience to the missioners (A.D. 1646), the negro grandee "had on a vest of cloth set with precious stones, and in his hat a crown of diamonds, besides other stones of great value. He sat on a chair under a canopy of rich crimson velvet, with gilt nails, after the manner of Europe; and under his feet was a great carpet, with two stools of the same colour, and silk laced with gold." After the usual palaver we gave the black earl a cloth and bottle of rum for leave to pass on, but no one would accompany us that evening, all pretending that they wanted time to fit up the hammocks. At night a body of armed bushmen marched down to inspect us.
The demands for porterage were so exorbitant next morning, that we set out on foot under the guidance of Tom Peter. We passed southwards over large tracts of bush and gramineous plants, with patches of small plantations, manioc and thur; and settlements girt by calabash-trees, cocoas, palmyra and oil palms. The people poured out, threatened impotent vengeance on those who brought the white men to "make their country," that is, to seize and settle in it. The only animals were fowls and pigs; small strong cages acting as hogstyes showed that leopards were dangerous; in 1816 Lieutenant Hawkey found signs of these animals, together with elephant, wild boar, and antelope. Now there is no sport below the cataracts, and possibly very little, except in the water, above them. Thence we debouched upon rolling land, loose and sandy waves, sometimes divided by swamps; it is the lower end of the high yellow band seen from the south of the river, the true coast of alluvial soil, scattered here and there with quartz and pebbles. Then the bush opened out, and showed to the north- east stretches of grassy land, where the wild fig-tree drooped its branches, laden with thick fleshy leafage, to the ground; these are the black dots which are seen from afar studding the tawny desert-like surface. Flowers were abundant despite the lateness of the season, and the sterility of the soil was evidenced by cactus and euphorbia.
After a walk of six miles Tom Peter pompously announced that we had reached the church. We saw only an oblong furrow and a little worm-eaten wood near three or four of the most miserable "magalia;" but a bell, hung to a dwarf gallows, was dated 1700, and inscribed, "Si Deus cum nobis Qis (sic) contra nos?" The aspect of this article did not fail to excite Mr. Richards' concupiscence: I looked into the empty huts, and in the largest found a lot of old church gear, the Virgin (our Lady of Pinda), saints, and crucifixes, a tank-like affair of iron that acted as font, and tattered bundles of old music-scores in black and red ink. In Captain Tuckey's day some of the Sonho men could read the Latin Litany; there was a priest ordained by the Capuchins of Loanda, a bare-footed (and bare-faced) black apostle, with a wife and five handmaids; and a multitude of converts loaded with crucifixes and satchels of relics. Our home march was enlivened by glimpses of the magnificent river seen through the perennial tropical foliage, and it did not suggest trite reflections upon the meanness of man's highest aspirations in presence of eternal Nature.
We had been treading upon no vulgar spot. We are now in the earldom of Sonho, bounded north by the Congo River and south by the Ambriz, westward by the Atlantic, and eastward by the "Duchy of Bamba." It was one of the great divisions of the Congo kingdom, and "absolute, except only its being tributary to the Lord Paramount." The titles of Portugal were adopted by the Congoese, according to Father Cavazzi, after A.D. 1571, when the king constituted himself a vassal of the Portuguese crown. Here was the Pinda whose port and fort played an important part in local history. "Built by the Sonhese army at the mouth of the River Zaire," it commanded both the stream and sea: it was plundered in 1600 by four French pirates. According to Carli (1666-67) "the Count of Sonho, the fifth dignitary of the empire, resided in the town of Sonho, a league from the River Zaire." Pinda was for a time the head-quarters of the Portuguese Mission, subject only to that of São Salvador; it consisted of an apartment two stories high, which caused trouble, being contrary to country custom.
At the French factory I found the employés well "up" in the travels of the unfortunate adventurer Douville ("Voyage au Congo et dans l'Intérieur de l'Afrique Equinoxiale fait dans les années 1828, 1829, et 1830. Par J. B. Douville, Secrétaire de la Société de Géographic de Paris pour l'année 1832, etmembre de plusieurs Sociétés savantes françoises et étrangères. Ouvrage auquel la Société de Géographic a décerné le prix dans sa séance du 30 mars, 1832. 3 tomes. 8vo. Paris, 1832"). Dr. Gardner, in his Brazilian travels, gives an account of Douville's murder, the consequence of receiving too high fees for medical attendance on the banks of the São Francisco. So life like are his descriptions of the country and its scenery, that no one in the factory would believe him to have been an impostor, and the Frenchmen evidently held my objections to be "founded on nationality." The besetting sins of the three volumes are inordinate vanity and inconséquence, but these should not obscure our vision as to their solid and remarkable merits. Compare the picturesque account of São Paulo with those of the latest English travellers, and the anthropology of the people, their religion, their ceremonies, their magic, their dress and costume, their trade, their manufactures, their maladies (including earth-eating), their cannibalism, the condition of their women, and the necessity of civilizing them by education before converting them, all subjects of the highest interest, with that of Mungo Park, for instance, arid we have a fair measure of the French traveller's value. The native words inserted into the text are for the most part given with unusual correctness, and the carping criticism which would correct them sadly requires correction itself. "Thus the word which he writes mouloundu in his text, and mulundu in his vocabulary, is not singular, as he supposes, but the plural of loondu, a mountain" (p. 200 of the" Review"). Firstly, Douville has warned the reader that the former is the spelling best adapted to French, the latter to Portuguese. Secondly, "mulundu" in Angolan is singular, the plural being "milundu"—a handful, the Persians say, is a specimen of the heap. The excess of female births in low and unhealthy places (1, 309) and as the normal result of polygamy (3, 243), is a highly interesting subject still awaiting investigation. I do not mean that Douville was the first to observe this phenomenon, which forced itself upon the notice of physiologists in ancient times. Foster ("Cook's Third Voyage") remarks that, wherever men and animals have many females, the feminine births preponderate over the masculine; a fact there explained by the "organic molecule" of Buffon. Pigafetta, the circumnavigator, gives the King of Tidor eighteen daughters to eight sons.
The French traveller does not pretend to be a mineralogist, but he does his best to lay open the metallic riches of the country; he gives careful observations of temperature, in water as well as air, he divines the different proportions of oxygen in the atmosphere, and he even applies himself to investigating the comparative heat of the negro's blood, an inquiry still far from being exhausted. The most remarkable part is certainly the medical, and here the author was simply in advance of his age. Instead of the lancet, the drastic cathartics, and the calomel with which our naval surgeons slew their patients, he employed emetics and tonics to an extent that would have charmed my late friend, Dr. Dickson, the chromothermalist, and he preceded Dr. Hutchinson in the use of quinine wine. Indeed, the peculiar aptitude for medicine shown in these pages led to the traveller's adopting the destructive art of healing as a profession, and caused his unhappy end. The curious mixture of utter imposture and of genius for observation which a traveller can detect in Douville renders him worthy of a monograph.