The days that remained before his departure, Burton spent at various Society gatherings, but the pleasures participated in by him and his wife were neutralised by a great disaster, namely the loss of all his Persian and Arabic manuscripts in a fire at Grindley's where they had been stored. He certainly took his loss philosophically; but he could never think of the event without a sigh.
Owing to the unwholesomeness of the climate of Fernando Po, Mrs. Burton was, of course, unable to accompany him. They separated at Liverpool, 24th August 1861. An embrace, "a heart wrench;" and then a wave of the handkerchief, while "the Blackbird" African steam ship fussed its way out of the Mersey, having on board the British scape-goat sent away—"by the hand of a fit man"—one "Captain English"—into the wilderness of Fernando Po. "Unhappily," commented Burton, "I am not one of those independents who can say ce n'est que le premier pas qui coute." The stoic, however, after a fair fight, eventually vanquished the husband. Still he did not forget his wife; and in his Wanderings in West Africa, a record of this voyage, there is a very pretty compliment to her which, however, only the initiated would recognise. After speaking of the black-haired, black-eyed women of the South of Europe, and giving them their due, he says, "but after a course of such charms, one falls back with pleasure upon brown, yellow or what is better than all, red-auburn locks and eyes of soft, limpid blue." How the blue eyes of Mrs. Burton must have glistened when she read those words; and we can imagine her taking one more look in the glass to see if her hair really was red-auburn, as, of course, it was.
Burton dedicated this work to the "True Friends" of the Dark Continent, "not to the 'Philanthropist' or to Exeter Hall." [187] One of its objects was to give a trustworthy account of the negro character and to point out the many mistakes that well-intentioned Englishmen had made in dealing with it. To put it briefly, he says that the negro [188] is an inferior race, and that neither education nor anything else can raise it to the level of the white. After witnessing, at the Grand Bonny River, a horrid exhibition called a Juju or sacrifice house, he wrote, "There is apparently in this people [the negroes] a physical delight in cruelty to beast as well as to man. The sight of suffering seems to bring them an enjoyment without which the world is tame; probably the wholesale murderers and torturers of history, from Phalaris and Nero downwards, took an animal and sensual pleasure in the look of blood, and in the inspection of mortal agonies. I can see no other explanation of the phenomena which meet my eye in Africa. In almost all the towns on the Oil Rivers, you see dead or dying animals in some agonizing position." [189]
Cowper had written:
"Skins may differ, but affection
Dwells in white and black the same;"
"which I deny," comments Burton, "affection, like love, is the fruit of animalism refined by sentiment." He further declares that the Black is in point of affection inferior to the brutes. "No humane Englishman would sell his dog to a negro." [190] The phrase "God's image in ebony" lashed him to a fury.
Of his landing at Sierra Leone he gives the following anecdote: [191] "The next day was Sunday, and in the morning I had a valise carried up to the house to which I had been invited. When I offered the man sixpence, the ordinary fee, he demanded an extra sixpence, 'for breaking the Sabbath.' I gave it readily, and was pleased to find that the labours of our missionaries had not been in vain." At Cape Coast Castle, he recalled the sad fate of "L.E.L." [192] and watched the women "panning the sand of the shore for gold." He found that, in the hill region to the north, gold digging was carried on to a considerable extent. "The pits," he says, "varying from two to three feet in diameter, and from twelve to fifty feet deep, are often so near the roads that loss of life has been the result. Shoring up being little known, the miners are not infrequently buried alive.... This Ophir, this California, where every river is a Tmolus and a Pactolus, every hillock a gold-field—does not contain a cradle, a puddling-machine, a quartz crusher, a pound of mercury." That a land apparently so wealthy should be entirely neglected by British capitalists caused Burton infinite surprise, but he felt certain that it had a wonderful future. His thoughts often reverted thither, and we shall find him later in life taking part in an expedition sent out to report upon certain of its gold fields. [193]
By September 26th the "Blackbird" lay in Clarence Cove, Fernando Po; and the first night he spent on shore, Burton, whose spirits fell, wondered whether he was to find a grave there like that other great African traveller, the Cornish Richard Lander. [194]