West African studies. Mary Henrietta Kingsley
his own account, surrounded by a mob of the blind hurrying Drivers who, I may remark, always attack like Red Indians in open order. That mantis perfectly well knew his danger, but was as cool as a cucumber, keeping quite quiet and lifting his legs out of the way of the blind enemies around him. But the chances of keeping six legs going clear, for long, among such brutes without any of them happening on one, were small, even though he only kept three on the ground at one time. So, being a devotee of personal courage, I rescued him—whereupon he bit me for my pains. Why didn’t he fly? How can you fly, I should like to know, unless you have a jumping off place?
Drivers are indeed dreadful. I was at one place where there had been a white gentleman and a birthday party in the evening; he stumbled on his way home and went to sleep by the path side, and in the morning there was only a white gentleman’s skeleton and clothes.
However, I will dwell no more on them now. Wretches that they are, they have even in spirit pursued me to England, causing a critic to observe that brevi spatio interjecto is my only Latin, whereas the matter is this. I was once in distinguished society in West Africa that included other ladies. We had a distinguished native gentleman, who had had an European education, come to tea with us. The conversation turned on Drivers, for one of the ladies had the previous evening had her house invaded by them at midnight. She snatched up a blanket, wrapped herself round with it, unfortunately allowed one corner thereof to trail, whereby it swept up Drivers, and awful scenes followed. Then our visitor gave us many reminiscences of his own, winding up with one wherein he observed “brevi spatio interjecto, ladies; off came my breeches.” After this we ladies all naturally used this phrase to describe rapid action.
There is another ant, which is commonly called the red Driver, but it is quite distinct from the above-mentioned black species. It is an unwholesome-looking, watery-red thing with long legs, and it abides among trees and bushes. An easy way of obtaining specimens of this ant is to go under a mango or other fruit tree and throw your cap at the fruit. You promptly get as many of these insects as the most ardent naturalist could desire, its bite being every bit as bad as that of the black Driver.
These red ones build nests with the leaves of the tree they reside on. The leaves are stuck together with what looks like spiders’ webs. I have seen these nests the size of an apple, and sent a large one to the British Museum, but I have been told of many larger nests than I have seen. These ants, unfortunately for me who share the taste, are particularly devoted to the fruit of the rubber vine, and also to that of a poisonous small-leaved creeping plant that bears the most disproportionately-sized spiny, viscid, yellow fruit. It is very difficult to come across specimens of either of these fruits that have not been eaten away by the red Driver.
It is a very fascinating thing to see the strange devices employed by many kinds of young seedlings and saplings to keep off these evidently unpopular tenants. They chiefly consist in having a sheath of exceedingly slippery surface round the lower part of the stem, which the ants slide off when they attempt to climb. I used to spend hours watching these affairs. You would see an ant dash for one of these protected stems as if he were a City man and his morning train on the point of starting from the top of the plant stem. He would get up half an inch or so because of the dust round the bottom helping him a bit, then, getting no holding-ground, off he would slip, and falling on his back, desperately kick himself right side up, and go at it again as if he had heard the bell go, only to meet with a similar rebuff. The plants are most forbearing teachers, and their behaviour in every way a credit to them. I hope that they may in time have a moral and educational effect on this overrated insect, enabling him to realise how wrong it is for him to force himself where he is not welcome; but a few more thousand years, I fear, will elapse before the ant is anything but a chuckleheaded, obstinate wretch. Nothing nowadays but his happening to fall off with his head in the direction of some other vegetable frees the slippery plant from his attempts. To this other something off he rushes, and if it happens to be a plant that does not mind him up he goes, and I have no doubt congratulates himself on having carried out his original intentions, understanding the world, not being the man to put up with nonsense and all that sort of thing, whereas it is the plant that manages him. Some plants don’t mind ants knocking about among the grown-up leaves, but will not have them with the infants, and so cover their young stuff with a fur or down wherewith the ant can do nothing. Others, again, keep him and feed him with sweetstuff so that he should keep off other enemies from its fruit, &c. But I have not space to sing in full the high intelligence of West African vegetation, and I am no botanist; yet one cannot avoid being struck by it, it is so manifold and masterly.
Before closing these observations I must just mention that tiny, sandy-coloured abomination Myriaica molesta. In South West Africa it swarms, giving a quaint touch to domestic arrangements. No reckless putting down of basin, tin, or jam-pot there, least of all of the sugar-basin, unless the said sugar-basin is one of those commonly used in those parts, of rough, violet-coloured glass, with a similar lid. Since I left South West Africa I have read some interesting observations of Sir John Lubbock’s on the dislike of ants to violet colour. I wonder if the Portuguese of Angola observed it long ago and adopted violet glass for basins, or was it merely accidental and empirical. I suspect the latter, or they would use violet glass for other articles. As it is, everything eatable in a house there is completely insulated in water—moats of water with a dash of vinegar in it—to guard it from the ants from below; to guard from the ants from above, the same breed and not a bit better. Eatables are kept in swinging safes at the end of coir rope recently tarred. But when, in spite of these precautions, or from the neglect of them, you find, say your sugar, a brown, busy mass, just stand it in the full glare of the sun. Sun is a thing no ant likes, I believe, and it is particularly distasteful to ants with pale complexions; and so you can see them tear themselves away from their beloved sugar and clear off into a Hyde Park meeting smitten by a thunderstorm.
This kind of ant, or a nearly allied species, is found in houses in England, where it is supposed they have been imported from the Brazils or West Indies in 1828. Possibly the Brazils got it from South West Africa, with which they have had a trade since the sixteenth century, most of the Brazil slaves coming out of Congo. It is unlikely that the importation was the other way about; for exotic things, whether plants or animals, do not catch on in Western Africa as they do in Australia. In the former land everything of the kind requires constant care to keep it going at all, and protect it from the terrific local circumstances. It is no use saying to animal or vegetable, “there is room for all in Africa”—for Africa, that is Africa properly so called—Equatorial West Africa, is full up with its own stuff now, crowded and fighting an internecine battle with the most marvellous adaptations to its environment.
CHAPTER II
SIERRA LEONE AND ITS SURROUNDINGS
Concerning the perils that beset the navigator in the Baixos of St. Ann, with some description of the country between the Sierra Leone and Cape Palmas and the reasons wherefrom it came to be called the Pepper, Grain, or Meleguetta Coast.
It was late evening-time when the—— reached that part of the South Atlantic Ocean where previous experience and dead reckoning led our captain to believe that Sierra Leone existed. The weather was too thick to see ten yards from the ship, so he, remembering certain captains who, under similar circumstances, failing to pick up the light on Cape Sierra Leone, had picked up the Carpenter Rock with their keels instead, let go his anchor, and kept us rolling about outside until the morning came. Slipperty slop, crash! slipperty slop, crash! went all loose gear on board all the night long; and those of the passengers who went in for that sort of thing were ill from the change of motion. The mist, our world, went gently into grey, and then black, growing into a dense darkness filled with palpable, woolly, wet air, thicker far than it had been before. This, my instructors informed me, was caused by the admixture of the “solid malaria coming off the land.”
However, morning