West African studies. Mary Henrietta Kingsley
activity by a vision of beautiful, definite earth-form dramatically unveiled. No longer was the—— our only material world. The mist lifted itself gently off, as it seemed, out of the ocean, and then separated before the morning breeze; one great mass rolling away before us upwards, over the land, where portions of it caught amongst the forests of the mountains and stayed there all day, while another mass went leisurely away to the low Bullam shore, from whence it came again after sunset to join the mountain and the ocean mists as they drew down and in from the sea, helping them to wrap up Freetown, Sierra Leone and its lovely harbour for the night.
It was with a thrill of joy that I looked on Freetown harbour for the first time in my life. I knew the place so well. Yes; there were all the bays, Kru, English and Pirate; and the mountains, whose thunder rumbling caused Pedro do Centra to call the place Sierra Leona when he discovered it in 1462. And had not my old friend, Charles Johnson, writing in 1724, given me all manner of information about it during those delicious hours rescued from school books and dedicated to a most contentious study of A General History of Robberies and Murders of the most Notorious Pyrates? That those bays away now on my right hand “were safe and convenient for cleaning and watering;” and so on and there rose up before my eyes a vision of the society ashore here in 1724 that lived “very friendly with the natives—being thirty Englishmen in all; men who in some part of their lives had been either privateering, buccaneering, or pirating, and still retain and have the riots and humours common to that sort of life.” Hard by, too, was Bence Island, where, according to Johnson, “there lives an old fellow named Crackers (his true name he thinks fit to conceal), and who was formerly a noted buccaneer; he keeps the best house in the place, has two or three guns before his door with which he salutes his friends the pyrates when they put in, and lives a jovial life with them all the while they are there.” Alas! no use to me was the careful list old Johnson had given me of the residents. They were all dead now, and I could not go ashore and hunt up “Peter Brown” or “John Jones,” who had “one long boat and an Irish young man.” Social things were changed in Freetown, Sierra Leone; but only socially, for the old description of it is, as far as scenery goes, correct to-day, barring the town. Whether or no everything has changed for the better is not my business to discuss here, nor will I detain you with any description of the town, as I have already published one after several visits, with a better knowledge than I had on my first call there.
On one of my subsequent visits I fell in with Sierra Leone receiving a shock. We were sitting, after a warm and interesting morning spent going about the town talking trade, in the low long pleasant room belonging to the Coaling Company whose windows looked out over an eventful warehouse yard; for therein abode a large dog-faced baboon, who shied stones and sticks at boys and any one who displeased him, pretty nearly as well as a Flintshire man. Also in the yard were a large consignment of kola nuts packed as usual in native-made baskets, called bilys, lined inside with the large leaves of a Ficus and our host was explaining to my mariner companions their crimes towards this cargo while they defended themselves with spirit. It seemed that this precious product if not kept on deck made a point of heating and then going mildewed; while, if you did keep it on deck, either the First officer’s minions went fooling about it with the hose, which made it swell up and burst and ruined it, or left it in unmitigated sun, which shrivelled it—and so on. This led, naturally, to a general conversation on cargo between the mariners and the merchants, during which some dreadful things were said about the way matches arrived, in West Africa and other things, shipped at shipper’s own risk, let alone the way trade suffered by stowing hams next the boilers. Of course the other side was a complete denial of these accusations, but the affair was too vital for any of us to attend to a notorious member of the party who kept bothering us “to get up and look at something queer over King Tom.”
Now it was market day in Freetown; and market day there has got more noise to the square inch in it than most things. You feel when you first meet it that if it were increased a little more it would pass beyond the grasp of human ear, like the screech of that whistle they show off at the Royal Society’s Conversazione. However, on this occasion the market place sent up an entire compound yell, still audible, and we rose as one man as the portly housekeeper, followed by the small, but able steward, burst into the room, announcing in excited tones, “Oh! the town be took by locusts! The town be took by locusts!” (D.C. fortissimo). And we attended to the incident; ousting the reporter of “the queer thing over King Tom” from the window, and ignoring his “I told you so,” because he hadn’t.
This was the first cloud of locusts that had come right into the town in the memory of the oldest inhabitant, though they occasionally raid the country away to the North. I am informed that when the chiefs of the Western Soudan do not give sufficient gifts to the man who is locust king and has charge of them—keeping them in holes in the desert of Sahara—he lets them out in revenge. Certainly that year he let them out with a vengeance, for when I was next time down Coast in the Oil Rivers I was presented with specimens that had been caught in Old Calabar and kept as big curios.
This Freetown swarm came up over the wooded hills to the South-West in a brown cloud of singular structure, denser in some parts than others, continually changing its points of greatest density, like one of Thompson’s diagrams of the ultimate structure of gases, for you could see the component atoms as they swept by. They were swirling round and round upwards-downwards like the eddying snowflakes in a winter’s storm, and the whole air rustled with the beat of the locusts’ wings. They hailed against the steep iron roofs of the store-houses, slid down it, many falling feet through the air before they recovered the use of their wings—the gutters were soon full of them—the ducks in the yard below were gobbling and squabbling over the layer now covering the ground, and the baboon chattered as he seized handfuls and pulled them to pieces.
Everybody took them with excitement, save the jack crows, who on their arrival were sitting sleeping on the roof ridge. They were horribly bored and bothered by the affair. Twice they flopped down and tried them. There they were lying about in gutters with a tempting garbagey look, but evidently the jack crows found them absolutely mawkish; so they went back to the roof ridge in a fuming rage, because the locusts battered against them and prevented them from sleeping.
We left Sierra Leone on the—— late in the afternoon, and ran out again into the same misty wet weather. The next morning the balance of our passengers were neither up early, nor lively when they were up; but to my surprise after what I had heard, no one had the much-prognosticated attack of fever. All day long we steamed onwards, passing the Banana Isles and Sherboro Island and the sound usually called Sherboro River.[2] We being a South-West Coast boat, did not call at the trading settlements here, but kept on past Cape St. Ann for the Kru coast.
All day long the rain came down as if thousands of energetic—well, let us say—angels were hurriedly baling the waters above the firmament out into the ocean. Everything on board was reeking wet.
You could sweep the moisture off the cabin panelling with your hand, and our clothes were clammy and musty, and the towels too damp on their own account to dry you. Why none of us started specialising branchiae I do not know, but feel that would have been the proper sort of breathing apparatus for such an atmosphere.
The passengers were all at the tail end of their spirits, for Sierra Leone is the definite beginning of the Coast to the out-goer. You are down there when you leave it outward bound; it is indeed, the complement of Canary. Those going up out of West Africa begin to get excited at Sierra Leone; those going down into West Africa, particularly when it is the wet season, begin to get depressed. It did not, however, operate in this manner on me. I had survived Sierra Leone, I had enjoyed it; why, therefore, not survive other places, and enjoy them? Moreover, my scientific training, combined with close study of the proper method of carrying on the local conversation, had by now enabled me to understand its true spirit—never contradict, and, if you can, help it onward. When going on deck about 6 o’clock that evening, I was alarmed to see our gallant captain in red velvet slippers. A few minutes later the chief officer burst on my affrighted gaze in red velvet slippers too. On my way hurriedly to the saloon I encountered the third officer similarly shod. When I recovered from these successive shocks, I carried out my mission of alarming the rest of the passengers,