specimen of the genus I have ever seen. He wore a khaki coat and very elderly tweed trousers, split behind; his feet were bare; he did not pander to that vitiated taste which demands underlinen, or at least a shirt, but, seeing it was the cold weather, he adorned his black skull with a woolly cap with ear-flaps, such as Nansen probably took on his North-Pole expedition.
There was a great deal of cargo—cotton goods, sugar, salt, coffee, dates; things that the French company were taking up to supply their factories on the river, and long before it was stowed the deck passengers began crowding on board. Apparently there was no provision whatever made for them; they stowed on top of the cargo, just wherever they could find a place, and every passenger—there were over ninety of them—had apparently something to say as to the accommodation, or the want of accommodation, and he or she said it at the very top of his or her voice in Jolloff or Mandingo or that bastard English which is a lingua franca all along the Coast. Not that it mattered much what language they said it in, because no one paid the least attention; such a babel have I never before heard. And such a crowd as they were. The steamer provided water carriage only for the deck passengers, so that they had their cooking apparatus, their bedding, their food, their babies, their chickens (unfortunate wretches tied by one leg), and, if they could evade the eagle eye of the French trader, their goats. The scene was bedlam let loose to my unaccustomed eyes. We were to tow six lighters as well, and each of them also had a certain number of passengers. As we started it seemed likely we should sweep away a few dozen who were hanging on in the most dangerous places to the frailest supports. Possibly they wouldn't have been missed. I began to understand why the old slaver was callous. It was impossible to feel humane in the midst of such a shrieking, howling mob. The siren gave wild and ear-piercing shrieks; there were yells from the wharf, more heartrending yells from the steamer, a minor accompaniment from the lighters, bleating of goats, cackling of protesting fowls, crying of children, and we were off without casualty, and things began to settle down.
I had thought my quarters cramped, but looking at the deck passengers, crowding fore and aft over the coals and on top of the boiler, I realised that everything goes by comparison, and that they were simply palatial. I had eighteen feet square of room all to myself to sleep in. It had one drawback. There was £5000 worth of silver stowed under the seats, and therefore the trader requested me to lock the doors and fasten the shutters lest some of the passengers should take a fancy to it. His view was that plenty of air would come through the laths of the shutters. I did not agree with the French trader, and watched with keen interest those boxes of silver depart all too slowly. I would gladly have changed places and let him and the Commissioner have my cabin if only I might have taken their place on the deck above. But on the deck was the wheel, presided over by the black captain, or the equally black and more ragged mate, so it was not to be thought of.
And that deck was something to remember. There were the large water-bottles there and the filter, the trader's bed in a neat little roll, the Commissioner's bed, draped with blue mosquito curtains, the hencoops with the unhappy fowls that served us for food, the Commissioner's washing apparatus on top of one of the coops, for he was a young man of resource, the rest of his kit, his rifle, his bath, his cartridge-belt, his dog, a few plates and cups and basins, a couple of sieves for rice, two or three stools, the elderly black kettle, out of the spout of which the skipper and the mate sucked refreshment as if they had been a couple of snipe, and last, but not least, there was the French company's mails for their employees up river. I was told the correspondence always arrived safely, and so it is evident that in some things we take too much trouble. The captain attended to the sorting of the mails when he had time to spare from his other duties. I have seen him with a much-troubled brow sorting letters at night by the light of a flickering candle, and, when the mails overflowed the deal box, parcels were stacked against the railing, newspapers leaned for support against the wheel, and letters collogued in friendly fashion on the deck with the black kettle.
For the first seventeen miles the little ship, towing her lighters behind and alongside, went up a river that was like a sea, so far away were the mangrove swamps that are on either side. Then we reached Fort St. James, and the river narrows. Very pathetic are the ruins of Fort St. James. No one lives there now; no one has lived there for many a long day, but you see as you pass and look at the crumbling stones of the old fort why West Africa gained in the minds of men so evil a reputation. The place is but a rocky islet, with but a few scanty trees upon it; above is the brazen sky, below the baked earth, on which the tropical sun pours down with all the added heat gathered from the glare of the river. They must have died shut up in Fort St. James in those far-away days. Tradition, too, says that the gentlemen of the company of soldiers who were stationed there were for ever fighting duels, and that the many vacancies in the ranks were not always due to the climate. But the heat and the monotony would conduce to irritability, and when a hasty word had to be upheld at the sword's point, it is no wonder if they cursed the Coast with a bitterness that is only given to the land of regrets. But all honour to those dead-and-gone Englishmen. They upheld the might of Britain, and her rights in the trade in palm oil and slaves and ivory that even then came down the river. And if they died—now, now at last, after many weary years, their descendants are beginning dimly to realise, as they never did, the value of the land for which they gave their lives.
It is the custom to speak with contempt of a mangrove swamp, as if in it no beauty could lie, as if it were only waste land—dreary, depressing, ugly. Each of those epithets may be true—I cannot say—except the last, and that is most certainly a falsehood. What my impressions would be if I lived in the midst of it day after day I cannot say, but to a passer-by the mangrove swamp has a beauty of its own.
When first I saw the Gambia I was fascinated, and found no words too strong for its beauty; and, having gone farther, I would take back not one word of that admiration. But I am like the lover who is faithless to his first mistress—he acknowledges her charm, but he has seen someone else; so now, as I sit down to write, I am reminded that the Volta is more ravishingly lovely, and that if I use up all my adjectives on the Gambia I shall have no words to describe my new mistress. Therefore must I modify my transports, and so it seems to me I am unfair.
As we moved up the river we could plainly see the shore on either side, the dense mangrove swamp, doubled by its reflection, green and beautiful against its setting of blue sky and clear river. Crocodiles lay basking in the golden sunshine on the mud-banks, white egrets flew slowly from tree to tree, a brown jolah-king, an ibis debased for some sin in the youth of the world, sailed slowly across the water, a white fishing-eagle poised himself on high, looking for his prey, a slate-blue crane came across our bows, a young pelican just ahead was taking his first lesson in swimming, and closer to the bank we could see king-fishers, bright spots of colour against the dark green of the mangrove.
“The wonder of the Tropics”—the river seemed to be whispering at first, and then fairly shouted—“can you deny beauty to this river?” and I, with the cool Harmattan blowing across the water to put the touch of moisture in the air it needed, was constrained to answer that voice, which none of the others seemed to hear, “Truly I cannot.”
It would be impossible to describe in detail all the little wharves at which we stopped; besides, they all bore a strong family resemblance to one another, differing only when they were in the upper or lower river. Long before I could see any signs of human habitation the steamer's skipper was wildly agitated over the mails, wrinkling up his brows and pawing them over with his dirty black hands—mine were dirtier, at least, they showed more, and the way to the deck was so coaly it was impossible to keep clean. Then he would hang on to a string, which resulted in the most heartrending wails from the steamer's siren; a corrugated-iron roof would show up among the surrounding greenery, and a little wharf, or “tenda,” as they call them here, would jut out into the stream. These tendas are frail-looking structures built of the split poles of the rhon palm. There seem to be as many varieties of palm as there are of eucalyptus, all much alike to the uninitiated eye.
The tendas look as if they were only meant to be walked on by bare feet—certainly very few of the feet rise beyond a loose slipper; and whether it was blazing noonday or pitchy darkness only made visible by a couple of hurricane lanterns of one candle-power, the tenda was crowded with people come to see the arrival of the steamer, which is a White-Star liner or a Cunarder to them—people in cast-off