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THE CONGO AND COASTS OF AFRICA

By

RICHARD HARDING DAVIS, F.R.G.S.


AUTHOR OF "SOLDIERS OF FORTUNE," "THE SCARLET CAR,"
"WITH BOTH ARMIES IN SOUTH AFRICA," "FARCES,"
"THE CUBAN AND PORTO RICAN CAMPAIGNS"


ILLUSTRATIONS
FROM PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE AUTHOR
AND OTHERS


CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
NEW YORK
1907


[Illustration (Frontispiece): Mr. Davis and "Wood Boys" of the
Congo.]



TO

CECIL CLARK DAVIS

MY FELLOW VOYAGER ALONG
THE COASTS OF AFRICA




CONTENTS


I
THE COASTERS 3

II
MY BROTHER'S KEEPER 32

III
THE CAPITAL OF THE CONGO 55

IV
AMERICANS IN THE CONGO 93

V
HUNTING THE HIPPO 118

VI
OLD CALABAR 142

VII
ALONG THE EAST COAST 176



ILLUSTRATIONS


MR. DAVIS AND "WOOD BOYS" OF THE CONGO _Frontispiece_

MRS. DAVIS IN A BORROWED "HAMMOCK," THE LOCAL MEANS
OF TRANSPORT ON THE WEST COAST 10

A WHITE BUILDING, THAT BLAZED LIKE THE BASE OF A
WHITEWASHED STOVE AT WHITE HEAT 22

THE "MAMMY CHAIR" IS LIKE THOSE SWINGS YOU SEE
IN PUBLIC PLAYGROUNDS 28

A VILLAGE ON THE KASAI RIVER 42

"TENANTS" OF LEOPOLD, WHO CLAIMS THAT THE CONGO
BELONGS TO HIM, AND THAT THESE NATIVE PEOPLE
ARE THERE ONLY AS HIS TENANTS 52

THE FACILITIES FOR LANDING AT BANANA, THE PORT OF
ENTRY TO THE CONGO, ARE LIMITED 56

"PRISONERS" OF THE STATE IN CHAINS AT MATADI 60

BUSH BOYS IN THE PLAZA AT MATADI SEEKING SHADE 70

THE MONUMENT IN STANLEY PARK, ERECTED, NOT TO
STANLEY, BUT TO LEOPOLD 82

THE _Deliverance_. THE RIVER RACED OVER THE DECK
TO A DEPTH OF FOUR OR FIVE INCHES. BETWEEN
HER CABIN AND THE WOOD-PILE, WERE STORED FIFTY
HUMAN BEINGS 86

THE NATIVE WIFE OF A _Chef de Poste_ 90

ENGLISH MISSIONARIES, AND SOME OF THEIR CHARGES 98

THE LABORING MAN UPON WHOM THE AMERICAN CONCESSIONAIRES
MUST DEPEND 106

MR. DAVIS AND NATIVE "BOY," ON THE KASAI RIVER 128

THE HIPPOPOTAMUS THAT DID NOT KNOW HE WAS DEAD 134

THE JESUIT BROTHERS AT THE WOMBALI MISSION 138

THERE, IN THE SURF, WE FOUND THESE TONS OF MAHOGANY,
POUNDING AGAINST EACH OTHER 152

A LOG OF MAHOGANY JAMMED IN THE ANCHOR CHAINS 156

THE PALACE OF THE KING OF THE CAMEROONS 160

THE HOME OF THE THIRTY QUEENS OF KING MANGO BELL 164

THE MOTHER SUPERIOR AND SISTERS OF ST. JOSEPH AND
THEIR CONVERTS AT OLD CALABAR 168

THE KROO BOYS SIT, NOT ON THE THWARTS, BUT ON THE
GUNWALES, AS A WOMAN RIDES A SIDE SADDLE 172

GOING VISITING IN HER PRIVATE TRAM-CAR AT BEIRA 182

ONE-HALF OF THE STREET CLEANING DEPARTMENT OF
MOZAMBIQUE 190

CUSTOM HOUSE, ZANZIBAR 194

CHAIN-GANGS OF PETTY OFFENDERS OUTSIDE OF ZANZIBAR 198

THE IVORY ON THE RIGHT, COVERED ONLY WITH SACKING,
IS READY FOR SHIPMENT TO BOSTON, U.S.A. 202

THE LATE SULTAN OF ZANZIBAR IN HIS STATE CARRIAGE 206

H.S.H. HAMUD BIN MUHAMAD BIN SAID, THE LATE
SULTAN OF ZANZIBAR 210

A GERMAN "FACTORY" AT TANGA, THE STORE BELOW, THE
LIVING APARTMENTS ABOVE 214

SOUDANESE SOLDIERS UNDER A GERMAN OFFICER OUTSIDE
OF TANGA 218




THE CONGO AND COASTS OF AFRICA


I

THE COASTERS


No matter how often one sets out, "for to admire, and for to see,
for to behold this world so wide," he never quite gets over being
surprised at the erratic manner in which "civilization" distributes
itself; at the way it ignores one spot upon the earth's surface, and
upon another, several thousand miles away, heaps its blessings and
its tyrannies. Having settled in a place one might suppose the
"influences of civilization" would first be felt by the people
nearest that place. Instead of which, a number of men go forth in a
ship and carry civilization as far away from that spot as the winds
will bear them.

When a stone falls in a pool each part of each ripple is equally
distant from the spot where the stone fell; but if the stone of
civilization were to have fallen, for instance, into New Orleans,
equally near to that spot we would find the people of New York City
and the naked Indians of Yucatan. Civilization does not radiate, or
diffuse. It leaps; and as to where it will next strike it is as
independent as forked lightning. During hundreds of years it passed
over the continent of Africa to settle only at its northern coast
line and its most southern cape; and, to-day, it has given Cuba all
of its benefits, and has left the equally beautiful island of Hayti,
only fourteen hours away, sunk in fetish worship and brutal
ignorance.

One of the places it has chosen to ignore is the West Coast of
Africa. We are familiar with the Northern Coast and South Africa. We
know all about Morocco and the picturesque Raisuli, Lord Cromer, and
Shepheard's Hotel. The Kimberley Diamond Mines, the Boer War,
Jameson's Raid, and Cecil Rhodes have made us know South Africa, and
on the East Coast we supply Durban with buggies and farm wagons,
furniture from Grand Rapids, and, although we have nothing against
Durban, breakfast food and canned meats. We know Victoria Falls,
because they have eclipsed our own Niagara Falls, and Zanzibar,
farther up the Coast, is familiar through comic operas and rag-time.
Of itself, the Cape to Cairo Railroad would make the East Coast
known to us. But the West Coast still means that distant shore from
whence the "first families" of Boston, Bristol and New Orleans
exported slaves. Now, for our soap and our salad, the West Coast
supplies palm oil and kernel oil, and for automobile tires, rubber.
But still to it there cling the mystery, the hazard, the cruelty of
those earlier times. It is not of palm oil and rubber one thinks
when he reads on the ship's itinerary, "the Gold Coast, the Ivory
Coast, the Bight of Benin, and Old Calabar."

One of the strange leaps made by civilization is from Southampton to
Cape Town, and one of its strangest ironies is in its ignoring all
the six thousand miles of coast line that lies between. Nowadays, in
winter time, the English, flying from the damp cold of London, go to
Cape Town as unconcernedly as to the Riviera. They travel in great
seagoing hotels, on which they play cricket, and dress for dinner.
Of the damp, fever-driven coast line past which, in splendid ease,
they are travelling, save for the tall peaks of Teneriffe and Cape
Verde, they know nothing.

When last Mrs. Davis and I made that voyage from Southampton, the
decks were crowded chiefly with those English whose faces are
familiar at the Savoy and the Ritz, and who, within an hour, had
settled down to seventeen days of uninterrupted bridge, with, before
them, the prospect on landing of the luxury of the Mount Nelson and
the hospitalities of Government House. When, the other day, we again
left Southampton, that former departure came back in strange
contrast. It emphasized that this time we are not accompanying
civilization on one of her flying leaps. Instead, now, we are going
down to the sea in ships with the vortrekkers of civilization, those
who are making the ways straight; who, in a few weeks, will be
leaving us to lose themselves in great forests, who clear the paths
of noisome jungles where the sun seldom penetrates, who sit in
sun-baked "factories," as they call their trading houses, measuring
life by steamer days, who preach the Gospel to the cannibals of the
Congo, whose voices are the voices of those calling in the
wilderness.

As our tender came alongside the _Bruxellesville_ at Southampton, we
saw at the winch Kroo boys of the Ivory Coast; leaning over the rail
the Soeurs Blanches of the Congo, robed, although the cold was
bitter and the decks black with soot-stained snow, all in white;
missionaries with long beards, a bishop in a purple biretta, and
innumerable Belgian officers shivering in their cloaks and wearing
the blue ribbon and silver star that tells of three years of service
along the Equator. This time our fellow passengers are no
pleasure-seekers, no Cook's tourists sailing south to avoid a
rigorous winter. They have squeezed the last minute out of their
leave, and they are going back to the station, to the factory, to
the mission, to the barracks. They call themselves "Coasters," and
they inhabit a world all to themselves. In square miles, it is a
very big world, but it is one of those places civilization has
skipped.

Nearly every one of our passengers from Antwerp or Southampton knows
that if he keeps his contract, and does not die, it will be three
years before he again sees his home. So our departure was not
enlivening, and, in the smoking-room, the exiles prepared us for
lonely ports of call, for sickening heat, for swarming multitudes of
blacks.

In consequence, when we passed Finisterre, Spain, which from New
York seems almost a foreign country, was a near neighbor, a dear
friend. And the Island of Teneriffe was an anticlimax. It was as
though by a trick of the compass we had been sailing southwest and
were entering the friendly harbor of Ponce or Havana.

Santa Cruz, the port town of Teneriffe, like La Guayra, rises at the
base of great hills. It is a smiling, bright-colored, red-roofed,
typical Spanish town. The hills about it mount in innumerable
terraces planted with fruits and vegetables, and from many of these
houses on the hills, should the owner step hurriedly out of his
front door, he would land upon the roof of his nearest neighbor.
Back of this first chain of hills are broad farming lands and
plateaus from which Barcelona and London are fed with the earliest
and the most tender of potatoes that appear in England at the same
time Bermuda potatoes are being printed in big letters on the bills
of fare along Broadway. Santa Cruz itself supplies passing steamers
with coal, and passengers with lace work and post cards; and to the
English in search of sunshine, with a rival to Madeira. It should be
a successful rival, for it is a charming place, and on the day we
were there the thermometer was at 72 deg., and every one was complaining
of the cruel severity of the winter. In Santa Cruz one who knows
Spanish America has but to shut his eyes and imagine himself back in
Santiago de Cuba or Caracas. There are the same charming plazas, the
yellow churches and towered cathedral, the long iron-barred windows,
glimpses through marble-paved halls of cool patios, the same open
shops one finds in Obispo and O'Reilly Streets, the idle officers
with smart uniforms and swinging swords in front of cafes killing
time and digestion with sweet drinks, and over the garden walls
great bunches of purple and scarlet flowers and sheltering palms.
The show place in Santa Cruz is the church in which are stored the
relics of the sea-fight in which, as a young man, Nelson lost his
arm and England also lost two battleflags. As she is not often
careless in that respect, it is a surprise to find, in this tiny
tucked-away little island, what you will not see in any of the show
places of the world. They tell in Santa Cruz that one night an
English middy, single-handed, recaptured the captured flags and
carried them triumphantly to his battleship. He expected at the
least a K.C.B., and when the flags, with a squad of British marines
as a guard of honor, were solemnly replaced in the church, and the
middy himself was sent upon a tour of apology to the bishop, the
governor, the commandant of the fortress, the alcalde, the collector
of customs, and the captain of the port, he declared that monarchies
were ungrateful. The other objects of interest in Teneriffe are
camels, which in the interior of the island are common beasts of
burden, and which appearing suddenly around a turn would frighten
any automobile; and the fact that in Teneriffe the fashion in
women's hats never changes. They are very funny, flat straw hats;
like children's sailor hats. They need only "_U.S.S. Iowa_" on the
band to be quite familiar. Their secret is that they are built to
support baskets and buckets of water, and that concealed in each is
a heavy pad.

[Illustration: Mrs. Davis in a Borrowed "Hammock," the Local Means
of Transport on the West Coast.]

After Teneriffe the destination of every one on board is as
irrevocably fixed as though the ship were a government transport. We
are all going to the West Coast or to the Congo. Should you wish to
continue on to Cape Town along the South Coast, as they call the
vast territory from Lagos to Cape Town, although there is an
irregular, a very irregular, service to the Cape, you could as
quickly reach it by going on to the Congo, returning all the way to
Southampton, and again starting on the direct line south.

It is as though a line of steamers running down our coast to Florida
would not continue on along the South Coast to New Orleans and
Galveston, and as though no line of steamers came from New Orleans
and Galveston to meet the steamers of the East Coast.

In consequence, the West Coast of Africa, cut off by lack of
communication from the south, divorced from the north by the Desert
of Sahara, lies in the steaming heat of the Equator to-day as it
did a thousand years ago, in inaccessible, inhospitable isolation.

Two elements have helped to preserve this isolation: the fever that
rises from its swamps and lagoons, and the surf that thunders upon
the shore. In considering the stunted development of the West Coast,
these two elements must be kept in mind--the sickness that strikes
at sunset and by sunrise leaves the victim dead, and the monster
waves that rush booming like cannon at the beach, churning the sandy
bottom beneath, and hurling aside the great canoes as a man tosses a
cigarette. The clerk who signs the three-year contract to work on
the West Coast enlists against a greater chance of death than the
soldier who enlists to fight only bullets; and every box, puncheon,
or barrel that the trader sends in a canoe through the surf is
insured against its never reaching, as the case may be, the shore or
the ship's side.

The surf and the fever are the Minotaurs of the West Coast, and in
the year there is not a day passes that they do not claim and
receive their tribute in merchandise and human life. Said an old
Coaster to me, pointing at the harbor of Grand Bassam: "I've seen
just as much cargo lost overboard in that surf as I've seen shipped
to Europe." One constantly wonders how the Coasters find it good
enough. How, since 1550, when the Portuguese began trading, it has
been possible to find men willing to fill the places of those who
died. But, in spite of the early massacres by the natives, in spite
of attacks by wild beasts, in spite of pirate raids, of desolating
plagues and epidemics, of wars with other white men, of damp heat
and sudden sickness, there were men who patiently rebuilt the forts
and factories, fought the surf with great breakwaters, cleared
breathing spaces in the jungle, and with the aid of quinine for
themselves, and bad gin for the natives, have held their own. Except
for the trade goods it never would be held. It is a country where
the pay is cruelly inadequate, where but few horses, sheep, or
cattle can exist, where the natives are unbelievably lazy and
insolent, and where, while there is no society of congenial spirits,
there is a superabundance of animal and insect pests. Still, so
great are gold, ivory, and rubber, and so many are the men who will
take big chances for little pay, that every foot of the West Coast
is preempted. As the ship rolls along, for hours from the rail you
see miles and miles of steaming yellow sand and misty swamp where as
yet no white man has set his foot. But in the real estate office of
Europe some Power claims the right to "protect" that swamp; some
treaty is filed as a title-deed.

As the Powers finally arranged it, the map of the West Coast is like
a mosaic, like the edge of a badly constructed patchwork quilt. In
trading along the West Coast a man can find use for five European
languages, and he can use a new one at each port of call.

To the north, the West Coast begins with Cape Verde, which is
Spanish. It is followed by Senegal, which is French; but into
Senegal is tucked "a thin red line" of British territory called
Gambia. Senegal closes in again around Gambia, and is at once
blocked to the south by the three-cornered patch which belongs to
Portugal. This is followed by French Guinea down to another British
red spot, Sierra Leone, which meets Liberia, the republic of negro
emigrants from the United States. South of Liberia is the French
Ivory Coast, then the English Gold Coast; Togo, which is German;
Dahomey, which is French; Lagos and Southern Nigeria, which again
are English; Fernando Po, which is Spanish, and the German
Cameroons.

The coast line of these protectorates and colonies gives no idea of
the extent of their hinterland, which spreads back into the Sahara,
the Niger basin, and the Soudan. Sierra Leone, one of the smallest
of them, is as large as Maine; Liberia, where the emigrants still
keep up the tradition of the United States by talking like end men,
is as large as the State of New York; two other colonies, Senegal
and Nigeria, together are 135,000 square miles larger than the
combined square miles of all of our Atlantic States from Maine to
Florida and including both. To partition finally among the Powers
this strip of death and disease, of uncountable wealth, of unnamed
horrors and cruelties, has taken many hundreds of years, has brought
to the black man every misery that can be inflicted upon a human
being, and to thousands of white men, death and degradation, or
great wealth.

The raids made upon the West Coast to obtain slaves began in the
fifteenth century with the discovery of the West Indies, and it was
to spare the natives of these islands, who were unused and unfitted
for manual labor and who in consequence were cruelly treated by the
Spaniards, that Las Casas, the Bishop of Chiapa, first imported
slaves from West Africa. He lived to see them suffer so much more
terribly than had the Indians who first obtained his sympathy, that
even to his eightieth year he pleaded with the Pope and the King of
Spain to undo the wrong he had begun. But the tide had set west, and
Las Casas might as well have tried to stop the Trades. In 1800
Wilberforce stated in the House of Commons that at that time British
vessels were carrying each year to the Indies and the American
colonies 38,000 slaves, and when he spoke the traffic had been going
on for two hundred and fifty years. After the Treaty of Utrecht,
Queen Anne congratulated her Peers on the terms of the treaty which
gave to England "the fortress of Gibraltar, the Island of Minorca,
and the monopoly in the slave trade for thirty years," or, as it was
called, the _asiento_ (contract). This was considered so good an
investment that Philip V of Spain took up one-quarter of the common
stock, and good Queen Anne reserved another quarter, which later she
divided among her ladies. But for a time she and her cousin of Spain
were the two largest slave merchants in the world. The point of view
of those then engaged in the slave trade is very interesting. When
Queen Elizabeth sent Admiral Hawkins slave-hunting, she presented
him with a ship, named, with startling lack of moral perception,
after the Man of Sorrows. In a book on the slave trade I picked up
at Sierra Leone there is the diary of an officer who accompanied
Hawkins. "After," he writes, "going every day on shore to take the
inhabitants by burning and despoiling of their towns," the ship was
becalmed. "But," he adds gratefully, "the Almighty God, who never
suffereth his elect to perish, sent us the breeze."

The slave book shows that as late as 1780 others of the "elect" of
our own South were publishing advertisements like this, which is one
of the shortest and mildest. It is from a Virginia newspaper: "The
said fellow is outlawed, and I will give ten pounds reward for his
head severed from his body, or forty shillings if brought alive."

At about this same time an English captain threw overboard, chained
together, one hundred and thirty sick slaves. He claimed that had he
not done so the ship's company would have also sickened and died,
and the ship would have been lost, and that, therefore, the
insurance companies should pay for the slaves. The jury agreed with
him, and the Solicitor-General said: "What is all this declamation
about human beings! This is a case of chattels or goods. It is
really so--it is the case of throwing over goods. For the
purpose--the purpose of the insurance, they are goods and property;
whether right or wrong, we have nothing to do with it." In 1807
England declared the slave trade illegal. A year later the United
States followed suit, but although on the seas her frigates chased
the slavers, on shore a part of our people continued to hold slaves,
until the Civil War rescued both them and the slaves.

As early as 1718 Raynal and Diderot estimated that up to that time
there had been exported from Africa to the North and South Americas
nine million slaves. Our own historian, Bancroft, calculated that in
the eighteenth century the English alone imported to the Americas
three million slaves, while another 2,500,000 purchased or kidnapped
on the West Coast were lost in the surf, or on the voyage thrown
into the sea. For that number Bancroft places the gross returns as
not far from four hundred millions of dollars.

All this is history, and to the reader familiar, but I do not
apologize for reviewing it here, as without the background of the
slave trade, the West Coast, as it is to-day, is difficult to
understand. As we have seen, to kings, to chartered "Merchant
Adventurers," to the cotton planters of the West Indies and of our
South, and to the men of the North who traded in black ivory, the
West Coast gave vast fortunes. The price was the lives of millions
of slaves. And to-day it almost seems as though the sins of the
fathers were being visited upon the children; as though the juju of
the African, under the spell of which his enemies languish and die,
has been cast upon the white man. We have to look only at home. In
the millions of dead, and in the misery of the Civil War, and
to-day in race hatred, in race riots, in monstrous crimes and as
monstrous lynchings, we seem to see the fetish of the West Coast,
the curse, falling upon the children to the third and fourth
generation of the million slaves that were thrown, shackled, into
the sea.

The first mention in history of Sierra Leone is when in 480 B.C.,
Hanno, the Carthaginian, anchored at night in its harbor, and then
owing to "fires in the forests, the beating of drums, and strange
cries that issued from the bushes," before daylight hastened away.
We now skip nineteen hundred years. This is something of a gap, but
except for the sketchy description given us by Hanno of the place,
and his one gaudy night there, Sierra Leone until the fifteenth
century utterly disappears from the knowledge of man. Happy is the
country without a history!

Nineteen hundred years having now supposed to elapse, the second act
begins with De Cintra, who came in search of slaves, and instead
gave the place its name. Because of the roaring of the wind around
the peak that rises over the harbor he called it the Lion Mountain.

After the fifteenth century, in a succession of failures, five
different companies of "Royal Adventurers" were chartered to trade
with her people, and, when convenient, to kidnap them; pirates in
turn kidnapped the British governor, the French and Dutch were
always at war with the settlement, and native raids, epidemics, and
fevers were continuous. The history of Sierra Leone is the history
of every other colony along the West Coast, with the difference that
it became a colony by purchase, and was not, as were the others, a
trading station gradually converted into a colony. During the war in
America, Great Britain offered freedom to all slaves that would
fight for her, and, after the war, these freed slaves were conveyed
on ships of war to London, where they were soon destitute. They
appealed to the great friend of the slave in those days, Granville
Sharp, and he with others shipped them to Sierra Leone, to
establish, with the aid of some white emigrants, an independent
colony, which was to be a refuge and sanctuary for others like
themselves. Liberia, which was the gift of philanthropists of
Baltimore to American freed slaves, was, no doubt, inspired by this
earlier effort. The colony became a refuge for slaves from every
part of the Coast, the West Indies and Nova Scotia, and to-day in
that one colony there are spoken sixty different coast dialects and
those of the hinterland.

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