and able officer and a dutiful but inexperienced Purser caused them to regard me as only a very early visitor to Canary. Now they required explanation. I said I was interested in Natural History. “Botany,” they said, “They had known some men who had come out from Kew, but they were all dead now.”
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Santa Cruz, Teneriffe.
I denied a connection with Kew, and in order to give an air of definiteness to my intentions, remembering I had been instructed that “one of the worst things you can do in West Africa is to be indefinite,” I said I was interested in the South Antarctic Drift—I was in those days.
They promptly fell into the pit of error that this was a gold mine speculation, and said they had “never heard of such a mine.” I attempted to extricate them from this idea, and succeeded, except with a deaf gentleman who kept on sweeping into the conversation with yarns and opinions on gold mines in West Africa and the awful mortality among people who attended to such things, which naturally led to a prolonged discussion ending in a general resolution that people who had anything to do with gold mines generally died rather quicker even than men from Kew. Indeed, it took me days to get myself explained, and when it was accomplished I found I had nearly got myself regarded as a lunatic to go to West Africa for such reasons. But fortunately for me, and for many others who have ventured into this kingdom, the West African merchants are good-hearted, hospitable English gentlemen, who seem to feel it their duty that no harm they can prevent should happen to any one; and my first friends, among them my fellow passengers on the——, failing in inducing me to return from Sierra Leone, which they strongly advised, did their best to save me by means of education. The things they thought I “really ought to know” would make wild reading if published in extenso. Led by the kindest and most helpful of captains, they poured in information, and I acquired a taste for “facts”—any sort of facts about anything—a taste when applied to West African facts, that I fancy ranks with that for collecting venomous serpents; but to my listening to everything that was told me by my first instructors, and believing in it, undoubtedly I have often owed my life, and countless times have been enabled to steer neatly through shoaly circumstances ashore.
Our captain was not a man who would deliberately alarm a new comer, or shock any one, particularly a lady; indeed, he deliberately attempted to avoid so doing. He held it wrong to dwell on the dark side of Coast life, he said, “because youngsters going out were frequently so frightened on board the boats that they died as soon as they got on shore of the first cold they got in the head, thinking it was Yellow Jack”; so he always started conversation at meal times with anecdotes of his early years on an ancestral ranch in America. One great charm about “facts” is that you never know but what they may come in useful; so I eagerly got up a quantity of very strange information on the conduct of the American cow. He would then wander away among the China Seas or the Indian Ocean, and I could pass an examination on the social habits of captains of sailing vessels that ran to Bombay in old days. Sometimes the discourse visited the South American ports, and I took on information that will come in very handy should I ever find myself wandering about the streets of Callao after dark, searching for a tavern. But the turn that serious conversation always drifted into was the one that interested me most, that relating to the Coast. Particularly interesting were those tales of the old times and the men who first established the palm oil trade. They were, many of them, men who had been engaged in the slave trade, and on the suppression thereof they turned their attention to palm oil, to which end their knowledge of the locality and of the native chiefs and their commercial methods was of the greatest help. Their ideas were possibly not those at present in fashion, but the courage and enterprise those men displayed under the most depressing and deadly conditions made me proud of being a woman of the nation that turned out the “Palm oil ruffians”—Drake, Hawkins, the two Roberts, Frobisher, and Hudson—it is as good as being born a foreign gentleman.
There was one of these old coasters of the palm oil ruffian type who especially interested me. He is dead now. For the matter of that he died at a mature age the year I was born, and I am in hopes of collecting facts sufficient to enable me to publish his complete biography. He lived up a creek, threw boots at leopards, and “had really swell spittoons, you know, shaped like puncheons, and bound with brass.” I am sure it is unnecessary for me to mention his name.
Two of the old Coasters never spoke unless they had something useful and improving to say. They were Scotch; indeed, most of us were that trip, and I often used to wonder if the South Atlantic Ocean were broad enough for the accent of the “a,” or whether strange sounds would ever worry and alarm Central America and the Brazils. For general social purposes these silent ones used coughs, and the one whose seat was always next to mine at table kept me in a state of much anxiety, for I used to turn round, after having been riveted to the captain’s conversation for minutes, and find him holding some dish for me to help myself from; he never took the least notice of my apologies, and I felt he had made up his mind that, if I did it again, he should take me by the scruff of my neck some night and drop me overboard. He was an alarmingly powerfully built man, and I quite understood the local African tribe wishing to have him for a specimen. Some short time before he had left for home last trip, they had attempted to acquire his head for their local ju ju house, from mixed æsthetic and religious reasons. In a way, it was creditable of them, I suppose, for it would have caused them grave domestic inconvenience to have removed thereby at one fell swoop, their complete set of tradesmen; and as a fellow collector of specimens I am bound to admit the soundness of their methods of collecting! Wishing for this gentleman’s head they shot him in the legs. I have never gone in for collecting specimens of hominidae but still a recital of the incident did not fire me with a desire to repeat their performance; indeed, so discouraged was I by their failure that I hesitated about asking him for his skeleton when he had quite done with it, though it was gall and wormwood to think of a really fine thing like that falling into the hands of another collector.
The run from Canary to Sierra Leone takes about a week. That part of it which lies in the track of the N.E. Trade Winds, i.e., from Canary to Cape Verde, makes you believe Mr. Kipling when he sang—
“There are many ways to take
Of the eagle and the snake,
And the way of a man with a maid;
But the sweetest way for me
Is a ship upon the sea
On the track of the North-East trade.”
was displaying, gracefully, a sensible choice of things; but you only feel this outward bound to the West Coast. When you come up from the Coast, fever stricken, homeward bound, you think otherwise. I do not mean to say that owing to a disintegrating moral effect of West Africa you wish to pursue the other ways mentioned in the stanza, but you do wish the Powers above would send that wind to the Powers below and get it warmed. Alas! it is in this Trade Wind zone that most men die, coming up from the Coast sick with fever, and it is to the blame of the Trade Wind that you see obituary notices—“of fever after leaving Sierra Leone.” Nevertheless, outward bound the thing is delightful, and dreadfully you feel its loss when you have run through it as you close in to the African land by Cape Verde. At any rate I did; and I began to believe every bad thing I had ever heard of West Africa, and straightway said to myself, what every man has said to himself who has gone there since Hanno of Carthage, “Why was I such a fool as to come to such an awful place?” It is the first meeting with the hot breath of the Bights that tries one; it is the breath of Death himself to many. You feel when first you meet it you have done with all else; not alone is it hot, but it smells—smells like nothing else. It does not smell all it can then; by and by, down in the Rivers, you get its perfection, but off Cape Verde you have to ask yourself, “Can I live in this or no?” and you have to leave it,
