West African studies Part 12

All the doctors present have to go through the same ordeal, and if the missing soul does not turn up, the party of doctors go to the head doctor's house to see if by chance he has got it in his box. All the things are taken out of the box, and if the soul is not there, the head doctor, the President of the College of Physicians, the Sir Somebody Something of the district, is held by his heels with his learned head in a hole in the floor, while the other doctors wash his hair. The water used is then taken and poured over the patient's head.

I told this story to all the African witch doctors I knew. I fear, that being hazy in geography, they think it is the practice of the English medical profession; but, anyhow every one of them regarded the doctors of the Na.s.s River as a set of superst.i.tious savages, and imbeciles at that. Of course a medical man had to see to souls, but to go about in squads, administer rough emetics to themselves, instead of to the patients, and as for that head was.h.i.+ng--well, people can be fool too much! None of them showed the slightest signs of adopting the British Columbia method, none of them showed even any signs of adopting my suggestion that they should go and teach those benighted brothers of theirs the theory of _insisa_.

If you ask me frankly whether I think these African witch doctors believe in themselves, I think I must say, Yes; or perhaps it would be safer to say they believe in the theory they work by, for of that there can be very little doubt. I do not fancy they ever claim invincible power over disease; they do their best according to their lights. It would be difficult to see why they should doubt their own methods, because, remember, all their patients do not die; the majority recover.

I am not putting this recovery down to their soul-treatment method, but to the village apothecary, who has usually been doctoring the patient with drugs before the so-called witch doctor is called in. Of course the apothecary does not get the credit of the cure in this case, but I fancy he deserves it. Another point to be remembered is that the Africans on the West Coast, at any rate, are far more liable than white men to many strange nervous disorders, especially to delirium, which often occurs in a comparatively slight illness. Why I do not pretend to understand; but I think in these nervous cases the bedside manners of a witch doctor--though strongly resembling that of the physician who attended the immortal Why Why's mother--may yet be really useful.

As to the evil these witch doctors do in the matter of getting people killed for bewitching it is difficult to speak justly. I fancy that, on the whole, they do more good than harm, for remember witchcraft in these districts is no parlour game; in the eyes of Allah as well as man it is murder, for most of it is poison. Most witchcraft charms I know of among people who have not been in contact with Mohammedanism have always had that element of mixing something with the food or drink--even in that common, true Negro form of killing by witchcraft, putting medicine in the path, there is a poisoned spike as well as charm stuff. There can be no doubt that the witch doctor's methods of finding out who has poisoned a person are effective, and that the knowledge in the public mind of this detective power keeps down poisoning to a great extent. Of the safeguards against unjust accusation I will speak when treating of law.

As to their using hypnotism, I suppose they do use something of the sort at times. West Indians, with whom I was always anxious to talk on the differences and agreements between Vodou and Obeah and their parent West African religion, certainly, in their description of what they called w.a.n.ga--and translated as Glamour--seemed to point to this; but for myself, save in the case of blood coming before, one case of which I witnessed, I have seen nothing beyond an enormously elaborated common sense. I dare not call it sound, because it is based on and developed out of animism, and of that and our white elaborated view I am not the judge, remembering you go the one way, I the other--which is the best, G.o.d knows.

CHAPTER X

EARLY TRADE IN WEST AFRICA

Concerning the accounts given by cla.s.sic writers of West Africa, and of the method of barter called the Silent Trade.

It is a generally received opinion that there are too many books in the world already. I cannot, however, subscribe to any Inst.i.tution that proposes to alter this state of affairs, because I find no consensus of opinion as to which are the superfluous books; I have my own opinion on the point, but I feel I had better keep it to myself, for I find the very books I dislike--almost invariably in one-volume form, as this one is, though of a more connected nature than this is likely to be--are the well-beloved of thousands of my fellow human beings; and so I will restrict my enthusiasms in the matter of books to the cause of attempting to incite writers to give us more. If any one wants personally to oblige me he will forthwith write a masterly history of the inter-relations.h.i.+ps--religious, commercial, and cultural--of the other races of the earth with the African, and he can put in as an appendix a sketch of the war conquest of Africa by the white races. I do not ask for a separate volume on this, because there will be so many on the others; moreover, it is such a kaleidoscopic affair, and its influence alike on both European, Asiatic, and African seems to me neither great nor good.

For the past fifteen years I have been reading up Africa; and the effect of the study of this literature may best be summarised in Mr. Kipling's observation, "For to admire an' for to see, For to be'old this world so wide, It's never been no good to me, But I can't drop it if I tried."

Wherein it has failed to be of good, I hastily remark, is that after all this fifteen years' reading, I found I had to go down into the most unfas.h.i.+onable part of Africa myself, to try to find out whatever the thing was really like, and also to discover which of my authors had been doing the heaviest amount of lying. It seemed clear to the meanest intelligence that this form of the darkening of counsel was fearfully prevalent among them, because of the way they disagreed about things among themselves. Of course I have so far only partially succeeded in both these matters; for, regarding the first, personal experience taught me that things differed with district; regarding the second, that all the people who have been to Africa and have written books on it have, off and on, told the truth, and that what seemed to the public who have not been there to be the most erroneous statements have been true in substance and in fact, and that those statements they have accepted immediately as true on account of their either flattering their vanity or comfortably explaining the reasons of the failure of their endeavours, have the most falsehood in them.

There is another point I must mention regarding this material for that much wanted colossal work on the history of African relations.h.i.+ps with the rest of the world--which I do not intend to write, but want written for me--and that is the superiority both in quality and quant.i.ty of the portion which relates to the Early History of the West Coast. Yet very little attention has been given in our own times to this. I might say no attention, were it not for Sir A. B. Ellis, that very n.o.ble man and gallant soldier, who did so much good work for England both with sword and pen. Just for the sake of the work being worth doing, not in the hope of reward; for twenty years' service and the publication of a series of books of great interest and importance taught him that West Africa was under a ban that it was beyond his power to remove; nevertheless he went on with his work unfaltering, if not uncomplaining, and died, in 1895, a young man, practically killed by the Warim incident--the true history of which has yet to be written. For the credit of my country, I must say that just before death he was knighted.

I do not quote Colonel Ellis's works extensively, because, for one thing, it is the duty of people to read them first-hand, and as they are perfectly accessible there is no excuse for their not doing so; and, for another thing, I am in touch with the majority of the works from which he gathered his information regarding the early history, and with the natives from whom he gathered his ethnological information. There are certain points, I grant, on which I am unable to agree with him, such as the opinion he formed from his personal prejudices against the traders in West Africa; but in the main, regarding the regions with which he was personally acquainted and on which he wrote--the Bight of Benin regions--I am only too glad that there is Colonel Ellis for me to agree with.

The fascination of West Africa's historical record is very great, bristling as it does with the deeds of brave men, bad and good, black and white. What my German friends would call the Bluth-period of this history is decidedly that period which was inaugurated by the great Prince Henry the Navigator; and no man who has ever read, as every man should read, Mr. Major's book on Prince Henry, can fail to want to know more still, and what happened down in those re-discovered Bights of Benin and Biafra after this Bluth-period closed. This can be done, mainly thanks to a Dutchman named Bosman, who was agent for the great Dutch house of the Gold Coast for many years circa 1698, and who wrote home to his uncle a series of letters of a most exemplary nature reeking with information on native matters and local politics, and suffused with a tender fear of shocking his aunt, which did not, however, seem in his opinion to justify him in suppressing important ethnological facts.

Regarding the ethnological information we have of the Gold Coast natives, the most important works are those by the late Sir A. B. Ellis.

His books are almost models of what books should be that are written by people studying native customs in their native land. We have also the results of scientific observers in the works of Buckhardt and Bastian, besides a ma.s.s of scattered information in the works of travellers, Bosman, Barbot, Labat, Mathews, Bowditch, Cruickshank, Winwood Reade, H.

M. Stanley, Burton, Captain Canot, Captain Binger, and others, and quite recently a valuable contribution to our knowledge in Mr. Sarbar's _Fanti Customary Laws_.[28] I think that every student of the African form of thought should master these works thoroughly, and I fully grant their great importance; but, nevertheless, I am quite unable to agree with Mr.

Jevons (_Introduction to the History of Religion_, p. 164) when he says, regarding Fetis.h.i.+sm, that "it is certainly amongst the inhabitants of the Gold and Slave Coasts that the subject can best be studied." These two Coasts are, I grant, the best place for a student who is resident in Europe, and therefore dependent on the accounts given by others of the things he is dealing with, to draw his information from, because of the accuracy and extent of the information he can get from Ellis's work; but, apart from Ellis the value of these regions to an ethnologist is but small, and for an ethnologist who will go out to West Africa and study his material for himself, the whole of the Coast regions of the Benin Bight are but of tenth-rate importance, because of the great and long-continued infusion of both Mohammedan and European forms of thought into the original native thought-form that has taken place in these regions. This subject I will refer to later, and I will return now to the history, confining myself to the earlier portions of it, and to that which bears on the early development of trade.

I sincerely wish I could go into full details regarding the whole history of the locality here, because I know my only chance of being allowed to do so is on paper, and it would be a great relief to my mind; but I forbear, experience having taught me that the subject, to put it mildly, is not of general interest. For example, person after person have I tried to illuminate and educate in the matter of our relations.h.i.+ps with the Ashantees; always, alas, in vain. Before I have got half through they "hear a voice I cannot hear that's calling them away;" or remember something "that must be done at once;" or, worst of all, go off straightway to sleep, after once or twice feebly enquiring, "Where is that place?" Of course I am glad that my little knowledge has been the comfort it has to several people. Once, when I was homeward-bound along the Gold Coast, three gentlemen came on board very ill from fever, and homeward-bound, too. Their worst symptom was agonising insomnia. "Not a wink," they a.s.sured my friend the Irish purser, had they had "for a couple of months." "We'll soon put that right for you on board this boat," he said, in his characteristically kind and helpful manner. To my great surprise, that same afternoon he deliberately tackled me on the subject of the real reason that induced Osai Kwofi Kari Kari to cross the Prah in January, 1873. I was charmed at this unwonted display of interest in the subject, and hoped also to gain further information on it from those recently s.h.i.+pped Gold Coasters in the smoking-room. I was getting on fairly well with it; and my friend the purser, instead of having "some manifests to write out," as was usual with him, n.o.bly battled with the intricacies of the subject for a good half hour and more; and then, just when I was in the middle of some topographical elucidation, accompanied by questions, up that purser rose, yawned and stretched himself, and hailed the doctor, who happened to be pa.s.sing by. "What do you think of that, doctor?" he said, pointing to the settee. "Do them a power of good," says his compatriot the medico. Turning round, I saw the three victims of insomnia grouped together; the middle man had his head pillowed on the oilclothed top of the table, and reclining, more or less gracefully, against him on either side were his two companions, their half-smoked pipes fallen from their limp fingers--all profoundly, unquestionably asleep. "Oh, yes! of course, I was delighted," but not flattered; and, warned by this incident, I will here only say that should any one be really interested in the eventful history of the long struggle between the English, Portuguese, French, Dutch, and Brandenburgers, with each other and with the natives, for the possession of the country where the black man's gold came from, they will find a good deal about it in the works already cited; and should any medical man--the remedy is perhaps a little too powerful to be trusted in the hands of the laity--require it for the treatment of insomnia as above indicated, I recommend that part of it which bears on the Ashantee question in small but regular doses.

Our earliest authorities mentioning Africa with the knowledge in them that it is surrounded by the ocean, save at Suez, are Theopompus and Herodotus. Unfortunately all Theopompus's works are lost to us, voluminous though they were, his history alone being a matter of fifty-eight volumes, while before he took up history he had won for himself a great reputation as an orator, during the reigns of Philip and Alexander the Great. He is perpetually referred to, however, though not always praised, by other great cla.s.sical writers, Cicero, Pliny, the two Dionysiuses and others, and was evidently regarded as a great authority; one particular fragment of his works that refers to Africa is preserved by aelian, and consists of a conversation between Silenus and Midas, King of Phrygia. Silenus says that Europe, Asia, and Africa are surrounded by the sea, but that beyond the known world there is an island of immense extent containing large animals and men of twice our stature. This island Mr. Major thinks, and doubtless rightly, is connected with the tradition of our old friend--you know what I mean, as Captain Marryat's boatswain says--the Atlantis of Plato. This affair I will no further mention or hint at, but hastily pa.s.s on to that other early authority, Herodotus, who was born 484 years before Christ, and whose works, thanks be, have survived. He says: "The Phoenician navigators under command of Pharaoh-Necho, King of Egypt, setting sail from the Red Sea, made their way to the Southern Sea; when autumn approached they drew their vessels to land, sowed a crop, waited until it was ripe for harvest, reaped it, and put again to sea." Having spent two years in this manner, in the third year they reached the Pillars of Hercules, (Jebu Zatout, and Gibraltar), and returned to Egypt, "reporting," says Herodotus, "what does not find belief in me, but may perhaps in some other persons, for they said in sailing round Africa they had the sun to the right (to the North) of them. In this way was Libya first known."[29]

Much has been written regarding the accuracy of these Phoenician accounts; for, as frequently happens, their mention of a thing that seemed at first to brand their account as a lie remains to brand it as the truth--and although I have no doubt those Phoenician gentlemen heartily wished they had said nothing about having seen the sun to the North, yet it was best for them in the end, as it demonstrates to us that they had, at any rate, been South of the Equator; and we owe to Herodotus here, as in many other places in his works, a debt of grat.i.tude for honestly putting down what he did not believe himself; he also has suffered from this habit of accuracy, becoming himself regarded by the superficial people of this world as a credulous old romancer, which he never was. Good man, he only liked fair play. "Here," he says as it were, "is a thing I am told. It's a bit too large for my belief hatch, but if you can get it down yours, you're free and welcome to s.h.i.+p it." Herodotus, however, accepts the fact that Africa was surrounded by water, save at its connection with the great land ma.s.s of the earth (Europe and Asia) by the Isthmus of Suez.

Several other attempts to circ.u.mnavigate Africa were made prior to Herodotus's writings. One that we have mention of[30] was made by a Persian n.o.bleman named Sataspes, whom Xerxes had, for a then capital offence, condemned to impalement. This man's mother persuaded Xerxes that if she were allowed to deal with her son she would impose on him a more terrible punishment even than this, namely, that he should be condemned to sail round Libya. There is no doubt this good lady thought thereby to save her son; but, as events turned out, Xerxes, by accepting her suggestion, did not cheat justice by granting this as an alternative to immediate execution. However, off Sataspes sailed with a s.h.i.+p and crew from Egypt, out through the Pillars of Hercules, and doubling the Cape of Libya, then named Solois, he steered south, and, says Herodotus, "traversed a vast extent of sea for many months, and finding he had still more to pa.s.s he turned round and returned to Egypt and then back to Xerxes, who had him then impaled, because, for one thing he had not sailed round Libya, and for another, Xerxes held he lied about those regions of it that he had visited; for Sataspes said he had seen a nation of little men who wore garments made of palm leaves, who, whenever his crew drew their s.h.i.+ps ash.o.r.e, left their cities and flew into the mountains, though he did them no injury, only taking some cattle from them; and the reason he gave for his not sailing round Libya was that his s.h.i.+ps could go no further." Sataspes's end was sad, but one cannot feel that he was a loss to the cla.s.s of romancers of travel.

Another and a more determined navigator was Eudoxus of Cyzicus (B.C.

117). The scanty record we have of his exploration is of great interest.

While he was making a stay in Alexandria, he met an Indian who was the sole survivor of a crew wrecked on the Red Sea coast. He is the Indian who persuaded Ptolemy Euergetes to fit out an expedition to sail to India, and off they went and succeeded in it greatly, but on their return the king seized the cargo; so therefore, as a private enterprise, the thing was a failure. However, Eudoxus was a man of great determination, and on the death of Ptolemy VII. in the reign of his successor, he set out on another expedition to India. On his return voyage he was driven down the African Coast, and found there on the sh.o.r.e amongst other wreckage the prow of a vessel with the figure of a horse carved on it. This relic he took with him as a curiosity, and on his successful return to Alexandria exhibited it there in the market place, and during its exhibition it was recognised by some pirates from Cadiz (Gades) who happened to be in that city, and they testified that the small vessels which were employed in the fisheries along the West African Coast as far as the River Lixius (Wadi al Knos) always had the figure of a horse on their prows, and on this account were called "horses." The fact of this wreck of a vessel belonging to Western Europe being found on the East Coast of Africa joined with the knowledge that these vessels did not pa.s.s through the Mediterranean Sea, gave Eudoxus the idea that the vessel he had the figure head of must have come round Africa from the West Coast, and he then proceeded to Cadiz and equipped three vessels, one large and two of smaller size, and started out to do the same thing, bar wrecking. He sailed down the known West Coast without trouble, but when he came to pa.s.sing on into the unknown seas, he had trouble with the crews, and was compelled to beach his vessels. After doing this he succeeded in persuading his crews to proceed, but it was then found impossible to float the largest vessel, so she was abandoned, and the expedition proceeded in the smaller and in a s.h.i.+p constructed from the wreck of the larger on which the cargo was s.h.i.+pped with the expedition. Eudoxus reached apparently Senegambia, and then another mutiny broke out, and he had to return to Barbary. But undaunted he then fitted out another expedition, consisting of two smaller vessels, and once again sailed to the South to circ.u.mnavigate Africa. Nothing since has been heard of Eudoxus of Cyzicus surnamed the Brave.[31]

On his second voyage he fell in with natives who, he says, spoke the same language that he had previously heard on the Eastern Coast of Africa. If he was right in this, some authors hold he must have gone down the West Coast, at least as far as Cameroons, because there you nowadays first strike the language, which does stretch across the continent, namely, the Bantu, and we have no reason to suppose that the Bantu border line was ever further North on this Coast than it is at present; indeed, the indications are, I think, the other way; but as far as the language goes, it seems to me that Eudoxus could have heard the same language as on the East African Coast far higher up than Cameroons, namely, on the Moroccoan Coast, for in those days, prior to the great Arab invasion, most likely the language of the Berber races had possession of Northern Africa from East Coast to West. However, there is another statement of his which I think points to Eudoxus having gone far South, namely, that the reason of his turning back was an inability to get provisions, for this catastrophe is not likely to have overtaken so brave a man as he was until he reached the great mangrove swamps of the Niger. The litoral of the Sahara was in those days, we may presume, from the accounts we have far later from Leo Africa.n.u.s and Arab writers, more luxuriant and heavily populated than it is at present.

Of these voyages, however, we have such scant record that we need not dwell on them further, and so we will return to about 300 B.C., and consider the wonderful voyage made by Hanno of Carthage, of which we have more detailed knowledge; although there still remains a certain amount of doubt as to who exactly Hanno was, mainly on account of Hanno apparently having been to Carthage what Jones is to North Wales--the name of a number of individuals with a habit of doing everything and frequently distinguis.h.i.+ng themselves greatly. The Carthaginians were to the cla.s.sic world much what the English are to the modern, a great colonising, commercial people--warlike when wanted. They planted colonies in North Africa and elsewhere, and had commercial relations.h.i.+p with all the then known nations of the world, including a trans-Sahara trade with the people living to the South of the Great Desert. We shall never know to the full where those Carthaginians went, from the paucity of record; but we have record of the voyage of this Hanno in a _Periplus_ originally written in the Punic language and then translated into Greek.[32] Hanno, it seems, was a chief magistrate at Carthage, and Pliny says his voyage was undertaken when Carthage was in a most flouris.h.i.+ng condition.[33] From the _Periplus_ we learn that the expedition to the West Coast consisted of sixty s.h.i.+ps of fifty oars each, and 30,000 persons of both s.e.xes, ample provisions and everything necessary for so great an undertaking. The object of this expedition was to explore, to found colonies, and to increase commerce. The expedition, after pa.s.sing the Pillars of Hercules, sailed two days along the coast and founded their first colony, which they called Thymatirum. Just south of this place, on a promontory called Soloeis, they built a temple to Neptune. A short distance further on they found a beautiful lake, the edges of which were bordered with large reeds, the country abounding in elephants and other game; a day's sail from this place, they founded five small cities near the sea called respectively Cariconticos, Gytte, Acra, Millitea, and Arambys. The next most important part of their voyage was their discovery of the great River Lixius, on the banks of which they found a pastoral people they called the Lixitae. These seem to have been a mild people; but there were in the neighbourhood tribes of a ferocious character, and they were also told there were Trogloditae dwelling in the mountains, where the Lixius took its rise, who were fleeter than horses. Unfortunately we are not told how long the Carthaginians took in reaching this River Lixius; but if the Carthaginians had been keeping close in sh.o.r.e they would not have met with a river that looked great until they reached the mouth of the Ouro (2336' N. lat), which is four miles wide, but only an estuary; but as the Carthaginians do not seem to have gone up it, they may not have noticed its imperfections, and so, pursuing that dangerous method of judging a West African river from its mouth, regarded it as a great river. However this may have been, they took with them as guides and interpreters some of the Lixitae, and continued their voyage for three days, when they came to a large bay, an island in it containing a circle of five stadia, and proceeded to found another colony on that island, calling it Cerne, where they judged they were as far from the Pillars of Hercules as these were from Carthage. So it is held now that Cerne is the same as the French trading station Arguin (about 240 miles north of Senegal River), on to whose shoals the wreck of the French frigate _La Meduse_ drifted in 1816, the tragedy of which is familiar to us all from Gericault's great painting.

Hanno next called at a place where there was a great lake, which they entered by sailing up a river called by them Cheretes. In this they found three islands, all larger than the island of Cerne. One day's sail then brought them to the extremity of the lake overhung by mountains, which were inhabited by savages clad in wild beasts' skins, who prevented their landing by pelting them with stones. The next point in their voyage was a large and broad river, infested with crocodiles and river horses; and from this place they made their way back to Cerne, where they rested and repaired and then set forth again, sailing south along the African sh.o.r.es for twelve successive days. The language of the natives of these regions the Lixitae did not understand, and the Carthaginians could not hold any communication with them for another reason, that they always fled from them; towards the last day they approached some large mountains covered with trees. They went on two days further, when they came to a large opening in the sea, on land on either side of which was a plain whereon they saw fires in every direction. At this place[34] they refilled their water barrels, and continued their voyage five days further, when they reached a large bay which their interpreters said was called the Western Horn. In this bay they found a large island, in the centre of which was a salt lake with a small island in it. When they went ash.o.r.e in the day time they saw no inhabitants, but at night time they heard in every direction a confused noise of pipes, cymbals, drums and song, which alarmed the crew, while the diviners they had with them, equivalent to our naval chaplains, strongly advised Hanno to leave that place as speedily as possible.

Hanno, however, being less alarmed than his companions, pushed on South, and they soon found themselves abreast of a country blazing with fires, streams of which seemed to be pouring from the mountain tops down into the sea. "We sailed quickly thence," says Hanno, "being much terrified."

Proceeding four days further they found that things did not improve in appearance from their point of view, for the whole country seemed ablaze at night, a country full of fire, and at one point the fire seemed to fly up to the very stars. Hanno says their interpreters told them that this great fire was the Chariot of the G.o.ds. Three days more sailing South brought them to another bay, called the Southern Horn. In this bay they found a large island, in which again there was a lake with another island in it, having inhabitants who were savage, and whose bodies were covered with hair. These people the interpreters called the Gorillae--some were captured and taken aboard, but so savage and unmanageable did they prove that they were killed and the skins preserved. As most of the inhabitants of the Islands of the Gorillae seemed to be females, and as these ladies had made such a gallant fight of it with their Carthaginian captors, Hanno kept their skins to hang up in the Temple of Juno on his return home, evidently intending to be complimentary both to the G.o.ddess and the Gorillae; but it is to be feared neither of them took it as it was meant, for Hanno had no luck from the G.o.ds after this, having to turn back from shortness of provisions, and finally ending his career by, some say, being killed, and others say exiled from Carthage on account of his having a lion so tame that it would carry baggage for him; Punic public opinion held that this demonstrated him to be a man dangerous to the State. The Gorillae seem to have worked out their vengeance on white men by making it more than any man's character for truth is worth to see one of them--except stuffed in a museum, with a label on.

How far Hanno really went down South is not known with any certainty. M.

Gosselin held he only reached the River Nun, on the Moroccoan coast.

Major Rennell fixed his furthest point somewhere north of Sierra Leone, and held the Island of the Gorillae to be identical with the Island of Sherboro'. Bougainville believed that he at any rate went well into the Bight of Benin, while others think he went at any rate as far as Gaboon.

I cannot myself see why he should not have done so, considering the winds and tides of the locality and the time taken; indeed, I should be quite willing to believe he went down to Congo, and that in the most terrific of the fires he witnessed an eruption of the volcanic peak of Cameroon, a volcano not yet extinct. Indeed the name given to this high fire "that almost reached the stars" by his interpreters--the Chariot of the G.o.ds--is not so very unlike the name the Cameroon Peak bears to this day, Mungo Mah Lobeh, the Throne or Place of Thunder, and this native name is also capable of being translated into "the Place of the G.o.ds" or spirits. The thing I do not believe in the affair is that the Lixitae interpreters ever called it or any other place "a chariot"; for as Hanno was the first white man they had seen, and they had no chariots of their own, it is unlikely they could have known anything of chariots; and I think this Chariot of the G.o.ds must have been an error of Hanno's in translating his interpreter's remarks. It is perfectly excusable in him if it is so, because to understand what an interpreter means who does not know your language, and whose own language you are not an adept in, and who is translating from a language regarding which you are both alike ignorant, is a process fraught with difficulty. I have tried it, so speak feelingly. It is true it is not an impossibility, as those unversed in African may hastily conjecture, because at least one-third of an African language consists in gesture, and this gesture part is fairly common to all tribes I have met, so that by means of it you can get on with daily life; but it breaks down badly when you come to the names of places. I myself once went on a long march to a place that subsequent knowledge informed me was "I don't know" in my director's native tongue. Still, if he did not know, I did not know, and so it was all the same. I got there all right, therefore it did not matter to me; but I was haunted during my stay in it by a confused feeling that perhaps I was flying in the face of Science by being somewhere else--being in two places at the same time.

I really, however, cannot help thinking Hanno must have got past the Niger Delta; for there is nothing to frighten any one, as far as the look of things go, until you go south from Calabar, and find yourself facing that magnificent Great Cameroon and Fernando Po; and Hanno's people were scared as they were never scared before. Yet, again, there are those fires, which were in the main doubtless what that very wise and not half-appreciated missionary, the late Rev. J. Leighton Wilson, says they were, namely, fires made by the native burning down the high gra.s.s at the end of a dry season to make his farms. Now Hanno could have seen any quant.i.ty of these along parts of the sh.o.r.es of the Bight of Benin, but is not likely to have seen them to any alarming extent on the Biafran Bight, because the sh.o.r.es thereof are deeply fringed with mangrove swamps, and the native does not start making farms in them.

Hanno might have seen what looked like the smoke of innumerable fires on the sides of Cameroon Mountain and Fernando Po. I myself have seen the whole mighty forest there smoking as if beneath it smouldered the infernal regions themselves; but it is only columns and wafts of mist, and so gives no blaze at night; if you want to see a real land of flame with, over it, a pall of cloud reflecting back its crimson light in a really terrifying way, you must go south of Cameroon, south of Congo Francais, south, until you reach the region of the Great Congo itself; and there--on the gra.s.s-covered hills and plains of the Lower Congo lands--you will see a land of fire at the end of the dry season, terrific enough to awe any man. Of course, if Hanno pa.s.sed the Congo and went down as far as the fringing sands of the Kalahari desert, he would certainly not have been able to get stores; but also down there he would not have met with an island on which there were gorillas; for even if we grant that there was sufficient dense forest south of the Congo in his days for gorillas to have inhabited, and allow that in old days gorillas were south of the Congo, which they are not now, still, there is no island near the coast. So I am afraid we cannot quite settle Hanno's furthest point, and must content ourselves by saying he was a brave man, a good sailor, and a credit therefore to his country and the human race.

After Hanno's time I cannot find any record of a regular set of trading expeditions down the West Coast by the Carthaginians. From scattered observations it is certain the commerce of the Carthaginians with the Barbary Coast and the Bight of Benin was long carried on; but it does not seem to have been carried on along the coast of the Bight of Biafra; and the voyage in 170 B.C. may be cited in support of this, showing that the voyage as far south as Eudoxus went was then considered as marvellous and new. Still, on the other hand, it must be remembered that, prior to our own day, the navigator had no great inducement to tell the rest of the world exactly where he had been; indeed, the navigator whose main interest is commerce is, to this day, not keen on so doing. He would rather keep little geographical facts--such as short cuts by creeks, and places where either gold, or quicksilver, and buried ivory, is plentiful--to himself, than go explaining about these things for the sake of getting an unrepaying honour. One sees this so much in studying the next period of this history--the early Portuguese and early French discoveries; you will find that one of these nations knew about a place years before the other came along, and discovered it, and claimed it as its own--with disputes as a natural consequence.

There has, however, been one very interesting point in the dealing of the nations of higher culture with the Africans, and that is the way their commerce with them has had periods of abeyance. The Egyptians have left us record of having been extensively in touch with the interior of Africa, _via_ the Nile Valley,--then came a pause. Then came the Carthaginian commerce,--then a pause. Then the Portuguese, French, English, Dutch, and Dane trading enterprise, say, roughly from 1340 to 1700,--then a falling off of this enterprise; revived during the Slave-trade days, falling off again on its suppression, and reviving in our own days. I suppose I ought to say greatly, but--well, we will discuss that later. These pauses have always been caused by the nations of higher culture getting too busy with wars at home to trouble themselves about the African, all the more so because the produce of Africa has filtered slowly, whether it was fetched by white man or no, into their markets through the hands of the energetic North African tribes and the Arabs. Whenever the white man has settled down with his home affairs, and has had time to spare, he has always gone and looked up the African again, "discovered him," and he has always found him in the same state of culture that the pioneers of the previous Bluth-period found him in. Hanno does not find down the West Coast another Carthage--he finds bush fires, and hears the tom-tom and the horn and the shouts. He finds people slightly clad and savage. Then read Aluise da Ca da Mostro and the rest of Prince Henry's adventures; well, you might--save that the old traveller is more interesting--almost be reading a book published yesterday. The only radical change made for large quant.i.ties of Africans by means of white intercourse was made by exporting them to America. How this is going to turn out we do not yet know; and whether or no, after the present period of white exploitation of Africa, there may not come another pause from our becoming too interested in some big fight of our own to keep up our interest in the African, we cannot tell; so I will pa.s.s on to a very interesting point in a method of trade mentioned by the early authorities--the silent trade.

Herodotus gives us the first description of it,[35] saying that the Carthaginians state that beyond the Pillars of Hercules there is a region of Libya, and men who inhabit it. When they arrive among these people and have unloaded their merchandise they set it in order on the sh.o.r.e, go on board their s.h.i.+ps and make a great smoke, and the inhabitants seeing the smoke come down to the sea sh.o.r.e, deposit gold in exchange for the merchandise, and withdraw to some distance. The Carthaginians then going ash.o.r.e examine the goods, and if the quant.i.ty seems sufficient for the merchandise they take it and sail away; but if it is not sufficient they go on board again and wait; the natives then approach and deposit more gold until they have satisfied them: neither party ever wrongs the other, for they do not touch the gold before it is made adequate to the value of the merchandise, nor do the natives touch the merchandise before the Carthaginians have taken the gold.

The next description of this silent trade I have been able to find is that given by Aluise da Ca da Mostro, a Venetian gentleman who, allured by the accounts of the riches of West Africa given by Prince Henry the Navigator, abandoned trading with the Low Countries, entered the Prince's service, and went down the Coast in 1455. When in the district of Cape Blanco, at a place called by him Hoden, he was told that six days' journey from this place there was a place called Tagazza, signifying a chest of gold; there large quant.i.ties of rock salt were dug from the earth every year and carried on camels by the Arabs and the Azanaghi, who were tawny Moors,[36] in separate companies to Timbuk, and from thence to the Empire of Melli, which belonged to the negroes; having arrived there they disposed of their salt in the course of eight days, at the rate of two and three hundred mitigals the load (a mitigal = a ducat), according to the quant.i.ty thereof, after which they returned home with the gold they had been paid in. These merchants reckoned it forty days' journey on horseback from Tagazza to "Timbuk" as Mostro, while from Timbuk to Melli it is thirty days' journey. Ca da Mostro then inquired to what use the salt taken to Melli was put; and they said that the merchants used a certain quant.i.ty of it themselves, for on account of their country lying near the Line, where the days and nights are of equal length, at certain seasons of the year the heats were excessive, and putrefied the blood unless salt was taken; their method of taking it was to dissolve a piece in a porringer of water daily and drink it. When the remainder of the salt reached Melli, carried thither on camels, each camel load was broken up into pieces of a suitable size for one man to carry. A large number of what Ca da Mostro calls footmen--whom we nowadays call porters--were a.s.sembled at Melli to be ready to carry the salt from thence further away still into the heart of Africa.

I have dwelt on this salt's wanderings because we have here a very definite description of a trade route, and the importance of understanding these trade routes is very great. We do not learn, however, exactly where the salt goes to beyond Melli; but Melli seems to have been, as Timbuctoo was, and to a certain extent still is, a trade focus; and from Melli evidently the salt went in many directions, and it is interesting to note Ca da Mostro's observations on the salt porters, who he says carry in each hand a long forked stick, which when they are tired they fix into the ground and rest their loads on; so to-day may you see the West African porters doing, save that it is only the porters who have to pa.s.s over woodless plateaux on their journeys that carry two sticks.

[Ill.u.s.tration: OIL RIVER NATIVES. [_To face page 245._]

Speaking however further on the course of this salt trade Ca da Mostro says that some of the merchants of Melli go with it until they come to a certain water, whether fresh or salt his informant could not say; but he holds it most likely was fresh, or there would be no need of carrying salt there; and it is the opinion of the few people who have of late years interested themselves in the matter that this great water is the Niger Joliba. But be this as it may, when those merchants from Melli arrive on the banks of this great water they place their shares of salt in heaps in a row, every one setting a mark on his own. This done, the merchants retire half a day's journey; then "the negroes, who will not be seen or spoken with, and who seem to be the inhabitants of some islands, come in large boats," and having viewed the salt lay a sum of gold on every heap and then retire. When they are all gone the negro merchants who own the salt return, and if the quant.i.ty of gold pleases them they take it and leave the salt; if not, they leave both and withdraw themselves again. The silent people then return, and the heaps from which they find the gold has been removed they carry away, and either advance more gold to the other heaps or take their gold from them and leave the salt. In this manner, says Ca da Mostro, from very ancient times these negroes have traded without either speaking to or seeing each other, until a few years before, when he was at Cape Blanco among the Azanaghi, who supply the negroes of Melli with their salt as aforesaid, and who evidently get from them gossip as well as gold. They told him that their fellow merchants among the black Moors had told them that they had had serious trouble in consequence of the then Emperor of Melli, a man who took more general interest in affairs than was common in Emperors of Melli, having been fired with a desire to know why these customers of his traders did not like being seen; he had commanded the salt merchants when they next went to traffic with the silent people to capture some of them for him by digging pits near the salt heaps, concealing themselves therein and then rus.h.i.+ng out and seizing some of the strange people when they came to look at the salt heaps. The merchants did not at all relish the royal commission, for they knew, as any born trader would, that it must be extremely bad for trade to rush out and seize customers by the scruff of their necks while they were in the midst of their shopping. However, much as the command added to their commercial anxieties, the thing had to be done, or there was no doubt the Emperor would relieve them both of all commercial anxieties and their heads at one and the same time. So they carried out the royal command, and captured four of their silent customers. Three they immediately liberated, thinking that to keep so many would only increase the bad blood, and one specimen would be sufficient to satisfy the Imperial curiosity. Unfortunately however the unfortunate captive they retained would neither speak nor eat, and in a few days died; and so the salt merchants of Melli returned home in very low spirits, feeling a.s.sured that their Emperor would be actively displeased with them for failing to satisfy his curiosity, and that the silent customers would be too alarmed and angered with them for their unprovoked attack to deal with them again. Subsequent events proved them to be correct in both surmises: his Majesty was highly disgusted at not having been able to see one of these people; and naturally, for the description given to him of those they had captured was at least highly interesting. The merchants said they were a span taller than themselves and well shaped, but that they made a terrible figure because their under lip was thicker than a man's fist and hung down on their b.r.e.a.s.t.s; also that it was very red, and something like blood dropped from it and from their gums. The upper lip was no larger than that of other people, and owing to this there were exposed to view both gums and teeth, which were of great size, particularly the teeth in the corners of the mouth. Their eyes were of great size and blackness. As for the customers, for three years went the merchants of Melli to the banks of the great water and arranged their salt heaps and looked on them for gold dust in vain: but the fourth year it was there; and the merchants of Melli believed that their customers' lips had begun to putrefy through the excessive heat and the want of salt, so that being unable to bear so grievous a distemper they were compelled to return to their trade. Things were then established on a fairly reasonable basis; the merchants did not again attempt to see their customers, and they knew from their experience with their captive that they were by nature dumb; for had there been speech in him, would he not have spoken under the treatment to which he was subjected? And as for the Emperor of Melli he said right out he did not care whether those blacks could speak or no, so long as he had but the profit of their gold.

This gold, I may remark, that was collected at Melli was divided into three parts: the first was sent by the Melli caravans to Kokhia on the caravan route to Syria and Cairo; the other two parts went from Melli to Timbuctoo, where it was again divided up, some of it going to Toet,[37]

and from thence along the coast to Tunis, in Barbary. Some of it went to Hoden, not far from Cape Blanco, and from there to Oran and Hona; thence it went to Fez, Morocco, Azila-Azasi, and Moosa, towns outside the Straits of Gibraltar, whence it went into Europe, through the hands of Italians, and other Christians, who exchanged their merchandise for the wares of the Barbary moors; and the remainder of the gold went down to the West African Coast to the Portuguese at Arguin. This description of the gold route is by Ca da Mostro, and is the first description of West African trade route I have found.

But I must tear myself from the fascination of gold and its trade routes and return to that silent trade. The next person after Ca da Mostro to mention it is Captain Richard Jobson, who in 1620-1621 made a voyage especially to discover "the golden trade," of what he calls Tombak, which is our last author's Timbuk, by way of the Gambia, then held by many to be a mouth of the Niger.

Jobson's inquiries regarding this "golden trade" informed him that the great demand for salt in the Gambia trade arose from the desire for it among the Arabiks of Barbary; that the natives themselves only consumed a small percentage of this import, trading away the main to those Arabiks in the hinterland, who in their turn traded it for gold to Tombak, where the demand for it was great, because that city, although possessing all manner of other riches and commodities, lacked salt, so that the Arabiks did a good trade therein. Jobson was also informed that the Arabiks had, as well as the market for salt at Timbuctoo, a market for it with a strange people who would not be seen, and who lived not far from Yaze; that the salt was carried to them, and in exchange they gave gold. Asking a native merchant, who was engaged in this trade, why they would not be seen, he made a sign to his lips, but would say no more. Jobson, however, learnt from other sources that the reason these negroes buy salt from the tawny Moors is because of the thickness of their lips, which hang down upon their b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and, being raw, would putrefy if they did not take salt, a thing their country does not afford, so that they must traffic for it with the Moors. The manner they employ, according to Jobson, is this: the Moors on a fixed day bring their goods to a place a.s.signed, where there are certain houses appointed for them; herein they deposit their commodities, and, laying their salt and other goods in parcels or heaps separately, depart for a whole day, during which time their customers come, and to each parcel of goods lay down a proportion of gold as they value it, and leave both together. The merchants then return, and as they like the bargain take the gold and leave their wares, or if they think the price offered too little, they divide the merchandise into two parts, leaving near the gold as much as they are inclined to give for it, and then again depart.

At their next return the bargain is finished, for they either find more gold added or the whole taken away, and the goods left on their hands.

A further confirmation of the existence of this method of trading we find in that most interesting voyage of Claude Jannequin, Sieur de Rochfort, 1639. He says, "In this cursed country"--he always speaks of West Africa like that--"there is no provision but fish dried in the sun, and maize and tobacco." The natives will only trade by the French laying down on the ground what they would give for the provisions, and then going away, on which the natives came and took the commodities and left the fish in exchange. The regions he visited were those of Cape Blanco.

To this day you will find a form of this silent trade still going on in Guinea. I have often seen on market roads in many districts, but always well away from Europeanised settlements, a little s.p.a.ce cleared by the wayside, and neatly laid with plantain leaves, whereon were very tidily arranged various little articles for sale--a few kola nuts, leaves of tobacco, cakes of salt, a few heads of maize, or a pile of yams or sweet potatoes. Against each cla.s.s of articles so many cowrie sh.e.l.ls or beans are placed, and, always hanging from a branch above, or sedately sitting in the middle of the shop, a little fetish. The number of cowrie sh.e.l.ls or beans indicate the price of the individual articles in the various heaps, and the little fetish is there to see that any one who does not place in the stead of the articles removed their proper price, or who meddles with the till, shall swell up and burst. There is no doubt it is a very easy method of carrying on commerce.

In what the silent trade may have originated it is hard to say; but one thing is certain, that the dread and fear of the negroes did not result from the evil effects of the slave trade, as so many of their terrors are said to have done, for we have seen notice of it long before this slave trade arose. Nevertheless, there can be but little doubt that it arose from a sense of personal insecurity, and has fetish in it, the natives holding it safer to leave so dangerous a thing as trafficking with unknown beings--white things that were most likely spirits, with the smell of death on them--in the hands of their G.o.ds. In the cases of it that I have seen no doubt it was done mostly for convenience, one person being thereby enabled to have several shops open at but little working expense; but I have seen it employed as a method of trading between tribes at war with each other.[38] We must dismiss, I fear, bashfulness regarding lips as being a real cause; but I will not dismiss the bleeding lips as a mere traveller's tale, because I have seen quite enough to make me understand what those people who told of bleeding thick lips meant; several, not all of my African friends, are a bit thick about the lower lip, and when they have been pa.s.sing over waterless sun-dried plateaux or bits of desert they are anything but decorative. The lips get swollen and black, and Ca da Mostro does not go too far in his description of what he was told regarding them.

FOOTNOTES:

[28] Clowes and Sons, 1897.

[29] _Melpomene_, IV. 41.

[30] _Melpomene_, IV. 43.