Every man\'s duty—“Three deaths in two days”—An old Portuguese settlement—A troubled District Commissioner—What to do with a wandering white woman—The Judge\'s quarters—The kindly medical officer and his wife—A West-African town—“My outside wife”—Dangers ahead—The man who was never afterwards heard of—The Forestry officer\'s carriers—“Good man, bad man, fool man”—First night in the wilds—Hair in the soup.
A great German philosopher has remarked that you very seldom get a human being who has all the qualities of his own sex without a trace of the characteristics of the other. Such a being would be hardly attractive. At least I consoled myself with that reflection when I found stirring within me a very masculine desire to be out of leading strings and to be allowed to take care of myself. It is pleasant to be taken care of, but it is decidedly uncomfortable to feel that you are a burden upon men upon whom you have no claim whatever. They were looking after me because they were emphatically sure that the Coast is no place for a lone woman. At the bottom of my heart, grateful as I was to the individuals, I didn\'t like it. I thought my freedom was coming at Axim, but it didn\'t.
Every man felt it his duty to impress upon me the unhealthiness of the Coast, and every man did his duty manfully, forgetting that I have a very excellent pair of eyes and an inquiring mind. The hot, still morning we arrived at Axim the captain, having discussed matters with the Custom officer, came to me solemnly shaking his head.
“A terrible place, Mrs Gaunt, a terrible place. Three deaths in Axim in the last two days.”
It was quite a correct Coast speech, and for the moment I was shocked, though not afraid, because naturally it never occurs to me that I will die, at least not just yet, and not because the people round me are dying. The captain was gloomily happy as having vindicated the evil reputation of the country, and I looked ashore and wondered what was wrong with so attractive a place.
The Portuguese, those mariners of long ago, chose the site and, as they always did, chose wisely. A promontory, on which is the white fort, juts out into the sea, and behind is all the luxuriant greenery of the Tropics, for the land rises just sufficiently to give beauty to the scene. I wondered why those three people had died, and I inquired. The whole incident is so characteristic of the loose talk that builds up an evil reputation for a country. Those deaths were held up to me as a warning. It would have been quite as much to the point if they had warned me against getting frost-bitten or falling into a cauldron of boiling sugar. One man died of a disease he had contracted twenty years before, and was exceedingly lucky to have lived so long, another had died of drink, and the third was a woman. She, poor thing, was the wife of a missionary from Sierra Leone, and had not been in a cooler climate for two years. There was a baby coming, and instead of going home she had come to Axim, had a bad go of blackwater, and when the baby came, her constitution could not stand the double strain, and she died. Only her death was directly attributable to the climate, and the exercise of a little common sense would have saved her.
So I landed and was not afraid.
But my arrival was a cause of tribulation to the District Commissioner. There was no hotel, so I appealed to him for quarters. It really was a little hard on him. He sighed and did his best, and the only time I really saw him look happy was about three weeks later when he saw me safely in a surf boat bound for the out-going steamer. But when I landed, the need for shelter was pressing, and he gave me a room in the Judge\'s quarters where it seems they bestow all homeless white strangers in Axim. Already the Forestry officer was there, and he had a sitting-room and a bedroom, so that I could only have a bedroom and a bathroom. Now, with a verandah and such a large room at my disposal, I could make myself more than comfortable; then, because I did not know African ways, I accepted the very kind invitation of the medical officer and his wife, the only white woman in Axim, to “chop” with them.
African ways are very convenient when you come to think of it. Here was a big empty room with a wardrobe and a little cane furniture in it. I went in with my brother\'s kit and set up my camp-bed, my bath, laid down my ground sheet and put up my table and chair, and I had all that was really necessary. Outside was the ragged garden, haunted they said, though I never saw the ghost, and because it was usually empty the big rats scrambled up the stairs, and the birds sat in the oleander bushes and called “Be quick, be quick” continually.
I couldn\'t take their advice because it is impossible to hurry things on the Coast and I must wait for the carriers.
The first night I had dinner—chop—with the medical officer and his wife and went to bed reflecting a little regretfully I had made no preparations for my early-morning tea. However, I concluded it might be good discipline to do without it. But it is a great thing to have a capable boy. Just as it began to get light Grant appeared outside my mosquito curtains as usual with a cup of tea and some fruit. The cup and teapot were my own; he had stolen all the materials from the Forestry officer next door, and I was much beholden to that young man when, on apologising, he smiled and said it was all right, he was glad I liked his tea.
Axim is a pretty little town with the usual handful of whites and the negroes semi-civilised with that curious civilisation which has probably persisted for centuries, which is not what we would call civilisation and yet is not savagery. It is hardly even barbarism. These Coast towns are not crowded with naked savages as many a stay-at-home Briton seems to imagine; they are peopled with artisans, clerks, traders, labourers, people like in many ways to those in the same social scale in other countries, and differing only when the marked characteristics of the negro come in. All along in these Coast towns the negroes are much the same. To their own place they are suitable; only when they try to conform too much to the European lines of thought do they strike one as outré or objectionable. I suppose that is what jars in the Christian negro. It is not the Christianity, it is the striving after something eminently unsuited to him. Left to himself though, he naturally goes back to the mode of life that was his forefathers\', and sometimes he has the courage to own it. I remember a man who called in the medical officer about his wife. The ordinary negro has as many wives as he can afford, but the Christian is by way of only having one, and as this man was clothed in the ordinary garb of the European, unnecessary coat, shirt, and hat, I naturally set him down as a Christian.
“I Christian,” he told me. “Mission-teacher once.”
“Not now?”
“No, Swanzy\'s agent now. You savey my wife; she get well?”
I said I had no doubt she would, and I rejoiced in this sign of marital affection, when he dashed it all to the ground.
“She not my real wife; she my outside wife,” said he as one who would explain their exact relations.
My views on negro homes received a shock, but after all if the women don\'t object, what matter? It is the custom of the country.
I looked round the town and took photographs, wasted many plates trying to develop in too hot a place, and declared my intention of going west just as soon as ever I could get carriers. I didn\'t quite know how I should manage, but I concluded I should learn by experience.
Even now, though I have travelled since then close on 700 miles in a hammock, I cannot make up my mind whether it would have been safe for me to go alone. Undoubtedly I should have made many mistakes, and in a country where the white man holds his position by his prestige it is perhaps just as well that a woman of his colour should not make mistakes.
“Not suitable,” said one who objected strongly to the presence of any white women on the Coast.
“Hardly safe,” said another.
“Not safe,” said a third emphatically, and then they told a story. Axim has been settled and civilised many years, and yet only last year a man disappeared. He was one of a party dining with his friends. After dinner they started a game of cards, and up the verandah steps came this man\'s house-steward. His master was wanted. The company protested, but he left declaring he would return immediately. He did not return and from that day to this neither he nor his house-boy have been seen by mortal eyes. The story sounds fearsome enough. It sounded worse to me preparing to go along the Coast by myself, but now, thinking it over calmly, I see flaws. Investigated, I wonder if it would turn out like the story of the three people dead in two days; true, but admitting of quite a different construction being put upon it than that presented for my edification. One thing I do know and that is that I would feel very much safer in an Ashanti village that has only been conquered in the last ten years than I would alone in any of those little towns along the Guinea Coast, between Axim and Half Assinie, that have been in contact with the white man for the last three hundred years.
Anyhow, Axim decided for me I should not go alone, and the Forestry officer, like the chivalrous, gracious gentleman he was, came forward and pretended he had business at Half Assinie and that it would be a great pleasure to have a companion on the road. And so well did he play his part that it was not till we were bound back from the Border that I discovered he had simply come to look after me.
Then I was initiated into the difficulties of carriers. The Omahin, that is to say the Chief of Beyin, had sent me twenty men and women, and the Forestry officer had two separate lots of Kroo boys and Mendis, and early one morning in January we made preparations for a start. We didn\'t start early. It seems to me how ever carefully you lay your plans, you never do. First no carriers turned up; then some of the Forestry officer\'s men condescended to appear. Then the orderly, a man from the north with his face cut with a knife into a permanent sardonic grin, strolled up. He was sent out to seek carriers, and presently drove before him two or three women, one with a baby on her back, and these it appeared were the advance contingent of my gang. A Beyin woman-carrier or indeed any woman along the Coast generally wears a printed-cotton cloth of a dark colour round her by way of a skirt, and one of the little loose blouses that the missionaries introduced on to the Coast over a hundred years ago because they regarded it as indecent for a woman to have her bosom uncovered. Now her shoulders are often covered by the blouse, but that many a time is of such skimpy proportions that it does not reach very far, the skirt invariably slips, and there is a gap, in which case—well, shall we say the result is not all the originators desired. A woman can carry anything but a hammock, but these carriers of mine were not very good specimens of the class. They looked at the loads, they went away, they came back, they altered, they grumbled, and at last about two hours late we started, I going ahead, the Forestry officer fetching up the rear to round in all stragglers, and in between came our motley array of goods. There is a family resemblance among all travellers on the Gold Coast. They all try to reduce their loads to a minimum and they all find that there are certain necessaries of life which they must have, and certain other things which may be luxuries but which they cannot do without, and certain other little things which it would be a sin not to take as it makes all the difference between comfort and savagery. So the procession comes along, a roll of bedding, a chop box, a kitchen box with pots and pans, a bath, a chair, a table, the servant\'s box, a load of water, a certain amount of drink, whisky, gin, and if the traveller is very luxurious (I wasn\'t) some claret, a uniform case with clothes, a smaller one containing the heavier things such as boots and the various goods that pertain to the European\'s presence there. Before the Commissioner goes his orderly, carrying his silver-topped stick, the insignia of his rank. I had a camera and a lot of heavy plates but I don\'t think the Forestry officer had anything special except a tent which took three men to carry and which we could never set up because we found on the first night that the ridge poles had been left behind. It is not supposed to be well to sleep in native houses, but it did us no harm.
The carrier divides the masters he serves into three divisions. “He be good man,” “he be bad man,” and “he be fool man.” My carriers decided I was a fool man and they were not far wrong. Less than an hour after leaving Axim, distance as yet is always counted by time in Africa, we came to the Ancobra River and my first difficulty arose. My hammock had not yet been brought across and I, walking on a little way, came to a swampy bit which it was difficult to negotiate without wetting my feet above the ankles. My headman stooped and offered a brawny, bare back for my acceptance. I hesitated. My clothes were not built for riding pick-a-back. I looked back; there was no hammock, neither, thank heaven, was there any sign of the Forestry officer. I tried to show them how to cross their hands and carry me as in a chair, but no, they would have none of my methods, and then I gave in hastily lest my travelling companion should appear, accepted the back, rode across most ungracefully, and was set down triumphantly on the other side. And then they, began to take advantage of me.
“Missus,” explained one, “you walk small. If man tote hammock, plenty broken bottle cut feet.”
And so I walked all through the outskirts of that little river-side village. It was the hottest part of a very hot day, the sand made the going heavy, and the sun poured down mercilessly out of a cloudless sky. I was soon exceedingly tired, but I was filled with pity for the unfortunates who had to carry me. They walked beside me happily enough or dawdled behind scorning the fool woman who employed them. I may say when I came back my men carried me over every foot of the path, but they set me down a dozen times that day, and when my companion came up and found me sitting under a cocoa-nut palm, as he did pretty frequently, he remonstrated with me and remonstrated with my men, but the thing rested with me. It took me all day long to learn that the men must do the work they had undertaken to do, and until I was convinced of it in my own mind they certainly were not. We had luncheon in the house of the headman of a fishing village; at afternoon tea-time we were sitting on the sand waiting for the tide to run out so that we might cross the Twin Rivers, and we waited nearly two hours, and at last as the darkness was falling we arrived at a village where we must stop the night. My first night in the wilds.
It was a small fishing village on the sands of the seashore, built of the stalks of the raffia palm which here the people call bamboo. The Chief had a compound cleared out for us, and I do not know now whether that compound was clean. In my mind it remains as clean, because till then I had always expected a native house to be most uninhabitable, and was surprised to find any simple comforts at all. The floors were of sand, the walls of the stalks of the raffia, and the thatch of the fronds. I prefer palm to mud for a wall; for one thing, it is nice and airy, the wind can blow right through it and you might almost be in the open air, but then again, you must make your toilet and have your bath in the dark, for if you have a light everything is as clearly visible to the outside world as if you had been placed in a cage for their special benefit. However, my bed was put up, my bath and toilet things set out, and I managed to dress and come outside for dinner which we had in the open. The grey sand was our carpet, the blue-black sky dotted with twinkling diamonds our canopy, and the flickering, chimneyless Hinkson lamp lighted our dinner-table. I was more than content. It was delightful, and then the serpent entered into our paradise.
“Kwesi,” said the Forestry officer angrily, “there\'s a hair in the soup.”
Kwesi had only brought the soup from the kitchen to the table, so it was hardly fair to blame him, but the average man, if his wife is not present, is apt to consider the nearest servant is always responsible for his little discomforts, and he does not change his character in Africa I find. Kwesi accepted the situation.
“It not ploper hair, sah,” he protested as apologetically as if he had sought diligently for a hair without success and been obliged to do the best he could with negro wool.
I, not being a wife and therefore not responsible, was equal to suggesting that it probably came off the flour bag and he might as well have his dinner in peace, but he was not easily soothed.
That first night, absolutely in the open, everything took on a glamour which comes back to me whenever I think of it. A glorious night out in the open in the Tropics is one of the pure delights of life. A fire flickered in the centre of the compound; to the right in a palm-thatched hut we could see the cook at work, and we had hors d\'oeuvre, which here they call small chop, and the soup which my companion complained of, and fish and chicken and sweets and fruit as good as if we had been in a London restaurant. Better, for the day\'s hammocking on the beach with the salt spray wetting our faces and the roar of the turbulent West-Coast surf in our ears had given us an appetite that required no tempting. The hair was but an incident; the sort of contrast that always marks West Africa. We dined luxuriously.
Around us were strewn our camp outfit, all the thousand and one things that are required to make two people comfortable. It had taken sixteen men to carry us twenty miles in our hammocks; it had taken five-and-twenty more to minister to our comfort. The headman of the village regarded us as honoured guests. He provided a house, or rather several houses in a compound, he told the carriers where they could get wood and water, he sold us chickens at exorbitant prices, but still chickens, and plantains and kenky and groundnuts for the men. And so we dined in comfort and talked over the incidents of the day.